CROSSING BORDERS

PITT SERIES IN RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES | Jonathan Harris, Editor

CROSSING
BORDERS
Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in
Russia and the Soviet Union

Michael David-Fox

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright 2015, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
David-Fox, Michael, 1965
Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union / Michael
David-Fox.
pages cm. (Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8229-6367-7 (paperback: acid-free paper)
1. Soviet UnionHistoryPhilosophy. 2. RussiaHistoryPhilosophy. 3. Soviet
UnionCivilization. 4. Social changeSoviet UnionHistory. 5. Political culture
Soviet UnionHistory. 6. IdeologySoviet UnionHistory. 7. Transnationalism
Political aspectsSoviet UnionHistory. 8. Visitors, ForeignSoviet Union
History. 9. Soviet UnionForeign public opinion. 10. Soviet UnionPolitics and
government. I. Title.
DK49.D385 2015
947.084dc23
2015004307

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
vii
INTRODUCTION
Threading the Needle:
The Soviet Order between Exceptionalism and Shared Modernity
1
PART I. Russian and Soviet Modernity
1. Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism:
On Ongoing Debates in Russian and Soviet History
21
2. The Intelligentsia, the Masses, and the West:
Particularities of Russian/Soviet Modernity
48
PART II. Ideology, Concepts, and Institutions
3. The Blind Men and the Elephant: Six Faces of Ideology in the Soviet Context
75
4. What Is Cultural Revolution? Key Concepts and the
Arc of Soviet Cultural Transformation, 1910s1930s
104
5. Symbiosis to Synthesis: The Communist Academy and the
Bolshevization of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 19181929
133

PART III. Mediators and Travelers

6. Understanding and Loving the New Russia:
Mariia Kudasheva as Romain Rollands Cultural Mediator
163
7. A Prussian Bolshevik in Stalins Russia:
Ernst Niekisch at the Crossroads between Communism and National Socialism
185
NOTES
221
INDEX
273

vi | CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ince I have been working on many of these essays for a long time, it is
simply impossible to list all the many debts I have accumulated along the
way. But I do want to start with one experience from long ago that proved
influential. For a semester in 1996 I was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for
Advanced Study (SCAS) when the late Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt was in
residence. Eisenstadt, who passed away in 2010, was then collaborating with Bjrn
Wittrock and others on what became their work on multiple modernities. Readers
of this book will see how influential this experience later proved for my thinking
about Russian and Soviet modernity. In Uppsala I also launched a long association
with Gyrgy Pteri, whose discussions with me about state socialism and many
comparative projects I have greatly valued over the years. But the idea and initial
work for this book originated much later, in 2010, when I was a fellow at the Davis
Center for Historical Studies at Princeton. There I benefited especially from the
presence of Michael Gordin, Stephen Kotkin, and Daniel Rodgers.
For valuable comments and suggestions on individual chapters I am grateful to
many colleagues, including Martin Beisswenger, Steve Grant, Masha Kirasirova,
Stefanie Middendorf, Jan Plamper, and Erik van Ree. Peter Holquist, a pioneer
for many of the topics discussed in this book, generously shared his insights on
chapters 2 and 3. David L. Hoffmann read extensive portions of the manuscript,
and I thank him for his valuable input. Elizabeth Papazian gave me the gift of
challenging and detailed comments on the book, which provoked extensive
revisionseven if I could not answer all her penetrating queries. I presented chapter 3 at the so-called malyi kruzhok (small study circle) at the European Reading
Room of the Library of Congress, and I am grateful to Susan Smith, Adeeb Khalid,
and my students Michelle Melton and Vladimir Ryzhkovskii, who took part in the
discussion. Mark Stern, then a talented Georgetown undergraduate, volunteered as
my research assistant for a summer. I also benefited from presenting chapter 2 at
Michigan State University and chapter 3 at the University of Michigan. I am grateful to Lewis Siegelbaum, Ronald Grigor Suny, and Jeffrey Veidlinger for hosting
vii

me, to James Meador for acting as a thoughtful respondent in Ann Arbor, and to
all those who took part in the discussions.
Since 2011, when I have been actively working on this book, I have found
a collegial and intellectually inspiring home in the Department of History and
School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. I presented chapter 2 in April
2014 at the Faculty Seminar of Georgetowns Department of History. I am grateful
for the comments of my colleagues, in particular David Goldfrank, Aviel Roshwald, Jordan Sand, and James Shedel. A number of my ideas have been born or
refined in my graduate colloquium at Georgetown, Major Approaches to Russian
and Soviet History, and I want to shout out an acknowledgment to each of my
current PhD students working on Russian and Soviet politics and culture: Simon
Belokowsky, Carol Dockham, Abby Holekamp, Isabelle Kaplan, Anita Kondoyanidi, Thom Loyd, Erina Megowan, Jonathan Sicotte, and Vladimir Ryzhkovskii.
I am also in the debt of my closest Russian colleagues at the Higher School of
Economics (HSE) in Moscow, all of them paragons of the internationally oriented,
deeply researched, and collaborative scholarship that has given so much to the field
and to me personally: Oleg Budnitskii, Oleg Khlevniuk, and Liudmila Novikova.
This book was completed when I was a scholarly adviser at the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences of the
National Research UniversityHigher School of Economics.
Chapter 1 has been significantly revised from Multiple Modernities vs.
Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History, Jahrbcher
fr Geschichte Osteuropas 55, no. 4 (2006): 53555.
Chapter 3 is previously unpublished but incorporates one revised section from
On the Primacy of Ideology: Soviet Revisionists and Holocaust Deniers (In Response to Martin Malia), Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no.
1 (2004): 81106.
Chapter 4 has been significantly revised from What Is Cultural Revolution?
Russian Review 58, no. 2 (1999): 181201.
Chapter 5 is slightly revised from Symbiosis to Synthesis: The Communist
Academy and the Bolshevization of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 19181929,
Jahrbcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas 46, no. 2 (1998): 21943.
Chapter 6 is previously unpublished but includes some revised passages from
The Heroic Life of a Friend of Stalinism: Romain Rolland and Soviet Culture,
Slavonica 11, no. 1 (2005): 329.

viii | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CROSSING BORDERS

INTRODUCTION
THREADING THE NEEDLE
The Soviet Order between Exceptionalism and Shared Modernity

evolutionaries, whatever else they may believe, are predisposed to think

that they are turning an entirely new page in history. As revolutionary
rulers consolidate their new order, they become even more heavily invested
in touting its unprecedented nature. The Bolshevik Revolution in fact triggered
decades of far-reaching transformation; it was marked by an initial wave of iconoclasm, violence, and utopianism that fueled the idea of Soviet exceptionalism, both
at home and abroad. Even after Stalins second revolution accentuated a hybrid
combination of radical change and what might be called statist-conservative elements, the notion that communism was unique and sui generis was constantly
trumpeted in Soviet ideology, assuming a prominent place in propaganda aimed
at domestic and foreign audiences. It was given additional weight by a range of
factors: the distance of Stalins USSR from the capitalist world, the novelty of
the five-year plans and the abolition of private property, the political system and
the party-state, and a thoroughly altered culture and society. These features of the
Soviet order could easily be perceived even by those who could see beyond endless
talk of the new world and the new historical epoch that the worlds first socialist
country had begun.
Acceptance of communist novelty, however, was shaped not just by the nature
of the revolutionary enterprise. It was furthered inside the country and without by
the layering of Soviet claims onto the great debates about Russian national identity
in the nineteenth century, which had already placed enormous stress on Russian
difference. These claims themselves were made in response to weighty European
traditions categorizing Russia as backward and barbarous.1
Before the dust had even settled from the initial revolutionary upheaval, there
began a long-standing, countervailing attempt to deflate or refute revolutionary
claims to uniqueness. Indeed, the precedent for such an attempt had already been
made prominent long before revolution came to Russia. As Alexis de Tocqueville
exclaimed in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856): Now, was the Revolution, in

reality, as extraordinary as it seemed to its contemporaries? Was it as unexampled,

as deeply subversive as they supposed? In drawing his famous conclusion that the
French administrative system survived the fall of the despot and had only achieved
an even greater centralization, Tocqueville remarked about the new regime: The
enterprise seemed incredibly bold and incredibly successful, because people only
thought of what they saw before them, and forgot the past.2
In the Soviet case, however, as opposed to Tocquevilles claim about
eighteenth-century France, few critics at home or abroad simply forgot about the
Russian past. A common way of disputing Bolshevik boasting about the dawn of
a new epoch was to invoke continuities with Russian autocracy. This was the case
both among the early political rivals of Bolshevism at home and among contemporary and later Western observers versed in the discourse of Russian backwardness.
The Stalin Revolution at the end of the 1920s vastly expanded the scale of change
and combined it with repressive social engineering, terror, and developmental violence.3 At the same time, it resurrected some of the heroes of the prerevolutionary
Russian past, rejected early Soviet egalitarianism as leveling, and, in the aesthetic
and cultural orientation that developed especially after the mid-1930s, seemed to a
number of radical and intelligentsia critics as hopelessly petty-bourgeois.4 All this
greatly raised the stakes of the debate over revolutionary novelty. One explanation
for the attractiveness of the concept of totalitarianism as applied to communism
after the 1930s was that it challenged the regimes self-presentation not through
continuities with the past but by placing the communist regime in the same camp
as its mortal enemy, Nazi Germany.5
The scholarly study of Soviet history, especially in the United States but also
in European countries, emerged in the transition from the interwar to the postwar
period out of contemporaries debates and Russian migr politics. So it is hardly
surprising that debates in the field have from the start faced the same fundamental
dilemma of grappling with Soviet novelty and uniqueness, on the one hand, and
their oppositeshistorical continuity, universalistic processes, and international
comparabilityon the other. When scholarship must address in new and altered
terms the same issues raised by historical actors and observers, especially in a
highly politicized context, it always creates additional complications and barriers
to self-awareness on the part of its practitioners.
Each generation in Russian and Soviet studies has navigated its own path
between the poles of Soviet exceptionalism and a stance minimizing or rejecting
the thesis of fundamental difference. The binary opposite of uniqueness was the
equation of the Soviet order with other societies, which for convenience I refer
to here as generic or shared modernity. Of course, the comparison of Soviet
communism to broader processes at play elsewhere can be made in different ways.
In some cases, the rejection of exceptionalism might be labeled normalization,
in that it downplayed or minimized the distinctiveness especially of the Stalin
period, including the scale of violence. In other cases, the Soviet Union could be
compared either to the West or to the developing world. As modern Russian and
2 | INTRODUCTION

Soviet studies developed in the postwar decades, however, the most sophisticated
practitioners recognized elements of both exceptionalism and commonality.
For example, the foundational postwar generation of historians, social scientists, and social theorists were not just adherents of communist or totalitarian
uniqueness. They also advanced influential theories of Soviet modernization and
industrial society.6 Later, revisionists and a generation of social historians were
inclined by their disciplinary outlookand a mission to seek social input rather
than the unfolding of a totalitarian ideato revel in the complexity of historical
particularity. But they often deployed social science concepts, reinforced by their
Sovietological cousins in other disciplines, that pointed in a more universalistic
or comparative direction.7 The seeming entrenchment of the Soviet order and the
end of mass terror after Stalin posed questions about the fate of radical utopianism
and convergence with the developed West. These concerns are starkly revealed by
deliberately paradoxical concepts found in book titles: ordinary Stalinism and
normal totalitarianism.8
The end of communism produced no consensus, and in certain ways it accentuated the starkness of the ongoing split between exceptionalism and shared modernity. Martin Malia, whose major works appeared in the 1990s but were prepared
for decades before then, followed the liberal Russian migrs who founded the
field in an eloquent, updated scholarly form. He placed imperial Russia squarely
on a European continuum that was wrecked by the surreal ideocracy of communism.9 The shift that Malia posited from shared Europeanness to Soviet ideological
uniqueness garnered criticism from Richard Pipes, who over many decades argued
for a fundamental continuity between tsarist patrimonialism and the late imperial
and Soviet police states.10 But the split has not involved only Malia and Pipesor,
more broadly, the tendency to blame either Marxism or Russian tradition for the
cataclysm of revolutionary violence.11 In the field of Soviet history, a debate about
the concept of Soviet modernity also began in the 1990s. It, too, centered on the
issue of Soviet connections to the Russian past and the degree of Soviet difference
from liberal and modern industrial powers.12
Since the collapse of communism, much heat has been generated over the issue
of Soviet exceptionalism versus shared modernity in the discussion of the revolutionary and interwar periods. The burgeoning literature on the post-Stalin period
has not found the idea of Soviet modernity nearly as controversial, at least not in
explicit terms.13 Yet if the rapidly expanding field of postwar Soviet history is to
grapple in a serious way with 1991, these scholars, too, will have to confront this
question. In sum, this bundle of issues centering on exceptionalismthe binary
oppositions between continuity and discontinuity, particularism and universalism,
uniqueness and relativismmust be recognized as defining the terrain in which
interpretations of Russian and Soviet history have revolved until the present day.
Although the centrality of this issue over time does appear to be a distinguishing
mark of Russian history, academic and political debates about the German Sonderweg (special path) or American exceptionalism suggest the Russian field is not
INTRODUCTION | 3

unique. Almost all non-European national histories have had to confront similar
theoretical problems when they come to the age of Westernization and modernization. In this sense, Russias early Europeanization starting with Peter the Great
and its attempt to find an alternative path after 1917 make it unusual but also bring
out paradigmatic issues with great force.
Crossing Borders offers a third waya via media or a move to the radical
centerpast the dueling binary oppositions that have shaped modern Russian
studies. It presents theoretical and empirical methods for combining the investigation of particularism with the pursuit of comparability. The vehicle is a collection
of essays that integrates work on topics that have preoccupied me for the better
part of two decades.14 This book has three components that overlap with but are
not identical to its three sections. The first component is theory and the conceptualization of major problems of the Russian/Soviet historical trajectory, including
the problems of modernity and ideology; the second is archival and primary research on the culture and politics of the early Soviet order; and the third is historiography and the broader history of the field. Although these three components
are present simultaneously in many of the chapters, the book is also divided into
three sections addressing questions of modernity, the early Soviet order and Stalinism, and transnational history. All the chapters can be read as self-standing works,
but they also refer to and follow one another. This introduction highlights the concerns raised by successive chapters and integrates the books disparate elements.
The theoretical essays on Russian and Soviet modernity engage with particular force the central question of particularity and universalism in an attempt to
chart the key dilemmas of the debate and to lay out my own via media. The chapters
based on archival and primary research, in contrast, explore key features of Soviet
distinctiveness: ideology, culture, and the institutional structures of the party-state.
These in-depth excursions into the crystallization and evolution of the Soviet
systemthat is, its particularismare crucial to steering a middle course between
the Scylla of exceptionalism and the Charybdis of shared modernity.
In the third section on transnational history, two chapters center on the perspectives and reactions of foreign contemporaries across cultural and political borders. As I see it, transnational history in the Soviet context can open up a new and
intriguing dimension to any consideration of Soviet particularity and introduce
new approaches to national (in this case Soviet) history. International borrowing
and the circulation of ideas were fundamental to every stage of modern ideas and
practices (an especially intriguing line of inquiry that would benefit from fuller
analysis than is possible here). In addition, cross-border travel and interaction,
which engage the lived experience of individual actors, allow a fine-grained exploration of what outside observers found different, projected as universal, or misunderstood. Furthermore, the large dash of historiography in this book indicates
how the core issues have resurfaced and evolved over time as Russian studies have
matured.

4 | INTRODUCTION

Why is the idea of Soviet modernity controversial? Why has the concept of
Soviet modernity emerged as one of the major issues confronted by the field in the
post-Soviet decades?
On the first, most superficial levellooking at the major features of the Soviet
Unionthe USSR did engage in processes long associated with modernization,
such as urbanization, industrialization, campaigns for mass literacy and education,
and the development of science and technology. These efforts proceeded further in
the postwar period, which is perhaps why the question of modernity has seemed
less subject to dispute and investigation for people studying late socialism.15 The
USSR had a space and nuclear program. It carried out repressive operations with
a level of centralization that its tsarist predecessor could not even aspire to match.
Elements often seen to connect it to the tsarist past, such as the Stalin cults association with the veneration of the tsar, had a broader history in modern politics and
propaganda.16 James C. Scott dubbed the sweeping, rational engineering of society and nature by a strong, centralized state high modernism, a phenomenon that
transcended any one ideology or political system.17 Stalins Soviet Union, with its
state ownership of the economy, ban on private property, takeover of autonomous
organizations, and massive and relentless, if rampantly inefficient and bumbling,
bureaucracy developed perhaps the most intrusive state and authoritarian high
modernist ideology of all. Although it is certainly possible to overstate Stalinisms
efficacy and reach, it became what Moshe Lewin called a superstate.18
But these observations do not close the case. Not only did all those features of
the modern state develop in highly idiosyncratic, often unique ways, but the Soviet Union displayed the absence of major features of modern industrial powers in
Europe and the West, the area that was historically the pacesetter for the modern.
To be sure, the concept of multiple modernities is important for shifting the lens
from the hoary Russian-European comparison to other parts of the world, and the
study of the many important Soviet interactions with the developing world is an
increasingly important avenue of inquiry.19 It is also important to keep in mind
that influence did not go only one way, and that Russia and the USSR also helped
shape the modern world.20 However, the fact remains that a number of phenomena
first closely associated with modernity in Western countries and then exported
elsewhere, such as market economies and mass consumerism, were not present in
Soviet civilization, at least in fully recognizable form.21 Features often associated
with premodern or tsarist society, such as highly hierarchical social relations and
personalistic ties, seem to have become more prominent in the 1930s, as many have
pointed out.22 My own view is that these personalistic features were intertwined
with the Soviet system even as the state bureaucracy grew in its size and capability
for radical interventionism, but that this fact should not discount the prominent
role of either institutions or ideology.23 The fact remains that under Stalin a significant chunk of the all-union economy was run by the secret police brutally
managing what was essentially slave labor in the Gulag. Those who vigorously
contest any notion of Soviet modernity, such as Alexander Etkind, can point to a
INTRODUCTION | 5

large portion of the economy consisting of millions of people forced to wield shovels and other primitive tools in corrective-labor camps that never forged New
Menperhaps, in Etkinds words, not even a single one.24 The rural population
was tied to collective farms (kolkhozy) and signaled the connection to the past by
using the initials of the All-Union Communist Party, VKP, to signify second serfdom (Vtoroe krepostnoe pravo). Communist economic disparities with advanced industrial powers, the social hierarchies that accrued under Stalinism, and a political
dictatorship reliant on large-scale violence have all been seen as both nonmodern
and antimodern. These challenges to the idea of Soviet modernity are important to
keep in mind, as is the need to interrogate the concept of tradition.
Another noteworthy objection is that the Soviets themselves did not really
have a concept of modernity. The Russian words for contemporary (sovremennyi)
or contemporaneity (sovremennost) can have similar connotations, but without
the conceptual and social scientific weight that the imported neologism modernost
does in the post-Soviet age. Even the modern period in Russian is novaia istoriia
(new history). Instead of talking about the modern, Soviet historical actors spoke
about socialism as the next historical stage. Frederick Coopers critique of the modernity concept, which joins others in emphasizing the conceptual confusion that
bedevils it, argues that scholars should not try for a slightly better definition so
that they can talk about modernity more clearly. Instead, he writes: They should
instead listen to what is being said in the world. If modernity is what they hear,
they should ask how it is being used and why; otherwise, shoehorning a political
discourse into modern, antimodern, or postmodern discourses, or into their modernity or ours, is more distorting than revealing.25
This is a useful injunction, but if we as historians do not hear a Soviet concept of modernity as such, should we refrain from considering it? I would argue
that the concepts behind what Soviet actors did articulate (about socialism as the
worlds next, more advanced historical stage) have in fact been discussed at length.
Shifting the lens of analysis can be productive. It is also important to recall that we
as scholars can hardly restrict ourselves to the conceptual toolkit of our historical
subjects, even if we wanted to do so.
The questions remain: Were all the elements of the Soviet system discussed
above features of modernity or a lack thereof? Should they be discussed without
resorting to the notoriously vague notion of modernity at all? Or can they be
incorporated into an exploration of an alternative, and ultimately failed, form of
Soviet or communist modernity? These are all legitimate and useful questions to
pose and well worth discussing.
The disparities in the rather superficial balance sheet sketched out above are
intended to pose the problem of Soviet modernity in stark form. They have sometimes been resolved with the thesis that the modern programs, agendas, or ideologies were incompletely realized or became something else in practice. In the
oft-cited words of Terry Martin, Modernization is the theory of Soviet intentions; neo-traditionalism, the theory of their unintended consequences.26 But the
6 | INTRODUCTION

conceptual problems become compounded when one considers that the concept
of modernity (more flexible than modernization) is one of the most elusive and
capacious in the human sciences. The gold standard of modernity, furthermore,
developed in Europe and North America over a long period of time, with many
significant national variations; it too was incompletely realized, especially in its
earlier stages. The discussion of modernity, again as opposed to the earlier social
science literature on modernization, is rife not with measurable processes but with
metaphysical shifts, such as new conceptions of time, the ability to conceive various kinds of transformation, or reflexivity in the relationship between knowledge
and the sociopolitical order. Given that the problem is conceptual and cannot be
resolved by measurable metrics, it is clear that any balance-sheet approach to Russia and the USSR will come up with a mixed and confusing analysis.
One easy solution is to jettison or avoid the issue of modernity in this context,
criticize its premises or difficulties, or focus on other questions. Indeed, many
practitioners in the field have embraced just such a resolution to the problem of
Russian/Soviet modernityperhaps in response to the form the debate over Russian and Soviet modernity took in the 1990s. I have also taken a critical stance
toward the discussion of modernity versus neo-traditionalism that brought the
discussion to a peak but also something of a dead end in the early 2000s yet has
had traceable aftereffects in the field. At the same time, this major question is the
latest twist in the more fundamental split between exceptionalism and shared modernity. One shunts it under the rug at ones peril, only to find it still present in
hidden or implicit forms. A key conceptual move, in my view, is to take modernity
as a lens, a heuristic device rather than a problem that can be solved with some sort
of aggressively formulated thesis or empirical breakthrough. It is hardly the only
such lens that can be used at the present time, but it acquires importance from its
stature as a core concept in the many disciplines of the human sciences and for the
many fields of the historical discipline. As Russian studies continues its post-Soviet
push to make itself relevant and to connect to other fields, an engagement with the
debate over modernity becomes a significant bridge to a more comparatively and
internationally informed discussion with other fields and disciplines.
This is the spirit in which I present chapter 1, which analyzes the scholarly
disputes over Russian and Soviet modernism and modernity in the post-Soviet
years. It argues that the first generation in the debate over Soviet modernity in
the 1990s and early 2000s was limited by the moment and conceptual framework
in which it crystallized. But despite and in part because of these limitations, this
debate has had a long history, up to and including the most recent voices that
reject notions of Soviet modernity in favor of archaic holdovers from the Russian
past.27 These disputes are put under the microscope not merely to clarify the issues
at stake but also to propose that the Russian field would benefit from grappling
more directly with the concept of multiple modernities.28 To be sure, this different
framework raises other conceptual problems. The notion of multiple modernities
INTRODUCTION | 7

and alternative modernities, just as with many other concepts, can become a fig
leaf for different intellectual and political agendas; for example, the idea of a distinctive, say, French modernity can be used as a rallying cry against Americanization. In a 2013 commentary Stefan Plaggenborg, after finding it highly significant
that sociological modernity theory is silent on Eastern Europe and especially
Soviet communism, nonetheless dismisses S. N. Eisenstadts theory of multiple
modernities as trivial and somehow extra-scientific, although it was a sociological theory that explicitly labeled communism as a modern form. For Plaggenborg,
Eisenstadts call to recognize difference is a fashionably multicultural and hence
politicized gesture that obscures a precise classification of what modernity is; the
theory of multiple modernties demands recognition of many trees, but together
they form no identifiable forest.29 It is entirely right that the notion of multiple
modernities is indeed incompatible with a single, concrete definition of the modern. It is also true that plurality in and of itself is no answer. Yet Plaggenborg offers
no solution to the problem he raises, except a less-than-rousing call to historicize
the discussion of modernity.30
Precisely from a historical point of view, however, the notion of multiple
modernities is valuable because it postulates that there is no single road to the
modern. Modernity is centrally engaged with processes and ideas of this-worldly
transformation. Western Europe may have forged many modern processes that
later were domesticated or elaborated on an international scale, but at the core of
the notion of multiple modernties is the realization that modernity is not exclusively a Western phenomenon.31 It also underscores that there is no single West.
From this it follows that interpreting the cultural or civilizational patterns of countries outside Western Europe becomes particularly significant in order to come to
any understanding of their particular variants of modernity. Otherwise, we would
be reduced to simply searching for how Western models were copied. Finally, the
question of commonalities and differences both become crucial in any grappling
with Soviet communism as an alternative form. In the end, my own goal in clarifying the contours, limitations, and afterlife of the post-Soviet scholarly debate over
modernity is to clear the way for a renewed discussion.
However, it is easy to issue proposals and critiques while not really sketching
out how an alternative construct would look. Chapter 2, therefore, shifts from
analytical critique to an attempt at historical synthesis. In the process, I propose
the notion of intelligentsia-statist modernity to capture somenot allof the
persistent yet historically evolving particularities of the Russian/Soviet variation
on modernity. It is a premise here that there were formidable differences between
tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, and that the Russian Revolution and Soviet
order introduced a whole array of novel agendas and practices. But no analysis
limited to the period after 1917 can capture the broader cultural foundations and
trajectory necessary to account for deeper patterns of evolution, and Soviet historians today engage far less than they might both with late imperial complexities
and the longue dure. Despite the heated debates and controversies that have punc8 | INTRODUCTION

tuated Russian and Soviet history, especially in the revolutionary and early Soviet
period, a simple opposition between continuity and discontinuity is a red herring.
There are always continuities and there are always breaks; the question is how to
locate and conceive them and the balance between them. Attentiveness to underlying continuities across the 1917 divide can heighten historians understanding of
breaks and ruptures by revealing what persists even as some paths are closed off.32
Crossing the border of 1917 here represents an attempt to provide a framework for
thinking about the trajectory of Russian/Soviet modernity on both sides of the
revolutionary divide. This attempt takes on special significance because those most
critical of the concept of Soviet modernity have most often justified their position
by pointing to traditional Russian continuities persisting after 1917 or, to put it
bluntly, Russian/Soviet backwardness.33
The key to my own approach to the problem of modernity in the Russian and
Soviet context, furthermore, is the conclusion that the binary opposition between
exceptionalism and shared modernity is a false one; time and again, it has led the
debate astray. If we accept that Russian/Soviet modernity is not identical to others,
we must devote special attention to its own set of particularities, but the very step
of considering it modern invites comparison of commonalities. Understanding Soviet communism as an alternative modernity informed by Russian legacies makes
it possible to pursue particularities and commonalities at the same time within one
coherent scholarly agenda. Treating the Soviet Union as very different from other
states does not mean it was utterly exceptional; treating it as connected to modernity does not make it normal.
But threading this needle raises other thorny issues. If Soviet communism
was an alternative modernity, then it was also a modern project that failed as an
alternative. Although scholars disagree about how alternative the Soviet model
was and when and how it failed, the fact remains: Soviet communism in the long
run was not able to resolve its deepest problems and perpetuate itself during its
seven-decade life cycle, and it ultimately vanished as an alternative. It is in this
sense that I call it a failed modernity. Our reading of the profound problems the
Soviet system confronted, created, and could not resolve must, however, be balanced with the dangers of reading history backward from 1991.
Chapter 3 addresses the problem of Soviet exceptionalism in a more indirect
but more targeted way by grappling with the definition and role of ideology in the
Soviet context. The content of a specific ideology (as opposed to its motivating or
legitimizing role) has a history of being downplayed or dismissed: for example, in
structuralist interpretations of comparative revolutions.34 Ideas as such were also
sometimes set aside in discussions of totalitarianism, which looked at the role or
underlying functions of ideologies rather than their content. That said, most interpretations of totalitarianism in the Russian/Soviet field, stretching from its early
years to what might be called the neo-totalitarian orientation of the late Martin
Malia, stressed the extraordinary importance of ideology in the Soviet case and
ratified a model of causality that deduced historical outcomes from the postulates
INTRODUCTION | 9

of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. For half a century practicing historians have been

running away from this understanding of ideology, thus jeopardizing ideology
itself as a category of historical analysis. The explosion of cultural approaches in
the Russian field has, however, brought with it a renewed attention to ideas and
ideologies as a part of the causal, explanatory mix. Examination of the content of
communist ideology and the implications of political ideas in specific contexts,
rather than just in terms of the historical grand narrative, has also received great
attention. This is attested by the state of the art in the Stalinism-Nazism comparison, where it is reiterated that the specific nature of ideology in each individual
case had profound consequences, ones that encompassed matters of life and death.35
Deep investigations of the content and implications of a single ideology in a
single setting tend to highlight particularity. In the Soviet case such distinctions
include the sheer pervasiveness of the dissemination of an official ideology, the
extent of the ideological establishment devoted to its elaboration, and its role in
building the very fabric of the Soviet system, which was based on core principles
such as anticapitalism. Not surprisingly, ideology has loomed large in discussions
of Soviet uniqueness. Thus at the opposite pole from the structuralist dismissal of
ideology (or minimization of it by subordinating or folding it into other parts of
the historical explanatory framework) stand prominent observers who argue that
ideology was a driving force of Soviet history. The nec plus ultra of this position
was again taken by Martin Malia, who viewed ideology as the element making
communism fantastic and surrealthe very opposite of shared modernity.36 A
variation on this interpretation has been reinforced by a major political theorist
of ideology, Michael Freeden. The founding editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies, Freeden has pursued an overriding mission to depathologize the notion of
ideology and understand it as a normal part of modern society and politics. In
service of these desiderata, however, Freeden has found it necessary to argue that
totalitarian ideologies are exceptional.37 Between the extremes of crowning and
dethroning ideology as the key to the history of Soviet communism have stood
many other practicing historians who are reluctant to reduce explanations of historical developments to ideological postulates, but who in so doing run the risk of
not giving the ideological arena its full due.
The interpretation of ideology as sketched out in chapter 3 occupies a key
part of the middle ground between exceptionalism and shared modernity. The
role of ideology is very distinctive in the Soviet context, I maintain; at the same
time, many important features of the Soviet ideological arena (not to mention the
history of our understandings of it) do connect this unusual case to other times and
places. As with the case of multiple modernities, the approach laid out in chapter
3 is theoretically pluralistic: it argues for the validity of multiple understandings of
ideology and abstains from according definitive primacy to one or another. Those
dimensions of ideology in the Soviet context explored in the chapter include ideology as doctrine, as worldview, as discourse, as performance, as belief, and, last but
not least, as a historical concept in the Marxist and Marxist-Leninist lexicon. Some
10 | INTRODUCTION

of these six faces of ideology point to major dimensions of Soviet distinctiveness;

engaging others uncovers parallels and commonalities with other times and places,
linking historical analysis in this field to others. Once again, therefore, my stance
eschews some sort of definitive choice between universalism and particularism; it
seeks not only to point to the direction of the middle ground but to describe that
terrain explicitly. Ultimately, given the centrality of the problem of ideology in the
Soviet field, it is truly surprising that so few practicing historians have meditated
on how to define ideology and its role. It has been my aim to make this chapter
accessible to students and graduate students entering the field and to hope that
the multiple ways of understanding ideology will be taken into account by future
generations of Soviet historians.
Chapter 4 is a rare Soviet-era excursion into the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) that is coupled with an interpretation of the cultural dimension to revolution in its early decades.38 In its original incarnation (1998), this piece formed part
of an exchange with Sheila Fitzpatrick, who in the late 1970s defined the concept
of cultural revolution in modern Russian studies. When I first wrote, Fitzpatricks
classic usage of the cultural revolution had morphed into a synonym for the
period of the First Five-Year Plan in Soviet history and, to Fitzpatricks own dissatisfaction, had become something of an unstated orthodoxy that did not require
any reference at all. I was concerned with replacing that received wisdom with
an understanding of cultural revolution as an evolving concept, key during two
decades of Bolshevik and Soviet attempts at cultural transformation.39 Even today,
there are many scholars who still employ the cultural revolution as essentially a
synonym for the 19281931 period, or at least the militant cultural campaigns of
the First Five-Year Plan period alone, while others, including myself, prefer for reasons central to the chapter to follow the post-Soviet Russian practice of referring
to this period as Stalins Great Break (velikii perelom). In this revision, I expand the
investigation to include a constellation of concepts surrounding kulturnaia revoliutsiia (cultural revolution)in particular, socialist byt (everyday life) and kulturnost
(culturedness).
As I undertook the challenge of linking my conceptual history of cultural
revolution more integrally into the broader arc of Soviet cultural transformation, I
began engaging in an unusual and, for me, hitherto unique form of scholarly dialogue. As I was aware, a range of scholars had reacted to my 1998 article in a series
of major monographs that were published for almost a decade afterwards. These
works engaged the articles central point of understanding cultural revolution as
less restrictively bound to the Great Break alone; they also conceived of a more
expansive understanding of cultural revolution in various ways, through the prism
of their own original research. This was particularly the case in the booming literature connected to the imperial turn in Russian and Soviet historythe study
of non-Russian cultures, nationalities policy, Sovietization, and cultural politics in
the union republics. As I learned from their work, I then incorporated it into this
new and expanded version of the piece.
INTRODUCTION | 11

The history of communist cultural transformation, centering on an ideological concept in early Soviet culture and politics, again elaborates on one major
aspect of Soviet particularism. However, chapter 4 also uses cultural revolution to
open up comparisonsin this case between Soviet and Chinese communism. The
two communist revolutions were directly interconnected, of course, and Maoism
can be seen as a variation on as well as a departure from Stalinism. Yet the two
second-world giants experienced, in this reading, a consequentially different unfolding of revolutionary phases that is brought out powerfully through the prism
of their experiences with cultural revolutionboth the concept and the phenomenon it signifies.40
Chapter 5 is included in this volume because it deals with a major dimension
of my workthe history of institutions. It analyzes, moreover, the history of not
one but two institutions: one of the oldest ones, the Academy of Sciences founded
by Peter the Great, and its revolutionary rival in the 1920s, the Socialist (after 1924,
Communist) Academy. The parallel existence of the Academy of Sciences and its
communist rival after 1918 led up to the fateful 1929 Bolshevization of the old
academy, which involved the takeover and transformation of the linchpin of the
Soviet science system and its eventual merger with the party institution in 1936.
By focusing on how the two academies were intertwined, we confront the unusual
fusion of two very different types of institutions, one a prerevolutionary Russian
institution subordinated to the state and the other its revolutionary challenger
subordinated to the party. For me, this is more than a key episode in the history of
Soviet science and intellectual life. It forms part of another pillar of Soviet particularism, the institutional history of the party-state.
The great Sovietologist Robert C. Tucker addressed the nature of the partystate by dubbing the young Soviet Union a movement-regime, a revolutionary
party in charge of a state. In his hands, this was designed to open up new comparisons; it derived from his early (1960) challenge to the concept of totalitarianism
and his attempt to juxtapose the Soviet case with other authoritarian, one-party
regimes such as Kemalist Turkey.41 At the same time, the mass-movement party in
power led to one of the most singular features of the Soviet system (which was
replicated, however, in other communist countries): the systematic and pervasive
dualism in which the party both infiltrated and shadowed the entire state apparatus. In institutional terms, for example, it is indisputable that the place of the
Nazi Party in the Third Reich was far more haphazard and far more modest. As
Stephen Kotkin explained through his concept of Stalinism as a theocracyand as
Tucker had before him, by speaking of the growing resemblance of the party-state
to a church-stateone of the justifying roles for the Party in shadowing the state
was as the keeper of the revolutionary ideology.42 In the 1920s, one of the classic
divisions created by the New Economic Policy (NEP) was that between reds and
experts, or, in other words, between party personnel and the bourgeois specialists who remained to work under the auspices of the new regime. In industry, for
example, the nonparty experts and specialists would need to be verified by reds,
12 | INTRODUCTION

that is, by party managers; their equivalent in cultural and scientific fields was the
party intelligentsia attempting to create a new red intelligentsia. The ultimate arbiters, however, were those who increasingly arrogated to themselves the role of new
red specialists in social engineering and political violence: the party leadership.
As this statement suggests, the division between party and state, reds and
experts, was not just crucial for the emerging political system and the institutional
arrangements of the entire Soviet order, especially during its heyday in the 1920s.
It was also a foundational divide in the history of Soviet science, education, and
culture.43 In this sense, cultural revolution had an important institutional dimension. If the NEP period witnessed a forced compromise between the nonparty institutions (such as the Academy of Sciences) and new party institutions and cadres,
then the Great Break was a period of assault and upheaval, followed by Stalins
rehabilitation of the old specialists in 1932. What ensued was a synthesis, but this
synthesis also had a long history in which successive cohorts or generations of
figures in the now theoretically unified Soviet intelligentsia negotiated the lingering divisions of the early Soviet split between reds and experts. The Academy of
Sciences was singularfor its distinctive prerevolutionary history, for its unusually protected status in the 1920s, and because these splits played themselves out
differently in different cultural fields and branches of knowledge. But studying it
does allow for insight into the broader processes in other areas.
Although the Academy of Sciences was a state institution, founded by Peter the
Great and shaped by two centuries of interaction with both the tsarist and Soviet
governments, in the 1920s it was just as fundamentally a bastion of the highest levels of the scientific intelligentsia, which under the NEP-era rules of the game were
the most useful and protected. The story of its communist rival, the aspirations of
the first communist academicians, the old academys forcible reorganization, and
the final incorporation of the rump Communist Academy into a dominant new
Soviet powerhouse is thus also a synecdoche for the tangled and tumultuous clash
of the nonparty and Bolshevik wings of the intelligentsia in successive phases of
the revolution.
In one of her most incisive, far-reaching essays, Sheila Fitzpatrick portrayed
the intelligentsia and the Party after the revolution as two surviving elites, resentfully interdependent, jealously jockeying for position, and withal the only
possible claimants for leadership in a fragmented and unsettled postrevolutionary
society. Both had more in common than either side cared to admit: a well-honed
sense of historical mission and moral superiority, along with an idea of culture as
something that (like revolution) an enlightened minority brought to the masses in
order to uplift them.44 Chapter 5 builds on these powerful insights in one highprofile context, but it comes to somewhat different conclusions about the ultimate
outcome. The intelligentsia and the Party were neither static nor monolithic, but
even portraying them as such as a heuristic device can simplify the outcome. In
Fitzpatricks words, the intelligentsia had lost freedom and self-respect along the
way, though it had won the battle of culture, while the Communists had lost conINTRODUCTION | 13

fidence in the relevance of Communism to culture, although it had won the battle
of power.45 The exploration here, in the context of the two academies, suggests a
less clear-cut resolution. It implies that their symbiosis in the 1920s made for a
high degree of interpenetration between the camps.
Furthermore, successive generational cohorts must be factored into the interpretation of what the two sides represented over the course of the dramatic twists
and turns of the Soviet period.46 From the point of view of the protagonists of the
1920s generation, one can plausibly say that both sides lost, but one might also
conclude that a synthesis unfolded in a way that no one could have planned or
expected. The implications of this line of reasoningthat in certain unexpected,
even hidden ways the Communist Academy transferred some of its ethos and mission to the bolshevized Academy of Sciencesis worth pondering. It means that
the Soviet Academy of Sciences, one of the major pillars of Stalin-era compromise
with the past, conservatism, or retreat, is, when the history of Bolshevization is
probed more deeply, a synthesis of a major revolutionary innovation of the 1920s
with the transformed old academic establishment. This, in turn, provides further
historical substance to the notion of intelligentsia-statist modernity.
The concluding, transnational section of the book interrogates foreign visitors and their perceptions of the Soviet Union, shaped by Soviet intermediaries
and practices of reception as well as their own ideologies and interests. The three
figures at the center of chapters 6 and 7, however, could not be more different: the
fellow-traveler Romain Rolland, perhaps the most prominent Western intellectual
to defend Stalinism in the 1930s; his wife, Marie Rolland, or Mariia Kudasheva,
a classic nonparty literary intellectual in the early Soviet years who became the
mediator between the great French writer and Soviet politics and culture; and
Ernst Niekisch, a far-right opponent of Hitler in the national revolutionary camp
of the late Weimar period, who constructed a hybrid doctrine and movement
that combined elements of Social Democracy and fascism and fantasized about a
Prussian-Russian geopolitical community of fate. The three figures under consideration thus represented radically different political experiences and views; Kudasheva, moreover, was a Soviet insider, whereas the other two foreigners were
very much outsiders looking in, each fascinated in vastly different ways.
In one sense, both Rolland and Niekisch in different ways serve to historicize
the great axis of universalism versus particularism in the Soviet order. The key
to Rollands vision of the Soviet Union and Stalinism were projections about the
universality of the Russian Revolution, which he understood through the prism
of its French counterpart; about pan-European antifascism, in which the Soviet
Union was allied with progressive Europe; and about the didactic, enlightening
monumentalism of Stalinist culture, which he personally favored far more than the
avant-garde. But Rolland, seeing universalism everywhere when he looked east,
soon ran up against the horrors of the Great Terror and the formidable particularities of Stalinist political culture. By contrast, Niekisch, in keeping with his ultrana-

14 | INTRODUCTION

tionalist Prussian Bolshevism, invented a two-camp affinity between the young

and vital East and a totalizing Prussian tradition of militarism and statism that it
could supposedly invigorate. In part, his views of Soviet communism were a projection of a fierce and overriding ideological and geopolitical hatred of the West.
Kudashevas political and ideological views, which in the sources are proSoviet in the 1920s and ardently antifascist in her years with Rolland in the 1930s,
are far more fragmentary and difficult to establish. In the context of Stalinism,
she was clearly quite constrained in numerous ways. It is in her activities as an
intermediaryas Rollands secretary, his translator, and the manager of his extensive interactions with the Soviet leadership, press, and cultural institutionsthat
she emerges as an important historical figure in her own right. Kudasheva was
one of many whose role in brokering relationships between Western visitors and
observers and the Soviets became increasingly important in the 1930s. But she belonged to a smaller club of what I call intimate mediatorslovers or spouses who
developed emotional ties with figures important to the Soviets and who exerted
on them special and sustained influence. Kudasheva, for example, quickly came to
personify the new Russia to Rolland and played a key role in his conversion to a
leading Western intellectual friend of the Soviet Union.
Both Niekisch and Rolland traveled to the USSRin 1932 and 1935, respectively. But to understand even these brief experiences inside the Soviet Union, we
must bring into the analysis an entire range of biographical, personal, and broader
contextual factors. In the case of Rollands tour and Kremlin meeting with Stalin,
the role played by Kudasheva was not the least of these factors. In the case of
Niekisch, his Soviet experiences are interpreted and embedded within a long-term
ideological odyssey, one that involved conversions from revolutionary Social Democracy to a far-right nationalism enamored with certain aspects of Leninism and
Stalinism (something commonly known in the German conservative revolution
as National Bolshevism). In 1945, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR),
he returned to communism. My effort here has been to see this unusual, indeed
extraordinary trajectory, if not as paradigmatic, then at least in certain ways as
exemplary. This holds, first, for the far-left/far-right interactions of intellectuals
and their political ideologies in the twentieth century. In this sense Niekisch is an
applied case in how to interpret ideology along with numerous other factors in a
particular historical setting. It holds, second, for the philo-Soviet (or National Bolshevik) strains within the so-called national revolutionary camp in Weimar as they
were interacting both with a rising National Socialism and with the Communist
Party of Germany (KPD). This complex Weimar terrain was also internationalized
by Soviet policies and operations attempting to convert National Bolsheviks from
the far right. Finally, images and perceptions first attached to these three figures
by contemporaries and persisting into their treatment as historical figures became
important to address when untangling their biographies. These include the persistent rumors implicating Kudasheva as an agent of the Peoples Commissariat of

INTRODUCTION | 15

Internal Affairs (NKVD); Rolland as a European icon within Stalinist culture; and
Niekisch as an anti-Hitler resister, a topic rediscovered much later by post-1968
German rebels attracted once again to national themes.
At first glance, the transnational chapters in this book may seem less engaged
with the central question with which the theoretical chapters began, the great
debate over exceptionalism and shared modernity in Russian studies and the alternative position staked out in this book. But I argue that they also relate to this
books overarching theme. The exploration of cross-cultural and trans-ideological
interactions opens up a set of desiderata for Soviet history: that it must be attuned
to its international and transnational dimensions; that it must be comparatively
informed, if only implicitly so; and that it must engage and situate itself in relationship with other countries, cultures, and political traditions.47 These goals can
be attained regardless of the type of history pursuedpolitical, social, cultural,
or intellectual. At the same time, these excursions into transnational history also
pull us back toward those features of the Soviet order, such as the institutional
arrangements of the party-state, that were both unusual and struck contemporary
outside observers as such. This section of the book thus fleshes out the alternative
space between exceptionalism and shared modernity.
The title of this volume, Crossing Borders, has several layers of significance.
The first, and most obvious, has to do with the international framework that discussions of modernity bring and the historical traveling across borders involved
in explorations of transnational history. The second has to do with the different
modes of inquirytheoretical, historical, and historiographicalthat I cross.
These boundaries are not often traversed, and I hope that readers will find the
results thought-provoking. In particular, the historiographical element, often taken
to mean a dry literature review suitable only for dissertations, is incorporated
into the essays as an exercise in intellectual history, to bring the central issues
alive, and as a reminder to avoid reinventing the wheel. Third, crossing borders
has implications for the handling of historical spherespolitical, social, cultural,
ideological, and economica problem that often comes up in discussions of causality and in the history of Russian and Soviet studies. Throughout the book I
come out against reductionism, maintaining that processes in each arena can be
given their own historical weight without shoehorning them into another, and
call attention to how claims for the primacy of one have shaped the contours of
Russian and Soviet studies. I do not argue that all explanations are equal but urge
that we extend the pluralistic stance taken toward multiple modernities and understandings of ideology to the question of the key pillars of historical investigation
and explanation. Statements that ideology has shaped all of Soviet history, that
political power is the cause of causes, that social factors were more fundamental,
or that everything revolves around culture or discourse exemplify ways that causal
and explanatory frameworks have been made and remade in a drawn-out battle
of reductionisms. There are numerous heuristic and methodological grounds for
16 | INTRODUCTION

giving each arena, or sphere, its own due and perceiving its own dynamics, but
crossing these conceptual and disciplinary borders in the history of the emerging
Soviet order permits us to uncover and investigate how different areas interact
within an expansive ecosystem.
Last, crossing borders assumes significance in the overarching attempt to find a
middle ground between the binary oppositions entrenched in this field, most notably the one between exceptionalism and shared modernity. This middle ground is
marked by webs of meaning, multicausal explanations, and pluralistic rather than
exclusionary interpretive frameworks. Exploring its contours may well result in less
starkmore nuanced and, in comparative perspective, more normalclaims.
For the history of Soviet communism that is a more challenging and, for Russian
studies, a more pressing goal.

INTRODUCTION | 17

PART I

RUSSIAN AND SOVIET MODERNITY

MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS.

NEO-TRADITIONALISM
On Ongoing Debates in Russian and Soviet History

he specter of modernity continues to haunt much Western scholarship on

Russian and Soviet history. In grappling with the issue, post-Soviet historiography has continued to invent new twists and variations on the thorny
problems of old. In the past, the polarizations in the field may have been described
somewhat differently: between industrial society and backwardness, between universalism and particularism, between Russia as European and Russia as unique.
While this chapter analyzes a specific dispute over modernity and the concept of
neo-traditionalism that first animated the field in the 2000s, it also looks backward
to these broader antecedents that its participants did not discuss and forward to the
debates continuing reverberations in the field.
In an edited volume on the new developments in the study of Stalinism, Sheila
Fitzpatrick placed disagreements between a modernity group and its critics at the
center of the new historiography. In the work of the current generation, Fitzpatrick wrote, two distinct approaches can be discerned. . . . The modernity
group . . . suggests that the stereotype of modernity based exclusively on Western
experience (parliamentary democracy, market economy) is inadequate and points
to the Soviet example as an important alternative form. She described this groups
case for an alternative Soviet modernity as resting on the presence of statist phenomena such as planning, early social welfare measures, scientism, surveillance,
and the disciplines of self and collective. The critics, adherents of the concept of
neo-traditionalism, did not necessarily deny that the Soviet Union in its way was
modern, but their interest, however, is drawn more particularly to the archaizing
phenomena that were also a part of Stalinism: petitioning, patron-client networks,
the ubiquity of other kinds of personalistic ties like blat, ascribed status categories, court politics in the Kremlin, the mystification of power and its projection
through display, and so on.1 When it first emerged, as Fitzpatrick noted, this
debate had an institutional dimension: the modernity paradigm was advanced first
and foremost in the 1990s by a cohort of Columbia University graduates inspired
by the work of the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin; the neo-traditionalist
21

model, elaborated on by Fitzpatricks own former doctoral students from Chicago,

was developed as a sort of response or alternative.2
The emergence of two polarized positions, each grouped around its own
concept, would be easily recognized by a historian of science or sociologist of
knowledge as a common phenomenon in the evolution of scholarship. But these
mundane features of the dispute should not obscure that it built on a foundational
axis of modern Russian studiesone that the late Leopold Haimson, drawing on
the Annales school, used to scrawl his famous iron cross on the blackboard on
the first day of class, introducing generations of graduate students to the vertical
line between universalism and particularism that divided the field of political and
social conceptions.3 Because the post-Soviet skirmish engaged this core issue, it
has retained significance even after many of its participants have moved on to new
phases of debate. The issue of how to approach the problem of Soviet modernity
continues to engage fundamental conceptual issues at stake in understanding Russias historical trajectory, the Soviet order, and Stalinism.
If this chapter has an underlying message, it is a plea to those who continue
to find the modernity and neo-traditionalist paradigms convincing to interrogate
their central concepts with depth and rigor. The aims of this discussion are (1) to
analyze the post-Soviet conceptual split in the historiography, focusing mainly
on works that explicitly advance notions of modernity and neo-traditionalism; (2)
to locate differences between the tendencies and their implications, especially in
their different understandings of the modern and their differing comparative lens;
and (3) to suggest how the concept of multiple modernities, which was not explicitly embraced by the first post-Soviet proponents of Russian/Soviet modernity, at
once resolves and complicates dilemmas already implicitly raised by the modernity
paradigm. Along the way, I point out the continuing reverberations of the split
in the 2010s, as numerous scholars take Soviet modernity as a given while others
privilege traditional features of the Soviet order.4

The First Generation of Soviet Modernity Scholarship

Modernity is a notoriously elusive concept. Although Fitzpatrick and the
neo-traditionalists tended implicitly to stress the unity of the modernity group
in the Russian and Soviet field, it is striking how historians have deployed the
concept to highlight differing aspects of the historical process. Hence the distinct
possibility exists that a modernity group was created only through critique. The
initial scholarly contributions within the modernity framework in the Russian context drew in different ways on the corpus of literature on modernity, both in theoretical and comparative terms, and they defined modernity in distinctly different
ways. In the collection of essays Russian Modernity, for example, the main attempt
to articulate a full-fledged understanding of modernity is Yanni Kotsoniss introduction, which puts almost all the emphasis on modernity as the internalization
of authority.5 David Hoffmann, in the conclusion to the same volume, equates
modernity with an Enlightenment ethos of progressive social intervention and the
22 | MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM

rise of mass politics.6 Peter Holquist, in his classic article on Russian surveillance
in its pan-European context, focuses on specifically modern practices, tools of
social and political engineering that were developed across the political spectrum
in Russia in the total war/revolutionary continuum of 19141921.7 For Stephen
Kotkin, who developed the important point that modernity meant different things
internationally in distinct historical periods, an interwar conjuncturethe age
of the massespursued a modernity shaped by the triad of mass production, mass
culture, and mass politics.8
As the concept of Russian and Soviet modernity thus became more widespread in the 1990s and 2000s, differing underlying features of modernity and
their Russian/Soviet manifestations came to the fore. It is evident that the differences depended quite directly on the authors historical subject and comparative
lens at hand. Yuri Slezkine in his Jewish Century, a book-length exercise in intellectual patage, sees modernization as everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. The
works first page declares that becoming modern meant becoming Jewish; but it
was not enough that the Jews were the only true moderns. Also interpreted as
quintessentially Jewish in the course of the book was that indictment of modern
life, aesthetic modernism; Marxism; Bolshevism; Freudianism (predominantly
Jewish); the first phase of the Russian Revolution (the Jewish age); and, last but
not least, the twentieth century. If any of these phenomena appear antimodern or
antimodernist, it is because modernity was also inseparable from the ancient and
tribal features of the Jews.9 In writing about the borderland kresy, by contrast, Kate
Brown describes a grimly uniform modernity based on uprooting the mosaic of
cultures, erasing the ethnic and local past in a war on backwardness that involved
disconnecting individuals, families, and communities from the populations they
became.10
It is, however, possible to identify certain underlying trends in the first generation of scholarly literature that invoked the concept of modernity in the Russian
and Soviet context. In particular, many of those who first came to identify the
modern in revolutionary Russia and the USSR tended to focus on transformational
agendas and processes, especially the interventionist state, programs articulated by
elites, and the shift in historical attitudes that animated them.
One can better understand both the plurality of positions on modernity and
this general if loose commonality through the dilemmas raised in the turn from
modernization to modernity outside the Russian field. Between the heyday
of modernization theory of the 1950s1960s and the rise of less teleological and
universalistic approaches of the 1990s and 2000s, the identification of common,
more or less measurable markers of modernization (such as levels of industrialization, literacy, urbanization, and secularization) was subsumed by the identification
of a range of abstract, ontological, cosmological shifts associated with the advent
of modernity in various times and places. These have included rebellion against
tradition (the original spirit of aesthetic modernism); profound changes in attitudes
MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM | 23

toward time and space; the rise of the key concept of society and the attendant
crystallization of the human sciences; a new reflexivity and awareness of agency
in an age of secularization; and an accompanying panoply of ambitious projects to
remake society, culture, and man.
For much postwar social science, modernization was essentially synonymous
with Westernization. This is not necessarily the case in contemporary understandings of modernity. One of the principal proponents of the notion of multiple modernities, the sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt, has written of the cultural program of
modernity as flowing from the advent of the awareness of the autonomy of man
and hence leading to a novel cognizance of contestation in the core ontological
concepts prevalent in a society or civilization. But since those civilizations can be
non-Western, one of the most important implications of the term multiple modernities is that modernity and Westernization are not identical; Western patterns of
modernity are not the only, authentic modernities, though they enjoy historical
precedence.11 The first generation of modernity scholars in the Russian field, writing in the 1990s and 2000s, willy-nilly began to participate in a methodological
shift toward multiple modernities, even though Eisenstadt and his concept did
not draw their attention.
There are two reasons for this seeming paradox. First, by pluralizing the concept, Eisendstadt and his colleagues were to an extent crystallizing a conclusion
about plural historical paths embedded in much recent work on modernity. Second, the post-Soviet engagement with modernity in the Russian and Soviet context by its very nature necessitated not associating modernity exclusively with
liberal democracy and the market, themselves tightly linked to the history of the
West. For the Russian/Soviet field, the embrace of modernity (and, by implication,
multiple roads to modernity) meant that historians, whether by intention or not,
began to operate on three macro-levels of analysis: the generic, the illiberal, and
the civilizational. According to a generic analysis, if modernity is not an exclusively
Western or liberal product, a proposition necessary if Russia/USSR is declared
modern, it follows that modernity must be expanded across geographical and political lines to include non-Western, nonliberal orders, yet the very act of counting
every such state as modern implies there must be at least some underlying or
connecting features of modernity that all modern systems display. Adherents of an
illiberal analysis hold that if Soviet communism is conceived as a variation on the
modern theme, then it must be explained how regimes that were dictatorial and
antiliberal (and in the USSRs case nonmarket) were at the same time modern. This
stance produced a special interest in the literature on Nazi modernity and, once
communism was brought in, the concept of not a generic but a specifically illiberal
modernity, thus reconfiguring the classic totalitarianism debate. In the civilizational
type of analysis, if it is accepted that modernities are not merely exported intact
from the West to the rest of the world (that is, if one begins to accept that modernities are multiple), then it follows that Russia generated a form of modernity that
was in certain ways distinguishable or different. This distinctiveness must have
24 | MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM

come either out of its own long-term historical path (which raises the specter of
continuity theses or at least the promise of transcending 1917) or out of its communist system, which in turn leads to the notion of Stalinism as a civilization, to use
the subtitle of Kotkins Magnetic Mountain.12 The initial wave of modernity scholarship from the first thus had a certain stake in distinctiveness and particularism
within the framework of its overall comparativism (just as the neo-traditionalists,
as we shall see, could always fall back on the argument that neo-traditionalism is
a special variant of modernity, despite their overall emphasis on Soviet difference).
However, the initial emphasis on using modernity to connect Russia/USSR to
other countries was so overt that this interest in the particularistic dimensions of
modernity in this context remained underdeveloped and largely hidden to participants in the debate at the time.
The problem was compounded because these three dimensions implicit in
the first generation of modernity scholarship encompassed a range of conceptual
and historical variables that was simply enormous. To complicate matters even
more, it is not sufficient to simply assert the notion of a unified Soviet modernity, because Stalinism rapidly evolved away from a number of features of the
early revolutionary state and jettisoned or reconfigured some of the most utopian (and in terms of the cultural intelligentsia, modernist) schemes to remake
human nature and society. The result was that the modernity school became an
easy target for accurate observations about the amorphousness and capaciousness
of the modernity concept. Few if any seemed to perceive that a solution to the dilemma and a way forward in the scholarship lay in focusing explicitly on features
of Russian and Soviet development that could be defined as both modern and
distinctive.
In fact, several of the initial group of historians of Russian/Soviet modernity
did develop comparative frameworks simultaneously with notions of Russian/
Soviet specificity.13 Yet they did so in targeted ways that differed substantially
from one another. For Kotsonis, the main distinguishing Russian particularism
was the persistence of an estate mentality (soslovnost) and the enormity of peasant separateness confronted and constructed even by modernizing activists; for
Holquist, it was Bolshevik ideology, which directed how modern practices were
used and prompted the continued mobilization for war even after the 19141921
deluge; for Kotkin, it was an excess of modernity, because the abolition of private
property and the planned economy allowed the USSR to implement productionist
Fordism to an unprecedented extreme, although the cunning of history rendered
this Soviet model obsolete in the postwar, postindustrial information age.14 That
said, the question remains: how could a tendency geared toward placing Russian/
Soviet modernity into a comparative contexta major innovation in a field where
uniqueness, backwardness, and otherness were seen to have reignedfully explore Russian/Soviet specificities and cultural differences in all their dimensions?
In the hands of Kotkin, Holquist, Kotsonis, Hoffmann, and others, the initial comparisons were almost invariably to Western Europe.15 To be sure, their comparative
MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM | 25

lens is often focused on the modern features that historians have seen in Nazi
Germanyitself long regarded as an aberration from modernity. That, and the
very act of positing modernity in the Russian/Soviet case, allowed for the modernity group implicitly to partake in the loosening of conceptual links between
modernity and the West, which we saw in the work of Eisenstadt. Only in Kotkins
case could one observe a non-Western society frequently brought into the comparative mix: Japan. That began to change in the 2010s, in what might be called a
second generation of modernity scholarship.16
The initial post-Soviet infatuation with modernity also left the literature vulnerable to the charge that it focused on discourse as opposed to implementation,
state rather than society, intentions rather than results. As Ronald Grigor Suny
wrote in the authoritative 2006 Cambridge History of Russia: Simply put, the modernity school emphasised what was similar between the West and the Soviet Union,
and the neo-traditionalists were fascinated by what made the USSR distinct. Modernity was concerned with the discursive universe in which ideas of progress and
subjugation of nature led to state policies that promoted the internalisation and
naturalisation of Enlightenment values. Neo-traditionalism was more interested in
social practices, down to the everyday behaviours of ordinary people.17 Put another way, this was the distinction Frederick Cooper made in the colonial context
between modernity as a condition and modernity as representation.18
Yet the sharpness of Sunys dichotomy between discourse and behavior, state
and society, appears something of a deliberate oversimplification. After all, scholars
like Kotkin and Holquist emphasized their deep concern with practices. A number
of the post-Soviet modernists did not so much ignore the social history that came
before them as attempt to transcend the ingrained state-society dichotomy. However, Suny was able to come to this conclusion because a great deal of scholarly
attention in post-Soviet modernity literature was trained on the modern features of
various projects, which by their nature were pursued by elites and generally easier
to discern than ground-level implementation or the broader patterns of culture and
mentalities. How to create a framework that convincingly encompasses more than
the state, discourse, and ideology?
One facet of the early Soviet communism, noted among others by Kotkin, is
that in certain respects the Bolshevik Revolution anticipated some features of
twentieth-century modernity, such as welfare measures. This revolutionary anticipation stands in interesting contrast to the significant lag in the first stages of
domesticating Western models described by Marc Raeff, when the Petrine state in
the eighteenth century imported features of seventeenth-century Central European
cameralism. As Raeff in that work forcefully pointed out, if the projects and models
were in many ways comparable, the socioinstitutional matrix for modernization
in Russia was radically different.19 That formulation implies that the interaction of
political and ideological projects with that matrix must also be at the center of
attention. The modernists initial tendency to focus on projects and programs left

26 | MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM

an opening for the neo-traditionalists to emphasize unexpected consequences in

the guise of Stalin-era retreats.
One does not need to accept the specific gist of the neo-traditional critique
that Bolshevik projects met Russian reality to produce unexpected reincarnations
of traditional societiesto realize that the implications of Raeffs socioinstitutional matrix for understanding Soviet modernity need to be thought through.
One needs to theorize a modernity that arose out of the confluence and interactions of a not merely modern but vociferously antiliberal, antibourgeois, anticapitalist revolutionary transformation and a society that had not fully experienced
liberalism, capitalism, or the bourgeoisie. Just as Russian Westernization preceded
that of most of the non-Western world, this anticipatory antibourgeois sentiment
might be compared to similar phenomena in numerous non-European settings.
Moreover, Holquists work on the era of total war and revolution points out that
the forceful imposition of antibourgeois mentalities in largely nonbourgeois settings does not mean that the backwardness thesis can simply be rerouted onto the
benighted masses, peasant or otherwise, who after 1917 and the Civil War were in
great numbers no longer pre-political.20
Those positing Soviet and especially Stalinist modernity found the most reinforcement in the historical literature on Nazi modernity. Yet it was not always recognized that the use of such scholarly ammunition brought with it the obligation
to grapple with Germanists earlier confrontations over the association of modernity with the genocidal destruction of an illiberal or totalitarian regime. Modernist
Russian historians starting in the 1990s were most influenced by Zygmunt Baumans work on modernity and the Holocaust, where the emphasis was on etatist
sculpting and gardening of the body politic.21 However, a number of developments
in the course of the 2000s displaced Auschwitz from the paradigmatic place it assumed in Bauman for his discussions of modernity. The subsequent wave of investigation of a very different Holocaust by bullets on the Eastern front, as well as
locales such as the much-discussed Jedwabne, Poland, in which local, village-level
causes interacted with ideological incitement, dates Baumans penetrating analysis
as much as it does those who imported it into the Soviet field.22
A more encompassing conceptual lens is necessary for Russianists, for whom
it is a perennial temptation to borrow selectively from German scholarship. We
can now perceive that the first generation of modernity debates in the Soviet field
had striking parallels with and perhaps direct cross-pollination from the earlier
German debate over the Sonderweg. In German scholarship, one side stressed the
persistence of premodern features (while the Soviet neo-traditionalists, as we shall
see, posited their recurrence). Comparative-minded Germanists objected that premodern phenomena were present in many societies and attacked the model of
a single West in terms identical to more recent Russian modernists. In his famous critique of the Sonderweg thesis, David Blackbourn spoke of viewing the
course of German history as distinctive but not sui generis, terminology that

MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM | 27

was repeated verbatim in the modernity literature decrying a Russian special path
(osobyi put).23
In another similarity, the linkage between the Holocaust and modernity was a
complicated and highly contested historiographical phenomenon that anticipated
sharp disagreements over Soviet modernity. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a
spate of German works placed Nazism into the context of modernization. For
example, a study by Gtz Aly and Susanne Heim stressed the economic and demographic motivations behind the Holocaust, thus locating its impetus in the rationality and utilitarianism of capitalism previously emphasized by the intellectuals
of the Frankfurt School. Prominent critics of these arguments, including Hans
Mommsen, respondedmuch like the neo-traditionalists in the Soviet fieldby
rejecting the association of the regime and modernity, insisting that only partial
or strategic engagement with elements of modernity was involved.24 While the referent of Nazism remains paramount in the discussion of Soviet modernity, to this
day comparisons with Italian Fascism remain highly underinvestigated.25
Those first making the case for Stalinist modernity did not confront the fact
that earlier arguments for Nazi modernity were controversial for containing a
certain critique of modern civilization, which enabled illiberal atrocities. Indeed,
echoes of the modern civilizational critique could easily be found in the Soviet
fieldfrom Kotkins presentation of the Enlightenment and its utopian mentality
as crucial for the understanding of Stalinism in the introduction to his celebrated
Magnetic Mountain to Hoffmanns association of Stalinist values with Enlightenment ideas and precursors.26 In this sense, a tacit political implication lurked just
below the surface in certain parts of the post-Soviet literature, the same one that in
its day so exercised the German critics of Nazi modernity: if a regime so murderous is identified so closely with processes common to modernity in the West, then
modernity itself in some sense bears the burden of the regimes horrors, rather than
factors or aberrations specific to the regime or country. Despite Holquists stated
intent to identify what was specific about Russias particular constellation of more
general European features, critics were aroused by the concluding sentence of his
celebrated article: insofar as Soviet Russia presents a problem, it is a problem of
the modern project itself.27
Other writers argued not for illiberal comparisons but for the systemic, oppressive sameness of modernity regardless of the political or ideological order. Kate
Brown, in her comparison of modern gridded space in the lives of settlers in
Montana and Soviet deportees to the Gulag in Karaganda, wrote that the physical
experience of industrial labor differs little whether in capitalism or communism,
because the same grid stretched over not only space but time, the process of production, and, consequently, lives. . . . Between 1880 and 1900, 700,000 workers
died on the job in the United States. Between 1934 and 1940, 239,000 forced
laborers died in Soviet labor camps.28 Once again, the urge to include Stalinism
in a generic modernity threatened to drown out the potential arguments for either
specific Russian/Soviet or illiberal historical trajectories.
28 | MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM

Controversies over Nazi modernity have been instructive not merely for laying bare the implications of blaming modern civilization but also for advancing
understandings of the modern in the German context. Out of the earlier German
historiographical moment came Detlev J. K. Peukerts book of essays on Max Webers diagnosis of modernity, which contained an essay that became famous in English translation: The Genesis of the Final Solution from the Spirit of Science.29
It was earlier in the same work, however, that Peukert confronted the concept of
modernity more directly, along with its applicability to the Nazi context, when he
advanced the notion of modernitys Janus face. Rationality was the fundamental
problem (Grundproblem) of modernity, and at least four structuring processes can
be distilled from Webers work in order to define it: the capitalist economy and
industrial class society; a rational-bureaucratic state order and social integration;
the triumph of science and technology; and rationalized and socially disciplined
ways of living. Yet, Peukert wrote in his critique, any modernity defined from
the contingency of these phenomena can only be contradictory, as it demonstrates
its insurmountable antinomies. Modernitys Janus face revealed itself when classical modernity was succeeded in the twentieth century by attempts to overcome
its crisis by working through it and against itfrom the New Deal to National
Socialism. The Nazis illiberal variation on modernity, then, was generated by the
Janus-like, contradictory nature ( Januskpfigkeit) of modernity itself.30 Both building on and going beyond Peukert and Bauman, Peter Fritzsche attempted to reinsert an appreciation of the fantastic vision of the National Socialists. He did so
by picturing them not as modernizers but as modernists who made the discontinuity of history the premise of their revolutionary racial, political, and geopolitical designs to reshape the body of the nation (Volkskrper).31
A notable work of comparative historical sociology complementary to Peukert, Peter Wagners Sociology of Modernity, like much of the literature on multiple
modernities, has been unjustly ignored in the Russian field. Wagners work not
only put communist modernity into a broader context but connected to Peukerts
Janus face thesis by tracing successive international phases of the modern. Wagner also viewed the interwar conjuncture as a general crisis of the restricted incarnations of modernity developed in the long nineteenth century. The new era
of mass mobilization and collective politics was marked by a protracted struggle
over societal reorganization in which many proposals aimed at a greater degree
of social organization than any liberal political or economic theory prescribed.
Strong state interventionism, rather than the old individualism, animated the entire spectrum of communist, fascist, social-democratic, and liberal projects. Wagner did not downplay radical differences among them but suggested how many
shared certain common ideological lineages, based themselves on internationally
circulated practices, or were influenced by experts who could migrate or convert
from one to the other.32 Wagners emphasis on stages of modernity, in tandem with
Peukerts notion of successive crises stemming from internal tensions, seems particularly applicable to Stalinisma key problem in any understanding of Soviet
MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM | 29

modernityas well as the shifts from NEP to Stalinism and late Stalinism to the
Thaw that are central in the Soviet field. Yet, as the discussion above suggests,
there is to this day little echo of these powerful discussions of the phases of modernity in Soviet historiography.
Closely related to this discussion of Peukert and Wagner is a central paradox
of modernity especially challenging for historians but also too rarely confronted
in Russian historical literature: many of the most quintessentially modern projects
are directed against the ills of the modern condition or, in the words of Marshall
Berman, hope to heal the wounds of modernity through a fuller or deeper modernity. To be fully modern, in the words of Bermans aphorism, is to be antimodern.33 In his essay, Modernity on Endless Trial, Leszek Koakowski pointed to the
frequency with which historical phenomena express both modernity and the antimodern resistance. Marxism, he wrote in a comment with relevance for the Soviet
case, combined enthusiasm for rationalism and technology with yearning after
the archaic community in which both sets of values would be implemented and
make a harmonious alloy: modern factory and the Athenian agora would somehow
merge into one.34
Given manifold variations, stages, and tensions within modernity that serious
grappling with the concept must recognize, on top of the special challenges facing
it in the Russian and Soviet field, we can appreciate the limitations of the initial
post-Soviet modernity literature in its single-minded stress on the comparability
of interventionist state projects. The state, to be sure, remains a predominant locus
for Soviet modern projects (and once again we see parallels with the ambiguously
modernizing tsarist autocracy, with its periodic reforms from above), but it has
to be brought in without leaving everything else out.35 There is, in this regard, a
conceptual danger of simply discounting the broader, nonstatist features of modernity and the theoretical literature associated with them or implicitly relegating
them to liberal modernity. What I have in mind is not just all those aspects of
modernity associated with civil society and the market but also the notions of
iconoclastic flux associated with urbanism and aesthetic modernism beginning in
the nineteenth century. A great many of the rigid, dictatorial, immobile features of
Soviet communism (especially under late Stalinism) run counter to the rapid flux
associated with modernism/modernity. Excising them from ones field of view
is problematic, in particular because a whole branch of literature links the social
and spiritual, political and aesthetic dimensions of modernity. Marshall Berman,
a pioneer in this regard, advocated a move to break down the hermetically sealed
components of modernizing politics and economics, on the one hand, and modernism in art, culture, and sensibility, on the other.36
The Soviet ideological state and the heavy-handed intertwining of ideology
with science, culture, and education poses special problems, for it produced modes
of development that some, such as David Joravsky, have seen as antithetical to the
fragmentation and pluralism of modern high cultureas, essentially, antimodern.
As the sociologist Johann P. Arnason, in general a strong proponent of the notion
30 | MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM

of communist modernity, says: the impact of a comprehensive and binding ideology (even if it never penetrated society to the same extent as historical religions)
limited the role of reflexivity in social life: the ability to confront problematic
aspects and consequences of modernizing processes was undermined by a priori
restrictions.37
One could maintain that Arnasons reflexivityalong with all nonstatist features of modernity, such as the market economy or consumer societywere simply
not a central or defining component of illiberal modernity or of Russian and Soviet
civilization. However, it then needs to be acknowledged that the tendency of a
multiple modernities argument to exclude unwanted features of modernity may
make problematic the literatures episodic dependence on other aspects of generic
modernity. One solution, and a response to Arnason, is to follow the logic of Kotkins argument: Soviet modernity, competing against its rivals, ultimately failed as
an alternative. In Kotkins interwar conjuncture, the Soviet Union participated in
the international cutting edge of modernity in the 1920s and 1930s, even anticipating its direction in certain respects; it was left behind when modernity, especially
in its economic dimensions, changed internationally in the postwar period and
rendered many parts of the USSR obsolete. Kotkin thus underscored that if the
Soviet Union was modern, it was also ultimately a failed modernity, and the implications of this need to be further incorporated into the analysis.38 The postwar
reconstruction under Stalin, however, does need to be supplemented by a much
more systematic consideration of the Khrushchev Thaw, which in many ways can
be considered the heyday of the Soviet system. Scholars have begun grappling
with the same issue they have long confronted in the context of the run-up to the
revolutionary collapse of 1917: weighing the sudden demise of the system versus
its capacity for evolution and cohesion.39
In his biography of Stalin, Kotkin has amplified his view of modernity as an
international contest. In his analysis of late imperial Russia, Kotkin writes: What
we designate modernity was not something natural or axiomatic. It involved a set
of difficult-to-attain attributesmass production, mass culture, mass politics
that the greatest powers mastered. Those states, in turn, forced other countries to
attain modernity as well, or suffer the consequences, including defeat in war and
possible colonial conquest. . . . Modernity, in other words, was not a sociological processmoving from traditional to modern societybut a geopolitical
process: a matter of acquiring what it took to join the great powers, or fall victim
to them.40 Thus desociologizing modernity in a geopolitical narrative about the
imperative of keeping up with great-power neighbors, Kotkin calls badly needed
attention to the constant processes of emulation across borders that were involved.
But in the spirit of the age of Social Darwinism about which he now writes, or
equally in the spirit of Stalins famous 1931 speech about catching up with the
West, he portrays those processes as brutally simple: acquire modern (primarily
economic, technological, military, and especially political) attributes or be crushed.
Given the involvement of politicians, scientists, experts, and professionals in perMULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM | 31

ceiving and domesticating foreign models and incorporating them on a mass scale
in modernizing societies, however, the international dimensions of modernity are
intricate enough to occupy an army of transnational historians for a generation. It
is unclear, moreover, how states forced other states to acquire mass culturethe
third and most neglected part of Kotkins triadespecially since so many elites
disdained or avoided it.41
Anna Krylovas discussion of Kotkin directly takes aim at his thesis that the
Soviet version of modernity was left behind internationally when Stalin reconstructed the postwar economy along interwar lines. Krylova contends that Kotkin
constructed a full-fledged stagnation narrative, although his treatment of the postwar period was more in the nature of a suggestive conclusion. More important,
however, is that Krylova contests the notion of a failed, alternative Soviet modernity by sketching out her own two-stage model of Soviet modernitywhat she
calls the Bolshevik and the Sovietwith the 1930s as the hinge period in a long,
uneven transition from the one to the other. The post-Bolshevik Soviet version
emerged as an urban and middle-class inflected socialist modernity, marked by
a discourse on individualization that diverged from earlier collectivism. Soviet
society and its discourses, as opposed to Soviet economics, evolved rather than
fell back on patterns from the 1930s; the postwar decades were the time when the
modern alienated and self-focused individual, as elsewhere, became a mass social
phenomenon. In this fashion, Krylova argues that the notion of a revolutionary,
Bolshevik alternative, and by extension the framework of multiple modernities,
must be replaced by an understanding of Soviet uneven development, which in
fact encompasses several visions and practices of modernity.42
Significantly, Krylova does not mention 1991 and the end of Soviet socialism.
It is also relevant to note that the Cold War, which coincides with the convergence
she pictures, was precisely the time when many in the developing world reacted to
communism as a model of development, or an alternative path to modernization.43
It is clear, however, that within the framework she sketches out, the collectivist,
Bolshevik vision of modernity also failed as an alternative, if much earlier. For if
the Bolshevik stage was gradually and unevenly in various realms superseded by
a Soviet modernity that was not the antipode of other industrialized societies,
as Krylova argues, then what can we call the original challenge other than an
alternative that failed? Whatever one thinks of Krylovas latest variation on the
shared modernity thesis, one implication is clear: the almost exclusive focus of
the first generation of modernity scholarship on the Stalin period can no longer
be sustained.44
To sum up: the first round of engagement with modernity in the Russian and
Soviet field in the 1990s and 2000s quickly confrontedand elideda number
of thorny problems. In the first category, it became necessary to decouple modernity from the liberal West while relying on a literature that analyzed the modern
in that context; it became necessary to establish that Russia/USSR shared aspects
of modernity while recognizing its specific historical path. In the second instance,
32 | MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM

the post-Soviet literature did not fully engage with the stages and tensions of
modernity or benefit from the concepts of multiple or failed modernity (with the
exception of Kotkin in the latter case). These are not easy or simple issues to confront: Eisenstadts recognition of modernity generated from within non-Western
civilizations, for example, is doubly challenging for the Russian field, where there
undoubtedly will never be consensus on the degree to which Russia was Westernized or still non-Western even before the Soviet Union attempted to leap beyond
the West. Yet the price of not confronting these issues is a historical tautology:
whatever features of Russia/USSR do have parallels with other modern societies
confirm its modernity, while those it lacks are simply an indication of its own path
to its own distinctive modern form.
There is a way out of this conceptual trap. By predicating investigation on
the understanding that modernities can be multiple, illiberal and non-Western,
tension-ridden, evolutionary, and punctuated by crisesand keeping in focus that
Soviet modernity ultimately could not be sustained as an alternativethe field
will be freed to investigate the particular and the modern simultaneously in the
Soviet context.

On Neo-Traditionalism and Tradition

The neo-traditionalist tendency advanced its scholarship as a direct rebuttal of
the modernity thesis. As Fitzpatrick noted in 2000, a number of works by Chicago
scholars on traditional aspects of the Soviet order lay behind the neo-traditionalist
case, notably Fitzpatricks own emphasis on patronage and blat in Everyday Stalinism
and her seminal article on the emergence of Soviet-like sosloviia, Ascribing Class.
Two of Fitzpatricks students, Matthew Lenoe and Terry Martin, were most deeply
involved in advancing the concept of neo-traditionalism in the field of Soviet history.45 Lenoes Closer to the Masses, the best monographic account of the forces and
intentions behind the transformation of print media in the interwar period, also
represented the most substantial exposition of the neo-traditionalist argument in
the context of Stalinism. This work, an archivally based investigation of the origins of Stalinization of Soviet newspapers, focused on the 19251932 period. The
empirical research revolved around the creation of cadres for new forms of what
were called mass journalism during NEP. The new propaganda style, based on
notions of heroic storming that appealed to the young, male generation of party
cadres, was essentially spread to the entire print media during the Five-Year Plan.
As Soviet newspapers engaged in information rationing and focused on mobilizing
party cadres for the tasks of forced industrialization, they abandoned the NEP
mass enlightenment project of edifying the entire populace and, by extension,
the early utopian goals of forging a New Man. Lenoe therefore discounted the
transformational state projects so dear to the heart of the modernity group (or, as
in the case of Stalinist reforging [perekovka], did not discuss them). In their place,
he maintained that the history of newspapers revealed that a cadres-oriented, stratified and status-oriented Soviet society had already emerged by the first phase of
MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM | 33

Stalinism, setting the stage for further retreats in the late 1930s.46 Although I do
not focus here on Lenoes empirical argument, it should be noted that the clear-cut
shift Lenoe saw from NEP-era utopianism to Stalin-era mobilization is open to
dispute. In particular, his larger claims about total abandonment of the New Man
rested on a relatively short-term chronological focus (the First Five-Year Plan period, when regime survival was on the agenda) and an investigation of newspapers
rather than other branches of culture (especially literature and education).47
It is in this shift from NEP utopianism to mobilizing Stalinism that Lenoe
identified the rise of neo-traditionalism. Adopting the Weberian categories in
which the concept was developed in social science during the 1980s, Lenoe argued that the early Soviet regime was based on the Partys impersonal charisma,
as opposed to the rational-legal order of the liberal West. This then devolved under
Stalin to neo-traditional forms of state and society, in particular a hierarchical
society divided into a number of status groups or estates.48
Tellingly, Lenoes charge that the modernity thesis obscures more than it
explains revolved entirely around highlighting differences between the Soviet
order and Western liberal democracies, implicitly yet unselfconsciously denying
the possibility of non-Western or multiple modernities. Lenoe allowed that in the
most general sense Soviet newspapers could be seen as participating in a mass
communications revolution that relied on new forms and technologies (an argument developed in Kotkins Modern Times, which Lenoe did not cite), but he
argued that, in a global context, agitprop and Soviet newspapers were sui generis.
Thus his most significant comparative move was to highlight differences between
Soviet agitprop and the contemporaneous North American science of public relations.49 As Lenoe put it: Postmodern claims for the dominance of discourse and
micro-practices of power over the self and the world have contributed to recent
arguments that the Soviet Union, Imperial Russia, and the liberal democracies
of the West share or shared something called modernity with many nefarious
consequences. Proponents of the shared modernity thesis argue that differences
between Leninist and liberal democratic regimes in forms of property, level of coercion, and political organization were less important than they appear.50
Lenoes rejection of modernity was thus a reaction to implied comparisons
between liberalism and communism. For him, Soviet modernity denoted shared
modernity with the West. Of the three elements on which the initial discussions of
Russian/Soviet modernity literature rested, according to the argument developed
here, he took issue with shared or generic modernity, omitting the possibility
of the other twoilliberal modern orders or a specific Russian/Soviet path to
modernity. Second, as the above quotation reveals, Lenoe declared the modernity
thesis guilty by association with postmodernism. It is true that widespread discussions of postmodernism during their heyday in the 1990s (including by those skeptical of the concept and phenomenon) influenced understandings of modernism
and modernity.51 However, recognizing that linkage is a far cry from asserting that
varying degrees of Foucauldian influence on Kotkin, Holquist, Kotsonis, and oth34 | MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM

ers made them and their work postmodern. The broader modernity literature from
the start has rested on many strands in history and the social sciences that were not
dependent on discourse analysis or poststructuralism.52 Justifying his preference for
a description of the Soviet order as neo-traditional rather than modern, Lenoe proclaimed that the Soviet order was a coherent alternative to the modernity of the
wealthy liberal capitalist states and a distinct developmental path to an industrial
modernity.53 Even as Lenoe confirmed here his identification of the modern with
Western liberal democracy and the market economy, his identification of a distinctive path could have easily been written by a proponent of multiple modernities.
These gaps in Lenoes logic are easier to understand when we consider the theoretical inspiration for Lenoes and Martins neo-traditionalism: the social science
of the 1980s. Both held up an essay by Ken Jowitt originally written in 1983 as a
source for their notion of neo-traditionalism and handling of Weberian categories
in understanding Soviet legitimation. In that work, Jowitt analyzed the striking
amalgam of charismatic, traditional, and modern features in Soviet institutions. He
maintained that modern elements had an integral place in communist regimes,
but their position in that amalgam gave the Soviet polity/economy a fundamentally novel quality. Jowitt in 1983 thus argued primarily against those who erroneously conclude that the Soviet Union is simply a variant of Western modernity,
criticizing in particular proponents of convergence theory. Modern elementsby
which he meant secular, empirical, individual orientations and practiceswere
not foreign to Soviet communism, then, but they were subordinated to charismatictraditional features of a unique system. For Jowitt, therefore, modernity meant a
rational, secular, and impersonal market system, something confirmed when he
referred to the impersonal/individuated predictability and standardization of a
market economy and electoral polity as the opposite of personalistic Soviet economic and political relationships.54 Soviet neo-traditionalism, for Jowitt, implied
the selective and partial incorporation of modern (Western) elements.
The most substantial work on which Lenoe and Martin relied was Andrew
Walders study of Chinese industry, Communist Neo-Traditionalism, which developed
a somewhat different stance on the communist mix of traditional and modern
but grew out of theoretical concerns similar to those of Jowitt. In an introductory chapter on neo-traditionalism, Walder justified the concept by asserting the
need to distinguish the distinctive social configuration of contemporary communism, which was characterized by a rich subculture of instrumental-personal
and patron-client ties designed to circumvent the formal regulations on housing
and goods. He underlined (as did Martin and Lenoe) that neo-traditionalism does
not imply not modern; drawing on works on modernization from the late 1960s,
heunlike Jowittaverred that there is no universal scale of modernity. The
reason for attaching the label traditionalist to the idiosyncratic communist social configuration lies rather in Western social science, which uses traditional
to denote dependence, deference, and particularism as opposed to impersonal,
contractual, and universal forms of authority. Thus Walders neo-traditionalism,
MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM | 35

while characterized by features traditionally held to be premodern, was both modern and unique. The main thrust of Walders argument was to distinguish neotraditionalism from totalitarianism theory (that is, patron-client relations were more
important than terror) and interest group/pluralism theories of the 1960s1970s
(according to his model, communist institutions shaped the social structure itself,
rather than the other way around). Walder appears to have especially inspired the
Soviet historians by emphasizing how things really worked in practice rather than
how they were officially described, feeding into the discussion of discourse and
reality, intentions and unintended consequences that remains paramount in the
Soviet context.
Distinguishing his model from the totalitarian and interest-group trends in
the social science of his day, Walder also intended above all to disprove convergence theory: Whether this convergence is measured on a continuum that contrasts particularism with universalism, ascription with achievement, tradition with
modernity, or totalitarianism with pluralism, the effort to gauge degrees of difference is bound to mislead. None of these concepts adequately characterizes the
distinctive social configuration of contemporary communism.55 While Walders
shrewd critique of these key binary oppositionsparticularly that between traditional and modernmight have been read more attentively by his latter-day neotraditionalist followers, it should be emphasized that both Jowitts and Walders
works preceded the development of the concept of multiple modernities in social
theory and that of illiberal modernities in historical scholarship. Both Jowitt and
Walder disagreed with social science theories that flattened differences between
communism and other societies, yet recognition of different historical paths and
systems became enshrined in the newer concepts.
Jowitt and Walder also diverged from one another. For Jowitt, modern elements were subordinated within an unambiguously nonmodern, traditional system, leading to a sharp, clear-cut line between traditional and modern that many
historians might have difficulty locating. For Walder, the gestalt, made up of elements social science has seen as traditional and modern, could itself be modernit
was just different and unique.
Both Jowitt and Walder, therefore, were enmeshed in debates that placed them
on the side of communist particularism and uniqueness. For Lenoe and Martin,
writing twenty years later, as well as for those who continue to be attracted to the
concept of neo-traditionalism, an issue worth pondering is that neither difference
nor the mixture of modern and traditional is disallowed by the concept of multiple or alternative modernities. Indeed, it can easily be argued that all modern
systems have coexisted and conflicted with persisting premodern or traditional
practices. At the outset of this discussion, moreover, one of the strands of the
existing literature on modernity in the Russian/Soviet field was identified as the
civilizationalthe notion that the path to modernity must in part derive from
Russian patterns or an emergent Soviet civilization. Ironically, this element of the
modernist argumentthat is, the one that has the most common ground with
36 | MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM

the neo-traditionalist focus on particularismwas bypassed by both Lenoe and

Martin. Let us now turn to the work of the latter, who came out in 2000 for neotraditionalism over modernizationnot modernities, multiple or otherwisein
an influential chapter, Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism.
The main point of Martins analysis was to assert the role of unintended consequences in the 1930s turn to ethnic primordialism. He argued that the Soviet
regime labeled the population in national terms to enact its indigenization (korenizatsiia) policies in the 1920s; nationality then became ascribed hereditary status
through passportization; and finally, the popular reification of what the regimes
theorists had previously recognized as constructed categories fueled the heavyhanded state cult of narodnost in the 1930s. Unforeseen consequences thus intertwined with broader Soviet social processes.56 Martin claimed that the evidence
behind this reconstruction strongly supports the neo-traditional paradigm. By
this he means an alternative form of modernization, one that includes the most
characteristic processes of market-driven modernization (industrialization, urbanization, secularization, universal education, and literacy), but one which likewise
produces a variety of practices that bear a striking resemblance to characteristic
features of traditional pre-modern societies. Martin ended with the oft-quoted
words: Modernization is the theory of Soviet intentions; neo-traditionalism, the
theory of their unintended consequences.57
Three features of this argument stand out. First, for Martin as for Lenoe,
modernity was synonymous with Western development and there was no consideration of the possibility of illiberal or non-Western modernity. The frequent
evocation of market-driven modernization, as in the quotation above, raises questions about whether Martin was further referring to Anglo-American as opposed
to continental models; statism does not have to be Stalinist, Soviet, or Russian.
Second, Martin correlated the return to primordial understandings of the Russian
nation in the 1930s with the persistence of traditional pre-modern practices in
Communist societies such as status and personalistic relations. For Martin as for
Jowitt, the primacy of social and ethnic hierarchies, as opposed to egalitarian universalism, was a key marker of traditionalism. But were these phenomena of the
same order, given that other modern societies did not repudiate ethnic primordialism? Was there also a gap between intentions and realities in what Martin would
see as genuinely modern societies? Given the nature of the argument, it is striking
that consideration of the prerevolutionary period was entirely absent. Those at the
forefront of calling attention to traditional or premodern elements of the Soviet
order were concerned not at all with examining traditionitself, like modernity,
hardly a straightforward, compact, or unproblematic concept.58
Indeed, defining tradition remains one of the most pressing issues for any
conception of neo-traditionalism. Barbara Walker has questioned Terry Martins
reliance on Walder: As Walder has defined it, [neo-traditionalism] is an explicitly
ahistorical term, excluding any consideration of the actual, regional histories of
MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM | 37

these traditional phenomena.59 The neglect of tradition in the guise of the Russian Empire before 1917 on the part of neo-traditionalists cuts off some compelling
opportunities to link the Soviet period to more long-standing patterns of development, whatever they are ultimately labeled. Indeed, what the neo-traditionalists
discerned in the Soviet interwar perioda combination of overlapping traditional
and modern elements, or a combined development of political and social modes
corresponding to several historical stagesis precisely what has animated some
of the most sophisticated and celebrated historical interpretations of imperial and
revolutionary Russia.60
Finally, while Martin used the term pre-modern to describe neo-traditional
phenomena such as ascribed identities and personalistic ties (hence his reference
to the persistence of traditional pre-modern practices in Communist societies),
he also wished to argue against the continuity of Russian/Soviet values and in
favor of extreme Soviet statism as the key to why those phenomena appeared.61
In this way, Martin never chose between Jowitt and Walder: when he wanted to
promote neo-traditionalism as the best characterization of the Soviet order he (like
Jowitt) underlined Stalinisms premodern elements; when he wanted to suggest
that neo-traditionalism was no simple return to Russian tradition he (like Walder)
turned around and implied that it was in its way modern too. Martins foil of marketdriven modernization cannot counter the objection that the modern, statist incorporation of traditional elements could be folded into the notion of multiple
modernities. The possibility is all the more striking in that not only ethnic but
racial primordialismand, if one includes the Nazis, the most aggressive possible
ascription of racial categorieswas prevalent in the modern polities of the interwar period.

Overlaps and Convergences

The clash between concepts of modernity and neo-traditionalism in the mid2000s was riddled with unresolved issues and problems within each trend. Let us
now turn to analyzing and contextualizing them in tandem. From this discussion
one can conclude that they did share common ground: both agreed that the Soviet
order to some extent combined or mixed modern features with others, whether
those were seen as traditional or distinctive, peculiarly Russian, specifically Soviet, or illiberal. Neither side completely denied either particularistic traits or
comparative commonalities. Both modernists and neo-traditionalists hedged their
claims by avoiding complete association with one of those two poles of universalism or particularism. Modernity scholarship made sure to emphasize the liberalilliberal gulf, the importance of ideology, or distinct features of the USSR, while
the neo-traditionalists took pains to assert that it was into a modernizing (if not
modern) system that their traditional features were incorporated. That said, it is
equally evident that the unresolved disagreements between these forms of scholarship nonetheless revolved around comparability versus uniqueness, universalism
versus particularism, differences in degree versus differences in kind. The question
38 | MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM

arises: if particularistic, unique, or traditional features can be recognized within

a paradigm that explicitly recognizes multiple modernities, unlike the initial
post-Soviet discussion of modernity, at what point does it cease to meaningfully
distinguish itself from the fundamental neo-traditionalist notion of a Soviet mix of
modern and traditional?
It is useful to set these issues within a broader historiographical context, for
the post-Soviet split reconfigured previously entrenched positions in the Russian/
Soviet field. The neo-traditionalist trend, consciously following many aspects of
Fitzpatricks oeuvre, still incorporated many elements of the classic revisionism
she inspired: the centrality of unintended consequences not predicted from above,
an accent on discontinuity from the 1920s to the 1930s, and, at least with Lenoe, a
structural assertion of the primacy of the First Five-Year Plan period. Yet it is this
trend that felt obliged strongly to distinguish the liberal West from a shared modernity with the Soviet Union while revisionism, in its day, deployed universalistic
social science concepts such as upward mobility to subvert notions of totalitarian
uniqueness. The modernity group, by contrast, with its powerful preoccupation
with the ideological and political dimensions of twentieth-century history, grew
out of a rejection of the social history of the 1970s1980s. Modernity scholars
maintained other debts to their totalitarian grandfathers, as well, including a general tendency to see continuities rather than breaks from Lenin to Stalin. Yet it was
precisely this branch of the post-Soviet generation of scholars that dedicated itself
to exploding strong claims about Soviet uniqueness that were associated with the
totalitarian framework. Such were the ironies of historiographical dialectics in the
post-Soviet age.
But an even wider lens is required to set the debate between modernity and
neo-traditionalism within the history of Russian studies. Participants in these
debates perhaps did not appreciate just how deeply divisions between Russian/
Soviet comparability and uniqueness were embedded in the field. The starkest
opposition and swing between the poles of particularism and universalism, David
Engerman suggested in his first work on the early history of Russian studies in the
US context, lay in the shift from the belief in national character and geographical
essentialism prevalent among experts in the incipient field from the late nineteenth
century through the interwar period to a nascent social science universalism that
came into its own after the Second World War.62 In his major history of Soviet
studies in the United States after 1945, Engerman subjected this postwar universalism to closer scrutiny, depicting it now as one part of a decades-long skirmish
between universalistic theoriesframeworks that were often undercut by their
implicit reliance on Western societiesand still vigorous notions of national particularity. As Engerman put it, The tension between universalist aims and national
particularity would dominate, in different ways, the study of Soviet economics,
politics, and society.63 The debate over modernity versus neo-traditionalism was
thus a continuation of a foundational split within the field.
A notable incarnation of this fundamental division that vividly comes across in
MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM | 39

Engermans work is the gap between the postwar social scientists at the Russian
Interview Project at Harvard, such as Claude Kluckhohn, who placed the Soviet
Union into a modern industrial context that included Western societies, and adherents of the totalitarian school who vigorously partitioned communism from the
West. As Engerman notes, the Russian Interview Projects overarching view, that
the USSR was a modern industrial society sharing much with Western Europe and
the United States, received some play in the academic world. But it was not as influential, especially in the short term, as Merle Fainsods How Russia Is Ruled (1953),
which stood for decades as the standard work on Soviet politics.64
In the fields long-standing division between comparability with the West and
non-Western or nonmodern difference, moreover, there was a history of ambiguity
that, as we have seen, was also recapitulated in the 2000s. For example, totalitarianism theory asserted irreconcilable differences between Stalinism and the West,
but it did so within the context of a Nazi-Soviet comparison that traced totalitarianisms lineage deep into European history. Revisionism, as mentioned, in turn
adapted some social science concepts developed for Western societies implicitly to
undercut totalitarianisms accruing claims of aberration from Western norms, yet
the revisionist schools social compositionhistorians trained to delve deeply
into the peculiarities of the social structureat the same time often gave this
scholarship a domestic, internalist, and particularistic thrust. In this context, we
can appreciate how the post-Soviet debate over modernity and neo-traditionalism
reconfigured key older divergences inside a new framework. At the same time, the
opposing groups distances from one other along the universalism-particularism
continuum continued to shrink in comparison with the older divisions in the field.
By the 2000s, it was more a matter of emphasis and implicit disagreement over
some key concepts.
Let us return to the issue of how the approach suggested by the concept of
multiple modernities can be distinguished from the neo-traditionalist notion of a
traditional-modern mix. One further divergence exposed in the post-Soviet debate
reveals the crux of the issue: differing understandings of the West and the path to
modernity. By contrasting the Soviet order with the modern Western world, the
neo-traditionalists appeared to conjure up a model of a unified (modern) West or
Western modernization against which the USSR could be measured. The modernists, by contrast (and by extension anyone explicitly endorsing the notion of multiple modernities) seemed to recognize that archaic features were embedded in many
societies and the path to modernity was twisted in prerevolutionary Russia as well
as in many parts of Europe, not to mention the rest of the world. Indeed, the notion
that traditional mentalities and practices persisted strongly in nineteenth-century
Europethe classic age of Western modernizationwould be entirely uncontroversial, for example, to European social and labor historians. Through their
more extensive comparative dimension, and in particular through their emphasis
on German comparisons, the modernists challenged the construct of a unified
West and the primacy of Anglo-American models within it.
40 | MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM

Reverberations and Reversions

The theory of neo-traditionalism advanced by Martin and Lenoe has left a noticeable wake in the field in the years since it was first advanced. I briefly examine
four differing responses: engaging the concept while modifying it; endorsing elements of the neo-traditionalist critique of Russian/Soviet modernity; fully backing
the concept of neo-traditionalism; and reverting to older notions of a fundamentally continuous Russian tradition.
One of the most significant engagements with the notion of neo-traditionalism
came from the British historian David Priestland in a 2007 work on Stalinist
ideology and the politics of mobilization. Priestland looked at the state of the
debate between adherents of modernity and neo-traditionalism and rightly concluded that both arguments were valuable but flawed. In particular, he pointed to
the highly disruptive, ideological upheaval of the Great Terror as having little
connection with a neo-traditionalist project that was primarily concerned with
stability. At the same time, Priestland justifiably objected to the straight line between the Enlightenment and Bolshevik modernity traced by Kotkin, Hoffmann,
and others in the 1990s (which, incidentally, tended to see the Enlightenment as a
unified phenomenon rather than referring, like much eighteenth-century scholarship, to multiple Enlightenments). The modernity groups stress on Enlightenment
roots, in turn, did not fit the Stalinist leaderships frequent elevation of heroism
over scientific rationality, and its persecution of wrecker specialists who defended
science against voluntaristic experiments.65
Rather than endorsing either modernity or neo-traditionalism, Priestland
preferred to emphasize the divisions within Stalinism. His work traced the clash
between revivalists who held to a voluntaristic or charismatic approach and a competing scientist, technicist approach to politics and economics. Then Priestland
wrote, In addition to these . . . a neo-traditionalist position emerged within Bolshevism, which, in effect, departed from Marxism, as it involved abandoning the
goal of transforming society into a fully egalitarian order. Stalin himself was much
attracted to revivalism but also frequently resorted to technicist and, occasionally, hierarchical neo-traditionalist approaches because permanent revolutionary
upheaval within the system was unsustainable.66
Priestland historicized neo-traditionalism by seeing it as one, hardly dominant
strand within Stalinism. In this move he resembled those, like David Brandenberger, who have focused on how Stalinism deliberately incorporated and deployed traditional symbols and iconongraphy. As Brandenberger has characterized
this late 1930s shift: Stalin and his entourage reinforced the new heroic line with
inspiring names and reputations drawn from the Russian national past. A supremely pragmatic decision, this Russocentric recasting of the usable past served
as an instrumental complement to official Soviet ideology and should not be seen
as a shift toward genuine nationalism or a fundamental departure from the regimes
commitment to Marxism-Leninism.67 David Hoffmann also saw no contradiction
MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM | 41

between the rise of modern mass politics in the 1930s and an instrumental emphasis on tradition. Interwar states invented traditions using the mobilizational power
of traditional appeals and symbols, he wrote, at the very moment when modern
rationalism was destroying traditions. . . . Fascist regimes in particular, but democratic and socialist governments as well, resorted to distinctly anti-modern themes
(the folk, the purity of rural life, the traditional family).68
In terms of Soviet history, Priestlands work held another important message.
Priestland rejected the notion of a single ideological system that constituted Bolshevism or Stalinism. The zig-zag, evolutionary development of Stalinist policy
he described in the 1930s, as it lurched from one tactic to another in attempting to
square its circles, suggested instead that we should not assume that one internally
coherent ideology or political culture informed Bolshevik decision-making.69
Thus Priestland contributed to a growing characterization of Stalinism as a hybrid
rather than a coherent, unified phenomenon.
A second type of response, endorsing elements of the neo-traditionalist critique
of modernity but never adopting the concept itself, came from Ronald Grigor Suny,
whose early critique of the modernity school we already encountered. Suny never
adopted the concept of neo-traditionalism, but he objected to both the vagueness
of the modernity concept and its homogenizing implications in the hands of historians. As he phrased it in an article published in 2007, modernity is an extraordinarily capacious term, which appears to explain everything from human rights
to the Holocaust. Sunys objections to the concept of Soviet modernity have been
both methodological and political. In the first case, the stress on the dark side of
the Enlightenment in the post-Soviet scholarship on modernity seemed to preclude
a vision of possible progress, and hence in his view held conservative implications.
This concern appeared to address the anti-Enlightenment ethos so fashionable in
the 1990s, but (as mentioned) that ethos had little to do with actual scholarship
on the eighteenth century. A more serious and enduring criticism, in my view, is
Sunys methodological objection to the use of the modernity concept in the field.
In his words, Soviet historians who wish to bring ideology back in are making
an important contribution to explanations of the Soviet experience, but modernity
is so broad a concept that unless particular elements are specified and the causal
links demonstrated it may obscure more than it illuminates.
If Sunys objection were merely to the breadth and possible political implications of the modernity concept, one could easily respond: many key terms in history and social science are elusive, complex, and politicized, but they are so central
that they are impossible to ignore. However, Sunys reservation here was actually
more targeted and focused on the application of modernity in Soviet history. He
shrewdly noted that an attempt to use modernity as an explanation for action, or
a causal factor in historical development, was a problematic feature of post-Soviet
scholarship. Rather than turning to modernity to explain the course of events or
the nature of the system, Suny offers, modernity is better seen as a context, an
environment in which certain ideas, aspirations, and practices are more likely to
42 | MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM

find support than others.70 Thus Suny did not so much endorse neo-traditionalism
or repudiate the concept of modernity as issue valid warnings about making modernity itself into a causal factor in Soviet history.
Between the mid-2000s and the early 2010s, explicit theories of neotraditionalism waned in the field. Yet the split in the field this chapter has described persisted and evolved in interesting ways. In the scholarship on the Stalin
period, a division persisted between those who tended to see the Soviet order as
within the modern universe of twentieth-century states, and others who continued
to focus on the neo-traditionalists emphasis on chaotic and personalistic implementation in the Soviet system in lieu of the overarching theorya sort of neotraditionalism aprs la lettre. In some ways, this replicated a division between
more theoretically and comparatively oriented scholars and those who were more
empirically inclined. But as explicit debate over the issue of Soviet modernity died
down, a swelling wave of research on the Thaw era appeared to find little to contest in the notion of Soviet modernity. At least, it was not made into a significant
problem. This was perhaps because an urbanized, industrialized nuclear superpower with a growing taste for consumer goods did not seem very traditional,
but also because much of the new historiography of the post-Stalin period did not
engage some of the big questions about the trajectory of the Soviet period that
were initially raised in the literature on the interwar period.
More rarely, some works ventured an explicit endorsement of the concept of
neo-traditionalism over modernity. One example I found of this type of response
was Wilson T. Bells impressively researched PhD thesis on the Gulag and forced
labor in western Siberia. Opposing the mirage of a modern, bureaucratic Gulag
that appeared on paper, Bell took the personalistic relations and informal practices
on the ground in western Siberian forced labor as proof of the neo-traditionalism
of the Soviet order. In a section designed to reject the modernity thesis, Bell raised
objections to Foucault and Baumans writings on prisons and camps as applied to
the Soviet order. Foucault, he justifiably concluded following Jan Plamper, wrote
about the Gulag in ambiguous ways.71 The nightmarish bureaucratic efficiency of
Baumans gardening state, moreover, hardly corresponded to the corruption and
deliberate inefficiency of the Gulag bureaucracy. Indeed, Bell suggested, bureaucratization and paperwork rules actually did not enforce centralization but rather
strengthened informal practices. Hence, the concept of neotraditionalism
modernization with the persistence and entrenchment of some premodern practicesdescribes the Gulag better than modernity.72
Here we can see both the long arm of the debates of the 1990s and 2000s on
the field as well as the continuing influence of the dichotomy between intent and
implementation. Bell zeroed in on Foucault and Bauman because of their relevance
for his topic of the camps, but also because they were intensively engaged by
the modernity literature of the 1990s. Although each of Bells individual points
is defensible and interesting, the overall rejection of modernity by taking issue
with these two theorists is a reductionist move. Given Bells stress here on the
MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM | 43

irrelevance of paperwork and the use of the most primitive tools and conditions to
explain the Gulags lack of modernity, Michael Manns critique of Bauman in his
Dark Side of Democracy is of particular interest. Mann speaks, like Bauman, in the
context of the Nazi extermination camps: The paperwork was deliberately denuded
of murderous language in order to conceal mass murder. Most extermination institutions were neither bureaucratic nor dispassionate. True, Germany was an advanced society under fairly efficient rule, with a very efficient army. . . . Yet foreign
collaborators, Romanian and Croatian fascists, used primitive techniques to almost
as devastating an effect. . . . Each group of perpetrators used the highest level of
modernity and technology available to it. That is the sole, and rather banal, truth
of Baumans and Feingolds argument.73
As Mann confirms, the new literature on the Holocaust in the East has undercut the literature on industrial killing, because there Nazi killings were far
from bureaucratic or high-tech. Mann forcefully argues that the modern element in
Nazism and the Holocaust lay elsewhere: in the modern mass movement, with its
discipline, comradeship, and careerism reinforced by a shared ideology.74 Manns
critique of Baumans approach to modernity, emphasizing ideology and ethos over
technology and bureaucracy, is especially relevant for students of Stalinism. No
discussion of the modernity of the Gulag, moreover, can leave out features differentiating it from, say, the tsarist penal system (which in other respects it perpetuated), such as the systematized role of medical criteria in facilitating the extent and
exploitation of human bodies.75 Here, as well, more broadly, Tarik Cyril Amars
elaboration of a distinctive Soviet form of modernity is relevantone that was so
relentless, vast, and massively persistent over time precisely because it was also so
bumbling, inefficient, and challenged on so many fronts.76
Of course, mixing discussions of the modernity or neo-traditionalism of Nazi
genocide and Stalinist forced labor, or reaching for conclusions about their respective systems as a whole only from these parts, however significant, is itself problematic. Even so, the gap between Soviet intentions and implementationwhich
Fitzpatrick, Martin, and Suny at various times have emphasized and that has impressed othersremains a key problem with which Soviet historians must grapple. Here Lynne Violas Kritika article on collectivization-era deportations remains
one of the most thought-provoking pieces on the dichotomy between planning
and practice. As Viola describes it, absurdly meticulous Soviet central planning on
paper went hand in hand in this period with astounding chaos and brutalization
on the ground. However, Violas central conclusion was that the vision of control
and rational order projected onto the chaos of Russia by an urban state determined
to transform was in keeping with what James Scott dubbed high modernism,
whose carriers tended to see state-imposed rationality in aesthetic terms. In an important conclusion, Viola maintained that the Stalinist planning aesthetic shared
much more in common with Socialist Realism than with scientific social engineering; hyperplanning and chaotic enactment were, moreover, more mutually
reinforcing than contradictory, as both were characteristic of the Soviet states
44 | MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM

efforts to master its bureaucracy en route to socialism. Picking up on this theme

in his commentary on the article, Peter Holquist suggested that there existed not
only a gulf between utopian planning and messy realization, but the two were
intrinsically related. Holquist pictured the intentions and the results as part of a
dialectic: hatred of backwardness and unbounded faith in the power of the state
led to inevitable failure of grandiose plans, which was then blamed not on the approach itself but on recalcitrance and backwardness, thus perpetuating the cycle.
Holquist concluded: Here the dynamic seems to be less Stalinist than a case of
the historically specific and hyper-charged recurrence of a persistent condition of
Russian history, to borrow a concept from Alfred Rieber: the fantasy of employing
state action as the instrument of transforming an inert Russian society, and the
consequent frustration when Russian society proved tenaciously impervious to
such transformative action.77 The scholar who so brilliantly analyzed the gulf
between planning and implementation invoked high modernism; the modernist
scholar, in response, pointed to persistent Russian factors.
If there is any pressing issue that the debate between modernity and neotraditionalism illuminates, it is the imperative to move beyond conceptual frameworks that segregate intentions and consequences, ideas and circumstances,
political programs and social reality, above and below. Only the study of their
interrelationships can lead out of the impasse created in the post-Soviet debate.
Finally, the increasingly explicit consolidation of Vladimir Putins authoritarianism in the Russian Federation in the 2010s appears to have inspired conceptions
that explained continuities among Russia, the USSR, and post-Soviet Russia. As
we have seen, there was a degree of overlap between scholarship in the modernity
and neo-traditionalist vein: scholars on both sides could agree that many features
of the Soviet period were novel and modern. Neither approach placed primary
emphasis on the oldest, most hoary theses of Russian backwardness. This may
be changing as conceptions of an eternally backward and dictatorial Russia prove
seductive not just in the sound bites of journalists but to historians and scholars
who are, or should be, trained to make distinctions over time into a primary tool
of the trade.
This historiographical step backward, or, to coin a phrase, reversionism, is on
full display in J. Arch Gettys Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence
of Tradition. Here, clan politics under Putin is regularly invoked to portray a fundamentally continuous, thousand-year-old political culture that drove the practices
of boyars and commissars alike. According to this view, Russian and Soviet history
form part of a single stream, and events from Russias distant past are pictured as
directly analogous to those both of the Soviet period and the post-Soviet present.
In its introduction, Gettys work appears to align itself with the notion of neotraditionalism, which is discussed approvingly. But in its more fundamental thrust,
this work advances a qualitatively more direct continuity thesis between what is
consistently called old Russia (everything before 1917, with an almost exclusive
emphasis on the Muscovite period) and Soviet/post-Soviet practices. Thus the BolMULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM | 45

sheviks, whatever their agenda or ideology, fell back willy-nilly on the ancient
and archaic practices of patrimonialism that were built into old Russian political
culture.78 While the neo-traditionalists in the early 2000s gave short shrift to actually examining tradition, Getty picks up where they left off and devotes his attention to filling in the gapreading all of Russian history backwards and forwards
from the Stalin period.
Gettys work frequently cites other continuity theses in the Russian field, notably Edward Keenans famous article, Muscovite Political Folkways.79 Those
theories have often been critiqued for their inability to point to concrete, causal
mechanisms by which features of Muscovy were recapitulated in the Soviet period.
Getty perpetuates this problem, largely glossing over the changes of the imperial
period from Peter the Great to 1917, during which, he maintains, little changed.80
Indeed, Gettys work gives little analytical weight to any kind of historical change,
although he riddles the book with caveats and contradictions. Thus, the notion
of neo-traditionalism, which incorporates a modern or novel (neo) appeal to traditionalism, has been supplanted in Gettys work into a stress on Russian tradition
tout court.81 Both 1917 and 1937 changed little: There had never been any other
way to govern Russia, and upon reflection it would have been surprising indeed if
Stalin could have replaced a thousand years of governing practice just by killing
the current incumbents. . . . That was how Russia had always been governed.82
Instead of picturing modernity as incomplete, proceeding in stages, punctuated by crises, in certain ways fused with elements from the past, and proceeding at
different paces in different areasas the approach taken in this chapter and in this
book would have itGetty reverts to a simple, binary dichotomy between modern
and archaic. This black-and-white division is based on a reading of Webers ideal
types, astonishing in its literal-mindedness, as if everything modern in governance
could be seen as rational-bureaucratic and as if everything before that was personalistic, traditional, and patrimonial.
But this simplistic binary opposition suffers from fatal flaws of elementary
logic. For example, if Russian patrimonialism is based on ancient and archaic traditions that make it different or backward, it is presumably distinguished from a
rational-bureaucratic modernity that can be located somewhere else in the world.
Could it have been in the West? Here one notes the almost complete lack of a
comparative framework in Gettys treatment. The debates over Nazi modernity
would seem relevant, given the personalistic phenomenon of working toward the
Fhrer and the fiefdoms in the Nazi empire, but no references to Hitler can be
found.83 Instead, we learn that informal personal arrangements similar to those of
Stalinism are common in modern states. In a bizarre twist, the one major comparison in the book appears to be between Stalin and British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher. Getty tells us that Thatchers personal interventionism into the workings
of the British Cabinet would not be far wrong if Stalin were substituted for Mrs.
Thatcher.84 Perhaps the Iron Lady as well as the Man of Steel was shaped by
archaic and ancient Russian tradition.
46 | MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM

Toward a New Debate

With Gettys move from neo-traditionalism to a stark continuity thesis about
Russian patrimonialism, it may well be that the debate over modernity in the Russian and Soviet field has entered a new phase. But in another, more promising and
intellectually fruitful respect, a new era has already begun. The spectacular rise
of transnational history in the years since the neo-traditionalist challenge, along
with cross-border investigations of the country in various periods, is capable of
informing the investigation in several ways. A concerted focus on transnational interaction can bring into clearer focus borrowings within the international system,
a phenomenon that might be called entangled modernities.
The study of borrowings, rejections, and adaptations reinforce comparative investigations, as suggested by the first full-fledged comparative history in the Soviet
field, David L. Hoffmanns Cultivating the Masses. This book is important to this discussion in two other ways. First, its major theme is that the Russian intelligentsias
nurturist (as opposed to biological) orientation in many disciplines, which one is
tempted to label traditional, played an important role in shaping the Soviet variant
of modernity. This represents an implicit counterpoint to neo-traditionalisms paradoxical and relentless focus on the communist period alone. Second, Hoffmann
adopts a more flexible understanding of Soviet modernity as non-Western and
simultaneously comparable and distinctive, explicitly engaging the literature on
multiple modernities to do so.85
In many ways, this breakthrough does not solve our problems; it merely offers
new ones. The biggest challenges engage perennial issues but now take the form
of connecting, and in so doing transcending the oppositions and polarizations that
have structured the field. One such challenge is how precisely to link particularism
(difference) to universalism (comparability). A second is how to connect the patterns of Russian and Soviet history, looking at a civilizational or developmental
trajectory without minimizing breaks and novelties. A third is how to examine
comparisons among forms of modernity without sacrificing a full-throated articulation of differences. Any framework shaped by such concerns would be cosmopolitan and comparatively informed in both geographical and chronological terms.
In it, modernity in and of itself would no longer serve as a causal explanation of
anything. It would become one potential opening rather than the endpoint of
investigation.

MULTIPLE MODERNITIES VS. NEO-TRADITIONALISM | 47

THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES,

AND THE WEST
Particularities of Russian/Soviet Modernity

or millions of people in the twentieth century Soviet communism was a formidable adversary or a model for rapid development, if not a possible future
for humankind. Among historians, however, in a field that matured after the
collapse of communism, the notion of modernity in the Russian and Soviet context
has struggled to escape from under a crushing weight of skepticism. A long tradition of discussing Russian divergences from Western development in the context
of backwardness defined many frameworks for understanding first the Russian
Revolution and then the failures of communism. This tradition was firmly in place
long before social theorists started to analyze Soviet communism as a variant of
high modernism or as part of a spectrum of multiple modernities. Thinking about
modernity in the Russian and Soviet context continues to labor under a double
burden, precisely because both regimes ended in the dustbin of history.
This discussion begins with the premise that Russian/Soviet particularism is
not identical to a simple, outright failure to become modern. On the contrary,
the most distinctive, particular features of Russian and Soviet history need to become central to a discussion of modernity in this context, precisely because we are
talking about a distinctive and particular version of modernity. Let us acknowledge, however, that many circumstances, not least two state breakdowns in 1917
and 1991, make it more than pertinent to ask what did fail about this version of
modernity even when it is recognized as such.
This chapter is a synthetic, analytical overview designed not to present detailed empirical findings but to stimulate interpretations of Russian and Soviet
modernity across the 1917 divide. It argues that one of the most fruitful approaches
to the paradoxes of Russian/Soviet modernityat once quite familiar internationally and in other ways strikingly unique, a remarkable engine fueling the rise of a
socialist superpower and ultimately a spectacular failureis to investigate the cultural or civilizational particularities that lie at the heart of the theory of multiple
modernities. As a result, intelligentsia and state efforts to attain modernity through
culture and enlightenment are at the center of this analysis of Russian/Soviet
48

modernitywhich, of course, had other major dimensions. Specifically, the focus

is on the relationship between the intelligentsia and the state, on the one hand,
and mass culture, on the other.1 In a nutshell, my argument is that this relationship
reveals one of the central features of Russian-Soviet modernity or, if you will, the
particular cultural patterns that shaped it. These patterns all derived from the way
long-standing traditions of state-sponsored transformation were wedded to Westernized elites attempts to overcome Russian backwardness, and they all revolved
around enlightenment from above and a search for alternatives to the market.
An internally focused civilizing mission became such a central feature of modern Russian and Soviet politics and culture because the oppositional intelligentsias
radical embrace of the masses was accompanied by the great, seemingly urgent
task of transforming them. At the birth of mass culture in the nineteenth century, this powerful drive was motivated by a strikingly broad consensus about
the pernicious effects of commercialismand, all the while, shaped by the ubiquitous comparison with the West. The intelligentsias enlightenment crusade may
have attempted to harness the deep-rooted traditions of autocratic state power,
but under the old regime it was unable fully to do so; only with the Bolshevik
Revolution, whose leaders derived from the radical wing of the intelligentsia, was
the antimarket enlightenment crusade prosecuted with the full force of the revolutionary dictatorship. To call attention to the dual architecture behind the transformations that resulted, I have given the resulting Russian/Soviet amalgam a name:
intelligentsia-statist modernity.

Particularities of Intelligentsia-Statist Modernity

When Anthony Giddens, prompted by debates over postmodernism, gave the
seminal lectures on modernity that deeply shaped subsequent thinking on the
topic, the rise of capitalism and the nation-state were fundamental to his understanding. Indeed, Giddens unambiguously stated that not only the origins but the
very nature of modernity were Western. At the same time, the globalization of
the modern ensured that it would behe did not specify whenapproached by
strategies and conceptions developed in non-Western settings. Without discussing
how Stalinism could be modern without capitalism or the nation-state, Giddens
suggested that the Soviet case showed how totalitarian possibilities are contained
within the institutional parameters of modernity rather than being foreclosed by
them.2
Building on Giddenss analysis of modernity as a double-edged sword, both
enabling and constraining, Peter Wagner argued that the assumption of radical
difference has precluded the seeing of similarities between Western and Eastern
industrial societies during the twentieth century. . . . Most such approaches placed
[state] socialism unambiguously outside the liberal traditions, turned it into liberal
modernitys other. It was not merely that socialist ideas were squarely in the modern tradition and the attempt to overcome the restricted, nineteenth-century liberal
configuration of modernity, Wagner argued. Communist implementation, reflectTHE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST | 49

ing the general interwar attempt to forge new forms of collective politics, reflected
the epitome of organized modernity rather than a non, pre- or even anti-modern
social formation.3 Wagner, however, based his understandings of communism
mainly on the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and his notion of organized
modernity was a term for the general, twentieth-century response to the crisis
of prewar liberal modernity rather than any culturally conditioned variant. Both
the significance of prerevolutionary Russian modernization and the specificities of
Russian/Soviet historical trajectories were beyond his purview.
As a number of historians of Russia took up the challenge of developing conceptions of Russian and Soviet modernity in the 1990s and 2000s, they were
preoccupied less with exploring the origins and features of one incarnation of
modernity than with making a convincing case that Russia/USSR could be considered modern in the first place. Given this imperative, it was logical and compelling that the centralized, interventionist statesomething, unlike developed
capitalism or the nation-state, that Russia and the Soviet Union did not lack but, to
the contrary, possessed in spadesdominated scholarly attention. Inspired by the
domestication of Foucault in the historical scholarship of the 1990s, a new wave of
scholarship on power and knowledge focused on experts and specialists, a key area
in which Russia also appeared close to the forefront rather than representing backwardness. As Yanni Kotsonis put it, rather than measure what was not achieved
and conclude that Russia was less than modern, the important fact is that historical
actors debated within the terms of modernity, and for this reason can be considered within the rubric of modernity.4 Discussions of Russian and Soviet modernity thus focused first and foremost on elements of comparability rather than on
the distinguishing contours of a Soviet system that diverged quite radically from
other modern states. Making Russian and Soviet particularity central smacked of
the old, noncomparative stress on what Russia lacked. Important contributions
not just to modern ideas but practices shed light on political violence, revolutionary mass politics, and socio-ideological engineering.5 References to the theorist of
links between modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman, and the theorist of
high modern states, James C. Scott, came to populate footnotes on Soviet history.6
Stephen Kotkin went one step further and claimed that an excess of modernist
implementationthe sheer extent of Soviet industrial Fordism and by extension
other aspects of the Stalin-era attempt to leap beyond liberal modernitywere
made possible by the party-state suppression of private property and the market.7
The first generation of studies devoted to Russian/Soviet modernity in the
1990s and 2000s, then, did not so much ignore its particularistic features as put
them on the back burner of analysis. Within the framework of multiple modernities, for inexplicable reasons almost completely ignored by the Russian field,
cultural continuities and ideological formations move to the center of attention.8
One of the most important implications of the term multiple modernities, wrote
S. N. Eisenstadt, is that modernity and Westernization are not identical; Western
patterns of modernity are not the only authentic modernities though they enjoy
50 | THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST

historical precedence and continue to be a basic reference point for others.9 The
civilizational patterns that animate modernity outside its original West European
core thus become key to explaining not uniqueness but the multiplicity of modernity itself.10 Exploring the civilizational dimensions of multiple modernities
meshes well with the thrust of a new generation of post-Soviet scholarship on
Stalinism as a civilization.11 It also allows us to build on rather than sidestep the
legacy of a sophisticated historiographical tradition delineating the particular features of imperial Russias trajectory within a broader European context.12 A prime
challenge, then, is to relate the accumulated insights about Russian and Soviet
particularism to the inherently comparative, international frame of reference of
multiple modernities.
At the heart of this analysis of intelligentsia-statist modernity, originating in
late imperial Russia and reaching its apogee in the Soviet order, lie three interlocking particularities of historical development, all spanning the revolution of 1917,
that for the historiographical and theoretical reasons outlined above have hardly
at all come into the discussion of modernity in the Russian context. First, the
Russian intelligentsiaa collective identity, subculture, and mentality that exerted
heightened influence starting in the late nineteenth century due to the oft-noted
weakness and fragmentation of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisieemerged from
the existential dilemmas of a Europeanized elite in a backward yet modernizing
autocracy. The intelligentsia ethosso central to Russian politics, culture, and
science in so many wayscrystallized just before Russia entered an accelerated
stretch along the path to modernity in the late nineteenth century.13
Although the burgeoning ranks of professionals and revolutionaries became a
leading force challenging tsarism, they were inspired by the potentialities of state
power. Especially after 1905, they saw a future nonautocratic state as a prime defender of public order. Moderate professionals and experts shifted toward a stance
of containment and circumscription of what was increasingly viewed as the
damaged and recalcitrant human material of the empires population.14 More generally, in the same period marked by the rise of mass culture, the intelligentsia
helped consolidate a strikingly broad tutelary, anticommercial elite consensus that
was the flip side of an equally intense intelligentsia cult of the masses. Influenced
by the new mass culture but opposed to it almost by definition, the intelligentsia
spearheaded the rise of mass political movements. These notable tendencies in
revolutionary Russia went on to drive the most widely disseminated features of
Soviet culture and ideology, as a series of far-reaching transformations at the heart
of the Soviet project went under the sign of cultural revolution and the creation
of a New Man.
Furthermore, both the intelligentsia and the nature of Russian mass culture
and politics were decisively influenced by the great prerevolutionary debate over
national identity and historical trajectories that went under the rubric of Russia
and the West, and these links only intensified with the attempt to leap ahead to
a superior order after 1917. To be sure, many intellectuals and professionals in
THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST | 51

non-Western modernizing countries like Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and
Mexico shared with the Russian intelligentsia strong faith in science and culture,
in avoiding the evils of bourgeois capitalism, and a strong, interventionist state.15
But the way the profound power of the imperial Russian and Soviet state amplified
the intelligentsias splits on Westernization led to the persistence of swings from
extremes of xenophobic isolationism to fascination with all things Western. This
must be considered among the most profound continuities of the Russian/Soviet
road to modernity.
Intelligentsia-statist modernity was thus predicated on deep, structural features of Russian historical development: the interventionist, autocratic, yet in the
nineteenth century ambiguously Westernizing state; the powerful tradition of state
service, which the intelligentsia transferred from the state to the narod, the people
or nation; competition and perceptions of difference with Europe and the West,
which became a central feature of Russian national identity in the nineteenth century; social, cultural, and imperial fragmentation, which intensified the search for
centralization and unity; and late, rapid, and telescoped modernization, which intensified already heightened opposition to the market and capitalism. These structural features of Russian historical development in turn brought out or reinforced
particular cultural or civilizational patterns that persisted in altered or evolving
form across one of the worlds great revolutions: patterns making up a tapestry of
ideas and practices derived from the attempt to overcome backwardness and either
join or overtake the West through internal mobilization and transformation of the
masses.
As we shall see, therefore, mass culture was neither left to benign neglect or,
in the Soviet context, recognized as a separate, self-contained sphere: rather, there
was a concerted, long-standing attempt to overcome the high-low divide. Such
attempts occurred in other settings, too, but not on the scale allowed by the Soviet
state influence on culture, which encompassed both a remarkably elaborate censorship and the economics of cultural production. In this fashion, Russian and intelligentsia approaches to enlighten the people and eradicate the market, reflected in
the broad-based horror of commercial boulevard entertainment and philistinism,
deeply informed the initial communist attempt to construct an alternative illiberal,
non-Western modernity. As the intelligentsia Kulturtrger traditionknown in
Russian as kulturtregerstvowas filtered through the official ideology of the revolutionary state, however, the elites were even more profoundly transformed than
the masses. The constriction of reflexivity, or the ability to revise in light of knowledge and experience, embedded in the codified dogmas of intelligentsia-statist
modernity soon handicapped the Soviet systems ability to negotiate change.

Russias Sattelzeit: The Modernity of Telescoped and Jagged Development

Reinhart Koselleck dubbed the half-century on both sides of 1800 as the Sattelzeit (literally, the saddle or transition time between early modern and modern),
a caesura and breakthrough of accelerated epistemic transformation in Central and
52 | THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST

Western Europe.16 Bjrn Wittrock, developing this notion in the context of multiple modernities, explained that this rapid ascendance of modern key concepts and
collective identities occurred after membership in a collectivity and the relationship of loyalty between ruler and subjects could no longer be taken for granted.17
By any such standard, as great as the impact of the Enlightenment and Romanticism were in Russia, Russias Sattelzeit came later than Europes. The late imperial
period was the time when Russian modernity began to truly take shape.
The revolutionary mobilization of the masses and the radical attempt to transform them appeared, like the phenomenon of mass culture itself, alongside Russias
late and extraordinarily rapid modernization following the emancipation of the
serfs in 1861 and the Great Reforms, a critical period for any analysis of Russias
road to modernity. This period ushered in a set of profound and complex changes
that exponentially took the effects of Russias modernization well beyond a relatively thin layer of elites and urban centers. For over a century and a half Russias
Europeanization had been at work, but this was the moment when the nature and
pace of change suddenly compounded the effects. A new bout of state-sponsored
Westernization under the Great Reforms, the spread of a money economy, rapid
urbanization, and the growth of professionals were followed toward the end of
the century by a leap of state-sponsored industrialization, the growth of an urban
working class, and the development of an embryonic consumer society. All these
developments facilitated the attempt of the intelligentsia and its offspring, the revolutionary movement, to connect to audiences and followers from the people.
The drive to Russian modernity thus became more of a mass phenomenon under
the imprint of a largely unreconstructed autocracy and still vital system of oldregime estates (sosloviia). In the context of Nicolaevan St. Petersburg, Marshall
Berman spoke about a phantasmagorical Russian modernity of underdevelopment; the late imperial period transformed this into a modernity of telescoped and
jagged development.18
Rejecting the notion of a unilinear transition from traditional to modern, Alfred J. Rieber turned attention to the contradictions, anomalies, archaisms, and
irregularities present in the late imperial period. The term he invented to describe
them was the sedimentary society, in which a successive series of social forms
accumulated, each constituting a layer that covered all or most of society without
altering the older forms lying underneath the surface. Crucially, he projected this
model forward: In Soviet as in autocratic Russia the problem was how to instill
the values of the dominant culturethese deeper layers of society that rested
underneath the accumulation of superficial social and institutional forms erected
from above.19
The most impressive conceptualizations of Russian historical development
center around this late and rapid old-regime modernization, its paradoxes and
contradictions, and the time lag (Ungleichzeitichkeit) embedded in Russian Europeanization. For Marc Raeff, the gap between domesticated European practices and
ideas and the distinctively Russian socioinstitutional matrix for modernization
THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST | 53

was at the heart of his landmark work on the well-ordered police state.20 Martin
Malia wrote about an East-West cultural gradient in which, for example, Russia experienced the equivalent of 1848 only in 1905. Malias time-lag analogies,
though, hid a more complex understanding: The political formula produced by
Russian backwardness, then, is the chronic compression or telescopingand thus
the chronic radicalizationof the stages of the modern movement toward democracy. In a notable formulation, Malia referred to the special path of each nation
along the East-West cultural gradient, in a series of Sonderwege from the Atlantic
to the Urals.21 Malias notion of multiple European special paths, in fact, answers
Coopers objection: if alternative modernities all represent alternatives to a European modernity, then one package of cultural traits is being awarded a European
pedigree while other packages are being linked across time to a people, however
defined, as in Chinese or Islamic modernity.22 The only response, in fact, is that
one must also avoid fusing various trajectories into a single European modernity.
Raeff and Malia invented memorable descriptions of an uneven, paradoxical
lurch to modernity under the aegis of an ambiguously modernizing autocracy.
Laura Engelstein tried to capture the singular position of Russian and, by extension, Soviet intellectuals and professionals operating within an old-regime custodial state, one that survived into the era in which the modern mechanisms of
social control and social self-discipline derived from Western practices had already emerged. Professionals, and the intelligentsia more broadly, were caught
suspended in a peculiar, Janus-faced pose between the authoritarian state and the
masses: Themselves excluded from power, Russian professionals were dependent
on and resentful of the state, drawn into alliance with disgruntled groups from below, yet culturally related to those above them.23 Just as the critique of capitalism
emerged before capitalism itself in Russia, Victorian notions of respectability (and,
one might add, myriad other intellectual and scientific imports) were modified
or questioned before they took root.24 To be sure, it is clear that Engelsteins descriptions of these particularities were cast to suggest deviation from the Western
standard in the imperial case and an illusory modernity in the Soviet.25 But
they might just as well be taken as an important component of one of its singular
forms.26

Serving and Remaking the Masses

The emergence of the concept of the intelligentsia, a group outside the estate
structure of society and hostile to autocracy and the status quo, came at the outset
of this key period of intensive transformation in the mid-nineteenth century and
reflected certain deep historical patterns. Modifying the ancient service traditions
of the elite, Catherine IIs emancipation of the nobility eased a transfer of allegiances from the ruler and state to the narod.27 It can also be seen as an offshoot
of the deep cultural split following in the wake of Westernization and the resulting debates over national identity. Nathaniel Knight argues that the idea of the
intelligentsia emerged after the 1860s, and was consolidated in the 1880s, as a
54 | THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST

counterpart or binary opposite to another key concept in Russian social thought

the narod or common people. Narod was a key term in the nineteenth century that
only gradually moved from connoting the people, then largely the peasantry,
toward connotations that included ethnically and nationally informed notions of
nation (the masses were a later construction dating to the revolutionary era
circa 1905/1917). Only under Nicholas I did the term narod come to refer to those
societal ranks that were the cultural repository of native Russianness, and this itself
emerged from the great discussion about Russia and the West in the same era. In
the words of Knight, to define the narod as all who are untouched by the culture
of the West is to imply an oppositea group whose main locus of self-definition
is precisely its identification with the universalistic values of European enlightenment.28 A unified culture came to be seen as a precondition for Russian selfconsciousness; unity of culture would heal the split between the two Russias of
the Europeanized elite and common people. Such were the stakes involved in the
intelligentsia mission to bring high (Westernized) culture to the masseseven
as the intelligentsia was closely associated with worship at the pedestal of the
people.29
Thus well before commercial mass culture, itself closely associated with the
West, became widely disseminated toward the end of the nineteenth century (commercialized urban entertainments existed from at least the seventeenth), a group
defined by the mission of bringing enlightenment to the masses was already in
place. To Russian intellectuals, the emergence of cultural forms created to make a
profit was seen not only to undermine the higher aesthetic and moral purposes of
elite culture, but also to threaten pristine, authentic narodnost, folk culture. Surely
the rapidity of industrial development and urbanization intensified the search for
alternatives to the ills associated with the early phases of modernity, extending
the breadth of that typical combination, antimodern modernism. Popular, paid
entertainment in the era of the mass press and rapid urbanization was depicted
by commentators as an evil scarcely different from the exploitation of factories
or brothels. The result was a veritable crusade to acculturate the popular classes
into the national, high culture, and to extirpate backwardness, ignorance, and
dissoluteness.30
The intelligentsias enlightenment mission did not prevent an explosion of new
popular culture genres flourishing alongside older ones, and this only heightened
the anxieties connected to the onset of modernity. However, the breadth of the
Kulturtrger tradition did have potent consequences. Vadim Volkov has suggested
that the rise of the modern Russian usage for culture itself (kultura, as opposed
to the previously prevalent enlightenment, or prosveshchenie) came out of the first
widespread intelligentsia attempts in the 1870s to implement the missionary idea
of transmission of education and culture to the backward masses. Culture came
to be understood as a kind of value that could be accumulated, purposely transferred to and acquired by wider groups in the population.31 This, precisely, was
the Soviet-era definition.
THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST | 55

Hence the paradoxes of repenting before and learning from the people while
instructing and teaching them, of somehow at once leading and following, that
were embedded not just in the revolutionary movement but in broader intelligentsia culture beginning with the populist period from the 1860s to the 1880s.
The cult of the masses, as traditionally noted, closely associated the intelligentsia
with sympathy for left-wing, revolutionary, and oppositionist grassroots activity;
yet the urge to civilize the masses ironically gave the Kulturtrger intelligentsia
tradition common cause with the tutelary state, parts of the bureaucracy, and indeed in some contexts with all elites. In the words of Richard Stites, intellectuals,
censors, priests, physicians, and revolutionarieshowever sharply they disagreed
among themselveswere often united in their animosity to the new [mass] culture
which they linked directly to vice.32
What were the effects of half a century of intense enlightenment work and
the intelligentsias war against backwardness on the masses themselves? In a certain sense, very little: commercial popular culture flourished and the intelligentsia
as yet had almost no power to influence everyday life in the vast empire. However,
there were a range of repercussions whose effects were later compounded exponentially by the Russian Revolution. First, newly conscious industrial workers
and the labor movement took shape in constant dialogue with the intelligentsia;
both groups were outside the official estate society and formed the backbone of
the revolutionary movement from the 1890s on. The work of the great labor historian Reginald Zelnik was devoted to this intelligentsia-worker nexus and the
emergence of a new stratum of worker-intellectuals who either identified closely
with intelligentsia mentors orparadoxically, like some extreme left revolutionary
intellectualsdeveloped an anti-intelligentsia view of the world.33 Foreshadowing many of the conflicts of early Soviet culture, many of these rabochie-intelligenty
(worker-intellectuals) populating educational societies, trade unions, workers theaters, and proletarian culture groups after the turn of the century were on a quest
for respectability and the acquisition of traditional high culture.34 At the same
time, the adoption of the intelligentsia category of culturedness (kulturnost) by
conscious workers starting in the 1880s was directly linked to debates about
Russia and the West.35 In the words of Steve Smith: Kulturnost was a sociological
category used to evaluate the level of civilization achieved by a particular society
along an evolutionary spectrum. In this respect, Russia was characterized precisely
by its lack of kulturnost, perceived as lying closer to Asiatic barbarism than to
western-European civilization. By linking the development of the individual self
to the development of civilization in society, kulturnost could be harnessed to
radical political ends.36
Turning their backs on the carnavalesque and subversive traditions of much
Russian folk culture, conscious workers adopted the same condemnatory attitude toward uncultured behavior as the elites.37 Mark D. Steinbergs work on
proletarian writers suggests that these worker-intellectuals were often culturally
marginal figures whose assertion of authorship implicitly challenged their as56 | THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST

cription as lower class, violating the conventional divisions . . . between popular

culture and the literary high culture. Personifying in this sense the attempt from
below to transcend the fateful gulf between the intelligentsia and the people, they
turned their back on popular and folk idioms and most often imitated a high
literary style, themselves adopting the mission of spreading consciousness and enlightenment. In this fashion, such anomalous figures became an important conduit
of ideas, vocabularies, and images across the boundary between the educated and
the masses.38
A similar, even more potent pattern of delayed dissemination of central intelligentsia missions was generated by the distinctly Russian version of self-fashioning,
pioneered by founding members of the intelligentsia tradition in the 1830s and
1840s, such as Vissarion Belinskii and Aleksandr Herzen. For them, Russian backwardness and bourgeois European philistinism alike would be transcended, as
Jochen Hellbeck has suggested, through the cultivation of critically thinking and
historically acting personalities. This conception of the self began to have a major impact on Russian social, political, and cultural life in late imperial Russia. A
recognizably related project of transforming the self as part of a collective engaged
in historical transformation became a massive, society-wide project in the early
Soviet period.39 One can trace a direct genealogy between the intelligentsia-worker
nexus in revolutionary Russia and Soviet subjectivity under Stalin.
The enlightenment crusade also had an impact on Russian mass culture itself.
Although profitability was virtually a taboo topic among the intelligentsia, the
fin-de-sicle produced a new breed of commercially successful artists and writers. Lev Tolstoi, who railed against commercial values, made an alliance with the
most savvy mass marketing entrepreneur in publishing, Ivan Sytin, who named
his venture Posrednik (the mediator) after his own role of negotiating between the
intelligentsia and the masses. Fifty years of culturalism on the part of the intelligentsia, in the words of Catriona Kelly and Steve Smith, had not been without effect on popular culture. Mass culture absorbed certain elements of that moralism
that was intrinsic not only to the intelligentsia tradition, but to the deeply religious
character of popular life as well.40
Despite the breadth of intelligentsia hostility toward the boulevard the new
late imperial mass culture, with its hothouse proliferation of new genres, had a
profound impact on middle and lower segments of the population. On the lower
levels, mass culture disseminated a certain cosmopolitanism, in which foreign,
Western, and exotic locales were the setting for expression of secular values and
the celebration of individual talent and worldly self-confidence.41 For the middle
groups in Russian society, traditionally seen as a missing middle class and notable
for the fragmentation and weakness of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, the lens of
commercialized mass culture is particularly revealing. On the one hand, middle
layers of society aped the intelligentsia. The rise of a middle-brow leisure culture
was spearheaded by what Louise McReynolds has even referred to a crossover
category, the bourgeois intelligentsia, which included figures such as the private
THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST | 57

theater entrepreneurs F. A. Korsh and A. S. Suvorin. On the other hand, given

that middle-class values and commercial culture represented everything the intelligentsia deplored, the vigorous development of mass culture by the revolutionary
period ensured that the bourgeoisie in Russia was better defined by cultural institutions than political ones.42 In this sense, the cultural sphere was a central battleground in late imperial Russias modernity of jagged and telescoped development.
Neither intelligentsia-cum-state tutelage nor the hatred of mass culture as symbol of the ills of Western or bourgeois modernity were unique to Russia. But the
breadth of the imperative to remake the masses during Russias rapid modernization drive after Russias Sattelzeit was such that it has prompted some analysts
to discuss a particularly Russian form of internal colonization.43 Combined with
the totalizing aspirations of the new party-state dictatorship and the lurch toward a fully nationalized planned economy, they became midwives at the birth
of a Soviet civilization that with some justification depicted itself as singular and
unprecedented.

From Revolutionary Confrontation to Totalizing Unification

Born in a new age of war and revolution, the party-state was in many respects
a drastic departure from the tsarist old regime. But even within the sharpest breaks
there are elements of continuity. Many of the features of early Soviet communism
that made for radical departures in the attempt to leap ahead of liberal modernity
into an alternative futurethe suppression of private property and the market,
the mass dissemination of Marxism-Leninism, the quests to create a new culture
and a New Manbuilt on certain continuations of the Russian tradition. Some of
the links derived from the emergence of the new regimes leadership from the old
radical intelligentsia and the revolutionary movement. Many of these continuities
across the revolutionary divide can also be traced to the logics of cultural, political,
or intellectual life which, in turn, connected to deep structures in Russian history.
But others derived specifically from the Bolshevik revolutionary leaderships emergence out of the old radical intelligentsia. In politicized and revolutionized form,
the old burning commitment to enlighten the masses and destroy the philistine
corruption of the marketplace was wedded to the unprecedented coercive powers of the new dictatorship. This marriage lay at the heart of intelligentsia-statist
modernity.
The fateful merger between intelligentsia enlightenment and Bolshevik tatisme
was personified by two major architects of Soviet culture, Anatolii Lunacharskii
and Maksim Gorky. Lunacharskii, the first commissar of enlightenment from 1917
to 1929, made his most significant contribution under Lenin; Gorky, who had a
falling out with Lenin in the early 1920s, returned at the end of the decade to
become the single most important figure driving the rise of Stalinism in culture.
While Gorky, the original nonparty Bolshevik, never joined the Party, he and
Lunacharskii both were associated with the same Left Bolshevik milieu, the institutional incubator of prewar party educational institutions in Capri, Bologna, and
58 | THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST

Longjumeau, out of which emerged much of the early Soviet approach to culture.44
Intellectually, both were close to the godbuilding movement that, mingling with
Nietzscheanism and Silver Age intellectual currents, tweaked classical Marxism to
make the creation of a new socialist culture, faith, and consciousness into primary
tasks of the revolution. Both Gorky and Lunacharskii were sometime defenders
of the old intelligentsia who devoted much energy to the emergence of the new;
both were extraordinary patrons, although Lunacharskii favored the avant-garde
and presided over NEP in culture, while Gorky favored less experimental and
more monumental forms and achieved the height of his influence during the Stalin
Revolution and the rise of socialist realism. Both, at different times, presided over
the creation of myriad new institutions.
At the outset of the new era, Lunacharskii famously dubbed himself an intellectual [intelligent] among Bolsheviks and a Bolshevik among intellectuals, while
Gorky, defending the intelligentsia to a vengeful, Civil War-era Lenin, exclaimed:
we, saving our own skins, are cutting off the head of the people, destroying its
brain.45 In sum, these two cultural giants straddling the early Soviet and Stalin
eras were both true heirs of the Russian intelligentsias enlightenment drive and
played key roles in welding and integrating it into Bolshevik politics and ideology. Both, ultimately, were first constrained and then bypassed by the system they
helped to build, with Lunacharskii sacked and sidelined at the end of NEP and
Gorky mythologized yet confined after his falling out with Stalin circa 1934.
But Soviet culture encompassed and integrated more than Bolshevism; it was
also partly an intelligentsia creation that pursued a dream of organic cultural unification. Katerina Clark began her pathbreaking interpretation of the ecosystem
of early Soviet culture with an analysis of pre-First World War romantic anticapitalism as a phenomenon broader than Bolshevism. Like so much else in this
discussion, romantic anticapitalism can be seen as an international phenomenon
present in many other countries, but its extent and intensity in Russia were unusual. The common denominator was not only a rejection of the market and of
the commercializing forces of culture, but other roots of key features of the Soviet
period. The critique of alienation and individualism frequently led to some dream
of a society where all were truly one, a sort of secular religion of the one. In continuation of the older quest for a unified national culture, this dream of unification
involved absolutizing one or the other pole in the hierarchies of high and low . . .
to the exclusion of the possibility that any middle ground between the two could
be entertained.46 In addition, as so many recent works have emphasized, early Soviet professionals and the avant-gardethe surviving intelligentsia that remained
virtually the only elite group from the old society not crippled by the social
revolutionoverlapped in many of their disciplinary and tutelary aspirations with
the Bolsheviks, even as the power of the party-state funneled their energies into
highly statized outcomes.47
In the age of massification (massifikatsiia), to use the term current in the 1920s,
not only did Bolshevik and Soviet missions radically extend the late imperial
THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST | 59

Figure 1. Aleksei Radakov, Znanie razorvet tsepi rabstva (Knowledge will break the chains
of slavery), 1920. The hand from the heavens above exerting pressure on the pile of
books exemplifies the Russian-Soviet, intelligentsia-etatist drive to enlighten the
masses. Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University.

60 | THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST

intelligentsias enlightenment drive, but the centralized power of the party-state

gave it unprecedented destructive and constructive reach. The destructive side has
been the simplest to describe. The assault on commercial culture began immediately after October 1917 with a decree banning nonparty advertising and the nationalization of publishers, film studios, and other media. The interlude of the New
Economic Policy allowed partial privatization but launched the kind of censorship
and self-censorship that allowed for the radical transformation and regulation of
culture that frequently has received the most scholarly attention. However, it is a
crucial fact that cultural production was turned into nothing less than a branch of
the planned economy. The emergence of Soviet culture was directly related to the
core economic and political structures of the Soviet system erected in the interwar
period.
The communists did by fiat what the old intelligentsia had wanted to do, as
Richard Stites expressed it: give the people what they thought was good for them
and not what they wanted. Political and moralizing forces surrounded popular
culture on all sides in the 1920s, curtailing and constricting many genres and
creating innumerable tensions between the revolutionary-political idiom and the
hunger for entertainment.48 The peak of party-intelligentsia repression of popular culture came during Stalins Great Break of 192831, which almost destroyed
folk and popular culture. It was a time when dogmatism led mass culture to a
nadir of popularity.49 The Five-Year Plan marked the full nationalization of publishing and other forms of cultural production and the hegemony of the militant
organizations of proletarian writers, musicians, and so onin fact, they were led
by party intellectualswhose main target was nonpolitical art, entertainment, and
the cultural relics of the past. Genres that had been both popular and financially
successful in the mixed economy of the NEPjazz, science fiction, detective stories, and indeed all forms of light entertainmentwere subject to severe assault or
channeled into highly politicized configurations after the militants associated them
with the West and the bourgeoisie. For example, some narrowly framed science
fiction continued to be written in the Stalin period, but the genre as a vehicle for
alternative utopias withered away.50
The search for status and respectability through the acquisition of accessible
high culture is most closely associated with the upwardly mobile new class of the
Stalin period, but tensions between those aspirations of workers and the utopian
plans of intellectuals began immediately after the revolution within Proletkult,
the first proletarian culture movement.51 By the same token, the culturedness
campaign of the mid- to late 1930s had deep roots in the Soviet civilizing process
begun in the 1920sa drive to rationalize as well as politicize everyday life and
to acculturate backward national minorities and segments of the population.52
Such areas as sanitary propaganda and the scientific organization of leisure
discussions of housing, dress, manners, and sexuality, not to mention a virtual
kaleidoscope of attempted transformations of behaviors and values, such as the

THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST | 61

struggle for cultured speech launched in 192324reflected a fusion of aspirations between experts and Party in what was broadly labeled the cultural revolution.53 The new Soviet person would not become merely socialist and collectivist
but a productive worker, loyal to the state, and a carrier of cultured behaviors.
These were, in part, both intelligentsia and Bolshevik projectionsand hence in
part Western vis--vis the lower classes and Russian vis--vis ethnic minorities.
But the project of transformation also proceeded internally, as the collectivist remaking of the self held powerful allure for many participants in the revolutionary
project.54
The Bolshevik Revolution layered an intensified ideological-geopolitical rivalry onto the old obsessions of national identity, so much so that the West as
model and other becameas with many non-Western or postcolonial paths to
modernitya defining component of the entire order. The promise to leap over
the West (in the guise of bourgeois-democratic, industrialized capitalism) intensified the long-standing Russian phenomenon of telescoping the stages of modernity, this time through a forced leap forward into an alternative socialist future.
The promise to create a historically superior political and economic system and ultimately a superior culture and society would overcome the curse of backwardness,
but the prize still remained to be snatched out of the arms of the advanced West.
The goal of catching up and overtaking thus implicitly adopted what were perhaps modified but ultimately Western yardsticks to measure industry, technology,
or science; ultimately, as well, the Stalinist Soviet Union inherited and ended up
celebrating its own Westernized, precommunist high culture. The antibourgeois
direction of early Soviet ideology and culture was therefore far from uniformly or
straightforwardly anti-Occidental in character. However, the condemned bourgeois and decadent forms of commercial mass culture, from Hollywood films to
the fox-trot and adventure genres that commanded mass audiences, were among
the most reviled (and hence by some coveted or admired) imports linked by moralizers and radicals to the capitalist West.55
The West was thus a source of bourgeois contagion but also the essential
starting point for any Soviet shortcut to the new modernity. For two decades
after 1917 Soviet culture and ideology was split by competing trends vis--vis the
outside world: one stressed subversion, espionage, and decadence emanating from
abroad; the other optimistically yearned to convert potential Western allies to the
cause.56 But more broadly, leading party intellectuals also shared with the early
Soviet avant-garde a yearning for the advent of a new, noncommercial culture for
the transformed masses. As Boris Groys put it, Soviet mass culture was a culture
for masses that had yet to be created.57
For example, in the 1920s Olga Kameneva, the sister of Lev Trotsky and the
wife of Politburo member Lev Kamenev, was the founder and head of the AllUnion Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS), the organization charged with
convincing the intelligentsia of foreign countries of Soviet achievements. In highlevel discussions with the Central Committee held in 1928, Kameneva openly as62 | THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST

serted that leftist tendencies in Europe were more advanced than those philistine
Soviets who aped European bourgeois and popular culture. The European intellectual left, she asserted, would import the best features of the new proletarian culture
from the USSR and then in turn reinforce those trends inside the USSR.58 This was
a remarkable declaration, coming from the figure charged with convincing the
world of Soviet achievements: in effect, European-Soviet cultural exchange could
save lowbrow Soviet culture from its own backward and philistine instincts. For
the Old Bolshevik intellectual, disdain for the vestiges of commercial mass culture
in the 1920s still trumped suspicion of the West, but by the 1930s this balance
would shift decisively.

Socialist Realism as a Sublation of the High-Low Divide

Up through the early 1930s the social engineering of the Bolsheviks was complemented by the aesthetic engineering of the avant-garde. The aestheticization of
politics went hand in hand with the politicization of aesthetics. The avant-garde is
too complex to reduce to a single formula, but in the words of Boris Groys, it can
at root be considered a movement from representing to transforming the world. By
the same token, because socialism would not only transform the world but make it
beautiful, the party leadership was transformed into a kind of artist whose material was the entire world.59 Groyss seminal grand rcit on the continuities between
the avant-garde and Stalinist culture, no matter how subsequently qualified, shifted
the terrain of the field: avant-gardists have come to be examined less as martyrs
and more as thoroughly engaged participants in central aesthetic and ideological
projects of the new regime. Bolshevik and avant-garde intellectuals, as a result,
appear more and more as sometimes estranged intelligentsia cousins, sharing an
implacable drive for hegemony, willingness to use coercion, lived commitment to
the cause, a taste for combining doctrinal elitism with mass transformation, and
totalizing aspirations ranging from society to the psyche.60 Yet, pace Groys, the
avant-gardes quest for a hegemonic aesthetic dictatorship was, particularly on the
level of causality, hardly the equivalent of the Bolsheviks dictatorship of the proletariat. Rather, the aesthetico-political program of the early Soviet avant-garde was
decisively shaped and modified by participation in the Bolshevik project.
At the same time, intelligentsia experts in a range of disciplines took part,
some eagerly, others under various degrees of pressure and coercion, in a range
of fieldssocial medicine, criminology, psychology, ethnography, demography,
and many othersthat became crucial to Bolshevik civilizing missions and Soviet
state-building.61 As with the avant-garde, the Bolshevik Revolution opened the
door to an unprecedented intelligentsia participationalbeit one that was etatized in the sense of subordinated to Marxist-Leninist ideology and Bolshevik
political oversightin the wake of 1917. As David L. Hoffmann has shown, the
nurturist prerevolutionary disciplinary culture of intelligentsia experts in scientific and social science fields was a key factor in the interwar decades reinforcing
Marxist-Leninist ideology.62 Indeed, given the fusion of ideology and technocracy
THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST | 63

in fueling the scope and direction of early Soviet and Stalin-era social engineering,
one is tempted to see the Bolshevik intelligentsia leadership as strangely linked to
the bourgeois specialists. They represented professional revolutionaries or political
specialists: their realm of theoretical expertise was Marxist-Leninist ideology and
their sphere of applied expertise was, first and foremost, political violence.
The intense battles over the definition and direction of revolutionary culture,
which began after 1917 and peaked during the Great Break, ultimately had to confront the fact that the politicized and experimental cultural products of the party
champions of proletarian culture and the nonparty avant-garde alike had severe
difficulties in attracting and swaying mass audiences. The new doctrine of socialist
realism that was canonized after the Stalin Revolution may have arisen only in
part because of this dilemma, but it certainly became a vehicle for its resolution.63
During a series of ideological-cultural gyrations during the 1930s, Soviet mass
culture was reconfigured in a form that would only be modified, not overthrown,
for the duration of the Soviet period. The antibourgeois attacks of the Great Break
featured elements of hostility to the culture of the past and the culture of the West,
but by the mid- to late 1930s the kinds of culture deemed acceptable for the Soviet
masses had undergone a significant evolution. For example, mastery of the old
Russian high culture was a badge of distinction, and acceptably political forms
of mass entertainment, and a peculiar, future-oriented dream world of socialist
consumption that held out consumer items for loyalists of the regime as a necessary accoutrement of the cultured good life, flourished within the framework of
socialist realism.64 As many observers have noted, the desire to reach and win over
mass audiences ultimately created a point of fusion between regime and popular
aspirations. In the words of Dobrenko, Socialist Realism is a cultural revolution
not only from above but also from below.65
The appeal of socialist realism was also a response to the social and political
results of the Stalin Revolution after 1929, with its massive promotion of cadres
into a new elite and its breakneck urbanization alongside the massive upheaval
of forced collectivization of agriculture. Many features of socialist realist mass
culture were folkloric, representing the adaptation in newly politicized forms of
old themes that resonated with mass audiences. Moralism and collectivism could
be taken from the old regime and from village life as well as the party-state and
intelligentsia preaching.66
The attempt to ratify a unified new culture with mass appeal reoriented the
early Soviet civilizing mission through a new, unprecedentedly mass drive for
kulturnost starting in the mid- to late 1930s. Now a standard stock of political and
cultural knowledge went along with higher standards of consumption and lifestyle
offered to the loyal and above all to the elites. A 1936 newspaper questionnaire,
Are You a Cultured Person? called for readers to recite a Pushkin poem and
the plots of Shakespeares plays while also showing familiarity with mathematics,
geography, and the classics of Marxism-Leninism. The Stalin-era kulturnost cam-

64 | THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST

paign coincided with the mass destruction of many members of the elite and those
dubbed aliens and marginals during the Great Terror. Indeed, the terror and the
culturedness campaign were related; one destroyed, the other attempted to create.
On the ground in the cultured spaces of Stalinism, such as the famous Gorky Park
for Culture and Leisure in Moscow, moreover, there were many exclusion mechanisms that separated the privileged or loyal from others.67 The mass dissemination
of culturedness has to be considered one of the most successful Soviet campaigns
of all time, so much so that, like the best advertising, it was hardly even recognized
as a campaign. In less crude and explicit form, it survived its origins in the 1930s
by many decades.68
The replacement of earlier communist asceticism with socialist consumption
and the new valorization of the Russian past were less a Great Retreat from the
earlier enlightenment drive, as so often assumed, but rather its continuation in
altered guise. The mid-1930s also witnessed a campaign for cultured trade that
linked consumerism for loyalists with behaviors suitable for the new Soviet person.
Although advertising in this period introduced Westernized images of glamour
and beauty, Soviet department stores were also in theory supposed to serve as
educational sites dedicated to increasing the cultural level of consumers. Even
shop windows were supposed to fulfill a pedagogical task.69 The turn to including consumption in the drive for enlightened self-transformation was what distinguished the use of consumer goods under socialism and capitalism.
Even socialist realist architecture, with its appropriation of flourishes and decorations from many styles of the pastso often taken as kitsch or reflections of
petty-bourgeois taste by the arbiters of high culture in the Westwas in theory
supposed to reflect how Soviet culture had inherited and surpassed the great civilizations of the past. Instead of a Great Retreat from earlier socialist values, Katerina Clark refers to a great appropriation: Soviet culture in the 1930s reworked
elements from the Russian past and from world culture, reflecting a new bid for
superiority not only in the realm of politics and economics but in the realm of
culture.70 In this decade, a veritable cult of culture arose as a key arena for proving
Soviet superiority.71
Most understandings of Stalinist culture and socialist realism revolve about
various kinds of fusion: between values of regime and masses, between intelligentsia and regime, between the values of the upwardly mobile cadres and the
culture at large, and between high and low. Of course, these fusions were never
completely implemented so much as asserted or theorized. The greatest contribution of socialist realism was not to create a single particular styleit never
did that, von Geldern observes, but to legitimize notions that socialist society
needed a uniform culture and that variations in style implied ideological unorthodoxy. Out of the great gulf between elites and masses there emergedif only in
theorya single homogenous culture.72 In similar fashion, Stalinism also attempted theoretically to transcend the external divide of Russia and the West by

THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST | 65

assuming the mantle of all progressive and hence Western civilization. Therefore,
as Greg Castillo has incisively observed, communism claimed to be the true West
as well as the Wests cultural savior.73
In practice, the dream of a unified culture and identity was belied by the multinational, multicultural, and multiconfessional nature of the Soviet state, which conditioned implementation and reception of Soviet projects. In the early decades not
just leading cadres but entire nationalities were perceived as European or Asiatic,
so that ideas about East and West had their own internal Soviet dynamic. Sovietization in practice varied markedly depending on region and republic, differences
between favored regime cities and other places, strikingly varied cultural and
national contexts and legacies, and the crucial urban-rural divide. Given all these
variables, it makes much sense to conceive a spatial dimension to Soviet modernity.
That said, it is important to register that the very division of culture into high
and low, elite and popular, was anathema to Soviet conceptions. Indeed, the terms
mass culture and popular culture were never used to describe Soviet culture or its
parts, both during the heyday of class-based terminology after 1917 and during the
long reign of socialist realism starting in the 1930s. Such formulations as kulturnomassovaia rabota (cultural-mass work) simply referred to enlightenment work on
a large scale. Indeed, the quality of massovost, or mass scale, which legitimated
monumentalism especially in conjunction with the productionist ideology of the
Five-Year Plan, resulted in ever-grander scale in areas such as mass spectacles.74
The class-based terminology favored especially in the 1920s discussions of culture
coexisted with formulations using mass and the masses, which included all the
lower classes. Mass culture (massovaia kultura), after the term became internationally common in the mid-twentieth century, was restricted by Soviet commentators
to refer to the commercial culture of the West. By contrast, the intense early Soviet
debates about the new culture revolved around a class-defined term, proletarian
culture, which was succeeded by politically defined categories that incorporated
both high and low: socialist culture and Soviet culture. Non-Russian national cultures in the USSR would, as the process of canon building proceeded under Stalin,
selectively inject parts of their own national and folkloric legacies and adopt Europeanized forms if necessary from Russian culture. In sum, in the Soviet context
the relationship between elite and popular was thus vastly more complicated than
Western models might lead us to believe, resulting in the virtual collapse of the
distinction, at least in theory, from the 1930s on.75
Socialist realism, in its core tenet of seeing the kernels of a bright future in the
drab present, or life not as it was but as it was becoming, was not just an aesthetic
doctrine or a sociocultural resolution to the battles over mass culture. It was also
one of the most disseminated parts of official ideology, or, as Sheila Fitzpatrick
first observed, a central method of representation characteristic of the Stalin period in all areas, and not just cultural production. In the socialist-realist view of
the world, a dry, half-dug ditch signified a future canal full of loaded barges.76
As Stalinism ostensibly resolved long-standing debates and struggles, it set an
66 | THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST

ideological time bomb at the heart of the Soviet project with its across-the-board
declaration of the superiority of the Soviet order.

Post-Stalinism and the Rediscovery of the West

Thus far we have seen how key features of Russias rapid and telescoped
modernizationthe development of a broad intelligentsia opposition disseminating a broad antimarket, tutelary cultural orientation around civilizing, mobilizing,
and remaking the masseswere deepened during the Soviet attempt to leap over
the West into an alternative modernity. The intelligentsias love-hate relationship
with the masses and Russias love-hate obsession with the West were two key
axes around which the twentieth centurys most powerful anticapitalist and statist
variation of modernity formed. However, as transnational historians have in recent
years begun to investigate, modern states have always evolved through close scrutiny of other models within the international system, and practices and knowledge
continually circulated as they were domesticated.77 Even under the most isolationist
phases of Stalinism international entanglements were decisive. In the 1930s, for
example, Soviet intellectuals dreamed of making Moscow an international cultural
capital, producing large numbers of translations from foreign languages that kept
appearing even during the height of the purges.78 Yet endemic claims of Soviet
superiority in all things, which introduced the element of what I have called ideological overstretch into claims about the Soviet order, were undercut when at the
end of the Second World War millions of Soviet soldiers were shocked by what
appeared to be fantastically higher standards of material culture in Europe as they
marched west. These were very different types of international contactsthe first
among intellectual elites, the second among the soldiering masses. Both were important in bolstering and undercutting the Stalinist superiority complex.79
Even so, the very fact of the grueling Soviet victory and reconstruction from
the ashes of an unprecedented war lent legitimacy to the Soviet version of modernity for decades. By the late 1940s it had also opened the door to a bipolar
superpower order that competed and intervened on a global scale. According to
Odd Arne Westad, the intellectual constructs that justified the two superpowers
universalistic pretentionsmodernization theory and Marxism-Leninismwere
dueling versions of what Scott has called high modernism.80 During the global
Cold War, Soviet modernity acquired the stature of a state-driven alternative to
capitalist development. Of course, this choice could not simply be imposed, either
in divided Europe or still less around the world; both the US and Soviet models
were domesticated, rejected, modified, or bypassed with an intricacy that would
take many volumes to describe. The Soviet Union quickly developed extensive
cultural and political engagements all over the globe. It is still important to reflect
on what various adherents or sympathizers during the Cold War found attractive
in Soviet modernity as a noncapitalist or non-Western alternative. To some, the
Soviet model was most inspiring because it appeared to provide a jump start, shortcut, and fast track to the goal. To others, its statism or its authoritarianism made it
THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST | 67

feasible, and it could be admired by virtue of its delivery through a one-party, mass
movement.81 But there was also the attraction of Soviet culture, which was actively
propagated through Soviet cultural diplomacy. Soviet civilization could present an
organically whole culture that appeared to transcend divisions (including ethnic
ones through the friendship of peoples model). Thus Soviet culture became an
aspect of Soviet modernity that could offset the image of the USSR in the developing world as a second-rate superpower that produced inferior products. The Soviet
road to high modernity, as Westad has noted, ran through education, science,
and technological progress.82
At the same time, late Stalinism after 1947, marked by the anticosmopolitan
campaign and an extreme isolationism bolstered by the onset of the Cold War,
made the ideological equation between anticapitalism and anti-Occidentalism far
more complete.83 Despite, or perhaps because of this development, an ongoing fascination with the West (especially the USSRs superpower rival, the United States)
was reinforced by continued elite consumption of Western luxury goods and the
permitted imports not just of high culture but Western mass culture. One might
mention only the importance of trophy films in the postwar USSR; in 1951, only
a quarter of films in distribution inside the USSR were Soviet.84 This paradoxical fascination-cum-condemnation was facilitated not least by the regimes own
political-ideological yardstick of taking the developed, industrialized capitalist
countries as Soviet communisms defining other. The opening to the outside world
after Stalins death was revelatory and hit with special force, but the ground for it
was well prepared. The Thaw was only an exaggerated and especially hard-hitting
part of the cycle of openings and closings, reform and reaction, crackdown and
thaw, that had deeply marked Russia and the USSRs development for over two
centuries.
During Khrushchevs Thaw and de-Stalinization, the three interlocking topics
that have been traced in this discussionthe intelligentsia, mass culture, and the
imaginary of the Westall shifted decisively. The breakdown of the enforced
cultural unity of socialist realism proceeded along many lines: the increasing
prominence of youth and other subcultures, some with roots in earlier periods;
experiments in form and rediscovery of the 1920s avant-garde; and complex skirmishes around modifying socialist realist conventions set in earlier decades. The
Soviet intelligentsiagiven the roots of intelligentsia-statist modernity, uniquely
privileged as well as terrorized under Stalinexperienced a remarkable civic revival that recapitulated certain features of its nineteenth-century predecessor.85 Ultimately, by the 1960s, this development fractured and openly undermined loyalty
to party-state agendas. At the same time, with the increasing stratification of Soviet
society and entrenchment of elites, the old intelligentsias remarkable cult of the
masses was increasingly inverted. Inside the new intelligentsia subcultures of the
late Soviet period technocratic trends were alive and well, but the earlier idealization of the masses mutated into something more resembling open disdain.
A series of remarkable openings flowed from Khrushchevs new engagement
68 | THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST

with the outside world, reflecting a remarkably optimistic renewal of open competition with the West.86 New vows to catch up and overtake were supplemented
by an intense effort to create not just a socialist lifestyle but a socialist consumer
culture that was not future-oriented but would improve the housing and everyday
life of millions of Soviet citizens. The search for an alternative socialist consumerism was a complicated process, but it ultimately held fateful consequences for a
variant of high modernity that had focused overwhelmingly on production and
never truly attempted directly to compete in the area of consumption.87
The two bouts of reform communism, first under Khrushchev in the 1950s and
then in the late 1980s under Gorbachev, directly linked to each other, proceeded
under the sign of a reactivized intelligentsia pushing cultural, ideological, and ultimately political change; intense new engagements with the West; and the advent
of a more fragmented, less didactic, and less straight-jacketed consumer, leisure,
and entertainment culture. The latter was now forced to compete directly with
Western mass culture, particularly popular as conveyed through bourgeois radio,
music, and dress, all of which were perceived as a grave threat by the authorities.88
However, by the time of the late Soviet niche society, when withdrawal, selfrealization, and cultural preservationism came to the fore, the long intelligentsia
drive to serve and remake the masses was no longer a dominant historical force.
Despite significant changes, however, in certain crucial ways the post-Stalinist
USSR remained recognizably within the framework of the system that had crystallized in earlier decades. To what degree it did not is perhaps the greatest question
facing the relatively new field of postwar history. One commentator, Anna Krylova, is rightly dissatisfied with how the new postwar literature has not grappled
with the entire arc of Soviet history. She has proposed a division between Bolshevik and Soviet modernity. The latter, in this view, started after the mid-1930s and
represented not a proposed but a realized nonmarket industrial society that reconfigured the relationship between the individual and the social.89 I would note only
that if social and cultural changes were deep (and they need to be weighed against
certain political, economic, and ideological continuities), they could also serve as a
bridge to earlier projects and periods. A case in point is the campaign for culturedness, which deepened and broadened in the 1950s as the civilizing and disciplinary
drives of the regime and professional intelligentsia gained traction in conditions
of far greater stability. This included powerful new initiatives to create socialist
lifestyle (byt) and behavior. The Partys mission to create the new Soviet person
and transform human nature gained a new lease on life with the Khrushchev eras
messianic spirit, a neo-revolutionary revival that superseded the dark Stalinist
imagery of masked enemies lurking everywhere. One corollary of this became an
expanded push to teach citizens how to behave at work, to conduct their personal
lives, to dress, to arrange their living space, and to spend their leisure time.90
At the same time, Stephen Lovell has described the expansion of a particularly
Soviet personal sphere, a concept deliberately opposed to the liberal privatepublic divide. Nurtured in conditions of reform and greater prosperity, in tens of
THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST | 69

millions of new single-family apartmentsthe largest housing project anywhere

in postwar Europeconceptions of personal autonomy matured and evolved
along with Soviet modernity itself. This personal sphere had its reflection in mass
culture, as hard-to-regulate amateur theater groups flourished (reportedly numbering 150,000 in 1958) and amateur musical performances such as the guitar poetry
of bards like Bulat Okudzhava circulated on tape.91 Officially sanctioned postStalinist mass culture and quasi-official forms of popular culture, more broadly,
not only subverted but reinforced the official ideology.92 The West, by the same
token, remained both the yardstick by which to measure the Soviet order and the
touchstone for still very much enforced definitions of decadent, subversive, and
forbidden trends.
The Soviet version of modernity thus faced ongoing cultural and ideological
challengeshow to best the West and its cultural and material allure and carry
through on its promise of creating a superior alternativeno less than economic,
political, or geopolitical dilemmas. As this statement suggests, the historical dynamic surveyed in this chapter must be seen as more than a purely statist phenomenon. Soviet modernity incorporated the powerful civilizing mission and intense
inferiority/superiority complex vis--vis the West of the Russian and Soviet
intelligentsiaas channeled, to be sure, through an unprecedented tatisme. The
Soviet version of modernity in this sense incorporated civilizational patterns that
interacted with the political and economic structures of the party-state. Indeed, the
various strands of this equation were able to reinforce one another, given the deep
Russian and intelligentsia roots of hostility to the market and the commitment to
social engineering, self-transformation, and kulturnost.
The culture that emerged as part of Soviet modernity was politicized and
regulated, but like Soviet education, science, and the creative intelligentsia itself,
it could boast many successes and attractive features. Different strands of the same
order may develop in varied ways, and projecting a narrative of failure onto the
entire history of intelligentsia-statist modernity downplays the remarkable transformations it fueled. At the same time, its endemic crises and the systemic collapse
of 1991 must also be explained. The demise of communism will be the subject of
historical debate for many decades to come. But in keeping with this chapters argument about the analytical importance of civilizational orientation in shaping the
Soviet version of modernity, one suggestive area to consider is the role of modern
reflexivity that social theorists in the tradition of Giddens have identified as a key
component for negotiating rapid change. The reflexivity of modern social life,
Giddens wrote, consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined
and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus
constitutively altering their character.93
Considering that the reach and promise of modernity are never fully realized,
Wittrock deployed the concept of promissory notesin accounting, a note unconditionally promising a sum that in the future will be paidto suggest how modern
orders, informed by the simultaneous rise of social science, revise themselves as
70 | THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST

they extend their institutional reach.94 In the Soviet context, however, extreme
statism, the encompassing role of codified doctrine, and the political time bomb
created by the claim to systemic superiority undermined the regimes accounting
practices. This was felt in the states and the intelligentsias limited approaches to
the problems felt by the masses, the hampered creation of social knowledge, and
sharp restrictions on the spread of information. Cultural production was limited
in its ability to depict and represent major problems. In his discussion of communist modernity, Johann P. Arnason put it bluntly: The impact of a comprehensive
and binding ideology limited the role of reflexivity in social life, because it was
trapped in a cycle of disseminating and teaching the codified postulates of official
doctrine.95 The very tutelary, enlightening, Kulturtrger thrust that drove first the
Russian intelligentsia and then the early Soviet state to remake the masses became,
to paraphase Marx, its own gravedigger.
After 1991, statism (gosudarstvennost) remained enshrined in post-Soviet Russia, but the enlightenment drive of the intelligentsia and its powerful anticommercial ethos were all but confined to the dustbin of history. Indeed, discussions
about the putative death of the intelligentsia itself were rife; if the intelligentsia as
a coherent and civic force still exists, its place in the new society is shrunken and
marginal. At the same time, post-Soviet elites have only augmented the late Soviet
disdain for the common masses. These developments represent a profound break
with an intelligentsia-statist modernity that was over a century in the making.
Single-stream continuity theories about eternal Russia ignore such ruptures. In
Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history, the more things change, the more they
do not always remain the same.

THE INTELLIGENTSIA, THE MASSES, AND THE WEST | 71

PART II
IDEOLOGY, CONCEPTS,
AND INSTITUTIONS

THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT

Six Faces of Ideology in the Soviet Context

o one can grapple with the history of communism without in one fashion
or another confronting the nature of ideology. Nor can one begin to think
about Soviet historical development without somehow grappling with the
role of ideology in the historical process. It is all the more startling, therefore,
to realize how scarce explicit discussions of ideology in the Soviet field actually
are.1 For the Soviet field, the difficulties of sorting out all the levels on which to
discuss the problem of ideology are especially acute. Marxist understandings were
both influential in Western scholarship in the twentieth century and central to
the ruling strategies of the party-state; it was impossible for Western theorists of
ideology to ignore the communist case when they formulated their ideas. There is
also the difficulty of studying in retrospect a phenomenon that was fetishized by
our historical subjects at the time.
In the place of explicit examinations of the topic, moreover, a great many
fallacies have grown up around the concept of ideology, to which even experts in
the field sometimes subscribe and novices unwittingly imbibe. In the single most
common understanding, which one can flag not only in student papers but even in
comments at conferences by professional historians of the Soviet period, ideology
functions simply as a shorthand for bias or what Michael Freeden has termed an
ideational straightjacket, an oversimplified adherence to a rigid framework of
preconceived ideas.2 The concept of ideology has a long history of being used
polemically to denote prejudice, misconceptions, and abnormality even by those
professing to neutral usage. In 1973 Clifford Geertz opened his influential essay
with the phrase: It is one of the minor ironies of modern intellectual history that
the term ideology has become thoroughly ideologized.3 The situation had not
much improved by the time of Terry Eagletons Ideology: An Introduction: I view
things as they really are; you squint at them through a tunnel vision imposed by
some extraneous system of doctrine. Eagleton cuttingly ventured that this man
on the street definition might be worthy of people in a pub, except for the fact

75

that it has been reinforced by so much postwar social scienceand this end of
ideology legacy itself constitutes an ideology.4
Writing about the hoary dichotomy in Cold War studies between ideology
and Realpolitik, Nigel Gould-Davies brilliantly dispensed with a more extended
series of fallacies about ideology. Ideologues, for example, are always operating
according to a master plan or blueprint; they must be inflexible, they must be
aggressive, and it is assumed they cannot cooperate with enemies.5 Many of these
suppositions, which Gould-Davies distilled from fallacious presumptions about the
role of ideology in Soviet foreign policy and the international arena, can, mutatis
mutandis, be observed in discussions of Soviet domestic history as well. What they
have in common is that they reduce and localize the nature of ideology, in that its
boundaries and effects are clear; ideology is taken to be a separate, discrete historical factor, one that can be disaggregated in the equation of historical causality. All
assume that political ideologies must be the dogma-driven antithesis of practicality, economics, or other rational concerns. In this sense, ideology functions as the
polar opposite of interests.
The first thing one can say in response to the pervasive tendency to make ideology into the binary opposite of rational interests, or to simply equate ideology
with irrational zealotry, is that not all ideologies are the same and do not function
in an identical way over time. The content, premises, and internal logic of what
might be called the ideological spherethat is, the arena in which the postulates
of ideology are formally developed, discussed, and disseminatedmatter enormously, as recent discussions of Nazism and Stalinism clearly show.6 Ideologies
can impose significant constraints on actors, but actors also can use and manipulate ideologiesand it is possible for both to happen simultaneously. In the case,
for example, of Leninism, a shrewd flexibility, hardheaded and tough practicality,
and a commitment to develop ideology dialectically in light of praxis were all enshrined as basic and defining principle (no matter how often this vaunted unity of
theory and practice was violated). In the words of Franois Furet: a philosophy
of history coexisted with a political method . . . The former was the poetry, the
latter the prose.7
One is tempted to paraphrase the old English proverb: show me your understanding of ideology and I will tell you who you are. Why, then, has this most
ideological of fields, for which an understanding of this key concept remains fundamental, not made discussion of ideology into a central concern? The relative
lack of sustained analysis of ideology in scholarship among historians of the Soviet
Union, it appears, had a lot to do with the fact that the empirical study of Soviet
history was professionalized largely in the wake of the heyday of totalitarianism
theory. Famously, the first of the six features of totalitarianism listed by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski was an official ideology, consisting of an official
body of doctrine covering all vital aspects of mans existence . . . focused and projected forward toward a perfect final state of mankind. Ideologies were taken to
mean action-related systems of ideas, a definition that encouraged linking them
76 | THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT

to results; they were totalitarian when devoted to the violent, total destruction and
reconstruction of the status quo. Thus, when such an ideology faced a real-life
situation, it was by nature inclined to force reality to fit its far-reaching idea of
the desirable. Thus did the ideological egg hatch into the totalitarian chicken;
consciousness determined being, and not the other way around.8 For many years,
too much emphasis on ideology, even considering it directly as a major factor in
the evolution of the Soviet system, appeared to be redolent of a top-down totalitarian approach with a simplistic view of how ideas determine the historical process.9
When considering the legacy of the totalitarian school for the problem of
ideology, it is necessary to point out that, as David Engermans history of Soviet
studies so clearly shows, the adherents of the totalitarianism concept in the field
were by no means monolithic. A wing of influential social science students of modernization accepted the concept of totalitarianism while not, in fact, endorsing the
primacy of ideology.10 Divisions on the role of ideology were more deeply rooted
than one would expect given the monolithic view of the totalitarian school in the
Soviet field. Even within classic totalitarian theory there were significant divergences. For Hannah Arendt, for example, no ideology was intrinsically totalitarian;
it became so only after a political movement transformed it into a total explanatory
framework.11 In this sense, one of the best-known historians of the role of ideology
in Soviet history, Martin Malia, whose major works were published in the 1990s,
was a vocal and visible adherent of a neo-totalitarianism of a very particular kind.
Malia, in a striking yet representative passage, proclaimed that all the basic institutions of the Soviet order . . . were the creations of ideology; they were nothing
less than the Party program set in steel, concrete, and the omnipresent apparat.
A brilliant intellectual historian whose incisive pen sketching the grand sweep of
historys ironical, inexorable logic has not infrequently suggested to observers the
backdoor influence of a Marxism he so despised, Malia made ideology not merely
into a precondition but the cause of causes in Soviet history.12
Malias widely read writings on Soviet communism, therefore, featured a specific understanding of ideology: it was doctrinal, discrete (in the sense that it was
clear where it began and ended, and how it affected history), and it constituted the
sole master key necessary to unlock the history of the ideocracy.13 Steve Smith
has made the point that Malias definition of ideology was quite conventional, in
that it was simply taken to be a set of beliefs about the world that motivate particular courses of action. As Smith put it, at each turning point in the narrative
in The Soviet Tragedy, Malia is at pains to demonstrate that a particular course of
action had to be taken; there is little space allowed for policy choiceand thus for
human agency (decision makers being captive to their ideology). In Smiths words,
despite all of Malias qualifications and occasional obfuscations, his work became
a teleology of the Big Idea.14 One can only add that Malia not merely inflated
ideologys role when it came to historical causality, butin a final historiographical irony to which he was blindreduced its many dimensions into one when
discussing the nitty-gritty of Soviet development. By treating ideology almost
THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT | 77

exclusively as a univocal, coherent doctrine, he bypassed the many other faces of

ideology in the Soviet context and their links to other sides of the historical process. Malia was a hedgehog, not a fox.15
An equally fundamental feature of the ideology of Martin Malia was identified by Yanni Kotsonis. What most would call liberalism and capitalism, Kotsonis
observed, were for Malia normal and reality, whereas socialism is ideology
and surreal rather than a competing ideology. Malia, he continued, was perfectly right that only a party that could imagine the complete nationalization of
industry would attempt to carry it out, and only a party that believed in class
struggle would attempt to eliminate entire classes. But Kotsonis countered that
liberalism too could be interpreted through an ideological lens: only a state that
does not believe in full unemployment would accept high levels of it, and only a
government that believes in race would introduce it into policy.16 The question,
however, remains: if one rejects Malias inflated understanding of ideology as the
cause of causes in Soviet historical development, his conventional and localized
understanding of ideology as doctrine, and his pathologizing of ideology as a phenomenon that has no analogue in the liberal West, where, then, lies the particularity or distinctiveness of ideology under Soviet communism? Surely, it was not just
the same as everywhere else. Or, put another way, what are the most productive
ways of understanding ideology in the Soviet context?
The answers to these questions have been hard to discern, and not just because Malias powerful yet particular understanding of ideology has dominated the
discussion. In the same years that Malia was popularizing his outsized definition
of ideology as the ever-present explanation for all major developments in Soviet
history, a wave of cultural history was sweeping the field. As historians swarmed
around topics involving language and discourse, rituals and festivals, egodocuments and the mentality of groups and individuals, applying cultural approaches to the workings of institutions and the policies of leaders, they shed light
on many questions that help explain the microdynamics of ideologys workings
inside the Soviet system. Yet the new cultural history of the long 1990s ultimately did not rehabilitate ideology into a full-fledged category of analysis. On
the contrary, discourse and culture were the dominant rubrics, so much so that
even sympathetic critics charged they had crowded out other vectors of conceptualization and causality.17 To this day, one can search the indexes of very fine works
of Soviet cultural history in vain for an entry under ideology.18 Along with the
word and concept of ideology itself, by and large, Soviet historians, as opposed to
their counterparts in the imperial period, remained relatively little concerned with
the history of concepts and intellectual history, areas key to the study of ideology.
In retrospect, the corners of what I am calling the ideological sphere that the
new cultural history probed most were Soviet ideologys symbolic, linguistic, and
discursive dimensions; its links to subjectivity and belief systems; and its presence
in cultural production and the realm of representations.19 For too long, there has,
seemingly, been little middle ground between the polarizing figure of Malia, who
78 | THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT

dominated the discussion of ideology and made its role all-encompassing, and
the frequently more specialized and rarified discussions of discourse and culture,
which often do not contain explicit discussion of ideology per se.
In this chapter, I sketch out an alternative approach to ideology in the Soviet
context. If we are not to fall into the fallacies and implicit assumptions of old, the
definition and historical role of ideology must be analyzed and debated explicitly.
An alternative must be found to approaching ideology through the back door, as it
were, by means of other categories and frameworks of analysis. One solution is to
employ a concept of an ideological sphere, which has been mentioned several times
already. In this context, one can note that conceiving an ideological sphere without
reification or rigid boundaries can complement analysis of the more conventionally
invoked political, social, economic, and cultural realms. In this sense, I can agree
with Malias insistence that ideas and ideologies, like politics, are an independent
variable, so that ideological phenomena cannot be reduced to a position of dependency vis--vis other major factors in Soviet history.20 However, it is my most basic
aim here to suggest the benefits of approaching and understanding ideologynot
only in the Soviet context, but perhaps especially herein a pluralist, multidimensional, and nonexclusionary fashion.
Recognizing the many faces of ideology is an exception in a literature in which
either a particular definition is implicit or a single view is promoted over others
(in recent years, this applies especially to ideology-as-discourse). Indeed, precisely
because there are multiple understandings of ideology in the Soviet context that
are crucial historically as well as historiographically, one must be especially clear
about how one approaches the concept in any given situation. This is the justification for the analysis of six faces of ideology explored in the pages ahead. There is
no magic in the number six; it is possible to construct another classification. These,
however, are the major dimensions that I have distilled from both the state of the
literature on ideology and the Soviet field, and I argue that these sometimes competing but also complementary approaches to ideology are especially important to
explore in depth over the lifetime of the Soviet system. Then the mode of analysis
shifts from conceptualizing major ways of defining ideology to understanding
its role as part of the broader historical process. This excursion into comparative
historiography, which locates the Russian field in the great debates over the role
of ideas versus circumstances since the French Revolution, imparts some distance
and perspective to judge a key interpretive issue for practicing historians: how to
conceive the role of ideology in the great upheavals from the Russian Revolution
to Stalinism and after.

The Case for Eclecticism

In the famous legend of the blind men and an elephant, widespread on the
Indian subcontinent, a group of sightless men gathers around an elephant and
attempts to find out what it is. They each feel a different part, such as leg, tusk, or
tail, and find out that they are describing radically different things. In some verTHE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT | 79

Figure 2. Itch Hanabusa (16521724), Ukiyo-e print illustration of blind monks

examining an elephant, from a book published in Tokyo in 1888. According to the
Buddhist parable, each man reaches a different conclusion based on which part of the
elephant he has examined. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division, Washington, D.C.

sions, it is only when the whole elephant is described to them that the men learn
for the first time that they are blind. In John Godfrey Saxes poem, The Blind Men
and the Elephant, these men are likened to learned theologians. The penultimate
verse of the poem refers to the opinions of the Indian men as exceedingly stiff and
strong. Although each was partly in the right, all were in the wrong!
The few sustained reflections on how to think about ideology in Soviet history
tend, implicitly or explicitly, to promote a single understanding or definition of
the term. Arguing in particular against Malias teleology, for example, Smith concludes that it is more productive to think of ideology as discourse rather than as
belief system.21 Ronald Suny, in a notable discussion, offers a somewhat differently
formulated conclusion: ideology is a term that gravitates between two poles of
meaning. At one end it is thought of narrowly as dogma or doctrine; at the other it
is something closer to discourse or culture. Like Smith, however, Suny clearly tilts
to the latter pole, finding that the more it is seen as dogma, the more a simple deduction is erroneously assumed from text to intention and action.22 David Brandenberger, for his part, endorses Sunys notion of the two poles and attempts to
reconcile them by covering both Stalinist doctrine and the ideological dimensions
of popular culture. But ultimately he folds the cultural pole into the doctrinal
one by emphasizing the scale and uniqueness of a Soviet ideological worldview
80 | THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT

disseminated by propaganda and indoctrination. Indeed, he holds, it is precisely

the doctrinaire, top-down approach to political ideology practiced under Stalin
that makes theoretical literature on ideology as a broader historico-cultural factor
in liberal societies of little relevance here. In this view, the choice is either to recognize Soviet ideological uniqueness or to normalize Soviet society by focusing
on pragmatic political practices or socio-cultural dynamics.23
I maintain that there is no reason not to have our cake and eat it too. We
can recognize the heavy-handed, totalizing codification and dissemination drive
of the massive, official Marxist-Leninist establishment and probe more subtle yet
equally revealing incarnations of ideology. None of those who have discussed the
nature of ideology in the Soviet context has made or tried to make a compelling
case that those two endeavors are mutually exclusive. But as one can see in these
interventions, a key problem that has emerged in the Soviet field is a split between
ideology as doctrine and other understandings, defined as either discursive or
cultural. In keeping with a given writers own proclivities, particular takes on
ideologywith the definition as doctrine in particular often eschewed because of
its association with Malias master keyare staked out and promoted.
If we are to take the problem of ideology seriously, however, it is more convincing, and ultimately more useful, to recognize that in fact there is no single (or
even two-sided) definition of ideology that can suffice. Both theoretically and in
terms of the types of historical experience involved, the concept of ideology must
be recognized as more multifaceted and multidimensional than that. To be entirely
clear: a single dichotomy between doctrine and discourse is also too narrow. Even
in the brief discussion of this single opposition above, an additional cultural pole
as well as the term worldview intruded. Eagleton, who listed seventeen definitions
of ideology in circulation, convincingly argues: the term ideology has a whole
range of useful meanings, not all of which are compatible with each other. To
try to compress this wealth of meaning into a single comprehensive definition
would thus be unhelpful even if it were possible.24 In Soviet history, as a practical
matter, ideology can in fact be understood fruitfully and simultaneously in terms
of doctrine, as worldview, as discourse, and, I argue, as other important things
besides. One key issue to be addressed in the elaboration of this argument is that
these different faces of ideology overlap and complement one another in their application to Soviet history, although there are also key points at which they clash.
Furthermore, each understanding can complement and not invalidate the others, if
only one sidesteps the pitfall of contradictory causal claims.

Ideology as Doctrine
Doctrine, or what came to be called Marxism-Leninism, is the starting point
for any investigation of ideology in Soviet history. This is because in a state that
elevated a political philosophy into the sole officially sanctioned dogma and spent
enormous efforts interpreting and inculcating it, all other scholarly understandings
of ideology inevitably, as we have already seen, must be distinguished from or
THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT | 81

related to ideology as doctrine. Certain features of Marxism-Leninism are readily

discernible: this was a highly text-based ideology, rooted in the classics and
newer writings, and thus had its adepts and its novices. It was disseminated on a
mass scale and therefore codified as a system of thought (one feature that can be
said to distinguish it as an ideology from ideas). It was regulated, and a significant
part of the party-state was devoted to it. Modern movements and states tend to
have more capabilities for spreading such systems of ideas on a mass scale. As we
have seen, a strong aversion to defining ideology as doctrine in the Soviet context
stems from its association with totalitarianism theory and inflated claims for ideologys causal role associated with Malias neo-totalitarian stance. How liberating it
will be, therefore, to recognize and incorporate into our broader understanding of
ideology in Soviet history an approach to ideology as doctrine that goes beyond
totalitarianism. Ideology can be taken seriously as doctrine without assuming,
in Sunys description of the recipe book view of ideology as a set of dogmas, a
simple deduction from text to intention and action.25
If the recipe book looks at component ideas in a static way, a more sophisticated integration of doctrine into Soviet history needs to explore it dynamically
as a complex entity. This involves both diachronic and synchronic dimensions. In
the first category, Marxism-Leninism was an ideology that evolved substantially
over time, and as it did so its very nature within Soviet state and society changed
quite radically. To paint with a very broad brush, one might say that in the 1920s
doctrine was at the heart of fierce political struggles about the direction of the
revolutions future, while much of the population was not yet Sovietized; in the
1930s and 1940s it shifted to justifying a socialism declared built, and through
urbanization and service in the Red Army its mass reach broadened substantially.
While the Thaw gave reform communism a new lease on life, by late socialism
Soviet Marxism had become an increasingly ossified yet broadly established and
highly elaborate system of signs and slogans. At any given point in timeand
here we come to the element of synchronic divisions within the doctrinethere
were many genres and levels that differed sometimes quite substantially from one
another. They ranged from the high theory of the elite theoreticians and academic
Marxist scholarship, to the watchdogs of the party line as articulated in the mass
press, to the many established levels of inculcation ranging from political enlightenment to propaganda and agitation. The entire constellation of genres and their
conventions shifted discernibly in times of socialist offensive or militant revivalism.
For example, during Stalins Great Break of 19281932, even the hitherto rarified,
small-circulation genres of academic Marxism and high theory were suddenly motivated or forced to adopt norms from mass propaganda.26 Finally, at any given
time the content of Soviet Marxism was not monolithic or even always coherent,
for its many strands contained major tensionsalthough professional ideologues
were skilled at smoothing those over. On some core issues such as private property or the class analysis of historical change the doctrine was more inviolable,
although certainly open to innumerable nuances and revisions; on others, such
82 | THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT

as gender, it was more indeterminate and there was more room for conflict and
change.27 Even as the ideological establishment tried hard to present a monolithic
faade, beneath the surface Marxism-Leninism was not univocal.
The issue of chronology also assumes importance here in another sense, in
terms of the literature in the field. Until quite recently, the Soviet historical field
has been heavily focused on the interwar period and Stalinism. Therefore, the
post-Stalin period is less well represented here, simply because the most penetrating works on both the doctrinal and other dimensions of ideology come from
earlier periods and are consequently cited in the course of this discussion.28 Nonetheless, there are exceptions to this, and some notable examples are drawn from
periods after 1953. It is important to state clearly that all the faces of ideology
elaborated here were present throughout the Soviet period. However, the ways
they overlapped and the balance among them shifted over time both as the place
of ideology in Soviet culture and society changed and as the party-state evolved
from a revolutionary movement-regime into a sluggish superpower run by the
gerontocracy.
Most important, Soviet ideology as doctrine can be integrated into broader
historical analysis with recognition of the division between structure and agency,
one of the most crucial axes around which modern social science revolves. This
one conceptual move goes a long way in moving beyond a simplistic model of
cause and effect. The Soviet ideological sphere was vast and weighty enough that
it was one of the pillars on which the Soviet order rested; it assumed a structural
force in Soviet history beyond the complete control of anyone, even Stalin himself.
Even when Stalins personality cult was at its height in the postwar years, for example, the most direct and heavy-handed interventions of the leader (vozhd) into
ideological discussions held major unintended consequences.29 On this topic, David Priestland has made sensible observations about what he calls the intentionalist
and structuralist dimensions of ideology in the Soviet case, suggesting ultimately
that neither aspect can be slighted. While ideology had a degree of autonomy,
in the sense that it was not ultimately controlled by those who articulated it,
it did structure political debate and shape the boundaries of the permissible. In
this sense, Marxism-Leninist ideology can be seen as a structuralist force within
Soviet politics, which both enabled and constrained discourse and action. But, he
hastens to add, it was far from the only such force. Any such recognition therefore
invalidates what Priestland calls traditional intentionalism, a focus on how the beliefs of rulers translated into action. That said, there was room for agencynot just
for altering ideology but for exploiting its many inconsistencies and strandsand
in this second sense intentionalism needs to balance recognition of the doctrines
structural role.30 How apt it is, as we see below, that Priestland adapted the terms
of modern German historiographical dispute and attempted to synthesize them for
an up-to-date understanding of Marxism-Leninism.
No matter how massive the Soviet ideological establishment became, and despite the isolationist drive to keep out alien ideologies especially under Stalinism,
THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT | 83

the ruling doctrine remained in dialogue with other ideologies. No ideology, even
Stalinism circa 1937, can be hermetically sealed. This points to a major synchronic
dimension to Soviet ideology as doctrine. As a practical matter, the quest to convert and convince as well as grandiose communist aspirations in the international
arena put portions of the Soviet intelligentsia and key parts of the party-state into
sustained interaction with the outside world.31 A less well-recognized conduit for
ideological interaction was the fact that even enmity could prompt change. Insofar
as combat with external or alien views produced internal modification, it constitutes a major form of negative influence. One of the most exciting lines of inquiry
in recent years in fact concerns these kinds of covert entanglements between communism and fascism.32 The study of the doctrinal aspects of ideology in the Soviet
Union is neither necessarily dull nor intrinsically totalitarian. It is only beginning
to be imaginatively explored.
For example, a particularly crucial issue to conceive over the entire lifetime
of Marxist doctrine is the relationship between socialism and nationalism. Marxs
distinction between historical and nonhistorical nations and the range of Social
Democratic approaches to the national questionfrom the Austro-Marxists to
Lenin and Stalin to Rosa Luxemburghave been written about in an entire library of works. But the entangled history of communism and nationalism and the
question of syncretism are much more challenging and complex. Both nationalism
and socialism emerged in the nineteenth century as new, modern ideologies; one
revolved around the idea of nation, the other around class; as Roman Szporluks
classic work suggested, they arose from many of the same causes and were intertwined from the very start.33 The ideological traffic between them became particularly intricate over the course of the Soviet period. A vast array of permutations in
advocating national and social transformations were articulated both in the center
and in the borderlands. But at the end of the 1920s real and imagined national
political movements inside and outside the Party from Ukraine to the Caucasus
and Central Asia were excoriated and persecuted. At the same time, Bolshevism
itself became increasingly statist and, by the mid-1930s, inclined to favor national
categories over class, and this change held profound implications for the politics
and culture of non-Russian titular nationalities as well as less well-known minority
national identities in the union republics.34
With the Russian element glorified as the first among equals in the friendship of peoples doctrine and the rehabilitation of Russian national heroes and key
elements of Russian nationalism, from patriotic rhetoric in the Second World War
to official anti-Semitism in the late 1940s, some would posit a fusion of Stalinism
and nationalism. I am more inclined to follow Brandenbergers thesis that Stalinist
ideologists, starting with the old commissar of nationalities himself, selectively
and instrumentally appropriated elements of nationalism.35 But doctrines, no matter
how manipulated, have a logic and impact of their own, and mass application
of these ideological instruments led to major and unexpected consequences. The

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implications for the study of ideology is clear. Instead of studying Soviet Marxism in isolation, one must conceive its relationship to other ideologies, including
nationalism, over time. This applies not just to Soviet reactions to nationalism
and national liberation movements at home and around the world, but to the internal position of nationalism within Stalinism and post-Stalinism. The author of
the most significant study of Russian nationalism in Soviet politics and culture
between 1953 and 1985, Nikolai Mitrokhin, has noted that virtually no scholarship puts Russian nationalism in the Soviet period in the context of non-Russian
nationalisms.36
As Mitrokhins work shows, Soviet Russian nationalists, especially in the socalled Shelepin group, many of them with formative experiences in the anticosmopolitanism campaign of the late 1940s, held positions in the Politburo and Central
Committee apparatus. In the post-Stalin period Soviet Russian nationalism began
to develop independently both as an ideology and as a social movement, and
by the 1960s it had become established with the label of the Russian party.
The example of this group within postwar Soviet communism offers great insight into how a constellation of ideas, or political ideology, is fruitfully studied
not separately but as it was connected to other historical factorsfrom the ruralto-urban social backgrounds of many movement members, to the anti-Semitic and
anti-Western myths and legends that became Soviet-era updates and adaptations of
prerevolutionary nationalist tropes, to the crucial yet previously obscure relationship between the broader ideological tendency and the specific organized movement of the Russian party.37 Clearly, as well, this topic in the history of ideology
cuts across not only 1917 but 1991. Looking at the intricate, overlapping relationship between Soviet communism and Russian nationalism gives great insight first
into the failures of the nationalists during perestroika and their comeback starting
in the late 1990s.38
Most important, probing ideology as a codified system of ideas does not preclude examining other ways of viewing it. On the contrary, studying the doctrinal
element can be both precondition and complement for grasping other dimensions
of ideology. To give just one example, if we are to take ideology as a worldview
something broader than just doctrine that on the individual level is potentially
syncreticthen the relationship between a specific worldview and the broader
system of ideas becomes crucial.39 In the terminology of Freeden, the study of
ideology can and should include both its macro and micro approaches. Looking
at political ideologies in broadest macro outline as traditions that function and
evolve over time can be combined with the results of probing the microhistory of
an ideologys inter- and intra-relationships.40 Studying communist ideology as
disseminated doctrinenot one that is closed and bounded but in its interaction
with other phenomenacan open up rather than close off analysis of ideologys
other faces.

THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT | 85

Ideology as Worldview
However imaginatively we probe the system of ideas that make up codified
doctrine, a broader concept that denotes an entire way of looking at the world
will still be in demand. Even Malia, the historian of ideas most devoted to seeing
the causal effects of doctrine, argued at one point that ideology was not a set of
precepts that people look up in a book and then apply. It is an all-encompassing
mind-set that pervades actions and decisions that to nonideological observers appear disparate and ad hoc.41 The notion of mind-set thus served Malia in his quest
to see ideology lurking behind every action, but there are more compelling reasons
to carve out an understanding of ideology as a mentality or worldview as distinct
from the set of notions disseminated and inculcated as Marxism-Leninismeven
as both could be interconnected and are legitimately understood as ideology. On
the one hand, a worldview is broader than doctrine: it encompasses not just a system of ideas and their codification, but how they are integrated into a compelling
outlook that explains and orients. On the other hand, worldview can be narrower
than the entire line of the Party or Marxism-Leninism as a whole: it can connote
the worldview of an individual, a group, or members of a field or institution, not
all of whom are necessarily versed in high ideology. As such it need not consist only of the official doctrineit can be syncretic or, for example, incorporate
personal and non-Marxist beliefs or idiosyncratic orientations. Although it was
precisely a worldview that many Soviet elites wanted to inculcate in the masses,
ideology as worldview as a working notion in Soviet history takes us beyond the
ideological establishment, the adepts and leaders who propagate doctrine. It gets at
the less deliberate and more entrenched patterns by which ideology takes hold
potentially on a far broader scale. By the same token, the concept of worldview
takes us beyond intentionality. Leaders who spent years studying and maneuvering around ideology as doctrine may have been far less aware of the boundaries
of their own worldview, which as something deep-seated in the structure of ones
outlook and ones era was less accessible to explicit self-reflection.
As a method of scholarly investigation, worldview appears to have two lineages via the notions of weltanschauung and mentalit. The former goes all the
way back to Hegel and Kant, the latter to the postwar formulations of the Annales
school. Karl Mannheim, whose 1929 Ideology and Utopia greatly influenced the
modern discussion of ideology, distinguished between particular and total ideologies, the former involving individual psychology and the latter implying the
worldview of a collectivity or entire epoch.42 But the point here is that in Anglophone historical scholarship the investigation of worldview or mentality, whatever
it is called, is closely related to the rise of cultural history. For example, Geertzs
symbolic anthropology, with its call to investigate the templates for the organization of social and psychological processes by means of thick description, had a
major impact on historians.43 In this context, it must be underlined that any such
cultural approach to ideology does not make ideology synonymous with culture;
86 | THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT

it merely harnesses the methods of cultural history to elucidate ideology. Culture,

both in terms of long-term patterns and cultural production, can certainly be seen
as overlapping and interacting with ideology, particularly in the Soviet context,
but exploring ideology as worldview should not conflate the two. Eric Naimans
influential study, for example, makes a sharp distinction between ideology and
culture in discussing the Soviet 1920s, portraying prevailing values and modes of
thought (culture) as inimical to utopian mentalities (ideology). In his explanation,
utopianism is all about the denial of culture . . . for culture . . . would seem to serve
as a conservative bulwark against efforts to create new societies.44 Naiman here
takes culture as something akin to ingrained habits or background of everyday life,
which is opposed to the template, to use Geertzs term, constructed by ideology.
This serves as a caution not to loosely take for granted what culture is in the Soviet
context, as well.45 However, revolutionary culture, in the sense of cultural production, was certainly far more in sync with the utopianism and transformationalism
of revolutionary ideology; and in later decades of the Soviet period, after relentless
and massive Sovietization processes interacted with the institutional structures of
Soviet life, culture even in Naimarks sense of the ingrained patterns of everyday
values could be interpreted as overlapping and interacting with Soviet ideology in
more direct ways.
Let us take one intriguing example to illustrate how ideology as worldview can
complement the study of systems of ideas. In the Soviet 1920s and 1930s, an entire
approach to evaluating visitors from the outside world became closely connected
to a hierarchical ranking of the countries from which they came. This hierarchy
of development was deeply embedded in Marxism, ever since Marx and Engels
perceived in Germanys future what was already occurring in England and France.
This teleological view based on economic advancement, so ingrained in Marxist
thought, was later heavily reinforced by what Steve Smith has called a new strain
in Bolshevik ideology, which might be termed productivism, that came to the
fore after 1920. Productivism, he explains, put the development of productive
forces and the planned organization of production at the heart of the socialist
vision. It emphasized the role of science and technology in building socialism.46
How interesting to find, then, that Bolshevik intellectuals and Soviet cultural officials applied a similarly teleological template from advanced to backward to individual foreigners whose politics and views of Soviet socialism were ranked and
prioritizedin conjunction with the place of their country of origin on the scale.47
The assumptions of Soviet international cultural policy, in this period heavily yet
never exclusively focused on the advanced West, thus mimicked the hierarchical
approach of Marxism-Leninism itself. While approaching ideology as doctrine
most often leads investigators to examine ideas as expressed in disseminated texts,
moreover, the more expansive notion of worldview leads into an examination of
how assumptions are reinforced by practices.
When we do examine the practices that expressed and reinforced worldview,
moreover, we find that teleological thinking also pervaded a whole range of deTHE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT | 87

sired practices (the ways foreigners were treated by those tasked to do so) and
embedded in noncanonical, nondoctrinal texts (from the writings of guides to
strategy documents to the political decisions of policy makers). These practices
were not at all directly or explicitly connected to the formal elaboration of Soviet
Marxism. Nowhere was it to be found in any doctrinal text that the classic teleologies of progress would be applied in the ranking of individuals and groups. What
can be observed, however, was how a dominant pattern of analysis in the system
of ideas became reflected, reinforced, and elaborated in a broader array of official or sanctioned practices structuring the way the system functioned. MarxismLeninism as doctrine, as it was institutionalized and spread on an unprecedented
scale, became consolidated into a worldview.
But this hierarchical view of the world cannot be understood solely in terms
of Marxism and Leninism. The Soviet obsession with the advanced West reiterated for a new age of ideological extremes the classic nineteenth-century Russian
debates about Russia and the West. The evaluations of foreigners, moreover, were
extended to include culturedness and not just political and ideological level by
guides and translators in the 1920s. This ranking of cultural level as well as political outlook reflected both the proclivities of the Old Bolshevik intellectuals in
charge of institutions of cultural diplomacy and the influential role of nonparty
personnel working for the Soviet state. Moreover, these evaluative rankings of
visitors from other countries were reinforced by a range of other Soviet practices
of evaluation embedded in the political system at home. They also had a rough
domestic analogue in the broad, not always unambiguous, but highly consequential hierarchy of national groups that emerged within the Soviet multinational
state and the zakon stadialnosti (law of development by stages) applied to nations,
natsionalnosti (nationalities), and narodnosti (peoples) by Soviet ethnographers and
other social scientists.48
The teleological worldview we are discussing can fruitfully be examined as
one incarnation of ideology. But, as this discussion suggests, this worldview drew
on many sources and was broader than Marxism alone. Recognizing the many
inspirations one must capture to understand it, one can perceive how using the
notion of ideology as worldview pushes us to connect the ideological sphere to
other areas. Furthermore, there were innumerable individual variations on the hierarchical worldview, and it was hardly shared across the board: the Eurocentric
view of Olga Kameneva, the head of VOKS, was quite different from that of Soviet
Orientologists who held a much different view of the Asian East.49 By engaging
the notion of ideology as worldview, therefore, we can get at how systems of ideas
(in this case, Marxist-Leninist doctrine) evolve into something larger (in this case,
a teleological worldview) as they intertwine with such factors as cultural context,
individual outlooks, and influential political practices.
The ambivalent Soviet relationship with the West, asserting both superiority
and an often covert respect and fascination, makes for a particularly rich vector
through which to probe Weltanschauung. But it is hardly the only one. One can
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imagine studies of Soviet worldviews centering on the changing relationship between the individual and the collective, on the changing relationship with the
past, or on the changing relationship between friends and enemies, among other
key lines of inquiry. But the case put forward suggests that here the notion of ideology as doctrine is not inimical to the notion of ideology as worldview; the two
are intimately connected, although neither can subsume the other. To probe this
deeply hierarchical worldview in a revolutionary state is relevant for understanding
some of the most fundamental workings of the Soviet system, which for all its revolutionary lan came to promote high modernist assumptions about measuring
progress that were not that dissimilar from those of its bourgeois, capitalist rivals
in the West.

Ideology as Historical Concept

The question of how ideology was understood historically may seem like a
part of the elephant that is qualitatively different from the others. Yet it is just as
important to feel as any other section of the beast, in part because it allows for the
attempt to factor historical actors understandings of it into the analysis.
Like so much else, the term ideology emerged from the crucible of the French
Revolution and the subsequent rise of the disciplines of the modern human sciences. The original coinage of the idologues, the Parisian intellectual group active
starting in the mid-1790s, denoted a proposed science of ideas that would facilitate
the transformation of human affairs. The best-known ideologue, Destutt de Tracy,
employed the example of mathematics to describe its exactitude. Napoleon and
his publicists, in turn, gave the term ideology a negative valence to connote the
use of philosophical theory in political practice.50 Later, Marx turned the idologiste
conception on its head when he decried ideology as a veneer covering over the
real workings of the economic base. It was in this sense that Marx and Engels, in
their Die Deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology [1846]) described ideology as a
mystifying weapon of class domination. This workwhich emerged only in fragments in 19031904 before it was recovered by David Riazanov at the Marx-Engels
Institute in Moscow, and was then published in full only in 1932, after the Marxist
scholars downfallpointed to ideology as that element of the superstructure that
made class contradictions appear necessary and moral. As the entry on ideology
in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Fundamental Historical Concepts) points out,
Marx and Engelss philippic against the idealism of the Young Hegelians placed
ideology in the same semantic field as speculation, philosophical abstraction,
pure phraseology and ideas, fantasies, spiritual sublimation, and outright
lies.51
However, it remained for Engels alone actually to coin the term false consciousness, so closely associated with the classical Marxist understanding of ideology. In a letter to Franz Mehring written in 1893, Engels avowed: Ideology is a
process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false
consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise
THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT | 89

it would not be an ideological process at all.52 The notion of ideology as false

consciousness, along with the numerous theories of bourgeois ideology inspired
by Marxism, has been debunked so many times that it need not detain us long. As
Freeden has summed it up, among the implications of false consciousness are the
assumptions that ideology is unitary, that it is ephemeral and dispensable in human
affairs, and that its distortions will change along with material relations.53 Indeed,
the notion of false consciousness is not far from the common fallacy of identifying
ideology as perverse or pathological blindness discussed at the outset.
What is fascinating to note is how Lenin built on a new, countervailing Social
Democratic traditionforged by Plekhanov, who viewed ideology as all socially
conditioned thought, and furthered by Eduard Bernstein, the first thinker to refer
to Marxism as an ideologyto promote scientific socialism as a positive tool for
creating the new society.54 His contemporary, Gyrgy Lukcs, in his 1920 Geschichte und Klassenbewutsein (History and Class Consciousness), a work well known
to Soviet Marxists, postulated a similar dichotomy between bourgeois ideology
and proletarian class consciousness.55 As a positive notion of ideology became the
Soviet mainstream, it became not all that far removed from the science of ideas of
the French revolutionary idologues, even as it made obligatory reference to how the
economic base shaped the superstructure. At the same time, some party Marxist
theoreticians in the early 1920s continued in the tradition of defining ideology as
false consciousness. The constitution of an ideological front at the same historical
moment, circa 19211923, came to denote a concrete series of policy measures to
suppress bourgeois ideology.56 What is at stake for us in all such formulations in
the evolution of the Soviet approach to ideology is nothing less than the possibility of historicizing the concept as a core component of the Soviet lexicon. Much
is to be gained by asking how it was understood and defined by different actors
throughout the course of Soviet history.
There was an easy way to reconcile the traditional Marxist view of bourgeois
ideology as the mystifications of the exploiting classes and a positive view of
Marxism-Leninism as the ideology of the proletariat. If all ideology was class
ideology, created by the material base, then nothing was simpler than to segregate
the obscuring quality of the ideology of the exploiting classes from the scientific
nature of the theory needed to create the new state and society. This bifurcation
was quite literally embodied in the two separate entries on ideology, totaling no
less than fourteen closely printed pages, in the first edition of the Bolshaia sovetskaia
entsiklopediia (Great Soviet Encyclopedia, BSE) in 1933. The first treated ideology in general, while the second was devoted separately to the ideology of the
proletariat.57 The entry on ideology as a whole, penned by N. Bobrovnikov, was
noteworthy for at least two other features above and beyond the sharp division
between bourgeois and proletarian ideology. First, it began with a broad, neutral
definition of ideology as either the totality of the forms of societal consciousness
(law, morality, science, art, philosophy, and religion) or particular instantiations
of societal consciousness, which Bobrovnikov called worldview (mirovozrenie). Sec90 | THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT

ond, in the treatment of ideology under socialism, the BSE, pragmatically and
tellingly, moved toward a more flexible understanding of the relationship between
base and superstructure. Ideology, the article avowed, was not only the product of
the mode of production; the economic base explained only its origins. Later, ideology could then acquire relative independence and even exert reverse influence
back on the economic base.58
This heightened, even formative historical role for ideology in official definitions, including the possibility that elements of superstructure could gain independence from and even influence the base, corresponds with its hugely visible and
explicit place of honor in Soviet state and society. In one of the many ironies of
Soviet history, this redefinition of the original Marxist notion of false consciousness, accomplished in order to turn socialist ideology into a positive instrument
for building the new society, held profound implications. It turned the Marxist
analysis of ideology from a critical tool of demystification into a Marxist-Leninist
celebration (or rote memorization of) an instrument of state. After all, building
socialism became synonymous with the success of the Soviet state, and an ideological justification could be (and was) cooked up to justify any zig or zag of policy,
including the most hard-boiled raison dtat. Thus the notion of ideology as false
consciousness, which at its heart suggests how ideology can be manipulated, never
lost its salience to Soviet history even as it only explains one aspect of ideologys
role. But the key point is that other, more subtle workings and incarnations of ideology could still motivate those who invented (not to mention digested) those very
justifications. Ironically, those who could critically read from the millions of texts
of Marx and Engels mass-produced in the USSR could acquire a powerful weapon
to criticize Marxism-Leninism.59
One of the great questions for further investigation involves how individual
historical actors understood the concept and power of ideology. In this context it is
interesting to note how Solzhenitsyn, in an inversion of the official definition, also
accorded ideology pride of place in the historical processnot as a key instrument
for the creation of the classless society but as the root cause of communist political violence. Macbeths justifications were feebleand his conscience devoured
him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and spiritual strength
of Shakespeares evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no
ideology. . . . Ideologythat is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification.
. . . Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on
a scale calculated in the millions.60

Ideology as Discourse
It was rather late in the day, in the words of Freeden, that students of ideology found it was profitable to treat ideologies as linguistic and semantic products. Hermeneutics, semantics, and postmodern studies are the three streams he
identifies as contributors to discourse theory in this area. In the Soviet field, it was
the post-Soviet linguistic turn that created a boom in discourse analysis, often
THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT | 91

crowding out (as argued above) explicit attention to ideology itself. But during the
heyday of that celebrated 1990s turn, the many migr Russian and early Soviet
works on linguistics remained little known and less discussed. An exception was
Afanasii Selishchevs Iazyk revoliutsionnoi epokhi (Language of the Revolutionary
Epoch), which had been published in 1928 and long known to historians.61 But Selishchev was but the tip of the iceberg; an important interest in language and revolution long predated 1917. For example, in 1894 the French Marxist (and Marxs
son-in-law) Paul Lafargue published a study of how the French Revolution had
transformed the French language that was translated by Karl Kautsky into German. The aftermath of total war in 1914 provoked great interest in such issues as
Russian slang and the language of war and revolution, in both Russia and Europe.
For example, in 1920 the French Slavic philologist Andr Mazon published Lexique
de la guerre et de la rvolution en Russie (19141918) (A Lexicon of War and Revolution
in Russia [19141918]), and in 1923 the Russian-Swiss linguist Sergei Kartsevskii
published Iazyk, voina i revoliutsiia (Language, War, and Revolution) in Berlin. A
rich vein of Soviet studies of language in the 1920s followed suit.62
Among recent discussions also rarely mentioned by historians, Mikhail Epstein
has attempted to develop the field of ideolinguistics by examining keywords as
ideologems. Although his ascription of the features of Soviet ideological language to a unique and novel totalitarianism is dubious, since some have analogues
in the most liberal of democracies, Epsteins account gives insight into the evolving structures of Soviet ideological language. For example, Soviet-speak routinely
contained pairings of positive and negative terms for the same concept, such as internatsionalizm and kosmopolitizm. Epstein argued that the structure of ideolanguage
before the late 1920s was built on a dyadic opposition between revolutionary and
inimical concepts, the sign of a militant ideology. But in the late 1920s, along
with the condemnation and linkage of both left and right deviations in the Party,
a crucial change occurred. A tetradic ideolanguage emerged that typically positioned a hegemonic yet often ambiguous center around two extremesthe sign
of Stalins highly flexible ideology of state.63 Other students of Stalinist newspeak
have paid close attention to Stalins own argumentation and how his seminarian
style pervaded the entire country during the era of the cult. Mikhail Vaiskopf,
author of perhaps the most substantive work in this area, has described how Stalin
deployed highly elastic concepts and, on this point echoing Epstein, preserved
maximum room for maneuver.64 The literary scholar Marietta Chudakovas work is
particularly interesting for its continuation of the analysis of novoiaz (the Russian
equivalent of Orwells newspeak) into the post-Stalin and post-Soviet periods.65
These and many other works of Soviet history following the linguistic and
cultural turns reveal the importance of paying attention to the concepts, linguistic
structures, and techniques of ideology. By taking the forms of ideology seriously,
together they convey a sense of Soviet ideologys high level of complexityeven if
its component ideas could be crude and simple. As discourse, ideology appears as a
vast web of often tension-ridden components and levels constantly in motion, thus
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highlighting the intricacy of its operation and evolution in a way that examining
ideas alone cannot. If ideology is defined in linguistic terms, Schull adds, its
significance in shaping action is not equivalent to its role in constituting beliefs.
Ones actions will be shaped by an ideology in so far as one must conform to its
conventions. . . . Having to respect certain conventions for meaningful communication always entails further commitments for the agents actual pattern of action.66
This stands in stark contrast to the simple equation of ideas, belief, and action
implicit in many older understandings of ideology.
While ideology can be seen as discourse, however, it is possible to posit a key
point at which discourse cannot replace the category of ideology. Ideology is one
form of discourse, according to Freeden, but it is not entirely containable in the
idea of discourse. This is because ideology is also a product of the historical and
political world. In some formulations of discourse theory that are hard to square
with the projects of most social scientists and historians, reality becomes simply what a discourse ordains reality to be, a discursive construct.67 For example,
the rich and justly influential work of Evgeny Dobrenko on socialist realism can
be seen as very much informed by the notion of ideology as discourse, since it
interprets and traces the ideologized aesthetics of socialist realism as an evolving
bundle of discourses with their own representational strategies. Its framework for
interpreting the Soviet historical experience appears to fit well with what Freeden
says about the theoretical primacy of discourse: it starts with the deliberately
provocative claim that the Soviet historical experience and socialism were products
of the representational mechanism that was socialist realism, and not the other way
around. Socialist realism created socialism and Soviet reality, and to explore this is
to enter a danger zone where historical arguments are only partially helpful. Or,
as Dobrenko puts it elsewhere: Aesthetics did not beautify reality; it was reality. By
contrast, all reality outside of Socialist Realism was but the wilderness of everyday
life, waiting to be rendered fit to be read and interpreted.68
An alternative to such interpretive frameworks (for practicing historians and
others whose disciplines might be made redundant by such formulations) would
be an approach to historical reality that analyzes it as a composite of interacting
spheres or arenas, rather than imparting absolute primacy to discourse. A model
of ideology as discourse that is historically informed is hardly an impossibility. In
such a model, discourses would be seen as both cause and effect and would not
monopolize causality or crowd out the other areas. In this sense, discourses can be
seen as exerting influence and in turn shaped by and gain traction through broader
historical, political, and social contexts. In fact, attention to the discursive means
and strategies by which ideology is conveyed opens up the key issues of intentionality and reception, or how ideology is produced and consumed.
As students of Soviet history have come to know so well, once the archival
revolution fatally punctured the monolithic faade of Soviet public culture, the
reception of even the most persistently disseminated orthodoxies was routinely
different in all sorts of ways from the intent of their creators.69 In a context in
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which ideology was packaged in so many forms and trumpeted on a mass scale for
so long, it becomes crucial to distinguish the level of intentionality from the unexpected consequences and the broader political and social functions that accrued
around ideologys articulation.

Ideology as Performance
This statement leads directly to a closely related topic, the ritualistic and performative dimensions of ideology. Soviet political culture, with its new holidays
and festivals, workplace and party meetings, criticism and self-criticism sessions,
red rites and slogans, was highly ritualistic from the start. Mass participation ensured that myriad Soviet practices became rituals, a point that connects to two
major dimensions in which ideological performativity must be considered. On the
one hand, enacting rituals are the means by which many participants could find
meaning and ideology was instantiated. For example, Soviet mass festivals, organized by festival experts and theoreticians, shaping the calendar year around, and
the symbolic politics they embodied have been closely connected to the Sovietization of the population.70 Party cell and workplace political meetings could turn
into fierce battlegrounds, notably during the self-criticism campaign of 19281929
and the Great Terror, linking the local level to the high politics of denouncing
deviations and purging enemies. On the other hand, ritualistic performance can
signify the moment at which the form in which ideology is packaged (staging
or enacting its norms) takes precedent over content (the ideas and values that the
ideology champions).
Setting out to explain why the array of famous postwar ideological discussions
and self-criticism sessions in disciplines from biology to physics led to different
outcomes, for example, the historian of science Alexei Kojevnikov found the key
in the formal rules and rites of public behavior rather than the contents and
results of disputes. These rules, implicit as well as official, were imported into the
realm of science and the nonparty intelligentsia from the Communist Party; some
actors played the game better than others, influencing the varied results. In this
depiction, ideology was no master plan, contrary to the loudly trumpeted official
nostrums, but was riven by controversy and no small degree of chaos via the often
contingent performance of its rituals.71 Kojevnikov focused on uncovering the rules
of the game to the exclusion of what people felt or thought about either the form
or the substance, although by implication the rules in his rendering were most
often manipulated consciously.
The anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, in a celebrated book, turned to late socialism and took the analysis of Soviet ideological performativity to a new level.
His work, like Kojevnikovs, was premised on the understanding that ideologized
performance became more important than ideological content. But under late socialism this phenomenon was taken to an extreme as ideological representations
became increasingly normalized, ubiquitous, and predictable in everyday life and
their content was changed or ignored. Yurchaks depiction lends specificity to
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the obvious observation that the nature and role of ideology in the Soviet Union
evolved dramatically over time. In particular, Yurchak emphasized the watershed
of Stalins death in depriving communist ideology of its external editorial voice.
But even as highly ritualized form took precedence over literal meaninga phenomenon Yurchak refers to as the hypernormalization of authoritative form
constant performance was far from meaningless to audiences. On the one hand,
it became malleable, subject to fine alterations and reinterpretations in everyday
life, and this led to unintended and unpredictable meanings. On the other hand,
its very repetitiveness had political and sociopsychological consequences, making
it feel as if the Soviet order would last forever.72
Yurchak counterposed this emphasis on ritual and performance with the
mask/truth model, positing ever-present dissimulation and a sharp binary opposition between hidden transcripts and official truth. In this fashion, Yurchak went
beyond examination of the rules of various genres of meetings and rituals to examine a kind of ideology that had become thoroughly pervaded by performativity.
Yurchak himself preferred, using Bakhtins term, to call it authoritative discourse
rather than ideology, arguing that the newly normalized Soviet ideological discourse no longer functioned at the level of meaning as a kind of ideology in the
usual sense of the word.73 This is the point, clearly visible in Yurchaks study,
where the emphasis on performance crowds out ideas, which scarcely matter as
such to the actors on the stage. Ideas, however, do mattereven under Brezhnev.
Understanding ideology as performance need not negate ideology as doctrine or
worldview. It is a commonplace to say that ideology declined and lost its grip in
the late Soviet period; understanding ideology as performance prompts us to ask
instead how its very nature, pivoting on the relationship between ideas and performance, was transformed.

Ideology as Faith
But let us reformulate this last proposition about ideas: what is at stake is not
just ideas but the way ideology affects hearts as well as minds, sparking belief or
faith. It is, more precisely, the balance between performance and faith that encapsulates, in a nutshell, many post-Soviet historiographical debates about what
Soviet people really believed or, put more historically, the manner and extent to
which we can say ideology was internalized. Theatricality in and of itself posits
no requirement to believe; yet a key aspect for the success of any ideology is its
ability to explain aspects of the world to its adepts and converts. If one pictures
Bolshevik ideology as a belief system or a form of faith, it can help explain how,
for example, commissars of the Civil War era were oriented after devastating destruction of total war and the birth of a new order. New Communists of humble
and not infrequently rural origin found the promise of a war on backwardness not
only in an abstract concept of socialist modernization but belief in a new order
that would elevate them, destroy the milieu they had escaped, and expropriate the
expropriators. As Peter Holquist observed, The ideology of Bolshevism became
THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT | 95

meaningful not as a set of abstract ideas, but as a program embraced by people

who found it a compelling interpretation of their lived experience in this time of
crisis.74 In the 1920s Marxism-Leninism armed the young ikapisty, rising Bolshevik intellectuals and scholars of the Institute of Red Professors (IKP), with an
intoxicating world-historical sweep to their theoretical pronouncements as well as
a keen awareness of their own historical role.75 As has often been noted, for the
members of the 1930s generation, many of whom decades later still saw the first
decade of Stalinist hardship and slaughter as the best time in their lives, the propaganda slogan enthusiasm could have huge resonance.
Faith is a broad category, but what I am addressing here is that element of
zeal, emotional dedication, or noncognitive commitment that attaches itself to
ideologys capability to provide an explanatory framework. In the Soviet case,
collectivismthe movements ability to hold out a sense of collective belonging
was intimately connected to this commitment.76 Faith in this sense hardly implies
the abandonment of reason or rationality, which is what the ex-Communist Arthur
Koestler tried to suggest when, long after the fact, he compared his conversion to
the Party to romantic love and religious faith: One does not fall in love with a
woman, or enter the womb of a church, as a result of logical persuasion.77 All it
implies is that communism, like other ideologies, gained much of its power in lived
experience through what Eagleton has called its affective, unconscious, mythical,
or symbolic dimensions.78
One illustration of the utility of probing ideology as faith or belief concerns
the problem of political violence, which looms large in discussions of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet party-state, and Stalinism. One can probe the doctrinal
aspects of this, from the ends-justify-the-means logic of Trotskys justification of
the Red Terror, to Lenins use of the term ruthlessness (besposhchadnost), the open
justifications for repressing class enemies under the dictatorship of the proletariat
in the 1920s, the taboos making it impossible to refer to the expanding Gulag as
anything but humane reeducation in the 1930s, and so on. But this gets us only so
far. What about the agents of violence, the lower-level actors who carried it out,
the cadres or peregibshchiki who committed excesses? What did they believe in?79
Undoubtedly, along a spectrum, some took more inspiration from ideology than
others, and not a few became known simply as sadists. Assessing any such cases,
examination of belief can hardly be divorced from an examination of worldview
and discourse, and all must be linked to practices and power. By the same token,
innovative studies probed another crucial question in Soviet history: what Red
Army soldiers during World War II believed in and how the experience of total
war on the Eastern front changed soldiers belief systems. For example, Catherine
Merridale discussed a distinct front-line ideology that was far removed from the
careful sophistry of Stalins ideologues.80
Faith, however, holds another set of implications that are more problematic
when applied to ideology: it recalls religion. The interpretation of MarxismLeninism as a political or secular religion boasts a complex and variegated ge96 | THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT

nealogy. It encompasses the Russian intellectual tradition, European scholarship

from the 1920s on, the recent academic movement to compare totalitarian political
religions of the far left and far right, and a long line of prominent scholars within
Soviet studies.81 For example, in his many works Robert C. Tucker variously called
attention to Marxisms total regeneration of humankind as a secular version of
Christian salvation, to Bolshevism as a millenarian movement, to Stalins use of religious terminology, and the growing resemblance of the party-state to a churchstate.82 The many works of discourse analysis from Igal Halfin prominently feature
religious concepts (eschatology, messianism) and extensive deployment of religious
terminology (inquisition, heresy, good and evil, faith, etc.).83 In terms of the institutional structures of the Soviet new regime, Stephen Kotkins Magnetic Mountain
contains a sustained discussion of party-state dualism as a form of theocracy.84 To
be sure, elements of communism that mimicked or recapitulated religious phenomena are not hard to find. Most obviously and frequently mentioned are the Soviet
attempts deliberately to replace religion with new rituals and beliefs, including
red corners, festivals and holidays, and cults of Lenin and Stalin. But there were
also more subtle structural parallels, such as the replacement of obligatory study
of Orthodoxy in the tsarist educational system with obligatory study of dialectical
and historical materialism.
However, a number of scholars maintain that the secular religions of the twentieth century do not involve the transcendent, and that the use of religion in
political religion is merely a heuristic device or metaphor. Even sympathetic critics
of the political religion concept, moreover, have found it too blunt a tool and too
generic a concept to probe the novel, supranational, but historically specific . . .
sense of mission produced by radical interwar regimes.85 Spirituality was absent
in the communist faith; Paul Froese has argued that religious worldviews offer
something lacking in Soviet Communisman object of devotion, a caring God,
who purports to care about the individual.86 It is, therefore, eminently possible to
question whether the concept of political religion can fully take into account the
novel nature of communisms appeal, as well as its major commitments to science
and atheism. In his work on the Stalin cult, Plamper, drawing on Edward Shils,
prefers to deploy the concept of sacrality. This term, in his words, avoids the pitfalls associated with the direct transposition of religious categories into politics,
which characterizes the notions of political religion or political theology.87 In
sum, recognition of ideology as faith need not necessitate adopting the notion of
political religion. Finally, understanding how ideology can inspire faith also opens
up the question of when and why it fails to do so.

Ideas versus Circumstances in the French, Russian, and Nazi Revolutions

At last we can shift gears and examine how the role of ideology has been
understood in the historical process. Here I would like not so much to rehearse
the development of the Soviet field in isolation as to suggest that a primary axis
around which the historiography of controversial modern cataclysms can be anaTHE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT | 97

lyzed is the polarization between ideas and circumstances. It is particularly revealing to compare the explanation of terror in the two great revolutions with the case
of Nazism and the Holocaust, because only two of the three (French and Russian,
Nazi and Soviet) are conventionally compared. A full triangulation, I argue, throws
the dynamics governing the place of ideology in conceptions of causality into stark
relief.
The French Revolution is a logical starting point because the classic split between ideas and circumstances emerged in political arguments used in the course
of the French Revolution itself. Mona Ozouf has located a continual vacillation
between force of circumstance and human will (another way of asserting the
force of agency or ideas) in the post-Jacobin rhetoric of Thermidor. Donald M. G.
Sutherland, more specifically, suggests that insofar as the historiographical thesis
of circumstances has involved a notion of the Terror as a defensive response to
external events, it can be traced back even farther to the justifications of emergency
measures on the part of Convention deputies in 1793. What is certain is that the
thesis of circumstances became crucial to a young generation of historians in the
1820s1830s and solidified with the institutionalization of French revolutionary
studies in the late nineteenth century.88
In its most general form, the thesis of circumstances in the French case has
held that the Terror was not generated by forces intrinsic to the revolution itself
(including Jacobin ideology). Nor was 1792 scripted in 1789. Rather, the Terror
was provoked by the simultaneous crises of foreign invasion, domestic counterrevolution, economic collapse, and treason in the army. All three strands of
republicanismliberal, democratic, and socialisttherefore defended the terror
as a result of circumstance, Hugh Gough explains. Terror had been forced on
politicians by counter-revolution and war and once that pressure was relieved, it
vanished.89
In opposition, various responses with almost as long a pedigree have asserted
the fundamental power of revolutionary ideas (whether examined through the
vehicles of political thought, political culture, or ideology) to shape revolutionary
events. Historically, the specter of the French Revolution influenced the Russian
revolutionary movement and the German conservative revolution; historiographically, the literature on 1917 and 1933 led to notable intellectual interactions among
the three fields.90 In modern French historiography, the ex-Communist Franois
Furet famously led the turn to the study of revolutionary mentality and political
culture as the prime generator of the Terror; this movement, known in the French
context as revisionism, returned ideas and ideology to the forefront of interpretations. As one scholar has summed it up, Furets 1978 Penser la Rvolution franaise
(Interpreting the French Revolution) argued that the terror was not a defensive
reflex against danger but an attitude deeply embedded in the revolutions ideology
and which fed into the practices of 20th-century communism.91 French revisionist
historiography, by analyzing first and foremost political culture rather than class,

98 | THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT

swung the pendulum away from not just Marxism but other forms of structuralist
interpretation.
The aftereffects of this basic split can be detected, in more sophisticated and
erudite variations, virtually down to the present day.92 However, the basic alternation made it almost inevitable that some historians would try to bridge the
dichotomy and construct explanatory frameworks that relied on the interaction of
ideas and context.93 The result is what Gough calls postrevisionism: a heterodox
phenomenon that, by rejecting the primacy of ideas alone and their inevitable
result in terror, is liberated to explore other factors such as political crises, gender,
and local or regional contexts. But the key point is that postrevisionism in French
revolutionary studies has not meant a simple return to the old circumstance theory, but rather excursions into the unfolding of the revolutionary process.94 There
is also less of a perceived imperative to focus, even if only implicitly, on the Terror
alone as the fulcrum of historical investigation. Therefore, in the words of Peter
Campbell, there is general agreement that the Revolution has gained enormously
in variety, in complexity, and that, as a consequence, we are in a period of renewal.
Deeper and more reflective analysis is becoming possible because there is less focus
on polemics between opposing views of the nature of the Revolution.95 Heterodoxy has bridged the rigid old oppositions and dichotomies.
Compare this French opposition between will and circumstance to the
intentionalist-functionalist debate in the German case. In the 1960s and 1970s,
interpretations of National Socialism were dominated by two contending schools.
The intentionalists asserted that the Holocaust flowed from Hitlers premeditated
intent and Nazi ideology, while the functionalists or structuralists pointed to the
cumulative radicalization of the system.96 This division, so long-lasting and the
subject of so much dispute, was nothing less than a variation (Fhrer-centered
and regime-centered, respectively) of the old dichotomy between ideas and circumstances. The stark opposition these two schools offered between inexorable
logic and contingent stages is quite comparable to the standoff between totalitarian
and revisionist historical schemas in Soviet studies during the 1970s and 1980s.
Because the German approaches were centered around and applied to the origins
of the Final Solutionto a large degree an empirical questionthe flaws in both
became readily apparent. To put it bluntly, by the 1980s it had become clear that
the intentionalists were incorrect to starkly posit a firm, premeditated Nazi goal
from the outset, and that the functionalists were wrong in stating that there had
been no specific, comprehensive decision (from above, as it were) to exterminate
European Jewry.97 Various modifications of both positions ensued.
Today, the intentionalist-functionalist debate has long been dead and buried.
As in the French case, a third historiographical phase transcended the old standoff.
In this case, it involved incorporating elements from both approaches and thus
transcending the old dichotomy. Ian Kershaws concept of working towards the
Fhrer in his Hitler biography, a term that evokes the systemic attempt to antic-

THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT | 99

ipate the will and desires of the leader on various levels as the leader principle
functioned at the heart of the political system, was a key moment in bridging the
two schools. It could do so precisely by encapsulating the interplay between Nazi
ideology and the functioning of the Third Reich.98 Today, most accounts construct
multicausal explanations that simultaneously account for the role of ideology and
other salient and pressing factors. It is common to examine how anti-Semitism
and racial ideology penetrated (but did not necessarily subsume) many other historical forces driving Nazi Germany, from imperial and colonizing ambitions and
long-standing cultural conceptions of the East to the conduct and course of the
war.99 To give but one major example, a sophisticated literature has arisen to address the interplay, overlap, and divergence between ideological and economic
motivations in the Holocaust.100 To be sure, echoes and aftershocks of the standoffs
still can be felt, much as in the French and Russian fields, as when a thesis of mutual German-Soviet wartime escalation of violence and barbarization is criticized
for obscuring how the war of annihilation (Vernichtungskrieg) grew out of Nazi
(but not Soviet) ideology.101
It is in these comparative contexts that the classic totalitarian-revisionist dispute in the Russian and Soviet field can fruitfully be revisited in its larger context.
This was a disagreement not just about history from above and from below, but a
contest in large part between the inexorable unfolding of ideological or political
imperatives versus the power of circumstances and unexpected consequences. In
the broadest terms, and despite all the significant differences among the three
historiographies, the most atrocious events of these three respective fieldsthe
Jacobin Terror, Nazi genocide, and the Stalinist mass repressionsdemanded
historical explanation and imparted a heightened importance to the search for
causality. Where did the roots of the catastrophe lie? What was at fault? In each
case this search created explanatory frameworks that became polarized between
ideas and circumstances variously construed. In both the German and Russian literatures, strong theses blaming ideology coalesced into paradigms, which were
then challenged by an antithetical explanatory framework emphasizing contingent
circumstances. With time, a third, conceptually more pluralistic period ensued and
the first stark antitheses were later transcended in increasingly multicausal syntheses. Since circa 1991, the Soviet field has experienced its own, more heterodox
period of postrevisionism.
In the French case, in contrast with the other two, there was from the start
a powerful interest in defending a good revolution and an attractive set of revolutionary ideas, and hence the thesis of circumstances had an especially long
pedigree. In the study of the Russian Revolution, many in the fields foundational
post-Second World War generation were inclined to emphasize the opposite position: to indict revolutionary or Marxist ideology as a kind of original sin. Whereas
in the French case mainstream, classic historiography downplayed the Terror or
separated the good revolution of 17891791 from the bad phase of 17921794,
in the Russian case revisionists questioned the inevitable progression from Le100 | THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT

nin to Stalin and looked for aspects or periods of the revolution to salvage. In a
neat reversal of the ascendancy of social history in the Russian field, therefore,
revisionism in French revolutionary studies meant a rebellious shift from social
explanations to the intense examination of the power of ideas and ideology as
worldview. Ironically, the two very different kinds of revisionism in the French
and Russian fields were roughly coterminous. But the crucial point is that both
took shape not as clean breaks with the previous historiography but as antithetical
inversions of the previous paradigmsand were therefore shaped as antitheses by
the thesis.
This development, in turn, has affected the methodological approach to ideology as a discrete variable or factor to be disaggregated and evaluated for its
causal effects, rather than a more diffuse and complicated phenomenon. Was the
Red Terror caused by Bolshevik predispositions or by the Civil War as a formative
experience? Was Soviet foreign policy driven by ideology or by Realpolitik? When
did Stalinist ideologues gain the upper hand over pragmatic or moderate industrializers? Each of these dichotomies, in its time salient in the historiography,
by its very formulation ignores the way ideology intersected with other arenas
and constantly interacted with the broader context. In 1989, the ever-prescient
Reginald Zelnik issued a call for historians to work their way through a complex
dialectic of ideology and circumstance, consciousness and experience, reality and
will. As Zelnik put it, even when circumstances can be taken as a given, it is hard
to conceive of ways of perceiving and reacting to them that are not ideologically
mediated.102 In the postrevisionist, post-Soviet phase of the historiography there
have been explicit calls to transcend what Peter Holquist, in a celebrated intervention, called a binary opposition between context and intent. He argued: The
binary modeleither context or intentfails to account for how these two factors
interact. An emphasis either on the circumstances of Russias past or the role of
Bolshevik ideology risks de-historicizing the specific conjuncture in which these
two components catalytically acted upon one another.103
As in other fields, the echoes of the old debates do continue, but on more
circumscribed and less polarized grounds. James Ryans recent work on Lenin
and political violence attempts to reassert the primacy of ideology, but only for
violence as approved and directed by the leading actors of the early Soviet state.
At the same time, he attempts to make this case within the framework of a postrevisionist understanding of Soviet history that restores the importance of ideology without re-invoking the traditional ideology-versus-circumstances dichotomy.104 A general consensus in the study of the Stalinist Great Terror (and this
bears comparison to the state of the art in Holocaust studies) now posits not a
single unitary phenomenon but the convergence of several lines of repression.
These encompass the discrete operations of the Great Terror, which targeted different groups such as political deviationists, non-Russian nationalities, peasants
previously branded kulaks, and socially alien elements.105 Crucially, each of these
converging operations encompassed differing ideological components as well as a
THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT | 101

discrete if overlapping history of political and institutional practices. What moves

to the center of attention, therefore, is the interplay between ideological goals and
political circumstances.106

The Multiple Faces of Ideology

This chapter advances a number of interrelated arguments. First, in response
to the limiting view of ideology as pathology and the assertion of the primacy
of ideology in Soviet history, the field has for too long swept ideology under the
rug. This has, to a large extent, deprived this quintessentially ideological field of
sophisticated and multifaceted understandings of ideology. Second, both theoretically and in the context of Soviet history, the concept of ideology is too broad to
be encapsulated by any one definition. From a single understanding of ideology as
doctrine, or its alternative incarnation as discourse, I advocate explicit recognition
of the multiple faces of ideology.
A thorny conceptual question concerns whether, having groped for the trunk,
tail, and body parts of our ideological elephant, we can really conceive of a coherent beast. In the Soviet context, on the one hand, such dimensions of ideology as
worldview, discourse, and performance can be seen as very much intertwined with
ideology as pervasive Marxist-Leninist doctrine. On the other hand, it is clearly
possible more generally to examine performance or discourse above and beyond
doctrine and even without the concept of ideology. Furthermore, it is necessary
to recognize those points where the different understandings of ideology clash
and become incompatible with one another. For example, ideology as doctrine is
distinctly narrower than worldview; there is also clearly a moment when viewing
ideology as performance, which does not necessarily imply belief, diverges from
ideology as faith. By the same token, tracing the historical uses of a concept,
however revealing, is hardly to limit the ways it can be defined in the present day.
Discourse, on the other hand, can become capacious enough to subsume both doctrine and worldview, and other vectors of historical analysis besides. Ultimately,
however, a pluralistic stance that sees advantages in probing many dimensions
of ideology is entirely tenable, and it serves to challenge the reductionism of the
one-dimensional definitions that are so often implicitly advanced. The corollary
here is that there are rewards to making ones understanding of ideology explicit
in historical writing. However we conceive of the different parts of the elephant
in the room working together, focusing on one to the exclusion of all the others
produces a distorted view.
Including the classic consideration of Soviet ideology as doctrine along with
other dimensions of ideology, such as worldview and performance, also allows us
to recognize Soviet distinctiveness while not making the Soviet or totalitarian case
utterly unique. It is unfortunate that Michael Freedens project of depathologizing
ideology and interpreting ideology as a normal part of modern society and politics
hinges on the suggestion that totalitarian ideologies are exceptional, obscuring the
bona-fide ideologies that are far more rooted in social thought and practice.107
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Although Soviet ideology was different, did it not draw on and establish very deep
roots in social thought and practice? Was it not authentic, genuine, or realthat
is, bona fide? Freedens position is not only untenable. It shunts the conventional,
abnormal view of ideology, which he so decries, onto totalitarianism in order to
carve out more fruitful understandings elsewhere, leaving the Soviet field in an antiquated and less-than-splendid isolation. If ideology can be rethought even here,
in the case of Soviet communism and Stalinism, the answer will not be merely
an affirmation that ideologies are normal. The results will be more complex and
rewarding, relevant both for Soviet studies and all those interested in ideology
more broadly.
An alternative to Freeden, taking into account significant Soviet difference but
also comparability in the realm of ideology, does exist. Probing the truly unusual
prominence of disseminated dogma and the genuinely unprecedented size of the
ideological apparatus in the Soviet case need not negate other areas where Soviet
ideology does bear important similarities to other times and places. Keeping the
prominence of Marxist-Leninist doctrine centrally in mind does not necessarily
cancel out exploration of other areas in the Soviet context where other important
faces of ideology are more usefully brought in. Although the vast body of the
elephant cannot somehow be ignored, the trunk and the tail are vital parts of the
animals physiognomy, too.
Finally, understanding the multiple possibilities for defining and explaining
ideologys role opens up its integration into the broader historical analysis. In
addition to probing the different faces of ideology, this chapter deploys the notion
of an ideological sphere to denote the arena in which ideology is promulgated and
received. If the ideological sphere is conceived as an arena with its own dynamics
and weight, not always all-important but also not reducible to other parts of the
historical process, it is possible to see how ideology can fit into a broader, nonreductionist framework for historical analysis. Such a framework need not replicate
the old opposition between ideas and circumstances: the ideological sphere can be
conceived as at once having its own dynamics and as overlapping with many other
historical forces. The very concept of an arena, moreover, suggests that ideology
is not always all-pervasive and that other areas are no less significant. Preserving
the importance of ideology in a field where it simply cannot be ignored, the recognition of the many faces of ideology has the potential to spark investigation of
the overlap, synergy, and divergence between ideology and other causal factors in
Soviet history.

THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT | 103

WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

Key Concepts and the Arc of Soviet Cultural Transformation,

1910s1930s

It would be a theoretically irredeemable short circuit if history were to be

constructed out of its own concepts, establishing a kind of identity between
linguistically articulated Zeitgeist and the conjunction of events. Rather, there
exists between concept and materiality a tension which is now transcended,
now breaks out afresh, now appears insoluble.
Reinhart Koselleck

ld historical paradigms never die; they are simplified and codified in textbooks. In the decades since the demise of the Soviet Union, the field of
Soviet history has witnessed intensive growth and far-reaching evolution.
But in terms of some of the fundamental concepts applied to the new terrain and
a reluctance, bolstered by specialization, to think across the subperiods making
up early Soviet, Stalin-era, and post-Stalinist history, a conservative attachment to
received wisdom appears surprisingly pronounced. This chapter is devoted to the
meaning of cultural revolution (kulturnaia revoliutsiia), a concept crucial in both
Soviet history starting in the 1920s and Western understandings of it. Numerous
scholars who discuss cultural revolution continue to treat the concept as a peculiar
episode of militancy during and even synonymous with the era of the First FiveYear Plan, now widely known in Russian scholarship as the Great Break or velikii
perelom. While textbook accounts continue to conceive of cultural revolution in a
fashion that has been dominant in Anglo-American scholarship since Sheila Fitzpatricks Cultural Revolution in Russia, 19281931, others have begun to approach it
as a more far-reaching phenomenon.1
The cultural revolution, we continue to be taught, was an episode largely
bounded by the years of the First Five-Year Plan. One textbook account published
in 2005 associated cultural revolution with an attempt to wage war on NEPs
relative cultural tolerance by extremist groups such as the Russian Association
of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) and dated its end to 1931, when it ceased to serve
104

Stalins purposes. Another predictably began the topic with the Shakhty trial of
1928 and associated cultural revolution solely with a few selected themes from the
years that followed: the purging of the intelligentsia, the proletarian episode in
literature, vydvizhenie. A third textbook from 2008, in a section titled Cultural
Revolution, states: Lenin understood this term to mean raising the cultural level
of the proletariat and peasantry and teaching them good manners and civilized
behaviour. From 1928, it meant the militant left attacking fellow travelers and
bourgeois specialists.2 As these examples suggest, when understandings of cultural revolution on the part of historical actors are discussed at all, an opposition
is drawn between Lenins definition, reduced to mass education and the cultivation
of civilized behavior, and the abrupt introduction of militant, class-war definitions
after 1928.
In other textbooks a more expansive understanding of cultural revolution
seems to make itself felt, but only in incipient ways. The 2011 version of Riasanovsky and Steinbergs standard A History of Russia contains a section on Cultural
Revolution and the Great Retreat, both in quotation marks. It associates cultural
revolution with phenomena broader than the Great Break of 19281932 by speaking of early radical experiments to transform society and a spirit of collectivism
and egalitarianism, which were followed by the acquisition of strikingly conservative traits in the 1930s.3 However, neither the rubric of cultural revolution nor
the rubric of Great Retreat is explicitly discussed or clarified. In one sense, they
are parallel, in that both are constructs that have been used in Western historiography, but in one crucial sense they are not. Cultural revolution differs from the
Great Retreat, the coinage of the migr sociologist Nicholas Timasheff, in that it
was used by Soviet historical actors at the time. This usage demands explanation.
In similar fashion, the 2011 edition of Ronald Grigor Sunys Soviet Experiment treats
an upper-case Cultural Revolution in a chapter called Culture Wars, which starts
with the topic of intelligentsia and revolution and early Soviet culture and is separate from several chapters treating the Stalin period. This sequence is significant,
because it recognizes that cultural revolution was part of a broader process of
revolutionizing culture and as such is not necessarily synonymous with the Great
Break or Stalinism. At the same time, Sunys textbook discusses cultural revolution
only in terms of the familiar Fitzpatrickian dichotomy between Lenins cultivation of civilized behavior and the more militant meaning of 19281931. As with
Riasanovsky and Steinberg, the Soviet rubric is mated with non-Soviet coinage,
in this case the culture wars in the United States. In subsequent pages, Suny reverts to reifying the fundamental concept as the Cultural Revolution (192831),
as if Stalin and others had enshrined the term the same way as Mao did the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution circa 1966. At the same time, Suny appears to
divorce cultural revolution from Stalinism by declaring that by 1932 the culture
wars were over.4
Ubiquitous references to the cultural revolution, bounded by the years 1928
1931, appear in both general histories and specialized scholarship, conveying the
WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION? | 105

impression that we are dealing with a concrete and particular phenomenon or even
periodization. The title of this chapter, in contrast, deliberately recalls the perennial cursed questions of the Russian revolutionary movement: Who is to blame?
What is to be done? and, most evocatively, What is the intelligentsia? To debate
such questions was to talk at once about transforming oneself and enlightening
others, to intertwine subject and object, self and other. This underscores my central
goal in the early Soviet context: to excavate the tangled links between an internal
cultural revolution, directed inward toward fashioning the revolutionary vanguard
and the individual revolutionary, and an external cultural revolution, aimed outward at both civilizing and Sovietizing the backward, not yet conscious classes
and nationalities.
To move toward a conceptual history of cultural revolution, then, allows us to
recover a contested and remarkably wide-ranging rubric, one that bridges myriad projects of internal and external transformation and illuminates the dynamics
between them in the turn from the 1920s to the 1930s. It also means to probe the
links between a cultural dimension to revolution, conceived in pre-First World
War Social Democracy and operationalized on a mass scale after 1917, and an
ideological construct that gained widespread currency only in the early 1920s. It
is, finally, to consider one key term within an entire vocabulary and repertoire of
cultural transformation. The tools of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) include
not merely tracing usages of a single concept, but probing a constellation of related
concepts and the semantic field surrounding it. It is this effort that will tie kulturnaia revoliutsiia to its kissing cousinsthe third or cultural front, the new everyday
life (byt)and its bastard heir, the concept of culturedness (kulturnost). Everyday
life was the focus of a campaign and discussion in the early 1920s, and culturedness was the rallying point for a major and far-reaching cultural-political campaign
in the mid- to late 1930s. Yet long before this, culturedness was also a less prominent but notable rubric closely connected to cultural revolution, just as cultural
revolution itself became crucial well before the radicalization of 19281929. Key
concepts must be interrogated before and after the moments of their most intensive
dissemination and politicization.
On another level, this chapter is more than a history of a concept, for cultural
revolution is examined as part of an interpretation of the Bolshevik cultural program. By this I mean the conceptualization of a cultural dimension to revolution
and its implementation in the practices of the early Soviet cultural front. Tracing these two intertwined trajectorieson the one hand, the cultural revolution
concept and on the other, the Bolshevik cultural projectforms the framework
for this discussion. If one axis around which I analyze the concept is its application outward and inward, to party adepts and to the masses, the other is the way
its meaning historically interweaves a civilizing-enlightening (positive) program
and a militant, antibourgeois, antispecialist, antipassiste (negative) agenda. Both
strands were present before and after 1928, although the balance shifted decisively
and the first could become as coercive as the second. Cultural revolution thus
106 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

emerges as one of the fundamental concepts of the early Soviet period, central to
the process of mating culture with revolution. It arose as a consequence of the first
Bolshevik conceptions of a cultural dimension to the revolution, shedding light
on Bolshevisms trajectory across the 1917 divide. Cultural revolution also left a
legacy for the related concept of culturedness, which after the 1930s campaign associated with it continued to exert a major influence for the duration of the Soviet
period. Exploring a significant Soviet concept in all its complexity and integrating
the findings into historical analysis is an endeavor fully in line with the field of
Russian conceptual history.5
In broadest outlines, the story that emerges goes like this: Social Democracy
traditionally viewed cultural problems as secondary. But in a postrevolutionary
period of retreat and introspection after the failed revolution of 1905, a cultural
dimension to the revolution was elaborated by the Left Bolshevik (Vpered) intellectuals. They invented a discrete constellation of Bolshevik cultural missions,
but the concept of cultural revolution itself was not yet widely in play.6 After 1917,
however, a cultural revolution avant la lettre was launched in earnest. A veritable explosion of cultural-enlightenment practices was capped by a more formal
constitution of the Bolshevik cultural project in 1920 and after, when the attack
on Proletkult marked a continuing appropriation of originally Vperedist cultural
missions in the Bolshevik mainstream.
It was only after all this that Lenin belatedly came to his influential notion of
cultural revolution. His overwhelming emphasis on civilizing-enlightening elements was in part due to its response to the fantasies of proletarian culture. But
Leninism soon gave the notion broad currency well beyond the Bolshevik theoretical elite, and the expansion of a negative, repressive program, which was
unsurprisingly already present in Lenins definition, opened the door to extensive
application and reworking of the concept in the mid-1920s. Not only did classwar definitions of cultural revolution become current among Bolshevik cultural
militants in those years, but the civilizing-enlightenment strand evolved as well
already providing revolutionary clothes for a Soviet inculcation of cultured, urban,
elite, respectable, Russian, and by extension European behaviors.
The NEP retreat constrained the revolutionary advance in many ways; at the
same time it stimulated culture-building missions and a crisis of revolutionary purity, ensuring that the Bolshevik cultural project was implemented to a far greater
degree in inner-party settings. In 1928, as cultural revolution became part of an
all-union campaign linked to the Partys left turn, the extreme formulations of
the mid-1920s became the new mainstream. The scales tilted precipitously toward
the immediate application of negative components of cultural revolution. Simultaneously, the inward-looking, inner-party, self-fashioning features so prominent in
the NEP-era Bolshevik cultural project suddenly found new outward applications,
informing the mass cataclysm that ensued.
Norbert Elias once referred to the expansion of Western standards of civilization through European colonization as the last wave of a medieval-early modern
WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION? | 107

civilizing process, one that had previously been spread within nations from elites
to the lower orders.7 Soviet cultural revolution, of course, was vastly more deliberate and ambitious than a civilizing process. It could be considered a revolutionary, Soviet variant of what the late S. N. Eisenstadt called the cultural program
of modernity, in which not only society but culture itself becomes subject to
active reconstruction.8 But my point here is that the direction of cultural revolution outward was no final or even discrete stage. In a cultural revolutionary
variation on the Russian/Soviet theme of internal colonizationin which hardly
known internal populations needed to be integrated along with newer, external
acquisitionsauto-enlightenment became an integral part of Bolshevik attempts
to bring consciousness to the masses. Cultural revolutionaries imagining the culture of the future thus might have been confronted with Marxs exclamation in Das
Kapital: De te fabula narratur! (This story is about you!)

Beyond Cultural Revolution as Class War: Historiographical Legacies

No less than the victors, the long-forgotten predilections of individual historians can make history. The reigning definition in Western scholarship has devolved
from what must rank as among the most influential short works in modern Russian
studies, Sheila Fitzpatricks introductory essay and article in Cultural Revolution
in Russia, 19281931. Fitzpatrick used the term cultural revolution as an evocative
label for a discrete episode in Soviet history when the phrase itself was imbued
with the meaning of class war. As such, it encompassed outbreaks of militancy
and iconoclasm, generational warfare in the professions, radical experimentation,
harebrained scheming in many areas of culture, and the influential attempts to
rapidly forge a new intelligentsia.9
Fitzpatrick made clear that the 19281931 episode was tied to an abrupt transformation from this concepts Leninist incarnation into class-war cultural revolution. That distinction having been drawn, hosts of later historians were freed to
explore aspects of the cultural revolution as an episode largely bounded by the
years 19281931. In fact, there were many avenues of investigation opened by the
heuristic device of examining cultural revolution as class war. First and foremost, it
prompted historians to treat the first phase of the Stalin period as a distinct subperiod with its own dynamics. That this breakthrough was one of Fitzpatricks own
goals in deploying the label is suggested in a little-known precursor to her article
in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 19281931, in which she stated, the whole episode
of proletarian cultural revolution escapes the neat label of Stalinism, for Stalin used
the proletarian weapon only so long as it was useful to him.10
Fitzpatrick was, despite her different agenda at the time, more attuned to historical uses of the term than subsequent historians. But this sensitivity naturally
centered around the shift in uses of cultural revolution around 1928, and in connecting that shift to new phenomena of the 19281931 period that she and other
historians were in the process of identifying (such as vydvizhenie, generational revolt, iconoclastic utopianism). As a result, the act of labeling the 19281931 episode
108 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

went a long way toward tacitly defining cultural revolution in Soviet Russia. By
the same token, retaining the term unmodified continues to trap it, in ways scarcely
made explicit, within the framework of five-year-plan phenomena discovered historiographically circa 1978.
Controversy raged so fiercely over whether cultural revolution came from
above or from below that it went largely unrecognized that Fitzpatricks historiographically specific formulation was widely internalized by Russian historians
with hardly any debate over the concept of cultural revolution itself. At the same
time, a range of lesser-known approaches challenged Fitzpatricks understanding,
but largely in a reactive wayinsofar as challengers agendas implicitly tried to
modify the basic scheme. The first of these might be called cultural revolution
as ideological problem. John Biggart convincingly argued that Nikolai Bukharin
(primarily in his writings of 1923 and 1928) tied cultural revolution above all to
advanced party cadres and class ideology rather than Lenins mass literacy and
elementary education. This pushed the problem back before 1928. But it followed
an old tradition of interrogating only a few top figures like Aleksandr Bogdanov,
Lenin, and Bukharin in isolation and in terms of high ideology. Rather than interpreting Bukharins stances as part reflection ofand part interaction with
the changed situation on the cultural front in the 1920s, for example, Biggarts
Bukharin advocates a radical break with the NEP system. Rather than viewing
Bukharin as a prominent exemplar of a widespread appropriation of the notion in
the 1920s, for Biggart he became apparently the sole intermediary between Leninist and Stalin-era cultural revolution.11
There have been other attempts to locate cultural revolution in the early years
after 1917, which have varied significantly in how they identify the agentsthe
cultural revolutionariesand hence the nature of the phenomenon. In one tradition uninfluenced by Fitzpatrick, a branch of German scholarship took the term
proletarian cultural revolution to describe the initiatives of Proletkult, thus tying
cultural revolution to the theory and practice of the early proletarian culture movement and almost exclusively to Bogdanov.12 Others have made important contributions to Lenins conception of cultural revolutionbut, unfortunately, without
considering it relationally not only to its reception and dissemination in the 1920s
but to Vpered, Proletkult, or the Great Break.13
Stefan Plaggenborgs more ambitious history of revolutionary culture, which
focused on the attempts to reorganize people as the leitmotif of a wide range of
early Soviet culture designers, made a promising attempt to move beyond both
cultural revolution as Proletkult phenomenon and cultural revolution as class war.
He did so by advancing a dualistic theory of cultural revolution. A first cultural
revolution included Proletkult and myriad other early Soviet cultural initiatives in
the decade after 1917 in that they all attempted to reshape people, both mentally
and physically. This effort was accorded the status of the real (eigentlich) cultural
revolution; it was followed after 1928 by a cultural revolution as a second social
revolution that crossed, la Fitzpatrick and Vera Dunham, social mobility with
WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION? | 109

middle-class values. This second, simplified Fitzpatrickian cultural revolution is

severed from the first in that it supposedly did not foster intensive human transformation but merely the philistine cultural fruits of social forces.14
Essential for Plaggenborgs two cultural revolutions, then, was a 1930s retreat from social engineering, which openly conflicts with a broad literature on
the 1930s and 1940s showing both the ongoing radicalism of Stalin-era social
engineering, of which purge and repression was a component part, and the mass
scale assumed by the evolving project of Sovietizing humankind.15 Flirting with
the glamorization of early Soviet cultural experimentation, but with a roughly
comparable result, William G. Rosenberg also pressed cultural revolution into a
two-stage model by dubbing Bolshevik cultural visions between 19171928 the
concepts first phase. Instead of Plaggenborgs reorganization of people, however,
Rosenberg more vaguely associated cultural revolution with remarkable cultural
creativity, heroic efforts, and imagination and creative experimentation. In
short, what this older piece openly severed was cultural aspirations (repeatedly
mentioned in the same breath as social factors and social support) and politics, the
grim yet supposedly well-known actualities of Bolshevik practice.16
There have been two different, original Western attempts to conceive of cultural revolution as an ongoing process transcending both the subperiods of Soviet
history and Bolshevik high theory: those of David Joravsky and Katerina Clark.
In many ways they are antipodes: whereas Joravskys use of the term referred to a
tightly defined (some might say deterministic) historical process, Clarks cultural
revolution was allusive and oblique, lurking amid the flora and fauna of a lush
Soviet cultural ecosystem.
Joravskys dissent in Fitzpatricks landmark volume insisted that cultural revolution has been a single, long-term process, and he decried the confusion and
question-begging that might result from singling out 19281931 as the cultural
revolution.17 Joravsky viewed that single process as a clash between communism
and modern high culture, rooted in communist leaders yearning for a unified
culture and consequent attempts to transcend its fragmentation (a yearning that
students of modernism, however, would recognize as a quintessentially modern
project). The conflict began with incipient prerevolutionary tensions; turned into
outbursts of controversy after the political revolution; reached a tormented plateau
of protracted warfare under Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, etc.; and then declined
slowly toward sullen toleration of autonomous thinkers and artists.18
Clarks Petersburg was based on the metaphor of an ecology of revolution,
traced from the world war through the establishment of Stalinist culture. It was
designed to uncover unexpected interconnections in a cultural system and explain
varying velocities of change in different outposts of aesthetic culture and intellectual life. The cultural revolutionaries par excellence were thus not communists
confronting culture but Petersburg intellectuals, whose antimarket, antiphilistine,
organicist ethos allowed them to help construct Soviet culture. The immersion
in a complex cultural system transcended what Clark terms the somewhat tired
110 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

framework of continuity or change? and the mysticism of decade in discussing the 1920s and 1930s.19 These remarks, mutatis mutandis, hold ramifications
for historians mysticism of the subperiodwar communism, NEP, cultural revolution. In Clarks cultural revolutionary ecosystem, the forms of revolutionary
culture flourish, mutate, and declineand a similar approach can be applied to the
very concept Clark employed in the title of Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution
but did not systematically interrogate. Clarks continuation of the story into the
1930s in Moscow, the Fourth Rome was also not concerned with cultural revolution
as a concept per se. But central to the sequel was the dream of making Moscow
into a world capital of culturea dramatic expansion of the Soviet cultural project
pursued by intellectuals and for a time shared by the party leadership.20
Joravskys cultural revolutionary tidal wave was inexorably propelled forward by the communist movement, although its Bolshevik leadership demiurge
remained blind to many of its contours even as it acted. In Clarks ecosystemic
alternative to a narrative based on the Party or Stalins control, the leadership was
often portrayed as answering or reflecting deeper cultural trends. Neither author,
however, was concerned with the historical evolution of the cultural revolution
concept. Historicizing cultural revolution points us to an alternative way of assessing causality and party agency.
On the one hand, the concept itself as traced here shows it to have been an
overtly Bolshevik one. But as an evolving, ongoing rubric for bringing revolution to the realm of culture, this Bolshevik cultural revolution embraced many
projects of transformation that went far beyond the Party, which themselves were
pursued by myriad nonparty professionals and intellectuals. At the same time, the
concepts inner-party origins linked it to an inner cultural revolution of NEP that
was played out above all in a party milieu. Cultural revolution was thus repeatedly
propelled into revolutionary and Bolshevik solutions, undermining its own gradualist incarnations and bringing allied, extra-Bolshevik approaches along with it.

Emergence of a Bolshevik Cultural Project

From the moment Bolshevism emerged as a tendency, Russian Social Democracy was already enmeshed in areas of culture that could be considered new, socialist, or proletarian. Not only had a rich party culture grown out of the revolutionary
movement and in study circles (kruzhki), but Social Democrats participated as a
minority in a whole range of intelligentsia enlightenment activities such as peoples
universities. Bolshevik cadres were also tied by many threads to such phenomena
as the new workers intelligentsia and its workers theater and literature. But all
this hardly implied that culture was considered a crucial ingredient of revolution.
Marxism taught the primacy of class and mode of production; Leninism preached
the centrality of political struggle. The launching of revolutionary missions in the
realm of culture was, then, in many ways predicated on a self-conscious conceptualization of a cultural dimension to revolution. Those Bolsheviks struggling to
reconcile the primacy of culture and consciousness with Marxist economic deterWHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION? | 111

minism and Bolshevik political struggle were, primarily, the Forward (Vpered)
Group and its heirs. In the prewar period, they took the stance, unusual for Bolsheviks but not for most non-Marxist anticapitalists in the intelligentsia, that
cultural change must precede socialist revolution.21
This enabled Vpered intellectuals to become pioneers within Bolshevism in
articulating an influential set of concerns that by the early 1920s became central
to communist agendas grouped around the third or cultural fronta socialist literature and art, party schools to train new people and a new intelligentsia, a new
science, ethics, and way of life. Most important, these missions were explicitly
deemed essential to the emergence of a new culture. Vperedists innovated the
slogan of proletarian culture, first advanced in the Vpered platform of 1909. The
new socialist culture that would be created and spread among the masses, that
manifesto maintained, would be part of the deliberate reconstruction of the entire
superstructure.22
Two kinds of genealogies have structured the vast literature on Vpered and
Bogdanov. One led to the alternative of Bogdanovs proletarian culture movement,
Proletkult; a countergenealogywhether it was carried through the communist
proletarian culture groups of the 1920s, intermediaries like Bukharin, or the voluntarism of the Great Breakwas structured in terms of a straight line toward
Stalinism.23 This familiar dichotomy has slighted both Vperedist and Leninist practices and interaction. As cultural missions gradually grew in importance within
the movement, their influence waxed on the Bolshevik mainstream, as it interacted
with the proletarian camp at each and every stage.
The Vperedists not only developed new cultural missions but organized their
own vehicle to further them in practicethe party schools at Capri and Bologna.
I have suggested elsewhere that a degree of cross-fertilization can be discerned
when one compares the Vperedist initiatives to Lenins school at Longjumeau,
and that distinctively Vperedist innovations passed into and informed Bolshevik
traditions. All, for example, established educational agendas combining similarly
defined realms of party theory, current politics, and practical revolutionary training; the utilitarian and party-political aspects were no less present at the Vperedist
schools. Along the way, the Leninists scrutinized their rivals so closely that it
seems much of Longjumeau was modeled on the Capri experience; there is also
evidence that some Leninists echoed the Vperedist rhetoric of creating a new proletarian intelligentsia. The result was a number of Bolshevik precedents that both
Leninists and Vperedists could find useful. Indeed, the result of this interaction
the blend of utopian vision and cadre politicsmight be seen as quintessential
Bolshevism. It allowed for the simultaneous pursuit of cultural aspirations, such as
the creation of a new intelligentsia, and a range of tasks crucial to immediate party
political concerns, such as the rapid training of badly needed cadres.24 It emphasized the ongoing transformation of the new cadres consciousness even as they
were sent out to recruit others.

112 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

The importance of this interaction notwithstanding, the original articulation

of the Bolshevik cultural project by a narrow circle of Vpered intellectuals isolated
in their European emigration ensured their ideas derived more from their own
representations of a workers intelligentsia and the new cultural epoch than from
the labor movements or workers cultural institutions, which were relatively sparse
in Russia in general. As Jutta Scherrer has suggested, Bogdanovs personal animosity toward the bourgeois, authoritarian individualism he perceived in Lenin and
Plekhanov during his inner-party political conflicts shaped conceptions about the
total socialist upbringing the Vpered platform demanded for proletarian culture.25
A sidelong glance at German Social Democracy conjures up a strangely familiar
yet markedly different path in the conceptualization of socialist culture. For most
German Social Democrats (SDs), areas like education, the arts, and cultural values
seemed also not to be of the highest priority. Despite glorification of workers, notions of the future socialist culture hardly revolved around the lives and mores of
existing workers. Yet instead of the Bolshevik far left, it was the reformist and revisionist wing of the German party that most concerned itself with cultural affairs.
They could busy themselves with a legal, existing, truly mass cultural movement;
an entire workers social-cultural milieu arose in the 1860s1870s, permeated trade
unions by the 1890s, and later became increasingly important in the party.26 Of
course, the worker-intelligentsia relationship was central to history of the movement of Russian Social Democracy; the revolutionaries also appear to have had
at least some connections to broader intelligentsia enlightenment initiatives for
workers and the urban poor, such as the peoples houses of the late imperial period, later reincarnated as Soviet palaces of culture.27 But if Social Democracy was
propelled to create an alternative culture of the future, in its Bolshevik-Vperedist
incarnation it did not emerge from an existing alternative culture, since that could
only come from a large, above-ground movement as in Germany, but was formulated virtually as an ab novo invention by a handful of migr theorists.
If Vperedists before 1917 insisted cultural transformation was a precondition
for revolution, Proletkults central leadership after the revolution noisily declaimed
that rapid dissemination of a new culture was essential to its survival.28 Yet one
Proletkult leader and later participant in the NEP-era discussion of cultural revolution, Platon Kerzhentsev, demonstrates how even proletarian culture maximalism
contained its obverse side: in 1919 he first discussed a base of enlightenment in
literacy and primary education, which would alleviate the horror of ignorance,
and in 1921 he conceded that changing culture took long decades. But he also
continued the Vpered tendency to universalize cultural change and, because Proletkult was so explicitly concerned with the proletarian vanguard, also to direct it
inward rather than only toward the most ignorant masses. Hence the new culture
would alter all areas of the human soulscience, art, everyday life. Morality,
comradely relations, socialist thoughts, feelings, byt, the new person with his
new feelings and moodsthese were the vast spaces around which Proletkult

WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION? | 113

spokesmen stretched the elastic skin of the new or proletarian culture.29 Much
later, as head of a new All-Union Committee for Arts Affairs in the mid- to late
1930s, Kerzhentsev became an architect of the anti-formalist campaign and the
ideological revival-cum-crackdown that Leonid Maksimenkov has dubbed the
Stalinist cultural revolution.30
Yet the Civil War-era cultural revolution avant la lettre was far broader and
deeper than Proletkult, because for the first time an entire repertoire of cultural
missions was embedded in the power and practices of the fledgling state. The
Red Army was the quintessential locus of cultural-enlightenment work in these
years, although this terms very interchangeability with political-enlightenment
work reveals a continuing conflation and expansion of the cultural and the political. The developing approach to cultural enlightenment, to which the Red Army
devoted massive resources, also typically intertwined concern with such areas as
general education and respect for science; political upbringing and revolutionary sentiment; the inculcation of an aesthetic sense and raising of the spiritualcultural level; and the forging of conscious defenders of the Soviet Republic.31 The
party leaderships pronouncements on the third front of culture as the next prime
area of revolutionary activity occurred only after the Red Armys victory in 1920.
So dubbed because it would expand victories on the military and political fronts,
the third front was constituted along with a veritable didactic revolution in which
even the Commissariat of Food Supply boasted a theatrical section and conducted
political-enlightenment work.32
The years 19201922 can be regarded as the time when a mainstream communist cultural project was finally launched. This was hardly because all Bolshevik
theoreticians could agree on what culture was or what it should bethey obviously could not. But this was the time when the Party equated itself with the
revolution as a whole much more tightly, and a massive yet identifiable repertoire
of cultural missions and practices were explicitly connected as part of the third or
cultural front. Given the prewar experience with the Capri and Bologna schools,
it is not surprising that the hostile cooption of Proletkult proved cause not simply
for denouncing a deviation but for appropriating aspects of the condemned movements raison dtre.
The Politburo formulated plans in October 1920 to effect Proletkults subordination to the party. In the fall and winter of 1920, precisely the moment when
the moves were made against Proletkult, the Party moved to consolidate existing
party and Red Army schools and develop a unified (edinaia) program for party
institutions formed into a single hierarchical ladder.33 Sverdlov Communist University, launched as a full-fledged three-year communist alternative higher school the
same year, absorbed the Proletkult university around the same time. More broadly,
the new emphasis on the third front of culture also marked greater recognition of
what Vpered and Proletkult had been asserting for a long time: a primary arena
of revolutionary change was cultural. The period 19201922, in which the shift to
peaceful reconstruction and the introduction of NEP overlapped, was thus the
114 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

time when a whole range of propagandistic, cultural, and enlightenment initiatives

moved far higher on the revolutionary agenda. These ranged from the creation of
a new intelligentsia, development of a party education, formulation of a communist ethics or morality, pursuit of a new kind of science, to a revolution in habits,
customs, and byt.
The formulation by Lenin of his notion of cultural revolution, primarily in his
last writings in 1922 and 1923, thus came after all this new attention to the third
front of culture. Lenins emphasis on inculcating the habits of civilized societies,
overcoming backward barbarism, and mastering science and technologywhat
Claudin-Urondo distinguishes as culture-civilisation and culture-savoirecame as a
belated response to more constructivist and iconoclastic currents already embedded
in the Bolshevik cultural project.34 But no matter how removed Lenins cultural
revolution appears from the meaning given to it by those many forces urging
even at that time, hardly all of a sudden in 1928destruction of bourgeois culture through militant confrontation, there were definite points of contact between
them. This is what Urondo terms culture-idologie, the forging of a new, ideological
consciousness through culture. This element comes through clearly even in Lenins
well-known anti-Proletkult theses of 1920: Not the invention of a new proletarian
culture, but the development of the best models . . . of the existing culture, from the
point of view of the Marxist world outlook and the conditions of struggle of the
proletariat in the period of its dictatorship.35 This last, crucial qualification left
Lenins notion of cultural revolution open to manipulation, appropriation, and development by others soon after it was formulated.

Conceptual Expansionism in the Mid-1920s

As Lenin articulated his notion of cultural revolution, a great debate over socialist byt overlapped and furthered it, prompted in its high-profile party and literary incarnations by Trotskys 1923 Voprosy byta (Questions of Everyday Life).
Trotskys work highlighted the imperative to internalize Soviet ideology and
spread the notion that Soviet socialism would require a new everyday life.36 The
debate over the new byt complemented the attention to cultural revolution. For example, Lenins stress on work habits, punctuality, and neatness aimed at civilizing
and transforming many groups: it could be applied to rural and urban populations,
nationalities, and rank-and-file party members. Such themes were echoed by other
writers on cultural revolution. Here the civilizing mission in external cultural
revolution formed but one thread in a much greater tapestry that included the debate over a new way of life and the values and behavior of the new person. Trotsky
in 1923 raised many of the very same issues, depicting struggle for culturedness
of speech, sobriety, work discipline, and the inculcation of a new rational life as
prime revolutionary tasks. Trotskys rejection of proletarian cultureour epoch
is not yet the epoch of a new culture, but only the preface to itis well known.
Yet Trotsky framed this position by condemning the proletarian culture camps
supposed separation of political tasks from those of culture and everyday life,
WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION? | 115

thus presenting his own position as the more radical.37 As this suggests, Trotsky
complemented Lenins cultural revolution by invoking two related fields, everyday
life and culturedness.
Cultural revolution as socialist civilizing mission was thus, in an entirely typical outward link, caught up with the great NEP-era concern with remolding everyday lifea term with great resonance connoting existence as well as constricting,
humdrum routine (as in the line from Maiakovskiis last, unfinished poem, written the day he took his own life: liubovnaia lodka / razbilas o byt) (The love boat
smashed up / against the dreary routine). In a 1924 dispute on Art and Byt, the
RAPP critic Grigorii Lelevich invoked Lenins grandiose cultural revolution to
call for a revolution in everyday life (bytovaia revoliutsiia) which would bring the
heroism of the Civil War era into a new front. Just as war communist heroism
conquered the mundaneit was above the ordinary (sverkh-bytovoi)the construction of new forms of life would destroy the beast of the old everyday life.38
As Christina Kaier and Eric Naiman have suggested, the wide-ranging debates on byt furthered by Trotsky were paralleled by an early 1920s state propaganda campaign for a novyi byt, or new everyday life, that emerged mostly from
the health and cooperative sectors. They characterize this campaign as more
narrowly and pragmatically focused on the twin goals of modernization and collectivization and aimed primarily at women. Kaier and Naiman captured the connection between the little-known 1920s campaign for a new everyday life and the
much-discussed 1930s campaign for culturedness: By the mid-1930s, as historians
have amply documented, the concept of the novyi byt had been transformed into
the parallel but fundamentally different concept of kulturnost, or cultured life,
different because by then it featured centrally the element of consumption.39 However, they did not mention a third side of the triangle, the connection between the
new everyday life and cultural revolutionperhaps because the latter has been
so closely associated with 19281931. The quest for a new everyday life began to
be pursued in the early 1920s internally and with intensive zealfor example,
in the communist student movement, the Komsomol, and urban communes, all
milieus centrally caught up in the broader cultural revolution.40
Urban communes experimenting with collective living and civic activism after
1917 drew on antecedents in the Russian revolutionary movement and ideas about
the Paris Commune. But as Andy Willimot has shown, as they sprang up in revolutionary Russia their diverse attempts to live the revolution quickly became intertwined with their supporters in the Party and Komsomol, communards intensive
reading of the Soviet press, and, increasingly in the age of industrialization, workplace initiatives. At least one communard raised the banner of cultural revolution
as early as 1919, but in the 1920s the movement engaged most intensively what its
young members had the power to change: introducing a new way of life (novyi
byt). In the urban communes this encompassed hygiene, gender roles, and questions of collective living but also centrally included the element of public activism.

116 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

Not surprisingly, communard activists (obshchestvenniki) eagerly embraced attacks

on nonparty personnel in universities and factories. The urban commune phenomenon illustrates how even small-scale experiments in forging a socialist everyday
life went hand in hand with cultural revolutionary attempts to transform others.
The urban commune movement peaked during the Great Break, encompassing a
network of activists and tens of thousands of members.41
Between the campaign for the new everyday life of the 1920s and the campaign for culturedness of the 1930s, both concepts overlapped with the evolving
notion of cultural revolution in their stress on the transformation of both revolutionaries and others. They also had another common denominator: a war on
cultural-ideological backwardness to be pursued as part of the revolutionary advance to socialism.
Culturedness was subject to much debate in the 1920s, well before the mid1930s campaign disseminated the concept on a mass scale. It was controversial in
the early years particularly since it was closely associated with Western standards
of behavior that may have appeared to both Russian and Bolshevik intellectuals
as civilized but, it could not be ignored, nonetheless emanated from the bourgeois capitalist countries. One solution in the 1920s was to actively reject behavior
identified as bourgeois as truly cultured; another was to accept some European
mores as universal standards of culturedness but to combine them with socialist
or Soviet political and civic (obshchestvennye) values and commitments as a way of
suitably revolutionizing the culturedness concept. (This latter solution, combining
civilizing and Sovietizing missions, was carried out on a vaster scale in the 1930s.)
Trotskys sister and Kamenevs wife, Olga Davidovna Kameneva, exemplifies the
voices advocating the less radical solution in the 1920s, best demonstrating the
Bolshevik elites Janus-faced involvement with cultural questions. As the head of
VOKS, the Bern-educated sophisticate, from her base in the Moscow art nouveau
masterpiece, the Riabushinskii mansion, arranged cultural tours for visiting European intellectual elites. Yet one of Madame Kamenevas sole books was a 1926
edited volume on cultural work in workers canteens. Here she tied the creation
of a new byt to the attainment of culturedness, which she defined not only as
literacy, bookishness, but much elsetidiness, cleanliness, discipline, respect,
recognition of rights of others, interest toward societal life. Lack of culturedness
and collective feeling was also evident among many party members, she noted,
a circumstance which the future organization on a mass scale of model show
canteens (pokazatelnye stolovye) might help alleviate.42 Interesting here is the frank
concern with overcoming the cultural backwardness of party members as well as
workers (the internal and external proletariat, as it were). But at the crux of her
conception was forging the link between cultured and Soviet behavior through
the activism of obshchestvennost, an untranslatable term connoting those groups
engaged in political and public activities.43 The circulation of a strongly developmental yet at the same time radically transformational notion of cultural revolution,

WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION? | 117

linking revolutionary and civilizing missions, was in its generic contours not a
specifically Bolshevik invention. Its articulation in the 1920s allowed for a wide
variety of long-standing agendas for cultural transformation to interact with and
mix with the Partys agendas under the rubric of cultural revolution. Among these
agendas were, notably, those of worker-intellectuals, nonparty experts in the social sciences, and non-Russian elites. In the first case, since the early years of the
twentieth century spokesmen for a workers intelligentsia had begun to insist on
controlling their own cultural life, the strong insistence that only workers could
independently make their own culture influenced and mixed with Vperedist agendas already in the prewar period. This left an influential legacy.44 In the case of
expert agendas interacting with Bolshevik missions in the 1920s, one could compile a small library of examples. For example, Daniel Beer has traced how theories
of deviance in several disciplines in the biomedical sciences came to reflect and
interact with the core 1920s cultural revolutionary concern with overcoming the
survivals of the past, which both Bolsheviks from Lenin on down together with
experts portrayed in terms of contamination and disease.45 In the last case, the
scope of which is also enormous, Adeeb Khalid has traced how Muslim modernists or Jadids, who had developed their agendas without Marxism and as much in
dialogue with the Turkic as the Russian world, came in the 1920s to be fascinated
by the idea of the revolutionary transformation of society, although they saw revolution in national, not class terms. They flocked into the new organs of power and
threw their energies into a number of projects of cultural transformation, above
all the creation of a self-consciously modern and revolutionary native culture.46
The early Soviet drive to eradicate backwardness and perezhitki (holdovers from
the past), which was able to attract so many existing movements for enlightenment
and human transformation, ensured that many who enlisted the term associated
cultural revolution not with the NEP-era cultural ferment within the revolutionary camp but to groups farthest from it. This was because to lift the cultural level
meant to focus on the most backward groups, those most removed from the vanguard; Lenin tellingly intertwined references to peasants, national minorities, and
women.47 But there was a built-in paradox flowing from these class, national, and
gender dimensions embedded in the civilizing cultural revolution: because the
most in need of aid were the most obviously other, the revolutionary vanguard
had the least foothold among them. Hence the raising up, it was taken for granted,
had to come from above and from without. A core tension inherent in Lenins
formulations from the start was that the cultural revolution had to eliminate backwardness and civilize, but that alone was not enough. It had also in some way to
reflect the new revolutionary order. In some balance and by some means, the backward masses had to be reshaped simultaneously by both culture and revolution.
Depending on the context, civilizing missions (for example, the unveiling campaign in Central Asia circa 1927) could become bloody and authoritarian, while
those considered quintessentially revolutionary (say, some of the early experiments
in proletarian culture) could benignly engage grassroots and quite traditional
118 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

aspirations for cultural mobility. The fate of cultural revolution hinged on the
balance between enlightenment versus coercion (the methods used) and long-term
versus immediate change (the time frame imposed).
There is now, as opposed to 1978 or even a decade ago, a substantial and
sophisticated literature on non-Russians in the interwar Soviet Union. The most
comprehensive study of early Soviet nationalities policy, Terry Martins Affirmative
Action Empire, employed what the author called a conventional periodization of
NEP, Cultural Revolution (19281932), and Great Retreat (19331938), associating
cultural revolution exclusively with class warfare and utopianism within that limited chronological frame.48 But the most significant works that have followed Martin on non-Russian nationalities have found this containment of cultural revolution
to the period of socialist offensive to be misleading as well as constraining.49 In the
Central Asian context, Khalid speaks of a Soviet project of cultural revolution more
expansive than the very specific campaign by the party to seize control of cultural
and scientific institutions between 1929 and 1932. This broader process meant
transforming the national cultural form and ushering in many specifically European norms of civilized behavior through the mobilizing and coercive agency of
the party-state, with its vision of the plasticity of human nature. Without invoking
this broader understanding of the term, he states unequivocally about cultural revolution, it is impossible to understand developments in the early Soviet period.50
Concurring with this understanding of a broader cultural revolutionary process
in the context of the South Caucasus, Jrg Baberowski avows: The cultural revolution was not only a campaign against class-alien elements and bourgeois specialists. It also included the civilizing and reeducation of the masses. Cultural
revolution combined civilizing missions and class warfare. Crucially, because the
national sphere appeared to demand greater amounts of cultural transformation, it
also provided a testing ground for the turn from enlightenment to coercion. Baberowski calls Islamic Central Asia and the Caucasus a laboratory for experiments in
civilizing programs that were tested before other areas of the empire, altering the
traditional conception of the 19281929 break. For example, in Azerbaijan coercive cultural revolutionary campaigns began at the end of 1927 and were already
at an initial high in 19281929.51 By the same token, the unveiling campaign in
Central Asia was launched in 1927. In her work on ethnographers and the multinational Soviet state, Francine Hirsch preferred not to subsume the entire period
of the Great Break, with its many pivotal developments, into the rubric of cultural
revolution. But Hirsch also expanded the conventional understanding of cultural
revolution during the upheaval of the late 1920s and early 1930s, arguing that even
in the period of the First Five-Year Plan ethnographers continued to employ the
civilizing and enlightening usages of the term. Moreover, as Hirsch demonstrated,
ethnographic campaigns for cultural revolution, which also continued well after
19311932, were extended to more advanced Russian and Slavic regions, where
they signified efforts to eradicate capitalist holdovers such as national chauvinism
and measure the Sovietization of beliefs and byt.52
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As all these examples suggest, the early Soviet application of cultural revolution to the nationality question ultimately continued with striking force the
central ambiguity present in Lenins own developmentalism: it was not the flame
of just Russian or European or prerevolutionary culture that the Promethean Party
would bring down from the sky but, necessarily and to some degree, a socialist,
Soviet, Marxist, or class culture. Indeed, in the context of cultural revolution in
the national sphere the two elements were already much intertwined in the mid1920s. An article in the leading party theoretical journal in 1925, for example,
illustrates how attractive Lenins gradualist stress on educational, technical, and
cultural levels could become for justifying the socialist reeducation of backward
nationalities in the mid-1920s. In an article titled On the Path to Cultural Revolution, Lenins assertion that raising cultural levels for socialism could follow
the political revolution is taken as a mandate for wide cultural work among the
culturally backward peoples of the USSR. Among those with the most wild
ideological and religious customs, the author declared, resorting to a potentially
violent agricultural metaphor, it is imperative to plow the local soil with a cultural tractor. Here the old revolutionary hostility to nonpolitical kulturtregerstvo,
or enlightenment for its own sake, was also very much present: cultural revolution
among the non-Russians meant raising not just the cultural level of the masses but
that of the most progressive elements (the batraks) in particular, in order to forge
the consciousness of the revolutionary, socialist-thinking proletariat.53
Positive parts of cultural revolution frequently derived from Lenins usage
enlightening people through literacy and hygiene and inculcating modern, civilized behaviors such as punctualitywere applied simultaneously to the primitive
peasantry and the backward nationalities. This can be observed in Nadezhda
Krupskaias 1927 On the Path to Cultural Revolution. Since losing much power to
the Department for Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) in 1920, Krupskaias
agency, the Main Committee for Political Enlightenment (Glavpolitprosvet), had
taken over cultural-enlightenment work in the countryside for much of the decade,
and the book cited peasant letters received by the agency. Krupskaia began conventionally: cultural measures were crucial to raise literacy in the countryside,
and production propaganda a precondition for industrialization. But when she
invoked the most lurid images of backwardnessdirt and diseaseshe turned to
the 93 percent infection rates of everyday [bytovoi] syphilis in Buriat Mongolia.
Supposedly caused by lack of elementary hygiene rather than sexually transmitted,
this disease frequently seizing entire villages was the result of our unculturedness and lack of the most elementary knowledge about the human body. Before
the next war among the bourgeois powers, wrote Lenins widow, using a reflexive
verb, our task is to civilize ourselves (tsivilizirovatsia). She repeated the term over
and over again.54 But Krupskaias invocation of dangerous ignorance in the rural
and tribal populations implied that making cultural revolution should be an emphatically transitive process. Everyday syphilis, which could be cured by the clean

120 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

new everyday life, made the need to remake byt urgent through the dangers of
infection and disease.
The external uses of cultural revolution were thus an integral part of a broader
vocabulary of transformation that encompassed everyday life, behavior, and the
new Soviet person. In this light, cultural revolution was one major avenue by
which intelligentsia conceptions of respectability for backward others were woven
into Bolshevik revolutionary ideology. Such model behavior served as the cultural
analogue of political consciousness. It also, ironically, spotlights some class biases
of the dictators of the proletariat. Joan Neubergers treatment of the prewar cultural
category of respectability discusses how reformist liberals, Vekhi intellectuals, and
Social Democrats all assumed that their own political and cultural codes provided
models for the deficient lower classes to adopt. . . . The cultural projects of the new
regime involved a set of values and didactic methods much like the culturalism of
the prerevolutionary intelligentsia and respectable middle classes. Concrete initiatives, such as the Society for the Struggle with Alcoholism, founded in 1928 by
party leaders including Bukharin, Larin, Semashko and Podvoiskii, could easily
smack of prerevolutionary bourgeois reformism.55 Even after the coercive, negative, and antispecialist strands of cultural revolution suddenly became more overt
after 1928, the civilizational and lifestyle aspects persisted.
A significant trend in the reworking of Lenins cultural revolution in the mid1920s can be identified as a more voluntarist interpretation of revolutionary tasks.
This is clear in the writing of the prominent Deborinite philosopher Ivan Luppol,
who wrote in 1925 that resistance (soprotivlenie) to cultural revolution is even more
cruel than to political or social revolution, because cultural revolution involves
the reeducation of the masses. The destructive side of Luppols voluntarism was
most evident closest to home, in his interpretation of the relationship between
cultural revolution and the bourgeois specialists. While making barely a nod toward the NEP-era orthodoxy that culture cannot be reorganized by revolutionary
violence, the dialectician went on to avow that it is necessary to take [vziat] all
of science, technology, all knowledge and art that is currently in the hands of
the specialists.56 Placing cultural revolution in the context of reeducation, furthermore, points to the ways in which the concept went far beyond behaviors and
values to capture the reformulation of consciousness, psyche, and soul. The Politburos widely discussed 1925 resolution on literature, drafted by Bukharin, began
with a materialist commonplace: objective economic conditions had raised cultural
demands. But it swiftly moved on to speak of a revolution (perevorot) inside peoples minds which now made cultural revolution a precondition for the creation of
a communist society.57 The Bolsheviks were not merely culturalist reformers; the
revolution was not a dinner party.
The appropriation of Lenin by various groups after his death in 1924 also included the early articulation of a hard, much more negative cultural revolution by
members of the Bolshevik left and the proletarian culture camp. A prime example

WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION? | 121

of this is Leopold Averbakhs bald 1925 assertion, anticipating Stalins famous

Great Break formulation, which the dictator repeated with prominent frequency
in 1928 and after, that socialist construction involved an intensification of the class
struggle. Averbakh anticipated Stalin by several years, and he spoke at the height
of NEP: cultural revolution is an intensification [obostrenie] of the class struggle in
the realm of ideology. Writing a year later, the young militant polemicist swore
that the question of proletculture was identical to Lenins conception of cultural revolution. But it did not only involve teaching to read and writecultural
revolution encompasses the militant [boevoi] reworking of the entire ideological
superstructure through class struggle, the outcome of which will be the cultural
hegemony of the proletariat.58
It has frequently been assumed that both Bolshevik and intelligentsia understandings of culture in this period revolved around high culture. But as we have
seen, the concept of cultural revolution in the 1920s also formed part of the explosion of understandings of the cultural and the political. Luppols writings on
Lenins cultural revolution serve as an excellent example again, for he was explicitly concerned with widening a traditional definition, which he terms spiritual
culture (science, art, and literature). Building again on Lenin, he insisted culture
must encompass traditions, habits, ideas, customs, and prejudices. Bukharins intervention in the debate about youth morals approached the same conclusion not
from an explicit widening of the category of culture but from linking cultural
revolution to the new byt and new person: What does cultural revolution mean? It
means a revolution [perevorot] in peoples characteristics, in their everyday habits,
in their feelings and desires, in their way of life, in their bytthe kind of revolution that will make them into new people.59 Similarly, the leading 1920s Marxist
philosopher, Abram Deborin, came to the conclusion that culture in the broad
sense of the word encompassed both societys base and superstructure, as long
as they involved a conscious cultivation [obrabotka] of nature. Reworking nature
is inextricably intertwined with reworking of man himself, his brain, his mental
and moral strengths and capabilities. Hence the current cultural revolution in the
broad sense of the term means changing the human psyche.60
We have come full circle: the most objectivist talk of raising civilizational standards could, through the penetration of culture into byt, and everyday life into the
new person, signify what Stalin later termed engineering human souls.

The Inner Cultural Revolution of NEP

As Lenins notion of cultural revolution was being reconfigured in the mid1920s, the most intensive engagement with the entire range of cultural missions brought to the fore by the third front was occurring in revolutionary and
inner-party settings. The 1920s witnessed one of the greatest debates about human
transformation in Russias history. But insofar as that debate was operationalized,
it was to a vastly greater extent inside the orbit of the Bolshevik Party itself,

122 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

within both a hothouse revolutionary environment and the power relations of the
party-state. This blatantly uneven development of the Bolshevik cultural project
set the stage for the radicalization of the cultural revolution concept at the end of
the decade.
The first set of reasons for this inner cultural revolution can be considered
structural and institutional, having to do with the nature of the emergent partystate and its cultural policy. Separate spheres, sectoralism, and principles of differentiation were endemic to the 1920s cultural order. In part, this division flowed
from the intricate and evolving party-state dualism at the heart of the new political
system and cultural polity. Bureaucratic cacophony resulted from overlapping competencies, communist outposts within state agencies, and the fact that strong left
and party tendencies exemplified by the Main Committee on Literature (Glavlit)
and Agitprop were built into the everyday formulation of official cultural policy.
Enlightenment activities, all kinds of social work, political and cultural upbringing, educational initiatives, the revolutionizing of everyday lifeall were more
eagerly and easily adopted by party cadres, milieus, or institutions, as the vanguard
party molded itself at least a step ahead of the society it was trying to build.61
At the same time, party-state dualism in the 1920s also threw up considerable
constraints, barriers, and restrictions to revolutionary missions outside the party
camp. Some flowed directly from the policies of NEP itself in 1921: institutional divisions and the principles of differentiation were part of NEP, the economic theory
of which was itself predicated on a notion of differentiated spheres (state, rural, and
cooperative economic sectors). In far-flung regions of the cultural polity, barriers,
distinctions, and compartmentalization took hold. One could point, for example,
to policy differences drawn between social and natural science, teaching and advanced research, mass and low-circulation publications, targeted and protected
zones and institutions, rank-and-file individuals and exceptional stars.62 Simultaneously, in aesthetic culture, one can talk of a partial breakdown of the quest for
cultural edinstvo. Clark has even referred to an increasing apartheid among high,
popular, and proletarian culture overtaking the war communist dream of an integral revolutionary culture, as specialization and a search for boundaries reigned.63
A second set of explanations for the inward focus of NEP-era cultural projects
have to do with ideology, discourse, and political culture. The enforced retreat of
NEP, and the communist idealization of a heroic war communist past, made the
everyday and cultural tasks within the communist camp a way of squaring the
circle, of revolutionizing the retreat. It also fostered a crisis of revolutionary purity,
manifested in the concerns with weeding out internal aliens in newly instituted
party purges, in combating the declassing of proletarians, in facing the new
bourgeoisie of NEPmen and kulaks, in a medicalized discourse of infection from
all sorts of deviations in politics and lifestyle. Underneath the positivist, materialist veneer of Marxist-Leninist ideology simmered a cauldron of lurid, dangerous,
hideous imagery that raised the specter of endemic corruption.64 If the avenging

WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION? | 123

sword of the proletariat was restrained from slashing political and social enemies
without, the cultural scalpel of self-transformation could make incisions against
the deviationist within.
All the civilizing, enlightening, and Sovietizing missions we have seen connected to the concept of cultural revolution overlapped with the hothouse development of inner-party cultural missions. Not only did the expanding party itself
constantly draw in the backward and the uninitiated, but there was always a more
advanced, more revolutionary level to achieve in forging the new way of life and
the new person. An intriguing and consequential example of this NEP-era, innerparty advance was represented by the pursuit of communist ethics and the new
way of life. In 1927 a Komsomol activist wrote a manifesto on the new in which
he condemned handshaking as an antisanitary source of infection, as the criminal invention of priests and the bourgeoisie; dances, the shaking of legs, were
dangerous because they fostered the rise of dust and a petty-bourgeois, philistine
removal from the masses. The essay was written as a satire, but an outpouring of
readers saw no irony and wrote letters expressing their solidarity. In the mid-1920s
several Komsomol organizations passed norms of behavior, ethical rules, or, in
the case of one provincial Komsomol committee, principles of the moral-sexual
upbringing . . . or a morality of the transition period.65
Party students and Komsomol youth debated the new way of life and questions
of behavior with an intensity that made some party leaders and official moralists
uncomfortable, to the point where too much attention to questions of personal life
was itself called a sign of degeneracy. One Sverdlov Communist University activist echoed this position when he pointed to a commitment to social interests and
revolutionary ideals the proper moral concern of the proletarian students, not the
sexual question or personal life.66 Yet the elaboration of a communist ethics after
1917, so closely related to the new byt, was enmeshed from the start in the Partys
system of power relations. The chief official moralist of the 1920s was Emelian
Iaroslavskii, who earned the position through his post in the inner-party police,
the Central Control Commission (TsKK), which in its everyday activities was concerned with ferreting out not only political deviations but, from its origins in 1920,
infractions of communist lifestyle and violations of party ethics.67 Thus were ethics
and lifestyle built into the very fabric of the Partys nascent disciplinary regime.
In communist power-political practices, what was considered political was pushed
into realms that were previously unmarked or private; and this expanding political
realm intersected with the expanding definition of culture.
The high TsKK official A. A. Solts told the Eleventh Party Congress in 1922
that such a systematic concern with morality and lifestyle was something new in
the Partys struggle. But it was now necessary, because a mass of non-Bolshevik
elements had infiltrated the successful ruling party, and the pitfalls of NEP created
a situation in which the enemy is not clearly before us.68 To pursue Bolshevik
cultural missions also meant to purge that enemy within. The attempt to create the

124 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

New Man went hand in hand with a struggle against remnants of the Old Man
within.69

Cultural Revolution and the Great Break, 19281929

Finally we can observe how the concept of cultural revolution was reformulated
and unleashed in 1928 at the outset of a great shift in party-state dualism and an
attempt to transcend boundaries that had persisted until then. As the Shakhty trial
was proceeding, a major Agitprop conference in late Mayearly June 1928 gathered
to discuss the tasks of cultural construction. In the influential pronouncements
of Agitprops A. I. Krinitskii, cultural revolution was recast as a struggle against
bourgeois attacks on the cultural front, from art to everyday life. Class-neutral
attempts to raise the cultural leveltied, as Fitzpatrick has shown, to attacks on
the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros)were counterposed to the
task of constructing proletarian culture. The mid-1920s range of positions on how
far to critically rework the culture of the past were now bluntly subsumed by an
endorsement of the position articulated previously by the fringe proletarian culture camp. The negative component, a struggle against bourgeois culture and its
carriers, predominated. One can easily trace the rapid spread of Agitprops iconic
text in the highly ritualistic political culture.70
Yet Agitprops antibourgeois cultural revolution was formulated as an attack
on a surrogate, Soviet, cultural bourgeoisie (the nonparty intelligentsia); it was not
primarily a foray against a universalized bourgeois culture that might, for example, call into question the ongoing drive for civilized behaviors. The immediate
context was a great reconfiguration of the NEP-era cultural polity. It involved a
shift in party-state dualism, as party positions within the cultural bureaucracy
and their institutional agendas went on the advance. Agitprop itself, to cite only
one example, was directly involved in tying Narkompros to the right and to old
Kulturtrger sins; soon Andrei Bubnov replaced Lunacharskii and state agencies
were purged and in crisis. Second, the boundaries and special zones that had persisted until then were suddenly undermined. To again cite only one example, it has
been plausibly suggested that the Unified State Political Administration (OGPU)
planned the Academy Affair as part of a series of show trialsthe industrial
party trial featuring engineers, the Laboring Peasant Party trial spotlighting
agronomistsin order to target those segments of the nonparty intelligentsia that
had been the beneficiaries of protected status before.71 Cultural revolutionaries did
not only storm over lines faded in the sand; the immediate construction of socialism was once again on the revolutionary agenda, but now in the context of the
twin drives of industrialization and collectivization.
Civilizing missions inherent in cultural revolution were not necessarily compromised by the new, coercive, class-war motif with which we are so familiar.
What should we understand cultural revolution to be? asked a trade-union textbook from 1929. Aping Agitprop phraseology and touting the intensification of
class struggle, the book listed three directions of cultural revolution: the remaking
WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION? | 125

Figure 3. Viktor Deni, Dolbanem (We will pound it), 1929. The sledgehammer, about to
pound (the double entendre is the same in Russian) a bottle labeled alcohol, is labeled
cultural revolution; the text of the Demian Bednyi poem at bottom refers to beating
drunkenness angrily, every day, yet in a cultured way (kulturno). Courtesy of Hoover
Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University.

126 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

of the masses, the remaking of cadres, and self-criticism. The remaking of cadres, presumably the low-level students the book addressed, meant acquisition of
knowledge, culturedness, and managerial skills (upravlencheskie navyki). The reeducation of the peasantry would include womens hygiene and sewing, as well as
the antireligious campaign. And the remaking of the masses did not concern only
the working class and peasantry but first and foremost ones own self. The internal-external dynamic was even more in play during the big drive for cadres of this
era. Similarly, a Proletkult theater tract of 1929 addressed itself to the practical
tasks of cultural revolution: work discipline, relations to time, moral norms, and
new methods of regulating everyday life. In 1930, at the height of the Great Break,
the struggle for universal primary education could still enable mass literacy to be
portrayed as the primary task of cultural revolution.72
As before, then, cultural revolution remained an encompassing, plastic rubric
which individuals could subtly alter, which could be linked to all sorts of current
tasks (as its application to the ongoing 19281929 self-criticism campaign above
suggests), and which was embedded in a far broader vocabulary of transformation. Yet the newly prominent rhetoric of coercive, destructive, forced assault
formulated at first as part of the antispecialist driveheld fateful ramifications as
it informed approaches to the masses and the backward objects of cultural revolution. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the literature on eradicating backwardness among nationalities. Articles on Central Asia, for example, continued
to describe cultural revolution as the acquisition of basic literacy and education,
the eradication of prejudices and old habits, but now the new culture to acquire
would be the ideology of the struggling working class. Overcoming wild ideological, psychological, and religious . . . prejudices would now require a forcible
assault.73 Yuri Slezkines study of the small peoples of the Far North analyzes in
simultaneously gruesome and comic detail the mechanical transfer of coercive programs formulated in the center to the conditions of the most remote and backward
periphery of all. Yet he concludes that it was not the drive to thoroughly replace
antiquated ways of life that was novel to the Great Break, only the speed and
the willingness to use force. By the same token, in this realm the main policies
of cultural revolution did not end in 19311932 when the central party leadership
began bolstering stability.74
In moving toward a conceptual history of cultural revolution and an interpretation of the Bolshevik cultural project, I have discussed four ways in which
revolutionizing the self and the transformation of others were intertwined. The
first might be called overlap: party members themselves streamed in from the backward masses, and all the big cultural missions could be refracted through a vanguard, party lens. The second might be called interpenetration: approaches toward
the other were made in terms of the self, the periphery in terms of the center, the
masses in terms of the elite. The third might be called uneven development: those
missions grouped as cultural were pursued and altered most intently within the
revolutionary camp, affecting their application elsewhere, a dynamic made most
WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION? | 127

noticeable in the sudden transcendence of boundaries around 1928. The last might
be called exorcism: addressing the enemies and deviations all around was linked to
an internal struggle against the enemy within.
The link between internal and external transformation explored here in the
context of cultural revolution holds broader implications for Soviet history. This is
for several reasons: elites and the state played such exaggerated roles in formulating projects of transformation; totalizing aspirations dictated that so much needed
to be transformed, and all at once; and the differences between elite and backward
could appear so great yet, given the mass party of a new type, so small. The notion of internal colonization is suggestive, for it suggests the heightened presence
of this nexus in Soviet-style transformations, whether they be of territories, of
culture, or of the soul. Jan Gross, for example, in discussing the Sovietization of
previously Polish territories between 1939 and 1941, noted that the policies and
practices of the Soviet occupiers were no different from those of the administration
at home (unusual as this may be in the history of conquest).75 Far less observed
than the many repressive measures of Sovietization was the official Soviet civilizing mission in the new territories. Soviet occupation forces and the Soviet press
alike talked about raising the newly conquered new territories up from backwardness and eliminating the vestiges of capitalism. This was the same language used
toward the non-Russian peoples inside the Soviet Union.76 But Soviets who actually saw these newly acquired territories, as in Eastern Europe after the war, had
trouble perceiving them as backward, at least in crucial respects. In this as in so
many other ways, communists attempt to remake others and their ongoing quest
to transform themselves was a two-way street.

The Culturedness Campaign as Cultural Revolution

Because early Soviet cultural revolution always contained within it the twin
elements of civilizing enlightenment and revolutionary coercion, its legacy could
swing sharply from one direction to the other. After the militant-utopian infighting of the Great Break was reined in, the culturedness campaign of the mid- to
late 1930s in some ways recalled the 1920s emphasis on enlightenment as the key
to socialist civilization and the new everyday life. Rather than perceiving these
important continuities between cultural revolution and Kulturnost, however, the
culturedness campaign has traditionally been seen as the polar opposite of cultural
revolution, as part of a Great Retreat. In light of the discussion here one can see
how the key Soviet concept of culturedness continued, in Stalinist and at first
rigidly codified form, the debates about cultural revolution and everyday life of
the 1920s, adding the element of cultured or socialist consumption that had been
building over the 1930s. Culturedness continued to imply the strong cultural revolutionary disdain for backward (by implication, non-European, non-Russian, or
non-intelligentsia) mores and nonedifying cultural forms. But it was novel in that it
incorporated full-blown Soviet consumerism, inculcating the message that certain
kinds of possessions and a certain type of consumption were part of a cultured
128 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

Figure 4. Polevomu stanukulturnyi byt (Cultured everyday behavior to the field station), 1936.
Collective farm workers are playing chess and volleyball in sanitary conditions, while the man
in the foreground reads Pravda next to Mikhail Sholokhovs novel about collectivization. The
poster illustrates a number of the values propagated in the mid-1930s culturedness (kulturnost)
campaign. Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University.

lifestyle.77 As the concept of culturedness was disseminated after 1934, the coercive,
militant, class-war elements of the Great Break may have been submerged. But by
then they did not have to be overt: as the culturedness campaign continued into
the era of the Great Terror, with the ideological revivalism and mass repression of
those years, the elements of hygiene, literacy, and enlightenment came to take a
back seat to the true virtues of Soviet man, internal consciousness and ideological commitment.78 In the Stalinist society of insiders and outsiders, the stakes in
remaining uncultured could seem high indeed.
In later decades, cultural revolution became the topic of stultifying, propagandistic books on the achievements of the Soviet era, but culturedness, and through
it many of the original concerns of cultural revolution, became part of the very
fabric of the Soviet system. It did so because the concept could express many aspirations of members of the intelligentsia, upwardly mobile cadres, and a political
system that now valorized culture as a sign of Soviet superiority. The initial, mass
propagation of Kulturnost in the purge-era propaganda campaign was obscured,
and like the best marketing campaigns of the West, it was widely internalized.
Thus it continued to have a huge purchase during the Khrushchev Thaw in the
WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION? | 129

1950s. For the Soviet Union did have one powerful cultural-ideological weapon to
fend off the allure both of Western consumer societies and the Soviet shock upon
seeing relative East European prosperity. This was the notion that Soviet culture,
values, and lifestyle trumped advances in technology or goods. There is a line
of continuity, completely unexplored in the literature, stretching from the early
Soviet cultural revolution to the Stalinist culturedness campaign and veritable cult
of high culture in the 1930s, to the Khrushchev-era competitive opening to the
outside world.

Epilogue: Maos Cultural Revolution

The tradition of referring to the period 19281931 as the Cultural Revolution inevitably raises the legitimate and intriguing comparison with what became
known as Maos Great Cultural Revolution. Indeed, Sheila Fitzpatrick has recalled
that her own decision in the 1970s to label utopianism and class-war militancy in
19281931 as the cultural revolution in Russia was initially inspired in Moscow
in the late 1960s when she read Soviet condemnations of the Chinese Cultural
Revolution.79 There are three major dimensions to the Soviet-Chinese problematic:
comparative history in the broadest sense; the specific history of the concept of
cultural revolution in both settings; and the elusive question of direct transmissions
from the Soviet example to the latter episode.
When it comes to comparison, my own inclination is first and foremost to
emphasize some of the most striking differences between the Stalinist Great Break
and the Maoist Cultural Revolution, differences that can be obscured by calling
them by the same name. The Soviet episode was brief and short-lived; the Chinese lasted at least a decade after 1966. One quite plausible explanation for why
the Soviet episode was much more contained is in part because the upheaval in
culture and ideologythe radicalization of cultural revolutionwas not only
spurred on but ultimately limited by another paramount dimension to the Great
Break, forced industrialization and the Five-Year Plan. It would be untenable to
claim that economics (and its scientific and educational corollaries) contained ideology in a straightforward way, as the two were thoroughly intertwined, but by
19311932 Stalin and the leadership clearly decided to curtail the concrete costs of
cultural-ideological frenzy. By contrast, in China successive mass movements of
collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution took place
years apart.80 Second, there were major political differences between what Stalin
and Mao were willing and able to unleash. The top Stalin leadership was relatively
united and, after the defeat of the right deviation in 1929, not only relatively untouched but unquestionably strengthened by the cultural-ideological campaign it
launched. Mao, by contrast, launched the Cultural Revolution in order to pursue a
politically cataclysmic hunt for revisionists and bourgeois elements within ruling
circles at the highest levels. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was, unlike the first
phase of Stalinism, directed as much against the new political elite as the old cul-

130 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

tural elite. Local party organizations could become virtually paralyzed for years as
local coalitions quite literally battled it out.
In culture, science, and education, the Chinese Cultural Revolution went far
beyond what even Stalinism attempted during the Great Break. This holds true
both in terms of the destructiveness of its attacks on Western and prerevolutionary culture (which Stalinism ultimately appropriated) and in terms of the scale
to which cultural institutions were attacked and destroyed. In the Chinese case
the entire educational system was massively disrupted in 1966 and only gradually
reopened (some colleges and universities remained closed until 1970). As is well
known, through the movement to send down elites and intellectuals to the countryside, the attempt to obliterate the difference between manual and mental labor
in education went much farther in China. To cite just one example, at the height
of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1968, factions armed with spears and rifles
wounded hundreds in pitched battles at university buildings in the hundred day
war at Tsinghua University. Soviet universities, experiencing upheaval but of a
qualitatively different extent and kind, were broken up into specialized institutes
under the aegis of the industrial commissariats.81
In sum, the sheer scope and violent repercussions of chaotic factional infighting and political strife that Mao incited through the Red Guards makes the Great
Break in culture and politics seem relatively controlled and contained by the Stalin
leadership and the Party, whose top priorities at the time were defined certainly to
a large extent by industrialization and collectivization.
There is also a clear divergence between the early Soviet history of the cultural
revolution concept and its Chinese counterpart. The Chinese episode, unlike the
Soviet, was initiated in politics and constituted in memory as the Great Cultural
Revolution. The landmark Central Committee resolution of April 8, 1966, defined
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution explicitly as a new stage of the socialist
revolution, guaranteeing that the term would be used to label the epoch.82
Finally, one must ask: what link is there in the Chinese use of the term itself
, the characters signifying Great Cultural Revolutionto Soviet
antecedents? The evidence at my disposal is very thin, but Joel Andreas has uncovered some intriguing and relevant facts. First, the term cultural revolution had an
important history in communist China before 1966. The Great Leap Forward that
got underway after 1957 not only was a program for rapid industrial development
but also contained an ambitious cultural program that was at some moments called
an Educational Revolution, at others a Cultural Revolution. This was supposed
to complement the social removal of the old, exploiting classes by bringing the
revolution to the cultural realm. Was this initial Chinese usage inspired by the
Soviet precedent? Andreas did find direct evidence that the Chinese Communist
Party investigated the evolution of Soviet educational policy, but this in and of
itself is hardly surprising. He also raised the possibility that radical remnants left
in Khrushchev-era policies influenced the Chinese. He concludes, No systematic

WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION? | 131

scholarship has yet been done on the extent to which radical Chinese policies
during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were modeled after
early Soviet policies.83
The question of models, like the history of concepts, raises the issue of reception, adaption, and domestication. From this incomplete vantage point, it certainly
makes eminent sense to interpret Maos Chinese communism as a close cousin and
divergent offspring of Stalinism, and to compare the two far more than has been
done so far. In this light, it must also be added that the Chinese Cultural Revolution presents fascinating comparisons with the Soviet experience not merely in
terms of defining cultural revolution as class war. The Chinese Cultural Revolution
emerged after the Stalin period had run its course, and therefore must be investigated in terms of the legacy of other aspects of Stalinismnotably, the Great Terror of 19361939 and the apogee of the Stalin cult between 1945 and 1953.84 This
epilogue to the broad and multifaceted history of cultural revolution in Russia, in
this sense, can be taken as an invitation to a much more extensive comparative and
transnational dialogue.

132 | WHAT IS CULTURAL REVOLUTION?

SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

The Communist Academy and the Bolshevization of the

Russian Academy of Sciences, 19181929

ny consideration of the particularities of the Soviet system must take into

account one of its most influential features, the bifurcation of the polity
into a party-state. When the Bolsheviks came to power, it was not at all
obvious that the Communist Party, from the lowliest party cell to the Politburo,
would come to shadow and parallel state institutions as well as operate inside
them. In fact, in the early years after 1917, there were proposals to abolish the Party
as superfluous, since the Bolsheviks now controlled a state.1 The initial rationale
for the emergent party-state, generally speaking, was that the Party needed to
remain the guardian of the purpose and mission of the revolutionthat is, the
keeper of ideology, overseeing a state apparatus that throughout the 1920s was
staffed by large numbers of non-Communists. In practice, however, party and state
quickly became intertwined, and they became far more so over the course of Soviet history. Beyond doubt, the party-state has to be considered one of the most
distinctive features of the Soviet order when it is put in comparative perspective or
measured against other modern states.
Party-state dualism was such a pervasive and significant phenomenon, moreover, that it had many ramifications and permutations in successive periods that
stretched far beyond the nature of the political system and state administration.
Early divisions between Bolshevik Party and Soviet state institutions and organizations, for example, had a profound impact on the history of Soviet science,
technology, and culture. The classic NEP division between reds and experts corresponded to the creation of institutions and groups that belonged de facto, if not
de jure, to the Bolshevik Party.2 This division set the stage for an assault on the
bastions of nonparty groups when the fragile, NEP-era modus vivendi between
them went under with the onset of the Great Break in 1929. At the apex of the
scientific world, in the case examined here of the rivalry between the Communist
Academy and the Academy of Sciences, the ultimate result was an intricate merger,
or synthesis.3 To return from the realm of science to the unique and evolving
nature of the party-state: although the Soviet state apparatus was bolshevized
133

far more in the Stalin period than it was under NEP, the First Five-Year Plan also
ratified a new, complex permutation of the party-state division in the guise of
tensions between ideological and industrializing/economic priorities. This new
stage in party-state dualismand its implications for the relationship among economics, politics, and ideologyis of central interest to the historical interpretation
of Stalinism.4
The bolshevization of the Russian Academy of Sciences, interpreted in this
chapter as the confrontational and coercive first step that initiated a forced merger
between party and nonparty traditions, can with justification be regarded as the
single most pivotal episode in the history of Soviet science and academia.5 The oldest Russian scholarly institution, and without doubt the most visibly autonomous
institution of the nonparty intelligentsia during NEP, the Academy of Sciences was
assaulted in the campaign to elect the first communist academicians in 19281929.
Political takeover, accompanied by 1930 with widespread arrests and dismissals in
the secret polices trumped-up Academy Affair (akademicheskoe delo) led to further
influx of Marxists and communists. The repressions and takeover were, in a sense,
the political precondition for a resulting massive expansion and greater status, for
they were followed by the Academy of Sciences transformation into what Vucinich
aptly called an empire of knowledgethe gargantuan, umbrella-like network of
scientific-research institutes that dominated the Soviet system of higher learning.6
To consider the roots and dynamics of the academys transformation, then, is to
question the entire shift from Bolshevik revolutionary challenges to the cementing
of a Soviet model.7
The bolshevization of the Academy of Sciences was extensively discussed in
the 1990s and early 2000s in Russia, when long-secret materials about previously
taboo repressions became available and the academy succeeded in preserving itself
for a long and tortuous post-Soviet decline. Since then, publications have petered
out, perhaps because historians working in the familiar paradigm of repressed
science have had little more to say. In the vast literature on the Academy of Sciences, however, the long-forgotten Communist Academy hardly makes more than
a cameo appearance. The silence has been deafening. This chapter makes the case
that the most important (although hardly the only) context out of which the designs and broader impact of bolshevization grew was a decade-long rivalry with
the chief scholarly and theoretical outlet for leading Bolshevik intellectuals, the
Communist Academy (before 1924, Socialist Academy; before 1922, Socialist Academy of Social Sciences).8 Although the party institution is routinely accorded a
mention in histories of its distinguished predecessor, the intertwined history of
the two institutions has never been systematically explored. The material here
shows that they were thrust into a symbiotic relationship in a crucial era of institution building and cultural transformation in the 1920s. Partly conscious, partly
imposed by the course of the revolution, this curious symbiosis between leading
Bolshevik intellectuals and eminent scientists informed the evolution of the party
and nonparty camps at the academic summit. At the same time, the hegemonic as134 | SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

pirations of Bolshevik intellectuals became embedded in their challenge and countermodel to the academic establishment, and the entire experience of the parvenu
Communist Academy proved decisive in the demise of the dualistic academic order
of NEP and the creation of a single dominant scholarly center. In this light, the
so-called bolshevization of the Academy of Sciences was not merely a campaign of
repression or a bid to implement communist plans in science.9 It was also the forced
synthesis of two institutionalized intellectual worlds that had for a decade evolved
in symbiotic reference to each other.
The confrontation between the Communist Academy and the Academy of Sciences paralleled and fed the classic binary oppositions that are so much a part of
the Soviet 1920s and the writing on the early Soviet period: party and intelligentsia, power and culture, politics and science. The history of the two academies,
therefore, prompts us not only to put those rubrics into context but to question
and see them in all their complexity as well. For the Communist Academy, as a de
facto but not de jure party institution, was at once fully embedded in the communist polity, yet it was still part of its own distinct, rapidly evolving movement of
party-Marxist intellectuals and a broader world of Marxist scholarship (for not all
Marxists in the Soviet 1920s were party members, of course).
If this consideration of the 1920s treats the NEP era as a decisive if contradictory phase of revolutionary cultural transformation, it also complicates the Manichean categories by placing the party intellectuals own distinguishable movement
between the party-state and the old academy. One of its chief purposes, then, is
to explore the institutional dimension close to the center of cultural revolution
in the 1920s and 1930s. If Sheila Fitzpatrick forcefully argued that, in the wake
of the upheaval of the Great Break, old intelligentsia forces and values ultimately
subsumed the Bolshevik revolutionary challenge in culturein her memorable
phrase, the party won the battle of power while the old intelligentsia won the
battle of cultureexploration of the institutional ramifications of the communist
cultural project suggests a more ambiguous and doubly ironic resolution.10 Not
only is the notion of a forced synthesis in which both sides lost more appropriate,
but key aspects of 1920s communist experimentation persisted long after they were
ostensibly abandoned. Indeed, even in the 1920s this discussion suggests a greater
interpenetration of proletarian and bourgeois camps than previously allowed. If,
as this chapter concludes, the Communist Academy in many ways lived on in the
bolshevized Academy of Sciences, then one of the chief monuments of Stalin-era
cultural conservatism (or, to use the historiographical clich, retreat) in fact represents a synthesis of a major revolutionary innovation of the 1920s with the transformed old academic establishment.11

Collision Course: The Rise of Rival Academies

It was fitting that one of the most significant initiatives taken by Bolshevik
and allied left socialist scholars and theorists in the wake of 1917 would be the
founding of an academy, and one that within a half-decade would emerge as a poSYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS | 135

lar counterweight to the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences founded by Peter

the Great. For the notion of a leftist, modern, alternative academy of the future had
acquired a foothold in radical intelligentsia culture in the decades before the revolution. In hindsight, the intertwined history of the two academies in revolutionary
Russia had roots in the manner in which the idea for a new kind of socialist academy coalesced against the backdrop of the tradition-bound, conservative image
of the old. The Imperial Academy, preceding the universities in Russia, had been
dominated by foreign scholars until after the 1860s. By the turn of the century, it
had transformed itself into a much different institution, participating in the academic autonomy movement and bolstering ties with the universities. Yet it was still
resented by large segments of the intelligentsia and could not emancipate itself
from stereotypes surrounding it first as a German, then as an archconservative
and elitist institution linked to the autocracy.12
In 1880, when still under the influence of foreigners, the academy famously
failed to admit to its ranks the outstanding Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev.
The rejection sparked an outcry in educated society and provided the impetus
for the institutions transformation into a fully Russian institution. Yet as late as
forty-nine years later, in the midst of the bolshevization campaign in 1929, the
blackballing of Mendeleev was likened by the Bolshevik intellectual and Communist Academy member Iurii Larin to the old academys equally momentous rejection of three communist candidates at the end of 1928.13
Indeed, the history of intelligentsia antagonism toward the academy before
1917 fed Bolshevik attacks on its past and present up until the late 1920s. For
example, one landmark Soviet-era report leaned directly on the anti-academy sentiments of a leftist prerevolutionary scientist close to the Bolsheviks, the Darwinist
K. A. Timiriazev (whose son, the physicist A. K. Timiriazev, was a prominent
member of the Communist Academy). This occurred, as we shall see, in a crucial
1927 Council of Peoples Commissars (Sovnarkom) analysis of the role and meaning of the Academy of Sciences at the outset of concrete bolshevization plans.
The lengthy historical section invoked the elder Timiriazev to the effect that any
institution rejecting Mendeleev and other great scholars could not represent science in Russia. It also catalogued reactionary sides from various periods of the
institutions pastcontrol by top-level tsarist appointees, a huge percentage of
nobles among academicians, the sometime influence of pan-Slavismand implied
they were largely determinent of the academys present. Far from being an institution pursuing pure science, as academicians claimed, the academy had served as
a definite political instrument for both the tsars and Provisional Government.14
If the old academy persisted as the established predecessor, the second, progressive, potential academy became a dream after the turn of the century at the
intersection of the revolutionary movement and the avant-garde. The idea of an
academy exerted its pull as an antidote to specialization, differentiation, and division of labor; it would be an institutional embodiment of the organicist, post-

136 | SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

liberal ethos which segments of the modernist avant-garde and the Bolshevik
intelligentsia shared.15 The Left Bolshevik (Vpered) faction, which in 1909 and
after pioneered the notion of proletarian culture, a new collectivist science, and
what became the central communist mission of creating a new intelligentsia, took
part in a little-known project to create a Russian Academy in exile of artists and
revolutionaries around 1912.16 Leading Vperedist intellectualsnotably the political economist, philosopher, and Proletkult leader Aleksandr Bogdanov; the
commissar of enlightenment and art and theater enthusiast Anatolii Lunacharskii;
the literary critic and after 1922 censor-in-chief Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii; and,
above all, the dean of Marxist historians in the 1920s and academic administrator
extraordinaire Mikhail Pokrovskiiwere prominent among those who founded
the Socialist Academy of Social Sciences (SAON) in Moscow in 1918 and became
leading members of it.
The Socialist Academy formally dedicated itself in 1918 to the scientific advancement of questions of socialism and communism.17 The early years before
1921, however, were a time when its academic mission and political physiognomy
were in flux, but also when the groundwork was laid for its emergence by the early
1920s as the flagship party scholarly center and chief antagonist to bourgeois science. This transformation was hardly inexorable. At first, the fledgling institution
was not even clearly dedicated to advanced research; with the universities hostile
to the new regime, and the training of cadres at the time seen as both more urgent
and revolutionary, it focused the bulk of its energies into a socialist higher school.
Politically, as well, in 1918 it initially demonstrated what was later regretted as a
naive enthusiasm for Social Democratic and socialist unity; its list of members (the
elitist title academician was never used) initially included Left Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and an international roster of foreign socialist dignitaries, from Karl
Kautsky to Rudolf Hilferding.
The new academys development was set back, moreover, when the enlightenment section collapsed in what was later referred to as the crisis of 1919. Most
students left for the front and, except for the creation of a library and the delivery
of papers, the new academys activity virtually came to a standstill. It is nonetheless
striking how the grand sense of historical purpose that fueled the expansionist rise
of the Communist Academy in the 1920s was present throughout this rocky and
ambiguous start. In the fall of 1918, for example, a proclamation written and translated into major foreign languages expressed this in words at least one of its leaders
enjoyed repeating in later years: The peasantry built cathedrals; the aristocracy,
castles and palaces; the bourgeoisie created theaters and universities, it read. The
proletariat has founded the Socialist Academy.18 More immediately, from the outset the new academy harbored hopes of staking out its position as the leading
authority in the social sciences; right away this brought it into conflict with the
old academy in Petrograd. In June 1918 the Academy of Sciences attempted to
found an Institute of Social Sciences in Petrograd which, as academicians such as

SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS | 137

Aleksandr S. Lappo-Danilevskii apparently hoped, might counterbalance future

encroachments by the Marxist social sciences. The Socialist Academy, consulted on
the advisability of the project, managed to deliver a decisive veto.19
With the hardening of battle lines in the Civil War, the Socialist Academy underwent a reinvention within a year of its founding. The new academy charter in
1919 dropped what were later called pacifist illusions and thoroughly revamped
the membership. Nineteen of thirty-nine members were new, and they included,
with a group of notable exceptions (including the ex-Bolshevik Bogdanov) leading Bolshevik Marxists and high-level party leaders of intellectual bent.20 New
honorary memberships were proferred to top party leaders like Lev Trotsky and
Grigorii Zinovev, who participated no more than their predecessors Kautsky and
Hilferding.
Yet it was only a far-reaching historical conjuncture in 19201921 that paved
the way for the new academy to become the main institutional base for what can
be termed party scholarshipa party-Marxist movement in academia with a specifically Bolshevik identity, at once an academic sector, an intellectual movement
in its own right, and an organic part of the party polity. Only by 1920 did the new
regime itself find its self-definition as a party-led dicatorship of the proletariat, in
which a far more centralized Party shadowed state organs at all levels. What is
remarkable is how a unique, bifurcated academic order capped by rival academies
in turn arose within the womb of this dualistic party-state. A coherent system of
party schools and party institutes was also created in 1920. This party academic
sector was designed, in no small part by leading party intellectuals connected
to the academy, as a hierarchical ladder of Bolshevik equivalents of secondary
schools, higher schools, and research institutes; the Socialist Academy was the natural choice to crown the edifice.21 The Bolshevik identity of the Socialist Academy
was consolidated. Before 1927 there was no decree specifying the party nature of
the academys scholarship, but the leadership in 1920 did make a formal decision
to admit only Communists as new members.22
The great changes of the early 1920s led to a great expansion of the Socialist
Academys mission that at once reoriented its activities and turned it into an ambitious and destabilizing force in early Soviet science. Between 1919 and 1921 one of
the major goals was to become a Marxist theoretical center, which in practice primarily meant presentation of papers (doklady) and such activities as hosting meetings to review drafts of Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhenskiis famous
textbook ABC of Communism.23 The goal of theoretical center remained, but new
concerns were layered on as a rapid expansion of the Socialist Academy coincided
with the introduction of NEP and intensified in 19241925. By the mid-1920s the
new institution boasted a library, publishing house, and higher party school (the
courses in Marxism), as well as either sections or institutes of law, literature and
art, economics, agriculture, natural and exact sciences, scientific methodology, the
revolutionary movement, world economics and politics, Soviet construction and
higher neural activity, as well as societies of biologists, historians, and statisticians.
138 | SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

The intensive expansion led to a much more concrete and frankly hegemonic reformulation of the Communist Academys plans in academia.
The Socialist Academys ethos, the aspirations and assumptions that defined
the identity and purpose of the institution, was written largely in the future tense;
its operative moods were both imperative and subjunctive. As a Bolshevik institution of higher learning it intertwined in its scholarly mission values of hegemony,
hierarchy, and monopoly embedded in communist political life. The goal of theoretical center soon overlapped with the determination to stake out a place as the
dominant scientific-research institution in the social sciences; this was related to
a yearning to govern academic work as a methodological and ideological center.
Preobrazhenskiis landmark article contained a striking phrase equating economic
and ideological planning at the center of the party-state: it would become a Gosplan in the realm of ideology.24 The Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923, in
theses drafted by Agitprop, opened up new horizons by sanctioning the expansion
of the academy outside the social sciences (it quickly dropped the social sciences
in its name). This first such official party pronouncement on the academy gave
such utopian hegemonic aspirations further impetus when it referred to a future in
which the Socialist Academy would unite all scientific-research work.25
Pokrovskii gave this resolution the widest possible circulation, noting that
service to the Party and struggle with the views of the bourgeois professoriate
would alter the expectations that existed in the academy at the beginning of
its existence. Hegemonic aspirations now spilled over from the realm of Marxist
theory and social sciences into higher learning as a whole. In 1924 the historian
proclaimed to the General Assembly, If we truly recognize that Marxism is a
science, then it is necessary to compel [nonparty] institutions to work according to
our plans.26 The Communist Academys name and position in the divided 1920s
order put the Academy of Sciences at the focal point of these aspirations, which
intensified after the mid-1920s. Lunacharskii announced in 1927 that the Communist Academy was an institution that should crown the entire edifice of science
and which is nearing that goal. Pokrovskii, in his most important pronouncement
on the Communist Academys history, claimed that the transition to NEP had redefined the academys role: We had the opportunity to . . . become an institution
that is, as I have repeatedly said, our party academy or, at least, a very firm basis
for a communist academy of sciences.27
Such a goal would hardly have animated party scholarship if, in direct contradiction to the rising aspirations of the Socialist Academy, the Academy of Sciences had not reestablished itself after 1917 as the countrys preeminent locus of
advanced research in an extraordinary arrangement with the Soviet state. It was
an ironic twist in the dual-academy rivalry that the post-October status of the
Academy of Sciences represented in its way the consolidation of a revolutionary
triumphof the February, not the October, Revolution. Before the fall of the old
regime potential academicians had been subject to political evaluation; the president of the academy, before the first freely elected scholar to the post after the fall
SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS | 139

of the old regime in 1917 (the geologist A. P. Karpinskii) was a high-level tsarist
political figure.28 When the Bolsheviks first mounted systematic attempts to interfere in the academys internal affairs in the late 1920s, and thus threatened to wreck
the rights of the collegial and democratic General Assembly, it was still within academicians living memory that the very same permanent secretary, the Orientalist
Sergei Fedorovich Oldenburg, had through 1905 presented prearranged decisions
for the pro forma approval of that body.29 Added on to the academys burden of
association with the autocratic past were more than casual connections with bourgeois February; several academicians served the Provisional Government, most
notably Oldenburg as minister of enlightenment from July 26 to August 31, 1917.30
The internal autonomy the old academy preserved after October followed, as
is well known, from an explicit quid pro quo arranged with Lenins Sovnarkom
in the spring of 1918. The academy recognized the new regime and agreed to
provide expertise to the state on questions of economic and technical importance;
in return, it received government funding, direct channels to Sovnarkom, merely
nominal subordination to Lunacharskiis and Pokrovskiis Narkompros, and an
explicit reservation of the right to determine its research agendanot to mention
an extensive material base.31
What is less well known are the motivations behind the academys swift switch
from harsh condemnation of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October (in tandem
with universities and other intelligentsia organizations), to the General Assembly
of January 24, 1918, when a majority of academicians first formally agreed to work
with the new authorities. Not only did many academicians operate from a deepseated desire to preserve Russian science, and later from perceptions that the new
regime was despite its despotism willing to support science and restore a strong
state. They also seized the opportunity to recapture the position, enshrined in the
academys charter of 1836, of the primary scientific institution of Russia.32
Still, just as the Socialist Academys identity in the early years before 1920
1921 was still in flux, so the Academy of Sciences position in the first years after
October was subject to uncertainty. The endangered status of old elites in a time
of social revolution, red militancy in civil war, and the brutal consequences of economic collapse combined to produce an atmosphere of misery and crisis for scholars. The crisis was exacerbated by threatening Bolshevik gestures and high-profile
repressions. Even Oldenburgthe quintessential conciliatortainted by former
membership in the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party, was humiliatingly
incarcerated in the Chekas Tactical Center Affair.33 No sooner had the academy
entered into a working relationship with Soviet power than leftist attacks on the
arrangement commenced. In 1918 the local Narkompros branch of the Union of
Communes of the Northern Region formulated a proposal to liquidate the academy as an utterly unneeded leftover of the pseudoclassical epoch of class society.34 Pokrovskii was behind another unrealized motion to the collegium of
Narkompros in 1918 to dissolve the old academy and create a state-run association
of scientific institutions in its place. Oldenburg used his connections to request
140 | SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

that Lenin halt attempts to destroy the academy by decree; it was an important step
in Lenins struggle over specialist policy within the Party that he firmly banned
mischief making around the academy.35
It was, then, only in the early 1920sprecisely the same moment that the
Socialist Academy emerged as a reactivated and explicitly party institution at the
head of a party academic sectorthat the old academy stabilized its status as a
protected, well-endowed, autonomous body with a new lease on preeminence. The
senior academy firmed up its working relationship with Sovnarkom and various
commissariats.36 The shift to the 1920s academic order also brought a great shift
in the status of academicians. The physiologist Ivan P. Pavlov, probably Russias
most famous scientist, had seen his gold Nobel medals confiscated and had scavenged for firewood to survive the Civil War. In 19201921 it was in no small part
his threat of emigration that prompted Lenin and top Bolsheviks, concerned with
international opinion and rebuilding science, to radically improve conditions for
Academician Pavlov and, by his insistence, Petrograd scholars. Now he emerged
as the prosperous dissident in the 1920s, running his own scientific empire with
a patriarchal hand and lambasting Marxism and the Bolsheviks with a fair share
of impunity.37
More broadly, the entrenchment of this Soviet star system in science was one
blatant manifestation of a new differentiation, hierarchy, and sectoralism strengthened by the turn to the New Economic Policy after 1921. Party-state policy in the
1920s made sharp distinctions between nonparty advanced research and teaching,
internationally prominent and rank-and-file scientists, and natural and social research. The key contradiction was that it also gave rise to a separate, new, Bolshevik academic sector capped by the Socialist Academy that was in its way stimulated
by the unfinished revolution, thus threatening all the uneasy arrangements of the
epoch.
A final irony in the old academys anomalous position in the 1920s was that
its very status as a privileged enclave, which could be taken as proof of how
valuable the academicians were to the regime, may have prompted the institution
and its scholars to take stances that were more politically provocative than they
might otherwise have been. It was not just Pavlov who criticized Marxism, the
Soviet order, and Bolshevik approaches to science. Certainly, Pavlov was able to
do so with exceptional bluntness and publicity; his special protection, and the
respect Bolsheviks professed for his materialist physiology, in fact devalued his
impassioned hostility to any conciliation over the election of Communists to the
academy in 19281929. As Oldenburg, his son a White migr and himself a former Kadet, lashed out on the eve of the elections in one of the private gatherings
of academicians, Ivan Pavlov can allow himself to say whatever he wants, they
wont touch him.38 Even so, as Vera Tolz has convincingly argued on the basis of
academicians letters and even official correspondence, criticism of Marxism and
Bolshevism before 1928, and opposition to the election of communist scholars to
the academy in that year, was not in the minority but rather in the mainstream of
SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS | 141

the main core of academicians elected before 1917. Furthermore, the autonomous
institution (especially its library in the mid-1920s, headed by the historian Sergei
Platonov) became something of a magnet for nobles and so-called former people
who, not able to work elsewhere, found protection and the possibility to exist at
the academy.39
By establishing an enclave for the Academy of Sciences and simultaneously
stimulating the ambitions of the Socialist Academy as an expanding party institution, the NEP settlement at the academy level ratified a collision course that shaped
Soviet science and higher learning.

Combative Symbiosis: Enmity and Emulation in the 1920s

A primary dimension of the Socialist Academys rivalry with the Academy of
Sciences was a symbolic and bureaucratic struggle for status. Before 1925, although
the old academy was nominally subordinated to the RSFSRs Narkompros, party
scholars complained it enjoyed de facto all-union (rather than republican) status
because of its unusual autonomy. Politburo consideration of the issue, however,
culminated in promotion in that year when the academy was put de jure under
Sovnarkom and renamed Soviet as an all-union institution. Even more galling,
the Academy of Sciences was simultaneously granted the official designation of the
highest scholarly institution in the land.40
Behind the scenes, however, Communist Academy leaders were acutely concerned with official standing, and Pokrovskii enlisted the help of a prominent
party politician, Avel Safronovich Enukidze, who was in the mid-1920s becoming
enmeshed in the ongoing struggle of party intellectuals to reshape Soviet science.
In 1925 Enukidze, secretary of the Central Executive Committee, was not only
put in charge of the crucial oversight committee for the Academy of Sciences (see
below); in the same year he joined the Communist Academy as a member of its
new Institute of Soviet Construction. This organization, designed explicitly as a
research arm of the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate, represented a significant step by
the Communist Academy to enhance its service role.41 Pokrovskii enlisted Enukidzes intervention to ensure that the party academy was also proclaimed the highest
scholarly institution. The Communist Academy followed suit with its own allunion status in 1926.42 It was no secret to Communist Academy leaders that such
party-state action, if only it could be arranged, could be decisive in any dealings
with bourgeois science.
For its part, the Academy of Sciences attempted to underscore its position as
highest scholarly institution by accentuating its traditional and historical role at
the academic summit. Vladimir Vernadskii, a pioneer in the study of the biosphere,
became the chairman of a commission on the history of science that demonstrated
concern with protecting the academys traditions and cultural role. Most of all,
the Academy wanted to show that it was the prime mover in the development of
scientific thought in Russia, as well as the chief Russian contributor to the pool of
world science.43
142 | SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

The two academiesthe older in Leningrad, Russias window on Europe and,

during the 1920s, the cradle of the nonparty intelligentsia, the other in Moscow,
seat of power and world revolutiondeveloped an unwritten division of labor that
to some may have justified their dual existence. The Communist Academys sphere
of influence was in the Marxist social sciences (with its specialized subdisciplines,
the study of labor and socialism and anything with an overtly sociological, economic, or philosophical bent), a contemporary emphasis in disciplines not exclusively Marxist (like literature and history), and consultation in what were seen as
expressly political and policy (rather than technical or scientific) areas. Consulting
work for party and state organs, an increasingly significant trend, was pursued in
the academy, especially in the Institute of Soviet Construction, the agrarian section, and the Institute of World Economics and Politics.44
Without doubt, the Academy of Sciences scholarly orientation in the 1920s
was significantly altered by party scholarships claims on social research. The old
academy underwent a slow postrevolutionary shift in the center of academic gravity from the humanities to the natural sciences, and in this area consolidated a
significant effort to augment the applied sciences.45 Its humanities divisions, as
if not to encroach on the Marxist domain, emphasized noncontemporary topics
and specialized or auxiliary fields, as exemplified by its renowned archeological
and ethnographic expeditions. The first Soviet-era Academy of Sciences charter of
1927, drafted with the aid of Communist Academy leaders, made reference to those
scientific disciplines which are under [the old academys] authority, and academicians in fact interpreted this to mean that they were restricted from encroaching
on areas close to Marxism.46
Several tendencies, however, destabilized this convenient division of labor.
Although after 1917 Soviet budget allocations attempted to increase the importance of the institutions physical-mathematical division, the Academy of Sciences
prolonged shift toward the natural sciences was hardly smooth. The two humanities divisions, Russian language and literature and the historical-philological department, were portrayed by party scholars as their major institutional-ideological
threat and were consolidated into one entity in 1927.47
After 1923, moreover, the Communist Academy (Comacademy) began its
own foray into the natural sciences, an implicit threat to the coexistence of the
two academies as well as an attempt to extend the domain of Marxist methodology onto virgin soil. Although the Comacademy remained weak in the natural
sciencesand encountered acute problems even finding qualified Marxists to staff
its section on natural and exact sciences, the Society of Marxist Biologists, and
the Institute of Higher Neural Activityits activities in this area were important
politically and ideologically. When a proposal surfaced in the academys presidium
to hand over the Institute of Higher Neural Activity to the Commissariat of Health
in 1927, the idea was rejected after Pokrovskii strenuously argued that any sign of
failure in the natural sciences would overjoy the All-Union Academy of Sciences
and similar institutions.48 In an internal report, Pokrovskii underlined that the
SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS | 143

Comacademy was not only a social science institutionthat is for certain . . . [It
is] the seeds of a Communist Academy of Sciences. Attempts to narrow the work
of the academy in any way would be attempts to weaken the significance of this
scientific-methodological center. And since there is only one center in any circle,
then it followswe will not be afraid of wordsthat our academy has a certain
monopoly on the leadership of party-scientific work in all its dimensions.49
The confrontational symbiosis of the two academic camps in the 1920s also left
its distinctive imprint on what might be called each sides academic ideology
conceptions and principles about the role and purpose of science and scholarship.
The majority of academicians, whose outlook was informed by prerevolutionary
academic culture, had been within a few years thrown by the Bolshevik Revolution
from the moderate left to the right of the political spectrum. Under tsarism, the
academic autonomy movement had been linked to the liberation movement and
ideals of social service. But in the struggles in higher learning in the half-decade
after 1917, supporters of academic autonomy were set against the self-proclaimed
avatars of progress and the champions of the masses. Faced with Bolshevik arguments about the political and even class nature of knowledge (concentrated in but
not limited to the social sciences) and insistent demands for an applied orientation
in the natural sciences, scholarship for its own sake and pure science now assumed
the cachet of nonconformism.
The effects of the two-camp relationship manifested themselves even more
openly in the latter part of the decade, as the academicians were forced to react
to Bolshevik conceptions and defend themselves against rising communist insistence on planning, collectivism, and serving socialist construction. This reaction
stretched across two key splits within the academy in the 1920sbetween those
favoring greater development of applied research and those skeptical of it, and
between the conciliatory leadership of the academy and more confrontational academicians critical of the Oldenburg line.50
Oldenburg himself, for example, found it possible or expedient to appear on
the podium at the tenth anniversary celebration of Sverdlov Communist University in 1928 and announce that the Academy of Sciences supported the communist
students in the building of a new culture. But his diplomatic efforts, and constant
invocation of Lenins nurturing attitude toward science, did not forestall his impassioned plea in 1927 for maintaining the academys traditions, maintaining focus
on the humanities, and even for reinserting into the new academy charter the individualist resolution of 1836 defining the task of an academician as spend[ing]
all his strength in developing his own science. Even those academicians most
concerned with augmenting applied science justified it only as a useful outgrowth
of pure research.51
By the same token, the ongoing dialogue left a deep imprint on the Communist
Academy as it developed in the 1920s. Party scholars formulated goals that grew
out of their Bolshevik and Marxist heritage but were also refined as conscious
inversions of what were perceived as the values of the nonparty establishment, the
144 | SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

discredited liberal and idealist academic values. The Communist Academys

alternative agenda was also cultivated over the course of the decade by following
those paths that promised to enhance its power and standing in the struggle for
dominance with the old academic elite. In place of institutional autonomy and
science for its own sake, the Communist Academy embraced service to revolution,
state, and Party. Because practicality and service were in fact novel yardsticks for
the Marxist social sciences, moreover, party scholarship evolved rapidly at the
Communist Academy. An early emphasis on high Marxist theory gave way to a
valorization of consulting work, tasks considered practical such as research for
party congresses and holidays, and collective projects such as anthologies on topics
relevant to current political campaigns.52
The new service orientation culminated in a 1927 resolution written by the Organizational Bureau (Orgburo) with deep involvement of the academy leadership,
approved by the Politburo, and published in the name of the Central Committee.
This document declared, the Communist Academy must pay special attention to
the theoretical preparation of vital contemporary economic and political problems
on the agenda of the Comintern and the Party. The resolution came in the wake
of an Orgburo meeting attended by the academy leaders Pavel Miliutin and Lev
Kritsman, at which Stalin and Molotov had expressed a desire to bring the institution closer to the Central Committee.
Kritsman later objected privately to the academy presidium that the resolution
threatened to cede control of its scholarly agenda and turn it into a mere apparat.
But in a calculated continuation of the bid to augment the institutions political
authority, the presidium overcame these reservations and its members helped draft
the Central Committee resolution. In a clause with even more resonance, the academy was anointed the scholarly organ of the Partys Central Committee.53
If the Communist Academy intellectuals consciously turned the ideals of the
old academic intelligentsia on their head, in other matters they covertly admired
the Academy of Sciences with its prestige and influence at home and abroad. One
of the most influential areas in which emulation occurred was in the organization
of science. This little-known aspect of the two-academy symbiosis did much to
determine the Soviet macro-organization of science.
In the years before 1917, the idea of the scientific-research institute garnered
a good deal of support among the academic intelligentsia and was promoted in
particular by the Academy of Sciences as a way of shoring up its prestige relative
to the rising research universities. However, most projects involving such institutes
were not approved by the tsarist government. After 1917, the new institutional
vehicle for advanced research continued to exert attraction as a modern and advanced imitation of European networks of research institutes that grew up after
the turn of the century, in particular Germanys Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft. But
the scientific-research institute could also be portrayed, as a report issued in 1922
by the Main Administration for Scientific, Scholarly-Artistic, and Museum Institutions (Glavnauka) enthused, as entirely the child of the revolutionary era, since
SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS | 145

institutes flourished in Russia primarily after 1917. Of eighty-eight institutes in the

RSFSR in 1925, seventy-three were founded after the revolution, fifty-four of them
in the natural and applied sciences.54 Based on the example of the Commission
for the Study of Natural Productive forces (KEPS), founded by Academician V. I.
Vernadskii in 1915, the Academy of Sciences had begun to upgrade its divisions
(otdely) into institutes as early as 1919.55 Oldenburg maintained close ties with German colleagues in the Gesellschaft, and after a European tour in 1926 he returned
with a world-historical statement that made him sound very much like a Bolshevik
intellectual: If the eighteenth century was the century of academies, and the nineteenth century the century of universities, the twentieth century is becoming the
century of research institutes.56
Here, indeed, was a crucial issue on which many nonparty and party scholars
could find common ground in the dual order of NEP. Yet this should not obscure
the differing agendas underlying the widespread support for the new structure.
The nonparty scientific intelligentsia during NEP often supported the formation of institutes as a way of protecting autonomy, securing funding, and institutionalizing their specialized fields.57 The Communist Academys embrace of the
scientific-research institute, however, adapted the allure of West European models
and the prestige of the nonparty academic establishment to the Bolshevik imperatives of centralization and planning. The Comacademys project of turning its
modest sections into institutes in 1924 was made with explicit comparison both to
the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft and the Academy of Sciences. David Riazanov,
whose views on organization proved the most influential within the party institution, proposed in that year not only to emulate but to surpass its rival by turning
the entire Communist Academy into a network of institutes. Riazanov pictured
the academy as the organizing center that would control institutes as the building
blocks of rapid expansion.58
In 1928, when Riazanov briefly floated the idea of abolishing academies altogether in favor of autonomous institutes (clearly a threat in the midst of the
bolshevization campaign), his proposal provoked sharp criticism at a Communist
Academy plenum on the grounds that only an academy ensured centralized political control.59 This exchange is important not for Riazanovs short-lived, rhetorical abandonment of the organizing center, but because it illustrated just how
much the Bolshevik intellectuals at the Communist Academy, the leaders of whom
would soon emerge as a major force behind the attempt to remake the commanding heights of higher learning, had come to treat the idea of an expanding network
of research institutes subordinated to a centralized academy as a given necessity at
the organizational summit of Soviet science.

Bolshevization as Forced Merger

The division in the twice-crowned academic edifice of the 1920s, with all its
dimensions, had one other distinctive feature: party scholars at the Communist
Academy were not merely intellectual rivals of the Academy of Sciences but be146 | SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

came a leading force in the many backstage oversight committees that carved out a
supervisory role over the older academy. It was here that a lengthy political process
was initiated that culminated in the bolshevization campaign.
It was natural that party intellectuals would rivet their attention on the Academy of Sciences archaic charter of 1836, because the imposition of a new university
charter in 1922, paving the way for party control over university administrations,
was the centerpiece of the struggle with the nonparty professoriate over the winning of the higher school.60 It was testament to the special position the academy
enjoyed that the first Soviet-era document there was not ratified until 1927. Yet the
charter issue had already become a preoccupation for the Bolshevik intellectuals
as early as 1924, and the issue became the focal point in the development of an
agenda for reforming the old academy.
In that year Pokrovskii became the champion of a draft charter for the old
academy which he promoted through his position as deputy commissar of enlightenment. Pokrovskiis hopes to thereby curtail the autonomy of the Academy
of Sciences can be judged by his report to a convention of education officials from
the union republics in October 1924: The Academy of Sciences is a gathering
of the most prominent Russian scholars with worldwide reputations, who know
perfectly well that they can find an outlet for their talents wherever they want. . . .
In such conditions it is necessary to approach it carefully, but we are all the same
approaching it and we put together a new charter for the academy, which makes
it possible to approach its work much more closely.61 Shortly before, Pokrovskii
wrote to Rykov, the head of Sovnarkom, to lobby for this draft charter, a document put out by Narkompross Glavnauka. Referring sarcastically to the honor and
independence that academicians coveted for their institution, Pokrovskii warned
Rykov that Oldenburg and the Academy of Sciences vice-president at the time,
Vladimir A. Steklov, would be dissatisfied with the draft: instead of conferring full
all-union status on the institution, it would have given control and report (kontrol
i otchet) powers over the academy to Glavnauka, leaving Sovnarkom the authority
to appoint the academys president.62 Internal Glavnauka theses on the Academy of
Sciences written around this time spelled out the motivations behind such organizational conclusions (to use the Bolshevik phrase): new organic connections
must be made between the activities of the Academy of Sciences and the economic
and cultural development of the USSR; above all, close ideological and organizational ties should be effected between the academy and two Narkompros bodies,
Glavnauka and the State Scholarly Council (GUS)the last headed by Pokrovskii,
whose scientific-political subsection was staffed entirely by a familiar circle of top
Bolshevik intellectuals.63
This bid to curtail the old academys autonomy failed. Instead, in 1925 the
Politburo decision to confer all-union status on the institution coincided with its
two hundredth jubilee. The Politburo allocated 60,000 rubles for the eleven-day
extravaganza, even sanctioning the invitation of such bourgeois foreign guests as
President Tom Garrigue Masaryk of Czechoslovakia in the hopes of garnering
SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS | 147

international prestige for the Soviet promotion of science.64 The result of this attempt was that the venerable academy reaped a windfall of public praise from party
leaders. Oldenburgs conciliatory stance toward the Soviet authorities, resented by
some of his fellow academicians, seemed to be paying off; he gushed to the head
of Sovnarkom that the jubilee was the beginning of a tremendous new scientific
movement, not neglecting to add a plea for more resources.65
The public triumph for the Academy of Sciences associated with the affair,
however, galvanized its enemies. The Politburo had created a special commission
to oversee the jubilee headed by the Communist Academys new de facto vicepresident, the economist Vladimir Miliutin (Preobrazhenskiis hold on the number
two spot eroded after his leadership of the Trotskyist opposition in 1924), who
seized the opportunity to recommend the formation of a new commission for
oversight of the work of the Academy of Sciences.66 This led to the creation of
the so-called Enukidze commission for aiding the work of the Academy of Sciences, which masterminded the bolshevization campaign.
At the time of his recommendation to the Politburo, Miliutin was already the
head of yet another commission, this one under Sovnarkom, that continued work
on changes to the Academy of Sciences charter from July 1925 to March 1926. The
draft charter put out in the name of this commission first conceived of crucial rule
changes governing the election of academiciansthey could be put forward not
only by academicians but by the scholarly institutions of the USSR. Meanwhile,
Permanent Secretary Oldenburg practiced delaying tactics to forestall the merger
of the two humanities divisions and increases in the number of academicians set in
the proposed charter.67 The new charter drafted by this Miliutin commission was
finally ratified by the Politburo on May 26, 1927, but the Partys highest organ
struck down a clause that would have openly stated that new academicians were
subject to state ratification.68 The Miliutin commission was pressing further than
the Politburo. Only a month earlier, in the presidium of the Communist Academy,
Lev Kritsman was venting the party scholars perennial plaint: The commanding
heights in the realm of science are still not yet in our hands, and Otto Shmidt even
ventured, Our leaders in the Central Committee must outlive one more illusion,
namely that by coddling the Academy of Sciences sufficiently political gain can be
made in relation to the West, etc.69
The charter approved in 1927 also introduced into the Academy of Sciences the
leadership structure common in communist academic institutions: that is, a strong,
Communist Academy-style presidium (itself strongly reminiscent of the bureau of a
party cell).70 As early as October 1927 Communist Academy luminaries Pokrovskii,
Miliutin, Lunacharskii, Riazanov, and Viacheslav Volgin received top-secret copies
from the head of Sovnarkoms Section on Scientific Institutions, E. P. Voronov, listing suggested candidates for election to the Academy of Sciences and the openings
of new places at the academy (in part reserved for the Marxist social sciences and
technical and applied sciences).71
The most obvious motivation in the behind-the-scenes monitoring of the
148 | SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

Academy of Sciences by the party scholars beginning in the mid-1920s was that
the Bolshevik intellectuals were determined to undermine the stature and resources
of the older academy. In 1927 Miliutin was once again put in charge of still another Sovnarkom commission to review the Academy of Sciences newly required
annual report; top Communist Academy officials Pokrovskii and Riazanov were
also included.72 This gave Pokrovskii the opportunity to submit a witty and bitter
attack on the nonparty institutiona bastion of dispassionate seekers of truth,
observing a well-intentioned neutrality toward Soviet power, yet unable to meet
the scientific needs of the present.
Pokrovskii took it as axiomatic that the role of center for scientific-research
work should only be filled by an academy; yet no one and nothing was uniting
the old one. He allowed that a reorganized old academy might become a center for
natural and exact sciences, but stagnant traditions were preventing even that. The
Bolshevik historian demanded that the needs of socialist construction become the
first duty of the all-union academy; it was impermissible to have a research agenda
that divided free scientific research and industrialization, as if the second interfered with the first. As far as the humanities division was concerned, he framed
a question that held enormous implications for his own academy: should the old
academy be limited to the natural and exact sciences, or should it also include
social sciences and humanities? In the last area the nonparty institution was most
active in history, the history of literature, and ethnography, Pokrovskii maintained,
but its activities were thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the good old times.
Finally, he pressed the point home: It is necessary either to radically reorganize
the humanities division of the academy, both in terms of its membership and program of study, or to close it down altogether.73
This salvo was just one among several reports of the Miliutin commission,
which taken together comprised a new push for an assault on the old academy
whether it was put in terms of the diminution, reorganization, or breakup of the
institution. Andrei Vyshinskii, a party legal scholar and jurist who played a prominent role in attacking the nonparty academic intelligentsia in the late 1920s (for
his role as presiding judge in the Shakhty show trial the next year he with great
symbolism donned a hunting costume) referred to a whole range of institutions
at the academy that do not have any right to exist.74 Volgin, himself later permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences from 1930 to 1935 and its vice-president
from 1942 to 1953, charged in his report that the humanities division suffered from
some kind of organic defect and was characterized by vulgar, atheoretical empiricism. The Communist Academy founder added pointedly: If we compare the
publications of the Academy of Sciences with those of the Communist Academy,
despite all the scholarly-technical advantages of the Academy of Sciences publications, . . . the works of the Communist Academy are noteworthy for the fresh
scientific thought that runs through them. It is especially interesting that Volgin at
this time opposed filling the humanities sections of the Academy of Sciences with
Marxists, because in current conditions this would weaken institutions such as
SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS | 149

the Communist Academy and the Marx-Engels Institute. Instead, Volgin proposed
dismembering the Academy of Sciences and attaching its humanities institutions
to various higher schools (VUZy).75
It thus seems evident that party scholars seized the new situation in 1927, coinciding with the first plans for a new socialist offensive and the anointment of the
Communist Academy as the Partys scholarly organ, to press more concretely for
measures that would diminish the Academy of Sciences. In this effort the Marxist
social scientists at the helm of the Comacademy united with party-oriented allies
in the technical and applied sciences whose hostility to the Academy of Sciences
was in part motivated by their desire to strengthen applied research and branch
science, the applied institutes under the auspices of the commissariats. The alliance was institutionalized with the founding of the All-Union Association for
Workers in Science and Technology for the Advancement of Socialist Construction
(VARNITSO) in 1927, the establishment of which was overseen by Viacheslav
Molotov and Bukharin. VARNITSOs founders, at their first convocation on April
7, 1927, frankly resolved to work to strengthen the material base of research institutes under Narkompros, the Scientific-Technical Administration of the Supreme
Soviet of the National Economy (VSNKh) and other agencies and weaken that of
the Academy of Sciences.76
A founding father of VARNITSO, the soil scientist and long-time champion
of combining scientific-research institutes with American-style practicality, Arsenii
Iarilov, had in fact lobbied for the radical reconstruction of the Academy of Sciences as early as February 1926. His platform was sent officially to Sovnarkom
executive secretary (upravdelami) and science administrator Nikolai Petrovich Gorbunov and confidentially to Miliutin; it represents an especially forceful blend of
the centralizing urge, the faith in planned and applied science integrated into the
socialist order, and hostility toward the old academys heritage which informed
the alliance between VARNITSO and party scholars. Constantly referring to the
academy as archaic or as an anachronism, Iarilov advocated a new all-union center uniting the entire complex of scientific-research institutions and organizations
. . . the entire all-union collective of scientific workers as a whole. Halfmeasures would be uselessor else Sanskritologists, astronomers, or mathematicians would remain at the helm of this vital nerve center instead of economists,
technician-organizers, and politician-planners.77
Among the many ties between the Communist Academy intellectuals and
VARNITSO was the inclusion of the soon-to-be academician A. N. Bakh as a
member of the Miliutin commission of 1927. Bakh, a biochemist and VSNKh
official who was elected to the academy in 1929, punctuated his report to the
Miliutin commission by calling for a cap on the Academy of Sciences budget and
unburdening the academy of a whole range of institutions. Miliutin compiled
excerpts from all these reports into a single document addressed to Sovnarkom that
opposed any increase in the old academys budget at the expense of analagous
scientific institutions.78
150 | SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

As concrete plans to reorganize the membership and activities of the Academy

of Sciences materialized in 1927, the same group of prominent Bolshevik intellectuals emerged to spearhead the effort. In August 1927 Miliutin, in the name of the
Sovnarkom Section on Scientific Institutions, sent out the top secret list of forty-six
potential candidates for membership in the Academy of Sciences, with a request
that Pokrovskii write evaluations of each one.79
Perhaps the most important body dealing with the Academy of Sciences for
the entire period 19251929, however, was the so-called Enukidze commission.
Designed as a special Sovnarkom link to the old academy after the jubilee, it met
several times in 1926, primarily to discuss budgetary issues and foreign travel with
the Oldenburg leadership. Its membership (apart from its namesake and chair) in
1926 included Miliutin as a representative of the Communist Academy and the top
Agitprop official Vilgelm Knorin, as well as Lunacharskii and Gorbunov.80
As a remarkable protest signed by Oldenburg, President Karpinskii, and
Vice-President Aleksandr Fersman in March 1927 reveals, the Enukidze commission met irregularly in 1926 and had ceded primary responsibility of the budgetary
and travel issues to Sovnarkoms Department of Scientific Institutions (ONU). The
manifesto of the academy leadership is distinguished both by its deployment of
a quasi-Sovietized language of justification and an overconfident, even reckless
boldness in its demands. Stressing the academys fulfillment of state tasks and its
great reputation abroad, the academicians invoked the respect for science their
institution inculcated in workers organizations and youth. Then they set about
attacking in no uncertain terms the abnormal exclusion of the academy leadership from direct ties with the government during a cooling of relations after the
jubilee. Lambasting ONU for its incompetent red tape and hostile, disrespectful
attitudes toward the academy, the academicians demanded a revival of direct links
to a rejuvenated Enukidze commission.81
The academicians had just made an enemy in the person of ONU chief Voronov. He responded by sending the Enukidze commission an extraordinary litany
of incriminating information and inferences about the old academy; we encountered its historical section at the outset as a virtual state of the art communist indictment of the institution. Among his accusations in response to the academicians
complaints, he charged unnamed academicians with using foreign trips to link reactionary Slavists with migrs abroad; trips had in fact been delayed by Voronov
because Viacheslav Menzhinskii, head of the secret police, had needed to discuss
OGPU political evaluations of the academicians with ONU. The academy harbored
nobles and ex-tsarist bureaucrats, although it shielded itself from complete scrutiny
by Soviet power. Oldenburg had in October opposed the revolution as the work
of the dark masses; the academy had put out religious-oriented publications until
1922. In sum, the old academy did valuable work, Voronov allowed, but was still
stagnant and had served the tsars more eagerly than the Soviet government. The
conclusions: freshen and replenish the list of academicians, open the institution to
close scrutiny, and introduce a Soviet-inclined group of academicians. The month
SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS | 151

after this report was written, the first public salvo in the bolshevization campaign
was fired, with no apparent explanation, in the form of a press attack on the academy for harboring nobles and other sins.82
Voronovs polemic did not fall on deaf ears, for the Enukidze commission was
not as idle as the academicians believed. Although it was formed as a Sovnarkom
organization, this affiliation seems to have been a facade erected for the public and
the academicians; Politburo protocols show the oversight body was in fact a special
commission of the Partys highest organ. By 1928 it defined its role as political
leadership over the Academy of Sciences. Along with the Leningrad oblast committee (obkom) of the Party, it directed the election campaign to the Academy of
Sciences and took the crucial decision to unleash a broad campaign in the press
on the elections.83
In March 1928 the Enukidze commission submitted its final report to the Politburo, which approved the commissions list of potential candidates for membership in the Academy of Sciences. The list was divided into Communists (the first
group later to be brought into the academy), figures close to us, and acceptable
candidacies. The Politburo authorized the commission to make changes in the
list as circumstances dictated; the press campaign and an overhaul of the academy
apparat (which resulted in the large-scale purge of academy personnel in 1929)
were also approved at this date. Given the persistent efforts of party scholars to
undermine the status of the Academy of Sciences before 1928, one of the most
striking resolutions the Politburo passed was to decline the request of Comrades
Pokrovskii and Riazanov to remove their candidacies and to oblige them to agree
to their election to the Academy [of Sciences].84 Could it be that the two Communist Academy foundersone the head of the party academy, the other the director
of the Marx-Engels Institutewere at this point reluctant to defect from the camp
of party institutions?
Acting on the initiative of the Enukidze commission, the Central Committees
Agitprop department launched an all-union campaign on silent interference in the
campaign for elections to the Academy of Sciences in the latter part of 1928. The
purpose was to develop a campaign in the press for some and against other candidates and neutral toward a third group, and to carry out a campaign of public
[obshchestvennye] evaluations of the candidates by organizing resolutions based on
Agitprop recommendations from scholarly and educational organizations from all
over the country.85
It was against the backdrop of this pressure riveted on the academicians in
Leningrad that the famous election of communist and party-favored academicians
took place in 1929. It has generally not been recognized that a pivotal moment in
the entire bolshevization episode came when an extraordinary series of encounters
took place between party scholars and academicians. These meetings occurred
when special preliminary disciplinary commissions consisting of academicians
and representatives of the union republics met from October 11 to 21 to agree
on nominations of candidates to be presented for the vote in the academys gen152 | SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

eral assembly. The representatives, in fact, comprised a delegation of party scholars, most from the Comacademyincluding Miliutin, Shmidt, the rising Marxist
legal theorist Evgenii Pashukanis, the dialectician I. K. Luppol, and the former
Proletkult theoretician and literary critic P. M. Kerzhentsev.86 The two academies were finally meeting face to face, but the party intellectuals appeared in the
guise of emissaries of the regime. When Academician Aleksei N. Krylov referred
to the guests as representatives of the government, a voice cried out that there
were none of those present, prompting the mathematician and engineer to correct
himselfNo? Then, representatives of scholarly institutions.87
It is true that these commissions did not conduct the only negotiations between the Party and the academy over the elections. As early as November 1927
members of the Enukidze commission had entered into preliminary talks with
Oldenburg about candidacies for what became forty-five new vacancies. By January 1928, however, Gorbunov opined in the name of the commission that Oldenburgs genuine willingness to shepherd through regime-sponsored candidacies
could not be counted on, due to the shaken position of his leadership within the
academy.88 Indeed, the Academy of Sciences was a relatively loose-knit institution,
and long-standing dissatisfactions with Oldenburgs conciliatory leadership of the
academy burst out into the open in the election crisis and exacerbated disagreements and strife.89
The disciplinary commission meetings between party scholars and academicians in late 1928, in spite of all the intrigue swirling around them, thus proved
to be an important moment of debate and confrontation between the sides. The
party emissaries opened with a potent maneuver: they demanded the preliminary
commissions select only one candidate for each vacancy in the upcoming elections
(something not required in the charter issued in 1927), thus turning the vote of
the academys general assembly from a selection into a yes-or-no ratification. This
measure proved genuinely controversial from the start and was strenuously resisted
by Vernadskii, the physicist A. F. Ioffe, and Oldenburg himself; even after the
measure was rammed through, the issue was revisited in many of the commission
sessions.90 However, what is noteworthy is that the academicians wrangled concession after concession as the party scholars strove to get their own handful of
Communists approved. Although the more confrontational academicians strongly
disapproved of it, horse trading was openly going on in the commissions. The
most blatant of many examples came with the approval of the historian M. K. Liubavskii. The rector of Moscow University in 1911, Liubavskii had remained at his
place when the cream of the professoriate resigned in a famous confrontation with
the conservative minister of education Lev Kasso. Liubavskii had been targeted
in the 1928 press campaign as a reactionary. The party scholars in commissions
continued the attacks, but he was soon approved at the same moment as the communist candidate Nikolai Lukin. The quid pro quo was obvious.91
Although both sides observed a cultured outward respect for one another in
the commissions, and the party scholars strove to impress their hosts with their
SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS | 153

knowledge of the scholarly credentials of the candidates, the clash of two academic
worlds was strikingly apparent. The academicians reiterated time and again that
only scholarly worth and scientific achievement should count as considerations. As
M. M. Bogoslovskii put it, truly we leave the framework of academic discussion
when we evaluate the social activities of one or another candidate. Pashukanis
retorted: The very process of electing a large group of members to the Academy
. . . is itself an event with huge social and political significance . . . to dwell on the
social-political character of each candidate is . . . imperative.92 The academicians,
however they voted, objected to the party scholars presentation of Marxist textbooks and mass pamphlets as scholarly works. Vernadskii opposed the Marxist
philosopher Deborin (seen by several academicians as a danger to natural science
because of his writings on the dialectics of nature) by making a distinction between mere philosophy and philosophical sciences.93 The argument was idiosyncratic but its thrust typical of the academicians stance.
The party scholars, in response, demanded consideration of a whole range of
considerations beyond pure qualifications. The representatives of Moscow insisted
on the relevance of not merely the political profile of the candidates, but of introducing new methodologies (i.e., Marxism), promoting practitioners of useful (i.e.,
applied) disciplines, and representing different regions and nationalities to make
the academy truly all-union. As a Ukrainian chemist was being voted down by the
academicians, Krylov remarked that if nationality was to be a consideration, Then
we would have to say that someone should be chosen because he is a Chuvash, another because he is a Tatar, and a third because he is an Armenian.94 The split between the camps was obvious and sharp as each conditioned the others response.
It is only against the backdrop of these lengthy negotiations, in which the
party scholars made great concessions, that the all-out crisis can be understood
when the three most controversial Marxist candidates approved preliminarily in
commissionsthe dialectician Deborin, the historian of the French Revolution
Lukin, and the Marxist literary critic Vladimir Frichefailed to receive the requisite two-thirds vote in a secret ballot of the general assembly on January 12, 1929.
Just as significant, the other Communists unanimously approved in disciplinary
commissions barely passed.95 The vitriolic hue and cry over this alleged political
demonstration of the un-Soviet academiciansan event that showed many had
voted one way in preliminary commissions and another in the general assembly
reflected the collapse of the thin fiction of respectful academic negotiation with the
representatives of party scholarship. Yet this maelstrom does not explain the depth
of the morass in which the academy found itself in 1929. Several sources attest that
the postelection composition of the academy after February 1929, as a result of the
trading in commissions, was, as Vernadskii put it, more independent, since the
enormous part of the new academicians consider the Oldenburg-Fersman policy
mistaken, too conciliatory. Oldenburg himself notified the authorities of this.96
Given this predicament, the outcomes the institution faced as of early 1929
were radical alteration (dissolution, massive reorganization, or merger with the
154 | SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

Communist Academy) or some sort of more gradual reform. Of these, the threat
to dissolve the Academy of Sciences into its component parts became a distinctly
realizable threat, which might have given the Communist Academy an unprecedented opportunity to step into its place. This threat was raised many times in this
crisis period, both before and after the rejection of the three party candidates. The
representatives of the union republics unambiguously threatened the recalcitrant
academy with the breakup of the institution. After the troika of party scholars
were rejected, a delegation of academicians, summoned to Moscow, was whisked
in a curtained limousine to an emergency summit meeting in the Kremlin. There,
the Politburo member Valerian Kuibyshev strongly argued for a radical assault on
the academy.97
There is still no reason to believe that the Academy of Sciences was genuinely
on the verge of dissolution in 1929, but the fact that the Communist Academy was
waiting in the wings gave the threat some bite. It is yet another irony of this story
that a decisive step toward preserving the Academy of Sciences was the resolution
of the new faction of communist academicians, the party scholars who had just
established a communist bulwark at the venerable academy. The factions deliberations, sent to the Politburo in February 1929, unanimously resolved that the task
in regard to the Academy of Sciences consists not in the destruction of this institution but in its lengthy reconstruction.98
In an extraordinary volte-face, the newly elected communist academicians,
including Communist Academy luminaries Pokrovskii, Riazanov, Deborin, Bukharin, and Friche, now gave their imprimatur to a defense of the old academy.99
Moreover, it is in the deliberations of the faction of communist academicians, the
leading representatives of party scholarship, that the future course of the Communist Academy first became perceptibly linked to a sudden shift in attitudes toward
the Academy of Sciences. After establishing a base for party scholarship within the
Academy of Sciences, the party scholars obviously began to plan the future of the
two academies in a dramatically different manner.
The restructured older academy, not its communist counterpart, was now for
the first time portrayed by the Bolshevik intellectuals as the Soviet Unions dominant scholarly institution of the future. From the point of view of long-term
prospects, it is imperative to hold the course for a single scientific institution,
embracing various disciplines with a single method, the communist academicians
advised the Politburo. . . . The Academy of Sciences must be radically reformed,
remade, and reconstructed. The Humanities Division was singled out for fundamental reorganization, which the administration of the Communist Academy and
other party institutions could help effect.
Moreover, communist academicians agreed to publish in journals, take part
in foreign delegations, and organize new cadres of youth around themselves at
the reformed institution. Bukharin, Pokrovskii, and Riazanov were delegated to
take the factions proposals to the Politburo, and the group resolved to confer with
VARNITSO leaders the next Friday over at the Marx-Engels Institute. The ComSYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS | 155

munist Academy was not forgotten; the new academicians simultaneously resolved
that the Communist Academy . . . must remain a scholarly center of communism
in, so to speak, its pure culture.100 Although the faction was perhaps unwilling to
put the full implications for the Communist Academy in writing, this formulation
was damaging enough for an institution that had for a decade groomed itself for
hegemony.
Riazanov now assured his new colleagues that having spent colossal energy
on the winning of the Academy of Sciences, he and his communist compatriots
were unlikely to destroy it from within. Rather, they were interested in reforming, supporting, and strengthening the institution. Most startling of all, Riazanov
permitted himself to disparage the achievements of the Communist Academy, in
which he had been a guiding force from the beginning. This, he now said, was
only a pale copy of the organization of the Academy of Sciences.101
The distinguished Marx scholars disenchantment and final break with the
Communist Academy he had founded was one explanation for this startling defection. A number of trends at the Comacademy in the mid- to late 1920s seem to
have precipitated his change of heart. The mid-decade was the time the party institution experienced a striking generational shift, as an influx of young researchers
(nauchnye sotrudniki) swelled from 20 in 1925 to 156 in 1927. Of the latter a full 75
percent had graduated from the Institute of Red Professors, bringing with them
a distinctively combative brand of Bolshevik political culture.102 By the eve of the
Great Break, the rising generation of young cadres thrust itself into the forefront of
disciplinary, ideological, and generational infighting. Along the way, the upheaval
in party scholarship began to make a mockery of the Comacademys vaunted
service function everywhere except in the realm of party ideology; by 1930 the
self-immolation of party scholarship had proceeded so far that the academys Vestnik, which had aimed to be the most scholarly of all party journals founded in the
early 1920s, had all but abandoned its research function.103 The outspoken and
erudite Riazanov had a lengthy history of political skirmishes with well-connected
party students at the Comacademys courses in Marxism, as well as the party cell
at the Marx-Engels Institute, which he ran with a firm hand. This became a major
liability around 1929, the year when his first serious feud with a group of red professors erupted. Riazanovs disgust with the hunt for deviations led him to unofficially abandon any role in the Comacademy presidium that same year.104
Pokrovskii, however, represents an opposite pole among the new communist
academicians. His own militance and maneuvering kept him at the helm of the
Comacademy, where he weathered the Great Break and took part in the metamorphosis of party scholarship. As the dean of Marxist historians, he stood at the
head of the attacks on non-Marxist historians at the Academy of Sciences, above
all on Platonov and Evgenii Tarle, to whom he repeatedly from the mid-1920s on
had referred in party discussions as the most reactionary group of historians in
the USSR. Mounting (but as yet circumstantial) evidence has linked his profes156 | SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

sional and increasingly personal antagonisms toward these historians with the
secret police repressions of the Academy Affair of 19291930.105 In 1929, moreover,
Pokrovskii opposed a plan by his fellow newly elected communist academicians,
Riazanov and Bukharin, to create a new Institute of History at the Academy of
Sciences, which would have combined the work of party and nonparty historians. Younger party historians, such as Grigorii Samoilovich (Tsvi) Fridliand, went
farther than their mentor in opposing the proposal of Bukharin and Riazanov,
openly calling for the Communist Academy to remain the only center of scientific
research work . . . in the realm of the social sciences.106
The sharp upsurge in infighting in the party camp, however, should not obscure the fact that with the unanimous resolution of the faction of communist academicians the course was set for the preservation of the old academy as the highest
scholarly institution and a potential new object of party scholarships yearning
for a single hegemonic crown for the edifice of science. The question now was
whether this would occur along with a radical and repressive destruction (lomka)
of old traditions and personnel (a stance with which Pokrovskii by reputation was
clearly associated among the academicians) or a more mild reforms and perhaps
gradual merger (sliianie) with the Communist Academy, which at least some sources
attribute to Riazanov and Bukharin.107
It was in setting the general course for the reorganization of the old academy, however, and not in determining the precise manner and repressiveness with
which it would be carried out, that the party intellectuals seem to have had a
decisive voice. The significance of the recommendations of the communist academicians was accentuated when the Politburo, on the initiative of the faction,
terminated the Enukidze commission in March 1929 and in its place appointed the
communist academicians as the basis for a new Politburo commission, headed by
Pokrovskii, which would plan out the reorganization of the Academy of Sciences.
In April 1929 the Politburo approved the plans of the communist faction of academicians on the further direction and organization of the work of the Academy
of Sciences, while refraining from organizing new institutes in the humanities at
the present stage.108 This suggests that the Politburo agreed to expansion of the
bolshevized academy in the humanities and social sciences, but only at a later date.
Long-held attitudes about the future of the Communist Academy did not vanish overnight. Several of the new academicians, such as Lunacharskii and above all
the condemned Politburo rightist Bukharin, were by mid-1929 under siege and
at the low point of their influence, and the Communist Academy was approaching
the apex of its growth. There were deep-seated reasons why many party scholars
continued to champion the Communist Academy for a few more years. For one
thing, the institution retained its significance as a communist counterweight in
scholarship as campaigns continued against the Academy of Sciences, its membership was overhauled, and calls for radical cultural revolution continued. At the
epicenter of the Academy Affair, the director of the academys library, the historian
S. F. Platonov, was accused by the OGPU of organizing a mythical anti-Soviet
SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS | 157

group, the All-Peoples Union of Struggle for the Resurrection of Free Russia.
During the wave of arrests that hit the Academy of Sciences in 1930, some Communist Academy members played the role of ideologically justifying the trumped-up
charges.109
Yet the political accusations against nonparty academicians, coming on the
heels of the large-scale purge of all the academys staff in 1929, had the effect
of further opening up the Academy of Sciences to party scholarship, since twothirds of the approximately 150 academicians and researchers known to have been
arrested were in the humanities.110 As the Academy of Sciences vastly expanded,
taking on an influx of young graduate students in 19291930, admitting a flood
of Marxist scholars and boosting the number of communist staff members from
nearly nil in 1928 to almost 350 by 1933, the Communist Academys claim to primacy among all Soviet scholarly institutions lost much of its political significance
and practical allure.111 The bolshevization of the Academy of Sciences was thus a
Pyrrhic victory for its longtime competitor. Although it would not become fully
apparent until after the upheavals and assaults of the Great Break were reined in,
much of the Comacademys purpose, and its drive, had in one stroke withered
away.
With the rehabilitation of the bourgeois specialists in 1932, the Communist
Academys role as chief institutional outlet for hegemonic party aspirations in academia further slipped away, and it spiraled into a period of rapid decline. In a final
resolution to the dynamic of Moscow-Leningrad confrontation inherent in the
history of the two academies, the headquarters of the Academy of Sciences was
moved to the capital city in 1934 and, fittingly, took up residence in new buildings that had been originally planned for the Communist Academy. In a stroke of
supreme irony, the party institution was swallowed by the Academy of Sciences
in 1936.112
In light of the Communist Academys place at the heart of the reinvention of
the old academy, this now appears as only the formal last step in a twisted path
from symbiotic rivalry in the 1920s to a complex merger between the institutions
and the traditions they represented. Many of the official, outward forms which
this merger imposed (the primacy of scientific-research institutes, vast expansion
and centralization, the fundamental reform in the humanities section, and the
valorization of service with all its ramifications) can be traced in part to either the
aspirations, the innovations, or the academic ideology of party scholarshipas it
had evolved at a Communist Academy ever eying its older rival.
The Communist Academys lengthy quest for hegemony in the 1920s was
conveniently forgotten in the 1930s and after, yet it appears perhaps the most
consequential of these bequeathals. By 1991, when the cunning of history had
transformed the Academy of Sciences, the imagined new scientific model of the
future, into a relicsome would again use the term anachronismof the Soviet
past, the Communist Academy was hardly at all recalled as anything but the im-

158 | SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS

placable foe of its pedigreed predecessor. But were its aspirations to crown the
edifice not in a sense realized in the gargantuan new Academy of Sciences? The
hegemony of this leviathan Soviet empire of knowledge was not the product of
two centuries of unbroken tradition stretching back to Peter the Great. It was a
legacy of the long-forgotten Communist Academy.

SYMBIOSIS TO SYNTHESIS | 159

PART III
MEDIATORS AND TRAVELERS

UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING

THE NEW RUSSIA
Mariia Kudasheva as Romain Rollands Cultural Mediator

n June 2, 1931, Romain Rolland wrote to Maksim Gorky about a Russian literary figure and translator who was becoming the most important
woman in his life: Mariia Pavlovna Kudasheva (ne Curillier) or, as she
became known after they married in 1934, Marie Rolland. Mariia Pavlovna has
done much, the grand crivain told the great proletarian writer, to make me understand and love the new Russia.1 Kudashevas visits to Villeneuve in 1929, and then
from July 1930 until May 1931, where Rolland lived on the shores of Lake Geneva,
came at a key moment in Rollands relationship with Stalins Soviet Union. Moving
away from his 1920s pacifism and admiration for Ghandi, the engag man of letters
was joining the most celebrated interwar friends of the Soviet Union, Western
intellectuals and literary figures who came to be lionized in an unprecedented
way during the rise of Stalinist culture in the USSR in the 1930s. In the wake of
Kudashevas visit, the elderly Rolland, twenty-nine years Kudashevas senior, told
Gorky of his decision to assume the honorary presidency of the French Society of
Friends and defend the Soviet Union from any threat or attack.2 Rolland, famous as
an outspoken and earnest man of conscience, went on to remain silent during the
purges and was perhaps the most distinguished European intellectual committed
to defending Stalinism in the 1930s.
Kudasheva played several roles that assume importance in understanding Rollands relationship to the Soviet Union throughout the period that the fellowtraveler lent his credibility and moral authority to the support of Stalinism in the
1930s. First and foremost, she became his secretary and the effective manager of
Rollands voluminous 1930s contacts with the Soviet press, publishing houses, and
cultural institutions. In this way Kudasheva not only contributed to one of the success stories of Soviet cultural diplomacy in the 1930s but also facilitated a veritable
Soviet cult of the French writer. Rollands translations, statements, and participation
from afar as a leading friend of the Soviet Union, made possible by Kudashevas
managerial activities, helped turn her husband into a living icon within Stalinist
culture in the era of the Popular Front. This was a status that Rolland himself
163

only partially understood and controlled, and Kudashevas role in its creation has
remained almost unexamined in scholarly literature. Furthermore, as Rollands
personal Russian translator, Kudasheva familiarized him with Soviet cultural life
and was present during his audience with Stalin in the Kremlin in 1935. Finally,
Kudashevas role in Rollands fellow-traveling was so great that at the time she was
denounced by Rollands critics as an NKVD operative manipulating her husbands
loyal defense of the Soviets. To this day her relationship with the secret police
has remained shrouded in mystery. This chapter considers Kudashevas impact on
Rolland by approaching her as an actor in her own right, with her own outlook
and distinct, multifaceted role in brokering the relationship between the writer
and the Soviet Union. It also regards her as a particular type of cultural meditator.
Mediators in this context can be understood as figures who were in frequent
contact with the outsider observer or traveler, shaping the cross-border contact
between interested foreigners and the Soviet system. In the case of the fellowtravelers and European intellectuals, the successful mediator had to be able to
bridge and operate simultaneously in two worlds: European cultural and intellectual life, on the one hand, and Stalinist cultural politics and ideology, on the other.
Their close contacts with Soviet sympathizers put a certain class of intermediaries
in a special position in both the institutions of Soviet cultural diplomacy and the
extraordinarily successful Communist International (Comintern)-based initiatives
of Willi Mnzenberg. Often several such figures were attached to every major
fellow-traveler, Rolland included. To navigate controversial debates about Soviet
policies in the interwar years, the language barrier, and the difficulties of traveling
in an increasingly closed society, Western sympathizers became quite reliant on
their Soviet contacts, heightening the mediators ability to influence views and
perceptions about the Soviet Union during the heyday of Western fascination with
communism.3 Especially during the sharp upswing in Western pro-Soviet sentiment during the First Five-Year Plan and the age of antifascist culture during the
Popular Front, Soviet cultural diplomacy assigned these figures an outsized role.
Inside the Soviet Union, after the first phase of Stalinism in the late 1920s made
international travel and exchange significantly more difficult, the place of Soviet
mediators paradoxically increased. These were the privileged party and Soviet
intellectuals, cultural officials, and diplomats who were able to travel around Europe, interact with foreigners, and report to the entire country on international
developments.
At the same time, mediators were increasingly under pressure to produce positive results and had to operate within the pressure cooker of Stalinist politics and
ideology. Their actions were quite constrained by their official or quasi-official
mission. But as often talented and impressive intellectuals in their own right, they
also had their own views about politics, culture, and their Western sympathizers.
Many of them, as I have argued elsewhere, can be called Stalinist Westernizers, in
that they saw an opportunity to bring Soviet culture close to the leftist culture of
Europe, and many of themincluding Kudashevagenuinely admired the writ164 | UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA

ers and intellectuals they also influenced or manipulated.4 Their official mission of
keeping Western intellectuals views of the USSR positive could be in sync with
their own proclivity to draw a Soviet culture closer to Europe, which in turn was
a precondition for the quest of making Moscow into a dominant, international
cultural capital.5
As Rollands companion and then wife and secretary, Kudasheva was no typical or ordinary mediator. Her case prompts reflections on the different types of
figures who came into sustained and close contact with prominent European sympathizers such as Rolland. Indeed, we can distinguish among at least three major
(and, as the case of Kudasheva suggests, overlapping) types of mediators in the
history of the Soviet encounter with foreign visitors. The first included Soviet
professionals, scientists, or cultural figures engaged in the same pursuit as their
Western counterparts. With the increasing mobilization and regimentation of the
Soviet intelligentsia in the late 1920s, major Soviet intellectuals with international
ties came to play official or quasi-official roles in contacts with and visits from
their foreign colleagues. Often they played this role because they already were in
contact or close to the foreigner in question. Rolland, for example, had been in
correspondence with Gorky for twelve years before the latter returned to the Soviet Union in 1928 to become perhaps the preeminent architect of Stalinist culture.
It was Gorky who invited Rolland to visit the USSR starting in the early 1930s and
who played a large role when he finally arrived in 1935.
The second type comprised Soviet cultural officials (and on a lower level,
guides and translators) or cultural diplomats, drawn from the ranks of party or
party-minded intellectuals. Rolland was important enough so that he was courted
by Aleksandr Arosev, the director of VOKS, the chief agency of Soviet cultural
diplomacy. Arosev, an Old Bolshevik revolutionary and childhood friend of Viacheslav Molotov who was a minor literary figure in his own right, had a connection with the French writer that, Arosev claimed, dated from his time in Paris
in the prerevolutionary emigration. As early as 1931, when a Rolland visit to the
USSR was already a possibility, Arosev boasted to Stalin that the left-leaning intellectual was one of his prime contacts in the French-speaking world (at a time when
Arosev was angling for a diplomatic post in France). On May 17, 1935, Arosev forwarded Rollands request to meet with Stalin during his upcoming visit and offered
to brief Stalin on the French writers mental makeup. Arosev also visited Rolland
in Switzerland in the mid-1930s, maintained VOKS oversight of his Soviet visit in
1935, and hosted Rolland and Kudasheva in his two adjacent apartments in Moscows House on the Embankment. Along with Kudasheva, Arosev was present and
translating during Rollands audience with Stalin.6 Arosevs correspondence with
Rolland makes clear that he wrote to Kudasheva separately in advance of the visit.7
Other mediators of these first two types who played major roles in the visits
and Soviet dealings of important figures include the ambassador to London Ivan
Maiskii, who was close to Sidney and Beatrice Webb; the avant-gardist Sergei
Tretiakov, who visited Berlin and influenced the likes of Walter Benjamin; and the
UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA | 165

flamboyant party journalist Mikhail Koltsov, who along with his common-law
wife Maria Osten played a major role in the visit of Lion Feuchtwanger.8 The
cultural amphibian Ilya Ehrenburg (Ilia Erenburg) was in a class of his own, since
he had significant ties with virtually the entire left-leaning wing of the French
intelligentsia.9
Kudasheva, by contrast, belonged to a third type, which might be called an
intimate mediator. She was one of those Russian, Soviet, or communist lovers or
spouses who came to have an emotional link to their partners that the other types
of mediators could not replicate, allowing her to personally represent or symbolize
the new Russia in a way other mediators could not. She did not start off that way,
however. She first got involved with Rolland as a minor mediator of the first two
typesa literary figure in her own right who initiated contact with the French
writer as early as 1922, on the one hand, and a VOKS guide-translator working
with French intellectuals, on the other.

Intimate Inspiration: Kudasheva and Rollands Soviet Friendship

Born in 1895 in St. Petersburg, Kudasheva was the daughter of Adle Curillier,
a French governess in a noble Russian household. Her father was a Russian army
officer whom the daughter never knew; she was declared illegitimate. She later
married Sergei Kudashev, the son of the noble family where her mother taught
(Kudashev joined the White Army during the Russian Civil War and reportedly
died of typhus in Crimea in 1920). Along the way, Kudasheva became a poet and
minor literary intellectual in her own right. As a close friend of the older poet and
patron extraordinaire Maximilian Voloshin, who was the center of a legendary
literary circle at his house in the Crimean coastal town of Koktebel, the young
Maia, as she was then known, moved in a close-knit literary intelligentsia milieu
that included Ehrenburg, Osip Mandelshtam, and Boris Pasternak.10 In late 1922
the widowed Kudasheva, who had eagerly read the first volumes of Rollands monumental Bildungsroman, Jean-Christophe, began a correspondence with the French
writer, barraging him with her poetry and exalting the new regime until she elicited a response. As this behavior suggests, Kudasheva belonged to that wing of
the literary intelligentsia that adapted to Soviet conditions, and throughout the
1920s she was loyally pro-Soviet.11 It was typical of the NEP period that this political stance, combined with her foreign language skills and cultural sophistication,
could overcome her previous marital tie with the nobility and the Whites, allowing
her talents to be employed as a VOKS guide-translator of the 1920s generation.
In 1922 Kudasheva became the personal secretary of Petr Semenovich Kogan
(18721932), president of the Academy of Artistic Sciences (Akademiia khudozhestvennykh nauk), founded the previous year to help bring the study of art and literature into the Soviet era. Kogan was a historian of West European literature
engaged in developing Marxist literary criticism until he came under attack by
militants in the proletarian literature camp during the Great Break.12 Kogan and
Kudasheva had an affair. Because Kogans academy had quickly become a sponsor
166 | UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA

of international exhibitions, he was able to bring her with him to one such exhibition of decorative arts in Paris in 1925. There Kudasheva met the French writer
and poet Georges Duhamel, who was so taken by Kudasheva that he made plans
to visit the USSR. This Duhamel did in 1927, traveling with fellow-writer Luc
Durtain. Duhamel spoke of Kudasheva to Rolland, who was prompted to write
Gorky on April 5, 1928, to ask whether he knew the faithful guide of Duhamel
and Durtain: she had written charming verse in French and was now passionate
about Bolshevism.13 At that point, Gorky did not yet know Kudasheva.
In 1928 the correspondence between Rolland and the literary Soviet guide became more tender. Rolland, following the pattern he had developed with previous
important women in his life, presented himself to Masha (a nickname for Mariia)
as a wise, fraternal elder who would help the younger woman realize herself.14
Rolland came from a Catholic, petit-bourgeois background in Burgundy, and it is
to these provincial origins that at least one biographer has attributed his frugal,
earnest sobriety, his disdain for caf society, and his puritanical morality (Rainer
Maria Rilke once called his private life a little spinsterish).15 As a compulsive
writer and graphomaniacal correspondent, however, Rolland was nothing if not
persistent, and he was determined to get more involved with his admirer. In July
1929 he made an urgent request that Kudasheva be given a position on the Leningrad publishing house Vremia, which was translating his collected works into
Russian, so that she could meet with him. She is my friend, he told Gorky simply,
and I desire to see her personally.16 Kudasheva took the position, and when Rolland decided to donate his honorarium to student stipends at Moscow University
in order to show his sympathy for education in the new Russia, he authorized mon
amie Kudasheva to announce the news to VOKS.17
The period in which Rolland became personally close to Kudashevamarked
at the outset by their newfound intimacy in 1928 and by the end of Kudashevas
long-term visit to Villeneuve in May 1931corresponded with a crucial shift in the
French writers stance toward the USSR. Around 19281929 Rolland was drawn
into a more pro-Soviet position, which deepened in the course of the First FiveYear Plan; by 1931 he was a full-fledged fellow-traveler, defending the USSR in
public debates and taking positions in Soviet friendship and front organizations.
The politicization and growing procommunist affiliation of previously nonpartisan European intellectuals during the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and
the Stalin Revolution was a much broader phenomenon. The same general path
toward formalizing affiliation or friendship with the Soviet cause was charted, for
example, in this same period by a range of such different literary figures as Andr
Gide and Theodore Dreiser. However, Rollands growing attraction to the USSR
under Stalin had many specific features, and to understand Kudashevas contribution it is necessary to look at these in their overall configuration.
From 1917 on Rolland had expressed a certain general approval for the Bolshevik Revolution, which was informed by his lifelong immersion in the French
Revolution. This tendency to view the Soviet revolutionary experience through
UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA | 167

the prism of the French, or as Michel Vovelle has put it, to play the game of analogies, was a distinguishing characteristic of French intellectuals and scholars as
they looked east.18 Rollands ardent pacifism, for which he came under attack in
the First World War with his 1915 antiwar manifesto Au-dessus de la mle (Above
the Fray), mitigated against embracing the violence openly justified in the early
years of the Bolshevik Revolution. In the 1920s Rolland also rejected the cultural
militarization of the new regime. From Gorky, who had fallen out with Lenin and
the party leadership in the early 1920s, he learned of the anti-intellectual features
of Bolshevism and the regimentation of culture.19
Rollands initial postrevolutionary stance was clarified with a famous debate
in 19211922 with one of his young followers, Henri Barbusse, who gathered procommunist intellectuals around the journal Clart. As Barbusse launched himself
on a trajectory that took him into the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1923 as
one of the partys leading intellectual soldiers, it brought him into conflict with
Rolland, who refused to be pulled along this path. In 19211922 the result was
a high-profile debate between Barbusse and Rolland, which was well known to
Soviet observers of Europe. Barbusse attacked intellectuals who stood above the
fray, warning that those who are not with us are against us; Rolland responded
with condemnations of Soviet violence, secrecy, intolerance, and centralization,
defending the intellectuals independence of the spirit. Despite Rollands distance
from communism in this period, he remained on good terms with Barbusse and,
Duchatelet has concluded, fascinated by the dynamism of the Russian Revolution.20
At the same time, Rolland was an inveterate hero worshiper on a constant
search for role models and heroic historical actors. Only this can explain his volteface, for example, from Ghandi in the 1920s to Stalin in the 1930s. Between 1903
and 1912 Rolland wrote Jean-Christophe, his masterpiece based on the life of Beethoven (the work had first attracted Kudasheva and later influenced generations
of Soviet readers). Rollands 1903 popular biography of Beethoven was the prototype for his series Lives of Illustrious Menlater, via Maksim Gorky, adopted
in the Soviet context in the series Zhizn zamechatelnykh liudeifollowed in later
years by biographies of Lev Tolstoy, Michelangelo, Gandhi, and others. Like JeanChristophe and other novels, his biographies were preoccupied with the heroic life
of cultural creators. In all these works, written for a mass audience in an accessible yet serious style of high popularization (haute vulgarisation), Rolland explored
the heroic nature of geniuses who, despite all suffering, remained continually
faithful to humanity.21 The other glue holding together his disparate social and
political engagementsunderlying successive conversions to a Tolstoy-inflected
pacifism before and during and after the First World War, enthusiasm for Gandhi
in the 1920s, and defense of Stalinism in the 1930swas his successive commitment to French-German, pan-European, and East-West reconciliation. This form of
internationalism was nurtured by his early sympathy to socialism, which dated to
about 1895 and was of a nondenominational type that eschewed class warfare. One
constant Fisher has identified in Rollands intellectual evolution was his intuitive
168 | UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA

feeling of contact with great forces, a sublime connection to humanity and the
world he termed, in an exchange with Freud, an oceanic sensibility.22 As he was
drawn closer to the Soviet Union after 1931 and pointedly distanced himself from
pacifism, Stalin as an intellectual man of action became the recipient of Rollands
glorification of the heroic culture creator.23
Finally, there was a cultural dimension to Rollands admiration of the Soviet
Union in the age of Stalin. He had long espoused a commitment to popular enlightenment and practiced didactic realism in a fashion that drew him closer to
Soviet culture during the eclipse of avant-garde experimentalism and the rise of
socialist realism. As far back as 1902, a year before the emergence of Bolshevism
itself, he had written both Le 14 juillet (July 14) and Le Thtre du people (The Peoples Theater). The first work marked the debut of his theatrical series about the
French Revolution, depicting the heroism of the masses in deciding their own fate
and ending in a mass festival. The second essay, published only in 1913, reflected
his activity as the driving force for a French popular theater at the turn of the
century, an early effort to encourage mass participation and bring theater to workers neighborhoods.24 After the October Revolution, Rolland was well-known to
Soviet theoreticians of a new theater and mass festivals, creating a feedback loop
of mutual admiration.25 From early on, then, Rolland embraced the social role of
art and rejected modernist experimentation. These features of his work during
the era of socialist realism and attacks on formalism can be contrasted to Andr
Gides aestheticism, which led Gide to always feel uncomfortable with Soviet cultural developments in the same period.26 In sum, the monumentalism of Stalinist culture was not repugnant to Rolland. Some of the components of Rollands
intellectual makeupnotably, the influence of Richard Wagner and Friedrich
Nietzschewere also present as currents running through Bolshevik culture, from
prewar Godbuilding to Gorkian revolutionary romanticism. In part because of
these overlapping patterns, a number of the shifts enacted within Soviet culture of
the Stalinist 1930sthe logocentric primacy of didactic literature for the masses
and the blurring of lines between high and popular culture, the glorification of
enlightenment, writers, and science, the embrace of nineteenth-century classics,
and the mass inculcation of culturednessappealed to Rollands outlook.
Rollands transformation into a committed fellow-traveler, which began in
19281931 and reached its apogee in the mid-1930s with his Soviet visit and talk
with Stalin, was therefore informed by an array of long-standing intellectual, political, and cultural features of his outlook. These were magnified by more general international changes underway after the late 1920sthe rise of fascism, the
crisis of capitalism during the Great Depression, and the Stalin Revolutionthat
brought him and many others into the Soviet orbit. At the same time, his status as a
leading Soviet friendinvolving a significant presence in Soviet culture and consistent public support for the Soviet order abroadcould be brought about only
by specific transactions with mediators and Soviet or Soviet-influenced cultural
organizations. In this sense, Kudasheva was only one among several such mediaUNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA | 169

tors, who included Gorky and Arosev. However, the language that Rolland used to
describe Kudasheva to Gorky in 19281931, including references to her passionate
attraction to Bolshevism and her transfer of love for the new Russia, strongly suggests that during this key transition period the infatuation of the literary master
with Kudasheva and his infatuation with Stalinism were closely intertwined. In
this light, Kudasheva was an indispensable catalyst in Rollands eager acceptance
of a newly formalized role as fellow-traveler.

Kudasheva and the Secret Police

A revealing episode occurred when Rolland first invited Kudasheva to visit
him abroad in 1929. Even though VOKS supported her request, the Soviet
authoritiesmeaning the visa service of the Peoples Commissariat of Foreign
Affairs, with vetting from the secret policeinitially rejected Kudashevas application for a foreign passport to spend three weeks with Rolland in Switzerland in
August 1929.27 This came at the outset of the Stalin period, when Soviet authorities
were drastically tightening restrictions on foreign travel. By the time Rolland was
told there would be a delay, he had paid for all expenses for Kudashevas trip, arranged for her to receive a Swiss visa, and traveled across Switzerland to meet her.
This setback prompted Rolland to send several angry letters to his Soviet contacts,
sparking a bout of bureaucratic wrangling on the part of his Soviet supporters. In
particular, Rolland vented bitterly to Gorky, who in 1929 had just achieved a commanding position by returning to a place of honor in Soviet culture: One could
say that the people in Moscow are busy finding ways to lose their last friendships
among the independent minds of the West. I will never forget this lack of respect
for me.28
Rolland had complained to the right person. On August 10, the day after
VOKS received a copy of Rollands letter of complaint to Gorky, a leading VOKS
official wrote to the secret police urging reconsideration of Kudashevas case.
VOKS wrote directly to Meier Abramovich Trilesser, head of the Foreign Department (Inostrannyi otdel, INO). Trilesser, a party member since 1901 and Cheka
member since 1918, also became deputy director of the entire OGPU; he was the
secret police official most heavily involved in VOKS affairs in the 1920s, judging by the frequency with which his name appears on documents.29 Significantly,
VOKSs appeal to Trilesser made its case for appeasing Rolland by invoking the
category of friend: Romain Rolland is a genuine friend of the USSR, having repeatedly demonstrated the best attitude toward the Union in the European press.
Among West European writers with worldwide reputations the USSR has too few
friends so as to offend Romain Rolland. A week later, on August 17a long time
for Rolland, but a remarkably short one for the Soviet bureaucratic Leviathan
Gorky telegrammed Rolland that Kudashevas departure had been authorized.30
That Rolland prevailed in a relatively short time is intriguing in two respects.
First, it reflected his genuine stature as a friend in Soviet eyes. The Soviets did not
use the term fellow-traveler for foreigners but endowed the personalized status
170 | UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA

of friend of the USSR with genuine meaning. Second, this episode suggests that
at least during her initial application for a foreign passport, Kudashevas visit to
Rolland in Switzerland was attempted in opposition to the bureaucracys stance
and therefore not in collusion with, or at least not planned out in advance by, the
OGPU, the secret police (after 1934, NKVD). If she had been tasked by the secret
police from the outset to ensnare Rolland, why would her application to travel to
Switzerland have been initially rejected?
There is, however, no evidence as to how the secret police may have approached Kudasheva after the initial rejection of her application was reversed. In
general terms, the secret police kept watch on leading intellectuals, both domestic and foreign, kept a widespread network of seksoty (sekretnye sotrudniki, secret
informants) to gather information on foreigners, and was deeply involved with
Soviet travelers abroad.31 So it is hard to imagine that Kudasheva, who left her
relatives and son, Sergei, in Moscow when she joined Rolland in Switzerland, had
no contact or relationship with the secret police during the time she was living
with Rolland.
The original source of the persistent rumors in the 1930s that Kudasheva herself was a Soviet agent was very likely Duhamel, the writer for whom she served as
guide during his visit of 1927 and whom she met again in 1930. In his diary from
1932, at a time when he was speculating on how Kudasheva influenced Rolland,
Duhamel acidly referred to her as an revolutionary Russian intriguer (intrigante
rvolutionnaire russe) whose natural predilection was to specialize in the genre
of famous writers. After serving him and Durtain as a benevolent secretary in
1927, he revealed, Kudasheva had begun a romantic correspondence (correspondence
amoureuse) with him after he returned homea precursor to what had happened
with Rolland. She loves letters, amorous complications, writers, perhaps even a
little glory, Duhamel gossiped in his cutting way. She would not object to making it into the history of literature and that of the revolution at the same time. Despite Duhamels mocking tone, he could have had some insight into Kudashevas
character and motivations. He may have also felt a bit jealous, of course. In any
case, behind Kudashevas actions he saw the Soviets, who had first tried to deploy
the temptresss feminine wiles against him, then with Rolland. It was a fine line
between the long arm of the Soviets and that of the secret police.32
Half a century after Duhamel wrote about his former guide, when Duhamels
son Bernard was publishing his fathers diary, he visited the elderly Kudasheva,
still living in Paris, and showed her these acerbic passages along with his fathers
accusation of manipulating Rolland on behalf of the Soviets. According to Bernard, Kudasheva discussed and at times resisted the implications of Georges Duhamels notes with a freshness of spirit that left the younger Duhamel fascinated.
Ultimately, he reported, she defended herself by admitting that she had been manipulated by the Soviets.33 This, of course, was a formulation vague enough to fit
several possible circumstances. The Soviets were not identical to the secret police.
On this point, the Russian writer Boris Nosik in 2001 wrote about a conversation
UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA | 171

he had with Kudasheva in Paris in the early 1980s, quoting her as saying, When
they sent me to Rolland. However, when one strips away the speculation, rumors,
and unsubstantiated claims from Nosiks rambling essay, one is left only with his
recollections of Kudashevas cryptic comments, which included an element of disdain for Rollandshe reportedly referred to him all those years later as a fool and
a mystic. Given that by almost any standard Rolland was indeed mystical and, in
light of his earnest admiration for Stalin and Stalinism, foolish as well, one cannot
read much into comments made four decades after his death.34
During the purge era, the ex-Communist Henri Guilbeaux, who had known
Kudasheva in Moscow while on Comintern work but who was by then a supporter
of Benito Mussolini, accused Kudasheva of being the source of Rollands proSoviet stance, which Rolland considered an outrage at the time.35 Descriptions of
Kudasheva as an OGPU/NKVD agent are repeated without documentation in later
literature as well. For example, Stephen Kochs sensationalist, quasi-fictionalized
book about spies and writers in the secret Soviet war of ideas against the West,
gives the air of knowing everything worth knowing about Princess Maria Pavlova [sic] Koudachova [sic]: she was a lady of the Kremlin and an agent directly
under Soviet secret service control . . . insinuating herself into every corner of [Rollands] existence and managing it for the apparat.36 The work, typically, received
public acclaim, dampened only slightly by doubts and misgivings by a few historians. In many of these gossipy tracts, distinctions among the NKVD, the Kremlin,
Stalin, and the Soviets are absent and make little difference in any case, since the
goal is to suggest perfidy and not to examine how things worked historically.37
In my view, it is reasonable to take some sort of contact between Kudasheva
and the Soviet secret police as virtually inevitable. But the archives of the Federal
Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB, a successor to OGPU/NKVD/
KGB) are closed, and we do not have the evidence to say what exactly this was.
Potential connections, reports, or even services rendered do not necessarily imply
that she was an agent or, by the same token, that she had no ability or room to
maneuver. What we can access is her extensive correspondence with the Foreign
Commission of the Presidium of the Union of Soviet Writers and the reports of
Arosev at VOKS. These documents suggest, as we shall see, that Kudasheva forcefully expressed views of her own and acted to protect Rolland from unwanted
Soviet contacts during the purge era. The evidence supports the apt observation
of Sophie Coeur, who has warned against the temptation, manifested in a sensationalist brand of anticommunist literature, to see Soviet mediators in general
as omnipotent agents on a single-minded political mission for the regime. Their
actions, not unlike their Western interlocutors, were complicated by loves, friendships, and rivalries for institutional and intellectual power, and not just political
efficacy. However, as Coeur writes, as opposed to Western intellectuals, who had
the luxury of greater choice and conviction, the Soviet mediators were marked by
far greater constraints, followed frequently by a tragic destiny.38

172 | UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA

Managing a Stalinist Cultural Icon

After Rollands turn to unconditional political support of the Soviet Union in
the early 1930s, his stature inside the Soviet Union began to grow. This opened the
door for his appropriation as a literary and cultural icon. Rollands works in Russian, translated for mass editions from the late 1920s on, had reached a circulation
of 1.3 million by November 1937. The accessibility of Rollands work as well as his
pro-Soviet and antifascist politics made him ideal for veneration by a mass Soviet
audience. For example, the literary critic Mikhail Apletin, who as the most active
administrator of the Foreign Commission of the Presidium of the Union of Soviet
Writers had extensive, ongoing contacts with Kudasheva in the 1930s, expressed
reservations about Gides complex, experimental, modernist style in the following
manner: This is not Rolland, this is a writer who is less accessible to the Soviet
reader.39
The quasi-official Soviet cult of Rolland could not dictate what varied Soviet
audiences would take from him, and indeed this could only add to the mass appeal
of foreign authors approved for mass dissemination. However, Rolland was presented and framed to Soviet audiences as part of what Katerina Clark has called
the Great Appropriationthe integration of international and prerevolutionary
Russian works into a Moscow-centric culture in order to affirm Soviet superiority
in the cultural realm, as in others.40 A typical example of a Rolland statement
presented to Soviet audiences was an article titled My Path to the Proletarian
Revolution, published in 1934 as part of the international acclaim for the newly established Union of Soviet Writers. Not only did this frame Rollands autobiography
as a conversion story culminating in his pro-Soviet stance, but the Soviet version
of Rolland was suspiciously fluent in Soviet ideolanguage. For example, in Russian
translation Rolland criticized himself as a bourgeois individualist in his youth,
lambasted the caste stereotypes of the parasitic intelligentsia, and overcame his
bourgeois intellectual wavering by embracing the Soviet Union.41
The high point in the cult of Rolland came in the wake of the writers June
28, 1935, meeting with Stalin. The Kremlin audience was itself the highlight of a
massively publicized visit during which Rolland and Kudasheva lived chez Arosev
in Moscow for a week and then spent three weeks at Gorkys villa. In the Kremlin,
Kudasheva was at her husbands side, taking notes in French at the meeting, while
Arosev acted as interpreter. The meeting with Stalin, and the visit more generally,
was pivotal in cementing Rollands transformation into a leading luminary among
the foreign friends, a stance that was shaken by his doubts about the purges in 1937
and broken with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Both the evidence of the uncensored transcript of the Kremlin talk and many of Rollands other interactions with
his French and Soviet interlocutors at the time suggest that Rolland had become
fascinated with Stalin as an intellectual man of action, a kind of philosopher-king
who bridged the old divide between thought and action. He began to explicitly
identify the lives of Bolshevik revolutionaries, and Stalin in particular, with the
UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA | 173

Figure 5. Romen Rollan posetil Kreml (Romain Rolland visits the Kremlin), Pravda, 25
June 1935. The front-page photograph shows Mariia Kudasheva (Marie Rolland) by the
writers side.
174 | UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA

heroic, engaged, creative geniuses like Beethoven to whom he had devoted so

much of his literary life.
The collection of essays Rolland published in 1935 on his literary companions
Shakespeare, Goethe, Hugo, Tolstoywas titled Compagnons de route (FellowTravelers), suggesting a linkage between the object of his fellow-traveling and
these cultural giants. These chapters, moreover, were followed by a final essay on
Lenin, whom Rolland had criticized while alive but rediscovered in the 1930s. The
Russian revolutionary tradition, he suggested in this work, could be mated with
the European cultural legacy: Two maxims, paradoxically, which complete each
other: We must dream, says the man of action [Lenin]. And the man of dream
[Goethe]: We must act!42 In the Kremlin, Rolland replaced Lenin with Stalin,
thereby affirming a key association of the Stalin cult, that Stalin was the Lenin
of today. Toward the end of the meeting, in the version kept in Stalins personal
archive, Rolland asked the mustachioed dictator about the source of that new humanism of which, he informed Stalin, you are the first representative.43 Writing
to Stalin on the eve of his departure from Moscow, Rollands tone was solemn as
he pledged his genuine conviction that the duty of all humanity was to defend
the heroic Soviet creation of a new world from all its enemies. From this duty
you know this, dear comradeI have never retreated, and will never abandon as
long as I live.44
Kudasheva, sitting by Rollands side in Stalins office, likely had a far more
realistic understanding of Stalins power. For example, at one moment Kudasheva
expressed alarm to Apletin at a clumsy mistranslation into Russian of one of Rollands letters, which made her husband appear indiscrete about the unpublished
transcript of the Kremlin meeting. She exclaimed, what will Comrade Stalin himself think, if this letter makes it to him!45 According to Arosev, it was Kudasheva
who persuaded Rolland to decline Stalins personal invitation to stay at a government dacha, preferring instead to visit Gorkywho had experienced a falling-out
with the Stalin leadership and was under close observation.46 Rolland recalled in
1938, by which time Arosev had already been purged, that his VOKS chaperone
had insistently pressed the visiting couple to accept Stalins invitation even after
they were staying with Gorky. Arosev urged Rolland not to offend Stalin by refusing his hospitality.47
Arosevs animosity toward Kudasheva, so typical of rival mediators vying at
once for the attention of Western luminaries and that of Stalin or the party leadership, was inflamed during the course of the VOKS directors frantic attempts to
manage Rollands visit. The stakes were particularly high during the reception of
an intellectual sympathizer elevated to the level of a state visit, and all the more so
since Rollands sojourn directly involved Stalin and the party leadership. Arosevs
hostility toward Kudasheva likely dated to the meeting with Stalin at the Kremlin
at which Arosev translated. Kudasheva frequently broke in to correct him, since,
according to Rollands diary, Arosev translated very imperfectly, and Masha, as far
as possible, rectified it. Arosev later hurried to save face in front of Stalin, assuring
UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA | 175

Figure 6. Beseda t. Stalina s Romen Rollanom (Conversation of comrade Stalin with

Romain Rolland), Pravda, 29 June 1935. The front-page photograph shows Mariia
Kudasheva on the far right. Aleksandr Arosev, the director of VOKS (far left), translated
while Kudasheva took notes in French during the 28 June 1935 Kremlin meeting between
Stalin and Rolland.

him that while Kudashevas translations were more refined, since she knew the list
of Rollands questions in advance, his were more literal and accurate.48 Arosevs urgent pleas for the couple to accept Stalins offer of a dacha suggest either that a stay
with Gorky was considered undesirable, or that Arosev feared the consequences
of failure, or both.
Having declined Stalins invitation to stay at the government dacha, according
to Arosevs July 14, 1935, letter to Stalin, Kudasheva went with Rolland to Gorkys
residence and evidently fell under the influence of someone who must be seen
as oppositional to all those careful efforts [zaboty] toward Romain Rolland that
we have enacted. Arosev explained that before the trip Kudasheva had shown
nothing but sympathy for us and the general line of the Party. But in the course
of living at Gorkys, Arosev went as far as to charge to Stalin, Kudasheva had
176 | UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA

manifested a changed attitude toward us. The Old Bolshevik intellectual went on
to denounce Sergei Tretiakov, the former avant-gardist prominent in the Union of
Writers Foreign Commission, for this bad influence. Tretiakov was, according to
Arosev, trying to convince Kudasheva and others that the genuine, literary society
[obshchestvennost] was one thing, and Communists, their Central Committee, is
another.49 Thus did Arosev at once condemn two rival mediators, Kudasheva and
Tretiakov, justify his performance as a translator, and attempt to insulate himself
against the fall-out should Rollands visit not come off as planned. Indeed, in this
letter to Stalin Arosev devoted more time to Kudashevas outlook than to Rollands
own.
Kudashevas presence also assumed significance during Rollands 1935 visit because she introduced Rolland to her son, Sergei Kudashev, then a talented student
of mathematics at Moscow State University, and her relatives, whom Rolland began to call his little Russian family. While the ability of the watched Gorky to
have frank conversations with Rolland during this period is doubtful, Rolland did
hold substantive talks over the course of his visit with several people critical of the
Soviet system, who told him, for example, about the terror in Leningrad following the Kirov assassination. Those who gave Rolland such information included,
notably, his own son-in-law, Sergei. In the course of their talks in private settings
around Gorkys villa, Kudashev talked to his father-in-law about Soviet conditions,
at the very least mentioning ideological conformity and the camps of the Gulag.50
Rollands apologia for Stalinism was thus not predicated on a complete lack of
information. From these encounters that occurred only because of his marriage to
Kudasheva, the foreign luminary was told about the cruel reality of Soviet life. At
the time, he chose to disregard these conversations. To be sure, Rollands diary and
correspondence reveals that the eminent foreign visitor was not totally uncritical of
Stalin, Gorky, or the regime. For example, he noted Stalins maliciousness at table
and Gorkys willingness to sanction brutality. However, in the wake of the 1935
visit he intensified his use of key concepts prevalent in both Stalinist and antifascist
culture, such as referring to writers as engineers of human souls. In a specific shift
that can be dated to the summer of 1935, he began to publish public commentary
mainly in communist and fellow-traveling publications and, despite ongoing private concerns, ceased all public criticism of Soviet policies.51 At the same time,
however, Rolland did not forget what he had heard from Kudashevas family. With
the onset of the violence of the Great Terror, Rolland began to perceive what he
had witnessed in 1935 in a new light. He recorded these new, 1938 reflections in
an appendix to his Moscow diary, where the perspectives of the young Kudashev
also figured.52
Between Rollands visit in 1935 and his anguished purge-era doubts, however,
lay the culmination of his rise into a living icon of Stalinist internationalism. The
apogee was the all-union celebration in 1936 of Rollands seventieth birthday jubilee on a gargantuan scale. Here the organizing principle of the celebration was
conceived by the Union of Writers planning commission as R. Rollands path
UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA | 177

to revolution, affirming a teleological progression toward higher consciousness

in the telling of Rollands biography toward recognition of Soviet superiority.53
Apletin took the initiative two months in advance, planning a multimedia celebratory evening (torzhestvennyi vecher) in the large hall of the Moscow conservatory.
Between the columns, with heavy-handed symbolism, hung full-length drapes
bearing portraits of Stalin, Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Rolland. The evening
included an exhibition, poems, literary scenes in a musical drama from Rollands
work, scholarly talks, and a recorded greeting from the master himself. It also
included the screening of a special documentary film about Rollands Soviet visit
in 1935. Testimonials were given by Soviet writers and factory workers familiar
with his works. The scale of the event was underscored by reproductions of the
evening by Union of Writers groups in the major cities around the country, a
radio broadcast, and a biography of Rolland mass-produced for the occasion.54 In
the press coverage of the event that appeared in newspapers from Minsk to Vladivostok, Rolland was hailed as holding an honored place among all the European
writers who had become friends of the Soviet Union: in an oft-repeated phrase,
he was the spiritual leader (vozhd) of the best part of the foreign intelligentsia.
Arosev, in his own widely published newspaper article, wrote that Rolland was an
enlightener of the masses; paraphrasing Marxs famous phrase on his own task as
a philosopher, he placed Rolland in a line of great artists who did not want just to
study the world but to change it. It was difficult to miss the connection between art
and politics, the cultural heritage and Marxism-Leninism, and ultimately between
Rolland and Stalin. In case anyone did, Arosev added that Rolland realized that all
true art was revolutionary, but that art alone was not enougha fact also recognized by the greatest genius of mankind Comrade Stalin. The celebration of the
spiritual leader paid tribute to the political vozhd; the cult of the great European
writer justified and amplified the cult of Stalin.
Kudashevas role as Rollands secretary quickly evolved into an effort to manage Rollands burgeoning Soviet contacts. This involved a partnership in the mid1930s with Apletin of the Foreign Commission of the Presidium of the Union of
Soviet Writers, which after its creation in 1934 eclipsed VOKS in prestige as an
organ of cultural diplomacy. That year, for example, Apletin begged Mariia Pavlovna to have Rolland write one or two pages for a collection, Writers of the World
on the USSR: Without R. Rolland the collection will not be complete.55 However,
the fact that Soviet media demand for Rolland was not coordinated by any single
clearinghouse is suggested by several pieces of evidencefrom the stream of requests from a motley array of Soviet publishing initiatives to local mistranslations
of his French comments that found their way into some provincial newspapers.
Rollandvia Kudashevas translation efforts, of coursereplied to fan mail by
playing the role of wise authority for Soviet schoolchildren and youthful writers.56
Kudasheva also fielded a wide array of Soviet requests for Rolland to lend his
international prestige by making formal statements on important milestones, such
as the death of Gorky in 1936. Rolland was expected to play well-publicized roles
178 | UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA

in political campaigns involving foreign perceptions of the USSR. For example,

as part of the Soviet campaign against Gide after the latters scandalous critique
of Stalins USSR in 1936, Rolland delivered a stinging repudiation of his countryman. The Russian-language statement put out in Rollands name had little of the
high-flown rhetoric about humanity to which he was prone; instead, it played up
the Stalinist charge of double-dealing at the center of the Soviet campaign against
Gide. According to Rollands statement, the substance of Gides worthless critique
was less important than his reluctance to speak up openly with his criticisms inside
the USSR. This meant he had played a double game. Rollands publication was
then relayed back to Europe via French Communists.57
Kudasheva introduced Rolland to a constant stream of Russian and Soviet
literary works, translating them orally for him. Her work as Rollands personal
Russian translator ranged from Gorkys press articles in the early 1930s to new
works of literature she particularly wished him to hear. For example, Kudasheva
told Apletin that she was reading to Rolland excerpts of Petr Pavlenkos acclaimed
novel In the East (Na vostoke, published in 1936), in which a young female fighter
pilot acquits herself heroically in the coming war. Kudasheva called it one of the
most wonderful books in recent years. It should definitely be translated into
French.58 She also spent a great deal of time on nineteenth-century classics, in 1936
reading Anton Chekhov to her husband. The gargantuan Soviet Pushkin jubilee
of 1937, during which, in the words of Angela Brintlinger, Aleksandr Pushkin
was brought into the public discourse as a politicized entity, forced to represent
a version of his own past which supported the legitimacy of the Soviet state,
found Kudasheva translating for Rolland almost the entire prose of Pushkin.59
Like many relationships between Western sympathizers and Russians, Rollands
involvement with Kudasheva fanned his interest in all things Russian as well as
Soviet. Apletin supplied her with ample quantities of the latest Soviet literary and
political materials to translate for Rolland. In 1936 Kudasheva even began to teach
Rolland the Russian language in preparation for a return trip in 1937 that, because
of the onset of the Great Terror, never took place.
In the course of her extensive correspondence with Apletin, Kudasheva took
the time to express not just literary opinions but strong political views about international affairs. For days . . . we have been following the Spanish events, she
wrote in July 1936. There the future of the French Popular Front will be decided
as well. . . . How strange that there are people who want to turn us back to the
Middle Ages, into beast-like creatures. Again that fall, she wrote: What joy now
in Spain! We are afraid to believe it. . . . But it seems as if there will be a victory
for the [republican] government! And you read Pavlenko and you do not suffer but
rejoice, feeling the brotherhood of all peopleall races.60 These are not cynical
or jaded words; Kudasheva had plenty of enthusiasm with which to infect Rolland.
At least one intriguing document from 1935 suggests that Kudasheva actively
consulted with her Soviet correspondents on how to help Rolland in his disputes
with European critics of the Soviet Union. An excerpt from one of her letters to an
UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA | 179

unknown Soviet addressee was collected in a folder of Arosevs high-level materials on his European travels. It concerned the Italian anarchist Alfonso Petrini, who
had emigrated to the USSR after the Fascist rise to power. After serving a term
in exile internally in the Soviet Union, Petrini was apparently extradited to Italy.
About the Italian PetriniI read just last night in the anti-Fascist newspaper
Avanti that he was put on trial and freed (in Italy) and he had been apparently
sentenced to twenty years in prison! This forces one to think that he was a
provocateurand thus the Soviet government probably because of that gave him
up (if that is the case). If this was so, it would be wonderful if R. [Romain Rolland]
could answer his correspondents, who have twice written him all about this
affair. This would be a stunning blow to their (anarchist-Trotskyist) movement! At present all anarchists, and many others, are adhering to the Trotskyist movement!61

Whatever Kudashevas oft-discussed relationship to the Soviet secret police was

precisely, she appears in these lines as an emotional, speculative amateur as opposed to a seasoned conspirator. That this portion of Kudashevas letter was excerpted suggests it was distributed within the Soviet bureaucracy.
If Kudashevas activities were the basis for a great expansion of Rollands presence in the Soviet press and cultural production in the mid-1930s, after the onset
of the Great Terror starting in 1937 Kudasheva began a tactic of curtailing his
participation. Her husband sent numerous pleas to Stalin attempting to protect
friends and acquaintances he had met in 1935 from execution, including Nikolai
Bukharin and Arosev. Stalin, of course, never replied. In these missives, Rolland,
clearly hoping for influence, continued to assure Stalin that he would remain loyal
to the Soviet cause.62 Rolland was anguished by the course of events but did not
break his relations with the Soviets. Evidently, Rollands decision not to publicly
criticize the Soviet Union despite his reservations convinced the Soviet side that
he was still a friend.63 Kudasheva adjusted by shielding Rolland from the extensive
Soviet contacts he had so eagerly embraced before.
After all, the combination of the Soviet cult of Rolland and the proclivity of
the Soviets to flatter Western intellectuals and show them evidence of their Soviet
fame contributed to a huge demand for the publication of Rollands correspondence to Soviet citizens and institutions. In June 1936, before the first Moscow trial
began in August, Kudasheva had told Apletin directly of her view that that you
(and nobody in the USSR) never should publish the letters of Rolland in order to
give him satisfaction . . . because he more likely will be embarrassed. However,
at that point she added that occasionally (and he understands this) one must put
personal tastes aside and act from the point of view of the social benefit [s tochki
zreniia polzy obshchestvennosti].64 A year later, at the height of the purges in the fall
of 1937, her tone had changed dramatically: it is wrong, ridiculous, to write him
every October, every May 1, every jubilee, etc.for five newspapers! . . . Rolland a
long time ago became indignant about this. . . . One must write him for genuinely
180 | UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA

new events, when he himself wants and can. Otherwise, after all, both words and
feelings are recycled [stiraetsia].65 The reference to the feelings of the indignant
Rolland was an oblique warning that the requests were becoming counterproductive. However, the machinery of the Soviet cult of Rolland rolled on, confirming
both its sheer extent and its ritualistic dimensions. Over a year later, in October
1938, Kudasheva repeated the same sentiment but with still sharper words. A request to you, Kudasheva wrote Apletin:
Ask the newspapers not to send telegrams, and if there is some [important] matter
send registered letters. Telegrams are useless [ni k chemu]. And do not call by telephone, like the Radio Committee recently; nothing is audible, and besides. Truly
Rolland absolutely cannot respond to so many urgent requests. He will soon be
seventy-three years old, he is a very sick and tired personand besides in the
West right now they are not up for jubilees and congratulations [na Zapade ne
do iublieev i pozdravlenii]. Again for Octoberten requests! Then it will be the
new year, then Womens Day, May 1, etc., etc. The Radio Committee wanted a
statement about the one-year jubilee of the release of the book Day of Peace!!!
And this is during days of global upheavals and the threat of war. . . . You cannot
continually distract him [otorvat ego] for nonsense [erunda].66

Here Kudasheva excused her stance with reference to her husbands health, age,
and literary work. But the care she took to include the shift in Western opinion
suggested obliquely that Rolland himself no longer looked favorably on constantly
participating in the celebratory rituals of Stalinism.
Rollands own calculations during this period are suggested by his purge-era
correspondence with another of the Soviet Unions most ardent supporters in the
French literary world, Jean-Richard Bloch. Both were disturbed by the Moscow
trials yet came to a conscious decision to remain silent in public so as not to hurt
the already troubled Soviet public image. In a letter to Bloch of March 3, 1938,
Rolland continued to express his illusions of influence: the hope that unpublicized
advice from the best friends of the USSR would help the Soviets realize the
publicly disastrous consequences of the purges on the antifascist Popular Front.67
In 1938, therefore, Rolland repeatedly turned down opportunities to condemn the
Great Terror in the USSR. But it is also significant that in that year he distanced
himself from open declarations of Soviet support and limited his direct contact
with Soviet organizations. It was this step that Kudasheva helped him undertake.
One question that arises in the study of Rollands relationship with the Soviets
is whether his stance was influenced during the purge era by the continuing presence in Moscow of Kudashevas son, Sergei, and the rest of her family. Certainly,
Rolland had tried to help Sergei, the mathematics student at Moscow University
who was married to a ballerina. In 1935 Rolland tried to use his connections with
Gorky to improve what he called their deplorable housing conditions, meaning
the one room in which Sergei Kudashev lived with his wife and sick grandmother.
Gorkys secretary promised to help, but without result. In September 1937, Rolland
UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA | 181

tried to use his stature inside the USSR to the same effect with an institution that
controlled many resources, the Union of Soviet Writers: I think that the Union of
Soviet Writers considers me enough of a colleague [confrre] to accept me (in the
person of my young son-in-law) in one of its houses. Clearly, Apletin was also involved in pursuing such requests. He wrote to Kudasheva in 1938 that a two-room
flat (rather than the three-room apartment requested) had been obtained through
Viacheslav Molotov, who as chairman of the Council of Peoples Commissars was
then the effective head of the Soviet government. Having obtained housing for
Sergei Kudashev, Rolland and Kudasheva became involved through Apletin in
securing a place for Sergei for graduate study at the Mathematical Faculty of Moscow University. In June 1940, Apletin informed Rolland that he had taken all
necessary measures and Sergei had been accepted by the rector of the university.68
Was Rollands refusal to criticize the Soviets in public in the late 1930sa step
that would have effectively destroyed his status as foreign intellectual friend
influenced by his concern for his wifes son and family? Although we can only
speculate on this point, this may well have been an important factor.69 But there is
at least some evidence that his discreet manner of distancing himself from the Soviets reflected certain political and ideological considerations as well. If the purges
troubled Rolland, his worldview was fundamentally shaken by the devastating
shock of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. In private letters and to his diary, Rolland
strenuously condemned Stalins cynical treason and regretted his mistake of believing that a new world was being built on the principles of humanism. At this point
he resigned from his figurehead position in the French Association of Friends of
the USSR. Once again, however, he did so without making the move public. One
prime reason for this that he articulated in his private papers was an enduring
desire not to aid the Soviet Unions enemies.70
Rollands death in 1944 revealed another piece in the puzzle of Mariia Kudashevas life. Shortly before his death, after the Red Army had turned the tide on
Nazi Germany, Rollands relations warmed a bit with the Soviet embassy in Paris.71
After Rollands death, the embassy became very interested in the organization
of the friends of Romain Rolland founded by Kudasheva and Rollands sister
Madeleine, who was primarily involved with collecting her brothers voluminous
papers.72 On November 12, 1946, the Soviet embassy in Paris wrote to the head
of VOKS, V. S. Kemenov, about the refusal of Kudasheva to give an important
role to Communists in the friends of Rolland organization. Sometime late in
Rollands life Kudasheva had converted to Catholicism. Surely Kemenev knew, the
Soviet embassy commentator said, that Rollands wife was a fervent Catholic.73
In assessing Kudashevas role as Romain Rollands cultural mediator in the
1930s, I would like to advance two broad conclusions that grow out of this discussion of her specific role. First, it is clear that Kudasheva was a contributing rather
than a controlling factor in shaping Rollands evolving intellectual and political
stance as a fellow-traveler. Rollands willingness to affirm Stalin and Stalinism
derived from a deep confluence between the writers intellectual makeup over the
182 | UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA

course of many decades and the historical conjuncture in Europe in the 1930s.
More immediately, there were other major figures, notably Gorky and Arosev, who
played important roles in brokering the specific transactions that cemented Rollands status as foreign intellectual friend of the Soviet Union. However, Kudashevas role as an intimate mediator was unique, it seems, in that she had the capability
of fostering a personal, emotional attachment between Rolland and the Soviet
order (encompassing the Bolshevik Revolution, the Stalinist state, and Russian and
Soviet culture). To be sure, Soviet outreach to foreign sympathizers between the
rise of international pro-Soviet sentiment in the late 1920s and the xenophobia of
the Great Purges deliberately and sometimes successfully attempted to foster a kind
of emotional identification by advancing the concept of a socialist homeland
to which foreigners could feel loyal. An emotional form of loyalty could also be
created without the presence of any intimate mediators in individual cases, such
as that of the African-American singer Paul Robeson, who developed a durable,
positive identification with the Soviet Union after he was profoundly affected by
the absence of racism in Soviet everyday life.74 However, it seems that what was
present in the case of Rollands infatuation with Kudasheva was a different form
of emotional synergy or even transference. As Rolland became intimate with the
passionately pro-Bolshevik Kudasheva, her role as mediator became far more potent. His affection for her as representative of Russian culture and the Soviet cause
informed and augmented his affiliation with Stalinism.
The second, broader phenomenon that the case of Kudasheva suggests has
to do with the position Rolland assumed within Soviet culture in the 1930s. Her
activities as his secretary and cultural manager without doubt expanded his connections and contacts with the Soviet literary world to a great extent. However,
Kudasheva did not single-handedly create the veritable cult of Rolland in prepurge Stalinist culture that culminated in his jubilee of 1936; she merely augmented
his presence in the USSR through her constant translations and by conveying
the writers innumerable, ritualistic statements for Soviet publications. Kudashevas
role as a focal point of contact between Moscow and Villeneuve thus points less
to her achievements in manipulating Rolland than to a hitherto unexamined link
between Rolland as an object of Soviet international missions abroad and Rolland
as the object of cultural appropriation at home.
Consider the multiple connections in the dynamics turning Rolland at once
into a European friend of communism and an icon of Stalinist culture. First, Rollands pro-Soviet positions starting during the era of the First Five-Year Plan were
an ideological sine qua non for his emergence as an object of cultural veneration
inside the USSR in the years that followed. Second, Stalinism, simultaneously with
the rise of its all-pervasive cult of the political leader, moved beyond the creation
of domestic cults of scientific and cultural authorities such as Ivan Pavlov in physiology, Anton Makarenko in pedagogy, and Gorky in literature.75 It also appropriated selected foreign icons from among the intellectual friends of communism.
Rolland cemented this status with his friendly meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin,
UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA | 183

which highlighted the political-cultural symbiosis undergirding such minicults.

Third, the celebration and mass publication of Rolland that ensued inside the
USSR was instrumental to the functioning of Soviet cultural diplomacy abroad.
It was a potent way of dazzling foreign intellectuals with evidence of their enormous stature and influence in the land of revolutionary socialism. Nothing attests
to this fact as much as the handsome album containing no less than four hundred
Soviet newspaper clippings about the Rolland jubilee that Apletin sent Rolland via
Kudasheva.76 In fact, Rollands support for Stalinism from the late 1920s to the late
1930s rose and fell in close correlation with his illusions of influence over the great
experiment. In the final analysis, Romain Rollands Soviet friendship was shaped
by this cross-border synergy of his fellow-traveling and his cult. Kudasheva, the
key facilitator, helped forge that consequential link.

184 | UNDERSTANDING AND LOVING THE NEW RUSSIA

A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN
STALINS RUSSIA
Ernst Niekisch at the Crossroads between
Communism and National Socialism

n August 20, 1932, as the Nazis marched closer to power and the Stalin Revolution hurtled grimly toward mass famine, a most incongruous
German figure crossed into Soviet territory. Ideologically confounding yet
consistently extremist, Ernst Niekisch (18891967) straddled and hybridized the
competing ideologies of the revolutionary left and radical right, converting from
one to the other in a fashion virtually unique in the twentieth-century age of extremes. A left-wing Social Democrat who rose up to briefly become chairman of
the Central Soviet in Munich during the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in
1918, Niekisch converted to vlkisch new nationalism in the mid-1920s and charted
a course toward the most outr anti-Western extremes of Germanys conservative revolution.1 Among the first Germans, along with Ernst Jnger, to use the
term totalitarianismembraced in a positive sense to compare Fascist Italy, Germany, and the USSRNiekisch maintained the most consistently philo-Bolshevik
Eastern Orientation on the German ultranationalist right, first dubbing himself
a champion of proletarian nationalism and then of Prussian Bolshevism.2 This
latter concept glorified a putative line from early modern Prussian military absolutism in Potsdam to the total state in Moscow, and back again to a future Berlin.
This eastward-looking union of national and social revolution became known in
Germanyand to Soviet observersas National Bolshevism (Nationalbolschewismus). Later tried and imprisoned by the Nazis for high treason, Niekisch after 1945
underwent a rare journey back again to the left, joining the Socialist Unity Party of
Germany (SED) and lecturing in sociology at Humboldt University in East Berlin.3
Niekischs Soviet visit in 1932 was made as part of an equally unusual group
that was itself a left-right hybrid: the Society for the Study of the Soviet Russian Planned Economy (Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der Sowjetrussischen
Planwirtschaft, Arplan), in which Communists such as Gyrgy Lukcs and Karl
Wittfogel mingled with Niekisch and other prominent intellectuals of the conservative revolution, including Ernst Jnger, Carl Schmitt, and the Nazi Party member

185

Graf Ernst zu Reventlow.4 In the fervid days of late Weimar, in cafes, circles, and
salons, social mixing and to a certain degree intellectual cross-pollination at the
political extremes had become a relatively common phenomenon. But Arplan represents something more: a little-known Soviet attempt, run through the Berlin
representative of the chief organ of Soviet cultural diplomacy, VOKS, to recruit
and penetrate groupings of the radical right, specifically those intellectuals and
nationalist politicians whose National Bolshevism might lead them into positions
favorable to the Soviets. This outreach ran in parallel to short-lived episodes, including in the early 1930s, in which the Moscow-directed Communist Party of
Germany (KPD) injected nationalist slogans into its propaganda in order to recruit
nationalists. At the same time, the numerous groupings and circles of what in Weimar Germany was known as the national revolutionary right also interacted with
and experienced recruitment attempts by the Nazi Party, and there were numerous
defections among Niekischs associates to the rising star of National Socialism.
As we shall see, Niekisch and his Widerstand (Resistance) movement also had
episodic contacts with the Nazis, for example with Goebbels and the dissident
left Nazi Strasser brothers. But after 1930 Niekisch emerged as the most virulent
enemy of Hitler on the extreme right.
This chapter takes Niekischs moment of direct contact with the Soviets as a
prism for understanding two interrelated questions: the logic behind Niekischs
ideological evolution and the Soviet participation in the politics of recruitment
and penetration of the radical German right in the late Weimar period. In the first
instance, Niekischs admiration for elements of the Stalin Revolutionthe relationship between Prussian and Russian Bolshevism, to use his terminologylay
at the epicenter of his overall attempt to combine revolutionary nationalism and
socialism. Closely examining his actual travel to the east holds the potential to
reveal important features of his fantastic Ostideologie, the geopolitical construct he
erected about a mythical East. In this regard, the existing scholarship on Niekisch
appears to be confounded in placing his political views precisely because he combined radical nationalism with admiration for Soviet communism, along with a
lingering vocabulary and reconfigured concepts from his days as a revolutionary
Social Democrat. Did his brand of anti-Nazi National Bolshevism imply, as most
historians (and, it seems, Soviet observers at the time) assumed, that he was on
the left of the right, much as the worker-based, anticapitalist national socialism
of Otto and Gregor Strasser made them left Nazis? Or did his totalizing antiWesternism, fanatical excoriation of the ideas of 1789, and glorification of annihilationist, apocalyptic solutions place him on the extreme right of the right, as
Dupeux has argued?5 By the same token, did Niekischs continuing workerism and
commitment to the expropriation of capitalist classes make him into one of the few
genuine National Bolsheviks in Weimar, or was his nationalist, racist interpretation
of Bolshevism so phantasmagorical that the term loses significance in depicting
his stance?6 How, then, should we understand the continuities and discontinuities
across his conversion from Social Democracy? This chapter asks in particular what
186 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

Niekischs glimpse of Soviet reality suggests about the place of Bolshevism within
his weltanschauung.
A second set of questions revolves around Soviet policy and perceptions about
Niekisch, Arplan, and the communist opening to the German radical right in
the run-up to the Nazi seizure of power. Elsewhere I have argued that Weimar
Germanywith its post-Rapallo diplomatic, scientific, and military mariages de
convenance with the Soviet Unionprovided the original testing ground for a key
dilemma in Soviet cultural diplomacy: the choice between leftist ideological sympathizers and influential yet ideologically distant willing partners.7 But how did
the Soviet side get past Niekischs distorted view of Russian and Soviet history, his
extremist nationalism, racist historiosophy, and anti-Semitism? Fierce internal conflicts within VOKSbetween those clinging to the long-standing partnerships
with left-leaning German sympathizers and establishment scholarly figures and
those promoting covert operations to cultivate the far rightreveal much about
the calculating, hard-headed utilitarianism that both sides shared in the hidden
Soviet dispute about Arplan.8 Focusing more intently on the case of Niekisch,
moreover, amplifies and clarifies what can be deduced from the documents about
these internal disputes. In particular, Niekischs Moscow meeting with Karl Radek,
then Stalins top German adviser, provides additional confirmation that the covert
cultivation of far-right German nationalists via the VOKS representative in Berlin
was sanctioned by and linked to broader strategies at the highest levels of Soviet
leadership. An in-depth interpretation of Niekischs politics and ideology thus can
advance interpretation of what the Arplan episode says about Soviet understandings and misunderstandings of Niekisch, German National Bolshevism, and the
rise of Nazism.

From the Bavarian Soviet to Anti-Versailles Resistance

Niekisch was born in 1889, the same year as his future frre ennemi, Hitler. His
birthplace was Trebnitz bei Breslau (after 1945, Trzebnica), in Silesia, and his father
was a master craftsman. When he was two years old, his family moved to Bavaria,
where his father bought his own small business in Nrdlingen. We have scant
information on Niekischs early life, and his didactic memoirs are more concerned
with narrating German and international history of the times he lived than his
early experiences. Still, there are a few clues that assume significance in light of
his later activities. The young Niekisch was educated to become a schoolteacher,
going through the preparatory school for primary school educators. Early on Nietzsches Will to Power made a great impression on him, but he only read Marx, he
remembered, at the age of twenty-six. He turned that age in 1915, the same year
that he fulfilled his military duty starting in the fall by serving as a sergeant at a
Russian prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Puchheim, near Munich.9
Was it a coincidence that his first contact with Russians in this camp corresponded with his first reading of Marx? What we do know is that it was a German
tactic starting in 1914 to allow Russian migr groups to spread revolutionary
A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 187

propaganda within POW camps in the hope of fostering antigovernment sentiment among the Russian prisoners. All Niekisch recalled in his memoirs was that
he took interest in the activities of the POWs, and in this year he read Marx and
began to study economics during frequent visits to Munich.10 Possibly, Niekischs
contact with Russians during the First World War assumed significance in a different way. As Oksana Nagornaia has shown, German colonial ambitions in the East
were on full display in these POW camps, and Russian prisoners were treated not
as Europeans but on a level with captured colonial troops.11
Niekischs firsthand observation and participation in the treatment of Russian
POWs, one could speculate, may have formed a backdrop for his views about
the October Revolution as a liberation from dependency on the West. This later
fed his ide fixe of an alliance with the Soviet East as a means of smashing the
colonial subjugation of Germany in the hated Versailles order. More broadly, it is
probable that Niekisch was familiar with the ideas of Fedor Dostoevsky, whose
impact on prewar Germany was enormous and made possible by his editor, Arthur
Moeller van den Bruck, an early ideologue of the conservative revolution. In any
case, Niekisch and his future journal Widerstand later displayed great interest in
Dostoevsky.12
What we do know is that Niekischs emergence as a revolutionary Social Democrat corresponded to the month with the October Revolution in 1917, and that
he adhered to its left-wing offshoot, the Independent Social Democratic Party of
Germany (USPD), until 1922. In 19171918 he wrote an unpublished manuscript on
Russia, Light from the East, which later went missing.13 With every fiber of my
heart, Niekisch recalled in one of the few emotional sentences in the early sections
of his memoirs, I longed for the revolutionary storm.14
One obvious continuity that stayed with Niekisch across his mid-1920s conversion to the far right, therefore, was his investment of hopes for Germany in Russia and the East. During the launch of his political career in the Bavarian Soviet he
maintained a distance from nascent German communist forces, however, and later
he always distinguished between the need for a geopolitical alliance with Soviet
communism and his more negative evaluation of the KPD. Niekischs rise in the
Bavarian Soviet movement was meteoric. He quickly became head of the Augsburg
Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat (Workers and Soldiers Soviet) and in December 1918
took part in the Berlin Congress of Soviets, where he saw Karl Liebknecht. For a
brief time in January 1919 he then became president of the Zentralrat der Arbeiter-,
Bauern-, und Soldatenrte (Central Soviet of Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Soviets) and editor in chief of its weekly publication. Niekisch was only connected to
the first, abortive Bavarian Soviet Republic and offered his resignation on the eve
of its second, communist phase under Eugen Levin. But because his resignation
was not formally accepted, he was held responsible and sentenced to two years
imprisonment after the regimes brutal suppression by the Freikorps.15
It is important to note discontinuities between his leftist and rightist phases, as
well. In contrast to his later positions in the conservative revolution, which glori188 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

Figure 7. Ernst Niekisch as a Social Democrat and member of the Executive Committee
of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers in Munich, early 1919. Fotoarchiv Hoffmann,
courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Mnchen/Bildarchiv.

fied militarism and the spirit of the front, Niekisch in his soviet period was close to
pacifism. In addition, the later apostle of the total state in his earlier incarnation
as a Social Democrat viewed the state as the instrument of the ruling class.16
However, in addition to his Eastern Orientation, a second notable continuity
in Niekischs ideology across the divide of his conversion from left to right was his
workerism. Between 1922 and 1925 Niekisch rather unexpectedly took a job headA PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 189

ing the Youth Secretariat of the Central Directorate of the German Textile Workers
Union. Again, we know little about this period, but his engagement with what was
then the second largest trade union in the country may have fed his later reluctance
theoretically to abandon the working class entirely in favor of a putatively unified
nation. Even after his nationalist conversion beginning in 1924, Niekisch retained
proletarian revolution as a large component of the national revolution. Between his
mid-1920s migration to the vlkisch right and his ultranationalist radicalization after 1929, when racial-civilization types of Prussianism and Romanism became
central to his movement, he labeled himself a proletarian nationalist.
At the same time, Niekischs anticapitalism and overt rejection of private property remained strong features of his thinking. It should be emphasized that his
ongoing ideological investment in the nationalization of the economy and the proletarian class appears to be the most Bolshevik or Soviet parts of his nationalism.
Those two features were also unusual when compared to the major ideologues of
the conservative revolution, from Oswald Spengler and Moeller van den Bruck at
the outset to Niekischs friend and confidant Ernst Jnger in the later phases. They
were equally distinctive among his fellow political practitioners in the splinter
groups and militant factions of what at the time was widely called the national
revolutionary camp (to distinguish them from the National Socialists, or NSDAP).
Even most of those figures labeled National Bolshevik in the 1920s supported a
geopolitical Eastern Orientation and a strong state, but their anticapitalism was
mainly political and cultural in orientation rather than an endorsement of nationalizing the means of production. In Niekischs revolutionary nationalism after
1926, by contrast, German emancipation from the colonial dominance of the West
depended on the mobilization of all weaponsincluding rejection of the capitalist
economic order.17 Thus his interest in exporting the economic autarky he saw in
the Soviet planned economy to a new Germany was a powerful motivation behind
his later membership in Arplan.
More generally, Niekisch did not explicitly repudiate his leftist ideas as he
moved to the extreme reaches of the right. Even after he began to operate in the
political culture of radical nationalism, reveling in the language of blood and
soil and the will to power, he retained discursive traces of his days in Social Democracy. Substantively, he managed not to reject class struggle and antibourgeois
radicalism even after he embraced national revolution.18 In sum, Niekischs 1920s
left-right conversion was something different from inversion and repudiation of
previous stances. Such a volte-face was the most common pattern among so many
intellectuals who traversed this path from left to right in numerous twentiethcentury national contextseven allowing for certain subtle, underlying continuities. Niekischs development was more singular. It was marked by his evolution
first within a conventional revolutionary ideology and then, with overt continuities
across the divide, within the force field of an illiberal, equally radical, right-wing
revolutionary ideology that itself, moreover, contained overlapping spaces with
the first.19 Niekisch became more extreme and more revolutionary after he turned
190 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

to the right. Furthermore, it is crucial to note, that second, national-revolutionary

ideologyNiekischs Prussian Bolshevismwas an attempt to carve a third way
between German communism and Nazism, both of which Niekisch opposed but
with which, as an aspiring revolutionary leader in a polarized and radicalized political field, he had significant interactions.
Niekisch found himself in between not just competing totalitarianisms struggling for power, but between poles in a Weimar discourse of social radicalism
in which a range of ideas traditionally associated with left and right were in
play.20 Niekischs movement from far left to far right took place as he carved out
his own distinctive place within a constellation of splinter groups in the third
way national revolutionary camp. Specifically, that distinctiveness consisted of
his ide fixe from the mid-1920s on that German revolutionary nationalism could
and should be wedded to Russian Bolshevism. For a brief time this made him important for Soviet calculations and operations in Berlin and, in 1932, brought him
to the USSR. During the radicalization of German politics in the early 1930s, the
national revolutionary camp in which Niekisch operated found itself at the epicenter of the overlap betweenand defections to and fromthe two powerful poles
of communism and fascism.

Radical of the Right

At the core of Niekischs conversion to nationalism was a fierce and abiding
anti-Occidentalism. This was first triggered in 1924 with the French and Belgian
occupation of the Ruhr, in response to German defaults on reparations payments
ordered by the Versailles Treaty. Niekisch demanded that the Social Democratic
Party of Germany (SPD) turn the fight against reparations into a revolution against
Western imperialism, writing a brochure on the topic that caused a stir in Social
Democratic circles. None other than the old Marxist revisionist and lion of Social
Democracy, Eduard Bernstein, accused Niekisch of approaching foreign policy in
a German nationalist (deutschnational) fashion. The Ruhr crisis, Niekisch recalled in
his memoirs, became the single root cause of the political transformation that led
him by July 1926 to resign his SPD membership.21
Niekisch traversed his course from Social Democracy to new nationalism as
a leader of an alternative socialist party (the Old Socialist Party, ASP) formed in
Saxony by renegade SPD deputies alarmed by the weakened SPD position in Saxony after 1923. To retain a coalition with bourgeois, nationalist political parties,
the ASP (which had a membership of eight thousand to ten thousand) moved
dramatically to the right, embracing ideas of the strong state and peoples community (Volksgemeinschaft). In July 1926 a founding member of the ASP, Eva Bttner,
invited Niekisch to become editor of the ASP newspaper, Der Volksstaat, and by
the fall of 1927 Niekisch had become the dominant figure in the ASP. As its official
spokesman during the years of its greatest significance, 19271928, Niekisch gave
the party a national-revolutionary bent and strategized to expand its influence outside Saxony. During this period Niekisch repudiated the old, allegedly nonrevoluA PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 191

tionary socialist tradition of the nineteenth century and extolled a new socialism
born in 1914; he reached back to Lasalle, whom Niekisch praised as a supporter,
unlike Marx, of the strong national state. Now writing about the spirit of 1914
and the dark stream of blood creating a people (Volk), Niekisch, like Moeller
van den Bruck before him, proclaimed Germany to be a proletarian nation. What
distinguished the rhetoric of the Old Socialists from that of Weimars traditional
right and the theoreticians of Weimars conservative revolution, in the words of
Benjamin Lapp, was the formers attempt to locate its constituency in the working
class and to combine a nationalist program with one of social reform. This was
in fact an attempt to create a kind of national socialism, and the Nazis viewed
the ASP as potential comrades.22 Even as Niekisch became more extreme, he was
not merely a fringe or marginal figure in the polarized world of Weimar politics.
The ASP, however, had lost support in the trade unions and by the 1928 elections
suffered a crushing defeat.
Niekisch had other irons in the fire. It was as the dominant figure in the journal Widerstand, which was published between 1926 and 1934 and took its name
from resistance to Versailles, that Niekisch developed first his proletarian nationalism and after 1929 his Prussian Bolshevism. By the early 1930s, Widerstand had
a circulation of three thousand to forty-five hundred and had built a distinct circle
(Kreis) of figures around its line and leaderan organizational form typical of the
conservative revolution. In 1929, Niekisch expanded his operations by founding a
Widerstand publishing house in Berlin that functioned until 1937. Before the Nazi
seizure of power the Widerstand circle was one of the most tight-knit and activist
of the conservative revolution, and his associates regarded Niekisch as a brilliant
writer and charismatic revolutionary, not least because they saw his ideological vision as unique.23 Niekisch included prominent contributors, including Ernst Jnger
and his closest fellow leader of the ASP in Saxony, August Winnig, but the Widerstand line was very much his own.
Niekisch thus moved in the late 1920s to develop the ideology he called Prussian Bolshevism as a fusion of nationalism and socialism. In this he leaned heavily
on two foundational thinkers of the conservative revolution, Spengler and Moeller
van den Bruck. Spenglers notion of Prussian socialism, set forth in his Preussentum und Sozialismus, published in 1919, was an attempt to liberate German socialism
from Marx and theorize a dictatorship of the German state, not the proletariat.
Like the later Niekisch, Spengler demonstrated an astounding lack of knowledge
and interest in Bolshevism as an ideology.24 Moeller van den Bruck, whose most
significant work was Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich [1923]) developed a fantastic
Ostideologie in which the young peoples of the Eastwhich included Germany
along with Russiawere opposed to the capitalist, materialist West. Even more
than Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck was immersed in Dostoevsky and made
deep forays into the Russian soul, into Russian life, into the whole Mysterium of
the Slav world.25 Niekisch, as we will see in more detail later, went further than
Moeller van den Bruck in his conception of a new German-Russian union in the
192 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

future utopia. Bolshevism for Niekisch represented an anti-Western, anti-Versailles

turn to a national revolution that would not just complement but revive and save
the idea of Potsdam. Facing Western colonization, Russia in 1917 had adopted
the Prussian tradition and under Lenin and Stalin took it to its furthest extreme.
In a striking formulation of 1931, Niekisch avowed that Russia has become more
Prussian than we ourselves remain.26 Thus, for Germany as for Russia (as Niekisch and other nationalists always referred to the USSR), the modern continuation
of Prussian absolutism was a total state in which economy, culture, society, and
personal life were contained.
Niekischs thinking about the Eastern Orientationthat is, the manner in
which he conceived Germanys interests as lying in the Eastwas marked by
what was called at the time the primacy of foreign policy. This implied that
everything about Germanys domestic future flowed from its international orientation. In fact, in Niekischs radical ideological constructions this more accurately
might be termed the primacy of geopolitics, since he was concerned with far more
than the conduct of foreign policy. The issue was, as he adapted Moeller van den
Brucks catchphrase, a community of fate (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) between Germany and Russia. As he put it in 1929, whether Germany will be or not be, its
very existence, depended on the fate of Russia. Niekischs Prussian Bolshevism
also contained an idea in common with communism, the notion of the new man
except that Niekisch reconceived the reborn human being as national and German
(der deutsche Mensch). Although Europe wished to put an end to German man, he
darkly prophesied, the new German person would find himself by picking a path
through the ruins [Trmmern] of Europe.27
As the above suggests, Niekischs politics during the period of his radicalization at the end of the 1920s were caught up in a historiosophy of racial types.
Niekischs embrace of blood mysticism (Blutmystik) drew on influences from the
mid-1920s, notably his close ASP and Widerstand colleague August Winnig. Winnig, one of the sources prompting Niekisch to adopt vlkisch, racist, and antiSemitic categories after the two met in 1925, also had a Social Democratic and
trade union background before gravitating to the ultranationalist right. He had
become commissar of East and West Prussia in 1919 and, the same year, Oberprsident of East Prussia; converting to nationalism earlier than Niekisch and participating in the Kapp Putsch, he was expelled from the SPD in 1920.28
Another influence in this period was the philosopher Alfred Baeumler, who
first introduced Niekisch to Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jnger in 1928.29 Beaumler
prompted Niekisch in the direction of a racist theory of history. Among Niekischs
racial-historical schema that emerged full-blown after 1929 was a notion of gendered races. The German racial original substance (Ursubstanz), Niekisch avowed,
was bisexual. It was thus feminized in contact with the Romanhere a synonym
for everything western and southern, as well as the ideas of 1789but masculinized when mixed with the primitive, virile Eastern or Slavic race.30 Niekisch
was vague about the contours of the future Ostblock, his new revolutionary empire
A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 193

stretching from the Rhine to the Pacific, but it was clear that it would come under
the leadership of a strong Germany. The eastward union and the debourgeoisification (Entbrgerlichung) of Germany were one and the same.31
Niekischs radicalization after 1929 corresponded with the Great Depression
and a drastic sharpening of his anti-Western animus. His most impassioned call for
a future mating between Prussias spirit and Russias strength went hand in hand
with the zenith of his odium for the West.32 As Uwe Sauermanns study shows,
some 28 percent of the articles in Widerstand in 1930 mentioned Russia (the Soviet
Union), while that figure jumped to 47 percent in 1931 and stayed at 46 percent in
1932.33 Niekisch had used the term Romanism earlier as a synonym for the bourgeois West, but only in this period did it morph into a single, pernicious enemy
encompassing everything to the south (the Mediterranean world) and to the west,
both ancient and modern. In a political program published in Widerstand in 1930,
Niekisch similarly made the ideas of 1789 into a grab bag of the Enlightenment,
humanism, individualism, the bourgeois economic and political order, parliamentarianism, and democracy.
During this period, Niekisch appeared to be casting around for ever more
sweeping outlets for his revolutionary nationalism. Despite his long-standing commitment to antibourgeois workerism, for example, at times in 1930 and 1931 he
glorified the German countryside in an antiurban paroxysm of praise for peasant
primitivism and barbarism, also hailing a return to pre-Christian times.34 Unlike
Moeller van den Bruck, who also saw an affinity between the young peoples of
Germany and Russia, Niekisch saw the old German Reich as Western and Romanized. In 1930 he wrote that Slavic blood would rout this Roman element, something
that would be achieved through population shifts (Bevlkerungsumschichtungen) in
the German South and West.35 Would Niekisch have directed ethnic cleansing
inward within Germany against Germans? As Niekischs Prussian Bolshevism
deepened in this period, it took on the cast of an apocalyptic, anti-Western annihilationism, for he openly advocated the complete undermining and destruction of
all that is generally regarded as important in western civilization . . . the west, with
all its works and pomps, must be annihilated.36 If Hitlers ideology could inspire
the implementation of genocidal devastation in the Slavic-Jewish East, Niekischs
never-implemented fantasies directed his own utopian-exterminationist impulse
toward a total obliteration of the Westnot excluding the Occidental element
within Germany itself.

Tactics of the Communist Left

To explain how a figure with views as ideologically odious to communist
orthodoxy could end up courted by the Soviets among fellow rightists in Arplan,
then hosted inside the USSR in 1932, requires an excursion into Comintern, KPD,
and Soviet policies engaging the opposite side of the political spectrum. Each
significant episode occurred during the crisis moments of the Weimar Republic
the first during the crisis of birth, when Niekisch was a Social Democrat in the
194 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

Bavarian Soviet Republic. The cosmopolitan Bolshevik intriguer Karl Radek, in

his prison political salon during his year-long incarceration in 1919, held many
meetings with a range of right-wing military and political representatives, something that may have been part of the prehistory of not just Weimar-Soviet relations
but a lingering potential for nationalist-communist cooperation.37
Radek was also present and active at the birth of the concept of National
Bolshevism. The term was current in German politics beginning in 1919, when
Paul Eltzbacher of the German-National Party called for a German Bolshevism
essentially soviets and social ownership of the means of production for the advancement of the nation. This was first termed nationaler Bolschewismus by the Deutsche Tageszeitung. In 1919 as well, the Hamburg Circle of the KPD, led by Heinrich
Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim, advocated a national communist alliance with
right-wing nationalists to overthrow the government in the wake of the crushed
Sparticist revolt in 1919. The precise degree to which Radek flirted with this unorthodox alliance is debatable, but he both sympathized and ultimately upheld
discipline by condemning the Hamburg dissidents as national Bolshevikian
intervention that helped introduce the term into the German press and political
life.38 National Bolshevism, a term that has shaped historians investigations and
appeared in documents produced by Soviet analysts during the late Weimar period, thus originated in effect as an epithet of communist condemnation against a
nationalist deviation. As is often the case with terms of opprobrium, it was later
adopted by some of those who desired to be known by the label, but this occurred
only among some minor figures of the national revolutionary camp, such as Karl
Otto Paetel, who featured the term in his journal. National Bolshevism, however,
never served as a self-identification for Niekisch, often taken as its leading exponent, and many others who were labeled as such.39
Radek, the polyglot Bolshevik and Comintern authority on East-Central Europe, was a leading figure in the two most significant episodes of communist political flirtation with the forces of the extreme nationalist and fascist right: the first
during the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, the second during the late
Weimar drift to the right that culminated in the Nazi seizure of power. The earlier
of these intersections came to be known as the Schlageter line. It came in the midst
of the Ruhrkampf, a campaign of resistance and sabotage championed by nationalists, and it characteristically involved the Comintern, the KPD, and the highest
levels of the Soviet state. The KPD introduced its Schlageter line on June 21, 1923,
at an open session of the Cominterns Executive Committee when Radek, acting as
a top Soviet and Comintern tactician, was sent to Germany during the revolutionary events of that year and electrified the Communist world by offering to make
common cause with German fascism. Radeks eulogy to the ultranationalist and
Nazi martyr Schlageter, a veteran Freikorps first lieutenant shot by the French for
sabotage in the Ruhr, introduced the notion that those who had turned to fascism
in their despair over the social ills and enslavement of their nation no longer
needed to be considered anathema. In the summer of 1923, the Schlageter line
A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 195

led to a number of joint negotiations and actions among Communists, right-wing

paramilitary groups, and Nazis in the Ruhr (never, however, involving Hitler). For
a brief time, posters with the Soviet star and swastika appeared together.40
Radek also entered into an engaged, public dialogue with German fascist intellectuals in 1923. The author of the most important study of Radek argues that
this reflected the Bolshevik emissarys exceptional early understanding of the
menace of fascism, which from that time on became his permanent obsession.
While it can plausibly be suggested that in 1923 Radek placed his hopes not in
alliances with fascist leaders but rather in winning over some of their troops, it is
hard to dissociate these tactics from a lifelong passion for political intrigue and
revolutionary optimism. In the run-up to the abortive German October in 1923
and again after 1930, when the engagement was covert rather than public, Radek
calculated that fascist forces could either be neutralized or enlisted in the effort to
bring down the state.41
Although Niekischs fierce anti-Westernism and move to the right, as we have
seen, was initially sparked by the occupation of the Ruhr, in 1923 he remained
firmly within the SPD and had not yet converted to revolutionary nationalism. He
was thus not affected by Radek or interested in the Schlageter line.42 However, a
leading inspiration behind the conservative revolution and thus the ideological
world in which Niekisch later operated, Moeller van den Bruck, became the most
influential figure to respond to Radeks open appeal for a discussion among Communists and nationalists. A range of others also eagerly entered into a dialogue
with the communist left. They included at least two future colleagues of Niekisch
in the radical right faction of Arplan. The first was Graf Ernst zu Reventlow,
author of a celebrated work on German foreign policy (published in 1914) who
became a vlkisch revolutionary and joined the Nazi Party in 1927, but even afterwards maintained ties with the Soviets. The second was Josef Beppo Rmer, the
Freikorps Oberland military leader directly involved in the violent suppression of
the Bavarian Soviet Republic, who had made connections with the KPD as early
as 1921. Rmer exemplified the kinds of criss-crossing, episodic entanglements
of communism and fascism that also involved Niekisch. In 1923 Rmer was the
paramilitary leader of the Bund Oberland, formed out of the former Freikorps of
the same name which later, after the famous concept with mystical and Christian overtones was introduced by Moeller van den Bruck, called its journal The
Third Reich. During the Ruhr occupation in 1923 Rmer was sentenced to death
in absentia by a French military court for his activities directing Oberland local
groups in coordination with local communist workers. In September of the same
year, Rmer had forged a short-lived alliance with the Nazis to counter a takeover
attempt of Oberland by a rival. Then, in 1925, Rmer made a week-long trip to
Moscow, visiting the Kremlin and other standard visitors sites; he maintained a
strong Eastern Orientation and National Bolshevik views. Niekisch, for his part,
connected to Rmers Bund Oberland in 1926, and he had followers there in the
late 1920s. Indeed, when the Bund split in 1930, a part of it went to the NSDAP and
196 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

part to the Oberland-Kameradschaft, affiliated directly with Niekischs Widerstand

circle. According to one scholar, this gave Niekischs ideology something of a real
base.43 Finally, Rmer joined the KPD in 1932, the same year he entered Arplan.
In sum, the legacy of Radeks Schlageter line in 1923 for German national revolutionaries and national socialists was significant. This far-right/far-left political
maneuvering had evolved by the time of the power struggles of the early 1930s
into practices of subversion and infiltration on both extremes of the political spectrum. One result of Radeks adventure in 1923 was to stimulate appreciation of the
Soviet order among extreme right intellectuals and cultural critics, which stood
in contrast to the conventional nationalist hatred of communism, and to endow it
with policy significance. The left-right rapprochement of 1923 formed a backdrop
for a resurrection of the tactic in the early 1930s.
After 1929, German Communists were caught up in the Cominterns third
period, when communist parties were encouraged to fight social fascists (Social
Democrats) more than the right itself. This had the well-known effect of deeply
splitting the German left during the rise of Nazism. After the Reichstag elections
of September 1930, when the Nazis made astonishing gains and became the second
largest party in the country, the KPD suddenly saw a great chance to win socialistthinking elements from the NSDAP.44 In the second half of 1930, as in 1923, the
KPD launched an attempt to appeal to nationalists. This was reflected especially
in the Central Committees Program for the National and Social Liberation of the
German People, which reproduced under Communist imprimatur virtually every
demand made for years by the Nazis and other right-wing extremists, from abrogating the Versailles Treaty to repudiating the Young Plan.45 In 1931, Comintern
and KPD forces succeeded in turning off the public ideological rhetoric involved in
the outreach to nationalists, before it was resumed in 1932.46 But behind the scenes,
throughout this period, efforts on both sides of the political spectrum to provoke
defections from the opposite camp were well underway.
A major communist coup in this attempt came in the wake of the so-called
Ulm Reichswehr trial held in Leipzig in SeptemberOctober 1930, a high-profile
case involving three Reichswehr officers imprisoned for treason after agitating for
the Nazi movement among the troops. One of these officers, Richard Scheringer,
fascinated by the storm troopers (Sturmabteilung, SA), hoped to spark an armed
national-cum-social revolution. At the trial, however, he listened to Hitler testifying
about the Nazi commitment to legality. The Nazi Fhrer, in the words of Timothy
Brown, explicitly repudiated those Nazis that toyed with the idea of revolution,
citing the case of the recently excluded Otto Strasser, who had left the party over
the question of socialism in July 1930. Disturbed by Hitlers seeming rejection
of the social component of national revolution and by the Nazi leaders so-called
legality oath, Scheringer made a spectacular defection to the Communist Party
that was announced in March 1931.47
Like Schlageter before him, Scheringer became a symbol and rallying point for
the Communists attempt to convert nationalists and draw support from pro-fascist
A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 197

elements. As the KPD seized on the case, this attempt became known as the
Scheringer line. Otto-Ernst Schddekopfs classic study published in 1960 observed in a footnote that the KPDs Scheringer line was without doubt [based] on
a direct directive from Stalin.48 This reasonable supposition has been borne out
by recent archival research. Comfortable with using the mobilizing power of nationalism through Soviet nationalities policy, Stalin approved the KPDs national
populist policies especially through KPD Politburo member Heinz Neumann, his
man in Berlin, who spoke Russian and visited Stalins Black Sea dacha at several
key moments.49
At the same time, the KPD took covert measures to combat the growing mass
popularity of the Nazis, operating through a secret branch of the party charged
with espionage and military matters, the M-Apparat. This German GPU (GPU
stands for Main Political Administration, one iteration of the Soviet secret police),
as it was sometimes nicknamed, was headed after 1928 by Hans Kippenberger,
who had been trained in a Red Army military school and maintained political
immunity through election as a KPD Reichstag deputy. Not coincidentally, Kippenberger was not only the head of M-Apparat but also the KPD Central Committee member most closely associated with capitalizing on Scheringers defection
from Nazism. The tasks of the M-Apparat in this period included subverting the
paramilitary formations and organizations of the national revolutionary and Nazi
camps through infiltration and espionage, as well as impersonating rightists and
putting out fake right-wing publications with a communist slant. One of these publications organized as part of the Schlageter line, as Timothy Brown has shown,
represented the KPDs attempt to create an artificial National Bolshevism under
Communist control.50 As we shall see, this activity in 19311932 closely mirrored
and complemented the Soviet initiative in bringing National Bolsheviks into the
Soviet-influenced Arplan.
Niekisch, the self-styled Prussian Bolshevik, was never tempted to join the
communist camp in this period, as did Beppo Rmer and several other national
revolutionaries. In 1931, one of Niekischs top lieutenants in Widerstand, Karl
Trger, did meet secretly with Kippenberger from the KPDs M-Apparat. So did
Karl Otto Paetels Group of Social-Revolutionary Nationalists. But nothing came
of these contacts.51 Niekischs followers in Oberland, moreover, were targeted by
the KPD recruitment drive among the nationalists, perhaps influencing Niekisch
to distance his Widerstand group from the KPD. The German Communists, he
wrote acidly in 1931, were the pure product of bourgeois society. Because the
KPD was oriented around the westernized part of the proletariat, the German
Communists no longer possessed the spiritual and vlkisch depth to carry out a
national revolutionas, in his view, Russian Bolshevism already had. In a striking
phrase, Niekisch called his Widerstand movement neither communist nor anticommunist, adding in a notable concession: but it is ready for communism [des
Kommunismus fhig] if there is no other way out.52

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Soviet Calculations and the Creation of Arplan

The key figure behind the campaign to woo far-right nationalist intellectuals
in Germany in the early 1930s, Aleksandr Girshfeld, was the Berlin representative
of VOKS, the chief agency of Soviet cultural diplomacy, which made the cultivation of noncommunist intellectuals and cultural figures its main priority. Girshfeld
was also a career diplomat in the Soviet embassy in Berlin, and (as it appears from
his aggressive refusals to subordinate himself to both VOKS and the Commissariat
of Foreign Affairs Central European Sector) a point man for covert, high-level
Soviet initiatives that may have included the involvement of the OGPU, the Soviet
secret police. Girshfeld followed a long line of VOKS representatives in Berlin
starting in the early 1920s who were distinctly less concerned with left-wing sympathizers in VOKS-managed institutions such as the Society of Friends of the
New Russia and far more eager to exert influence over politically well-connected
Germans who could not be marginalized as pro-Soviet.
But VOKS, of course, maintained ties with its chief German partner organizations, the leftist Society of Friends and the scholarly, politically mainstream
German Society for the Study of Eastern Europe. As a result, internal clashes between those inclined to favor the leftist sympathizers and those who yearned for
more influential targets continued among Soviets involved in German policy. In
the twilight of Weimar, during what VOKS analysts referred to as Germanys fashizatsiia, or fascistization, Soviet expectations spiked about the potentialities of the
radical right. For that minority of Soviet emissaries in Germany who continued to
be inclined to court influential bourgeois nationalists, the nationalists in question
were no longer the same. Earlier, they had been relatively moderate figures such as
the Vernunftrepublikaner Otto Hoetzsch, the center-nationalist historian and leading Russian scholar at the helm of the East European societywhose extensive
involvement with VOKS and the Soviets from 1923 on was prompted by his pursuit
of foreign policy relevance and the demands of science.53 Now, ironically, those
German figures deemed to have the most meaningful practical influence over continuing German-Soviet relations were ultranationalist radicals drawn to the Stalin
Revolution, those considered National Bolsheviksideologues such as Niekisch.
Arplan, a highly unusual, hybrid organization that included Communists and
fascists, was a key organization through which Girshfeld involved himself with
the representatives of the revolutionary right. The chairman and main figure behind Arplan was Friedrich Lenz of the University of Giessen, a professor of law
and economics who moved in national revolutionary circles that included Niekisch. In this camp, the economic crisis and images of the regimented mobilization of the Soviet industrialization drive combined with the allure of autarky as
a means of escaping Western domination to spark interest in the Soviet planned
economy. Lenz, with his background in political economy, converted from a brand
of scholarly socialism to the new nationalism during the Weimar period.54 But the
fact that he was realist in his exposition rather than irrationalist and vlkisch made
A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 199

him a better direct contact for the Soviets than someone like Niekisch. In Lenzs
Aufriss der politischen konomie (An Outline of Political Economy), published in
1927, the Giessen professor deployed economic analysis to describe the West in
familiar nationalist terms as the site of vulgar materialism and individualism. The
same year he became the main figure behind the journal Vorkmpfer, published in
seven thousand copies, which increasingly sounded themes of radical anticapitalism within the new nationalism.55 In October 1929 Lenz wrote in Die Kommenden,
a radical right publication, that Russia was the only state keeping Germany free
from the shackles of Versailles.
At the end of 1929, together with another future Arplan member, Werner
Kreitz, Lenz founded the Vorkmpfer Kreis, a national-revolutionary group.56
Kreitz, Lenzs associate as the publisher of Vorkmpfer, was also close to Ernst
Jnger. All three shared a fascination for the military-utopian mobilization and
national autarky embodied by the Soviet industrialization drive. In 1931, Kreitz devoted a series of articles in this journal to Soviet planning, in which he did not hide
his admiration for Stalin as leader of the Russian national revolution; this formed
one context in which Lenz decided to found Arplan the next year.57
Lenz and Kreitzs Vorkmpfer tendency stood quite close to Niekischs Widerstand movement.58 Indeed, Niekisch in his memoirs claimed to have inspired Lenz
to first come up with the idea for forming Arplan. Niekisch dated the original
idea to a Widerstand conference in 1931 attended by Lenz, who then pursued the
concept with his contacts at the Soviet embassy in Berlin.59 Niekischs memoirs
are corroborated by the Soviet involvement with Arplan, which did emerge out of
contacts with Lenz in Berlin.
As the diplomat and VOKS representative Girshfeld became the main Soviet
handler for Lenz and Arplan, his covert plans to control the organization for Soviet purposes were channeled through Lenzs right-hand man, Arplans secretary.
This was the political journalist Arvid von Harnack, whom Girshfeld called a
person completely close to us. Significantly, von Harnack was a former radical
rightist (a Freikorps member in the early 1920s) who in the early 1930s became an
unofficialthat is, secretmember of the KPD. Girshfeld expressed supreme
confidence that he could manipulate Arplan through Harnack and others. As
Girshfeld wrote to Moscow, VOKS would handle the Arplan delegations visit to
the USSR in the summer of 1932, but until then the composition of the society, its
practical activities, and [its] ties with us are being regulated.60
What, then, was the nature of the membership of the organization in which
Girshfeld invested his confident hopes, and which Niekisch and other national
revolutionaries joined? While the fact of Arplans existence is well known in the
literature, discussions about it have suffered from a paucity of archival evidence,
especially on the Soviet side, and there has even been a lack of clarity about its
membership. In this context the list of fifty-one Arplan members sent by Lenz to
VOKS in August 1932 is of great interest. Arplans ideologically motley membership was fused together from a number of discrete groups. The first was an aca200 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

demic contingent of economists and engineers interested in Soviet planning; the

second was a small group of those figures who had ongoing, close Soviet contacts
through other organizations, such as Erich Baron of the Society of Friends and
Otto Hoeztsch and Klaus Mehnert of the East European society. Third, there was
a group of communist and leftist intellectuals, including Gyrgy Lukcs and Karl
Wittfogel, a number of communist functionaries, and leftist sympathizers such as
the architect Bruno Taut and the Frankfurt School Marxist Friedrich Pollock. Finally, there were the national revolutionaries and national socialists, who made up
about one-third of the members. In addition to Niekisch, Jnger, Rmer, Reventlow, and Lenz, who have already been discussed, other conservative revolutionaries in Arplan included Hugo Fischer and Hans Zehrer, both affiliated with the
journal Die Tat (The Deed), and Adolf Grabowsky of Berlins Hochschule fr Politik, formerly of the Anti-Bolshevik League.61 However, the membership of Arplan
fluctuated after its founding meeting on July 14, 1931. Other documents name as an
Arplan member the legal thinker Carl Schmitt, whom Niekisch knew in the early
1930s as an intimate of the Jnger brothers and their circle, later the crown jurist
of the Third Reich. The same sources include the national-revolutionary publicist
Friedrich Hielscher, who was connected to Ernst Jnger more peripherally and in
this period launched Das Reich.62
Throughout 1932, fierce internal Soviet disagreements erupted between Girshfeld and numerous VOKS, Foreign Affairs, and Gosplan officials over the courtship of far-right German nationalists. A high VOKS official lectured Girshfeld
in January 1933 about the most important goals of Soviet cultural diplomacy in
Germany: to mobilize sympathetic views of the USSR andin an implicit contrast
to behind-the-scenes manipulationto encourage breaks with fascism and social
fascism.63 Girshfeld was rebuked from Moscow that Arplans composition was
extraordinarily motley, and a VOKS specialist inquired with incredulity: who is
this Graf Reventlow who has become a member of Arplan, the well-known Hitlerite or someone else? (Kakoi eto graf Reventlov, izvestnyi li gitlerovets ili kto
libo drugoi, popal v chleny Arplana?)64 The range of further objections may be
summed up as follows: concern that Girshfeld was overly attentive to the National
Bolsheviks at the expense of the possibilities of cultivating other ties, notably
in German academia; fear that connections with fascists would jeopardize Soviet
influence over left-wing sympathizers; and distrust in the effectiveness of Girshfelds control over Arplan. Girshfeld was told that Arplan would not be flexible
enough to allow VOKS to conduct its various campaigns through it. Finally, a
major concern in officially inviting the far-right intellectuals to visit the USSR
was that their commitment to hard-core nationalist ideology would render them
immune to the well-developed Soviet methods of impressing guests. The largest
part were fascists, wrote the head of VOKSs Central European Sector, H. Timm,
about the Arplan delegationthe kind that the trip would leave without deep
impressions.65 Clearly, all these arguments were couched in highly instrumental
and utilitarian terms. By necessity, bureaucratic infighting had replaced open poA PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 201

litical discussion. Even so, it is clear that many Soviet officials much preferred to
preserve the traditional Soviet focus on left-wing fellow-travelers. Pushing back
at Girshfelds position, moreover, did have concrete consequences: it limited proposed Soviet financial support for Arplan.66
The Soviet internal disputes over Arplan are indicative of multiple Soviet agendas, overlapping international operations, and sheer institutional cacophony that
played a role in Soviet relations with European cultural and intellectual figures
more generally. At the same time, it is a highly significant fact that infiltration of
segments of the radical and right-oppositionist intelligentsia was acknowledged
even by Girshfelds many detractorsas a necessary task of Soviet cultural
work in Germany.67 The repetition of this stock phrase confirms that cultivation
of the radical German right, despite all objections and obstructions on the Soviet
side thrown up in the course of everyday policy making, had become a mandatory
policy handed down from above. Girshfeld, far from a lone operator, was carrying
out a broader policy.
Closed archives prevent us from knowing the Soviet secret polices specific role
in plans for Arplan or Girshfelds relationship with the OGPU, but it does appear
that the Soviet security organs were another operator in this broader policy of engaging the German right. There is documentary evidence pointing to at least some
secret police involvement both in Arplan and in a hybrid left-right organization
that Girshfeld was also tasked with overseeing, the Bund Geistige Berufe (Union
of Intellectual Professions). Specifically, an operational report from the Berlin residence (rezidentura) of the Soviet secret police gave an overview of Arplan and the
Bund, saying that they both were founded to attract into the orbit of our influence
a range of highly placed intellectuals of a rightist orientation.68
Even less is known about the Bund Geistige Berufe than about Arplan, but it
appears that from the perspective of Soviet involvement the two were sister organizations. The Bund was founded in the fall of 1931, around the same time plans
were laid for Arplan. Two party intellectuals who joined Arplans communist faction, Gyrgy Lukcs (who joined the KPD in July 1931 after being sent to Berlin)
and Karl Wittfogel, cooperated closely in work among the right-wing intellectual
circles in these two hybrid left-right organizations. According to a transcript of his
Liubianka interrogation by the NKVD in 1936, Lukcss activities included coordinating the KPD fraction within Arplan and establishing covert contacts with the
Tat circle and Niekischs Widerstand circle.69 He was also involved in recruiting
radical rightist figures to the Bund, which like Arplan mixed active Communists
with right-wing revolutionaries. Arvid von Harnack, the covert Communist reporting to Girshfeld and working for Lenz in Arplan, entered the Bund, as did
a number of the national revolutionaries in Arplanincluding Lenz, Jnger, and
Niekisch. Girshfelds official diplomatic diary in 1932, moreover, confirms that he
too was directly involved with organizing the Bund, which featured at least one
Nazi conference speaker.70 In the case of the Bund, which became active in late
1932, well-known Communists refrained from speaking at open meetings and in
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discussions for tactical reasons, although they helped plan events. This report
raises the distinct possibility that Girshfeld, at the time when he was tasked with
promoting Soviet and communist ties with National Bolsheviks and radical rightists in Arplan, was connected to the OGPU office in Berlin. This likelihood seems
greater given the Soviet diplomats activity in the mid-1930s. After the Nazi seizure
of power, it was Girshfeld who recruited von Harnack, whom he knew well from
Arplan days, to the famous Rote Kapelle espionage group run by the NKVD.71 The
declassified secret police report cited above is noteworthy for another reason. It
focused exclusively on the mission of bringing intellectuals of a right orientation
into Soviet orbit, indeed attributing the founding of Arplan and Bund to this purpose. This left out all the other motivations of Soviet cultural diplomacy connected
with Arplan that, for example, VOKS officials promoted, such as improving ties
with German scholars and burnishing the image of the planned economy.
Girshfeld, in an important report to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in
October 1932, made his strategies and goals for the infiltration of rightist circles most explicit, and they appeared in language quite similar to the secret
police document cited above. The current Soviet cultural-political line (kulturnopoliticheskaia liniia), he wrote, lay in deeply penetrating radical and rightoppositionist circles of the intelligentsia, who have political weight, widening sources
for our influence and information . . . [and] propagandizing the idea of politicoeconomic rapprochement [sblizhenie] with the USSR. Because this work needed
to be carried out during the ever deeper and more intensive development of
fascism, Soviet methods had to be more subtlepresumably than previously
more public initiatives in Germany as in the VOKS-sponsored Society of Friends.
Now, in particular, all organizations on which we will operate have to have a
totally German appearance [sugubo-nemetskii oblik]. Girshfeld emphasized that the
German leadership must not sense Moscows influence, which must be deeply and
reliably concealed behind the scenes. Turning to Arplan, Girshfeld wrote that the
main goal was to penetrate various right-radical groupings of the intelligentsia
[pravo-radikalnye gruppirovki intelligentsii] who represent so-called National Bolshevism (Tat, Aufbruch, Vorkmpfer, etc.).72
In this pregnant and significant phrase about National Bolsheviks, Girshfeld
was referring to the journals and circles led by Arplan members Zehrer, Rmer,
and Lenz, respectively; Niekischs Widerstand group was encompassed in the etc.
The goals of Girshfelds operationto further rapprochement between Germany
and the USSR and to gain information and influencewere in fact typical of the
goals of VOKSs cultural diplomacy, which especially in this period were quite
often justified in terms of specific foreign policy goals and neutralizing critics
in a crisis of relations. The key difference was that in this case the goals did not
include influencing public opinion, and the aspirations of influence reached about
as far into alien ideological territory as was possible. In this case rapprochement
was to be achieved in an entirely covert fashion, as opposed to open friendship. Ultimately, the underlying assumption was that resulting improvements in
A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 203

German-Soviet relationswhich at this time included high-level bilateral cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Red Armycould be achieved even during
or after the fashizatsiia of Germany.
The notion that a degree of influence over influential rightists might have
positive effects for the Soviets was not entirely far-fetched. For example, Niekisch
boasted about having noteworthy access to Reichswehr officers precisely because
his ideological stance sparked their interest in furthering German-Soviet military
cooperation.73 However, on the Soviet side, sanguine expectations about what the
rise of fascism would mean for relations between the states, as we shall see, was reflected at the top of the Soviet leadership, and an overestimation of the importance
of National Bolshevik positions on the German far right appears to have played
a role. Girshfelds formulation, in this regard, makes clear that National Bolshevism itselfin the sense of some kind of positive estimation of the Soviet order
and German-Soviet relationswas the most important factor for the Soviet side
when pursuing the covert quest for influence on the German right. The national
revolutionaries worldviewswhich in the case of Niekisch included nationalism,
racism, anti-Semitism, and fanciful racial-historical theories, if they were taken
into account by Girshfeld and his putative Soviet secret police handlerswere
relevant only in that they made Soviet influence and interactions viable.

Niekischs Idea of Russia and His 1932 Arplan Visit

As Arplan began its activities in January 1932, organizing a round of conferences, talks, teas, and a collection of Soviet literature on planning, lively discussion opened up among its left, right, and academic wings over the applicability
of Soviet-style planning for Germany. At Arplans two-day conference in Berlin
in January 1932, Sergei Bessonov of VSNKh, a high official in the Soviet trade
delegation, regaled the Germans with facts, figures, and charts in the Soviet style.
The discussions on January 3 revolved around whether partial planning was possible. A number of the German academics maintained that a planned economy was
indeed possible without revolution or the Soviet political system; Lukcs retorted
that only the socialist state could guarantee the distribution of the means of production. This dispute continued to animate the mixed left-right Arplan delegation
that made its way into Soviet territory in 1932.74 However, there is no evidence that
Niekisch engaged with these kinds of detailed debates about the Soviet planned
economy that involved so many other Arplan members. To understand both his
membership in Arplan and his experience of the 1932 trip, we must explore the
place of Russian history and the Soviet order in his ideology more closely.
For Niekisch, the entire course of Russian history was a successful struggle
against the West, its values, and its power. In Russian blood, he wrote in The
Five-Year Plan, an article from 1930 that can be taken as a baseline expression of
his views before the 1932 trip, there lies an element of extreme enmity to Europe.
It is its Asiatic heritage. The carrier of Westernization before 1917 in Russia was
the Jew, and its representative after 1917 was Trotsky; Lenin, however, was a Misch204 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

ling, half Slav, half Tatar. Ancient Russian instincts (Urinstinkte) complemented
Lenins, making it possible after 1917 for the Russian Peoples Body (Volkskrper)
to mobilize against the Western poison. All of Soviet domestic development, including the Five-Year Plan, was a product of the resulting anti-Western geopolitical
stance. Niekisch closed with a rhapsody to Soviet regimented collectivism, calling
it wonderfully mysterious that a Volk of one hundred million could act in concert
in its economic, cultural, and social life to pursue freedom from Western domination.75 With a conception such as this, it hardly mattered that Niekisch threw in
some fantastically high production statistics and peppered his description with
adjectives such as wunderbar (wonderful) and grossartig (great). His passion was for
a community of fate, not the mundane workings of the Plan.
In another 1930 work, Entscheidung (Decision), Niekisch elaborated on his
interpretation of Russian-Soviet history. Niekisch adopted a Slavophile reading, portraying everything Western (Westlertum) in Russian history as an artificial imposition from the time of Peter the Great. In an apparent reference to the
Decembristswhom he mixed up as generals rather than officers who reached
Paris in 1812, and were rotted by their contact with Francehe attributed the
influx of Western civilization to such contacts and the growth of the liberal bourgeoisie. Next he brought in the Stolypin land reforms: the attempt to break the
collectivist land commune, the mir, and turn Russians into individualists failed
because the mir was in their blood. Just when Russia was in danger of becoming
a colony of the West in the First World War, Bolshevism, born in war, blocked the
Western advance by drawing on collectively defined Russian souls. After the Jew
Trotsky was defeated, Bolshevism came to fully represent the rebirth of Asiatic
Russia.
How did Germany fit into this metahistorical struggle between Asiatic good
and Western evil? While Europe since Rapallo was doing everything to break
Germany and Russia apart, the road to Germanys de-Europeanization lay to the
east. Only there would Prussian militarism (Kmpfertum) be wedded to Russian
collectivism. Niekisch ended with a call for a powerful Germano-Slavic world
empire [Weltreich].76
Did this coarsely reductionist reading of Russian/Soviet history have realworld implications? In a work published in the previous year, Niekisch depicted
the Polish state as a barrier between Germany and Russia erected by the victorious
Versailles order.77 Since at this point he recalled Western attempts to interfere with
the relations between Prussia and Russia, which had partitioned Poland in the
eighteenth century, he made it perfectly clear that the destruction of the Polish
state was a precondition for the fateful union for which he yearned.
This exposition underlines several features of the role Russia played in Niekischs political ideology. Both Russia and Bolshevism alike represented a repudiation of the hated ideas of 1789 that Germany needed to amputate from its
own Volks body. Second, in his depiction of Russian and Soviet history as a binary struggle between imported Westernization and native Asiatic instincts, Lenin
A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 205

and Stalin appeared as national revolutionaries at the helm of their own nationalsocialist revolution against the West. In his conception Marxist-Leninist ideology
was thus either subordinated to geopolitics or merely a cover for this more fundamental truth. In a work published in 1929, Niekisch amplified this notion by
comparing the USSR with Fascist Italy, the only other country that represented
a counterweight to the Western order. Both fascism and Bolshevism shared the
same spiritual structure: antiliberal, anti-individualistic, and ready for violence
(gewaltttig). But Bolshevism began in the social sphere and combined social with
national imperatives, whereas fascism began the other way around.
Nevertheless, he praised the Bolshevik East as far more boldly anti-Western
than the fascist South.78 For Niekisch, the social component of Soviet socialism
ratified a notion that he continued to cherish for Germany, the necessity of internal conflict in carrying out de-Westernization. But in other works, Niekisch made
clear that Russian Bolshevism had grown in Russian soil and could not be transplanted. Instead of a model to be copied, Bolshevism represented the icebreaker
of the conservative revolution: it would be the dynamite that would blow up the
Versailles order and the existing civilization. Ever vague on the nature of the future
German-Slavic union he envisaged, Niekisch made clear only that Russian Bolshevism would help Prussian Bolshevism create a new autocratic form.79
Niekisch traveled to the land in which he invested so many ideological dreams
as part of the Arplan study trip that visited the USSR on VOKSs invitation
from August 20 to September 15, 1932. The VOKS officials critical of Girshfelds
Berlin-based operation to recruit rightists had blocked full Soviet financial sponsorship of the Arplan trip, so Niekisch financed the journey by tapping funds from
a benefactor of Widerstand.80 At the time of his trip, the institutions and practices
governing the Soviet reception of foreign visitors faced serious challenges from
the severe economic adversity created by forced industrialization and collectivization. The groups itinerary (LeningradMoscowKharkovDneprostroi
OdessaKiev) was a standard one. But it took the group through Ukraine at the
start of the worst agricultural crisis of the collectivization era. The poor harvest
and forced requisitions in the coming winter culminated in a massive, man-made
famine that left as many as three to four million dead from starvation and hungerrelated disease. Foreign correspondents were banned from Ukraine later in 1932
and in 1933, and starting in the winter of 1933 the tourism agency Intourist stopped
operating there, canceling bookings for a time.81 The attempt to create favorable
impressions despite harsh conditions and looming agricultural catastrophe proved
the trickiest task of Arplans Soviet hosts. In general, widespread impoverishment
could hardly be concealed. It had to be explained away. Visitors, including Niekisch, would need some kind of compelling justification for hardships if they were
to come away with views favorable to the Soviets.
Met by VOKS and Gosplan officials and served by Intourist guides, the delegations itinerary was customized in a manner usually reserved for politically
and professionally important guests. Almost every day we were invited to [meet
206 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

with] another peoples commissar, who held forth and commented on voluminous
statistical material, recalled Niekisch, clearly taxed and a bit peeved, while at the
same time the stores were empty.82 Indeed, a barrage of meetings with planning
officials and economic institutes, including at Gosplan and Jen Vargas Institute
for World Politics and Economics, was supplemented by tours of major factories often visited by foreigners, such as Elektrozavod. These were rounded out
by visits to museums, cultural institutions, and model sitesincluding the secret
police-run colony for the rehabilitation through labor of juvenile delinquents,
the Dzerzhinskii Labor Commune.83 Tightly packed schedules, the norm for such
delegations, minimized unsupervised time that could not be controlled. The delegations stay in Kiev, which one VOKS official deemed completely unsuitable for
show [pokaz], was cut short; among other incidents, the itinerary was changed
in Rostov-on-Don when the delegations guide received unpleasant information
about the situation in another standard stop for foreign visitors, the giant sovkhoz
Verbliud. But Niekisch became ill at the end of the groups Moscow sojourn and
decided to skip the last part of the delegations itinerary. He traveled alone to Kiev
before leaving the country, missing Kharkov and Odessa (and thus a visit to the
Jewish milk commune Red Star and the resorts and beaches of the Black Sea).84
Many leftist sympathizers in the interwar years found ways to justify hardships
or other negative phenomena they may have witnessed in the USSR, but how
did Niekisch and the other German rightists react? Here the comparison between
Niekisch and his friend and National Bolshevik colleague, Arplan Chairman Lenz,
is illuminating. However well disposed Lenz was to a foreign policy alliance with
the USSR, he, like others in the delegation, were able to consult with German
diplomats, who were among the best informed foreign observers of the worsening
agricultural situation. Lenz was clearly shocked by the severe belt-tightening and
general backwardness he perceived, and his public pronouncements were closely
tracked by the Soviets upon his return to Germany. For example, Lenz was covered
in the German press as speaking in late 1932 to red student groups about the
terrible conditions and monstrous hardship endured by the Soviet population.
For him, any comparison between German conditions and the monstrous backwardness of Russia was impossible.85 By contrast, Niekisch openly, even greedily,
embraced mass economic hardships as evidence of collectivist commitment to the
cause. This differed from the depiction of a bright future justifying present difficulties, a common trope of VOKSs cultural diplomacy and Soviet ideology during the
rise of socialist realism that was adopted by numerous left-wing sympathizers. Niekisch, however, did not justify measures taken in the name of the future but openly
reveled in the harsh, steeling experience of hardship as such in the here and now.
In his report on the trip in Widerstand, Niekisch made no attempt to downplay
or conceal the fact that Soviet people were poorly dressed, or that even the most
renowned stores of Nevskii Prospekt in Leningrad or near the Kremlin in Moscow
resembled impoverished junk shops (Trdelladen). His reactions demonstrate how
a major dimension to foreign perceptions lay not in Potemkin villagesthat is,
A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 207

in concealing Soviet realitybut rather in interpreting the gray, dusty, and harsh
uniformity. The grimness of Soviet life that Niekisch saw proved to him only that
Russia in actual fact is proletarian; every glance backs this up. Ubiquitous privation was the clearest possible evidence that the Russian national will to live (Lebenswille) had expanded into a Slavic-Asiatic will to empire (Imperiumswille). The
greater the adversity Niekisch witnessed, the more he perceived a willing domestic
sacrifice for external greatness in combating the West.
As Niekisch moved quickly from the conditions of Soviet life to his familiar
world-historical abstractions, he demonstrated only a glancing familiarity with
the Soviet order. In his rendering, prostitution had been eliminated, every single
worker took pride in socialist construction, and relations between men and women
had been de-eroticized. Turning traditional disdain for Eastern barbarism on its
head, Niekisch readily allowed that Germany was more civilized, more prosperous, cleaner, and better kept, but all these were qualities that after all belonged
to countries without a world-historical task.86 What Niekisch discovered in the
grim Soviet conditions of 1932 was vital barbarian-proletarian strength. He found
what he already believed needed to become the crucial ingredient in the recipe for
Germanys own rebirth and imperial rise.
These post-travel passages about the proletarian state suggest that Niekischs
sojourn helped prompt a renewal of his earlier workerisman element of his
ideological makeup that distinguished him from many other trends and figures
in Germanys conservative revolution who may have shared some of his fascination with the USSR. Niekischs renewed workerism superseded the glorification
of the German peasant Volk we witnessed in some of his writings from 1930 and
1931. Before his Soviet trip, he had taken to lauding the vital primitivism of the
German countryside. By contrast, in his travel report from 1932 the collectivistic,
enthusiastic Russian worker represented at once an instinctual, primitive Russian
anti-Westernism and a more modern, advanced human being. In contrast to European and German workers who could harbor bourgeoisthat is, Westernideals
in their hearts, the Russian worker had hardly experienced bourgeois civilization
at all. Thus the Russian communist worker who believed in his world mission was
a more advanced form of man (Art Mensch). Certainly, Niekisch allowed, the
worker as a type is a thirstier, leaner, more modest, and flatter form of man than
the ruling human types have been up until now. But he believed in himself, in his
creative force, and his future.87
This backhanded veneration of the worker in the USSR corresponded with a
renewed iteration of Niekischs revolutionary idea that a segment of the German
working class would lead the way to the new Germany. But this position reflected
not only a response to his Soviet journey but the influence of his fellow Arplan
member Ernst Jnger and his Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (The Worker: Mastery and Form [1932]). Between 1928 and 1932 Niekisch had become personally
close to the Jnger brothers and a regular member of their circle. Years later he

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recalled the impression Ernst Jnger, the politically aloof, icy intellectual elitist
of the conservative revolution, made on him at their first meeting: He gave the
impression of being well groomed and self-restrained to the utmost degree. His
sentences carried within them something resembling refined aphorisms.88
Der Arbeiter was Jngers most significant work since his In Stahlgewittern
(Storms of Steel [1920]). Niekisch hailed it in a review in the very same issue of
Widerstand in which he published his account of his Soviet trip, suggesting that he
was considering both his travel experience and the book simultaneously. Perhaps
the prime example of reactionary modernism, Der Arbeiter attempted to transcend both nationalism and socialism as relics of the past by pointing to a new,
trans-ideological, planetary style in which a universal, technocratic society would
be ruled by the worker, in effect collectivist worker-soldiers. Thus Jngers photographic Die vernderte Welt (The Changed World [1933]) juxtaposed images of May
Day parades in Moscow, New York skyscrapers, and Nazi storm troopers. In Der
Arbeiter Jnger set forth an elaborate vision of a future totalitarian order mobilized
for industrial production and destruction, in which the worker-soldier was the
new man.89 What Jnger himself found most compelling in the Soviet communism of the Plan was the statist militarization of labor. In a book review published
in 1933 in Niekischs Widerstand, Jnger singled out for admiration Stalinisms total mobilization (totale Mobilmachung).90
However, if Jngers technocratic-militaristic vision heralded a future universalistic society, Niekisch hailed Der Arbeiter as a transfiguration of Russias experimental world, domesticating his friends work for his own robust brand of the
Eastern Orientation.91 The more fundamental point, however, is that Niekischs
views of the Soviet Union did not significantly change as a result of what he did
and saw inside the USSR in 1932. He still saw a Germano-Slavic union as the road
to empire; he still viewed Russian Bolshevism as the indispensible spark for Prussian Bolshevism to lead the way in the utter destruction of Western civilization.
What he wrote after the trip was in the same basic mold as what he wrote before.
The new inflection on the worker that did appear was most likely a reflection of
Jngers influence, perhaps augmented by his Arplan-sponsored talks with enthusiastic if lean Soviet workers in the factories.92
On the one hand, Niekisch vividly exemplifies, this suggests, how for Germans
from the extreme left to the extreme right before 1933, Soviet Russia was, in
many ways, a projection screen for fantasizing about a new Germany.93 However,
large numbers of interwar travelers and intellectuals found in their Soviet tour
something far more than projection. For some, it was a life-changing experience;
for many more, it offered an opportunity to immerse themselves in different aspects of Soviet culture and life. Niekisch belonged to a third, perhaps even more
numerous group, whose observations were cursory and in the main simply confirmed what they had wanted to see. But it is startling to find Niekisch in this
least observant and intellectually curious group precisely because of the outsized

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role that Russia and Bolshevism assumed at the center of his ideology. What this
suggests is just how purely Germano-centric his Eastern Orientation was and just
how abstract and phantasmagorical his understanding of Bolshevism remained.
What is especially intriguing, however, is the potential importance the Arplan
visit may have had for the perceptions of the Soviet side about the rise of fascism in
Germany. Niekischs example raises the question of the potential influence that the
Arplan rightists and other National Bolsheviks in contact with the Soviets appear
to have assumed in the calculations of the Soviet leadership. A prime example of
such contact was the very detailed political consultation between Niekisch and
Radek that took place during an afternoon session in Moscow. Niekisch recalled
how impressed he was with Radeks familiarity with the tendencies of the right:
Radek carefully followed the entire German literature, including that of the right.
So he was familiar with the writings of Otto Strasser and had information about
every political tendency in Germany.94 Indeed, earlier in 1932 Radek made a confidential visit to Poland with the express purpose of assessing German attitudes
toward the USSR (he obviously could not travel to Germany at this time).95
At the time that he met Niekisch, Radek was at the height of his influence
in affecting Soviet calculations and policies toward Germany. After having engineered the Schlageter line in 1923, Radek adhered to Trotskys Left Opposition and
was expelled from the Party in 1927, after which he capitulated and was readmitted
in 1930, steadily and assiduously ingratiating himself as Stalins servile pen. In
1932 his profuse demonstrations of loyalty to Stalin yielded concrete dividends.
Radeks grasp of international politics and knowledge of Germany were very much
lacking in Stalins entourage, and in 1932 the general secretary authorized him to
form an influential new Bureau of International Information in the Central Committee. Here Radek gathered restricted information and recommended Soviet international strategies with a direct channel to Stalin.96
The meeting with Niekisch, we also know, was not the only conversation
Radek had with Arplan members. For example, the press section of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs reported during the same period that Radek had held
a conversation that lasted five to six hours during the Arplan delegations time
in Moscow with Arplan member Adolf Grabowsky, noting that Karl Vengardovich was concerned with evaluations of individual members of the Tat group.97
The Tat circle, represented in Arplan (but not in its study delegation) by its main
figure, Hans Zehrer, was grouped around the journal of the same name that by
1932 had a circulation of thirty thousand. The Tat group had in common with
Niekisch a tendency toward the Eastern Orientation and an attempt to transcend
left and right, although Niekisch and Zehrer had a falling out. Although Zehrer
did not agree with Niekischs cult of Prussia, the Tat circle did develop the notion
of Zwischeneuropa, a joint German-Slavic space between East and West.98 Radek,
it is clear, was immersed in the tendencies of German National Bolshevism. His
conversations with Niekisch and Grabowsky about the German right appear as

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another confirmation of his direct involvement in the policy of penetrating groups

of revolutionary nationalists, in which Arplan itself was a component part.
Radek was the most knowledgeable and sophisticated observer of Germany
close to the top of the Soviet leadership, but he was not the only top Soviet leader
to take an interest in German National Bolshevism. There are other indications
that the assurances of far-right nationalists interested in supporting an Eastern
Orientation, both inside the NDSAP and without, may have had an effect on the
Soviet leaderships calculations. Specifically, in August 1932the beginning of
the month that brought the Arplan delegation to the USSRPolitburo member
Lazar Kaganovich wrote to Stalin about his readings of transcripts between Soviet
diplomats in Germany and two German figures eager to continue cooperation with
the Soviets. These were the Nazi Reventlow, another Arplan member, as well as
the military agent, adventurer, and professor of military geography Oskar Ritter
von Niedermayer, who lived in the USSR for eight years as the Wehrmachts principal representative in the covert Soviet-German military collaboration. Reventlow
was in contact with the Soviet embassy in Berlin from the time of the Schlageter
line in 1923 through the early 1930s. In 1932 in particular, the Soviet embassy in
Berlin was highly interested in Reventlow and pursued contacts with him. For his
part, Niedermayer had invited the Soviet embassy in Berlin to contact the Nazi
leader Hermann Gring and through him build permanent Soviet contacts with
the NSDAP. From the transcripts it is clear, Kaganovich assured Stalin, that even
fascist elements need to trust us, that they are not inclined to disrupt the relations
that have grown between us. This, of course, is very important, because, it seems
. . . these elements will remain in power in Germany. As Oleg Khlevniuk and the
editors of the Stalin-Kaganovich correspondence note, this was probably what
Stalin wanted to hear. In the run-up to the Nazi seizure of power, Hitler and the
rise of the radical right did not elicit significant commentary from Stalin, who was
preoccupied with internal Soviet upheavals and wished to avoid an open breach
with Germany.99
In this context, Niekischs recollection of his conversation with Radek assumes
significance. According to Niekisch, Radek was a good prophet and predicted
the upcoming fascist victory, opining that if necessary the Soviet Union would
endure having dealings with a Nazi Germany. However, he regarded Hitler and
the Nazis as politically much too dumb to see the great possibilities of GermanRussian cooperation.100 In interpreting these comments, one must factor in the
distance of Niekischs recollections and the craftiness of the intriguer Radek.
However, if Niekisch was at all accurate, it appears that Radek was holding out
before Niekisch something he himself ardently wished for: the possibilities of
German-Soviet cooperation. This suggests, in turn, that Radek was attempting
to cultivate Niekisch and German National Bolsheviks to help maintain or protect German-Soviet tiesa stance very much in line with the Soviet policy toward Arplan.

A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 211

As for Kaganovichs amateurish reading of the Sovietophilic inclinations

of German fascismeven fascist elements need to trust usthis suggests the
dangers for the Soviet leadership of extrapolating from conversations with those
figures most willing to engage the Soviets. However utilitarian the interaction
between Soviet cultural diplomacy and the German fascist intellectuals was for
both sides in 1932, it opened up channels of communication that may have given
the Soviet leadership a sanguine view of continuing German cooperation with the
Soviet Union in the event of an extreme nationalist triumph in Germany. The work
of Bert Hoppe has suggested that Stalin appears to have thought highly of the
potential for pragmatic ties between a pro-Soviet, anti-Western Nazi group that
would continue Weimar-Soviet economic and military cooperation.101 If so, Stalin
seriously and fatefully underestimated Nazi anticommunism. As for Niekisch, by
the time he met with Radek he had emerged as Hitlers most vociferous critic on
the far right of the German political spectrum.

Niekisch and the Nazis

The communist involvement with national revolutionaries and National Bolsheviks, in the end, cannot be fully understood without consideration of roughly
analogous Nazi policies of recruiting and influencing German Communists and
conservative revolutionaries outside the Nazi Party. Indeed, the KPDs attempts at
infiltration and recruitment from the radical right in the early 1930s, although they
had a few high-profile successes, were never as successful as Nazi recruitment from
the communist left in the same period.102 The KPDs nationalist rhetoric was less
convincing to potential converts to the right, as one historian has put it, than the
Nazis social revolutionary rhetoric was to those from the left. If the KPD had its
M-Apparat and policies of infiltrating and influencing the other political extreme,
which Soviet involvement ventures such as Arplan paralleled, the Nazi Party appears to have engaged in similar types of activities.103
How, then, did Niekisch and his associates navigate the competing National
Socialist pull? The principal historian of Niekisch and Widerstands interactions
with the NDSAP, Uwe Sauermann, has tracked how the Nazi press, which rarely
responded to publications outside the party, paid considerable attention to Widerstand in its early years as an interesting combination of nationalism and socialism.
In 1927 Gregor Strasser, then the propaganda chief of the NDSAP, cited Nazi
commonalities with Widerstand: both were fanatically nationalist, socialist, and
revolutionary. There were other positive references to Niekisch in the Nazi press
the same year. But Niekischs valorization of Russia troubled Alfred Rosenberg,
the Baltic-born Nazi ideologue who was editor of the Nazi organ Vlkischer Beobachter, prompting a decision in 1928 to deliberately ignore the Prussian Bolshevik.
Joseph Goebbels, who in the mid-1920s had experienced his own National Bolshevik moments, had taken an interest in Niekisch since the latters days as an Old
Social Democrat in Saxony. In 1930 Goebbels made an attempt to recruit Niekisch
in the time before the Widerstand movement took an openly anti-Nazi stance.
212 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

Figure 8. Ernst Niekisch in a photograph taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, who joined

the Nazi Party in 1920 and served as Hitlers official photographer from 1921 until
his arrest in 1945. Fotoarchiv Hoffmann, courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
Mnchen/Bildarchiv.

Goebbels met with Niekisch in the apartment of a Widerstand colleague. It was

the last such Nazi attempt: Niekischs post-1930 critique of Nazism as Roman and
Hitler as a German Mussolini prompted the Nazi press for the first time to publish
A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 213

articles about Niekisch as a Soviet-friendly enemy.104 In 1930, as well, Niekisch,

Ernst Jnger, and other National Bolsheviks took part in a congress of the Group
of Social Revolutionary Nationalists that included Gregor and Otto Strasser (as
noted, Otto was expelled from the NDSAP in 1930).105
A number of Niekischs associates, however, were able to bridge the gap between revolutionary nationalism and National Socialism. For example, the philosopher Baeumler, who as we have seen had a distinct influence on Niekisch and
introduced him to Ernst Jnger, fell into the Nazi orbit after 1929 and after 1933
became one of the court ideologists of Alfred Rosenberg.106 A far-right paramilitary group, the Wehrwolfverband, which had been founded during the occupation
of the Ruhr, had a Fhrer, Fritz Klopf, who published in Widerstand and spoke
warmly of Niekisch but ultimately could not sympathize with the idea of an alliance with Bolshevism. In June 1933 the Wehrwolf troops merged with the Nazi SA.
As also previously noted, the Freikorps paramilitary group, Bund Oberland, split
in 1930, with a part joining the NDSAP and the splinter Oberlandkameradschaft
supporting the Widerstand circle.107 Finally, some members of the Widerstand circle depicted the rise of National Socialism with some degree of sympathy in the
pages of their journal between 1930 and 1933.108
Niekisch, by contrast, turned into an open enemy of Nazism in 1930. In this
he may have also been influenced by his association with Jnger, who, as is well
known, looked down on Nazism as a vulgar and plebeian product of direct democracy.109 In 1932, when Hitler was a candidate for Reichsprsident, Niekisch
published a strongly anti-Nazi tract, Hitler, ein deutsches Verhngnis (Hitler, a German
Disaster). His open enmity with Nazism thus corresponded to his radicalization
and the emergence of his Prussian Bolshevismthat is, his most passionate defense of a German-Slavic Union. The consistency and depth of Niekischs Eastern
Orientationprecisely where he stood out along the continuum of the conservative revolutionand the depth of his third way commitment to social as well
as national revolutionary upheaval were the greatest sources of his opposition to
Nazism. In part, the old Social Democrat saw fascism in the left-wing tradition: it
was petty-bourgeois and corrupting of German socialism.
Niekisch soon found another way to fit Nazism into his bizarre historiosophy.
He rejected the Italian term fascism as Romanized, and Nazism, with its base in
Munich, also belonged to the alien Roman world: The fascist transformation [Faschisierung] of National Socialism was its Munichization [Vermnchnerung]. Niekisch asserted that Nazism belonged to the Western-Catholic-Southern civilization,
while his own ideology championed a Prussian-Protestant-Russian world. Hitler,
ein deutsches Verhngnis portrayed Hitler as a Romanized German, a mere a gendarme of the West. Niekisch thus positioned himself as a critic of Nazism from
the racist extremes of the national-revolutionary camp, actually attacking Hitler as
a particularly dangerous creature of the Anglo-Franco-Jewish West.110 It is worth
pondering Stefan Breuers remark: If Niekisch was an enemy of Hitler, it was only

214 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

in the sense that Stalin was. It had nothing to do with hindering terror, but only
with who would carry it out.111

Precedents and Entanglements: Russian National Bolshevism

The term National Bolshevism emerged, as we have seen, in the German context in 1919. But a Russian phenomenon that acquired the same label emerged as
an influential current among migr Russian political thinkers hailing positive,
national features in the Bolshevik Revolution. This current crystallized around the
time when the Whites were defeated in the Russian Civil War in 1920 and could no
longer provide an alternative to the consolidation of the new Soviet regime. In the
scholarly literature in the Russian context, following the work of Mikhail Agursky,
a central place in Russian National Bolshevism has been accorded to the Smena
vekh (Changing Landmarks) group that published its eponymous work in Prague
in 1921. Agursky, however, did not limit it to this small yet influential group: he
defined Russian National Bolshevism more broadly as statist nationalism, or the
Russian etatist ideology that legitimizes the Soviet political system from the Russian etatist point of view, contrary to its exclusive Marxist legitimacy.112 Thus
Russian National Bolshevism, like its German counterpart, has been attached to
certain specific figures while acquiring a more general significance.
It turns out that considering the case of Russian National Bolshevism in the
context of Niekisch and German National Bolshevism is very instructive. The
exercise points not only to a certain parallel development provoked by similar
circumstances in the interwar conjuncture but also to little-known interactions
and entanglements. In the early 1920s and the early 1930s, both smenovekhovtsy and
Eurasianist thinkers took interest in German National Bolshevism or in Niekisch
specifically. The Soviet experience of coopting these Russian migr nationalists,
moreover, preceded the communist outreach to Arplan by a decade and met with
notable success.
The smenovekhovtsy, whose work caused a sensation among Russian migrs
and was widely known and even republished in the Soviet Union, called for the
Russian intelligentsia to go to Canossa and support the new Soviet state. The
Bolsheviks were reuniting Russia, making it a great power on the world stage,
and the revolution commanded the support of the Russian nation. Most important,
in spite and not because of their ideology, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were in fact
pursuing Russian national missions.113 The article Patriotica by N. V. Ustrialov
sounded all these themes and assumed a central place in Smena vekh. The author, a
right-wing Kadet disillusioned with party politics, had been director of the press
agency glorifying Aleksandr Kolchaks dictatorship in Omsk. On the eve of his
departure for Harbin, his movement defeated, Ustrialov underwent a conversion to
his electrifying stance in favor of a strong Soviet state.
The anti-Bolshevik movement by the power of events tied itself too closely to
foreign elements and therefore armed Bolshevism with a certain national aureole,

A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 215

Ustrialov wrote in his Hegelian vein; this allowed an internationalist movement

dialectically to play a national role. Like a number of German conservative revolutionaries, Ustrialov expressed a certain admiration for Lenin as a strong figure
who was capable of jettisoning pure communism to pursue a national revolution.114
Although Ustrialov wrote extensively in Patriotica about the French Revolution
and Thermidor, he was in fact closely monitoring the German nationalist scene
throughout this period. In a letter to P. B. Struve from October 15, 1920, which
Struve made public, Ustrialov referred explicitly to the German case and called his
own position National Bolshevism. Although the Russian use of the term was
never as prominent as its German counterpart in the 1920s, it was picked up by
both the Russian migrs and their Soviet observers.115 A key difference between
German and Russian conservatives perceiving positive elements of Bolshevism, of
course, was that the Germans were deeply illiberal radicals on the right thirsting
for their own national revolution, while the Russian great-power nationalists, like
Ustrialov, were ex-liberals ever more enamored with the decisiveness of dictatorship, forced to reconcile with a seemingly popular yet evolving revolutionary fait
accompli.
The group of Eurasianists, who arose around the same time as the smenovekhovtsy, were not Hegelian but religious-philosophical in their orientation; they rejected cooperation with the Soviet regime while nonetheless seeing the revolution
as a decisive historical turn against the West. By the early 1930s, the Eurasian
movement underwent an internal crisis, as some of its original members (such
as N. S. Trubetskoi) left and others became infatuated with Marxism. Yet those
who were left, as Martin Beisswenger has discovered, took a deep interest in German national-revolutionary groupings of that era and opened up some contacts
with them. In early 1932, in a report to P. N. Savitskii, the leader of the Central
Committee of the Eurasianist organization, A. P. Antipov expressed a particular
interest in Niekisch and his Widerstand movement. He was particularly enamored
with its anti-Western historiosophy and in particular Niekischs Potsdam idea.
After all, Niekischs imagined historical road from Potsdam ultimately propagated
Russian statist ideas that assumed Germany had something to learn from Russia.
Beisswenger agrees with Leonid Luks that most of the similarities between German conservative revolutionaries and the Eurasianists stemmed from parallels in
the national and pan-European circumstances in which they arose in the interwar
period. These included their rejection of Western civilization, their illiberal and
utopian orientation, and their ideology-centered, generational rebellion. Even so,
Beisswenger makes a strong case that their direct contacts have not been sufficiently explored.116
For their part, the Bolsheviks themselves launched a policy of coopting
members of the Russian intelligentsia from 1918 on, explicitly including those
motivated to reconcile with the Soviets on national, patriotic, and imperial
grounds. In 1921, the Bolshevik litterateur N. L. Meshcheriakov greeted them as
National-Bolsheviks who would inevitably move closer to the true Bolshevik216 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

Communists. The ideas of the smenovekhovtsy were triumphantly propagated as

well as harshly criticized in the Soviet 1920s, and the label smenovekhovstvo was
deployed far beyond the original Smena vekh group to encompass many different
types able to come to terms with the new regimeincluding prominent Ukrainian
migrs who underwent their own analogous yet in some ways distinctive reorientation. In fact, a parade of Russian and Ukrainian migrs returned to the USSR
and received positions during NEP. During the new ideological offensive of the
Great Break after 1928 these figures came under attack, and they were particularly
vulnerable during the Great Terror.117 Ustrialov, for his part, found it possible to return only in 1935; he was arrested in 1937. Ultimately, the Russo-German entanglements in this realm go beyond the ideological similarities and interactions among
intellectuals and enter the realm of Soviet political strategy. It is quite plausible to
surmise that Soviet success in coopting Russian National Bolsheviks in the 1920s
set the stage for the communist policy in Germany that wooed German national
revolutionaries in the early 1930s.
During the time of his membership in Arplan and his Soviet visit, Ernst Niekisch had become one of the most extremist voices in the twentieth-century age
of extremes. His political trajectory and the evolution of his ideology were distinctive, even unique. But in this very uniqueness, by exaggerating and taking
to their extreme certain more general features of the left-right entanglement, he
points to the significance of broader phenomena in several ways. First, Niekisch
went farther than anyone else in the German conservative revolution by making
the broader strain of fascination for Stalinism and the Soviet order the centerpiece
of his worldview. His case, therefore, suggests that a positive vision of elements of
Bolshevismadapted, domesticated, and distorted, to be surebecame a significant phenomenon on the far right, in particular within the national-revolutionary
camp. Second, this kind of cross-fertilization was heightened during the left-right
mixing of the late Weimar period, as Communists confronted a rising National
Socialism and a right-wing, national revolution was in the offing. Third, even as
he resisted all attempts to gravitate to either communism or National Socialism,
Niekisch illustrates how the camp of national revolutionaries became a poaching
ground in recruitment efforts by Communists and Nazis. Furthermore, as Arplan
illustrates, the Soviet and Comintern presence in Berlin resulted in the internationalization of such efforts, which for a time brought figures on the German revolutionary right into direct contact with the Soviets.
Weimar Germany on the eve of the Nazi Revolution was unusual both for this
interpenetration of the far left and the far right and for the power of the attractions, and not just hatred, that aspects of Stalinism exerted on radical nationalism.
Niekisch, even as he charted his unique and independent course, represents the
nec plus ultra of both these phenomena. Niekischs Prussian Bolshevism is a prime
illustration of the complicated circulations of illiberal modernity and the powerful
allure of the total state. However, here it must be added, as the case of his visit in
A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 217

1932 so clearly illustrates, that what Niekisch took from Bolshevism and Stalinism
was neither a model or a political lesson, still less an immersion into a political
culture. Rather, he gained inspiration within the framework of his own ideological
system. His mythologization of Bolshevism in both its Prussian and its Russian varieties was so intense that his glimpse of Soviet reality did little except reinforce it.
In the end, the disagreements over whether Niekisch attacked Hitler from
the left or the right sides of the right are confounded by Niekischs revolutionary
extremism. It is important to recognize what Niekisch as a national revolutionary retained from his days as a revolutionary Social Democrat. Here his concept
of internal or class conflict within the nation appears particularly significant. As
Rtsch-Langenjrgen has observed, Niekischs notion of a Prussian race, which
stood in contrast to Hitlers Aryanism, would have relegated significant numbers of Germans to the rank of service personnel, if not worse.118 Thus Niekischs
ever-conflictual vision of the national revolution, which he fashioned out of the
tradition of class conflict, stood in stark contrast to the vision of a harmonious
national Volksgemeinschaft. At the same time, Niekischs revulsion for the West and
his hunger for revolutionary destruction was unmatched by any. Here, in a zone
where the extremes meet, one cannot make clear-cut, binary distinctions. Niekisch
resisted the pull of both Nazism and communism, for he was always a contrarian
and a radical, third way oppositionist. His stance reflected the depth and flowering
of extremism at an extraordinary moment of crisis.
This discussion suggests some conclusions about German National Bolshevism
as well. Niekisch appears in dozens of scholarly references as the quintessential
National Bolshevik, for his Eastern Orientation and proletarian rhetoric was the
most consistently strong within the conservative revolution. However, as we have
seen, not only did he himself never adopt the term, but his Bolshevism, despite
a proclivity toward anticapitalist nationalization of the economy, was fabricated
entirely within the framework of his own national-revolutionary ideology. Any
fixed, social science definitions of National Bolshevism would come up with few
other than Niekisch who attempted to combine national revolution with some
sort of putatively genuine Bolshevism (either in the German or the Russian case)
that would include such core features of Bolshevism as proletarian class conflict
and the nationalization of the economy. Although Niekisch was one of the few
figures on the German far right who episodically did incorporate such elements,
he did so within an extreme nationalist framework and thus himself confounds
that classification. A more authentic and convincing schema would be to place
Niekisch in the way he saw himself at the time, in the national-revolutionary camp
that attempted to mix social and national revolutionto create national socialism
outside the framework of Nazism. However, it is also necessary to recognize and
analyze the prevalence of the National Bolshevik label at the time. In both the
German conservative revolution and the Russian migr intelligentsia, this period
witnessed an attempt to domesticate and appropriate the success of Bolshevism for

218 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

a national framework. As we have seen, there were not only parallels but a degree
of interaction between the Russian and German versions of those trends labeled
National Bolshevik at the time. Both Soviet and German Communists, moreover,
attempted to take advantage of them for more than a decade.
What is perhaps most interesting is that Soviet observers of the Weimar Republics last crisis, such as Girshfeld in his reports on Arplan, also adopted the
National Bolshevik label as meaningful. For the Soviets, as the case of Niekisch
shows, openness to praising and allying with the Soviets trumped all other considerations, such as the rest of his ideology. Indeed, as the net of Soviet cultural
diplomacy was cast widely over potential collaborators, an enormous range of
noncommunist ideologies on the left were tolerated among sympathizers and
fellow-travelers; with sufficient incentive ideological litmus tests could easily be set
aside on the right as well. Judging by the case of Arplan, the Soviets misunderstood Niekisch perhaps as much as he misunderstood them. But the Soviet misapprehension of Niekischthe notion that his National Bolshevism would make
him susceptible to their influencepoints to a broader Soviet incomprehension of
the revolutionary right and the dangers of Nazism. Communist utilitarian practices
and covert missions, so clearly on display in the case of Arplan, made Soviet representatives eagerly perceive that National Bolshevism offered them an opening and
an opportunity. But by seeking out National Bolsheviksthat is, those open to
the Eastern Orientation or potential conversionthe Soviets ended up accessing
information and assurances that fed illusions of what the rise of fascism would
mean for Soviet-German relations. As the case of Niekisch so clearly suggests, it
is in this sense of influence through misunderstanding, rather than any kind of
straightforward emulation, that a basic entanglement is revealed.

Epilogue
After the Nazi seizure of power Niekischs journal and publishing house continued to function, but an isolated Niekisch delegated almost all organizational
work to his associates Karl Trger and Joseph Drexel. On one occasion after
the Nazi seizure of power, KPD documentation suggests, he met in Paris with
a high-ranking German Communistmost likely the head of M-Apparat, Hans
Kippenberger. According to the KPD report, in this meeting on August 12, 1933,
meeting Niekisch expressed disappointment with Soviet attempts to come to an
accommodation with Hitler, as reflected in the stance of the Soviet embassy in Berlin, calling this a sign of weakness.119 In 1935 Niekisch published Die dritte imperiale
Figur (The Third Imperial Figure), which the Nazi authorities allowed to circulate
for a year after its publication in Berlin. This tract updated Niekischs geopolitical
and racist historiosophy for the age of the Third Reich. In the historical schema
presented here, the first figure was the Roman, representing everything remotely
connected to the classical world through the Catholic Middle Ages; the second figure was the Jew, connected to humanism, Protestantism, Masonry, liberalism, and

A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA | 219

revolution. The third and final figure was a conquerer from the east, the barbarian
who would destroy the West and dominate world history.120 In the late 1930s,
Niekisch published an article in Switzerland under a pseudonym that repeated his
criticisms of Nazism from his Hitler book of 1932, beginning a process that culminated in 1939 in his conviction and imprisonment for high treason. Liberated by
the Red Army near Berlin in 1945, by then partly handicapped and nearly blind,
he joined the German Communists and the SED.121
In his new incarnation as a German Communist in the German Democratic
Republic, Niekisch began to teach sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin
in 1947. In 1949 he was appointed to the rank of professor and director of the
Institute for the Study of Imperialism. But Niekisch hardly had the temperament
to remain orthodox: in 1950 he fell into disfavor, and in 1951 his institute was
closed. Niekisch experienced the suppression of the workers revolt on June 17,
1953, as a final disillusionment with East German communism, and he moved over
to West Berlin, where he had maintained his Charlottenburg apartment. In the
postwar period, Niekisch began systematically to reconfigure his own past, an effort helped by his former right-hand man in the Widerstand circle, Joseph Drexel,
who became a newspaper magnate and publisher based in Nuremberg. The old
Widerstand colleagues portrayed their resistance movement as directed against
Hitler, not Versailles.122 After writing his memoirs, Ernst Niekisch died at age
seventy-eight in 1967, a year short of a very different revolutionary storm. But in
the disillusionment with neo-Marxism and the rediscovery of national themes by
some radicals in the wake of 1968, Niekisch was rediscovered by a new generation
of German youth. Niekischs writings were bought up and photocopies of them
were passed from hand to hand. This minor rehabilitation faded as professional
historians such as Uwe Sauermann pushed back against his apologists in early
scholarly studies of Niekischs political journey.123
But Niekisch and his remarkable ideology are hardly yet ready to be claimed
completely by the professional servants of Clio. Given the post-Soviet persistence
and the extraordinary, disturbing prominence of movements claiming the mantle
of National Bolshevism in Putins Russia, it is not surprising that Ernst Niekisch
has been rediscovered there. In 2011, a translation of his political writings from the
1920s and 1940s appeared in Russian with a preface by O. Iu. Plenkov. There one
can find the remarkable claim: Niekischs idea of combining national liberation
with socialism in a unified whole was later implemented by Mao, Ho Chi Minh,
Castro, Khomeini, and other antibourgeois, anti-Western revolutionary tendencies.
The true theoretician of these movements was not Marx or Lenin but Ernst Niekisch.124 With this claim, as exaggerated as Niekischs own fantastic revolutionary
syntheses, a latest, Russian twist in a remarkable, peripatetic ideological odyssey
was complete.

220 | A PRUSSIAN BOLSHEVIK IN STALINS RUSSIA

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: Threading the Needle

1. Essential works on these questions include Marshall T. Poe, A People Born to Slavery:
Russia in Early Modern Ethnography, 14761748 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000);
Alfred J. Rieber, Persistent Factors in Russian Foreign Policy: An Interpretive Essay,
in Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), 31559; Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the
Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Catriona Kelly,
Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001); Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in
Identity and International Relations (London: Routledge, 1996); Neumann, Uses of the Other:
The East in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
Bruno Naarden, Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia: Perception and Prejudice, 18481923
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and, on revolutionary iconoclasm, Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, trans. John Bonner (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1856), 17, 252.
3. A discussion of the term developmental violence can be found in Christian Gerlach
and Nicholas Werth, State ViolenceViolent Societies, in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism
and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 17576.
4. One of the most influential contemporary works on these developments was Nicholas Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York:
E. P. Dutton, 1946); one of the most influential scholarly treatments came from Vera S.
Dunham, In Stalins Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). The term leveling (uravnilovka) was promoted by trade union officials in
the 1920s in the context of pursuing wage equality and was initially condemned by Stalin
in 1931 in his New Conditions speech, in the context of introducing piecework and
other wage differentials. See Wendy Z. Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry
in Stalins Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 246; David L. Hoffmann,
Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 19291941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1994), 94.
221

5. The classic history of the concept of totalitarianism and the decades-long debate over
it is Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), but on the earliest usages see also Bruno Bongiovanni, Totalitarianism: The Word and the Thing, Journal of Modern European History 3, no. 1 (2005): 517.
6. Here see esp. David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of Americas
Soviet Experts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 2.
7. The best known is social mobility: see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility
in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); see also Engerman,
The Soviet Union as a Modern Society, chap. 7 of Know Your Enemy.
8. Vladimir Shlapentokh, A Normal Totalitarian Society: The Soviet UnionHow It Functioned and How It Collapsed (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001); Ronald Tiersky, Ordinary
Stalinism: Democratic Centralism and the Question of Communist Development (Boston: Allen and
Unwin, 1985). For a historicizing treatment of Nicholas Timasheffs 1946 The Great Retreat,
which became a classic among Soviet historians questioning how late Stalinism related to
the revolution, see Jeffrey Brooks, Declassifying a Classic, Kritika: Explorations in Russian
and Eurasian History (hereafter Kritika) 5, no. 4 (2004): 70919, part of a four-article discussion of Stalinism and the Great Retreat.
9. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 19171991 (New
York: Free Press, 1994); Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the
Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). See also Catherine
Evtuhov and Stephen Kotkin, eds., The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe,
17891991 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
10. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York: Scribners, 1974); Pipes, The
Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990); Pipes, East Is East, review of Malia, Russia
under Western Eyes, in The New Republic, April 26May 3, 1999, at www.misterdann.com/
eurareastiseast.htm.
11. As Peter Holquist has suggested in Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia in the
Epoch of Violence, 190521, Kritika 4, no. 3 (2003): 62752.
12. One full-length comparative work that evolved out of these debates is David L.
Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 19141939
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
13. See, for example, Juliane Frst, ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction
and Reinvention (London: Routledge, 2006); Melanie Ili and Jeremy Smith, eds., Soviet
State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev (London: Routledge, 2009); Repenser le Dgel,
special issue of Cahiers du monde russe 47, nos. 12 (2006); Polly Jones, ed., The Dilemmas of
De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (London: Routledge, 2006); David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and
Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000); and a historiographical
overview by Miriam Dobson, The Post-Stalin Era: De-Stalinization, Daily Life, and Dissent, Kritika 12, no. 4 (2011): 90524.
14. Two of the chapters here (chaps. 2 and 7) are new; two others (chaps. 3 and 6) are
also previously unpublished but incorporate one revised section (in the first instance) and
some passages (in the second) from previous articles. Two others (chaps. 1 and 4) were
published in previous incarnations but have undergone extensive reworking to reflect my
current thinking and the state of the field. One (chap. 5) has been only slightly updated
from its original form.
222 | NOTES TO PAGES 24

15. For example, Alexei Yurchaks celebrated Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More:
The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), simply states:
Like Western democracy, Soviet socialism was part of modernity (10). But for a more
explicit investigation in the East German context, see Katherine Pence and Paul Betts,
eds., Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2008).
16. For comparative perspectives on the modern leader cult beginning with Napoleon
III in France, see Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2012); for comparative perspectives on Soviet cultural diplomacy and propaganda, see Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural
Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 19211941 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011), chap. 1.
17. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 88.
18. Moshe Lewin, RussiaUSSRRussia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York:
New Press, 1995).
19. Here see, for example, David C. Engerman, The Second Worlds Third World,
Kritika 12, no. 1 (2011): 183211.
20. For a broad and engaging, if preliminary, overview, see Steven G. Marks, How
Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004). For a model of circulation rather than transfer, see
Circulation of Knowledge and the Human Sciences in Russia, special issue of Kritika 9,
no. 1 (2008). Soviet innovation and influence was a key theme in my own work on cultural
diplomacy (David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment).
21. On residual markets even under Stalinism, see Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet
Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 19171953 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2004). For similarities as well as differences between Soviet retailing
and consumption and the early history of consumerism in Western countries, see Amy
E. Randall, The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). On welfare, medicine, and a range of other comparative topics
in the history of state interventionism, see Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses.
22. Perhaps most prominently, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in
Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
23. David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, 8997.
24. See, for example, Alexander Etkind, Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of
Salvation? Kritika 6, no. 1 (2005): 17186, esp. 17475, quotation 177.
25. Frederick Cooper, Modernity, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 115.
26. Terry Martin, Modernization of Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism, in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David Hoffmann
and Yanni Kotsonis (New York: Macmillan, 2000), 16184, quotation 176.
27. J. Arch Getty, Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).
28. The key text is Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed., Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2002), a book version of the Winter 2000 number of Daedalus.

NOTES TO PAGES 57 | 223

29. Stefan Plaggenborg, Schweigen ist Gold: Die Moderntheorie und der Kommunismus, Osteuropa 63, nos. 56 (2013): 6778, quotation 71.
30. Plaggenborg, Schweigen ist Gold, 78.
31. The burgeoning literature on non-Western modernities includes Sivaramakrishnan
and Arun Agrawal, eds., Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst, and
Heike Schmidt, eds., African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate (Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann, 2002); Jaafar Aksikas, Arab Modernities: Islamism, Nationalism, and Liberalism in the Post-Colonial Arab World (New York: Peter Lang, 2009); and Huricihan Islamoglu
and Peter C. Perdue, eds., Shared Histories of Modernity: China, India, and the Ottoman Empire
(New Delhi: Routledge, 2009). For a noteworthy critique of the uses of modernity in
colonial studies, see Cooper, Modernity.
32. Although I have not been able to treat 1991 in this book, Russian and Soviet studies will have to grapple with multiple regime changes in the twentieth century, much as
Germanists have had to do for 1918, 1933, the rise of two Germanies in 194547, and 1989.
33. For the most recent example, see Getty, Practicing Stalinism.
34. To cite one celebrated case, Theda Skocpols classic work in comparative revolutions, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), rejected any explanatory role for ideologies
in explaining the outcomes of major revolutions, as famously pointed out by William H.
Sewell, Jr., Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case, Journal of
Modern History 57, no. 1 (1985): 5785, esp. 59.
35. I am referring to the essays in Geyer and Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism.
36. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, 7.
37. Michael Freeden, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 93.
38. The Russian fields relatively recent excursion into conceptual history has thus
far been far more extensively pursued in the imperial period. See, for example, Aleksei
Miller, Denis Svizhkov, and Ingrid Shirle [Schierle], eds., Poniatiia o Rossii: K istoricheskoi
semantike imperskogo perioda (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2012). For a critical
intervention in response to the revival of Begriffsgeschichte, see Walter Sperling, Sleeping
Beauty? Or What Can We Expect from a Begriffsgeschichte of Russia Today? A Critical
View on a Historical Perspective, Jahrbcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas 60, no. 3 (2012):
373406.
39. Michael David-Fox, What Is Cultural Revolution? Russian Review 58, no. 2 (1999):
181201; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution Revisited, Russian Review 58, no. 2
(1999): 2029; David-Fox, Mentalit or Cultural System: A Reply to Sheila Fitzpatrick,
Russian Review 58, no. 2 (1999): 21011. The key text is Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural
Revolution in Russia, 19281931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).
40. For recent thinking on stages and outcomes in the field of comparative revolutions,
including the phenomenon of second revolutions, see Jack A. Goldstone, Rethinking
Revolutions: Integrating Origins, Processes, and Outcomes, in Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 29, no. 1 (2009): 1832; and Goldstone, Revolutions: A Very
Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
41. Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Studies in Stalinism and Post-Stalin
Change (New York: Praeger, 1963); Tucker, Toward a Comparative Politics of Movement-

224 | NOTES TO PAGES 812

Regimes, American Political Science Review 55, no. 2 (1961): 28180; Gleason, Totalitarianism,
127.
42. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1990), 38; Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), esp. 29398.
43. The classic work in English on the redexpert divide is Kendall E. Bailes, Technology
and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 19171941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978).
44. Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Power and Culture, in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture
in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992), 56.
45. Fitzpatrick, On Power and Culture, 15.
46. Sustained treatment of the problem of generations in Soviet history is rare; for a
work with a significant amount of Soviet material, see Stephen Lovell, ed., Generations
in Twentieth-Century Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). On the rise of the idea
of generations in Russia as an intelligentsia phenomenon of the nineteenth century, see
Lovell, From Genealogy to Generation: The Birth of Cohort Thinking in Russia, Kritika
9, no. 3 (2008): 56794.
47. For my take on transnational history in the Russian and Soviet field, see Michael
David-Fox, The Implications of Transnationalism, Kritika 12, no. 4 (2011): 885904; and
David-Fox, The Iron Curtain as Semi-Permeable Membrane: The Origins and Demise of
the Stalinist Superiority Complex, in Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange
across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s1960s, ed. Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014), 1439.

CHAPTER 1: Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism

1. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Introduction, in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 1999), 11.
2. Fitzpatrick, Stalinism, 14n.29. Among the Columbia graduates mentioned below are
Jochen Hellbeck, David Hoffmann, Peter Holquist, Yanni Kotsonis, and Amir Weiner;
among the Chicago graduates are Matthew Lenoe and Terry Martin. On the productive
interface between the Columbia and Chicago schools, see Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Whither
Soviet History? Some Reflections on Recent Anglophone Historiography, Region: Regional
Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia 1, no. 2 (2012): 21330, quotation 216.
3. Jochen Hellbeck and Peter Holquist, Leopold Haimson (19272010), Kritika 12, no.
3 (2011): 761.
4. Another possibility, discussed below, is the notion of an influential yet a failed
Russian-Soviet variation on modernity that spans both sides of 1917.
5. Yanni Kotsonis, Introduction: A Modern Paradox: Subject and Citizen in Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Russia, in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed.
David Hoffmann and Kotsonis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 5. See also Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backwards: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia,
18611914 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), 35, where he advances a similar definition
of modernity and invokes Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1990).
6. David L. Hoffmann, European Modernity and Soviet Socialism, in Russian Modernity, 24647. In a subsequent book, he wrote, I define modernity . . . in terms of two

NOTES TO PAGES 1223 | 225

features common to all modern political systemssocial interventionism and mass politics (Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 19171941 [Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2003], 7).
7. Peter Holquist, Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context, Journal of Modern History 69, no. 3 (1997): 41550.
8. Stephen Kotkin, Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,
Kritika 2, no. 1 (2001): 11164.
9. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004),
esp. 1, 2, 44, 99, 175, 199, 24041, 263.
10. Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 2, 4.
11. S. N. Eisenstadt, Multiple Modernities, Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 129, here
23. Indeed, a sociological endorsement of the concept went farther, criticizing Eurocentric theories of modernity (Ibrahim Kaya, Modernity, Openness, Interpretation: A
Perspective on Multiple Modernities, Social Science Information 43, no. 1 [2004]: 3557).
On colonial and non-Western modernities, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993);
Chatterjee, Omnibus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000).
12. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995).
13. David Hoffmann, in a signed From the Editor column in Russian Review, called
for more comparative history in the Soviet field to elucidate both particular and more
universal aspects of the Soviet system. See Soviet History in Comparative Perspective,
Russian Review 57, no. 4 (1998): viiviii.
14. Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backwards, esp. 32, 185; Kotkin, Modern Times, esp. 118.
Peter Holquist, in Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia in the Epoch of Violence,
190521, Kritika 4, no. 3 (2003): 62752, made a notable move toward an emphasis on
the interaction of context (circumstances) and ideology (intent), as opposed to the interpretive move of isolating ideology as a factor. Here and in Making War, Forging Revolution:
Russias Continuum of Crisis, 19141921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2003),
he dropped explicit promotion of the modernity concept, evidently on the reasonable
assumption that it would detract attention from other lines of argumentation.
15. David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism,
19141939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), discussed below, marks a notable
departure from his earlier work.
16. For example, Holquist made an intriguing argument that in their aspirations to
purge and transform the existing socioeconomic order Russian mobilization and food
supply policies in 19141917 were analogous to Kemal Beys efforts to Turkify economic
life (Making War, 35). A pioneering work in pursuing a range of Russian-Ottoman comparisons was Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia,
and the Middle East, 19141923 (London: Routledge, 2001).
17. Ronald Grigor Suny, Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the Twentieth Century: How the West Wrote Its History of the USSR, in Cambridge History of Russia, vol.

226 | NOTES TO PAGES 2326

3: The Twentieth Century, ed. Suny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 566,
quotation 60.
18. Frederick Cooper, Modernity, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
(Berkeley: University of California, 2005), 11415.
19. Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in
Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Europe, American Historical Review 80, no. 5 (1975):
122143, quotation 1238. But for a critique of Raeff for focusing more on the theory than
the practice of cameralism, see Andre Wakefield, The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
20. Holquist, Making War.
21. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2000, orig. 1989). A collection integrating Russian and Soviet studies into a comparative
framework paid homage to Baumans gardening state in its title: Amir Weiner, Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Perspective
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). On illiberal modernity, see Weiner,
Landscaping the Human Garden, 3. On illiberal, socialist subjectivity, see Jochen Hellbeck,
Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006), 9.
22. The phrase comes from Patrick Debois, The Holocaust by Bullets (New York: St.
Martins Press, 2008); the reference is to Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish
Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York: Penguin Books, 2002). See also my discussion
of Michael Manns critique of Bauman, below.
23. David Blackbourn, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: Reappraising German
History in the Nineteenth Century, in The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society
and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany, by Blackbourn and Geoff Eley (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984), 292.
24. Gtz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen
Plne fr eine neue europische Ordnung (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1991). For a discussion of debates in German history on modernization and modernity, see Ian Kershaw,
The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed. (London: Arnold,
2000), 16182, 24348.
25. See, for example, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy 19221945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
26. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 69; Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 4, 78, 16, 18, 166, 187.
27. Holquist, Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work, 61. The latter but
not the previous sentence was cited by Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture,
Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004),
11.
28. Kate Brown, Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly the Same
Place, American Historical Review 106, no. 1 (2001): 1748, here 65, 68. Browns figures
are low even in terms of official mortality statistics. But as several scholars have noted,
Gulag mortality rates were kept artificially low either through outright falsification or by
the policy, initially reinforced starting in 1930 by central directives and carried out over
many years, of regularly releasing prisoners on the verge of death. See Oleg Khlevniuk,
History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans. Vadim Staklo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 78; Michael Ellman, Soviet Repression Statistics:

NOTES TO PAGES 2628 | 227

Some Comments, Europe-Asia Studies 54, no. 7 (2002): 115172, esp. 115153; and Golfo
Alexopolous, Health, Medicine, and Mortality in Stalins Gulag, paper presented at the
Russian History Seminar of Washington, DC, November 4, 2011.
29. Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Genesis of the Final Solution from the Spirit of Science,
in Nazism and German Society, 19331945, ed. David F. Crew (London: Routledge, 1994),
27499, orig. published as Peukert, Die Genesis der Endlsung aus dem Geist der Wissenschaft, in Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht,
1989), 10221.
30. Peukert, Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne, 64, 164. See also the volume dedicated
to Peukert: Frank Bajohr, Werner Johe, and Uwe Lohalm, eds., Zivilisation und Barberei: Die
widersprchlichen Potentiale der Moderne (Hamburg: Christians Verlag, 1991).
31. Peter Fritzsche, Nazi Modern, Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 1 (1996): 121.
32. Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge,
1994), 6267, quotation 66, and his elaboration in Modernity: Understanding the Present
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).
33. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New
York: Penguin, 1988), 98, 14. For a subsequent and similarly joint analysis of modernity
and modernism applied in the German context, see Fritzsche, Nazi Modern.
34. Leszek Koakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, orig. 1986), 10.
35. In addition to Bauman, discussed above, James C. Scotts identification of high
modernism with hyperinterventionist state projects proved influential in the Soviet field.
See James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
36. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 88.
37. David Joravsky, Cultural Revolution and the Fortress Mentality, in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, ed. Abbott Gleason et al. (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1985); Johann P. Arnason, Communism and Modernity, in
Multiple Modernities, special issue of Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000), 68. See also Arnason,
The Future That Failed: Origins and Destinies of the Soviet Model (London: Routledge, 1993). At
the same time, others have seen in the arbitrariness and relativism of the Soviet ideological world not antimodernism or high modernism but an anticipatory Soviet postmodernism (see Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary
Russian Culture, trans. Anesa Miller-Pogacar [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1995], 101, 194, 206). This only serves to underline the difficulties of integrating the Soviet
cultural and ideological system into a broader comparative framework.
38. Kotkins discussion of Fordism in Modern Times was one of the few examples
in the immediate post-Soviet literature directly to address the economic dimensions of
modernity. For an emphasis on how imported Fordism was selectively adapted and modified to become something distinctively new, see Yves Cohen, Circulatory Localities: The
Example of Stalinism in the 1930s, Kritika 11, no. 1 (2010): 1145.
39. See especially Steven V. Bittner, A Negentropic Society? Wartime and Postwar
Soviet History, Kritika 14, no. 3 (2013): 599619, which argues that there was a great deal
more to the postwar and post-Stalinist periods than decay and collapse (619).
40. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, 1: Paradoxes of Power, 18781928 (New York: Penguin, 2014),
6263.

228 | NOTES TO PAGES 2931

41. Mass culture is left out of Kotkins initial description of modernitys vicious geopolitical competition (Stalin, 1:45). See also the important statement: Of all the failures
of Russias autocracy with regard to modernity, none would be as great as its failure at
authoritarian mass politics (130).
42. Anna Krylova, Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament,
Contemporary European History 23, no. 2 (2014): 16792, quotations 185, 186, 187, 191.
43. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of
Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3; on the Soviet model as globally perceived as one of two major alternative modernities and a distinct form or road
to high modernity, see 17, 25, 92, 172, 397, and passim. On systemic exceptionalism as
part of state-socialist identity, see Gyrgy Pteri, The Occident Withinor the Drive for
Exceptionalism and Modernity, Kritika 9, no. 4 (2008): 92937.
44. This point is also made by Stefan Plaggenborg, Schweigen ist Gold: Die Moderntheorie und der Kommunismus, Osteuropa 63, nos. 56 (2013): 76.
45. Fitzpatrick, Introduction, 14n.29.
46. Lenoe, Closer to the Masses. See also Lenoe, In Defense of Timasheffs Great Retreat,
Kritika 5, no. 4 (2004): 72130.
47. For more detail, see my review of Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, in Journal of Cold War
Studies 9, no. 1 (2007): 16164.
48. Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, 251.
49. Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, 57, 247.
50. Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, 45.
51. For example, see Linda Hutcheon, ed., A Postmodern Reader (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1993), section 1 (Modern/Postmodern).
52. For example, Fitzpatrick noted social science influences on the modernity group
that can hardly be considered postmodern, including Norbert Elias and James Scott (Introduction, 8).
53. Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, 253.
54. Ken Jowitt, Neo-Traditionalism, in New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 12158, quotations 123, 12425, 12526,
128, 131. This essay was originally published in Soviet Studies 35, no. 3 (1983): 27597.
55. Andrew G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), esp. 710.
56. Terry Martin, Modernization of Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism, in Russian Modernity, 16184 (also published in Fitzpatrick, Stalinism).
This outline was developed further in his full-fledged study of Soviet nationality policy:
Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union,
19231939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
57. Martin, Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? 175, 176.
58. On this point, see Brown, A Biography of No Place, 80.
59. Barbara Walker, (Still) Searching for a Soviet Society: Personalized Political and
Economic Ties in Recent Soviet Historiography, Comparative Studies in Society and History
43, no. 4 (2001): 63142, quotation 634.
60. Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State; Alfred Rieber, The Sedimentary Society,
in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial
Russia, ed. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West (Princeton, NJ: Prince-

NOTES TO PAGES 3238 | 229

ton University Press, 1991), 34366; Laura Engelstein, Combined Underdevelopment:

Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia, American Historical Review 98, no.
2 (1993): 33853; and Martin Malia on the telescoping of the Western itinerary in Russia,
in Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 207.
61. Martin, Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? 163 (emphasis added).
62. David Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the
Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
63. David Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of Americas Soviet Experts (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6.
64. Engerman, Know Your Enemy, 68.
65. David Prestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in
Inter-War Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 14.
66. Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization, 37, 408.
67. David Brandenberger, Simplistic, Pseudo-Socialist Racism: Ideological Debates
within Stalins Creative Intelligentsia, 193639, Kritika 13, no. 2 (2012): 36593, quotation 36768. Brandenberger cites the broader deployment of symbols of tradition in Eric
Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983). See also Kevin M. F. Platt and Brandenberger, eds., Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2006).
68. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 247.
69. Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization, 16. For different takes on the
tensions and lack of consistency in Stalinism, see Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great
Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 19211941 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 8 and epilogue; and Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in
Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010).
70. Ronald Grigor Suny, On Ideology, Subjectivity, and Modernity: Disparate
Thoughts about Doing Soviet History, Russian History/Histoire russe 34, nos. 14 (2007):
19, quotation 9.
71. Jan Plamper, Foucaults Gulag, Kritika 3, no. 2 (2002): 25580.
72. Wilson T. Bell, The Gulag and Soviet Society in Western Siberia (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2011), 11425, quotation 124.
73. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 141, referring to the work of Henry L. Feingold.
74. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, 278.
75. Here see Golfo Alexopoulos, Human Raw Material: Health and Inhumanity in Stalins Gulag (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, forthcoming), and Alexopoulos, DestructiveLabor Camps: Rethinking Solzhenitsyns Play on Words, forthcoming in Kritika.
76. Tarik Cyril Amar, Paradox City: Lviv, Sovietization, and Nation-Shaping in a European
Borderland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming).
77. Lynne Viola, The Aesthetic of Stalinist Planning and the World of the Special
Villages, Kritika 4, no. 1 (2003): 10128; Peter Holquist, New Terrains and New Chronologies: The Interwar Period through the Lens of Population Politics, Kritika 4, no. 1
(2003): 16375, citing Alfred J. Rieber, Persistent Factors in Russian Foreign Policy: An

230 | NOTES TO PAGES 3845

Interpretive Essay, in Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Washington, DC:
Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1993), 322.
78. J. Arch Getty, Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); these two terms appear esp. on 2, 3, 8, 9, 11,
18, 33, 44, 68, 69, 70, 72, 75, 79, 86, 279. Describing the debate between the modernity
and neo-traditionalism groups, Sheila Fitzpatrick referred to personalistic elements of
Stalinism such as patron-client networks and blat as archaizing, but Gettys archaic
takes this conclusion farther. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Introduction, 11.
79. Edward Keenan, Muscovite Political Folkways, Russian Review 45, no. 2 (1986):
11581.
80. Getty, Practicing Stalinism, 91. A more sophisticated work positing Muscovite-Soviet
continuities was Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of
Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), which was critiqued widely in reviews precisely on its inability to explain the mechanisms of continuity over time. Earlier,
in a response to Keenans Muscovite Political Folkways, Richard Wortman highlighted
two problems: Keenans already outdated understanding of political culture, and the
problems of glossing over the many changes of the imperial period (Muscovite Political
Folkways and the Problem of Russian Political Culture, Russian Review 46, no. 2 [1987]:
19197). Three decades later, Getty recapitulates both problems. For my own review of
Getty, see Slavic Review 73, no. 3 (2014): 63538.
81. In her review of Getty, Sheila Fitzpatrick declared: I am sympathetic to this argument [about Bolsheviks being sucked in to the deep structures of Russian history] and
to the dismissive attitude toward formal ideology it implies, but Getty overdoes it (Fitzpatrick, Whose Person Is He? London Review of Books 36, no. 6 [2014]). One cannot help
recall an uncanny similarity with an earlier historiographical conjuncture: Fitzpatricks
distancing of Young Turk revisionists, including the young J. Arch Getty, for overdoing
and exceeding her own revisionist emphasis on social forces from below in 1986. See
Fitzpatrick, New Perspectives on Stalinism, Russian Review 45, no. 4 (1986): 35773,
esp. 37172, and Fitzpatrick, Afterward: Revisionism Revisited, Russian Review 45, no. 4
(1986): 40913.
82. Getty, Practicing Stalinism, 267, 268.
83. This concept was first introduced to historians of National Socialism by Ian
Kershaw in Working toward the Fhrer: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship, Contemporary European History 2, no. 2 (1993): 10318, and substantiated in his
two-volume biography of Hitler, republished in one volume as Hitler: A Biography (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
84. Getty, Practicing Stalinism, 117.
85. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses.

CHAPTER 2: The Intelligentsia, the Masses, and the West

1. In this chapter, mass culture denotes both the new commercial culture (as opposed
to folk or popular culture) that experienced its explosive rise in the late nineteenth century
and, in the Soviet period, politicized, mass-circulation cultural production aimed at the
masses (massy).
2. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1990), 8, 17476.

NOTES TO PAGES 4649 | 231

3. Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge,

2004), 66, 101. Wagners term organized modernity derives from Hilferdings organized
capitalism (68, 211n.45).
4. Yanni Kotsonis, Introduction: A Modern ParadoxSubject and Citizen in Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Russia, in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed.
Yanni Kotsonis and David L. Hoffmann (New York: St. Martins, 2000), 116, quotation 3.
5. See esp. Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russias Continuum of Crisis,
19141921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
6. For a book title using the metaphor, see Amir Weiner, ed., Landscaping the Human
Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in Comparative Perspective (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2003).
7. Stephen Kotkin, Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,
Kritika 2, no. 1 (2001): 11164.
8. See Daniel Beer, Origins, Modernity, and Resistance in the Historiography of
Stalinism, Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (2005): 36379.
9. S. N. Eisenstadt, Multiple Modernities, in Multiple Modernities, ed. Eisenstadt (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 129, quotation 23.
10. Johann P. Arnason, Communism and Modernity, in Multiple Modernities, 6190,
quotation 65.
11. The foundational work here is Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
12. I have in mind the works of Marc Raeff, Martin Malia, Alfred J. Rieber, and Laura
Engelstein, discussed below.
13. On the last of the triad, see Michael Gordin, Karl Hall, and Alexei Kojevnikov,
eds., Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 18601960, special issue of Osiris 23
(September 2008).
14. Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity,
18801930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 2526.
15. David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Soviet Social Intervention in Its International
Context, 19141939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 100101.
16. Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing, History, Spacing Concepts (Cultural Memory in the Present) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 5.
17. Bjrn Wittrock, Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition, in Multiple Modernities, 3160, here 44. See also Wittrock,
Johann Heilbron, and Lars Magnusson, The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity, in The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity: Conceptual
Change in Context, 17501850, ed. Heilbron, Magnusson, and Wittrock (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), 134.
18. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), part 4.
19. Alfred J. Rieber, The Sedimentary Society, in Between Tsar and People: Educated
Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel
D. Kassow, and James L. West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 34366,
quotations 36162, 365.
20. Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in
Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe, American Historical Review 80, no. 5 (1975):

232 | NOTES TO PAGES 5054

122143, quotations 1238, 1242; see also Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 16001800 (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1983).
21. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 19171991 (New
York: Free Press, 1994), 65; Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the
Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 103.
22. Frederick Cooper, Modernity, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
(Berkeley: University of California, 2005), 114.
23. Laura Engelstein, Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Late
Imperial and Soviet Russia, American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (1993): 33853, quotation
343 (the title of which, notably, plays on Trotskys notion of combined development);
Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Sicle Russia
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 4.
24. For a classic, evocative example, see Daniel P. Todes, Darwin without Malthus: The
Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989).
25. For Western standard, see Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 4; on illusory modernity,
Engelstein, Combined Underdevelopment, 353. For Engelsteins reflections on her own
uses of modernity, see An Interview with Laura Engelstein, Kritika 15, no. 4 (2014):
68990. Numerous scholars have discussed how the notion of a Western standard is itself
illusory; for its effects on the Russian field, see, for example, Michael Confino, Questions
of Comparability: Russian Serfdom and American Slavery, in Explorations in Comparative
History, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2010), 92112.
26. Peter Holquists notion of an intelligentsia-professional parastatal complex (Making War, esp. 14, 21) can be taken as just such a distinctive yet modern formation.
27. This is the thesis of Marc Raeff, The Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The EighteenthCentury Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966). For a critical new overview of the scholarship on the Russian intelligentsia over time, see Gary Hamburg, The
Russian Intelligentsias, in A History of Russian Thought, ed. William Leatherbarrow and
Derek Offord (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 3.
28. Nathaniel Knight, Was the Intelligentsia Part of the Nation? Visions of Society in
Post-Emancipation Russia, Kritika 7, no. 4 (2006): 73358, quotations 748.
29. Svetlana Boim [Boym], Za khoroshii vkus nado borotsia! Sotsrealizm i kitch,
in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, ed. Khans Giunter [Hans Gnther] and Evgenii Dobrenko (St.
Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2000), 87100, here 91.
30. Steve Smith and Catriona Kelly, Commercial Culture and Consumerism, chap. 2
of Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 18811941 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), quotations 113, 152; Timo Vikhavainen, Vnutrennyi vrag: Borba s meshchanstvom
kak moralnaia missiia russkoi intelligentsii (St. Petersburg: Kolo, 2004).
31. Vadim Volkov, The Concept of Kulturnost: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing
Process, in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York: Routledge, 2000),
21030, quotations 212.
32. Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 12.
33. Reginald E. Zelnik, Introduction, Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia:

NOTES TO PAGES 5456 | 233

Realities, Representations, Reflections (Berkeley: University of California International and

Area Studies, 1999), 115, here 2, 9.
34. See, e.g., E. Anthony Swift, Workers Theater and Proletarian Culture in Prerevolutionary Russia, 190517, in Workers and Intelligentsia, 26091.
35. In this context, see Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and
Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
36. S. A. Smith, The Social Meanings of Swearing: Workers and Bad Language in Late
Imperial and Early Soviet Russia, Past and Present 160, no. 1 (1998): 167202, quotation
178.
37. Smith, The Social Meanings of Swearing, 181.
38. Mark D. Steinberg, Worker-Authors and the Cult of the Person, in Cultures in Flux:
Lower-Class Practices, Values, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Stephen P. Frank and
Steinberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 171, 174; Steinberg, Proletarian
Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 19101925 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
39. Jochen Hellbeck, Introduction, and Russian Autobiographical Practice, in Autobiographical Practices in Russia/Autobiographische Praktiken in Russland, ed. Hellbeck and Klaus
Heller (Gttingen: V&R unipress, 2004), 1124, 27898, quotations 13, 290.
40. Smith and Kelly, Constructing Russian Culture, 125, 154; Charles A. Ruud, Russian
Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 18511934 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University
Press, 1990), 3033. See also Robert C. Otto, Publishing for the People: The Firm Posrednik
18851905 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987).
41. Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 18611917
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Smith and Kelly, Constructing Russian
Culture, 117, 121.
42. Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), quotations 5556, 293.
43. See, for example, Aleksandr Etkind, Khlyst: Sekty, literatura, revoliutsiia (Moscow:
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998); and Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russias Imperial
Experience (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).
44. My take on this can be found in Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher
Learning among the Bolsheviks, 19211929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), esp.
2645.
45. Lunacharskii quoted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet
Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 12; Gorky to V. I. Lenin, September 6, 1919, in Boris Ivanovich Bialik,
Gorkii i ego epokha: Issledovaniia i materialy (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), 29. On September 15,
1919, Lenin famously wrote back, in fact they are not its brains, but its shit. Quoted in
Stuart Finkel, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet
Public Sphere (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 13.
46. Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 17,
47. For notable new studies, see Beer, Renovating Russia; and Elizabeth Papazian, Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2009).

234 | NOTES TO PAGES 5659

48. Stites, Russian Popular Culture, chap. 2, quotations 41, 52; see also Smith and Kelly,
Constructing Russian Culture, 15254.
49. James von Geldern, Introduction, in Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs,
Movies, Plays, and Folklore 19171953, ed. von Geldern and Richard Stites (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995), xvi.
50. Here see, inter alia, Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in
the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), chap. 11.
51. Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia
(Berkeley: University of California, 1990), chaps. 45.
52. David Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2003), chap. 1; Christina Kaier and Eric Naiman, eds., Everyday
Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2006).
53. See Beer, Renovating Russia; and Katherina Kucher, Der Gorki-Park: Freizeitkultur im
Stalinismus 19281941 (Cologne: Bhlau Verlag, 2007). On cultured speech, see Smith,
The Social Meanings of Swearing, 19293.
54. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Peter Fritzsche and Hellbeck, The New Man in
Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 30244.
55. Von Geldern, Introduction, xv.
56. On this split, see Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 19211941 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011). On contagion as a defining feature of NEP political culture, see Kenneth Pinnow,
Lost to the Collective:Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 19211929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2010).
57. Boris Groys, Die Massenkultur der Utopie/Utopian Mass Culture, in Traumfabrik
Kommunismus/Dream Factory Communism, ed. Groys and Max Hollein (Frankfurt: Hatje
Cantz, 2004), 23.
58. Kameneva to Smirnov (Otdel pechati TsK), January 21, 1928, and V TsK VKP(b),
no date, 1928, in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 5283, op. 1a,
d. 118, ll. 920, 115, respectively. TsK VKP(b) is the Russian abbreviation for Central
Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik).
59. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond,
trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). For classic works
emphasizing divergences between 1920s and Stalinist culture, see Stites, Revolutionary
Dreams; and Vladimir Papernyi, Kultura dva, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006).
60. Clark, Petersburg; Papazian, Manufacturing Truth; Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005);
Erika Wolf, USSR in Construction: From Avant-Garde to Socialist Realist Practice (PhD
diss., University of Michigan, 1999).
61. Here see, inter alia, Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the
Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Pinnow, Lost to the
Collective; and Beer, Renovating Russia.

NOTES TO PAGES 6163 | 235

62. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses.

63. The most comprehensive treatment is in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, comprising 1,036
pages.
64. Amy Randall, The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
65. Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet
Literary Culture, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), xx.
66. Stites, Russian Popular Culture, quotations 5, 6. For the Russian-language literature,
see V. G. Lebedeva, Sudby massovoi kultury v Rossii vtoraia polovina XIXpervaia tret XX
veka (St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo S.-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2007).
67. Volkov, The Concept of Kulturnost, 224; Kucher, Der Gorki-Park, 283. See also
Hoffmann, Stalinist Values; and Kelly and Shepard, Constructing Russian Culture, 291313.
68. Boim, Za khoroshii vkus.
69. Randi Cox, All This Can Be Yours! Soviet Commercial Advertising and the Social
Construction of Space, 19281956, in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of
Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington,
2003), 139.
70. Katerina Clark, From Production Sketches to World Literature: The Search for a
Grander Narrative, paper presented at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, June 2010.
71. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution
of Soviet Culture, 19311941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); David-Fox,
Showcasing the Great Experiment, chap. 8.
72. Von Geldern, Introduction, xviii.
73. Greg Castillo, East as True West: Redeeming Bourgeois Culture, from Socialist
Realism to Ostalgie, in Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, ed. Gyrgy
Pteri (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 87104.
74. Malte Rolf, Das sowjetische Massenfest (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006), 8688,
161.
75. Adele Marie Barker, The Culture Factory, in Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex,
and Society since Gorbachev (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 1245, quotation
20.
76. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation
of Privilege and Taste, in her The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 217.
77. Here see in particular Yves Cohen, Circulatory Localities: The Example of Stalinism in the 1930s, trans. Stephanie Lin, Kritika 11, no. 1 (2010): 1145; and Cohen, Le sicle
des chefs: Une histoire transnationale du commandement et de lautorit (18911940) (Paris: ditions Amsterdam, 2013).
78. Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 1820.
79. For a fuller analysis, see Michael David-Fox, The Iron Curtain as Semi-Permeable
Membrane: The Origins and Demise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex, in Cold War
Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s1960s, ed. Patryk
Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014),
1439. On Soviet encounters with Europe at the end of the war, see Oleg Budnitskii, The
Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945,
Kritika 10, no. 3 (2009): 62982.

236 | NOTES TO PAGES 6367

80. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Odd Arne Westad, The Global
Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 33, 397.
81. Here see the suggestive comments in Gyrgy Pteri, The Occident WithinOr
the Drive for Exceptionalism and Modernity, Kritika 9, no. 4 (2008): 92937; and Steven
G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 9.
82. Westad, The Global Cold War, 92, 123.
83. On postwar Stalinism as a watershed period in Soviet history, see Juliane Frst,
ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London: Routledge,
2006).
84. Stephen Lovell, From Isolationism to Globalization, chap. 9 of The Shadow of War:
Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the Present (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
85. Vladislav Zubok, Zhivagos Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009).
86. Zubok, Zhivagos Children, chap. 3; Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West:
Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press,
2000).
87. See the contributions by Susan Reid and Pteri in Imagining the West; and Rsa
Magnsdttir, Keeping Up Appearances: How the Soviet State Failed to Control Popular
Attitudes to the United States of America, 19451959 (PhD diss., University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2006).
88. For a rare archival study of a provincial city, see Sergei Zhuk, Popular Culture,
Identity, and Soviet Youth in Dniepropetrovsk, 195984, Carl Beck Papers, no. 1906
(2008); and Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet
Dniepropetrovsk (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Press, 2010). On the imaginary West
under late socialism, see Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The
Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), chap. 5.
89. Anna Krylova, Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament,
Contemporary European History 23, no. 2 (2014): 16792.
90. Miriam Dobson, Khrushchevs Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of
Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), quotations 3, 8; see also
Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).
91. Lovell, The Shadow of War, chap. 5; Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street:
Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center
Press, 2013). See also Lewis H. Siegelbaum, ed., Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet
Russia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
92. On patriotic and didactic forms, see Sabine Dullin, Limage de lespion dans la
culture populaire sovitique des annes 1950: Entre affirmation patriotique et valeurs de
Guerre froide, in Culture et Guerre froide, ed. Jean-Franois Sirinelli and Georges-Henri
Soutou (Paris: PUPS, 2008), 89102.
93. Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, 38. See also Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and
Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition, and Aeshetics in the Modern Social Order
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).

NOTES TO PAGES 6770 | 237

94. Bjrn Wittrock, Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition, in Multiple Modernities, 36; see also Peter Wagner, A Sociology
of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge, 2004), xiii.
95. Arnason, Communism and Modernity, 68.

CHAPTER 3: The Blind Men and the Elephant

1. David Brandenberger made the same point in Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology,
Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 19271941 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2011), 1. See also Benjamin Nathans, review of The Cambridge History of Russia, 3: The Twentieth Century, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), in
Journal of Modern History 81, no. 3 (2009): 75658.
2. Michael Freeden, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), 2.
3. Clifford Geertz, Ideology as a Cultural System, chap. 8 of The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 193.
4. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 2007), 34. Similar points
are made, for example, by Michael Freeden, Editorial: On Pluralism through the Prism of
Ideology, Journal of Political Ideologies 7, no. 1 (2002): 5; and Freeden, Editorial: What Is
Special about Ideologies? Journal of Political Ideologies 6, no. 1 (2001): 512.
5. Nigel Gould-Davies, Rethinking the Role of Ideology in International Politics
during the Cold War, Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 1 (1999): 90109.
6. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism
Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Peter Holquist, State Violence
as Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism, in Landscaping the Human
Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in Comparative Perspective, ed. Amir Weiner
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1945.
7. Franois Furet, The Passing of An Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century,
trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 173. Furet was speaking about both Bolshevism and fascism.
8. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 9, 74, 8485; chaps. 710 are devoted
to totalitarian ideology.
9. See, for example, the autobiographical comments about this at the outset of Ronald
Grigor Suny, On Ideology, Subjectivity, and Modernity: Thoughts on Doing Soviet History, Russian History/Histoire russe 34, nos. 14 (2007): 1.
10. David Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of Americas Soviet Experts (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
11. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (Cleveland: Meridian Books,
1958), 47071.
12. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 19171991 (New
York: Free Press, 1994): 512; Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the
Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), chap. 5.
13. Hence Richard Pipess well-known disagreements with Malia, given Pipess emphasis on power and the tradition of Russian autocracy. Pipes wrote: In dealing with the
Soviet Union, Malia plays down the influence of its social base and its politics in favor
of its ideology, or, more narrowly, of the regimes monopoly of language. Pipess main

238 | NOTES TO PAGES 7177

disagreement with Malias concept of the USSR as an ideocracy was that it eliminated
the quest for power as a significant factor in the explanation of this dictatorship. See
Pipes, East Is East, review of Malia, Russia under Western Eyes, in the New Republic, April
26May 3, 1999, www.misterdann.com/eurareastiseast.htm.
14. Steve Smith, Two Cheers for the Return of Ideology, Revolutionary Russia 17, no. 2
(2004): 11935, quotations 124, 125.
15. As I noted in my exchange with Malia in the Times Literary Supplement, July 20, 2001.
16. Yanni Kotsonis, The Ideology of Martin Malia, Russian Review 58, no. 1 (1999):
12430, quotation 126.
17. Laura Engelstein, Culture, Culture, Everywhere: Interpretations of Modern Russia
across the 1991 Divide, Kritika 2, no. 2 (2001): 36393.
18. To give one example, Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).
19. There are numerous exceptions to this broad-stroke generalization, of course. See,
for example, Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century
Revolutionary Patriotism (London: Routledge, 2002); and James Ryan, Lenins Terror: The
Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence (London: Routledge, 2012). Whether postmodernist thought and poststructuralism were inimical to the very notion of ideology, a
question of central concern to Eagleton (Eagleton, Ideology, esp. xx), appears less relevant
in historical fields where arguably there were few if any pure postmodernists.
20. See, for example, Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, 108; Malia, Russia under Western Eyes, 11.
What he neglected to add was that the same warning against reductionism goes for other
major variables vis--vis ideology and politics.
21. Smith, Two Cheers, 13233, following Joseph Schull, What Is Ideology? Theoretical Problems and Lessons from Soviet-Type Societies, Political Studies 40, no. 4 (1992):
72841.
22. Suny, On Ideology, 3, 5.
23. Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis, 1, 256, 264n.14 (citing Geertz on ideology
as a broader historico-cultural factor). His earlier National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture
and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 19311956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002) was also a productive exploration of ideology mainly understood
as a line propagated by ideologists that in the process of adoption and dissemination was
reflected in cultural and scholarly production.
24. Eagleton, Ideology, 1.
25. Suny, On Ideology, 3.
26. See Michael David-Fox, Science, Political Enlightenment, and Agitprop: On the
Typology of Social Knowledge in the Early Soviet Period, Minerva 34, no. 4 (1996):
34766.
27. On these points in the realm of gender roles and identities, see Anna Krylova, Soviet
Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
28. But for an even rarer attempt to bring ideology back in for post-Soviet Russia, if
for the most part through its crucial absence, see Stephen Hansons Weberian theory of
ideology in Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France,
Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
29. As Ethan Pollock has clearly demonstrated in Stalin and the Science Wars (Princeton,

NOTES TO PAGES 7783 | 239

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Other major works on the intersection of Soviet
science and ideology include Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union
(New York: Knopf, 1972); and Alexander Vucinich, Einstein and Soviet Ideology (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
30. David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in
Inter-war Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007), 1718.
31. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of
Soviet Culture, 19311941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Karl Schlgel,
Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008), chaps. 5, 6, 12, 17, 31.
32. For intriguing examples, see Marlne Laruelle, The Concept of Ethnogenesis in
Central Asia: Political Context and Institutional Mediators (194050), Kritika 9, no. 1
(2008): 16988; Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making
of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), chaps. 67; and Katerina
Clark and Karl Schlgel, Mutual Perceptions and Projections: Stalins Russia in Nazi
GermanyNazi Germany in the Soviet Union, in Beyond Totalitarianism, 396442. See
also Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, eds., Fascination and
Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 19141945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012).
33. Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx and Friedrich List (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991).
34. See, esp., the sophisticated handling of these issues in Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of
Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998); Khalid, Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Nationalizing the Revolution: The Transformation of
Jadidism, 19171920, in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and
Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (New York: Oxford University Press,
2001), 45162.
35. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism.
36. Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkikh nationalistov v SSSR 19531985
(Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003), 31; for his survey of the existing literature,
see 1330.
37. Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia, 77, 31. On the question of continuity between prerevolutionary Russian nationalism and late Stalinist anticosmopolitanism, see Frank
Grner, Russias Battle against the Foreign: The Anti-Cosmopolitanism Paradigm in
Russian and Soviet Ideology, European Review of History/Revue europenne dhistoire 17,
no. 3 (2010): 44572.
38. Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953
1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
39. As forcefully shown by Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary
under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
40. Freeden, Ideology, 93.
41. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, 131.
42. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge,
trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985).
43. Geertz, Ideology as a Cultural System, 218.
44. Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, NJ:

240 | NOTES TO PAGES 8387

Princeton University Press, 1997), 5, 16. By the same token, Isabelle V. Hull makes a
compelling distinction between organizational and institutional culture, involving tacit
yet highly influential assumptions, and the broader political cosmology or ideology in
Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2005).
45. Engelstein, Culture, Culture, Everywhere.
46. S. A. Smith, The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 104.
47. Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western
Visitors to the Soviet Union, 19211941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5557;
David-Fox, The Fellow-Travelers Revisited: The Cultured West through Soviet Eyes,
Journal of Modern History 75, no. 2 (2003): 300335.
48. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 26769.
49. David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, 55; Vera Tolz, Russias Own Orient: The
Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
50. Ulrich Dierse, Ideologie, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner
Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klet-Cotta, 1983), 3:13169, here 133, 137; Destutt de Tracy published Elments didologie, 4 vols., between 1801 and 1815.
51. Dierse, Ideologie, 153; Freeden, Ideology, 5. Freedens book is an analytical history
of schools of thought about ideology, stretching from the ideologues and Marx through
modern approaches beginning with Karl Mannheim.
52. Friedrich Engels to Franz Mehring, July 14, 1893, in Marx and Engels Correspondence,
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm, discussed by Eagleton, Ideology, 8891.
53. Freeden, Ideology, 712.
54. Dierse, Ideologie, 16263; Eagleton, Ideology, 90.
55. Gyrgy Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans.
Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).
56. See, for example, V. V. Adoratskii, Ob ideologii, Pod znamenem marksizma, nos.
1112 (1922): 199210; for contemporaneous uses of the term ideological front, see Stuart
Finkel, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public
Sphere (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 67, 240n.3.
57. N. Bobrovnikov and S. Zaitsev, Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1st ed., vol. 27, sv.
Ideologia, sv. Ideologiia proletariata (Moscow: OGIZ RSFSR, 1933).
58. Bobrovnikov, sv. Ideologiia, 45253, 45566. The neutral definition was repeated
in later Soviet reference works: see Brandenberger, Propaganda State, 5, citing a 1940 Politicheskii slovar.
59. On the continuing hold of Marxism over Soviet intellectuals during the Thaw
including among political prisoners arrested in the post-1956 crackdown who were
derogatively dubbed Marxists by their camp wardenssee Vladislav Zubok, Zhivagos
Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009),
15460. For a discussion of ideology and the Thaw, see Christine Varga-Harris, Politics,
Ideology, and Society after Stalin: Charting a New Course? Russian Studies in History 50,
no. 3 (20112012): 310.

NOTES TO PAGES 8791 | 241

60. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation,

vol. 1 (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007), 17374.
61. A. M. Selishchev, Iazyk revoliutsionnoi epokhi: Iz nabliudenii nad russkim iazykom poslednykh let (19181926) (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1928).
62. Paul Lafargue, La langue franaise avant et aprs la Rvolution (1894), www
.marxists.org/francais/lafargue/works/1894/00/pl18940000.htm; Andr Mazon, Lexique
de la guerre et de la revolution en Russie (19141918) (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honore Champion, 1920); Sergei Kartsevskii, Iazyk, voina i revoliutsiia, www2.unil.ch/slav/ling/textes
/Karcevskij23.html. I am grateful to Peter Holquist for these references. Many of the early
Soviet studies are discussed by Marietta Chudakova, Iazyk raspavsheisia tsivilizatsii:
Materialy k teme, in Novye raboty, 20032006 (Moscow: Vremia, 2007), 234350. A highly
relevant study is Michael Gorham, Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics
of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003).
63. Mikhail Epstein, Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking: An Inquiry into the
Language of Soviet Ideology, Kennan Institute Occasional Paper, no. 243 (1991); Epstein,
After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).
64. Mikhail Vaiskopf, Pisatel Stalin (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002); see
also Erik van Ree, Stalin as Writer and Thinker, Kritika 3, no. 4 (2002): 699714.
65. Chudakova, Iazyk raspavsheisia tsivilizatsii. Although novoiaz or novorech were
later coinages, there is an analogy between contemporary recognition of the new Soviet
ideological lexicon and Victor Klemperers diary notes and later work on Lingua Tertii
Imperii, showing how language reflected, furthered, and embodied Nazi ideology. See
Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii. A Philologists Notebook,
trans. Martin Brady (London: Continuum, 2006).
66. Schull, What Is Ideology? 732. For an application to Soviet literary and cultural
policy, see Joseph Schull, The Ideological Origins of Stalinism in Soviet Literature,
Slavic Review 51, no. 3 (1992): 46884.
67. Freeden, Ideology, chap. 8, quotations 105, 112.
68. Evgeny Dobrenko, The Political Economy of Socialist Realism, trans. Jesse M. Savage
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), xixii, 4.
69. Here see, for example, David Brandenberger, Simplistic, Pseudosocialist Racism:
Debates over the Direction of Soviet Ideology within Stalins Creative Intelligentsia,
193639, Kritika 13, no. 2 (2012): 36593; for rich materials on a spectrum of local reactions to the party line, see, for example, Zbigniew Wojnowski, De-Stalinization and
Soviet Patriotism: Ukrainian Reactions to East European Unrest in 1956, Kritika 13, no. 4
(2012): 799829.
70. Here see esp. Malte Rolf, Das sowjetische Massenfest (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition,
2006).
71. Alexei Kojevnikov, Rituals of Stalinist Culture at Work: Science and the Games
of Intraparty Democracy at Work, Russian Review 57, no. 1 (1998): 2552; Kojevnikov,
Games of Soviet Democracy: Ideological Discussions in Sciences around 1948 Reconsidered, MPIWG Preprint Series, no. 37 (1996), Max-Plank-Institut fr Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin. On the postwar discussions, see Pollock, Stalin and the Science Wars.
72. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 14, 21, 162. For a no less rarified

242 | NOTES TO PAGES 9195

discussion of material practices in the transmission of late Soviet ideology, considering

discussions in anthropology that address its oscillation between explicit doctrine and
everyday assumptions, see Sonja Luehrmann, The Modernity of Manual Reproduction:
Soviet Propaganda and the Creative Life of Ideology, Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 3
(2011): 36388, quotation 365.
73. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 1417. For a definition of Soviet ideology as a discursive filter on communication, as opposed to a belief system, that is applied to the perestroika-era collapse, see Tom Casier, The Shattered Horizon: How Ideology Mattered
to Soviet Politics, Studies in East European Thought 51, no. 1 (1999): 3559. On the influence
and debate over James Scotts hidden transcripts, see Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist,
and Marshall Poe, eds., The Resistance Debate in Russian and Soviet History (Bloomington, IN:
Slavica Publishers, 2003).
74. Peter Holquist, Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism: Russia in the Epoch of Violence,
190521, Kritika 4, no. 3 (2003): 62752, quotation 645; see the material on Dmitrii Oskin
and the mentality of similar cadres in Orlando Figes, The Russian Revolution, 18911924
(New York: Penguin Books, 1996).
75. Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks,
19211929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), chap. 3.
76. This has been explored most extensively by Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 10, 97,
113, 154, 161, and passim.
77. Arthur Koestler, untitled essay in The God That Failed, ed. Richard Crossman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2001, orig. 1949), 15.
78. Eagleton, Ideology, 221.
79. For a discussion of this issue, see Lynne Viola, The Problem of the Perpetrator in
Soviet History, Slavic Review 71, no. 1 (2013): 123.
80. Catherine Merridale, Ivans War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 19391945 (New York:
Henry Holt, 2006), 22930. See also Oleg Budnitskii, The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society: Defeatism, 194142, Kritika 15, 4 (2014): 76798.
81. For a detailed discussion and references, see Michael David-Fox, Opiate of the
Intellectuals? Pilgrims, Partisans, and Political Tourists, Kritika 12, no. 3 (2011): 72340;
and David-Fox, Religion, Science, and Political Religion in the Soviet Context, Modern
Intellectual History 8, no. 2 (2011): 47184.
82. Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, 3rd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2001), 24; Tucker, Lenins Bolshevism as a Culture in the Making, in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, ed. Abbott Gleason,
Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 2538;
Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 18791929: A Study in History and Personality (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1973), 12930; Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1990), 38.
83. Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary
Russia (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2000); Halfin, Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at Leningrad Communist University (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press,
2009).
84. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), esp. 29398.
85. David D. Roberts, Political Religion and the Totalitarian Departures of Inter-war

NOTES TO PAGES 9597 | 243

Europe: On the Uses and Disadvantages of an Analytical Category, Contemporary European

History 18, no. 4 (2009): 381414, here 39092.
86. Paul Froese, The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 178.
87. Plamper, The Stalin Cult, xvi. Although Stalin portraits were in some ways similar to
Orthodox icons, in Plampers example, this will not explain the direction of Stalins gaze,
which was invariably directed at a focal point outside the picture; for Stalin was perceived
as the embodiment of the linear, Marxist force of History (xvii).
88. Mona Ouzouf, The Terror after the Terror: An Immediate History, in The Terror,
vol. 4 of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. Keith Michael
Baker (Tarrytown, NY: Pergamon, 1994), 318, here 11; D. M. G. Sutherland, The French
Revolution and Empire: The Quest for a Civic Order (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 2, 175, 388.
89. Hugh Gough, Terror in the French Revolution, 2nd ed. (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 67.
90. On the Russian and French cases, see Tamara Kondratieva, Bolcheviks et Jacobins:
Itinraire des analogies (Paris: Payot, 1989), trans. as Kondrateva, Bolsheviki-iakobintsy
i prizrak termidora (Moscow: Ipol, 1993); Robert Mayer, Lenin and the Jacobin Identity
in Russia, Studies in East European Thought 51, no. 2 (1999): 12754; and Michel Vovelle,
17891917: The Game of Analogies, in The Terror, 34978. For a consideration of the
comparison least often made among the three cases, see George L. Mosse, Fascism and
the French Revolution, in The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New
York: Howard Fertig, 1999), 6994.
91. Gough, Terror, 7.
92. For a variation on the thesis of circumstances, see Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence
and Terror in the Russian and French Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2000); for a variation on the primacy of ideology, see Patrice Gueniffey, La politique de
la Terreur: Essai sur la violence rvolutionnaire, 17891794 (Paris: Fayard, 2000). Note also
the reference to Furets top-down model of the influence of ideas in Sutherlands local
and regional study of the Jacobin and White Terror, Murder in Aubagne: Lynching, Law, and
Justice during the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 287.
93. For an explicit attempt to transcend the historiographic standoff between circumstances and ideology in a general history of the French Revolution, see Sutherland, The
French Revolution and Empire.
94. Gough, Terror, 912.
95. Peter R. Campbell, Redefining the French Revolution: New Directions, 1989
2009, H-France Salon 1, no. 1 (2009), www.h-france.net/Salon/h-francesalon.html.
96. The phrase is the well-known formulation of Hans Mommsen. An advanced introduction to historiography, now dated but with no analogue in the Soviet field, is Ian
Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems of Perspective and Interpretation, 4th ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000).
97. Christopher R. Browning, Beyond Intentionalism and Functionalism: A Reassessment of Nazi Jewish Policy from 1939 to 1941, in Reevaluating the Third Reich, ed.
Thomas Childer and Jane Caplan (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993), 21133.
98. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, 2000); Kershaw, Working Towards
the Fhrer: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship, Journal of Contemporary
History 2, no. 2 (1993): 10318.

244 | NOTES TO PAGES 97100

99. See, for example, the synthesis in Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler
and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2009), chaps. 69.
100. For example, see Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008), chap. 4; and Mark Mazower, Hitlers Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008), chaps. 912.
101. John Connelly, Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word, Kritika 11, no.
4 (2010): 81935, quotation 825, referring to Michael Geyer and Mark Edele, States of
Exception, in Beyond Totalitarianism, 34595.
102. Reginald Zelnik, Circumstances and Political Will in the Russian Civil War, in
Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History, ed. Diane P.
Koenker, William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald Grigor Suny (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 37481, quotation 37980.
103. Holquist, Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism, 628.
104. Ryan, Lenins Terror, 6.
105. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Varieties of Terror, introduction to part 4 of Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Fitzpatrick (New York: Routledge, 2000), 258; David Hoffman, Cultivating the
Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 19141939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2011), 278. For a landmark contribution, see David Shearer, Policing Stalins Socialism:
Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 19241954 (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2009).
106. Hoffman, Cultivating the Masses, 4.
107. Freeden, Ideology, 93.

CHAPTER 4: What Is Cultural Revolution?

1. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed. Cultural Revolution in Russia, 19281931 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1978).
2. Walter Moss, A History of Russia since 1855, 2nd ed. (London: Anthem Press, 2005),
2:368; Lewis Siegelbaum, Building Stalinism 19291941, in Russia: A History, ed. Gregory
Freeze (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3046; Martin McCauley, The Rise and
Fall of the Soviet Union (Edinborough Gate, Essex: Pearson Education, 2008), 13435.
3. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia, 8th ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 59597.
4. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States,
2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 22631, quotations 230, 291.
5. Russian conceptual history has emerged as a significant trend in German and Russian scholarship, along with the renewed (and in Russia novel) interest in the works of
Reinhart Koselleck and his collaborators. But thus far it has been pursued mostly in terms
of the pre-reform and postreform periods of imperial history and not in Soviet history.
See the discussion in Vera Dubina, review of N. E. Koposov, N. D. Potapova, and M. M.
Krom, eds., Istoricheskie poniatiia i politicheskie idei v Rossii XVIXX veka: Sbornik nauchnykh
rabot (2006), and Peter Thiergen, ed., Russische Begriffsgeschichte der Neuzeit: Beitrge zu
einem Forschungsdesiderat (2006), Kritika 9, no. 4 (2008): 95062. For a study on the late
Soviet and post-Soviet period, see Aleksandr Bikbov, Grammatika poriadka: Istoricheskaia
sotsiologiia poniatii, kotorye meniaiut nashu realnost (Moscow: Izdatelskii dom Vysshei shkoly
ekonomiki, 2014).
6. One historian, for example, discusses Bogdanovs theory of proletarian cultural rev-

NOTES TO PAGES 100107 | 245

olution without a single Bogdanovian usage of the category itself; see Gabriele Gorzka,
Proletarian Cultural Revolution: The Conception of Aleksandr A. Bogdanov, Sbornik:
Study Group on the Russian Revolution, no. 9 (1983): 6782.
7. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and
Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 464.
8. S. N. Eisenstadt, The Cultural Programme of Modernity and Democracy: Some
Tensions and Problems, in Culture, Modernity and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Zygmunt
Bauman, ed. Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe (London: Routledge, 1996), 2541.
9. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Editors Introduction, and Cultural Revolution as Class War, in
Cultural Revolution in Russia, 19281931, 140, esp. 2, 812.
10. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution in Russia, 192832, Journal of Contemporary
History, 9, no. 1 (1974): 3637. I refer to this period as the Great Break (velikii perelom),
because this term can encompass the collectivization and industrialization drives, because it was used at the time by Stalin, and because it is currently standard in Russian
historiography.
11. John Biggart, Bukharins Theory of Cultural Revolution, in The Ideas of Nikolai
Bukharin, ed. A. Kemp-Welch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 13158.
12. See esp. Gabriele Gorzka, A. Bogdanov und der russische Proletkult: Theorie und Praxis
einer sozialistischer Kulturrevolution (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1980), 1516; Richard
Lorenz, ed., Proletarische Kulturrevolution in Sowjetrussland (19171921) (Munich: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1969). For a treatment openly acknowledging a presentist interest in
proletarian and socialist culture in light of May 1968, see Franois Champarnaud, Rvolution et contre-rvolution culturelles en URSS: De Lenine Jdanov (Paris: ditions Anthropos,
1975).
13. Gernot Erler, Die Leninische Kulturrevolution und die NEP, in Kultur und Kulturrevolution in der Sowjetunion, ed. Eberhard Kndler-Bunte (Berlin: sthetik und Kommunikation Verlag, 1978), 3345; Carmen Claudin-Urondo, Lnine et la rvolution culturelle
(Paris: Mouton, 1975); Maurice Meisner, Iconoclasm and Cultural Revolution in China
and Russia, in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, ed. Abbott
Gleason et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
14. Stefan Plaggenborg, Revolutionskultur: Menschenbilder und kulturelle Praxis in Sowjetrussland zwischen Oktoberrevolution und Stalinismus (Cologne: Bhlau Verlag, 1996), 21, 2324,
25, 4546. The reference is to Vera S. Dunham, In Stalins Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet
Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
15. One can see this in works ranging from David R. Shearer, Policing Stalins Socialism:
Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 19241953 (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2009) to Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
16. William G. Rosenberg, Editors Introduction, in Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the
Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, ed. Rosenberg (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1984), 1819,
2224.
17. David Joravsky, The Construction of the Stalinist Psyche, in Cultural Revolution in
Russia, 19281931, 1078.
18. David Joravsky, Cultural Revolution and the Fortress Mentality, in Bolshevik
Culture, 9596. Although I do not see such a clash between communism and modernism
at the heart of cultural revolutioneven as I agree it played out over a long period

246 | NOTES TO PAGES 108110

reading Joravskys chapter sometime in the late 1980s started me along the path that led to
the present work.
19. Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995), ix.
20. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of
Soviet Culture, 19311941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
21. Clark, Petersburg, 21.
22. Sovremennoe polozhenie i zadachi partii. Platforma, vyrabotannaia gruppoi
bolshevikov, in Neizvestnyi Bogdanov, ed. N. S. Antonova and N. V. Drozdova (Moscow:
AIRO-XX, 1995), 2:3761.
23. The libertarian alternative of Vperedism was most forcefully advocated by Zenovia Sochor in Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1981); the line to totalitarianism is advocated, for example, by John Eric
Morot, Alexander Bogdanov, Vpered, and the Role of the Intelligentsia in the Workers
Movement, Russian Review 49, no. 3 (1990): 24248.
24. Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks,
19181929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 2637.
25. Iutta Sherrer [Jutta Scherrer], Otnoshenie mezhdu intelligentsiei i rabochimi na
primere partiinykh shkol na Kapri i v Bolone, and E. Svift [Anthony Swift], Rabochii
teatr i proletarskoi kultura v predrevoliutsionnoi Rossii, 19051917, in Rabochie i intelligentsiia Rossii v epokhu reform i revoliutsii, ed. S. I. Potolov et al. (St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo
Russko-Baltiiskii Informatsionnyi tsentr BLITs, 1997), 54248; 174, 181.
26. The above is drawn especially from Vernon L. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
27. Adele Lindenmeyr, Building a Civil Society One Brick at a Time: Peoples Houses
and Worker Enlightenment in Late Imperial Russia, Journal of Modern History 84, no. 1
(2012): 139, esp. 3032.
28. On links to the Vperedist platform in the formulation of Proletkults mission, see
Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley:
University of California, 1990), 43 and passim.
29. P. M. Kerzhentsev, Kultura i sovetskaia vlast (Moscow: Izdatelstvo TsIK, 1919), 320;
Kerzhentsev, K novoi kulture (Petrograd: Gosizdat, 1921), 56; Ot redaktsii, Proletarskaia
kultura, no. 3 (1918): 3536; Valerian Polianskii, Pod znamia Proletkulta, Proletarskaia
kultura, no. 1 (1918): 34.
30. Leonid Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki: Stalinskaia kulturnaia revoliutsiia 1936
1938 (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia kniga, 1997).
31. Sputnik politrabotnika (Moscow: 17-aia gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1919), 8792,
99100; Kratkii ocherk kulturno-politicheskoi raboty v Krasnoi Armii za 1918 god (Moscow, no
publisher, 1919), 15, 8.
32. Desiatyi sezd Rossiiskoi kommunisticheskoi partii. Stenograficheskii otchet (816 marta 1921
g.) (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1921), 87.
33. Protokol zasedaniia Politicheskogo Biuro Ts.K. ot 9 oktiabria 1920 goda, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsialno-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI) f. 17, op. 3, d. 113, l.
1; also, d. 75, l. 3.
34. Claudin-Urondo, Lnine et la rvolution culturelle, 2731.

NOTES TO PAGES 111115 | 247

35. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (hereafter PSS), 5th ed., 55 vols. (Moscow: Institut
Marksizma i Leninizma, 19581965), 41:462.
36. Christina Kaier and Eric Naiman, Introduction, in Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, ed. Kaier and Naiman (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2006), 122, here 4.
37. Lev Davydovich Trotskii, Voprosy byta, in Sochineniia (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1927),
21:358, 46270.
38. G. Lelevich, Proletarskaia literatura i bytovaia revoliutsiia, Oktiabr, no. 1 (1925):
14146.
39. Kaier and Naiman, Introduction, 45.
40. For example, see Ibeen-Shrait, Studencheskie kommuny, Krasnyi student, nos. 89
(2021) (1924): 4445; and Ustav kommuny im. M. N. Liadova, Sverdlov Communist
University, October 4, 1926, Tsentralnyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii
Moskvy (TsAOPIM) f. 459, op. 1, d. 27, ll. 8795.
41. Andy Willimott, Living the Revolution: Urban Communes and Soviet Socialism, 1917
1932(Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), introduction and chapter 1.
42. O. D. Kameneva, K uluchsheniiu byta rabochikh, in V pomoshch kultrabote v
rabochem stolovoi, ed. Kameneva (Moscow: Doloi negramotnost, 1926), 36. For a more
extensive discussion of Kameneva in this context, see Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the
Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 19211941 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3537.
43. A forthcoming collection of essays edited by Yasuhiro Matsui, Interface between
State and Society: Obshchestvennost and Civic Agency in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,
will be the first study to interrogate the concept and related phenomena across the revolutionary divide. For my own understanding of the new type of Soviet obshchestvennost
emerging in the 1920s as involving obligatory activism, see Michael David-Fox, review of
Irina Nikolaevna Ilina, Obshchestvennye organizatsii Rossii v 1920-e gody (Civil Organizations
in Russia in the 1920s), in Kritika 3, no. 1 (2002): 17381.
44. Here see Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in
Russia, 19101925 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), esp. 5661, quotation 57.
45. Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity,
18801930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008): esp. 17173.
46. Adeeb Khalid, Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central
Asia in Comparative Perspective, Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 23940.
47. Gernot Erler and Claus D. Kering, Kulturrevolution, Sowjetsystem und demokratische
Gesellschaft: Eine vergleichende Enzyklopdie (Freiberg: Verlag Herder, 1969), 1160.
48. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union,
19231939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 25, 238.
49. Just as the literature, despite a range of positions, has largely abandoned Timasheffs
Great Retreat as a straightforward synonym for the mid- to late 1930s, because it simplifies Stalinisms ongoing radicalism. See David L. Hoffmann, Was There a Great Retreat
from Soviet Socialism? Stalinist Culture Reconsidered, Kritika 5, no. 4 (2004): 65174;
and the discussion of Timasheff in subsequent articles in the Forum Stalinism and the
Great Retreat.
50. Khalid, Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization, 238.

248 | NOTES TO PAGES 115119

51. Jrg Baberowski, Der Feind ist berall: Stalinismus im Kaukasus (Munich: Deutsche
Verlags-Anstalt, 2003), 55354.
52. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet
Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 138, 138n.170, 26263.
53. I. Arkhincheev, Na putiakh kulturnoi revoliutsii, Bolshevik, nos. 1718 (1925):
6074.
54. N. K. Krupskaia, Na putiakh kulturnoi revoliutsii (Moscow: Doloi negramotnost,
1927), 816. On the interpretation of nonvenereal syphilis in Russian medical and intelligentsia culture, see Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity
in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 165211; on contemporary scientific and venerological interest in Buriat Mongolia, see Susan Gross Solomon,
The Soviet-German Syphilis Expedition to Buriat Mongolia, 1928: Scientific Research on
National Minorities, Slavic Review 52, no. 2 (1993): 20432.
55. Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 19001914
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 254, 280; Kathy Transchel, Under the
Influence: Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 19001932, (PhD
diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996), 251 and passim.
56. I. Luppol, Problema kultury v postanovke Lenina, Pechat i revoliutsiia, nos. 56
(1925): 120, here 18; and Luppol, Problema kultura . . . Okonchanie, in Pechat i revoliutsiia, no. 7 (1925): 1428, here 26.
57. Postanovlenie Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) O politike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi
literatury, 18 iiunia 1925 g., in Schaste literatury: Gosudarstvo i pisateli 19251938, ed. D. L.
Babichenko (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997), 17.
58. Leopold Averbakh, O politike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi literatury, Oktiabr, no. 9 (1925): 12627; Averbakh,O proletarskoi kulture, napostovskoi putanitse,
i bolshevistskikh aksiomakh, Bolshevik, no. 6 (1926): 10114. For his part, Kerzhentsev
openly defined cultural revolution as a struggle against bourgeois culture and its holdovers and the creation of proletarian culture (P. Kerzhentsev, Ob oshibke tt. Trotskogo,
Voronskogo i dr., Oktiabr, no. 1 [1925], 11516).
59. N. Bukharin, Za uporiadochenie byta molodezhi, in Komsomolskii byt (Moscow:
Molodaia gvardiia, 1927), 99.
60. Luppol, Problema kultury, nos. 56, 3; A. Deborin, Marksizm i kultura, Revoliutsiia i kultura, no. 1 (1927): 89. In the same vein, see Ot redaktsii, Revoliutsiia i kultura,
5; and E. Pashukanis, Zametki o kulture i politike, Revoliutsiia i kultura, no. 2 (1927):
1317. The mid-1920s engagement with the cultural followed two other developments: the
dissemination of culture as a form of class ideology in Bogdanovs Proletkult and a more
general spread of ethnographic notions of culture first applied to peasants and nationalties. On the gradual spread of an anthropological concept of culture in Russia after the
turn of the century, see Neuberger, Hooliganism, 1011; on Bogdanov and Proletkult, see
Mally, Culture of the Future, esp. 89, 2930.
61. On cultural policy, see Stuart Finkel, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia
and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007);
and Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Soft Line on Culture and Its Enemies, in her The Cultural
Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992),
91114.

NOTES TO PAGES 119123 | 249

62. A significant and often overlooked study in the latter area is Daniel Todes, Pavlov
and the Bolsheviks, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 17, no. 3 (1995): 379418.
63. Clark, Petersburg, 14347.
64. Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997); Kenneth Pinnow, Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the
Promise of Soviet Socialism, 19211929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).
65. Vl. Kuzmin, Pismo o novom byte, Komsomolskii byt (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia,
1927): 31921; Ippolit, Komsomolskii byt kak on est (Obzor literatury), Pechat i revoliutsii, no. 4 (1927): 122; Politicheskoe vospitanie Komsomola (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1925), 18.
66. F. W., Voprosy vospitatelnoi raboty, Sverdlovets, nos. 56 (1923): 42.
67. See esp. M. A. Makarevich, ed., Partiinaia etika: Dokumenty i materialy diskussii 20-kh
godov (Moscow: Politizdat, 1989).
68. Makarevich, Partiinaia etika, 144.
69. Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck, The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi
Germany, in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and
Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 30244, quotation
322. Here there is a rough analogy with the Nazi Revolutions attempt to purge the Jew
within and non-Aryan values, opened up through the identification of the enemy in
terms of spiritual as well as biological features. See George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1966); and esp. Dirk Rupnow, Racializing Historiography: Anti-Jewish Scholarship in
the Third Reich, Patterns of Prejudice 42, no. 1 (2008): 2759.
70. Fitzpatrick discusses the Agitprop conference in Cultural Revolution as Class
War, 10, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 4142. For the immediate influence of its
formulations, see A. Maletskii, Problema kulturnoi revoliutsii v programme Kominterna,
Revoliutsiia i kultura, no. 19 (1928): 9.
71. F. F. Perchenok, Akademiia nauk na velikom perelome, Zvenia, no. 1 (Moscow:
Feniks, 1990): 23233.
72. Kulturnaia revoliutsiia i kultrabota soiuzov: Po programme rainnoi (uezdnoi) profshkoly
(Moscow: Izdatelstvo MGSPS Trud i kniga, 1929), 58; Kulturnaia revoliutsiia i zadachi teatra Proletkulta (Moscow: Izdaniia Proletkulta, 1929), 57, 9; A. Vishnevskii, O
kulturnoi revoliutsii, Revoliutsiia i kultura, nos. 1314 (1930): 1112.
73. S. Pismennyi, O nekotorykh osnovnykh momentakh kulturnoi revoliutsii v natsrespublikakh Srednei Azii, Revoliutsiia i kultura, no. 10 (1928): 1120; I. Arkhincheev, Na
putiakh kulturnoi revoliutsii, Bolshevik, no. 11 (1928): 5870.
74. Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 198204, 21946.
75. Jan Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Polands Western Ukraine and
Western Belorussia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 230, 11522.
76. Tarik Cyril Amar, Sovietization as a Civilizing Mission in the West, in The Sovietization of Eastern Europe, ed. Balzs Apor, Pter Apor, and E. A. Rees (Washington, DC:
New Academia Publishing, 2008), 2946.
77. Vadim Volkov, The Concept of Kulturnost: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing
Process, in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York: Routledge, 2000),
21030; Steve Smith and Catriona Kelly, Commercial Culture and Consumerism, chap.
2 of Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 18811941 (Oxford: Oxford Univer-

250 | NOTES TO PAGES 123129

sity Press, 1998), esp. 113, 152; Timo Vikhavainen, Vnutrennyi vrag: Borba s meshchanstvom
kak moralnaia missiia russkoi intelligentsii (St. Petersburg: Kolo, 2004); David L. Hoffmann,
Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 19171941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 11845.
78. Volkov, The Concept of Kulturnost, 226.
79. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution Revisited, Russian Review 58, no. 2 (1999):
2029, here 2023.
80. The implications of this are emphasized by Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins
of the Cultural Revolution, 3: The Coming of the Cataclysm, 19611966 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997), 46671.
81. Joel Andreas, Rise and Fall of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins
of Chinas New Class (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), esp. 8890, 133, 269;
Michael David-Fox, The Assault on the Universities and the Dynamics of Stalins Great
Break, 19281932, in Academia in Upheaval: Origins, Transfers, and Transformations of the
Communist Academic Regime in Russia and East Central Europe, ed. David-Fox and Gyrgy
Pteri (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2000), 73104.
82. Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking
-review/1966/PR196633g.htm.
83. Andreas, Rise and Fall, 48, 267, 316n.21.
84. For this argument, see Andrew G. Walder, Cultural Revolution Radicalism: Variations on a Stalinist Theme, in New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution, ed. William A.
Joseph et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 4161.

CHAPTER 5: Symbiosis to Synthesis

1. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of
California, 1995), 292.
2. Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918
1929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
3. The most substantial, if uneven, recent history of late imperial and early Soviet
higher education and science is Aleksandr Dmitriev, ed., Raspisanie peremen: Ocherki istorii obrazovatelnoi i nauchnoi politiki v Rossiiskoi imperiiSSSR (konets 1880-kh1930-e gody)
(Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2012).
4. See, for example, Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain; David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007); and Daniel Stotland, Ideologues and Pragmatists: World War II, New
Communists, and Persistent Dilemmas of the Soviet Party-State, 19411953 (PhD diss,
University of Maryland, 2010).
5. Before 1917, the academy was known as the Imperial Academy of Sciences; after 1925,
as the Academy of Sciences of the USSR; after 1991, it again became the Russian Academy
of Sciences.
6. The most important works in what is now a voluminous literature on the academy after the revolution are Loren Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party,
19271932 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967); F. F. Perchenok, Akademiia
nauk na velikom perelome, Zvenia: Istoricheskii almanakh, no. 1 (Moscow: Feniks, 1990):
163235; Alexander Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR,

NOTES TO PAGES 129134 | 251

19171970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and on the Academy Affair, V.
P. Leonov et al., eds., Akademicheskoe delo 19291931 gg.: Dokumenty i materialy sledstvennogo
dela, sfabrikovannogo OGPU, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Biblioteka Rossiiskoi akademii nauk,
1998).
7. Here see Michael David-Fox and Gyrgy Pteri, eds., Academia in Upheaval: Origins,
Transfers, and Transformations of the Communist Academic Regime in Russia and East Central
Europe (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2000); and Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
8. For a documentary publication, see B. I. Kozlov and G. A. Savina, eds., Kommunisticheskaia akademiia TsIK SSSR, 19181936: Materialy k sotsialnoi istorii (Moscow: Slovo, 2008).
9. M. G. Iaroshevskii, ed., Repressirovannaia nauka, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1991,
1994).
10. Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Power and Culture, in her The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 15.
11. On Nicholas Timasheff and his concept of the Great Retreat, see the forum of
articles on Stalinism and the Great Retreat in Kritika 5, no. 4 (2004).
12. Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 18671917 (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1970), 66. The academys image in late imperial Russian academic and
intelligentsia culture has yet to be systematically interrogated. But Vera Tolzs prosopographical work has contrasted the persistent myths of its conservatism with the moderate
reformism of the majority of academicians in 1905 and after (most proved to be gradualist,
constitutional monarchists who reacted favorably to the October Manifesto). See Vera
Tolz, Russian Academicians and the Revolution: Combining Professionalism and Politics (New
York: St. Martins Press, 1997).
13. On the Mendeleev affair, see Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 9698; on Larin,
see V. S. Brachev, Ukroshchenie skroptivoi, ili kak AN SSSR uchili poslushaniiu, Vestnik
akademii nauk SSSR, no. 4 (1990): 123, and Tolz, Russian Academicians, chap. 2.
14. E. Voronov, Dokladnaia zapiska, Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii
(GARF) f. A2306, op. 1, d. 3438, ll. 611.
15. Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 2122.
16. John Biggart, The Russian Academy and the Journal Gelios, Sbornik, no. 5 (1980):
1727.
17. Polozhenie o Sotsialisticheskoi akademii obshchestvennykh nauk, 1918, Arkhiv
Rossiiskoi akademii nauk (ARAN) f. 643, op. 1, d. 158, ll. 23.
18. Quoted in A. Udaltsov, Ocherk istorii Sotsialisticheskoi akademii (19181922 g.g.),
Vestnik Sotsialisticheskoi akademii (hereafter VSA), no. 1 (1922): 17.
19. Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge, 9798; Joel Shapiro, A History of the Communist
Academy, 19181936 (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1976), 4345.
20. A. D. Udaltsov, Ocherk istorii Sotsialisticheskoi akademii (19191922 gg.), VSA,
no. 1 (1922): 1337. Among the prominent party leaders who by the early 1920s participated as much as time would allow were Bukharin, Lunacharskii, and Karl Radek;
active core participants included such prominent Bolshevik intellectuals as Evgenii A.
Preobrazhenskii, Vladimir P. Miliutin, Ivan I. Skvortsov-Stepanov, Otto Iu. Shmidt, and
Arkadii K. Timiriazev. Other founders included the Old Bolshevik legal scholar Mikhail
A. Reisner, the Marxologist David B. Riazanov, the student of the French Revolution

252 | NOTES TO PAGES 134138

and Paris Commune Nikolai N. Lukin, and the historian of European socialist thought
Viacheslav P. Volgin.
21. See Evgenii Preobrazhenskiis plans to develop a single hierarchical ladder of party
institutions in Deviataia konferentsiia RKP(b): Sentiabr 1920 goda. Protokoly (Moscow: Politizdat, 1972), 12425.
22. See I. Grosman-Roshchin to A. V. Lunacharskii, January 10, 1920, GARF f. A2306,
op. 1, d. 429, l. 169.
23. Protokol zasedaniia prezidiuma Sotsialisticheskoi akademii obshchestvennykh
nauk, 15 oktiabria 1921, GARF f. 3145, op. 1, d. 86, l. 10.
24. E. A. Preobrazhenskii, Blizhaishie zadachi Sotsialisticheskoi akademii, VSA, no. 1
(1922): 7. Gosplan is short for State Planning Committee.
25. Rezoliutsiia po voprosam Propagandy, pechati i agitatsii priniatsia Agitpropsekts.
XII-go partsezda 25 aprelia 1923, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsialno-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI) f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 367, ll. 2442; KPSS v resoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh
sezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK, 5th ed. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1984), 3:106.
26. Protokol obshchego sobraniia chlenov Sotsialisticheskoi akademii, October 11,
1923, VSA, no. 6 (1923): 42021; Protokol obshchego sobraniia chlenov Sotsialisticheskoi
akademii 17 aprelia 1924 g., Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi akademii (hereafter VKA), no. 8
(1924): 387.
27. Lunacharskii cited in V. D. Esakov, Sovetskaia nauka v gody pervoi piatiletki (Moscow:
Nauka, 1971), 55; Pokrovskii, 10 let Kommunisticheskoi akademii. Vstupitelnoe slovo M.
N. Pokrovskogo na iubileinom zasedaniia plenuma Kommunisticheskoi akademii 25 maia
1928 g., VKA, no. 28 (1928): 18.
28. Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 21415.
29. Zapiska o rabote Sergeia Fedorovicha Oldenburga v kachestve nepremennogo
sekretaria Akademii nauk v 192829 gg, sostavlennaia Elenoi Grigorevnoi Oldenburg,
ARAN f. 208, op. 2, ed. khr. 57, l. 55. I am grateful to Daniel Todes for presenting me with
a copy of this unique diary.
30. I. D. Serebriakov, Nepremennyi sekretar AN akademik Sergei Fedorovich Oldenburg, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 1 (1994): 223.
31. K. V. Ostrovitianov, ed., Organizatsiia nauki v pervye gody sovetskoi vlasti (19171925):
Sbornik dokumentov (Leningrad: Nauka, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1968), 24, 1035; Serebriakov, Nepremennyi sekretar AN, 226n.28; Kendall E. Bailes, Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: V. I. Vernadsky and His Scientific School, 18631945 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990), 14951.
32. Tolz, Russian Academicians, chap. 2.
33. On the arrests of scholars, see Protokol no. 1 Politicheskogo Biuro TsK ot 11 sentiabria 1919 goda, RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, d. 26, l. 2; S. G. Isakov, Neizvestnye pisma M.
Gorkogo V. Leninu, Revue des tudes slaves 64, no. 1 (1992): 14356.
34. Cited in Leonov et al., Akademicheskoe delo, 1: xiii, xiv.
35. Serebriakov, Nepremennyi sekretar AN, 225, 229; Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 72.
36. Robert A. Lewis, Government and the Technological Sciences in the Soviet Union:
The Rise of the Academy of Sciences, Minerva 15, no. 2 (1977): 17499.
37. On Pavlovs evolving interrelationship with the revolutionary regime, see Daniel
Todes, Pavlov and the Bolsheviks, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 17, no. 3 (1995):

NOTES TO PAGES 138141 | 253

379418; and Todes, Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), parts 6 and 7.
38. Zapiska o rabote Sergeia Fedorovicha Oldenburga, l. 41.
39. Piat volnykh pisem V. I. Vernadskogo synu, Minuvshee 7 (1992): 431; Perchenok,
Akademiia, 199200. In 1917 nineteen of the forty-six full academicians were members
of the hereditary nobility (Tolz, Russian Academicians, chap. 2).
40. Protokol zasedaniia no. 70 Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) ot 8 iiulia 1925 goda, RGASPI
f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 510, l. 6; Ostrovitianov, Organizatsiia nauki v pervye gody, 2078; Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences, 74. The phrase vysshee uchenoe uchrezhdenie Soiuza SSR
was in fact ambiguous, simultaneously carrying the meanings supreme and higher.
Only in the Academy of Sciences charter of 1935 was the ambiguity resolved by adding
the phrase, uniting the most outstanding scientists in the country (see Ustavy Akademii
nauk SSSR, 17241974 [Moscow: Nauka, 1974]).
41. Vypiska iz protokola no. 70 zasedaniia Orgbiuro TsK ot 13 marta 1925 g., RGASPI
f. 147, op. 1, d. 33, l. 15; Polozhenie ob Institute sovetskogo stroitelstva pri Kommunisticheskoi akademii, ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 33, l. 57; and the speech by Valerian V. Kuibyshev, head of the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate, at the inauguration of the Institute of
Soviet Construction in 1925, ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 39, ll. 134.
42. Protokol no. 1 zasedaniia Biuro Prezidiuma ot 11 dekabria 1924 g., ARAN f. 350,
op. 1, d. 26, l. 1; Stenogramma zasedaniia Biuro Prezidiuma Kommakademii [sic], 27 fevralia 1926, ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 53, l. 2.
43. Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge, 101.
44. On the latter, see Gerhard Duda, Jen Varga und die Geschichte des Instituts fr Weltwirtschaft und Weltpolitik in Moskau 19211970 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 5375.
45. Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge, 1016, 121.
46. Tolz, Russian Academicians, chap. 2.
47. Kenneth Bailes, Natural Scientists and the Soviet System, in Party, State, and Society
in the Russian Civil War, ed. Diane Koenker et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989), 271; Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge, 101; Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences, 86.
48. Stenograficheskii otchet zasedaniia Biuro Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi akademii. 24 dekabria 1927, ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 119, l. 36.
49. Pokrovskii, O deiatelnosti Kommunisticheskoi akademii, no date, prob. 1928,
ARAN f. 540, op. 4, d. 31, l. 8.
50. On these divisions, see Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences, 2829: S. Belomortsev, Bolshevizatsiia Akademii nauk, Posev, no. 46 (1951): 11; and Komissiia po naukam
tekhnicheskim: Zasedanie ot 20 oktiabria 1928 g., GARF f. 3316, op. 45, d. 1, l. 353.
51. Anatolii Lunacharskii, Nauka v SSSR, RGASPI f. 142, op. 1, d. 179, l. 49; Sergei
Oldenburg, V komissiiu SNK SSSR po sodeistviiu raboty Akademii nauk SSSR, February 25, 1927, GARF f. 3316, op. 45, d. 34, ll. 18894; S. F. Oldenburg, Lenin i nauka,
Nauchnyi rabotnik, no. 1 (1926): 37; Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge, 95.
52. In 1922 a special commission was formed to augment the academys service functions. See Protokol zasedaniia Prezidiuma Sotsialisticheskoi akademii obshchestvennykh
nauk, 26 fevralia 1922 g., RGASPI f. 17, op. 60, d. 230, ll. 45; and Shapiro, A History of
the Communist Academy, 4348, 11213.
53. O rabote Komakademii (Postanovlenie TsK VKP[b] ot 22 iiulia 1927 g.), Pravda,

254 | NOTES TO PAGES 141145

July 26, 1927, 6. See Zasedanie Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi akademii 2 aprelia 1927
g., ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 93, ll. 12.
54. Otchet Glavnauki za 1922 god, Biulleten Glavnauki, nos. 34 (1922): 14. On the
number of new institutes, see F. N. Petrov, Nauchno-issledovatelskie instituty SSSR,
Molodaia gvardiia, nos. 911 (1925), 14649; on the impact of the Kaiser-WilhelmGesellschaft, see especially Jrgen Ntzold, Die deutsch-sowjetischen Wissenschaftsbeziehungen, in Forschung im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Gesellschaft: Geschichte und
Struktur der Kaiser-Wilhelm/Max-Plank-Gesellschaft, ed. Rudolf Vierhaus and Bernhard von
Brocke (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag, 1990), 778800. I rely here on what remains the most
significant statement on this issue, Loren R. Grahams The Formation of Soviet Research
Institutes: A Combination of Revolutionary Innovation and International Borrowing,
Social Studies of Science 5, no. 3 (1975): 30329. For a differing interpretation, see also Alexei
Kojevnikov, The Great War, the Russian Civil War, and the Invention of Big Science,
Science in Context 15, no. 2 (2002): 23975.
55. V. A. Ulianovskaia, Formirovanie nauchnoi intelligentsii v SSSR, 19171937 gg. (Moscow:
Nauka, 1966), 6869.
56. S. F. Oldenburg, Iz vpechatlenii o nauchnoi zhizni v Germanii, Frantsii i Anglii,
Nauchnyi rabotnik, no. 2 (1927): 89.
57. See, for example, Paul Josephson, Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991), 71.
58. Protokol obshchego sobraniia chlenov Sotsialisticheskoi akademii 17 aprelia 1924
g., VKA, no. 8 (1924): 385; Plenarnoe zasedanie prezidiuma Komm. akademii, 15 iiunia
1926 g., ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 45, l. 4.
59. Pervaia vsesoiuznaia konferentsiia marksistsko-leninskikh nauchno-issledovatelskikh uchrezhdenii (2225 marta 1928 g. Stenograficheskii otchet), VKA, no. 26 (1928):
266.
60. K. V. Ivanov, Novaia politika obrazovaniia v 19171922: Reforma vysshei shkoly,
in Raspisanie peremen, 35979; Stuart Finkel, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia
and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007),
chap. 2.
61. Soveshchanie Narkomprosov soiuznykh i avtonomnykh respublik, I-e zasedaniia,
27 oktiabria 1924 g., ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 5, l. 64.
62. M. N. Pokrovskii. Predsedateliu Sovnarkoma RSFSR A. I. Rykovu. 25 noiabria
1924, ARAN f. 1759, op. 4, d. 96, ll. 12.
63. Tezisy po dokladu Glavnauki o Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d.
18, ll. 45.
64. Protokol no. 70 zasedanii Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) ot 8 iiulia 1925 goda, RGASPI f.
17, op. 3, ed. khr. 510, l. 6; also ed. khr. 509, ll. 1, 3 and ed. khr. 516, l. 1. On the jubilee, see
Marina Sorokina, Partners of Choice/Faute de Mieux? Russians and Germans at the 200th
Anniversary of the Academy of Sciences, 1925, in Doing Medicine Together: Germany and
Russia between the Wars, ed. Susan Gross Solomon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2006), 61102.
65. S. F. Oldenburg to A. I. Rykov, December 9, 1925, in Vestnik Rossiiskoi Akademii
Nauk 63, no. 4 (1993): 35871.
66. Protokol no. 86 zasedaniia Politbiuro ot 29 oktiabria 1925 goda, RGASPI f. 17, op.
3, ed. khr. 526, l. 5.

NOTES TO PAGES 146148 | 255

67. Sergei Oldenburg, V komissiiu SNK SSSR po sodeistviiu raboty Akademii nauk
SSSR, 25 fevralia 1927 goda, GARF f. 3316, op. 45, d. 34, ll. 19498.
68. Protokol zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) ot 26 maia 1927 goda, RGASPI f. 17,
op. 3, ed. khr. 636, ll. 45.
69. Zasedanie Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi akademii, April 2, 1927, ARAN f. 350,
op. 1, d. 93, ll. 1213.
70. Ustav Akademii nauk SSSR: Proekt komissii SNK SSSRPred. V. P. Miliutin,
March 3, 1926, ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 284, ll. 1427.
71. E. Voronov to V. P. Miliutin, GARF f. 3415, op. 2, d. 5, l. 29. Twelve copies of this
document were sent. Others who received it were Gorbunov, Vyshinskii, Aleksandr Krinitskii, and Maksim Litvinov.
72. Protokol no. 1 zasedaniia Komissii SNK SSSR po rasmotreniiu otcheta Akademii
Nauk SSSR, June 21, 1927, ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 18, l. 49.
73. M. N. Pokrovskii, K otchetu o deiatelnosti Akademii nauk za 1926 g., ARAN f.
1759, op. 2, d. 18, ll. 88102.
74. GARF f. 3415, op. 2, d. 3, l. 6.
75. V. P. Volgin, report for 1927 Miliutin commission (untitled), GARF f. 3415, op. 2, d.
3, ll. 2930.
76. Protokol zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) ot 13 oktiabria 1927 goda, RGASPI f.
17, op. 3, ed. khr. 655, l. 5; also ed. khr. 638, l. 5; I. A. Tugarinov, VARNITSO i Akademiia
nauk SSSR (19271937 gg), Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, no. 4 (1989): 4655.
77. Arsenii Iarilov to Nikolai Petrovich Gorbunov, February 19, 1926, handwritten t.
Miliutinu V. P. Tolko lichno, GARF f. 3316, op. 45, d. 34, ll. 8182. For his earlier views,
see his 1917 pamphlet, Demokratizatsiia vysshei selsko-khoziastvennoi shkoly i strakhovanie
nauki.
78. A. N. Bakh, Otzyv ob otchete o deiatelnosti Akademii nauk za 1926 g., GARF f.
3415, op. 2, d. 3, ll. 4042; Doklad o deiatelnosti Vsesoiuznoi Akademii nauk za 1926 i
o plane rabote ee na 1927/28 g. Proekt, with Miliutins handwritten corrections, GARF f.
3415, op. 2, d. 3, ll. 313.
79. Zav. Otdelom nauchnykh uchrezhdenii pri SNK SSSR M. N. Pokrovskomu. 29
avgusta 1927 g., ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 18, ll. 37880. Pokrovskiis responses are on ll.
38183.
80. Protokol no. 91 zasedaniia Politbiuro ot 19 noiabria 1925 goda, RGASPI f. 17,
op. 3, ed. khr. 531, l. 9; Povestka zasedaniia komissii SNK SSSR po sodeistviiu rabotam
Akademii nauk Soiuza SSR, GARF f. A2306, op. 1, d. 3438, ll. 7980 and other materials,
ll. 1841, 47, 7073, 77. It seems that a troika of party scholars was also closely involved
with the Enukidze commission: the ubiquitous Pokrovskii; Sverdlov Communist University rector Martyn N. Liadov; and Otto Iulevich Shmidt, a prominent figure in the Communist Academy and its leading authority in the natural sciences (K voprosu o rashirenii
funktsii Komissii A. S. Enukidze, ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 18, ll. 38485).
81. A. Karpinskii, Sergei Oldenburg, and A. Fersman, V Komissiiu pri SNK SSSR po
sodeistviiu rabotam Akademii nauk Soiuza SSR, GARF f. A2306, op. 1, d. 3439, ll. 25.
82. E. Voronov, Dokladnaia zapiska, April 2, 1927, ll. 611; Alexsey E. Levin, Expedient Catastrophe: A Reconsideration of the 1929 Crisis at the Soviet Academy of Sciences,
Slavic Review 47, no. 2 (1988): 265.

256 | NOTES TO PAGES 148152

83. M. N. Pokrovskii to A. S. Enukidze, June 1928 (no day given), RGASPI f. 147, op. 1,
d. 33, l. 80.
84. Protokol no. 16 zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) ot 22 marta 1928 goda, RGASPI
f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 678, l. 3; Postanovlenie komissii Politbiuro po voprosu o vyborakh
akademikov, RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 678, ll. 1113.
85. Partiinoe rukovodstvo Akademii nauk: Sem dokumentov iz byvshego arkhiva Novosibirskogo obkoma KPSS, Vestnik Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, 64, no. 11 (1994): 103343; L.
V. Matveeva, and E. G. Tsygankova, Vseukrainskaia Akademiia nauk: God 1929-i, in In
Memoriam: Istoricheskii sbornik pamiati F. F. Perchenka, ed. A. I. Dobkin and M. Iu. Sorokina
(Moscow: Feniks, 1995), 11618.
86. The voluminous stenographic reports of the commission meetings can be found in
GARF f. 3316, op. 45, dd. 134.
87. Obshchee sobranie Osobykh komissii: Zasedanie 10 oktiabria 10 chasa utra,
GARF f. 3316, op. 45, d. 14, l. 316.
88. See the important materials from the Presidential Archive published in Nashe
polozhenie khuzhe katorzhnogo: Pervye vybory v Akademiiu nauk SSSR, Istochnik, no.
3 (1996): 114, 120. For a later migr account stressing prearranged understandings among
academicians (Oldenburg and Platonov) and Bolsheviks (Enukidze and Bukharin), see
Belomortsev, Bolshevizatsiia Akademiia nauk, 1112.
89. For evidence of this, see Nashe polozhenie, 13033; and Zapiska o rabote Sergeia
Fedorovicha Oldenburga, ll. 53, 178.
90. Obshchee sobranie, ll. 32931; and, for example, Zasedanie komissii po naukam
khimicheskim, 20 oktiabria 1928, GARF f. 3316, op. 45, d. 14, l. 71.
91. Zasedanie komissii po naukam istoricheskim, 12 oktiabria 1928, GARF f. 3316, op.
45, d. 4, l. 16.
92. Zasedanie komissii po naukam istoricheskim, 12 oktiabria, ll. 21, 27.
93. Zasedanie komissii po naukam filosofskim, 14 oktiabria 1928, GARF f. 3316, op.
45, d. 1, ll. 22148.
94. Zasedaniia komissii po naukam khimicheskim, 13 oktiabria 1928, GARF f. 3316,
op. 45, d. 1, l. 172.
95. It seems likely that this famous episode was an unexpected result of the secret ballot. Before the vote, Academician Ioffe urged his colleagues in a private meeting not to
permit the three to be elected unanimously (Perchenok, Akademiia, 186).
96. Piat volnykh pisem, 43334; Zapiska o rabote Sergeia Fedorovicha Oldenburga, ll. 82, 84, 11820.
97. Perchenok, Akademiia, 18485, 183, 188. The Kremlin meeting, however, ended in
a compromise when special reelections were agreed on for the blackballed troika.
98. V Politbiuro TsK VKP(b): Protokol zasedaniia fraktsii kommunistov-akademikov
ot 25 fevralia 1929 g., RGASPI f. 147, op. 1, d. 33, l. 105. Emphasis in orig.
99. Lukin and Gleb Krzhizhanovskii were also Communist Academy members elected
to the Academy of Sciences, but were not present at this meeting. Ivan Gubkin was the
only communist academician who was not a member of the Communist Academy.
100. Protokol zasedaniia fraktsii kommunistov-akademikov, ll. 1056.
101. Untitled speech by Riazanov, RGASPI f. 301, op. 1, d. 80, ll. 5769.
102. B. I. Cherepnina, Deiatelnost Kommunisticheskoi partii v oblasti podgotovki
nauchno-pedagogicheskikh kadrov po obshchestvennym naukam SSSR za 19181962

NOTES TO PAGES 152156 | 257

gg. (Candidate of Sciences diss., Institut narodnogo khoziaistva im. Plekhanova, Moscow, 1964), 7071.
103. Ob itogakh raboty i novykh zadachakh, stoiashchikh pered Komakademii na
novom etape, VKA, no. 3738 (1930): 11.
104. See his remarkable resignation letter: D. B. Riazanov, V prezidium Kommunisticheskoi akademii, February 8, 1931, RGASPI f. 147, op. 1, ed. khr. 33, ll. 5259. See also
Iakov Rokitianskii and Reinhard Miuller [Mller], Krasnyi dissident: Akademik Riazanov
opponent Lenina, zhertva Stalina. Biograficheskii ocherk, dokumenty (Moscow: Akademiia, 1996),
and Ia. G. Rokitianskii, Tragicheskaia sudba akademika D. B. Riazanova, Novaia i
noveishaia istoriia, no. 2 (1992): 10748.
105. See Pokrovskii to Central Committee Secretariat, L. M. Kaganovich, and A. I.
Krinitskii, December 18, 1928, RGASPI f. 147, op. 1, ed. khr. 37, l. 18; B. V. Ananich, O
vospominaniiakh N. S. Shtakelberg, in In Memoriam, 85; and B. S. Kaganovich, Evgenii
Viktorovich Tarle i peterburgskaia shkola istorikov (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1995),
3536.
106. Protokol zasedaniia kommunisticheskoi fraktsii Soveta Obshchestva istorikovmarksistov ot 11 marta 1929, RGASPI f. 147, op. 1, d. 30, ll. 23; T. I. Kalistratova, Institut istorii FON MGU-RANION (19211929) (Nizhnii Novgorod: Izdatelstvo Nizhnii
Novgorod, 1992), 16162.
107. Zapiska o rabote Sergeia Fedorovicha Oldenburga, ll. 18, 108, 177; Piat
volnykh pisem, 434n.11.
108. Protokol no. 68 zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) ot 14 marta 1929, RGASPI f.
17, op. 3, ed. khr. 730, l. 5; Protokol no. 73 zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) ot 15 aprelia
1929 g., RGASPI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 735, l. 3.
109. V. S. Brachev, Delo Akademika S. F. Platonova, Voprosy istorii, no. 5 (1989):
11729.
110. Perchenok, Akademiia, 209; Stennogramma zasedaniia Plenuma komissii
proverke apparata Akademii nauk SSSR, 24 avgusta 1929, GARF f. 3316, op. 1, d. 15, ll.
47984; Komissiia po chistke apparata Akademii nauk: Zasedanie 21 oktiabria 1929 g.,
GARF f. 3316, op. 1, d. 15, ll. 48895.
111. The Communist Academy and its new Leningrad division (LOKA) were given a
role in promoting and training these new cadres for the Academy of Sciences in 1930. See
Vypiska iz protokola zasedaniia Prezidiuma Uchenogo komiteta TsIK Soiuza SSR, 26
marta 1930 g., GARF f. 7668, op. 1, d. 92, l. 6 ob. Excellent sources on the reorganization
can be found in the records of TsIKs Uchennyi komitet, e.g., GARF f. 7668, op. 1, d. 209,
l. 54; d. 210, ll. 321; d. 360, ll. 78.
112. Perchenok, Delo, 228; Shapiro, A History of the Communist Academy, 291331;
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Cultural Orthodoxies under Stalin, in The Cultural Front, 246.

Chapter 6: Understanding and Loving the New Russia

1. Maria Pavlovna a beaucoup fait pour me faire mieux comprendre et aimer la Russie
nouvelle. Romain Rolland to Maksim Gorky, June 2, 1931, in Correspondance Romain
Rolland-Maxime Gorki (Paris: A. Michel, 1991), 236. The letters are also published in Russian as M. Gorkii i R. Rollan: Perepiska (19161936) (Moscow: Nasledie, 1995), here 194.
2. Rolland to Gorky, August 10, 1931, Correspondance, 243. On the category of friends
of the Soviet Union, and how it assumed an almost contractual importance for sympa-

258 | NOTES TO PAGES 156163

thizers and Soviets in the 1930s, see Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment:
Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to Soviet Russia, 19211941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 6.
3. See the reflections on les mdiateurs from Sophie Coeur, Comme ils disent SSSR:
Louis Aragon et lUnion sovitique dans les annes 1930, in Les engagements dAragon, ed.
Jacques Girault and Bernard Lecherbonnier (Paris: LHarmattan, 1997), 5967, esp. 6265.
On foreign writers inside the Soviet Union, much information can be found in Leonid
Maksimenkov, Ocherki nomenklaturnoi istorii sovetskoi literatury: Zapadnye pilgrimy u
stalinskogo prestola (Feikhtvanger i drugie), Voprosy literatury, no. 2 (2004): 24291; no. 3
(2004): 274353; and Maksimenkov, ed. Bolshaia tenzura: Pisateli i zhurnalisty v Strane sovetov
19171956 (Moscow: Materik, 2005), on Rolland 238, 300, 37881, 38990, 391, 411.
4. Michael David-Fox, Stalinist Westernizer? Aleksandr Arosevs Literary and Political
Depictions of Europe, Slavic Review 62, no. 4 (2003): 73359.
5. Here see Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the
Evolution of Soviet Culture, 19311941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
6. A. Arosev to I. V. Stalin, January 25, 1935, Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. R-5283, op. 1a, d. 276, l. 26; Arosev to Stalin, July 31, 1931, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsialno-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI) f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695,
ll. 5960; Arosev to Stalin, May 17, 1935, GARF f. R-5283, op. 1a, d. 276, l. 109; Arosev
to Stalin, May 23, 1931, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 695, ll. 5657. See also David-Fox,
Stalinist Westernizer?
7. Aleksandr Arosev crit Romain Rolland pour la preparation de son voyage (1935),
in Cousu de fil rouge: Voyages des intellectuels franais en Union sovitique, ed. Sophie Coeur
and Rachel Mazuy (Paris: ditions CNRS, 2012), 14243.
8. On Maiskii and the Webbs, see Ivan Mikhailovich Maiskii, Dnevnik diplomata: London 19341943, 2 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 2006); Gabriel Gorodetsky is preparing a major,
annotated translation of Maiskiis diaries for Yale University Press. On Tretiakov and
Berlin intellectuals, see Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, chap. 1; on Koltsov and Feuchtwanger, see the works of Anne Hartmann, including Lion Feuchtwanger, zurck aus
Sowjetrussland: Selbstzensur eines Reisebericht, Exil: Forschung, Erkentnisse, Ergebnisse 29,
no. 1 (2009): 1640; Hartmann, Abgrndige Vernunft: Lion Feuchtwangers Moskau 1937,
in NeulektrenNew Readings: Festschrift fr Gerd Labroisse zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Norbert
Otto Eke und Gerhard P. Knapp (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 14977; and Hartmann,
Lost in Translation: Lion Feuchtwanger bei Stalin 1937, Exil: Forschung, Erkentnisse, Ergebnisse 28, no. 2 (2008): 518.
9. The best biography of Ehrenburg remains Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The
Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999, orig. 1996);
the preeminent Russian student of Ehrenburg, commentator and compiler for many editions of his writings, is Boris Frezinskii.
10. Barbara Walker, Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2005), 45, 142. Kudasheva knew Pasternak from the mid-1910s
through the publication of her poetry, and she later facilitated his contacts with Rolland.
See Christopher Barnes, Pasternak: A Literary Biography, 2: 19281960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1213.
11. M. P. Arakelova and A. A. Gorodnitskaia, Ocharovannaia dusha: M. P. Kudasheva-Rollan, in Rossiiskaia intelligentsia na rodine i v zarubezhe, ed. Tatiana Aleksandrovna

NOTES TO PAGES 164166 | 259

Parkhomenko (Moscow: Rossiiskii institut kulturologii, 2001), 16175; Sophie Coeur, La

grande lueur lEst: Les franais et lUnion sovitique 19171939 (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1999),
65, 67; Bernard Duchatelet, Romain Rolland tel quen lui-mme (Paris: ditions Albin Michel,
2002), 16175, 285, 33132, 398.
12. Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1st ed. (Moscow: OGIZ, 1938), 33:21718.
13. Elle sest maintenant passionne pour le bolchevisme. Rolland to Gorky, April 5,
1928, Correspondance, 199.
14. Duchatelet, Romain Rolland, 291.
15. David James Fisher, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), 13.
16. Rolland to Gorky, July 28, 1929, Correspondance, 200. The twenty-volume Vremia
publication, the first Soviet edition of Rollands Sobranie sochinenii (Collected Works) was
under the general editorship of P. S. Kogan, Kudashevas former employer at the Academy
of Artistic Sciences, and contained a preface from Gorky and Rollands Austrian friend
and admirer Stefan Zweig. It began publication in 1932.
17. Romain Rolland to Mariia Kudasheva, September 29, 1929, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d.
129, ll. 12021. VOKS wrote the collegium of Narkompros about the funding on November 4, 1929 (l. 119).
18. Michel Vovelle, 17891917: The Game of Analogies, in The French Revolution and
the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 4: The Terror, ed. Keith Michael Baker (Tarrytown,
NY: Pergamon, 1994), 34978; Eva Oberloskamp, Fremde neue Welten: Reisen deutscher und
franzsischer Linksintellektueller in die Sowjetunion 19171939 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag,
2011), chap. 5, section B.
19. Fisher, Romain Rolland, 5359, 65.
20. On the Rolland-Barbusse debate, see esp. chap. 5 of Fisher, Romain Rolland; see also
Duchatelet, Romain Rolland, 23145.
21. Miriam Krampf, La conception de la vie hroique dans loeuvre de Romain Rolland (Paris:
Le Cercle du Livre, 1956), 96; Fisher, Romain Rolland, 2729.
22. Fisher, Romain Rolland, 1012; see also Duchatelet, Romain Rolland, 11.
23. For comparison of Rollands view of Stalin with those of other fellow-travelers, see
David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, chap. 6.
24. Fisher, Romain Rolland, 23.
25. James von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals 19171920 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 26, 111.
26. F. J. Harris, Andr Gide and Romain Rolland: Two Men Divided (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1973), 68.
27. On the Soviet system for approving foreign travel in this period, see Michael
David-Fox, From Illusory Society to Intellectual Public: VOKS, International Travel,
and Party-Intelligentsia Relations in the Interwar Period, Contemporary European History
11, no. 1 (2002): 732.
28. Rolland to Gorky, August 6, 1929, Correspondance, 202.
29. A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, Lubianka: Organy VChK-OGPU-NKVD-NKGBMGB-MVD-KGB, 19171991. Spravochnik (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003), 24, 189, 276, 292.
30. Iu. V. Maltsev, Brio. predsedatelia VOKS. Tov. Trilesseru. Zam. Pred. OGPU,
August 10, 1929, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 125, l. 54; Gorky by telegram to Rolland, August
17, 1929, Correspondance, 203.

260 | NOTES TO PAGES 166170

31. On seksoty, see G. B. Kulikova, Pod kontrolem gosudarstva: Prebyvanie v SSSR

inostrannykh pisatelei v 19201930-kh godakh, Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 4 (2003): 56.
32. Georges Duhamel, Le livre de lamertune: Extraits du journal de Blanche et Georges Duhamel, ed. Bernard Duhamel (Paris: Mercure de France, 1983), 18492.
33. Bernard Duhamel, Note sur Marie Pavlovna, in Georges Duhamel, Le livre de
lamertune, 41517.
34. Boris Nosik, Kto ty?Maia. Gipertekstovaia versiia, www.pseudology.org
/chtivo/Kudasheva.htm, orig. Zvezda, no. 4 (2001).
35. Coeur, La grande lueur, 65, 67; Duchatelet, Romain Rolland, 33132, 398; Anne
Hartmann, Literarische Staatsbesuche: Prominente Autorin des Westens zu Gast in Stalins Sowjetunion (19311937), in Die Ost-West-Problematik in den europaischen Kulturen und
Literaturen/Problematika VchodZapad v evropskch kulturch a literaturch (Dresden: Neisse
Verlag, 2009), 112. In the memoirs of Victor Serge, Guilbeaux is recalled as a chronic
denouncer who kept a card-index of gossip about his comrades, and plagued the Cheka
with confidential notes (Memoirs of a Revolutionary, trans. Peter Sedgwick [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002], 144).
36. Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas against the
West (New York: Free Press, 1994), 21, 223. Koch has no concrete evidence about Kudasheva at all, excepting an interview conducted in 1989 with Willi Mnzenbergs widow,
Babette Gross, and the work of Guilbeaux, whose name is also misspelled (345n.35). The
less evidence Koch has, the more he talks about archival documents: he bolsters a passage
on Kudasheva with a phrase about innumerable files in the Central Party Archives in
Moscow, later gushing: Did Triolets file in the NKVD, like that of Koudachova [sic], bear
the sinister stamp: Nash? Ours? (230). He takes the phrase ladies of the Kremlin from
Nina Berberova (376n.62)
37. See the reference to NKVD agent Maria Kudasheva, the wife of Romaine [sic] Rolland, in Roman Brackman, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life (London: Frank
Cass, 2001), 248. The charge is repeated by Vladimir Fedorovski and Gonzague SaintBris, Les gries russes (Paris: J. C. Lattes, 1994), 26379, and more categorically by Nosik,
Kto ty?Maia.
38. Coeur, Comme ils disent SSSR, 64.
39. Zasedanie ino. komissii SSP SSSR 29-go maia 1936 g., Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi
arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI) f. 631, op. 14, ed. khr. 5, l. 19.
40. Katerina Clark, From Production Sketches to World Literature: The Search for a
Grander Narrative, paper presented at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, June 2010.
41. Romen Rollan [Romain Rolland], Moi put k proletarskoi revoliutsii, Internatsionalnaia literatura, nos. 34 (1934): 910.
42. Quoted in Fisher, Romain Rolland, 255. Goethe was the key icon in the Germanophone antifascist culture of the period.
43. Beseda t. Stalina s Romen Rollanom. Perevodil razgovor t. A. Arosev. 28.VI.sg
[1935], with handwritten addition not for publication (ne dlia pechati), RGASPI f. 558,
op. 11, ed. khr. 775, ll. 116, here l. 13. For an interpretation of the various versions of the
transcript of the Rolland-Stalin conversation, see Michael David-Fox, The Heroic Life
of a Friend of Stalinism: Romain Rolland and Soviet Culture, Slavonica 11, no. 1 (2005):
329.
44. Pismo Romen Rollana tovarishchu Stalinu, 20.VII.1935, RGALI f. 631, op. 11, d.

NOTES TO PAGES 171175 | 261

283, l. 13. See a similar declaration in Rolland to Kerzhentsev, April 4, 1936, RGALI f. 631,
op. 14, ed. khr. 729, l. 19.
45. Mariia Kudasheva to Mikhail Apletin, December 28, 1936, RGALI f. 631, op. 14, d.
729, l. 201.
46. A. Arosev to I. V. Stalin, July 14, 1935, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, ed. khr. 276, l. 188.
47. Romain Rolland, Notes complmentaires (de 1938) a mon rcit de voyage en
U.R.S.S, Voyage Moscou: Juinjuillet 1935, ed. Bernard Duchatelet (Paris: ditions Albin
Michel, 1992), 281.
48. Rolland, Voyage Moscou, 125; A. Arosev to I. V. Stalin, July 14, 1935, GARF f. 5283,
op. 1a, ed. khr. 276, ll. 19091.
49. Arosev to Stalin, July 14, 1935, l. 188.
50. Rolland, Voyage Moscou, 14243, 161, 182, 199, 284; Fisher, Romain Rolland, 24849;
Duchatelet, Romain Rolland, 31725; Hartmann, Literarische Staatsbesuche, 257.
51. Duchatelet, Romain Rolland, 31725, 277, 252; Fisher, Romain Rolland, 24550.
52. Rolland, Notes complmentaires (de 1938), Voyage Moscou, 27793.
53. Mikhail Apletin, sekretar MORPa predsedateliu Ino. komissii SSP SSSR tov.
Koltsovu, M. E. 8.XII.1935, RGALI f. 631, op. 11, d. 283, l. 76; see also l. 75; V Bolshom
zale Konservatorii, program of January 29, 1936, l. 63; for dozens of congratulatory letters
sent to Rolland, ll. 52, 5562.
54. 70 let Romen Rollanu: Torzhestvennyi vecher v Bolshom zale Konservatorii,
Komsomolskaia pravda, January 30, 1936, in RGALI f. 631, op. 14, ed. khr. 735, l. 17.
55. Mikhail Apletin to Mariia Kudasheva, May 14, 1934, RGALI f. 631, op. 14, d. 741, ll.
4445.
56. Kudasheva to Apletin, December 28, 1936, l. 201; Romain Rolland, Au cercle litteraire R. Rolland, Section artistique, Moscou, RGALI f. 631, op. 14, d. 741, l. 102.
57. Romen Rollan ob Andre Zhide. Otvetnoe pismo inostrannym rabochim Magnitogorska, RGALI f. 631, op. 14, ed. khr. 718, l. 33; Pismo Romen Rollana, Bakinskii
rabochii, June 21, 1936, l. 5. On Rollands condemnation of Gide in LHumanit on January
18, 1937, see Harris, Andr Gide and Romain Rolland, 156; Duchatelet, Romain Rolland, 33031.
58. Mariia Kudasheva to Mikhail Apletin, October 28, 1936, RGALI f. 631, op. 14, d.
729, ll. 127, 153. On Pavlenkos novel from 1936, see Anna Krylova, Stalinist Identity from
the Viewpoint of Gender: Rearing a Generation of Professionally Violent Women-Fighters
in 1930s Stalinist Russia, Gender and History 16, no. 3 (2004): 62653.
59. Mariia Kudasheva to Mikhail Apletin, May 2, 1937, RGALI f. 631, op. 14, d. 741, ll.
4243; Angela Brintlinger, Writing a Usable Past: Russian Literary Culture, 19171937 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 4.
60. Mariia Kudasheva to Mikhail Apletin, July 22, 1936, and October 28, 1936, RGALI
f. 631, op. 14, d. 729, l. 127, ll. 153, 158; see also Vypiska iz pisma zheny Romen Rollena
ot 30/XII-35 goda, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 324, l. 32. This delo documents the extent of
Rollands Soviet press and other contacts facilitated by Kudasheva in 1936, the high point
of Rollands Soviet friendship.
61. Vypiska iz pisma zheny Romen Rollena ot 30/XII-35 goda, l. 32. Italics in orig.
62. Romain Rolland to I. V. Stalin, October 1, 1935, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 775,
ll. 120, 12122; Rolland to Stalin, December 27, 1935, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 775, ll.
125130; Rolland to Stalin, March 18, 1937, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 775, ll. 140141;
Rolland to Stalin, December 29, 1937, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 775, ll. 15455; unad-

262 | NOTES TO PAGES 175180

dressed letter by Rolland about Arosevs wife (whom he did not know but whose mother
had contacted him), January 26, 1939, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 775, ll. 16263.
63. See the positive report on Rollands relations with the USSR distributed by A. I.
Angarov, head of the Central Committees Department of Culture and Propaganda, to I.
V. Stalin, L. M. Kaganovich, and A. A. Andreev, RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 775, l. 123.
64. Mariia Kudasheva to Mikhail Apletin, June 8, 1936, RGALI f. 631, op. 14, ed. khr.
729, l. 68.
65. Mariia Kudasheva to Mikhail Apletin, September 4, 1937, RGALI f. 631, op. 14, d.
741, ll. 7071. Kudasheva expressed the same sentiments in another letter to Apletin of
June 12, 1937 (ll. 5455).
66. Mariia Kudasheva to Mikhail Apletin, October 26, 1938, RGALI f. 631, op. 14, d.
754, l. 43.
67. Romain Rolland to Jean-Richard Bloch, March 3, 1938, Bibliotque Nationale,
Fonds Jean-Richard Bloch, cited along with other correspondence in Ludmila Stern,
French Intellectuals and Soviet Cultural Organizations in the 1920s1930s (PhD diss.,
School of Modern Language Studies, University of New South Wales, Australia, 2000),
8788.
68. Romain Rolland to Vladimir Petrovich Stavskii, September 20, 1937, RGALI f. 631,
op. 14, d. 74, l. 74; Mikhail Apletin to Mariia Kudasheva, October 7, 1938, RGALI f. 631,
op. 14, d. 754, l. 43; Apletin to Rolland, June 9, 1940, RGALI f. 631, op. 11, d. 283, ll. 1112.
Sergei Kudashev died in 1941 defending Moscow from German attack.
69. Ludmila Stern, Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 19201940: From Red Square
to the Left Bank (London: Routledge, 2007), 19495, 201, and, on Apletins correspondence
with Rolland and others, chap. 8.
70. On Rolland from 1939 to 1944, see esp. Duchatelet, Romain Rolland, 34092. Rolland lived to have something of a reconciliation with the Soviet embassy in Paris in 1944.
However, in that year before his death he had no interest in resuming his former political
positions or activities.
71. On the last period of Rollands life, see Duchatelet, Romain Rolland, 34092.
72. Fisher, Romain Rolland, 14.
73. Lambassade sovitique en France la VOKS au sujet de la publication posthume
des notes prises en URSS par Romain Rolland (1946), translation of document in GARF f.
5283, op. 22, d. 2, ll. 35660, in Cousu de fil rouge, 32427.
74. On Robeson and others in this context, see David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, chap. 7. On the Soviet bid to replace the United States and Palestine as an ideological vaterland among American Jews, see Daniel Soyer, Back to the Future: American Jews
Visit the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 3 (2000): 12459.
75. Here see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Cultural Orthodoxies under Stalin, in her The Cultural
Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992),
23856. On the rise of culture itself as a kind of ersatz religion in the 1930s, see Clark,
Moscow, the Fourth Rome.
76. RGALI f. 631, op. 14, ed. khr. 729, ll. 5556.

CHAPTER 7: A Prussian Bolshevik in Stalins Russia

1. The term conservative revolution dates to the Weimar period. According to one historian, it was established by the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the political theorist

NOTES TO PAGES 180185 | 263

Edgar Jung (Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic [Houndmills:
Macmillan, 1996], 2).
2. Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 29.
3. The principal studies of Niekisch are Uwe Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der revolutionre Nationalismus (Munich: Bibliotheksdienst Angerer, 1985); Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch
zwischen allen Fronten (Munich: Herbig Aktuell, 1980); Birgit Rtsch-Langejrgen, Das
Prinzip Widerstand: Leben und Wirken von Ernst Niekisch (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1997);
and Michael Pittwald, Ernst Niekisch: Vlkischer Sozialismus, nationale Revolution, deutsches
Endimperium (Cologne: PapyRossa Verlag, 2002). Niekisch also figures prominently in
the major studies of German National Bolshevism: Otto-Ernst Schddekopf, Nationalbolschewismus in Deutschland 19181933, rev. ed. (Frankfurt: Verlag Ullstein, 1972, orig. 1960);
Louis Dupeux, National-bolchevisme: Stratgie communiste et dynamique conservatrice. Essai sur
les different sens de LExpression en Allegmagne, sous la Republique de Weimar (19191933) (Lille:
Atelier reproduction des theses, 1976); and Dupeux, ed., La Rvolution conservatrice dans
LAllemagne de Weimar (Paris: ditions Kim, 1992). Niekisch also is examined at length in
Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982).
4. On Arplan, see Michael David-Fox, Annherung der Extreme: Die UdSSR und die
Rechtsintellektuellen vor 1933, Osteuropa 59, nos. 78 (2009): 11524; A. N. Dmitriev, K
istorii sovetsko-germanskikh nauchnykh i politicheskikh sviazei nachala 1930-kh gg.:
Arplan (nemetskoe obshchestvo po izucheniiu sovetskogo planovogo khoziaistva), in
Nemtsy v Rossii: Problemy nauchnykh i kulturnkykh sviazei (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin,
2000), 25172; and B. Lange and A. N. Dmitriev, Rabochee obedinenie po izucheniiu
sovetskogo planovogo khoziastva (Arplan), in Sovetsko-germanskie nauchnye sviazi vremeni
Veimarskoi Respubliki, ed. E. I. Kolchinskii (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2001), 197206. On the
1932 Arplan Studienreise, see David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy
and Western Visitors to Soviet Russia, 19211941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011),
chap. 7.
5. Louis Dupeux, Pseudo-travailleur contre prntendu tat bourgeois: Linterprtation de lHitlerisme par Ernst Niekisch en 19341935, in La Rvolution conservatrice dans
LAllemagne de Weimar, ed. Dupeux (Paris: ditions Kim, 1992), 36175; Dupeux, National-bolchevisme, 282, 308.
6. The first position is argued by Erik van Ree, The Concept of National Bolshevism:
An Interpretive Essay, Journal of Political Ideologies 6, no. 3 (2001): 289307; the second by
Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch, esp. 297304.
7. Michael David-Fox, Leftists versus Nationalists in Soviet-Weimar Cultural Diplomacy: Showcases, Fronts, and Boomerangs, in Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia
between the Wars, ed. Susan Gross Solomon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006),
10358. For the broader context of German-Soviet diplomatic and political relations and
ideological entanglements, see Gerd Koenen, Der Russland-Komplex: Die Deutschen und der
Osten 19001945 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005); Christoph Mick, Sojwetische Propaganda,
Fnfjahrplan und deutsche Russlandpolitik 19281932 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995); G.
N. Sevostvianov, ed., Dukh Rapallo: Sovetsko- germanskie otnosheniia 19251933 (Ekaterinburg:
Nauchno-prosvetitelskii tsentr Universitet, 1997); Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist,
and Alexander M. Martin, eds., Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled

264 | NOTES TO PAGES 185187

Histories, 19141945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); and the still-classic
Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965).
8. Here see David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, chap. 7.
9. Ernst Niekisch, Erinnerungen eines deutschen Revolutionrs (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1974), 1:5, 26, 3335.
10. O. S. Nagornaia, Drugoi voennyi opyt: Rossiiskie voennoplennye Pervoi mirovoi voiny v
Germanii (19141922) (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2010), 30910; Niekisch, Erinnerungen,
1:34.
11. Nagornaia, Drugoi voennyi opyt, 14956, 18283.
12. Martin Baissvenger [Beisswenger], Konservativnaia revoliutsiia v Germanii i
dvizhenie evraziitsev: Tochki soprikosnoveniia, Forum noveishei vostochnoevropeiskoi istorii i
kultury, no. 2 (2009): 2340, here n.42.
13. Armin Mohler, Zeittafel, in Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch zwischen allen Fronten,
17778.
14. Niekisch, Erinnerungen, 1:35.
15. Mohler, Zeittafel, 181; Niekisch, Erinnerungen, 1:4445, 70.
16. Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der revolutionre Nationalismus, 23.
17. Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der revolutionre Nationalismus, 22526; Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution, 6168; Van Ree, The Concept of National Bolshevism,
quotation 294.
18. Here see Rtsch-Langejrgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, esp. 101, 190; Dupeux,
National-bolchevisme, 282309.
19. Historians have recently become concerned with explaining this overlap. For a work
particularly relevant to this discussion, see Timothy S. Brown, Weimar Radicals: Nazis and
Communists between Authenticity and Performance (New York: Berghan Books, 2009). On
projects of revitalization and longing for a new order as a common, mobilizing dynamic
of German politics coming out of war and revolution, see Peter Fritzsche, Germans into
Nazis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
20. Brown, Weimar Radicals, 5.
21. Benjamin Lapp, Revolution from the Right: Politics, Class, and the Rise of Nazism in Saxony,
19191933 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1997), 119; Niekisch,
Erinnerungen, 1:114. Bernsteins article was published in Glocke, January 8, 1925.
22. Lapp, Revolution from the Right, esp. 11925.
23. The most in-depth study of Widerstand is Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der revolutionre Nationalismus, here 56.
24. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the
Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 6768; Schddekopf, Nationalbolschewismus, quotation 44. Niekischs reading of Spengler, Reventlow, and Rankes
history of Prussia dated to 1919 (Dupeux, National-bolchevisme, 283). Interestingly, after
Spenglers Decline of the West had caused a furor in its 1922 Russian translation as Zakat
Evropy, the precursor of VOKS and the Commissariat of Enlightenment told the Soviet
embassy in Berlin in 1924 that it was highly desirable that Spengler visit the USSR. See
O. D. Kameneva. Pred. Komissii zagranichnoi pomoshchi Prezidiuma TsIK. Sovetniku
Polpredstva v Germanii S. I. Brodovskomu, September 30, 1924, Arkhiv veshnei politiki
Rossiiskoi Federatsii (AVP RF) f. 082, op. 7, d. 52, p. 18, l. 14.
25. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology

NOTES TO PAGES 187192 | 265

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 209, 24647, and Part III more generally
on Moeller van den Brucks biography.
26. Ernst Niekisch, Das Gesetz von Potsdam, Widerstand, no. 8 (1931): 22533, here
230.
27. Ernst Niekisch, Gedanken ber deutsche Politik (Dresden: Widerstands-Verlag, 1929),
253, 386. On the new man in comparative context, see Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck, The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, in Beyond Totalitarianism:
Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 30244.
28. Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der revolutionre Nationalismus, 51; Breuer, Anatomie der
konservativen Revolution, 93; Dupeux, National-bolchevisme, 297.
29. Ulrich Frschle and Volker Haase, Friedrich Georg Jnger und Ernst Niekisch, in
Friedrich Georg Jnger, Inmitten dieser Welt der Zerstrung: Briefwechsel mit Rudolf Schlichter,
Ernst Niekisch und Gerhard Nebel, ed. Frschle and Haase (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 2001), 61;
Frschle and Thomas Kuzias, Alfred Baeumler und Ernst Jnger (Dresden: Thelem, 2008),
7379.
30. In 1930 Niekisch had warm words for another elaborate racial interpretation of German and world history, Alfred Rosenbergs Myth of the Twentieth Century (Breuer, Anatomie
der konservativen Revolution, 93).
31. Rtsch-Langejrgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, 1046. It is possible that Niekisch was
familiar with the writings of Klaus Haushofer, the University of Munich professor and
main figure in the Munich school of geopolitics in the Weimar and Nazi periods, as both
Haushofer and Niekisch were close to the Oberland group in the mid-1920s. See HansAdolf Jacobsen, Karl Haushofer: Leben und Werk, 1: Lebensweg 18691946 und ausgewlte Texte
zur Geopolitik (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1979), 2012.
32. Rtsch-Langejrgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, 106; Dupeux, National-bolchevisme,
281.
33. Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der revolutionre Nationalismus, 106, 291.
34. Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der revolutionre Nationalismus, 227, 229, 232, 242, 251.
35. Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution, 112.
36. James Donohoe, Hitlers Conservative Opponents in Bavaria 19301945 (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1961), quotation 19.
37. Jean-Franois Fayet, Karl Radek: Biographie politique (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004),
289311.
38. Warren Lerner, Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 8690; van Ree, The Concept of National Bolshevism, 29293.
39. Paetel later provided a retrospective, quasi-scholarly justification of the term in
Versuchung oder Chance? Zur Geschichte des deutschen Nationalbolschewismus (Gttingen:
Musterschmidt-Verlag, 1965). In January 1933 Paetel published Das nationalbolschewistische
Manifest [The National Bolshevik Manifesto] calling for an alliance between national revolutionaries and the KPD (Rtsch-Langejrgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, 199).
40. Schddekopf, Nationalbolschewismus, 7, 5556, 6162, 7086, 11125, 175; Fayet,
Radek, 44567; Lerner, Karl Radek, 8690, quotations 12021; G. A. Kosmach, Nationalbolshevizm v Germanii i sovetskaia Rossiia (19191932 gg.), in Rossiia i Germaniia, no. 1,
ed. B. M. Tupolev (Moscow: Nauka, 1998), 28193.
41. Fayet, Karl Radek, 289311, 44567, 66182, quotations 453, 454; Bert Hoppe, In

266 | NOTES TO PAGES 193196

Stalins Gefolgschaft: Moskau und die KPD, 19281933 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2007), 178, 221.
42. Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der revolutionre Nationalismus, 23.
43. The above draws on Oswald Bindrich, Vom Nationalbolschewisten zum Anhnger
der KPD (1923 bis 1933), in Beppo Rmer, ein Leben zwischen Revolution und Nation (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1991), 1050; see also Dupeux, National-bolchevisme, 181, 19195,
57879. On Niekischs base in Oberland, see Rtsch-Langejrgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand,
15763; Dupeux, National-bolchevisme, 298, 300, 304; and Niekisch, Erinnerungen, 1:155.
44. Schddekopf, Nationalbolschewismus, 287.
45. James J. Ward, Smash the Fascists . . . German Communist Efforts to Counter the
Nazis, Central European History 14, no. 1 (1981): 3062, quotation 38.
46. Hoppe, In Stalins Gefolgschaft, chaps. 5 and 8.
47. The trial is at the center of Brown, Weimar Radicals, 1518, quotation 17. Scheringer
was assured that the Nazi commitment to legality was a ploy (18), and the Nazis continued
to call their rise to power a revolution.
48. Schddekopf, Nationalbolschewismus, 502n.11. See also Kosmach, Nationalbolshevizm, 28193; Dmitriev, K istorii, 235; and L. I. Gintsberg, Nakanune prikhoda
fashizma k vlasti v Germanii: Novye dannye o pozitsii KPG, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia,
no. 1 (1996): 38.
49. Hoppe, In Stalins Gefolgschaft, chaps. 5 and 8, esp. 18488, 263, 29197, 311; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) i Komintern, 19191943: Dokumenty (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), 64752.
50. Brown, Weimar Radicals, 3, 10, 25, 100101, 158n.100, quotation 102; Ward, Smash
the Fascists, esp. 4749; and, for background, esp. Ward, Terror, Revolution, or Control?
The KPDs Secret Apparat during the Weimar Republic, Terrorism 7, no. 3 (1984): 25797.
The KPD-sponsored National Bolshevik publication was Aufbruch: Kampfblatt in Sinne
des Leutenant a.D. Scheringer, an attempt to recruit rightists that was launched by Kippenberger and in 1932 edited by Beppo Rmer.
51. Rtsch-Langejrgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, 197; Ward, Smash the Fascists, 50,
citing a 1970 interview with Paetel.
52. Ernst Niekisch, Der politische Raum deutschen Widerstandes, Widerstand, no. 11
(1931): 331; Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der revolutionre Nationalismus, 28385; RtschLangejrgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, 28184.
53. David-Fox, Leftists versus Nationalists. On Hoetzsch, see Uwe Liszkowski, Osteuropaforschung und Politik: Ein Beitrag zum historisch-politischen Denken und Wirken von Otto
Hoetzsch, 2 vols. (Berlin: Arno Spitz Verlag, 1988); and Karl Schlgel, Von der Vergeblichkeit eines Professorenlebens: Otto Hoetzsch und die deutsche Russlandkunde, Osteuropa 55, no. 12 (2005): 528.
54. Dupeux, National-bolchevisme, 42863.
55. The most illuminating treatment of Lenz of which I am aware is in Dupeux, National-bolchevisme, 42863, upon which the above is based.
56. Schddekopf, Nationalbolschewismus, 220, 222, 282, 361.
57. On Kreitz, see Dupeux, National-bolchevisme, 45758, 458n.3
58. Paetel, Versuchung oder Chance, 23.
59. Niekisch, Erinnerungen, 1:216.
60. Girshfeld to VOKS, January 19, 1932; Shuman to Girshfeld, February 4, 1932;
Girshfeld to VOKS Sector on Central Europe, February 29, 1932, copies Narodnyi

NOTES TO PAGES 196200 | 267

komissariat inostrannykh del (NKID), AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 71, ll. 10, 22, 3132.
On von Harnacks KPD affiliation, see B. Lange and A. N. Dmitriev, Rabochee obedinenie, 205.
61. Mitgliederliste, Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 5283, op.
6, d. 172, l. 190. Hugo Fischer has been named among those supporting Niekischs Widerstand (see Frschle and Kuzias, Alfred Baeumler und Ernst Jnger, 74).
62. Spravka o deiatelnosti Arbplana [sic] i Soiuza rabotnikov umstvennogo truda v
Germanii, podgotovlennnaia D. Lukachem dlia otdela kadrov IKKI, in Besedy na Lubianke: Sledstvennoe delo Drda Lukacha. Materialy k biografii, ed. Reinhard Mller and Ia.
Rokitianskii, 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow: Institut slavianovedeniia RAN, 2001), 11820; Klaus
Mehnert, Memorandum ber die Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der sowjetrussischen
Planwirtschaft, 8 Januar 1932, in Russland in der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung 18431945,
ed. Gerd Voigt (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1994), 38182; and Koenen, Der Russland-Komplex (on Schmitt, 343).
63. E. O. Lerner [VOKS] to Girshfeld, January 2, 1933, AVP RF f. 082, op. 16, d. 33, p.
76, ll. 713, here l. 12.
64. Shuman, Zav. Otdelom Tsentralnoi Evropy [VOKS], to Girshfeld, March 19, 1932,
AFP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 71, l. 37.
65. H. Timm, untitled report (in German), GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 172, ll. 17176.
66. Shuman to Girshfeld, AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 71, l. 77.
67. Zam. Pred. VOKSa E. O. Lerner. Upolnomochennomu VOKS v Germanii t. Girshfeldu. Kopiia: Shternu NKID. 16 dekabria 1932, AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 71, ll.
21415; Zav. 2-m Zapadnom otdelom (Shtern). Referent (Sheinin). V Kollegiiu NKID. 16
noiabria 1932, AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 71, ll. 2078.
68. Facsimile of top secret Spravka, no date, Berlin rezidentura OGPU, stamped
Rassekrecheno Sluzhby vneshnei razvedki RF, in Sekrety Gitlera na stole u Stalina: Razvedka i kontrrazvedka o podgotovke germanskoi agressii protiv SSSR, ed. V. K. Vinogradov et al.
(Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995), 95.
69. Spravka A. Gabora o rabote D. Lukacha v Germanii, May 16, 1936, in Besedy na
Lubianke, 1023.
70. Dnevnik tov. Girshfelda. Berlin, 7 oktiabria 1932, GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 196, ll.
18891; Aleksandr Girshfeld to F. N. Petrov, April 25, 1932, AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28,
p. 71, l. 95.
71. Lange and Dmitriev, Rabochee obedinenie, 205.
72. Girshfeld. Berlin, 27 oktiabria 1932. NKID 2-i Zapadnyi Otdelt. Sheininu,
GARF f. 5283, op. 1a, d. 196, ll. 19395. Copies were sent to the Soviet ambassador to
Germany, Krestinskii, and VOKSs Lerner. Aufbruch, which featured Nazi defectors and
former sympathizers turned critics, by late 1932 had a circulation of a hundred thousand
and discussion circles in thirty-two cities, designed to attract recruits from the far right,
especially the right-wing intelligentsia and officer corps known to be disillusioned
with Hitler. Its ideological content was overseen by the head of Ressort C (fascist organizations) in the KPDs M-Apparat (Brown, Weimar Radicals, 100102; Ward, Smash the
Fascists, 5052).
73. Niekisch, Erinnerungen, 1:170.
74. Abschrift. Protokoll ber die Sitzung am 3. Januar 1932, 4 Uhr [Arplan], GARF f.
5283, op. 6, d. 172, ll. 24352; Abschrift. Protokoll ber die Sitzung am 4. Januar 1932,

268 | NOTES TO PAGES 201204

10 Uhr, GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 172, ll. 25052; Arplan, Protokolle der Studienreise nach der
Sowjet-Union vom 20. August bis 12. September 1932 (Berlin: n.p., 1932), sections 3 and 4.
75. Ernst Niekisch, Der Fnfjahrplan, Widerstand, no. 6 (1930): 196202.
76. Ernst Niekisch, Entscheidung (Berlin: Widerstands-Verlag, 1930), 13740, 142, 186.
77. Ernst Niekisch, Gedanken ber deutsche Politik (Dresden: Widerstands-Verlag, 1929),
251.
78. Niekisch, Gedanken, 24142.
79. Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution, 150; Sylvia Taschka, Das Russlandbild
von Ernst Niekisch (Erlangen and Jena: Palme & Enke, 1999), 30, 3637 (this useful but
limited work is a revised MA thesis).
80. Pittwald, Ernst Niekisch, 71.
81. Matthias Heeke, Reisen zu den Sowjets: Der auslndische Tourismus in Russland 19211941
(Mnster: Lit Verlag, 2003), 240.
82. Niekisch, Erinnerungen, 1:217; Arplan, Protokolle der Studienreise.
83. H. Timm, untitled report in German, GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 172, ll. 17176; see also
Otchet po delegatsii Arplana, pribyshei v Leningrad 23 avgusta i vyekhavshei v Moskvu
26 avgusta, signed V. Pokrovskii, GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 172, l. 143.
84. Niekisch, Erinnerungen, 1:218; M. Liubchenko. Pred. Vseukrainskogo obshchestva
kultsviazi. Tov. Lerneru. Zam. Pred. VOKS. 8 avgusta 1932 (Kharkiv), AVP RF f. 082,
op. 15, d. 28, p. 27, l. 187; Arplan, Protokolle der Studienreise, section 2, no pagination.
85. Wir sind alle krank und hungern . . . , Sport Zeitung, December 28, 1932, GARF f.
5283, op. 6, d. 172, l. 11. For other negative reports picked up by the Soviets, see Biulleten ne dlia pechati no. 39. Inostrannoi informatsii Tass, 9/1133. List no. 15: Antisovetskii
doklad fon-Gofmanstal, Berlin, November 2, 1932, GARF f. 5283, op. 6, d. 172, l. 11.
86. Ernst Niekisch, Betrachtungen zu einer Russlandreise, Widerstand, no. 10 (1932):
28998.
87. Niekisch, Betrachtungen, 291, 296.
88. Niekisch, Erinnerungen, 1:188.
89. Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 75, 81, 91, 100, quotation 72; Thomas Nevin, Ernst
Jnger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 19141945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996),
11517. The literature by and about Jnger is too voluminous to cite here.
90. Ernst Jnger, Ein neuer Bericht aus dem Lande der Planwirtschaft, Widerstand,
September 1933, in Jnger, Politische Publizistik 1919 bis 1933, ed. Sven Olaf Berggtz (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001) 65259, quotation 657.
91. Quoted in Nevin, Ernst Jnger and Germany, 132; Niekischs review of Der Arbeiter is
in Widerstand, no. 10 (1932): 30711.
92. This point is supported by Taschka, Das Russlanbild, 33.
93. Katerina Clark and Karl Schlgel, Mutual Perceptions and Projections, chap. 10 of
Beyond Totalitarianism, 396441, here 414.
94. Niekisch, Erinnerungen, 1:217.
95. Fayet, Karl Radek, 664.
96. Fayet, Karl Radek, 66182; Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, The Special World: Stalins Power
Apparatus and the Soviet Systems Secret Structures of Communication, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009), 1:192223.
97. Otdel pechati NKID. Zav. O. P. (Umanskii). Otvet. referent (Muronov). Tov. Vinogradovu, Berlin, September 3, 1932, AVP RF f. 082, op. 15, d. 28, p. 71, l. 173.

NOTES TO PAGES 205210 | 269

98. Koenen, Das Russland-Komplex, 34243; Woods, Conservative Revolution, 88100;

Rtsch-Langejrgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, 17380. Besides Zehrer, Tat circle members
in Arplan included Hugo Fischer and Giselher Wirsing.
99. Kaganovich to Stalin, August 3, 1932, in Stalin i Kaganovich: Perepiska 19311936 gg.,
ed. Oleg Khlevniuk et al. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), 259, 304; Politbiuro TsK RKP(b)
i Komintern, 66667; on Reventlow and the Soviet embassy, see Hoppe, In Stalins Gefolgschaft, 315. On Niedermayer, see Hans-Ulrich Seidt, Berlin, Kabul, Moskau: Oskar Ritter
von Niedermayer und Deutschlands Geopolitik (Munich: Universitas Verlag, 2002).
100. Niekisch, Erinnerungen, 1:217.
101. Hoppe, In Stalins Gefolgschaft, 31115.
102. Schddekopf, Nationalbolschewismus, 28596, 392, 396403.
103. Brown, Weimar Radicals, 117.
104. Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der revolutionre Nationalismus, 10611, 124; on Goebbels and the ASP, see Pittwald, Ernst Niekisch, 63.
105. Pittwald, Ernst Niekisch, 136; on the Strasser brothers socialistic nationalism
and some of their organizations interconnections with Niekisch and his associates, see
Rtsch-Langenjrgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, 18088.
106. Frschle and Haase, Friedrich Georg Jnger und Ernst Niekisch, 61.
107. Rtsch-Langenjrgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, 15163.
108. Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der revolutionre Nationalismus, 438.
109. Frschle and Haase, Friedrich Georg Jnger und Ernst Niekisch, 62; Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution, 139.
110. Dupeux, Prsentation generale, in La Rvolution conservatrice dans LAllemagne, 12;
Rtsch-Langenjrgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, 11115.
111. Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution, 112.
112. Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1987), xv. The earlier Russian version appeared as Ideologiia natsionalbolshevizma (Paris: YMCA Press, 1980). Notably, the English edition does not include the
chapter on Eurasianism.
113. S. S. Chakhotin, V Kanossu! in Smena vekh (Prague: Politika, 1921), 15066. The
foremost work of scholarship is Hilde Hardeman, Coming to Terms with the Soviet Regime: The
Changing Signposts Movement among Russian migrs in the Early 1920s (DeKalb: Northern
Illinois University Press, 1994).
114. N. V. Ustrialov, Patriotica, in Smena vekh, 59, 63.
115. Hardeman, Coming to Terms, 40, 214n.96; Agursky, Third Rome, 249. At the Peoples
University in Harbin, Ustrialov taught courses on Spengler and on Eurasianism (Hardeman, Coming to Terms, 42).
116. Baissvenger [Beisswenger], Konservativnaia revoliutsiia v Germanii, 26, 36; Leonid Luks, Die Ideologie der Eurasier im zeitgeschichtlichen Zussamenhang, Jahrbcher
fr Geschichte Osteuropas 34, no. 3 (1986): 37495.
117. Christopher Gilley, The Change of Signposts in the Ukrainian Emigration: A Contribution to the History of Sovietophilism in the 1920s (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2009); Hardeman,
Coming to Terms, 100.
118. Rtsch-Langenjrgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, 115.
119. Rtsch-Langenjrgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, 2056.

270 | NOTES TO PAGES 210219

120. Donohoe, Hitlers Conservative Opponents, 1921.

121. Mohler, Zeittafel, 20310.
122. Armin Mohler, Vorwort, in Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch zwischen allen Fronten, 710.
123. Mohler, Vorwort, 7. In 1977, a German television film was screened, Das Verhr
des Ernst Niekisch [The Interrogation of Ernst Niekisch].
124. O. Iu. Plenkov, Ernst Nikish: Popytka sinteza bolshevizma i prusskoi etiki, in
Ernst Nikish [Niekisch], Politicheskie sochineniia, trans. A. P. Shurbelev et al. (St. Petersburg:
Dal, 2011), 534, quotation 9.

NOTES TO PAGE 220 | 271

INDEX

Note: Page references in italics refer to figures.

ABC of Communism (Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii), 138
Academy Affair, 125, 134, 15758
Academy of Artistic Sciences, 166, 260n16
Academy of Sciences (All-Union Academy of
Sciences), 133, 136, 13738, 139, 143, 144, 145,
146, 152, 154, 156, 251n5, 254n40, 257n99,
258n111; advantages of, 14950; assault
on, 134, 155; Bolshevization of, 12, 14,
158; charter of, 147; Communist Academy
and, 135; election to, 148; enclave for, 142;
Enukidze commission and, 151; founding of,
12; hostility for, 150; Institute of History at,
157; leadership of, 153; Marxists and, 149;
protected status of, 13; reorganization of,
157; transformation of, 134, 15859; work
of, 148, 149
Affirmative Action Empire (Martin), 119
Agitprop. See Department for Agitation and
Propaganda
Agursky, Mikhail, 215
All-Peoples Union of Struggle for the
Resurrection of Free Russia, 158
All-Union Association for Workers in Science
and Technology for the Advancement of
Socialist Construction (VARNITSO), 150,
155
All-Union Committee for Arts Affairs, 114
All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad
(VOKS), 62, 88, 117, 166, 167, 170, 172,
175, 176, 178, 182, 186, 187, 199, 200, 201;
cultural diplomacy of, 203, 206, 207;
Society of Friends and, 203

Amar, Tarik Cyril, 44

Andreas, Joel, 131
Anti-Bolshevik League, 201
anticapitalism, 10, 59, 68, 190
antifascism, 14, 164
antimodernism, 30, 228n37
Antipov, A. P., 216
anti-Semitism, 84, 85, 100, 187, 204
anti-Westernism, 68, 191, 196, 208
Apletin, Mikhail, 173, 178, 179, 263n65;
Kudasheva and, 180, 181, 182; Rolland and,
182, 184
Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der
Sowjetrussischen Planwirtschaft (Society
for the Study of the Soviet Russian Planned
Economy, Arplan), 185, 186, 190, 194, 197,
215, 217, 219; creation of, 199204; founding
of, 203; Niekisch and, 21, 187, 20412
Are You a Cultured Person? (questionnaire), 64
Arendt, Hannah, 77
Arnason, Johann P., 30, 31, 71
Arosev, Aleksandr, 172, 173, 178, 180, 183,
263n62; Gorky and, 170; Kudasheva and,
175, 177; Rolland and, 165, 17576; Stalin
and, 177
Arplan. See Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium
der Sowjetrussischen Planwirtschaft
Art and Byt (Lelevich), 116
ASP. See Old Socialist Party
Au-dessus de la mle (Rolland), 168
Aufriss der politischen konomie (Lenz), 200
authority: hypernormalization of, 95;
internalization of, 22
Avanti, 180
Averbakh, Leopold, 122

273

Baberowski, Jrg: on cultural revolution, 119

backwardness, 21, 48, 62, 117; Russian/Soviet,
9, 49
Baeumler, Alfred, 193, 214
Bakh, A. N., 150
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 95
Barbusse, Henri, 168
Baron, Erich, 201
Bauman, Zygmunt, 43, 44, 50, 227nn2122,
228n35; modernity and, 27
Bavarian Soviet Republic, 185, 18791, 195, 196
Beer, Daniel, 118
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 168, 175
behavior: civilized, 105, 125; cultured, 62;
transformation of, 61; uncultured, 56
Beisswenger, Martin, 216
Belinskii, Vissarion, 57
Bell, Wilson T., 4344
Benjamin, Walter, 165
Berlin Congress of Soviets, 188
Berman, Marshall, 30, 53
Bernstein, Eduard, 90, 165n21, 191
Bessonov, Sergei, 204
Bey, Kemal, 226n16
Biggart, John, 109
Blackbourn, David, 27
Blind Men and the Elephant, The (Saxe), 80
blind men/elephant, legend of, 7980, 80 (fig.)
Bloch, Jean-Richard, 181
Bobrovnikov, N.: worldview and, 90
Bogdanov, Aleksandr, 109, 113, 137, 138,
249n60; proletarian culture movement and,
112, 245n6
Bogoslovskii, M. M., 154
Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (BSE), 90, 91
Bolshevik cultural project, 107, 123, 127;
emergence of, 11115
Bolshevik Party, 122, 133
Bolshevik Revolution, 1, 26, 49, 63, 96, 144,
167, 168, 183, 215; national identity and, 62
Bolsheviks, 27, 59, 62, 101, 113, 118, 133, 141;
cultural reform and, 121; dictatorship of
the proletariat and, 63; initiatives by, 135;
Russian intelligentsia and, 216; social
engineering of, 63
Bolshevism, 23, 42, 84, 97, 110, 111, 112, 141,
168, 169, 205, 238n7; Fascism and, 206;
German, 195; ideology of, 9596; National,
15, 185, 186, 187, 190, 195, 198, 199, 203,
204, 207, 210, 211, 212, 214, 21519, 220;
political rivals of, 2; positive elements of,
216; Prussian, 15, 185, 186, 191, 192, 193, 194,

274 | INDEX

198, 206, 209, 212, 214, 217; Russian, 186,

191, 198, 206, 209; spiritual structure of,
206; Stalinism and, 218; success of, 21819
Bolshevization, 14, 13334, 136; as forced
merger, 14659
bourgeois specialists, 12, 13, 158
Brandenberger, David, 41, 80, 84, 230n67,
238n1
Breuer, Stefan: on Niekisch/Hitler, 21415
Brintlinger, Angela, 179
Brown, Kate, 23, 28, 227n28
Brown, Timothy, 197, 198
Brzezinski, Zbigniew: on totalitarianism, 76
BSE. See Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia
Bukharin, Nikolai, 121, 138, 150, 155, 157, 180,
252n20, 257n88; cultural revolution and,
109, 122; Great Break and, 112
Bund Geistige Berufe, 201, 202, 203
Bund Oberland, 196, 214
Bureau of International Information, 210
Bttner, Eva, 191
Cambridge History of Russia (Suny), 26
Campbell, Peter, 99
capitalism, 67, 78, 190; bourgeois, 52; crisis
of, 169; critique of, 54; industrialized,
62; organized, 232n3; socialism and, 65;
Stalinism and, 49; utilitarianism of, 28
Castillo, Greg: communism and, 66
Castro, Fidel, 220
Castroism, 110
Catherine II, emancipation and, 54
Central Committee of the Communist Party
(TsK), 62, 85, 131, 148, 152, 177, 197, 198,
210, 216, 235n58; resolution by, 145
Central Control Commission (TsKK), 124
Central European Sector, 199
Central Executive Committee (TsIK SSSR), 142
centralization, 2, 5, 43, 146
Cheka, 140, 170, 261n35. See also KGB; Peoples
Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD);
secret police; Unified State Political
Administration (OGPU)
Chekhov, Anton, 179
Chinese Communist Party, 131
Chinese Cultural Revolution. See Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution
Chudakova, Marietta, 92
civilization, 8, 70, 115, 194, 205, 209;
bourgeois, 208; development of, 56;
Russian/Soviet, 31, 36, 58, 117; Stalinism as,
25, 51; Western, 66, 1078, 216

civilizing mission, 49, 70, 115, 125; Bolshevik,

63; cultural revolution as, 116, 118, 119;
Soviet, 61, 64, 128
Clark, Katerina, 59, 65, 11011, 173
Clart, 168
class struggle, 119, 122, 125, 127
Claudin-Urondo, Carmen, 115
Coeur, Sophie, 172
Cold War, 67, 68, 76
collectivization, 6, 53, 96, 116, 125, 129, 131,
144, 205, 246nn910; forced, 64, 206
colonization, 58, 108, 128, 193
Comacademy. See Communist Academy
Comintern. See Communist International
Commissariat of Enlightenment, 125, 265n24
Commissariat of Food Supply, 114
Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, 199, 201,
203, 210
Commissariat of Health, 143
Commission for the Study of Natural
Productive Forces (KEPS), 146
communes, 116, 117, 207
communism, 34, 36, 40, 66, 69, 137; acceptance
of, 1; culture and, 14; failure of, 4, 9, 44, 48,
70; fascism and, 84, 191; German, 197, 198,
212, 219, 220; history of, 75; modernism
and, 9, 246n18; nationalism and, 195, 197;
Nazism and, 218; Soviet, 8, 15, 26, 30, 48,
77, 78, 85, 97; surreal ideocracy of, 3; war,
111, 116
Communist Academy (Comacademy), 12, 13,
14, 134, 136, 137, 139, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147,
149, 150, 151, 152, 256n80, 257n99, 258n111;
Academy of Sciences and, 135; agenda of,
145; hegemony of, 15859; legacy of, 159;
luminaries of, 148, 155; reorganization
by, 155, 157; as scholarly center, 156. See
also Socialist Academy of Social Sciences
(SAON)
Communist International (Comintern), 164,
194, 195, 197
Communist Left, tactics of, 19498
Communist Neo-Traditionalism (Walder), 35
Communist Party, 69, 94, 133, 197; Komsomol
and, 116
Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 15, 186,
188, 194, 197, 202, 212, 219; Hamburg Circle
of, 195; National Bolshevism and, 198;
Widerstand and, 198
conceptualization, 4, 106, 11522, 224n38
Constitutional Democratic Party, 140
consumerism, 31, 69, 128, 12930, 223n21

convergences, 3840
Cooper, Frederick, 26, 54
Council of Peoples Commissars, 136, 182
Crisis of 1919: 137
Cultivating the Masses (Hoffmann), 47
cultural diplomacy, 88, 207, 223n20; Soviet,
68, 184, 187, 199, 203, 212, 219, 223n16
cultural forms, 55, 119
cultural history, 78, 86
cultural icons, Stalinist, 173, 17584
cultural institutions, 15, 113
cultural missions, 20, 114, 122, 12425
cultural production, 67, 71, 87, 231n1, 239n23;
economics of, 52
cultural revolution, 12, 13, 62, 104, 1067,
12021, 12728, 135, 246n18; Bolshevik,
111; as civilizing mission, 116, 118, 119;
as class war, 10811, 132; components of,
107; concept of, 11, 109, 125; culturedness
campaign as, 12830; direction of, 108, 125,
127; dualistic theory of, 109; ethnographic
campaign for, 119; everyday life and, 116;
external, 106, 115, 121; history of, 106, 111,
127; internal, 106, 12225; legacy of, 10811;
proletarian, 109, 245n6; radicalization of,
123, 130; references to, 1056; rubric of, 118;
Soviet, 108, 109, 120; Stalinist, 109, 114;
transformational notion of, 117; understanding of, 11, 105. See also Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution
Cultural Revolution in Russia, 19281931
(Fitzpatrick), 104, 108
culture, 4, 26, 121; academic, 144; aesthetic,
123; antifascist, 164; Bolshevik, 135, 169;
bourgeois, 15, 115, 125; commercial, 58,
59, 61, 66, 231n1; communism and, 14;
consumer, 69; designers, 109; discourse and,
79; dominant, 53; ethnographic
notions of, 249; existing, 115; folk, 55, 56,
231n1; high, 56, 57, 64, 65, 68, 110, 130,
169; identity and, 66; ideology and,
30, 8687; intelligentsia, 136; leisure,
57; material, 67; modern, 30; national,
59; noncommercial, 62; of the past, 64;
political, 4, 84, 98, 123, 125, 156, 231n80,
235n56; popular, 56, 57, 61, 63, 66, 70, 80,
169, 231n1; proletarian, 56, 63, 64, 66, 107,
112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 125, 137; regimentation
of, 168; revolutionary, 64, 87, 118; Russian,
57, 66, 183; socialist, 66, 113, 246n12; Soviet,
12, 14, 51, 52, 56, 61, 62, 65, 66, 110, 111, 130,
133, 164, 165, 169, 170, 183, 228n37;

INDEX | 275

culture (cont.); Stalinist, 16, 65, 163, 165, 169,

183, 235n59; understanding, 55; Westernized, 55, 64. See also mass culture
culture-civilisation, 115
culture-idologie, 115
culture-savoire, 115
culturedness, 11, 61, 62, 106, 116, 127, 12830,
169; campaign for, 65, 117, 130; intelligentsia
category of, 56; standards of, 117
Curillier, Adle, 166
Dark Side of Democracy (Mann), 44
Das Dritte Reich (Moeller van den Bruck), 192
Das Kapital (Marx), 108
Das Reich, 201
De Tracy, Destutt, 89
Deborin, Abram, 122, 154, 155
Decembrists, 205
Deni, Viktor: poster by, 126 (fig.)
Department for Agitation and Propaganda
(Agitprop), 120, 123, 125, 151, 152, 250n70
Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Jnger),
208, 209
Der Volksstaat, 191
Die Deutsche Ideologie (Marx and Engels), 89
Die dritte imperiale Figur (Niekisch), 219
Die Tat, 201
Die veranderte Weld (Jnger), 209
discourse, 26, 96, 102, 123; analysis, 91; culture
and, 79; ideology and, 79, 80, 9194;
political, 6; theoretical primacy of, 93
Dmitriev, Aleksandr, 251n3
Dobrenko, Evgeny, 64, 93
doctrine, 71, 88, 243n72; ideology and, 8185,
86, 87
Dolbanem (Deni), 126 (fig.)
Dostoevsky, Fedor, 188, 192
Dreiser, Theodore, 167
Drexel, Joseph, 220
Duchatelet, Bernard, 168
Duhamel, Bernard: Kudasheva and, 171
Duhamel, Georges, 167, 171
Dunham, Vera, 109
Dupeux, Louis, 186
Durtain, Luc, 167, 171
Dzershinskii Labor Commune, 207
Eagleton, Terry, 75, 81, 96, 239n19
Eastern Orientation, 185, 189, 193, 196, 209,
210, 211, 214, 218, 219; National Bolshevism
and, 190

276 | INDEX

economic cooperation, Weimar-Soviet, 212

Edinstvo, 123
education, 131; ideology and, 30; mass, 5;
universal, 37
Educational Revolution, 131
Ehrenburg, Ilya, 166, 259n9
Eisenstadt, S. N., 8, 24, 26, 33, 50, 108
Elektrozavod, 207
Elias, Norbert, 1078
Eltzbacher, Paul, 195
Engels, Friedrich, 87, 89, 91
Engelstein, Laura, 54, 232n12, 233n25
Engerman, David, 39, 40, 77
enlightenment, 28, 41, 53, 55, 56, 57, 194;
cultural, 107, 114; intelligentsia, 58
Entscheidung (Niekisch), 205
Enukidze, Avel Safronovich, 142, 151, 257n88
Enukidze commission, 148, 152, 153, 157
Epstein, Michael, 92
tatisme, 58, 70
ethics, communist, 115, 124
ethnic minorities, 37, 62, 194
Etkind, Alexander, 56
Everyday Stalinism (Fitzpatrick), 33
Everything Was Forever (Yutchak), 223n15
exceptionalism, 910, 229n43; modernity and,
34, 7, 16, 17; Soviet, 1, 2, 3
Executive Committee (Comintern), 195
Fainsod, Merle, 40
false consciousness, Marxist notion of, 91
fascism, 28, 167, 204, 210, 212, 238n7;
Bolshevism and, 206; communism and, 84,
191; rise of, 169, 199; spiritual structure of,
206
Federal Security Service of the Russian
Federation (FSB), 172
Feingold, Henry L., 44
Fersman, Aleksandr, 151, 154
Feuchtwanger, Lion, 165
Fischer, Hugo, 201, 268n61, 270n98
Fisher, David James: on Rolland, 16869
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 11, 22, 39, 44, 66, 104,
125, 130, 231n78; Agitprop conference and,
250n70; cultural revolution and, 108, 109,
110; Getty and, 231n81; Great Break and,
135; on intelligentsia, 1314; modernity and,
33, 229n52; Stalinism and, 21
Five-Year Plans, 1, 11, 33, 34, 39, 61, 66, 104,
119, 130, 134, 164, 167, 183, 204, 205
forced labor, 43, 44

Fordism, 25, 50, 228n38

Foreign Commission (Presidium of the Union
of Soviet Writers), 172, 173, 178
Foreign Department, 170
Forward Group, 112
Foucault, Michel, 34, 43
Frankfurt School, 28, 201
Freeden, Michael, 75, 90, 91, 103, 241n51;
ideology and, 10, 85, 93, 102
Freikorps, 91, 188, 195, 196, 214
French Association of Friends of the USSR,
182
French Communist Party (PCF), 168
French Revolution, 79, 89, 92, 154, 169, 216,
252n20; good/bad phases of, 100101;
ideas/circumstances and, 97102
French Society of Friends, 163
Freud, Sigmund, 169
Freudianism, 23
Frezinskii, Boris, 259n9
Friche, Vladimir, 154, 155
Fridliand, Grigorii Samoilovich (Tsvi), 157
Friedrich, Carl: on totalitarianism, 76
Friends of Rolland organization, 182
friendship of the peoples model, 68, 84
Fritzsche, Peter, 29
Froese, Paul, 97
Furet, Franois, 76, 98, 238n7, 244n92
Gandhi, 163, 168
Geertz, Clifford, 75, 86, 87
General Assembly, 139, 140, 153, 154
Genesis of the Final Solution from the Spirit
of Science, The (Peukert), 29
genocide, 44, 100
German Democratic Republic (GDR), 15, 50,
220
German-National Party, 195
German Society for the Study of Eastern
Europe, 199
German Textile Workers Union, Niekisch and,
190
Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (Lukcs), 90
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Marx/Engels and,
89
Getty, J. Arch, 45, 231n78, 231nn8081; neotraditionalism and, 47; Thatcher and, 46
Giddens, Anthony, 49, 70
Gide, Andr, 167, 169, 173; Rolland and, 179,
262n57
Girshfeld, Aleksandr, 199, 200, 201, 202, 219;

Arplan and, 203; National Bolshevism and,

204; VOKS and, 206
Glavnauka. See Main Administration for
Scientific, Scholarly-Artistic, and Museum
Institutions
Glavpolitprosvet. See Main Committee for
Political Enlightenment
godbuilding movement, 59, 169
Goebbels, Joseph, 186, 212, 213
Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 175
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 69
Gorbunov, Nikolai Petrovich, 150, 151, 153,
256n71
Gring, Hermann, 211
Gorky, Maksim, 58, 59, 173, 175, 176, 179,
181, 183; Arosev and, 170; death of, 178;
Kudasheva and, 167; Lenin and, 168;
Rolland and, 153, 165, 170, 260n16; Stalin
and, 177
Gorky Park for Culture and Leisure, 65
Gorodetsky, Gabriel, 259n8
Gosplan, 139, 201, 206, 207
Gough, Hugh, 98, 99
Gould-Davies, Nigel, 76
Grabowski, Adolf, 201, 210
Great Break, 11, 13, 61, 82, 104, 105, 109, 119,
122, 125, 12728, 129, 130, 133, 158, 166,
217; collectivization/industrialization and,
246n9; infighting of, 128; intelligentsia
and, 135; revolutionary culture and, 64;
Stalinism and, 131; urban communes and,
117; voluntarism of, 112
Great Depression, 167, 169, 194
Great Leap Forward, 130, 131
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 105,
13032
Great Purges, xenophobia of, 183
Great Reforms, 53
Great Retreat, 65, 105, 119, 128, 248n49, 252n11
Great Retreat, The (Timasheff), 222n8
Great Terror, 2, 41, 65, 94, 101, 129, 177, 179,
180, 181, 217; legacy of, 132; universalism
and, 14
Gross, Babette, 261n36
Gross, Jan, 128
Group of Social-Revolutionary Nationalists,
198
Groys, Boris, 62, 63
Gubkin, Ivan, 257n99
Guilbeaux, Henri, 172, 261nn3536
Gulag, 5, 28, 43, 96, 177; modernity and, 44;
mortality rates for, 227n28

INDEX | 277

Haimson, Leopold, 22
Halfin, Igal, 97
Hamburg Circle (KPD), 195
Hanabusa, Itch: illustration by, 80 (fig.)
Hanson, Stephen, 239n28
Hartmann, Anne, 259n8
Haushofer, Klaus, 266n31
Hegel, G. W. F., 86
hegemony, 12, 139, 15859
Heim, Susanne: study by, 28
Hellbeck, Jochen, 57, 225n2
Herzen, Aleksandr, 57
Hielscher, Friedrich, 201
high culture, 56, 57, 65, 68, 110, 169; cult of,
130; Russian, 64
Hilferding, Rudolf, 137, 138, 232n3
Hirsch, Francine, 119
History of Russia, A (Riasanovsky and
Steinberg), 105
Hitler, Adolf, 14, 46, 99, 194, 196, 211, 212, 213,
220, 268n72; Aryanism and, 218; Niekisch
and, 186, 21415; portrayal of, 214; socialism
and, 197
Hitler, ein deutsches Verhngnis (Niekisch), 214
Ho Chi Minh, 220
Hochschule fr Politik, 201
Hoetzsch, Otto, 199, 201
Hoffmann, David L., 22, 25, 28, 4142, 63,
225n2, 226n13; on modernity, 225n6; Soviet
modernity and, 47
Hoffmann, Heinrich: photo by, 213
Holocaust, 42, 44, 50, 98, 99, 100, 101;
modernity and, 27, 28
Holquist, Peter, 23, 25, 26, 28, 45, 225n2,
226n16, 242n62; Bolshevism and, 9596;
Foucauldian influence on, 34; parastatal
complex and, 233n26; total war/revolution
and, 27
Hoppe, Bert, 212
House on the Embankment, 165
How Russia Is Ruled (Fainsod), 40
Hugo, Victor, 175
Hull, Isabelle V., 241n44
humanism, 182, 194
Humboldt University, 185, 220
Iarilov, Arsenii, 150
Iaroslavskii, Emelian, 124
Iazyk revoliutsionnoi epokhi (Selishchev), 92
Iazyk, voina i revoliutsiia (Kartsevskii), 92
identity, 140; Bolshevik, 138; collective, 51, 53;

278 | INDEX

culture and, 66; gender, 239n27; national, 1,

51, 54, 62, 84
ideolinguistics, 92
ideology, 4, 9, 12, 26, 67, 70, 7778, 98, 123,
129, 134, 226n14, 228n37, 239nn1920;
abnormal view of, 103; academic, 144; alternative to, 79; analysis of, 76; approaches
to, 79, 101; articulation of, 94; binding, 31;
blaming, 100; Bolshevik, 59, 87, 9596,
215; bourgeois, 90; circumstances and,
244n93; class, 249; as codified system, 85;
communist, 10, 85; concept of, 75, 81, 91,
1012; culture and, 30, 8687; defining, 79,
103; dimensions of, 83, 102; discourse and,
79, 80, 9194; discussion of, 75, 7677, 79;
doctrine and, 8185, 86, 87; education and,
30; as faith, 9597; as false consciousness,
90, 91; high, 86; historical, 75, 78, 79,
81, 85, 8991, 102, 103; importance of,
38, 103; interpretation of, 10; Jacobin, 98,
244n92; Marxist-Leninist, 6364, 89, 100,
123; multiple, 10, 1023; nature of, 10, 75,
76, 95; Nazi, 99, 100, 242n65; notion of,
90, 93; official, 10, 70; as pathology, 103;
as performance, 9495; political, 81, 85,
205, 241n44; power of, 91, 101; primacy
of, 101, 244n92; problem of, 11, 75, 77, 81;
proletarian, 90; racial, 100; revolutionary,
12, 121, 190; role of, 76, 77, 95, 100; science
and, 30; six faces of, 11, 79, 103; socialist, 91;
Soviet, 10, 41, 51, 62, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84,
92, 100, 102, 103, 115, 164, 207, 243nn7273;
Stalinist, 41, 101, 103; technocracy and,
6364; text-based, 82; totalitarian, 10;
understanding, 11, 16, 79, 86, 93, 95, 102;
Weberian theory of, 239n28; Western
theory of, 75; working-class, 127; as
worldview, 8689, 102
Ideology: An Introduction (Eagleton), 75
Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim), 86
Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences, 136,
251n5
In Stahlgewittern (Jnger), 209
In the Esat (Pavlenko), 179
individualism, 29, 32, 59, 194, 200; authoritarian, 113; bourgeois, 173
individualist resolution (1836), 144
industrialization, 5, 21, 23, 37, 55, 120, 125, 131,
149, 246n10; forced, 33, 130, 206; Soviet,
199, 200; state-sponsored, 53
Institute for the Study of Imperialism, 220

Institute for World Politics and Economics,

207
Institute of Higher Neural Activity, 143
Institute of History, 157
Institute of Red Professors (IKP), 96
Institute of Soviet Construction, 143, 254n41
Institute of World Economics and Politics, 143
intelligentsia, 53, 56, 59, 61, 64, 115; Bolshevik,
13, 64, 117, 13435, 137, 149; bourgeois, 57;
concept of, 54; creative, 70; culture of, 25,
51, 63; death of, 71; enlightenment mission
of, 55; European, 164; Great Break and,
135; hostility of, 57; masses and, 51, 67;
parasitic, 173; party, 1314; proletarian, 112;
radical, 58; Russian, 51, 70, 71, 117, 215, 218;
scientific, 13; Soviet, 13, 67, 68, 70, 84, 165;
state and, 49; Vpered, 112; workers and, 111,
113, 118
intentionalism, 83, 94
internationalism, 92, 99, 168, 177
Intourist, 206
Ioffe, A. F., 153, 258n95
Jacobin Terror, 2, 99, 100
Jadids, 118
Janus face thesis of modernity (Detlev
Peukert), 29, 54
Jean-Christophe (Rolland), 166, 168
Jewish Century (Slezkine), 23
Joravsky, David, 30, 110, 111, 247n18
Journal of Political Ideologies, Freeden in, 10
Jowitt, Ken, 35, 36, 37, 38
Jnger, Ernst, 185, 190, 192, 193, 201, 202,
2089, 214, 269n89; Niekisch and, 209;
vision of, 209
Jnger, Friedrich Georg, 193, 201, 2089
Kadet Party, 140, 141, 215
Kaganovich, Lazar, 178, 211, 212
Kaier, Christina, 116
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, 145, 146
Kamenev, Lev, 62
Kameneva, Olga Davidovna, 6263, 88, 117,
248n41
Kant, Immanuel, 86
Kapp Putsch, 193
Karpinskii, A. P., 140, 151
Kartsevskii, Sergei, 92
Kasso, Lev, 153
Kautsky, Karl, 92, 137, 138
Keenan, Edward, 46, 231n80

Kelly, Catriona, 57
Kemenov, V. S., 182
Kershaw, Ian, 99, 231n83
Kerzhentsev, Platon M., 113, 114, 153, 249n58
KGB, 172. See also Cheka; Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD); secret police;
Unified State Political Administration
(OGPU)
Khalid, Adeeb, 118, 119
Khlevniuk, Oleg, 211
Khomeini, Ayatollah, 220
Khrushchev, Nikita, 31, 6869, 129
Kippenberger, Hans, 198, 219, 267n50
Klemperer, Victor, 242n65
Klopf, Fritz, 214
Kluckhohn, Clyde, 40
Knight, Nathaniel, 54
Knorin, Vilgelm, 151
Koch, Stephen, 172, 261n36
Koestler, Arthur, 96
Kogan, Petr Semenovich, 16667, 260n16
Kojevnikov, Alexei, 94
Koakowski, Leszek, 30
Kolchak, Aleksandr, 215
Koltsov, Mikhail, 166
Komsomol, 116, 124
Korsh, F. A., 58
Koselleck, Reinhart, 52, 104, 245n5
Kotkin, Stephen, 12, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28, 41, 50,
229n41; Fordism and, 228n38; Foucauldian
influence on, 34; Krylova and, 32; modernity
and, 31, 33, 34; party-state dualism and, 97
Kotsonis, Yanni, 225n2; Foucauldian influence
on, 34; liberalism and, 78; modernity and,
22, 50; particularism and, 25
KPD. See Communist Party of Germany
Kreitz, Werner, 200
Krinitskii, Aleksandr I., 125, 256n71
Kritika, 44
Kritsman, Lev, 145, 148
Krupskaia, Nadezhda, 120
Krylov, Aleksei N., 153, 154
Krylova, Anna, 32, 69
Krzhizhanovskii, Gleb, 257n99
Kudashev, Sergei, 166, 171, 177, 181, 182
Kudasheva, Mariia Pavlovna, 14, 15, 163, 165,
176, 258n1, 261n36, 262n60, 263n65;
Apletin and, 180, 181, 182; Arosev and,
175, 177; Bolshevism and, 170; Duhamel
and, 167, 171; Gorky and, 167; Kogan and,
16667; Pasternak and, 259n10; role of, 164;

INDEX | 279

Kudasheva, Mariia Pavlovna (cont.); Rolland

and, 16673, 175, 17784; secret police
and, 17072, 180; Stalin and, 176; views of,
1516
Kuibyshev, Valerian V., 155, 254n41
kulaks, NEPmen and, 123
kulturnost, 11, 56, 70, 106, 129; concept of, 116;
Stalin-era, 6465
Kulturtrger, 52, 55, 56, 71
Laboring Peasant Party, 125
Lafargue, Paul, 92
Lapp, Benjamin, 192
Lappo-Danilevskii, Aleksandr S., 138
Larin, Iurii, 121, 136
Lasalle, Ferdinand, 192
Laufenberg, Heinrich, 195
Le 14 juillet (Rolland), 169
Le Thtre du people (Rolland), 169
Lebedev-Polianskii, Pavel, 137
Left Bolsheviks, 58, 107, 137
Lelevich, Grigorii, 116
Lenin, Vladimir, 39, 58, 59, 84, 101, 118,
204, 205, 216, 220, 234n45; academy and,
14041; anti-Proletkult thesis of, 115;
appropriation of, 12122; authoritarian
individualism and, 113; civilized societies
and, 105, 115; cult of, 97; cultural revolution
and, 105, 107, 109, 115, 116, 120, 121, 122;
developmentalism and, 120; Gorky and, 168;
ideology and, 215; mass literacy and, 109;
Prussian tradition and, 193; Rolland and,
175; Social Democracy and, 90; Sovnarkom
and, 140; Stalin and, 175
Leninism, 15, 76, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112;
worldview and, 88
Lenoe, Matthew, 33, 36, 39, 41, 225n2;
empirical argument of, 34; mobilization
and, 34; modernity and, 34, 37; neotraditionalism and, 35
Lenz, Friedrich, 207, 267n55; Arplan and, 199,
200, 201, 202, 203
Levin, Eugen, 188
Lewin, Moshe, 6
Lexique de la guerre et de la rvolution en Russie
(Mazon), 92
Liebknecht, Karl, 188
literacy, 5, 23, 37, 109, 120, 127
Liubavskii, M. K., 153
Lives of Illustrious Men (series), 168
Lovell, Stephen: personal sphere and, 6970
Lukcs, Gyrgy, 90, 185, 201, 202, 204

280 | INDEX

Lukin, Nikolai N., 153, 154, 253n20, 257n99

Luks, Leonid, 216
Lunacharskii, Anatolii, 58, 59, 137, 139, 140,
148, 151, 157, 252n20
Luppol, Ivan, 121
Luxemburg, Rosa, 84
M-Apparat, 198, 212, 219
Magnetic Mountain (Kotkin), 25, 28, 97
Maiakovskii, Vladimir, 116
Main Administration for Scientific, ScholarlyArtistic, and Museum Institutions
(Glavnauka), 145, 147
Main Committee for Political Enlightenment
(Glavpolitprosvet), 120
Main Committee on Literature (Glavlit), 123
Main Political Administration, 198
Maiskii, Ivan, 165
Makarenko, Anton, 183
Maksimenkov, Leonid, 114
Malia, Martin, 3, 10, 81, 86, 230n60, 232n12,
238n13; cultural gradient and, 54; exchange
with, 239n15; ideocracy and, 239n13;
ideology and, 77, 7879; modernity and,
54; neo-totalitarian stance of, 9, 82; Soviet
communism and, 77; teleology of, 80;
time-lag analogies and, 53, 54
Mandelshtam, Osip, 166
Mann, Michael, 44, 227n22
Mannheim, Karl, 86, 241n51
Mao Zedong, 105, 13032, 220
Maoism, 12, 110
Martin, Terry, 33, 36, 41, 44, 119, 225n2; on
modernization, 6, 37; neo-traditionalism
and, 35, 37, 38
Marx, Karl, 71, 87, 91, 108, 178, 187, 192, 220,
241n51; ideology and, 89
Marx-Engels Institute, 89, 150, 152, 155, 156
Marxism, 4, 23, 30, 59, 82, 87, 99, 111, 118,
139, 141, 143, 145, 154, 156, 216; courses
in, 138; humankind and, 97; as ideology,
90; influence of, 77; Soviet, 82, 85, 88, 90,
241n59; worldview and, 88
Marxism-Leninism, 10, 41, 58, 6364, 67, 81,
82, 83, 86, 90, 91, 102, 103, 123, 178, 206;
classics of, 64; as doctrine, 88; hierarchical
approach of, 87; interpretation of, 9697
Marxists, 82, 92, 149, 241n59
Masaryk, Tom Garrigue, 14748
mass culture, 23, 31, 32, 52, 53, 55, 56, 229n41,
231n1; battles over, 66; commercial, 62, 63;
commercialized, 57; development of, 49, 58;

intelligentsia and, 51; Russian, 51, 57; Soviet,

62; Stalinist, 70; Western, 68, 69
masses, 59, 61; cult of, 56; idealization of, 68;
serving/remaking, 5458
Mazon, Andr, 92
McReynolds, Louise, 57
Mehnert, Klaus, 201
Mehring, Franz, 89
Mendeleev, Dmitrii, 136, 252n13
Menzhinskii, Viacheslav, 151
Merridale, Catherine, 96
Meshcheriakov, N. L., 216
Michelangelo, 168
military cooperation, Soviet-German, 199, 204,
211, 212
Miliutin, Pavel, 145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153
Miliutin, Vladimir P., 252n20
Miliutin commission, 148, 149, 150
Mitrokhin, Nikolai, 85
mobilization, 25, 52, 11910, 222n7, 226n16;
politics of, 41; Stalin-era, 34; total, 209
Modern Times (Kotkin), 34
modernity, 110, 225nn56, 227n24, 229n52,
231n78; aesthetic, 23, 30; alternative, 36,
229n43; analysis of, 49; antimodern, 55;
archaic and, 46; Bolshevik, 41, 69; Chinese,
54; colonial studies and, 224n31; communism and, 246n18; concept of, 6, 7, 22, 23,
30, 42, 43, 226n14; cultural program of, 24,
108; debate over, 8, 47; desociologizing, 31;
discussion of, 21, 51; engagement with, 32,
47; European, 54, 226n11; exceptionalism
and, 34, 7, 16, 17; French, 8; fundamental
problem of, 29; geopolitical competition
of, 229n41; high, 44, 45, 68, 89, 228n37;
Holocaust and, 27, 28; illiberal, 31, 227n21;
illusory, 54, 233n25; intelligentsia-statist,
8, 14, 4952, 58, 68, 70, 71; Islamic, 54;
liberal, 30, 32, 49, 50, 58; literature on, 22,
28, 35; multiple, 5, 78, 16, 22, 24, 32, 33,
37, 38, 39, 40, 48, 50, 51; Nazi, 24, 27, 29,
46; neo-traditionalism and, 38, 39, 40, 41,
44, 45; onset of, 55; organized, 50, 232n3;
paradigm of, 21, 22; paths to, 62; positions
on, 23; promise of, 70; reactionary, 209;
rejection of, 34; Russian, 7, 9, 25, 27, 34, 41,
48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 58, 225n4; scholarship, 26;
shared, 2, 3, 16, 32, 34; socialist, 32; Soviet,
3, 4, 56, 7, 9, 2233, 34, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47,
48, 49, 50, 52, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70; stages/
tensions of, 33; Stalinist, 27, 28; stereotype
of, 21; of telescoped/jagged development,

5254; tradition and, 39; understanding, 22,

34; variants of, 8, 47, 48; vision/practices of,
32; Western, 5, 24, 35
Modernity on Endless Trial (Koakowski), 30
modernity theory, 4, 8, 23, 33, 43, 67
modernization, 4, 5, 6, 7, 23, 24, 28, 52, 116,
227n24; market-driven, 37; paths to, 32;
rapid, 53; regime, 53; Russian, 58, 67;
socialist, 95; socioinstitutional matrix for,
26, 5354; Western, 40
Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 188, 190, 192,
194, 196, 266n25; community of fate and,
193
Molotov, Viacheslav, 145, 150, 165, 178, 182
Mommsen, Hans, 28, 244n96
Moscow, the Fourth Rome (Clark), 111
Moscow University, 153, 167, 181, 182
Munzenberg, Willi, 164, 261n36
Muscovite Political Folkways (Keenan), 46
Mussolini, Benito, 172, 213
My Path to the Proletarian Revolution
(Rolland), 173
Nagornaia, Oksana, 188
Naiman, Eric, 87, 116
Napoleon, 89
Napoleon III, leader cult and, 223n16
Narkompros, 125, 140, 142, 147, 150, 260n17
narod, 37, 52, 54, 55, 88
National Bolshevism, 15, 185, 186, 195, 196,
199, 203, 204, 207, 214, 220; Eastern
Orientation and, 190; German, 187, 210, 211,
212, 215, 218; KPD and, 198; Nazism and,
219; Russian, 21519
national revolution, 14, 185, 19091, 195, 216,
217, 218
National Socialism, 15, 29, 99, 186, 190, 217,
231n83; revolutionary nationalism and, 214;
transformation of, 214
nationalism, 15, 187, 198, 204, 209, 212, 215;
bourgeois, 199; communism and, 195, 197;
proletarian, 185, 190; revolutionary, 186,
190, 191, 196, 214; Russian, 84, 85, 240n37;
socialism and, 84, 192; Stalinism and, 85,
217
nationalization, 61, 78, 190, 218
Nazi Party, 12, 186, 187, 196, 212
Nazi Revolution, 21721; ideas/circumstances
and, 97102; Jews/non-Aryan values and,
250n69
Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939), 173, 182
Nazism, 28, 76, 98, 191, 213; communism and, 218;

INDEX | 281

Nazism (cont.); criticism of, 220; Holocaust and,

44; National Bolshevism and, 219; rise of,
187, 19596, 197
neo-traditionalism, 6, 7, 22, 25, 26, 28, 42, 47,
231n78; concept of, 21, 43; modernity and,
38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45; Soviet, 27, 35; tradition
and, 3338, 46
NEP. See New Economic Policy
Neuberger, Joan, 121
Neumann, Heinz, 198
New Communists, 95
New Deal, 29
New Economic Policy(NEP), 13, 30, 59, 61, 107,
109, 114, 118, 121, 134, 135, 139, 141, 142, 146,
166, 217; cultural projects of, 123; cultural
revolution of, 111, 12225; extremist groups
and, 104; introduction of, 138; kulaks and,
123; mass journalism and, 33; periodization
of, 119; political culture of, 235n56; reds/
experts and, 12, 133; utopianism of, 34
New Man, 6, 33, 34, 51, 58, 125
Nicholas I, 55
Niekisch, Ernst, 16, 188, 189, 200, 201, 202,
213; anticapitalism and, 190; anti-Westernism
of, 196; Arplan and, 21, 187, 20412; Bolshevism and, 1415, 187, 191, 193, 218; Eastern
Orientation of, 189, 193, 214; on extremists/
Soviet Russia, 20910; Five-Year Plan and,
204; Goebbels and, 213; Hitler and, 186,
21415; ideology of, 186, 187, 18990,
193, 197, 205; Jnger and, 209; National
Bolshevism and, 211, 215, 264n3; national
revolution and, 19091, 218; Nazis and,
21219; Potsdam idea and, 216; Prussian
Revolution and, 217; Radek and, 210;
Reichswehr and, 204; Romanism and, 194;
self-identification, 195; Social Democracy
and, 191, 194; socialism and, 19192;
Stalinism and, 212, 218; USSR/Fascist Italy
and, 206; Widerstand and, 192, 197, 198;
workerism and, 186, 208; worldviews and,
204; writing of, 220; youth of, 187, 188
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 169, 187
Nietzscheanism, 59
NKVD. See Peoples Commissariat of Internal
Affairs
Nosik, Boris, 171, 172
novyi byt, 116
NSDAP, 190, 196, 197, 211, 212, 214
Oberland-Kameradshaft, 197
October Manifesto, 252n12

282 | INDEX

OGPU. See Unified State Political

Administration
Okudzhava, Bulat, 70
Old Bolsheviks, 63, 88
Old Regime and the Revolution, The (Tocqueville),
12
Old Socialist Party (ASP), 191, 192, 193
Oldenburg, Sergei Fedorovich, 144, 146, 147,
148, 151, 153, 154, 257n88; incarceration of,
14041
On the Path to Cultural Revolution (Krupskaia),
120
On the Path to Cultural Revolution (Lenin),
120
Organizational Bureau (Orgburo), 145
Orwell, George, 92
Osten, Maria, 166
Ostideologie, 186, 19293
Ozouf, Mona, 98
Paetel, Karl Otto, 195, 198, 266n39
Paris Commune, 116
particularism, 3, 21, 25, 35, 36, 37; comparability and, 4; Russian/Soviet, 48, 51;
universalism and, 11, 14, 22, 38, 39, 40, 47
party-state dualism, 97, 123, 125, 133, 134
Pashukanis, Evgenii, 153, 154
Pasternak, Boris, 166, 259n10
patrimonialism, 4, 46, 47
Patriotica (Ustrialov), 215, 216
Pavlenko, Petr, 179
Pavlov, Ivan P., 141, 151, 183
Penser la Rvolution franaise (Furet), 98
Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs
(NKVD), 1516, 170, 171, 172, 202, 203. See
also Cheka; KGB; secret police; Unified
State Political Administration (OGPU)
perestroika, 85
performance: faith and, 95; ideology as, 95;
ritualistic, 94; worldview and, 102
Peter the Great, 4, 12, 46, 136, 159, 205
Petersburg, Crucible of the Cultural Revolution
(Clark), 11011
Petrini, Alfonso, 180
Peukert, Detlev J. K., 29, 30
Pipes, Richard, 3, 238n13
Plaggenborg, Stefan, 8, 109, 110
Plamper, Jan, 43, 97
Platonov, Sergei F., 142, 156, 157, 257n88
Plekhanov, Georgi, 90, 113
Plenkov, O. Iu., 220
pluralism, 36; fragmentation and, 30

Pokrovskii, Mikhail, 121, 137, 139, 140, 142,

14344, 148, 149, 152, 155, 156, 157; Academy
of Sciences and, 147
Politburo, 85, 133, 142, 147, 148, 152, 155, 157,
198, 211; literature and, 121
politics, 13, 35, 82, 99, 106, 112, 134, 239n20;
Bolshevik, 59, 63; collective, 50; culture
and, 4, 11, 84; German, 265n19; mass, 23, 31,
42, 50, 226n6; modernizing, 30; Russian, 2,
57; Soviet, 12, 14, 21, 40, 117; Stalinist, 164;
Weimar, 192
Pollock, Ethan, 239n29
Pollock, Friedrich, 201
popular culture, 57, 63, 66, 70, 80, 169, 231n1;
commercial, 56; repression of, 61
Popular Front, 163, 164, 179, 181
Posrednik, 57
postmodernism, 35, 91, 228n37, 239n19;
association with, 34; debates over, 49
postrevisionism, 99, 100, 101
post-Stalinism, 6771
poststructuralism, 35, 239n19
power: mystification of, 21; relations/system
of, 124
Preobrazhenskii, Evgenii A., 138, 139, 148,
252n20, 253n21
Preussentum und Socialismus (Spengler), 192
Priestland, David, 41, 42, 83
Program for the National and Social
Liberation of the German People, 197
proletarian culture, 63, 64, 66, 112, 113, 114,
115, 118, 121, 122, 125, 137; fantasies of, 107
Proletkult, 61, 107, 109, 112, 11314, 127, 137,
153, 249n60; culture and, 113; leadership
of, 113
Promethean Party, 120
propaganda, 1, 81, 129, 223n16; mass, 82;
sanitary, 61
Provisional Government, 136, 140
Prussian Bolshevism, 15, 185, 186, 191, 192, 193,
194, 198, 206, 209, 212, 214, 217
Pushkin, Aleksandr, 64, 179
Putin, Vladimir, 45, 220
racism, 38, 183, 204
Radakov, Aleksei: book cover of, 60 (fig.)
Radek, Karl, 187, 195, 211, 212, 252n20; Arplan
and, 210; Niekisch and, 210; Schlageter line
and, 196, 197
radicalism, 54, 110, 19194, 248n49
Raeff, Marc, 26, 27, 53, 54, 227n19, 232n12
Realpolitik, 76, 101

Red Army, 82, 96, 182, 198, 204, 220;

cultural-enlightenment work and, 114
Red Guards, 131
Red Star, 207
reductionism, 16, 102, 239n20
Reichswehr, 197, 204
Reisner, Mikhail A., 252n20
Reventlow, Graf Ernst zu, 18586, 196, 201,
211, 270n99
revisionism, 39, 40, 101
revolution, 58; culture and, 111, 118; ecology
of, 11011
revolutionary nationalism, 186, 190, 191, 196;
National Socialism and, 214
Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., 105
Riazanov, David B., 89, 146, 148, 149, 152, 155,
156, 157, 252n20
Rieber, Alfred J., 45, 53, 232n12
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 167
Robeson, Paul, 183, 263n74
Rolland, Madeleine, 182
Rolland, Romain, 174, 176, 263n63, 263n70;
Apletin and, 182, 184; Arosev and, 165,
17576, 263n62; Barbusse and, 168; cult
of, 173, 183; Gide and, 179, 262n57; Gorky
and, 163, 165, 170, 260n16; Kudasheva and,
16673, 175, 17784, 262n60; Lenin and,
175; path of, 17778; political campaigns
and, 17879; political support by, 173;
Russian Revolution and, 167, 168; Stalin
and, 15, 163, 164, 167, 169, 173, 178, 182,
260n23; Stalinism and, 14, 177, 182, 183,
184; transformation of, 8, 16970;
Trotskyist movement and, 180; VOKS
and, 170
Romanism, 190, 194
Rmer, Josef Beppo, 198, 201, 203, 267n50;
Bund Oberland and, 196; KPD and, 197
Rosenberg, Alfred, 212, 214
Rosenberg, William G., 110
Rote Kapelle, 203
Russian Academy of Sciences, 134, 251n5
Russian Association of Proletarian Writers
(RAPP), 1045, 116
Russian Civil War, 27, 101, 116, 138, 141, 166,
215; cultural revolution and, 114
Russian Interview Project, 40
Russian Modernity (Kotsonis), 22
Russian Revolution, 8, 23, 44, 56, 79, 139, 169,
188; ideas/circumstances and, 97102
Russian Social Democracy, 113
Russian studies, 2, 4, 22, 27, 224n32, 227n21

INDEX | 283

Ryan, James, 101

Rykov, A. I., 147
Sattelzeit, 58
Sauermann, Uwe, 194, 212, 220
Savitskii, P. N., 216
Saxe, John Godfrey, 80
Scheringer, Richard, 197, 198, 267n47
Scheringer line, 198
Scherrer, Jutta, 113
Schlageter line, 19596, 197, 198, 211
Schmitt, Carl, 185, 201
Schuddekopf, Otto-Ernst, 198
Schull, Joseph, 93
science, 5, 121, 133, 149; development of, 142;
ideology and, 30; repressed, 134; technology
and, 115
Scientific-Technical Administration of the
Supreme Soviet of the National Economy
(VSNKh), 150, 204
scientism, 21
Scott, James C., 44, 50, 243n73
secret police, 17072, 180. See also Cheka;
KGB; Peoples Commissariat of Internal
Affairs (NKVD); Unified State Political
Administration (OGPU)
Section of Scientific Institutions, 148, 151
secularization, 23, 24, 37, 97
SED. See Socialist Unity Party of Germany
self-criticism, 94, 127
self-transformation, 65, 70, 124
Selishchev, Afanasii, 92
Serge, Victor, 261n35
Shakespeare, William, 64, 91, 175
Shakhty trial, 105, 125, 149
Shils, Edward, 97
Shmidt, Otto Iu., 148, 153, 252n20
Sholokhov, Mikhail, 129
show trials, 105, 125, 149
Sites, Richard, 56
Skocpol, Theda, 224n34
Skvortsov-Stepanov, Ivan I., 252n20
Slezkine, Yuri, 23, 127
smenovekhovtsy, 215, 216, 217
Smith, Steve, 56, 57, 77, 80, 87
Sochor, Zenovia, 247n23
Social Darwinism, 31
Social Democracy, 14, 15, 84, 107, 121, 185, 186,
189, 191, 193, 194, 214, 218; German, 113;
pre-First World War, 106; Russian, 111, 113
Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD),
188, 191, 196

284 | INDEX

social engineering, 2, 13, 23, 63, 64, 70

social forces, 16, 110, 231n81
socialism, 45, 49, 91, 93, 120, 137, 168, 209, 212,
220, 237n88; capitalism and, 65; German,
214; nationalism and, 84, 192; revolutionary,
184; scholarly, 199; science/technology and,
87; Soviet, 32, 87, 115, 223n15
Socialist Academy of Social Sciences (SAON),
12, 134, 137; emergence of, 141; ethos of, 139;
identity of, 140; mission of, 138; science/
higher learning and, 142. See also Communist Academy (Comacademy)
Socialist Academy of Social Sciences (SAON),
134, 137
Socialist Realism, 44, 59, 6367, 68, 93, 169
Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), 137
Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), 185,
220
social life, 5, 57, 71; reflexivity in, 31, 70
social revolution, 121, 185, 218
Social Revolutionary Nationalists, 214
Society for the Struggle with Alcoholism, 121
Society of Friends of the New Russia, 199,
201, 203
Society of Marxist Biologists, 143
Sociology of Modernity (Wagner), 29
Solts, A. A., 124
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 91
Sonderweg, 34, 27, 54
Soviet Academy of Sciences, 14
Soviet communism, 8, 15, 26, 30, 77, 85, 97,
188; analysis of, 48; ideology and, 78;
legacy of, 48
Soviet Experiment (Suny), 105
Soviet history, 9394, 104, 128, 133, 205;
ideology and, 81, 102, 103; postrevisionist
understanding of, 101; study of, 2
Soviet ideology, 41, 51, 62, 77, 80, 81, 92, 100,
102, 103, 164, 207; arbitrariness/relativism
of, 228n37; as doctrine, 83, 84; internalizing, 115; transmission of, 243n72
Soviet modernity, 3, 56, 7, 9, 34, 44, 47, 48,
49, 52, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70; concept of,
42, 50; debate about, 4, 43; first generation
of, 2233
Soviet studies, 2, 77, 224n32, 227n21, 242n62;
ideology and, 103; totalitarian/revisionist
historical schemas of, 99
Soviet Tragedy, The (Malia), 77
Sovietization, 11, 66, 82, 94, 106, 117, 119, 124,
128
sovkhoz, 207

Sovnarkom, 136, 140, 141, 142, 147, 149, 150,

152; Section on Scientific Institutions of,
148, 151
SPD. See Social Democratic Party of Germany
Spengler, Oswald, 190, 192, 265n24, 270n115
Stalin, Joseph, 3, 34, 39, 46, 67, 84, 101, 105,
108, 134, 145, 168, 170, 176, 179, 180, 183,
187, 198, 206, 210, 244n87, 246n10; Arosev
and, 177; cult of, 5, 83, 97, 132, 172, 178;
cultural revolution and, 111; death of, 68;
Gorky and, 177; Great Break and, 11, 61, 82,
122; ideology of state and, 92; Kaganovich
and, 211; Kudasheva and, 176; Lenin and,
175; leveling and, 221n4; Mao and, 130;
modernity and, 32; new class and, 61;
Niekisch and, 212; political ideology and,
81; Prussian tradition and, 193; rehabilitation by, 13; religious terminology and, 97;
Rolland and, 15, 163, 164, 167, 169, 173, 178,
182, 260n23; Soviet subjectivity and, 57;
speech of, 31; and Thatcher compared, 46
Stalin Revolution, 1, 2, 59, 64, 167, 169, 185,
186, 199
Stalinism, 4, 15, 21, 22, 29, 30, 40, 41, 42,
45, 46, 65, 66, 68, 69, 76, 79, 80, 83, 84,
96, 105, 108, 110, 112, 128, 129, 164, 170,
172, 223n21, 230n69, 231n78, 237n83;
Bolshevism and, 218; capitalism and, 49; as
civilization, 25, 51; context of, 33; defense
of, 14, 168; efficacy/reach of, 5; fascination
for, 217; Great Break and, 131; ideology and,
103; isolationist phases of, 67; legacy of,
132; mobilizing, 34, 209; modernity and,
28; nationalism and, 85, 217; ordinary, 3;
revolution and, 222n8; rise of, 58; rituals
of, 181; Rolland and, 14, 177, 182, 183,
184; support for, 163; as theocracy, 12;
understanding, 28, 43
State Planning Committee (Gosplan), 253n24
State Scholarly Council (GUS), 147
statism, 15, 38, 71
Stattelzeit, 5254
Steinberg, Mark D., 56, 105
Steklov, Vladimir A., 147
Stites, Richard, 61
Stolypin, Pyotr, 205
Strasser, Gregor, 186, 212, 214, 270n105
Strasser, Otto, 186, 197, 210, 212, 214, 270n105
Struve, P. B., 216
Sturmabteilung (SA), 197
Suny, Ronald Grigor, 26, 43, 44, 105; ideology
and, 80, 82; methodological objection of, 42

Sutherland, Donald M. G., 98, 244n92

Suvorin, A. S., 58
Sverdlov Communist University, 114, 124, 144
Sytin, Ivan, 57
Szporluk, Roman, 84
Tactical Center Affair, 140
Tarle, Evgenii, 156
Tat circle, 203, 210, 270n98
Taut, Bruno, 201
technology, 5, 30, 115, 121, 133
Terror. See Great Terror; Jacobin Terror
Thatcher, Margaret, 46
Thaw, 30, 31, 43, 68, 129, 241n59
Third Reich, 12, 100, 201, 219
Third Reich, The (journal), 196
Timasheff, Nicholas, 105, 222n8, 248n49, 252n11
Timiriazev, Arkadii K., 136, 252n20
Timm, H., 201
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12
Todes, Daniel, 253n29
Tolstoy, Lev, 57, 168, 175
Tolz, Vera, 141, 252n12
totalitarianism, 24, 36, 76, 82, 92, 97, 103,
247n23; concept of, 2, 3, 12, 39, 77, 222n5;
discussions of, 9
tradition, 42, 46, 49; neo-traditionalism and,
3338
transformation, 8, 52, 61, 117, 134, 15859,
16970, 214; cultural, 11, 12, 106, 118, 134,
135; internal/external, 128; revolutionary,
118; self-, 65, 70, 124; state-sponsored, 49;
utopianism and, 87
Tretiakov, Sergei, 165, 177, 259n8
Trilesser, Meier Abramovich, 170
Trger, Karl, 198
Trotsky, Lev, 62, 115, 117, 138, 204; Bolshevism
and, 205; combined development and,
233n23; cultural revolution and, 116; Left
Opposition and, 210
Trotskyists, 148
Trubetskoi, N. S., 216
Tucker, Robert C., 12, 97
Ulm Reichswehr trial, 197
unification, totalizing, 5859, 6163
Unified State Political Administration (OGPU),
125, 151, 157, 170, 172, 199, 202, 203. See
also Cheka; KGB; Peoples Commissariat of
Internal Affairs (NKVD); secret police
Union of Communes of the Northern Region,
140

INDEX | 285

Union of Intellectual Professions, 202

Union of Soviet Writers, 172, 173, 177, 178,
182
Union Writers Foreign Commission, 177
universalism, 3, 21; particularism and, 11, 14,
22, 38, 39, 40, 47
urbanization, 5, 23, 30, 37, 53, 55, 64, 82
Ustrialov, N. V., 215, 216, 217, 270n115
utopianism, 1, 3, 28, 34, 87, 108, 119
Vaiskopf, Mikhail, 92
Varga, Jen, 207
VARNITSO. See All-Union Association for
Workers in Science and Technology for the
Advancement of Socialist Construction
Vengardovich, Karl, 210
Vernadskii, Vladimir I., 142, 146, 153, 154
Versailles Treaty, 18791, 197
Viola, Lynne, 44
violence, 1; developmental, 2; political, 13, 50,
64; revolutionary, 4
VOKS. See All-Union Society for Cultural
Ties Abroad
Volgin, Viacheslav P., 148, 149, 150, 253n20
Volk, 192, 205, 208
Vlkischer Beobachter, 212
Volkov, Vadim, 55
Volksgemeinschaft, 191, 218
Volkskrper, 29, 205
Voloshin, Maximilian, 167
von Geldern, James, 65
von Harnack, Arvid, 200, 202, 203, 268n60
von Hofmannsthal, Hugo, 263n1
von Niedermayer, Oskar Ritter, 211
Voprosy byta (Trotsky), 115
Vorkmpfer, 200, 203
Voronov, E. P., 148, 151, 152
Vovelle, Michel, 168
Vpered, 107, 109, 112, 113, 114
Vperedism, 107, 112, 118, 137, 247n23, 247n28
VSNKh. See Scientific-Technical Administration of the Supreme Soviet of the National
Economy
Vucinich, Alexander, 134
Vyshinskii, Andrei, 149, 256n71

286 | INDEX

Wagner, Peter, 29, 30, 49, 50, 232n3

Wagner, Richard, 169
Walder, Andrew, 3536, 3738
Walker, Barbara, 37
Webb, Beatrice, 165
Webb, Sidney, 165
Weber, Max, 29, 46
Wehrwolfverband, 214
Weimar Republic, 192, 194, 219; Nazi
revolution and, 21718
Weiner, Amir, 225n2
Weltanschauung, 86, 88
West: rediscovery of, 6771; Soviet relationship with, 8889
Westad, Odd Arne, 67
Westernization, 4, 27, 52, 54, 204, 205;
modernity and, 24, 50; Russian divergences
from, 48;
state-sponsored, 53
Widerstand, 186, 192, 193, 197, 200, 202, 203,
206, 21213, 214, 216, 220; KPD and, 198
Widerstand, 188, 192, 194, 207, 209, 214
Will to Power (Nietzsche), 187
Willimot, Andy, 116
Winnig, August, 192, 193
Wirsing, Giselher, 270n98
Wittfogel, Karl, 185, 201, 202
Wittrock, Bjrn, 53
Wolffheim, Fritz, 195
Worker-Peasant Inspectorate, 142, 254n41
workerism, 186, 194, 208
worldview, 81, 90, 96, 204; ideology as,
8689, 102
Wortman, Richard, 231n80
Young Hegelians, idealism of, 89
Young Plan, 197
Yurchak, Alexei, 9495, 223n15
Zehrer, Hans, 201, 203, 210, 270n98
Zelnik, Reginald, 56, 101
Zentralrat der Arbeiter-, Bauern-, und
Soldatenrte, 188
Zinovev, Grigorii, 138
Zweig, Stefan, 260n16