The historians who conducted the interviews in Stalingrad not only documented the work and impact of the ideological apparatus but participated in it. As Soviet citizens they felt called on to help the Red Army defeat Hitler’s Germany. They understood their project as an important contribution to the education and mobilization of Soviet society in time of war. Like the writers and artists who volunteered as war correspondents and photographers in the Red Army, the historians wanted to make themselves useful. They did this by reviving the avant-garde documentary style that Russian critics, writers, and filmmakers had developed after the 1917 revolution.226 The participants in this avant-garde movement took as their subject the Soviet world, where, from their vantage point, a drama of monumental importance was unfolding. They believed it was misguided and senseless to retain traditional art forms such as the novel, whose invented world turned its back on the real one. The critic Sergei Tretyakov argued that writing a work like War and Peace in the Soviet era would be anachronistic. The preferred medium was the newspaper, which day after day and page after page reported news of Soviet industrialization and fostered it in the process. News coverage and eyewitness interviews not only represented reality; they also ordered raw facts into a meaningful framework. As documentarians, artists, and intellectuals were “operatives” participating in the “life of the material” and engineering a new world.227
Historians and Communist party representatives alike embraced the documentary aesthetic at the beginning of the 1920s, and together initiated a series of large-scale historical projects. The first was the Commission for the Study of the October Revolution and of the Russian Communist Party (Istpart). Founded in 1920, it recorded the history of the Bolshevik uprising for future generations. In Moscow, Petrograd, and numerous other Russian cities, “commemorative evenings” were held in which people relayed their experiences of the 1917 upheaval. The directors of the commission served as mediators in a system of history workshops run through local party bureaus, municipal administrations, and newspaper offices. The directors wanted to gather as many eyewitnesses as possible; they believed that bearing witness to the founding moment of Soviet history would make them active participants in the revolution as well as inspire readers.228 Despite these high expectations, however, the commission’s publication output was meager. As the history of the revolution became entangled in the battle for Lenin’s legacy, party leaders began to censor the eyewitness accounts. By the time The Short Course of the History of the All-Union Communist Party appeared in 1938, most Istpart documents had been expunged from the official record and confined to state archives.
In 1931, in the midst of the first five year plan, the writer Maxim Gorky conceived of a grand literary project: every large factory in the Soviet Union—he had over three hundred in mind—would write its own history and include as many workers as possible as coauthors. A staff of almost one hundred writers and journalists working full-time supervised the mammoth project. Their job was to teach factory workers documentary techniques and expand their historical consciousness by encouraging them to record their own experiences. Gorky asked the editors to collect memories primarily from “shock workers,” working-class heroes who far surpassed their work quotas. Gorky embraced the ideas of Nietzsche but interpreted them in a socialist vein. He believed that every person came into the world a hero, but that heroic essence would unfold only if it received proper support. In Gorky’s eyes the hero had an important function as a teacher, “a HUMAN BEING in capital letters” who showed others how to become more human than they already were. The project’s staff members were to foster a society-wide emergence of socialist heroes while learning from the stories they collected and reforging themselves in a collectivist spirit.229 By the time war broke out in 1941, twenty volumes had been published in the series History of the Factories and Plants. Among them was the well-received volume People of the Stalingrad Tractor Factory (1934). It presented a variety of literary sketches and photographic portraits of factory workers, and included an introduction by Gorky and a closing essay by the writer Leopold Averbakh. The work showcased the many functions of the project’s authors: observers, creators, participants, and literary engineers of mass transformation.230
In 1931 another historical project began under Gorky’s supervision: the history of the Russian Civil War. Aesthetically and institutionally similar to his previous work but much larger in scale, it was not intended to be a military history in the traditional sense. Rather, it aimed to depict the heroic individuals who fought in the Civil War, be they workers, peasants, or soldiers. It was to be the start of a new Marxist historiography of the masses that upended traditional hierarchies and mobilized each and every participant. Fifteen narrative volumes were planned, supplemented by documents, scholarly analysis, memoirs, art books, and photo albums. The project was fueled in part by Gorky’s concern that the millions of peasants entering the urban industrial workforce in the 1930s could undermine the spirit of the proletarian revolution; all the more reason to invoke this spirit in the life histories of working-class heroes for the political education of “unfinished” workers from rural provinces.231 The Civil War project eventually acquired gigantic dimensions, with local commissions in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East. By 1933, three thousand eyewitness accounts had been recorded. The commission directors in Moscow created a catalog of 100,000 index cards and a bibliography of more than 10,000 books.232
The project’s chief editor was the young historian Isaak Mints. The work, full of intense exchanges with Gorky, was no doubt a formative experience for Mints, who had served as a commissar in the Civil War. 233 He learned to manage a large-scale historical study with multiple field offices and countless workers, to conduct eyewitness interviews, and to embrace Gorky’s idea of the socialist hero. The Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War, which Mints founded in December 1941, primarily relied on the institutional and intellectual resources of the Civil War project.234
Isaak Mints was born in 1896 in the Ukrainian mining region of Dnepropetrovsk. The son of a Jewish merchant, he wanted to study at the University of Kharkov but was denied admission on account of his religious background. Instead, he joined the revolutionary movement, becoming a member of the Bolshevik party in April 1917, and fighting in the Red Army when the Civil War broke out in early 1918. Mints quickly rose to commissar in a Cossack division, where he was in charge of political education. In 1920 he was named head commissar in a prestigious Cossack corps.235 (One can only imagine the chutzpah required of Mints to hold his own among the Cossacks, who were infamous for their anti-Jewish hatred.)236 After the Civil War he completed a degree in history at the Institute for the Red Professors and later became its deputy director. In the 1920s he wrote about the history of the Civil War. In 1935 he completed his doctoral work, and by 1936 he had become a corresponding member of the Academy of the Sciences.237
In 1935 the first large volume of the Civil War history appeared. But it was soon withdrawn and pulped, as many of the eyewitnesses and several of the editors were swept up in Stalin’s purges. The revised edition appeared in 1938. Neither it nor the second volume, published four years later, bears any resemblance to Gorky’s idea of a workers’ history.238 Instead, they describe the political conflicts of 1917, glorify Stalin, and demonize those denounced in the show trials of 1936–1938. In the run-up to the first volume’s publication, Stalin met frequently with Gorky, Mints, and the other editors, eventually making seven hundred corrections to the manuscript.239 By then, Mints must have understood the political implications of historical publishing in the Soviet Union. The materials he assembled portrayed Stalin and his comrade in arms Voroshilov as revolutionary liberators. From here it was only a small step to Stalin’s apotheosis as the agent of world history in The Short Course of the History of the All-Union Communist Party. Many researchers have alleged that Mints coauthored The Short Course, but available sources provide no supporting evidence.240
Isaak Mints, late 1920s
In 1984, looking back, Mints recalled that the idea to write the history of the Great Patriotic War occurred to him several weeks after fighting broke out.241 Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812—Russia’s first Patriotic War—had been on his mind. He may have been influenced by War and Peace, Tolstoy’s novel about the events of 1812, which in the summer of 1941 was reprinted in large numbers and consulted by many Soviet citizens looking for historical and moral orientation:242
How did that business start? It was July 1941, a hard time. Our armies were retreating, fighting their way out. At that difficult time I wrote a letter to the Central Committee: I understand that conditions are tough. But think how much better our understanding of the Patriotic War of 1812 would have been if its participants had left us their stories. We must not waste time now. We must record current events. Later mankind will ask how it all happened. I proposed that we create a commission that would gather materials, study, analyze, and create a chronicle of this great epic. Weeks went by. There was no answer. I realized that history was probably the last thing we needed to worry about. That would be true if there were no connection between history and the present. But there is a connection—a direct one. I was very worried, called several times, and then lost hope.
On August 27, 1941, the Central Committee—possibly at Mints’s urging—discussed creating a chronicle of the Great Patriotic War but rejected the idea as impractical.243 The timing was inopportune: by the summer of 1941 the Wehrmacht had pushed far into the Soviet Union’s interior, with German troops surrounding Smolensk, just 220 miles from Moscow. Even for historical optimists—which all communists were—spinning these circumstances into a Soviet success story would be difficult. The situation continued to worsen in the following weeks. On October 8, General Zhukov reported to Stalin that the last Soviet line of defense around Moscow was crumbling, and on October 15 Stalin ordered the evacuation of the capital. The tide did not begin to turn until November, when the Germans had to halt their pincer offensive and fresh Soviet troops were deployed on the Moscow front. Stalin’s decision to stay in the city, together with his public speeches on the anniversary of the revolution on November 6 and 7, also did their part to boost Soviet morale. On December 5 the Red Army began its counteroffensive against Army Group Center.244
Most institutes of the Academy of Sciences and their staff were evacuated farther east in October. Mints and some of his coworkers refused to leave. It was a courageous decision: as later became known, German intelligence agents had listed the editorial office of the “History of the Civil War,” located on 9 Comintern Street, among the “strategic objects” that were to be seized following the conquest of Moscow.245 In his diary Mints merely noted that on November 25, Georgy Alexandrov, party secretary for agitation and propaganda, mandated the creation of a commission to collect documents and materials for a chronicle of the Patriotic War.246 Two weeks later, on December 10, the Moscow Regional Party Committee, with First Secretary Shcherbakov presiding, passed a directive creating the Commission on the Establishment of a Chronicle of the Defense of Moscow.247 Alexandrov was appointed to chair the commission, with Mints as his deputy. Other members included Communist party philosopher Pavel Yudin, GlavPURKKA official Fyodor Kuznetsov, Pravda’s editor in chief Pyotr Pospyelov, and other representatives of the Moscow Regional Party Committee. Mints was entrusted with building a task force of around twenty researchers from the Academy of Sciences to gather documents on the war and write a daily chronicle of events. According to the directive, local party administrations were to assist the commission with collecting the materials. It also mentioned installing commission branches in large factories to document wartime output. Journalists, writers, war illustrators, and other artists were to provide advice and assistance, while the Main Political Administration of the Red Army was to supply the commission with newspapers, brochures, reports on the political climate, and documents from army life. The directive bore the hallmarks of Gorky’s grand historical projects. Mints confirmed this in his brief diary entry for December 11: “In a word, it was suggested to use all the editorial experience of The History of the Civil War.”
Before the commission was officially established, Mints began searching for staff. On November 30 he gave a lecture to a packed crowd of six hundred researchers at the House of Scholars, outlining the commission’s goals and calling on audience members to participate. “One could feel,” he subsequently noted in his diary, “that the audience was seeking and expecting to be used in work, to be instructed what to do. They were waiting for leadership.”248 One week later Mints visited the Moscow front. In a division made up of Moscow communists he met historian Arkady Sidorov and three associates from his Civil War project.249 The next day Mints ran across two earlier staff members in another division: he asked army command to place them in different units to ensure maximum benefit for the commission.250 Over the next weeks Mints assembled a small task force. By July 1942 the Civil War research unit had returned to Moscow after being evacuated, and Mints had gathered forty permanent staff members—historians, literary scholars, bibliographers, and stenographers.251
In the first months the commission mainly focused on the defense of Moscow. As new branches were set up, the staff began to collect materials from other battle sites: Leningrad, Tula, Odessa, Sevastopol, and, in December 1942, Stalingrad. A separate chronicle for each city was planned. Early on, Mints had envisaged two further publications. One was the history of the Red Army beginning with the units that had received the coveted Guards status (awarded for extraordinary valor in combat). In March 1942 an internal commission memo declared, “It is paramount to ensure that all Guards units and all divisions have their combat history recorded. That is the most important order of business of the day, as the history of a military unit is excellent material for educating soldiers, and for transmitting experience, knowledge, and military tradition. That will help in the creation of a great history of the Great Patriotic War in the future, after victory.”252 The troops in the Guards divisions were accorded a similar function to the shock workers in Gorky’s history of the Soviet industry. Just as the most productive workers served as role models for laborers from rural villages, the Guards units were to show regular troops how to be heroes. Gorky’s heroic model found even clearer expression in the second publication Mints was planning: an encyclopedia of Soviet heroes—a collection of short biographies assembled from interviews and other documents for every Soviet soldier who had been awarded a gold star. The purpose of this encyclopedia was to identify shining examples and encourage readers to emulate them.
The commission’s other areas of concentration were the partisan movement, the war economy, Soviet women and non-Russian nationalities in battle, and the German occupation. Mints turned to the last subject immediately after the Historical Commission was established. On December 26, 1941, he traveled with a delegation of scientists and engineers to Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy’s estate outside Tula that had temporarily fallen into German hands. The delegation was to inventory the destruction wreaked by the invaders on the estate and the state museum there. Mints and his staff, accompanied by a stenographer, spoke with museum personnel and farmers from the neighboring kolkhoz who had witnessed the Germans firsthand. The resulting publication provided a key impetus for the creation, in November 1942, of the Extraordinary Commission for the Investigation of Crimes of the German-Fascist Invaders. (At the Nuremberg trials the Soviets presented the documentary evidence collected by this commission.)253
Notably for the Stalin era, Mints acted mostly without official mandate. He quickly renamed the Commission on the History of the Defense of Moscow the Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War. He even recruited workers for his expanded project, though he was unable to get the blessing of party heads, and with them their resources and authorization.254 (It should be remembered that Gorky’s projects of the 1930s were formed by Central Committee decrees and thus stood under the supervision of the party.)255 In his diary Mints complained about the bureaucracy and the lack of support from the Academy of Sciences.256 His protests and the uncertain state of the commission show how much personal control Mints had over the project and how much depended on his initiative, though nominally he was only its vice president.
Professor I. I. Mints lecturing to Red Army commanders near Mozhaisk, February 16, 1942. Illustrator: A. I. Yermolayev
According to a staff member, Mints traveled to the front multiple times during the war and held hundreds of lectures for political officers and soldiers. Again and again, he impressed those present with his tireless energy.257 Mints’s signature appears frequently in the handling of the source materials. He repeatedly reminded his staff to collect materials impartially and focus on documents and materials normally left out of the archive: army newspapers, brochures, leaflets, political reports, film spools, personal letters, diaries, oral histories.258 Their task was to record civilian war efforts as well as combat operations. Following the documentary spirit of Gorky’s projects, Mints envisioned an histoire totale encompassing all the war’s participants through a variety of media.
In the beginning interviews were only one of many sources of information used by the commission; over time they came to dominate its work.259 This was not least because of their popularity among the eyewitnesses. Soldiers and partisans pressed for interviews. As one said, they believed that “we have earned attention and our place in history.”260 Due to the many staff members and institutions involved in the project, Mints had guidelines drawn up for carrying out interviews: “It is necessary to record live stories of individual commanders, political workers, and soldiers about specific combat episodes, and about entire time periods of their lives, their encounters, thoughts, feelings, and so on.” Mints recommended that a unit’s commander and chief of staff be interviewed first. This top-down view would give historians helpful perspective when later questioning individual soldiers, commanders, and political workers who had heroically distinguished themselves. Each interview, the guidelines explained, must contain basic information on the respondent: “biographical details about each storyteller: brief information about the date and place of birth, name, patronymic, home address, party affiliation, and work prior to the war. In certain cases (of particular interest) the biography should be taken down in detail. Such work is best carried out with the help of stenography or, in case and a stenographer is unavailable, by brief hand notation. If the circumstances permit, the notation should be read back to the interviewee and signed by him. It should be indicated when, where, and by whom the notation was made.”261
The central idea was to shed light on the “living person,” “his thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and in connection with that, his place and role in combat.” “It is necessary,” the guidelines underscored, “to collect the notes of individuals on any ‘free’ subject bearing on the history of the unit (a combat episode, a report of some encounter, the enemy, the fighting spirit, etc.).” Mints stressed the importance of encouraging soldiers to speak freely without interruption: “for historians, their private feelings, thoughts, and observations are valuable, and therefore they should be able to say anything they like.”262 The guidelines noted the importance of preserving the memory of the fallen, in addition to recording the voices of war: “It is important to take down the stories about fallen comrades at arms, subordinates, commanders, as well as eyewitness accounts of heroic acts and deaths, in order to most fully preserve the glorious image of the fallen.”263 For Mints, a committed communist, politics was a self-evident part of documentary work. But he believed that it should not be “detached” from individuals and combat, as was often the case, but integrated into the entire complex of events. The guidelines concluded with the following points:
10.Do not gloss over difficulties and shortcomings. Reality should not be made more presentable. Remember the instruction of comrade Stalin that “only in a struggle with difficulties are true cadres forged.”
11.Show the daily routine of the unit (its life, leisure, connection with the home front, correspondence, joy, and grief).
12.Maintain strict historical truth throughout. Carefully check all events, dates, names, and facts by cross-examining people and documents.264