4
History was a high-risk profession in the Soviet Union, and many Soviet historians spent months, years, or decades in various branches of its penitentiary system. Some of them died there; others survived and went on to resume their professional activities. Their writings after the gulag have left us with a rare experiment on the nature of the historical profession, a unique source that we should read respectfully and in detail.
Most of these historians were trained within the mainstream traditions of archive-focused historiography or classical philology. Some of them added to this training their philosophical interests, which ranged from neo-Kantianism to Marxism. Some were haunted by their gulag experience and felt a compulsive drive to represent it, which meant producing historical parallels and analogies to this experience; others were less affected. The postmodern idea that historical writing is a genre of storytelling that reflects the life experience of its authors (and readers) would sound foreign to most of these scholars. But they would willingly agree that their understanding of their contemporary environment was infused by their professional knowledge. The opposite was true as well: their historical ideas developed under the influence of their Soviet experience and, specifically, their experience as survivors of and witnesses to the gulag.
Many memoirs testify to the fact that history was a frequent subject of conversation in the camps, among nonhistorians and historians alike. When two former officers of the victorious Red Army, Lev Kopelev and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, met in a camp barrack soon after the end of World War II, they immediately started debating Russian and European history. Solzhenitsyn was a mathematician and poet, but his experience in the camps turned him into a popular historian. History was the process that had brought the camp into being and delivered suffering to its prisoners. In and after the camp, the process of working through this experience often took the form of individual speculations and public debates on history. The gulag was a pathological symptom on a huge scale, and like an individual patient who excavates his past in order to recover from his symptoms, the gulag prisoners dug into the past in order to diagnose the troubled state of their nation, empire, and world. After the collapse of the gulag in 1953–1956, the broader society became as interested in historical therapy as the convicts had been earlier. Writing history became central for the post-Stalinist public sphere, and remarkably often, ex-convicts would become its most popular historians.
The Historians’ Affair
In 1929, the Soviet political police arrested the most prominent historians of Leningrad. They were accused of plotting a coup and shaping an alternative Russian government. More than 150 people were arrested, almost all of them academic historians or archivists. This massive trial, one of the first of its kind, has been remembered as the “Historians’ Affair.” The leaders of the historical discipline were arrested along with their wives, daughters, and graduate students. Most of them received relatively short terms, three to five years, and spent them working on the construction of the notorious Belomor Canal. Their fates and subsequent academic careers varied dramatically.
Matvei Liubavsky, a senior historian who before 1917 had been the rector, or head, of Moscow State University, was exiled to Bashkiria. There, in one of Russia’s internal colonies, he wrote a major treatise on Russia’s colonization and then died in 1936. His book was not published until about six decades later. One of Liubavsky’s students, Yevgeny Tarle, who was also arrested in connection with the Historians’ Affair, was more fortunate. Tarle spent one year in prison and two in exile in Kazakhstan. He survived this experience and had a glittering academic career, becoming a full academician and Stalin Prize laureate. Stalin personally liked Tarle’s biography of Napoleon (1936), which does read as if it was modeled after Stalin. Tarle’s magisterial work was a global history of colonialism (1965). It is important that both these historians, Tarle and Liubavsky, wrote their major treatises on colonization, a direct, unlimited manifestation of power. However, their two books, the definitive Soviet work on the subject, on the one hand, and a subversive, unpublishable manuscript, on the other, could not be more different. Tarle wrote a standard Marxist narrative of colonialism as a stage in the development of capitalism, with British, French, and other empires competing and dividing the world. Liubavsky wrote a history of colonization as an internal Russian affair, in which Moscow invaded Novgorod, Siberia, and many other lands, including Bashkiria, where he wrote this book.1
A younger survivor of the Historians’ Affair was Nikolai Druzhinin, a social historian who had already taken part in revolutionary activism, World War I, and the Russian civil war. In 1930, he spent ten weeks in a cell with fifty prisoners; there was not enough room for them to lie down on the floor simultaneously, so they organized a roster system to make sure that everyone had a chance to rest.2 In the daytime, they organized lectures on technology, history, and Pushkin. During interrogation, Druzhinin confirmed that the arrested historians, some of them his teachers, were hostile to the Soviet state, but denied his own involvement in their conspiracy. Atypically, his female investigator released him. Druzhinin would go on to a long and successful career, becoming the foremost Soviet historian of Russian agriculture. Decades after his imprisonment, Druzhinin learned that his investigator had herself been arrested in 1938, spent eight years in the gulag, and died shortly after release. Druzhinin died almost a centenarian in 1986. Shortly before his death he wrote a memoir of how he had informed on his teachers, and how his persecutor had saved him before herself becoming a victim. It was a dry report. Druzhinin offered no explanation or apology, but it was evidently important to him that the story be recorded for posterity.3
After his release in 1930, Druzhinin started work on a monumental two-volume study of a peculiar Russian institution, state serfdom, and a nineteenth-century bureaucrat, Count Pavel Kiselev, whose reforms aimed at improving the management of the so-called state peasants, serfs who belonged to the state rather than to private owners. This book could be read as an optimistic model helping to boost the legitimacy of the ongoing collectivization; published in 1946, it received the Stalin Prize. Even the most vigorous Stalinist critics did not detect any sign of dissidence in this book, but I do. Druzhinin was writing about the imperial “attempts to achieve total control over the life of the state peasants” and about the “personal freedom that was the foundation for peasants’ economic initiative.”4 There were obvious parallels here to the Soviet state’s treatment of the peasantry. Soviet collectivization was an unprecedented event that subjected millions of peasants, from the Arctic to Central Asia and from the Carpathian Mountains to the Pacific coast, to a unified regime of work and life that was shaped to suit the state’s convenience.5 Russian intellectuals, and historians first and foremost, could not help but reflect on the relation of this collectivist regime to the specifically Russian traditions, those that previous generations of intellectuals had almost unanimously deemed to be oppressive, such as serfdom, and those that they believed to be progressive or even prophetic, such as the peasant commune. Collectivization renewed interest in the Russian peasantry and in the history of those movements that were ideologically focused on the peasantry, such as populism and Tolstoyanism. As Druzhinin was accumulating the academic regalia of status and power in the 1950s and 1960s, he managed to consolidate a coherent, relatively productive branch of Soviet historical studies that was focused on the history of the peasantry. Interestingly, this direction of historical studies outpaced its more famous counterpart in Russian literature, the so-called village prose movement, by roughly one decade.6
The Cosmic Academy of Sciences
With the start of the double Soviet movement of collectivizing the peasantry and repressing the townfolk, the gulag in its various manifestations, from the prison to the camp to exile, became a zone of contact between the intelligentsia and “the people,” which meant everyone else from the hugely diverse Soviet Union. Nobody documented this situation better than the historian Dmitry Likhachev, who became the leading intellectual of the perestroika era in the 1980s.7 Arrested in 1928 together with other members of his student circle, the “Cosmic Academy,” Likhachev was condemned to five years of hard labor, which he served in the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp and on the Belomor Canal, until he was released in 1932. The Solovetsky camp was the starting point of the growing gulag system and its experimental base. Entrusted with the ideological and even artistic reeducation of the masses of prisoners, convicts with connections to the unusually large camp administration led relatively safe lives. For those masses, however, at times the Solovetsky camp was not much different from an extermination camp. Characteristically, there was a high turnover of camp authorities, with the managers of the camp often becoming its victims. This constant change and uncertainty added chaos to the rigid system of status hierarchy, so that nobody’s survival was secured in this “exemplary camp.”8 Though Likhachev survived this camp because he was employed by an internal agency that specialized in the reeducation of the adolescent inmates, he attributed this miracle to his friendships with one or two authoritative criminals who exercised informal power over the camp.9 He also derived scholarly benefit from his friendships with the criminals. Starting with an article in the Solovetsky camp newspaper, which he then developed into a series of extended research essays, Likhachev focused his first publications on the criminal language and other aspects of the cultural world of the “thieves” who were held in the camp.10
Studying criminals as “the people,” Likhachev continued an age-old tradition of the Russian intelligentsia. In the gulag, the distinction traditionally drawn in Russian ethnography between “the people” and the intelligentsia was reconstituted in the contrast between criminal prisoners, on the one hand, and the political prisoners, who came from the intelligentsia, on the other. Focusing on the “criminals,” Likhachev’s essays were well informed both in terms of his empirical evidence and his theoretical background. Before Likhachev, the conventional wisdom held that the criminal argot should be viewed as one of the “secret languages,” which certain ethnic, religious, or professional groups developed in order to protect their communication from more powerful groups. Launched in the mid-nineteenth century by Vladimir Dal and his circle, who founded Russian ethnography as an instrument of imperial administration, this understanding of argot as a “secret language” feels curiously similar to modern postcolonial models, such as James Scott’s anthropology of “hidden transcripts.”11 Likhachev vigorously rejected this understanding. In his view, the criminals were, on the contrary, marking themselves through their argot; far from making themselves inconspicuous, they made themselves noticeable by using it. Speaking both the colloquial Russian and their argot, they were bilingual, and they shifted from one language to another at will. The key to this argot was emotional and not functional, claimed Likhachev. By using his argot, a criminal wielded a magical power over his world. As a magical tool, the words of argot conflated the signifier with the signified. The fine rational distinctions that modern languages develop to communicate human experience—between words and facts, or between subjects and predicates—collapsed in the criminal argot, which Likhachev deemed a regression or even degeneration from the modern to the primordial, primitive state of language. Apart from scores of examples drawn from the living speech of the convicts, Likhachev referred to a surprisingly broad assortment of philosophers and anthropologists, from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl to Bronislaw Malinowski. Comparing thieves to shamans, he claimed that the argot of the “criminals” in the Solovetsky camp was a kind of missing link, a clue shedding light on the historical evolution of language.
An inadvertent anthropologist, Likhachev construed his mission as bearing witness to his unlikely bedfellows in the camp. His story was unusually articulate and sympathetic to people who were so radically different from himself. His “thieves” were as exotic, inaccessible, and dangerous as the most remote of the tribes, and his careful anthropology of this largely unknown world should be recognized as a major achievement. In his study of the “emotional expressivity” of the thieves’ argot, Likhachev highlighted the fact that this language, which sounded so grim and threatening to outsiders, was in fact notable for its wit and creativity. The key to this divergence is humor or, as Likhachev put it, that which is funny. Many elements of argot vocabulary, speculated Likhachev, were originally born out of jokes. When used in the context of the argot, these words might still hint at jokes of the past and express their “inerasable wittiness.” Argot thus manifests and reproduces funniness in its “diluted form.” Connected to a particular worldview that focuses on and venerates chance, fate, and risk, argot is a defensive mechanism because it downplays danger, mocks it, and neutralizes it by holding it up to mockery. Argot circulates within isolated communities and does not feel “funny” outside of these communities. Merging the magical with the comical and looking for the linguistic manifestation of this combination in one of the most dangerous, violent social environments, Likhachev’s theory of argot was a remarkable construction.
Likhachev’s empirical study of the criminal argot was contemporaneous with a literary discovery of the Renaissance carnival that another convict, Mikhail Bakhtin, made in the same years in remote exile in Kazakhstan. Bakhtin was arrested a few months after Likhachev and a few months before the eruption of the Historians’ Affair. Like Likhachev’s thieves’ argot but on a broader scale of generalization, Bakhtin’s carnival merged poetry with magic and irony with obscenity. Both authors imagined a life that was radically different from the everyday routine, and both projected it into cultural performances rather than in racial or tribal identities. There is much in common between these observations, though their textual references were very different. Why did these two authors, Bakhtin and Likhachev, draw such similar conclusions from studies that were so remote and disconnected, both empirically and methodologically? And why was it the case that decades later, precisely these two authors became the best-known cultural historians of Russia?
Mores Ancient and Modern
Another historian and convict, Boris Romanov, triangulates this relation and helps to understand it. Romanov was arrested in 1930 as part of the Historians’ Affair. After thirteen months of investigation, a period that he later described as the worst time of his life, he was convicted to five years of hard labor; he served three and a half years working on the Belomor Canal. Later, when he applied for rehabilitation in 1956, he pleaded “a deep psychological trauma” that was “an obstacle to scholarly work” and had “various medical consequences.” He received psychiatric treatment for this condition. In the private letters that were recently published by one of his former students, Romanov wrote about his enduring fear of being rearrested, “a horrible burden” that was still with him even in 1953, more than twenty years after his incarceration.12
In 1947 and after many delays, Romanov published a book, The People and Mores of Ancient Russiaa, pioneering work of historical ethnography based on a close reading of medieval Russian sources. Critics accused Romanov of pessimism and pornography in depicting “the people”; “misanthropy” was a word that Romanov’s critics used extensively. They were quite right. In his book, Romanov described medieval Russia as a world of “lawlessness and violence.” Analyzing the etymology of the Russian word for “work” (rabota, strada), he demonstrated its ancient connection to the word “slave” (rab), its correlation with “suffering” (stradanie), and its contrast with the idea of freedom. Focusing mainly on one social group, the slaves (kholopy), Romanov cited their laments and argued that the legal position of slaves was indistinct from that of cattle. Forced to work with no contract or any legal protection whatsoever, a slave could be killed by his master with impunity. The state imposed no penalty for such crimes, and the church was indifferent. Romanov also gave a deeply sympathetic account of medieval opposition to the centralizing efforts of the state. One twelfth-century author, Daniil Zatochnik, provided the inspiration for many of these conclusions. Romanov presented Daniil in a way that embraced his own experience: “This free man dived deeply into the boiler of people’s life. . . . He sent consolation to some and warning to others, . . . saw multiple falls into the depth of slavery, and experienced it, to some extent, on himself.” Daniil’s nickname, Zatochnik, means “convict.” Indeed, the Moscow prince exiled him to a distant land near Kargopol, quite close to the place where his future historian, Romanov, would serve on the Belomor Canal.13
After an ideological debate on this book, Leningrad State University sacked Romanov. Dmitry Likhachev was one of those few who tried to defend him. Much later, in his book The Laughing World of Ancient Russia (1976), Likhachev combined the experience of his youth in the Solovetsky camp with Bakhtin’s carnivalesque intuition and Romanov’s bitter readings of Russian sources. Likhachev’s accomplishment in this book was a coherent, widely accepted picture of medieval Russian life as the world of a fundamental dualism. Prosperity and order dominated in one part of this world; poverty, hunger, and confusion governed the other. Absurd, mocking, and laughing, this second world was populated by “troubled” people “on the run”; it was also a “counter-culture” and an “anti-world.” This world was “unrepresentable,” wrote Likhachev, and the men of this world were “naked” and “bare.” In their bareness, men were equal. They possessed nothing that was dear to them, and nothing revealed the former origin, status, or class that they had left behind in the first world. This bareness made them bitter, honest, and daring.
A common reading of this book claims that the laughing world is organized as a carnival. But while it is true that Likhachev does sound like Bakhtin, it is equally true that sometimes he sounds more like Agamben. Likhachev construes his antiworld not as a cyclical event in this world but as its permanent part, a cursed place, a hell on earth. In this laughing world, “debauchery replaces the church and the prison courtyard replaces the monastery.” Therefore the laughing world is simultaneously the world of darkness—a difficult combination for the unprepared reader. To depict this world, Likhachev uses an interesting word, “kromeshnyi,” best translated as “ghastly,” and normally used in Russian in conjunction with “darkness.”
Two decades after The Laughing World was published, Likhachev revealed its secret source. In his memoirs, Likhachev wrote clearly that the ghastliness of his medieval laughter was drawn from the camp. In the Solovetsky camp where he spent three years of his youth, he observed the convicts striving to “remedy the criminal, shameful world of the camp as the laughing world.” Boldly applying to the camp the eponymous concept (smekhovoi mir) from his best-known work of scholarship, Likhachev clearly stated the epistemological (rather than historical) connection between the modern world of the camp and the medieval world of the carnival. In his memoirs, he described the camp as a ghastly world of hard labor, routine violence, enforced sociality, hysterical discharges, and creative obscenity. The tortured convicts had nothing that was dear to them, and in moments of leisure they mocked everything and everyone. According to Likhachev, the folkish humor of prisoners was a defensive mechanism: “humor, irony told us: all this was not real.” Combining the magical and the comical, the laughing world of these people was a fantasy rather than reality, perhaps an imaginary compensation for their life in a shameful world. Literally, in the Solovetsky camp “debauchery replace[d] the church and the prison courtyard replace[d] the monastery.”14
In his works on Russian laughter, Likhachev referred to Bakhtin respectfully, but in his memoirs he presented a more complex picture of the relationship between the intellectual journeys of these two major thinkers. He described the atmosphere in his student group, the Cosmic Academy, as self-consciously carnivalesque. They performed an extended parody of their university; for example, Likhachev held the title of “Professor of Melancholic Philosophy.” In fact, Likhachev hints that Bakhtin derived his idea of the carnival from the rumors he had heard about Likhachev’s Cosmic Academy.15 These words suggest an anxiety of influence, and also a prisoners’ rivalry. Likhachev did not want to be dependent on Bakhtin; in his memoirs, he reversed this relation. Having survived one of the harshest of the Soviet camps and having discovered there firsthand its extreme traditions of obscene argot and folkish laughter, Likhachev did not want to cede his primacy to a fellow convict who sat out the years of terror in mild and boring exile.
The three Soviet historians of the laughing world, Likhachev, Romanov, and Bakhtin, were all survivors of terror. They had much to share, and reading their books one is struck by a strong sense of an external agenda in their speculations about the distant past. Eloquent and penetrating, their ideas do not grow from the textual material itself; rather, an external agenda has organized their material in away that its authors found intuitively plausible. As readers, however, we do not necessarily share this intuition, since we do not share the basics of their life experience. Still, we respond to their works, finding in them not only richness of detail but also creativity and compassion. Because of the Soviet censorship and for other reasons, these three authors did not acknowledge the formative influence of prison, gulag, and famine on their works. Only Likhachev’s memoir interprets his earlier studies as echoes of his extraordinary personal experience. Applying templates forged through recent and common ordeals to distant and variegated pasts, these works of history repeat rather than remember, act out rather than work through. But they have all proved highly successful with later generations of readers. Circulating among survivors, the creative energy of mimetic mourning produced an unusual but coherent worldview that many admirers have cherished, appreciated, and, to some extent, understood.
Gothic Realism
Arrested in 1938, Olga Berggolts, poet, philologist, and graduate of the Institute of History of the Arts, was severely tortured and gave birth to a still-born child. After seven months she was released. Like many intellectuals of the time, she kept a diary, which was confiscated, read and marked, and then returned. She commented on this fact bitterly: “Now my tortured, defiled diaries are in my desk. No matter what I write, I keep feeling all the time that my words will be highlighted by the red pencil. . . . Oh, shame! shame! shame! Never ever was there such unfreedom!” After her release, her diary entries returned again and again to her prison experience. “Why did they subject me to that torment? . . . And what was the point of that unlimited, boundless, savage human suffering, into which my own suffering dipped deeply, but also broadened to the point of madness?” She perceived the long hours of interrogation as unforgivable violations of her subjectivity: “They removed my soul, dug around inside it with their stinking fingers, spat into it, shat on it, then stuffed it back in and said, ‘Carry on with your life.’” She believed that those months in jail had destroyed her not only as a person but also as a Soviet writer: “How will I write the novel about our generation . . . the novel about the agency [sub’ekt] of the epoch, the agency of consciousness, when my consciousness has been subjected to such pogroms, when it has lost its pre-prison balance?”16 But in prison, she also read the other prisoners her verses about Stalin. These verses had already gained her some popularity before her arrest, and the prisoners “loved” them. She stayed in Leningrad throughout the siege of 1941–1944 and would later be celebrated as the major poet of this tragic and heroic time.
Mikhail Bakhtin wrote his treatise on the Renaissance carnival, the most influential book ever written by a Russian cultural historian, in a situation not much different from Berggolts’s. Arrested in 1928, after interrogations Bakhtin was sentenced to five years in the Solovetsky camp, but because of his poor health, the sentence was commuted to a Kazakhstan exile. It may have been the case that there, too, he received special treatment on health grounds. He was unusually lucky, described the treatment in the investigation prison as “humane,” and never complained about the conditions in exile. Despite his poor health, he outlived his investigator, who was shot in 1936, by many decades. Compared to Likhachev and Romanov, Bakhtin was an armchair observer of the underbelly of the Soviet camp system. At the time of his arrest, Bakhtin had already completed his book on Dostoevsky; exceptionally, it was published while he was in jail. From his exile in the steppes of northern Kazakhstan, he watched the collectivization and the resulting famine, which was devastating in that part of the country. His term of exile was completed in 1936, but he did not return to the metropolis. He survived the subsequent years by voluntarily staying in the same remote location, then moving to another odd and remote place, Mordovia, in European Russia, occasionally changing his addresses and effectively “becoming illegal,” as he put it decades later.17 It seems that he complemented his luck with an unusually smart understanding of his time, combined with the competent management of his own life and work.
Several of Bakhtin’s friends were shot while he was in exile. One of them, Pavel Medvedev, was a professor at Leningrad State University and the first editor of the personal documents belonging to the greatest poet of the prerevolutionary era, Aleksandr Blok (according to Bakhtin, Medvedev received the documents from Blok’s widow after becoming her lover). Shortly before Medvedev was arrested and shot in 1938, he helped Bakhtin to obtain a teaching position.18 Another close friend, poet and mystic Boris Zubakin, was accused of organizing an anti-Soviet Masonic lodge, which in this case was a true charge. He was shot in 1937. Yet another friend, the engineer Vladimir Rugovich, shared the same fate. Other members of what we know now as “Bakhtin’s circle,” philosophers Matvei Kagan, Lev Pumpiansky, and Valentin Voloshinov, all died young men in the late 1930s.
According to his biographers, Bakhtin was also close to a major political figure, Nikolai Sukhanov. An active member of the populist party the Socialist Revolutionaries, Sukhanov converted to Marxism and in 1917 joined the Mensheviks, the dissenting part of the Social-Democratic Party. More important, Sukhanov was the author of one of the most detailed memoirs of the revolution of 1917; Lenin read and reviewed Sukhanov’s memoir shortly before his death, and was furious. Sukhanov was also a journalist and editor who published many luminaries of the Russian prerevolutionary Left in his journal, New Life. In the mid-1920s in Moscow, Sukhanov was trying to relaunch the old debates about the Russian peasant commune, an explosive theme on the eve of collectivization. The intense political divisions of early Soviet life ran through his family. Sukhanov’s wife, Galina Flakserman, was a Bolshevik who worked for Lenin and other top leaders of the revolution; in fact, the vote on the decision to launch the Bolshevik coup of 1917 took place during a conspiratorial meeting held in the couple’s apartment. Reportedly, Flakserman typed some of Bakhtin’s manuscripts for him.19 If Bakhtin needed fresh material on the paradoxes of politics and culture, he could not have found a better source than this family.
Bakhtin was a survivor. His strategy enabled him to outlive Stalinism, physically as well as intellectually. Never talking explicitly about his fear, mourning, or guilt, would appear to have been a part of this strategy. But until the end of his life, Bakhtin was deeply interested in the history and meaning of Russian revolutions and eagerly discussed these topics. Only in 1973 did he feel safe enough to express his regret that in 1917, Prime Minister Aleksandr Kerensky had not suppressed the resurgent Bolsheviks by force.20
Bakhtin was always engaged in Russian literature, from Gogol to the early twentieth-century symbolists, as well as particular manifestations of the Russian folk religion.21 Yet his arrest did seem to bring about a shift. Before his arrest, Bakhtin had been writing a book on a classic of Russian literature, Dostoevsky; in exile, he changed his subject to a classic of European literature, Rabelais. In this effort, Bakhtin was exploring mournful spaces of “world culture,” where the poet Mandelstam, the composer Shostakovich, and the artist Sveshnikov also felt at home (see chapter 5). Before his arrest in 1934, Mandelstam famously said that he belonged to a poetic movement that was defined by a “longing for world culture.”22 Cut off from their roots and living, as Mandelstam wrote in his epigram that mocked Stalin, “without feeling a country under our feet” (see chapter 2), these people were longing for world culture, but in the most unusual ways. In his paradoxical treatise written in 1933 in anticipation of arrest, Conversation about Dante, Mandelstam challenged the received wisdom by describing Dante as “a tortured and hunted man,” full of “internal worries and heavy, vague uneasiness,” who “during all the course of Divina Commedia does not know how to behave, how to step, what to say, how to bow.” If Dante the narrator had descended to hell without Virgil, speculates Mandelstam, we would have had “no saga of ordeals and attractions, but the most grotesque buffoonery.”23 This was a longing for the other combined with a projection of the self, a feeding ground for creative and deconstructive exercises. Like Mandelstam, Bakhtin expressed his fear and mourning in terms of “world culture,” which for him meant Rabelais and other great figures of the European Renaissance, from Cervantes to Shakespeare. Like Mandelstam, Bakhtin perceived this culture in highly original ways.
Bakhtin’s carnival is an event in which social roles are swapped and established truths mocked. The powerless become strong, subalterns are eloquent, authorities agree to be ridiculed, and the whole social machinery reveals its contingent and laughable nature. Bakhtin speculates that in medieval Europe, historical carnivals were regular feasts of “popular culture,” which in the later cultural epochs migrated into the literary works of authors such as Rabelais, Goethe, and Dostoevsky. However, he is also inclined to understand whole epochs as carnivalesque. In periods of social turmoil, “when truths change,” all life becomes a carnival: this is the closest Bakhtin comes to dealing with Russia’s revolution in this work. Another crucial concept in his dissertation is “gothic realism.” Later, Bakhtin would drop this warped concept from his vocabulary, but in the dissertation that he wrote in Kazakhstan and Mordovia, he argues that “gothic realism” infused a large part of medieval culture, including chimeras and monsters on cathedral walls; stories of the descent into the kingdom of the dead; fables about animals and spirits; and obscenity in popular language, which regularly refers to the “gothic” enigma of fertile death. Other examples of “gothic realism” provided by Bakhtin include the art of Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, two masters of the monstrous, and also images of “pregnant, laughing death,” which, Bakhtin says, is the very essence of the grotesque (see chapter 8). These images represent “two bodies in one,” the dying body and the new body about to be born. Despite his lifelong infatuation with Freud, Bakhtin is rarely interested in sexuality as such: when he mentions genitals, they are symbols of procreation, which in this gothic world happens on the edge of death. Representing the collective and immortal body of the people rather than any egotistic and perishable personality, Bakhtin’s gothic realism is positive and cheerful: “The very flow of time, the very change of epochs became the subject of ambivalent laughter.” In modern times, laments Bakhtin, this complex imagery has degenerated into “moralizing consolations or theoretical utopianism,” which loosens its connection to both mourning and laughter. All of this is crucial for the Bakhtinian history of literature: “fragments of gothic realism fill the literary space of the last three centuries.”24 Because these double-bodied symbols resurge during the gothic carnival, “there is nothing that is entirely dead: every meaning will celebrate its revival.” Having been to hell and back, Bakhtin plays Virgil rather than Dante: he leads the reader to the “most grotesque buffoonery” but softens its horror with rational explanations and spiritual consolations.
Completed as a dissertation in 1945, Bakhtin’s work on carnival became famous twenty years later when the new, post-Stalinist generation of intellectuals helped to publish and publicize it. This powerful and ambiguous text sends many messages at once, but one thing is undeniable: a feeling of historical and personal loss infused Bakhtin’s study. His emerging book was searching for a meaningful way of dealing with these losses, a way that would promise their compensation or even redemption without “dialectically” erasing the reality of the loss.
In this bitter, self-conscious position, Bakhtin was close to his German contemporary and fellow victim of terror Walter Benjamin. Arguably the most profound analogy to Bakhtin’s dissertation on Rabelais is Benjamin’s dissertation on the seventeenth-century German Trauerspiel, tragic drama of the German Counter-Reformation. One written in 1925 on the Italian island of Capri and the other written throughout the 1930s in the Kazakh town of Kustanai, these dissertations overlap in their politicized readings of the Renaissance and the early baroque period, in their common emphasis on popular culture, and in their themes of mourning and humor. As Bakhtin did with his carnival, Benjamin deliberately extended the meaning of Trauerspiel far beyond its historical period: “For these are not so much plays which cause mourning, as plays through which mournfulness finds satisfaction: plays for the mournful.” Also in a Bakhtinian way, Benjamin wrote about “the characteristic feeling of dizziness” that “the spiritual contradictions” of the baroque epoch induce in the modern reader. Both thinkers sought justification for nascent cultural forms in the distant past, though Benjamin was clearer when he highlighted the “remarkable analogies” between the baroque plays of mourning and expressionism; he even wrote that the authors of Trauerspiel were more successful in their work of mourning for the victims of the Thirty Years War than his contemporary artists who had seen World War I and the failed revolution in Germany. Both Benjamin and Bakhtin struggled to distance their respective subjects, the Trauerspiel and carnival, from the idea of tragedy. Having received the aesthetical tradition that spread from Aristotle to Nietzsche, they both thought it to be inadequate for the new, twentieth-century experience. If in tragedy death is the “ever immanent reality,” said Benjamin, in mourning plays death “frequently takes the form of communal fate.” These mourning plays were so “offensive or even barbaric to refined taste” that they were said to be “written by brutes for brutes.” Like Weimar and early Soviet cultures, mourning plays were “haunted by the idea of the catastrophe” but fought against the “historical ideal of the restoration.”25 Though they never met or read one another, Bakhtin and Benjamin would happily have agreed about many of their historical observations. Even more important for this hypothetical consensus is their similar political experience on the margins of emerging dictatorships, and similar intellectual sources: classical philology, Marxism, Freudianism, and messianic mysticism.
Benjamin and Bakhtin transformed their personal feelings toward their sorrowful times into powerful idioms that became sharable by their followers, both in their countries and abroad, though with very significant delays. Benjamin would work on many different subjects after Capri, but Bakhtin kept rewriting his Kustanai study for decades. Much of the powerful mythology of the first version remained in his book as it was published in 1965 and translated into English in 1993. However, in the new atmosphere of the Thaw, Bakhtin substantially revised the text. He probably thought that the earlier version was too personal a document and hoped that his revisions would make it more objective, less like a dream or myth and more like a conventional piece of scholarship. In the final version, the carnival became more optimistic than it was in the first, less like a mourning ritual and more like a rite of spring, though Bakhtin’s thesis in both versions was that these two events were one. Many additional details and some terminological novelties, such as the replacement of the “gothic” with the “grotesque” and the erasure of the concept that was crucial for the first version, “gothic realism,” worked in this sanguine direction.26 As we know, Benjamin failed his dissertation, but Bakhtin defended his successfully.
White Negroes
Leonid Pinsky, a historian of European literatures, was in jail from 1950 to 1956, and after release, submitted an essay, “The Tragic in Shakespeare,” to a literary journal. His friend, the Shakespearean scholar Aleksandr Anikst, was surprised to see that Pinsky had not revised this essay at all since his arrest. Anikst asked Pinsky: “Is it possible that a hard life experience did not compel you to deepen your understanding of the tragic?” Pinsky responded, “My mind does not change just because they beat my ass.” Anikst, both of whose parents spent many years in the camps, commented that this response was typical for Pinsky: in his longing for world culture, he refused to see a relation between real-life experiences and the work of a cultural historian.27 The responses of other ex-convicts could not have been more different. In 1936, a prominent historian of Russian literature, Yulian Oksman, was arrested in Leningrad. After a year in prison and nine years in some of the harshest camps of the gulag where he worked as a lumberjack, shoemaker, and bathhouse attendant, Oksman developed a set of entirely new ideas, which experts have called his “post-camp worldview.” He told a friend that two terms in the gulag were needed for his epiphany, which he also called his “healing”: for a transformation of this depth, he said, “one term would be insufficient, I did need precisely these ten years.”28 Before his arrest, Oksman was a major expert on Pushkin and the senior editor of the collected works of Pushkin in seventeen volumes, a major accomplishment of the Soviet “science of literature.” It was launched, in a macabre way, in 1937 to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Pushkin’s murder. By then Oksman was already in northern Siberia, in the notorious Kolyma camps.
In many ways an opposite to Bakhtin, Oksman was an archival scholar, a successful bureaucrat, and an active, sometimes aggressive public intellectual. His lifelong passion was the historical and political context of Russian literature, a subject that fit easily with the dominant Marxist worldview that Oksman shared with the 1930s Soviet elite, of which he was a member. He left his legacy in textual work with manuscripts and commentaries, and shunned interpretative speculations. Scholarly contributions of this kind tend to be lacking in glamour, and no biography of Oksman has been written. However, several major publications document his rich correspondence, which presents not only the stoicism of a survivor but also a persistent search for historical metaphors capable of explicating, or even explaining, what it was that had happened to him. Always interested in the rebellious moments of Russian history and literature, after serving his decade-long sentence Oksman focused on the defiant nineteenth-century critic Vissarion Belinsky. Oksman devoted years of work to an encyclopedic volume on Belinsky, but his true labor of love seems to have been the annotated publication of a single, rather obscure document: the letter that Belinsky wrote to Gogol in 1847. Oksman emphasized the fact that he had begun his study of Belinsky’s letter straight after his release from the Kolyma camp, and characterized this work as his “testament.” After a great deal of trouble with the censors, Oksman finally republished this letter, accompanying it with many pages of commentary. Reading the document in question helps us to understand how this textological work was connected to survival in a torture camp.
In the letter, Belinsky commented on Gogol’s last book, which called upon the reader to support the monarchy and proposed a pious compliance with Orthodox teachings as the way to both civil peace and salvation. In strong and creative language, Belinsky accused Gogol of misguiding the reader. “One cannot keep silent when lies and immorality are preached as truth and virtue under the guise of religion and the protection of the knout,” wrote Belinsky. “You failed to realize that [what] Russia . . . needs is not sermons . . . but the awakening in the people of a sense of their human dignity lost for so many centuries amid dirt and refuse; she needs rights and laws.” Instead, wrote Belinsky, Russia “presents the dire spectacle of a country where men traffic in men.” Belinsky means serfdom, and he uses the striking phrase “white Negroes” to describe the Russian peasantry.29 Refuting doubts raised by some previous scholars, Oksman proved the authenticity of this astonishing letter, which is indeed one of the strongest appeals for freedom that has been written in Russian.30 He also demonstrated the importance of this letter as a source for the later Russian practitioners of revolution, such as Mikhail Bakunin. It was Oksman’s agenda to show that Russian literature and criticism led Russian politics and revolution.
A textual example gives a glimpse at what Oksman was trying to achieve through his unusual methods of scholarship. In a fragment of Belinsky’s letter, he spotted an infelicitous wording, “dignity lost . . . amid dirt and refuse” (v griazi i navoze). He wrote to a friend that he had doubts about the accuracy of this standard reading of Belinsky’s manuscript. Having reviewed three available drafts of this letter, he reached an alternative reading that satisfied him more: “dignity lost . . . amid dirt and unfreedom” (v griazi i nevole) was his preferred reading.
It took three years for Oksman to obtain official permission to publish his study. Twenty-five separate internal reviews of the publication were commissioned, and the publication was discussed at ten meetings of the editorial board, but still was not approved for release. In 1952, Oksman presented an ultimatum to the provincial university in Saratov where he taught: either his study of that letter would be published, or he would leave the university. This time, he won, but his version of this subversive text did not make its way into many of the subsequent collections of Belinsky’s and Gogol’s works. When American or Russian university students read Belinsky’s famous letter to Gogol today, it is unlikely that they are reading Oksman’s version.
Oksman’s correspondent, Kornei Chukovsky, a charismatic critic and children’s poet, wrote to him in 1961 that Belinsky’s anniversary in Moscow “went as they [the authorities] wanted it to be. At least it was clear that the great freedom-lover was foreign to them—foreign and hostile.”31 When Khrushchev’s campaign of de-Stalinization reached its peak in 1962, Oksman decided that the time for more direct action had arrived. Among all the intellectual survivors of the gulag, he seems to be the only one who understood his mission as one of not only mourning for the victims but also taking revenge on the perpetrators. In 1963, he passed to an émigré Russian press an article in which he named the colleagues who had denounced him, and many others, in the 1930s-1950s; these people still held power in Moscow and Leningrad. This publication was unprecedented; moreover, Oksman did not deny his authorship.32 The same year Oksman also passed Akhmatova’s Requiem and some of Mandelstam’s verses for publication in the West.33 In response, KGB agents would search Oksman’s apartment once again, this time on the basis of the mistaken hypothesis that it was Oksman who was publishing stories in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz (Siniavsky would be revealed as the real author behind Tertz about a year later).34 But strangely, Oksman was not rearrested. Toward the end of his life, he had plans for an epic, large-scale memoir that would survey the whole path of the intelligentsia through the Soviet era. He died before he managed to realize this bitter project.35
Intellectual prisoners often returned from the camp with a particular interest in the deep, primordial mechanisms that drive humanity in the conditions when the commitments of culture and civility have been forgotten by some and never learned by others. The military translator and future ethnographer Eleazar Meletinsky was arrested in 1942, released in the chaos of war in 1943, arrested again in 1949, and served time in the gulag until 1954. His experience ranged from five months of solitary confinement to the overcrowded barracks to the camp hospital, where he was saved from hunger and death. Later a charismatic scholar of myth and folklore with a cosmopolitan breadth, he once interrupted his long, detailed memoir of his camp experience with an interesting aside. Why was it, he asked himself, that he found himself mentioning the ethnicity of every friend or enemy whom he met in the camps? In the overfilled cells and barracks, he explained, when everyone had an equal—and equally uncertain—fate, ethnicity was the anchor that helped to sort out human relationships. It is clear that Meletinsky’s subsequent interest in deep, archetypical mechanisms of myth, folklore, and primordial culture was sparked and developed during his time in the prisons and camps. Another survivor of the gulag with somewhat similar interests who also shaped the Soviet and post-Soviet humanities, Lev Gumilev was the son of Anna Akhmatova and her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, who was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921. Lev Gumilev served in the northern camps from 1938 to 1944 and then again, in Kazakhstan and Siberia, from 1949 to 1956. There he developed his idiosyncratic but highly influential theories about mechanisms of “ethnogenesis” and the role of “passionarity” in nation building. There was not much that was similar in the conclusions of these two scholars, one Jewish, cosmopolitan, and thoroughly structuralist, the other nationalist, anti-Semitic, and desperately judgmental.36 However, their starting point was the same: the cramped, all-male, deliberately primitive cells and barracks, and this experience defined their lifetime interests. In the Europe and America of the 1960s, the overwhelming preoccupation with the primitive had postcolonial roots; in the Soviet Union, former inmates of the gulag promoted and propelled parallel developments.
The World Upside Down
Unsurprisingly, a historian and survivor wrote the best analysis of the Soviet labor camps after Solzhenitsyn. In 1981, an archaeologist and professor at Leningrad State University, Lev Klein, was arrested for his alleged homosexuality. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison; a retrial shortened his term, and he served about eighteen months in a prison and labor camp. A prolific scholar whose books range from a reading of Homer to the origins of the Russian state, Klein summarized his camp experience in a short book, The World Upside Down.37 In a narrative that combines a personal story with ethnographic analysis, Klein reveals the hierarchical structure of the community of inmates; the unconditional power of charismatic “thieves” and the pathetic life of the rogues; and the unlimited violence that was applied routinely all across this community. Klein believes that “the subculture of Soviet labor camps,” with its strict hierarchy and unlimited violence, is unique in modern times, though he sees many analogies for this structure among the primordial tribes, as anthropologists know them. The subculture of the camps shares with these tribes such rituals and institutions as initiations, castes, tattoos, self-mutilation, and others. Klein also documents the sexual dynamics of this all-male community, with its sharp distinction between active and passive homosexuals and the subordinate, stigmatized position of the latter. Initiation rituals, beatings, and rapes underline the informal hierarchy of the camp and structure many aspects of its life. Klein also tells the story of his own survival in this harsh environment. He makes it clear that the late-Soviet camp, which he observed in the 1980s, in many ways represents an even more brutal and debased version of the old Stalinist gulag system. Detailed and analytical, Klein’s book called for a radical transformation of the Russian penitentiary system, one of the most vicious and also most enduring of the Soviet legacies.
Interestingly, Klein is the only historian who analyzes the structure of power in camp and prison with such clarity. It is not only the absence of censorship that makes this new analysis feasible but also a late-Soviet and post-Soviet disenchantment with old romantic sentiments. There is no trace of populism in Klein’s relentless narrative, no belief in the self-generating morality of the common folk. Klein’s only hope is the disciplining force of “culture,” which he understands in moralistic, elitist terms that seem obsolete in the Western context. For Klein, “culture” means the enlightening, civilizing, and standardizing “culture” as Matthew Arnold understood it, not the playful and relativist culture of postmodern thought. But this top-down attitude does not prevent Klein’s narrative from expressing a very human compassion for the victims of the state that had created the camps and of the gangs that ruled them.
Many of the details that Klein relates in this book are so cruel and transgressive that reading it is almost unbearable. However, in 1990, after a heated debate in their professional journal, Russian ethnographers largely endorsed Klein’s conclusions. A professional ethnographer who served in a labor camp between 1949 and 1954, Vladimir Kabo supported Klein. In his own memoir, Kabo remembers how he first developed his interest in the history of magic and religion in the gulag; decades later, he became an expert on the aboriginal cultures of Australia and emigrated to that country in 1990. In his response to Klein’s essay, Kabo notes differences between his experience and Klein’s.38 Kabo confirms that in his experience, the camp of the early 1950s had not featured the sadistic, systemic violence to the extent that Klein describes in his essay on the late-Soviet camps. During the thirty years that separated their terms, Soviet camps have only become crueler, says Kabo.
Looking at the historical interests of the camp survivors, I discern several major preoccupations. In and after jail, one group of historians focused on the macrohistory of power. Theirs was a history from above, focused on external and internal colonization, and I discern in their works grand-scale parables of collectivization and the gulag. Another group of historians worked on the microhistories of violence, misery, and humor that they discovered in the camps. Theirs was a history from below, and they developed a sharp, human, and consistent view on this history. In the primitive and the primordial, these historians found allegories for their camp experience. They strove to synthesize this experience with their historical material, but the very nature of this experience meant that their lives and sensibilities were radically different from their readers’. This is why some of these historians puzzle, surprise, even shock us, and polarize our responses. The most extreme and for us almost inconceivable experience of violence and survival in prison and the camps left its traces on these historical works.
First, this was a bitter experience of social injustice, evil, and contingency. The intellectual prisoners thought and talked through such problems ceaselessly. Is it mere chance that I am in prison? If my suffering has been caused by the Soviet regime, should this regime be viewed as a random and arbitrary freak of nature, or a matter of law-based historical necessity? As a prisoner, Dmitry Likhachev gave an improvised talk to his peers on the problem of chance. He essentially denied its existence. Every person defines his fate, consciously or not, and there is no such thing as contingency, said Likhachev. For example, romantic poets lived short lives while realist writers lived long ones, and in both cases this was a matter of choice. In the same way, each and every prisoner, he said, determined the circumstances of his own arrest. This was what Likhachev believed in 1928; when he composed his memoirs fifty years later he mocked these juvenile ideas as the kind of nonsense that was typical among the prisoners.
Second, being in the camp broadened the survivors’ social horizon to an extent that was unimaginable elsewhere. An intellectual like Likhachev met many kinds of people in the Solovetsky camp that he would have been unlikely to meet otherwise: Orthodox monks, serial murderers, old Bolsheviks, professional thieves, religious sectarians, navy officers, Uzbek nationalists, and many others. Almost inescapably, the surviving intellectuals in the camp became lay ethnographers. On a more general level, for these and other intellectuals the wild, suffering population of camps and prisons became the Soviet Other, a distant analogue of the noble savage of the Enlightenment.
A third feature of the gulag’s intellectual life was its radicalism. In the life of the camp that Likhachev found “fantastic,” “monstrous,” and “nightmarish,” the routine mechanisms of reality testing did not work. Rationality and common sense are calibrated for civilized life, not for the “theater of the absurd” that was the camp. Therefore, wrote Likhachev, the ideas that he and his peers discussed in the camp were typically “extravagant” and “contrarian.” They espoused “impossible theories” and set out to demolish “the common views,” that is, the views that were common outside of the camps and that had now been so radically destabilized by their camp experiences. When the old, blind, and very established Likhachev dictated these lines, his attitude toward his own past was highly ironical. But he could still remember the appeal and the power of these radical ideas. He could still make out the unmistakable music of the gulag in the background of both Bakhtin’s book on the carnival and the literary scholarship that Siniavsky produced in the camp, forty years after Likhachev had served his term.39 The intellectuals from the camps still recognized one another from afar.