Constructing a New Past:
The Soviet Experience in Post-Soviet Historiography

Peter Holquist
Cornell University

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that polity’s past finally can be treated as "history." Of course, this does not mean that the past is no longer at issue but that it is at issue in different ways. While the Soviet Union may be no more, its past marches on in popular memory and the professional historical literature.

For seventy-five years the Soviet regime used history to legitimate itself. Now, with its passing, history is used to frame that regime and its society, most often to delegitimate it. At the grossest level, the most obvious change has been the reversal of ideological markers. What was once good is now bad (1917, socialism, etc.), and vice versa. But, at a more profound level, much of the topography of historical memory itself remains strikingly unchanged. My paper will focus on three ways in which the Soviet regime’s matrix of history has stubbornly outlived the polity it was meant to justify. And I should note that my observations are equally true for much of Western scholarship as they are for what is now termed otechestvennaia istoriia.

1. The first realm in which Soviet self-representations have carried over into the post-Soviet world is in the form of "Soviet exceptionalism." The Soviet Union presented itself as the bearer of the future and all that was good for mankind. Thus the "socialist world" (meaning not all socialist countries, but only those following the Soviet lead) confronted the "capitalist world." There is now a tendency to maintain this monolithic image, but to invert its signifier from one of salvation to that of ruin and devastation. What is strikingly absent is any comparative understanding of the Soviet experience. Many post-Soviet works simply assert the distinctiveness of the Soviet regime and the society it produced. Whether the Soviet Union could or should be compared to non-totalitarian regimes is a point of dispute. But it is notable that there has not yet even been a systematic comparative study of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist USSR, a comparison often asserted but as yet not convincingly analyzed.

2. And the tendency to appropriate the Soviet past as a hermetically sealed spatial realm (or, at best, one shared solely with Nazi Germany) is compounded by an even more successful heritage of Soviet self-understanding: Soviet history itself as a discrete chronological bloc. The success of this self-appellation is apparent in the title of this paper: the only way of nominating the current period is not as yet by its own attributes, but as "post"-Soviet. (This conference’s agenda--"Russia at the end of the Twentieth Century--is thus a refreshing departure in situating Russia not solely in relation to its Soviet past.) Whereas 1917 once marked the shift to building socialism, now it most often signifies the downward spiral into degradation and tyranny. Conveniently, the model of a discretely Soviet chronological period means that all the negatives identified with it can be neatly compartmentalized and thus dispensed with--or, if negative features continue to exist, need only be imputed as perezhitki, be they structural or psychological, of sovetskii byt. The demonization of the Soviet period thus determines the romanticization of the Imperial past, a phenomenon most glaringly evident in the fairy-tale like portrayal of Rossiia, kotoruiu my poteriali.

As much as the events of Soviet history, this bracketing off of the Soviet period does much to set Russia apart from the general European scene. One way in which the study of Russian history remains different from that of other European societies is in the virtual absence from the Russian narrative of three of the most crucial years in twentieth-century world history: 1914-1917. Look at any general textbook of imperial Russia: it is likely to end in 1914. Pick up a book on Soviet history: it begins in 1917. To the extent that the years 1914-1917 are treated, they are presented as the antechamber of Revolution. Russia’s First World War experience, in both the Western and Russian literature, has been virtually devoured by 1917. What does it mean, for instance, that the event which scholars such as Arno Mayer, George Mosse and Paul Fussell have identified as having established the principles and matrix of modern memory--the First World War--in Russia was virtually occluded by the Revolution? Yet contemporaries such as Peter Struve and Maxim Gorky rightly noted that the Revolution could be seen just as much as growing out of the war as the war could be seen as merely an epiphenomenon feeding into the Revolution. From this vantage point, the Bolshevik regime does not mark so much a sharp break from idyllic Russia of 1913 as an extension of total war practices already emerging, within both state and society, from 1914. While it may be emotionally satisfying to blame the Bolsheviks for the massive surveillance of society, the practice actually began under the Imperial regime during the First World War, a practice parallelled, incidentally, by all other major European powers during the First World War. The Bolsheviks thus were not distinct in conceiving of or deploying surveillance, but rather for retaining it after the Great War’s end (not so inexplicable if one believed, as the Bolsheviks did, that the national violence of the Great War had simply been recast along the axis of civil war and class struggle).

Demonstrations that "Bolshevik" practices actually emerged out of the Imperial period, and especially the Imperial total war regime, remain unwelcome. In 1994 S. Nelipovich addressed one of the major lacunae in Russian twentieth century history with his account of the Russian Imperial regime’s deportation policy during the First World War, a policy that resulted in the mass, forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of innocent Imperial subjects (Nelipovich originally calculated the number of forced deportees--Russian imperial subjects--at 600,000; he has now revised this figure upwards to one million). Yet as interesting as Nelipovich’s article itself was the response of the editors of the volume in which it appeared. They felt compelled to include a disclaimer, running at the bottom of five of the article’s thirteen pages of text, apologizing for Russian Imperial policy as "non-systematic" and in any case analogous to the measures of other states. What is striking here is the need felt, in 1994, to salvage the Russian Imperial past as one’s own, in a way the compilers would obviously not have felt about having to "contextualize" dekulakization or the Soviet state’s deportations during the Second World War.

There are some encouraging counter-eddies to the prevalent current. The works of Yuri Slezkine (Arctic Mirrors), Aleksandr Etkind (Eros nevozmozhnogo) and Katerina Clark (Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution), to take but three examples, suggest the value of examining Russian history across the 1917 divide. Subsequent publications by Nelipovich have appeared without apologetic commentary. Perhaps most encouraging, scholars can move beyond past Soviet claims to specificity and instead have begun to study how the Soviet state sought to inscribe its own meaning into historical events like 1917, and how it succeeded in doing so to such an extent that its inscriptions remain after the regime has collapsed. For this reason, Fred Corney’s forthcoming work on how the Bolsheviks coded 1917 and especially October within their own narrative--and how this coding tenaciously continues to determine even how October’s ideological opponents see it--will thus be a significant correction to our views of the Soviet system’s foundation event.

3. Yet perhaps the most profound way in which the signification has been reversed but the underlying structure of memory has remained (Yuri Lotman, after all, long ago observed the tendency of Russian culture to binary systems) is the failure to deal with history in a way that accords for the possibility of simultaneity and ambivalence. People clearly are able to see both bad and good in the Soviet past: one need only contrast the prevalent condemnation of the regime’s atrocities with the nostalgia evinced by Stalin-era films or for the camaraderie and idealism that the Stalinist period undoubtedly fostered alongside its mass "repressions" (quotes because the term "repression," an artifact of Khrushchev’s measured distancing of the Stalinist past, should no longer serve as a euphemism for individuals’ deliberate execution or imprisonment). Yet all too rarely does historical memory manage to deal with the two phenomena--idealism and persecution, fear and hope--simultaneously. All too frequently these contradictory aspects simply oscillate. At the crudest level, this inability to see ambivalence has led to a purely manichean vision of the past, with the forces of light arrayed against the forces of darkness. Thus the almost ridiculous hair-splitting about who was a "good" and who a "bad" Bolshevik--determined almost exclusively by these individuals’ date of execution rather than by their actual actions. This one-dimensional representation, with a person’s standing determined largely by their time and circumstances of persecution alone, means that representations of the Soviet past becomes a veritable camera obscura of those times. Nowhere is this truer than with the interesting phenomenon of "memory books" (pamiatnye knigi), tragically thick books which list the victims of the Terror by name, date of birth, social status, date of arrest and date of execution, sometimes including even a mug shot. While their purpose is laudable--to put an individual face on Stalin’s mass persecutions--they result in flattening these individual lives out into the very categories of the regime which devoured them. For this reason, works such as Aleksandr Zinov’ev’s "Nashei iunosti polėt," Lev Kopelev’s I sotvoril sebe kumira and even Joseph Brodsky’s "In a Room and Half" are invaluable less for any empirical material they might include than as examples of how to work through nostalgia, ambivalence and human complexity.

The much-celebrated opening of the archives will not help here, in part because they do not contain the type of documentation that has proved most useful in other cases. (Here I mean specifically the materials generated by prosecution of perpetrators which have provided the foundation for pathbreaking and deeply layered analyses by Christopher Browning, Mark Mazower and others in the Nazi case.) More profoundly, the problem is no longer one of archival access or even access to relevant materials. We suffer not from a shortage of materials, but from a surfeit of them. Tellingly, the most representative genre of post-Soviet historical study is the documentary compilation, bursting with primary source documentation but eschewing interpretation. From Karelia to Buriatia, Russian scholars and archivists are publishing raw source material. Some are of greater value, some of less. But our problem is no longer one of access; it has become one of interpretation. One might suggest that if there are any blank spots now, they lie more in our conceptualizations than in the archives themselves.