INSIDE THE STALIN ARCHIVES
Discovering the New Russia
By Jonathan Brent
Illustrated. 335 pp. Atlas & Company. $26
Paper Trail
By MARTIN WALKER
In January 1992, Jonathan Brent, the editorial director of Yale University Press, flew to the newly re-established nation of Russia in a bid to secure the rights to publish selected material from Soviet archives for the Annals of Communism project of his press. The previous month, Russia’s new leader, Boris Yeltsin, had declared that the hitherto secret party, state and K.G.B. archives would be opened, and scholars and publishers from around the world were eager to explore and exploit this potential bonanza. There was even heady talk of a Russian version of the Nuremberg trials, with the Communist Party in the dock.
It did not quite work out like that. There was no trial. The K.G.B. archives have been selectively closed, and many obstacles have been placed in the path of researchers; Vladimir Putin’s Russia began reimposing the power and prerogatives of the state in a way that owed as much to czarist as to Soviet traditions. Despite this, Yale University Press, along with the Hoover Institution and some other scholarly enterprises like the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project, have done extraordinary work and fundamentally changed many orthodox views of the Soviet era.
Brent’s engaging memoir, “Inside the Stalin Archives,” reveals as much about the grim realities of post-Soviet life and bureaucracy as it does about the archives themselves. Equipped with little Russian and few contacts, but with an almost palpable sense of decency and honest intentions that illuminate his book, Brent explains for the general reader as well as for specialists how he went about his work in the new Russia. In gloomy offices and run-down party buildings, and even in the old office of the secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, he offered fair contracts to Russian editors and researchers; they were paid as much as their Western counterparts, and promised respect and academic recognition as well.
Through Yeltsin’s wretched early years of poverty and dislocation in the 1990s and through the sleeker but more menacing times of Putin’s oil-enriched restoration of traditional authority, Yale University Press has published more than a score of important books. It has recently published newly discovered stenographic records of some 30 Politburo meetings in the 1930s and ’40s, and it is working on Stalin’s personal archive.
Brent is among the first to stress that none of this could have been achieved without the brave and honest work of Russian archivists and scholars in the Soviet period and after. He relates one haunting anecdote of a respected and elderly historian who just two years ago published a straightforward study that included the historically true statement that Red Army troops had occupied Lithuania even before Hitler’s invasion of 1941. Officially threatened with the loss of his apartment and pension, and retaliation against his daughter’s career if he dared repeat such allegations, he tells Brent: “It is a return to the 1970s. There is nothing to do about it.”
That is a telling point. Russia is not going back to the Terror of the 1930s or to the gulag, but to a softer and greedier form of power that has echoes of Leonid Brezhnev’s years and of prerevolutionary czarism. There will be no return to the period of Lenin’s 1922 memorandum, unearthed by Brent’s Yale project and published in “Yhe Unknown Lenin,” which explains that it was only now “when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh . . . that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy, not stopping [short of] crushing any resistance.”
The Yale project has established beyond doubt that the Soviet authorities knew exactly what kind of social hell they were inflicting. Andrei Vyshinsky, the chief prosecutor during the purge trials of the 1930s and later the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, wrote a memorandum on his 1938 inspection tour of the gulag: “These prisoners have deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human beings. . . . Somebody — obviously hostile — is arranging for people to die en route and to die upon arrival.” That is the classic Stalinist response; for any flaws in the system, sabotage must be responsible.
Among the gems in the archive, Brent tells us, is a cache of pornographic cartoons, idly sketched by Politburo members during their meetings. Stalin drew one graphic scene that illustrated his accompanying note: “For all the sins, past and present, hang Bryukhanov by the testicles. If the testicles hold out, consider him acquitted by trial. If they do not hold, drown him in the river.” Bryukhanov, a commissar of finances, was shot in 1938.
We know a lot about Stalin now, including his fondness for musicals (he even tried his hand at lyrics). After exploring his personal library with its copious annotations, Brent concludes that Stalin was as much intellectual as brute and calls him “an idealist in the sense that he believed completely in the primacy of ideas.” Brent has a point; Stalin believed in his ideas to the death, or as he put it: “mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts — yes, by his thoughts — threatens the unity of the socialist state.”
If one hero emerges from “Inside the Stalin Archives” it is Aleksandr Yakovlev, a former Columbia University graduate student and Soviet ambassador to Canada, and perhaps the real intellectual author of glasnost and perestroika. Yakovlev, badly wounded in the Nazi siege of Leningrad, was a traditional Russian intellectual who had a bumpy career in the party until Gorbachev brought him onto the Politburo to be its most liberal voice. After Gorbachev’s fall, Yakovlev continued to campaign for full disclosure of the Soviet past, and he tells Brent of one of the pivotal moments in the last days of the Soviet regime. In the winter of 1991, when Lithuanian crowds began demonstrating against Soviet rule, Gorbachev asked Yakovlev, “Should we shoot?”
If a single Soviet soldier fired a single bullet on the unarmed crowds, Soviet power would be over, Yakovlev replied. Bullets were fired, almost certainly not on Gorbachev’s orders, and the Soviet Union collapsed seven months later. What Yakovlev did not tell Gorbachev, although he thought it as he left the room, was that if the troops did not shoot, Soviet power would also be over. Its time had passed; the game was up. And the documents from the archives that Brent has managed to publish go a long way to explaining why.
Martin Walker, the senior director of the Global Business Policy Council, was the Moscow correspondent of The Guardian during the 1980s. His new novel “Bruno, Chief of Police” will be published in March.
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