Writing History in the Soviet Union

Making the Past Work

Arup Banerji

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781032653006
• eBook ISBN: 9781351381987
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Social Sciences

The history of the Soviet Union has been charted in several studies over the decades. These depictions while combining accuracy, elegance, readability and imaginativeness, have failed to draw attention to the political and academic environment within which these histories were composed. Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work is aimed at understanding this environment. The book seeks to identify the significant hallmarks of the production of Soviet history by Soviet as well as Western historians. It traces how the Russian Revolution of 1917 triggered a shift in official policy towards historians and the publication of history textbooks for schools. In 1985, the Soviet past was again summoned for polemical revision as part and parcel of an attitude of openness (glasnost') and in this, literary figures joined their energies to those of historians. The Communist regime sought to equate the history of the country with that of the Communist Party itself in 1938 and 1962 and this imposed a blanket of conformity on history writing in the Soviet Union. The book also surveys the rich abundance of writing the Russian Revolution generated as well as the divergent approaches to the history of the period. The conditions for research in Soviet archives are described as an aspect of official monitoring of history writing. Another instance of this is the manner by which history textbooks have, through the years, been withdrawn from schools and others officially nursed into circulation. This intervention, occasioned in the present circumstance by statements by President Putin himself, in the manner in which history is taught in Russian schools, continues to this day. In other words, over the years, the regime has always worked to make the past work.

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1 The Histories of History in the Soviet Union

‘Remember how we used to boast that ours would be the generation to change history? I always assumed we were talking about changing the historical future. Now it seems like I was wrong. Seems like we were planning to change the historical past as well’.

—The historian Anton Antonovich Abramov to the
Party member Boris Alexandrovich, Ivanov, in the 1930s.¹

Historians, War and Revolution

HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP WAS MORE DEEPLY SHAKEN AND STIRRED BY THE privations and shortages that marked all of life during the revolution and Civil War than obstructive state policies. Many intellectuals fled from Petrograd during the Civil War, most commonly to the apparently calmer south of the country, even as others moved to Moscow as that city was named the capital. The denuding by institutes of their staff to meet the needs of the front, the shortages of paper; or the limited funds available for research salaries and for publication of findings crippled academic activity. Universities and other institutions of learning were disrupted, scholars and teachers fled, were arrested, mobilized, or eked out a precarious existence. Private book publishing too was hampered by the paper shortage, as well as by the requisition of private and co-operative printing presses, the mal- or non-functioning of others and the municipalization of the book trade which was first introduced in Moscow in October 1918, that curtailed freedom of the press or by the operations of the State publishing house (Gosizdat) The years of the wars isolated Russia from the European book market, while within the country the few books that were published—in Kiev, Odessa, Kazan, Kharkov or Siberia—could be obtained only with difficulty in Petrograd. Traffic in books between Moscow and Petrograd dwindled to a thin stream even as soaring costs made them luxury articles. Financial stringency forced the closure of half a dozen scholarly history journals. Bolshevik concern with maintaining tolerable educational standards shrank as the imperatives of winning the Civil War and administering universal scarcity obscured all else.

Soviet scholarship began with considerable capital on hand in the form of historians trained under the old regime. Many historians chose to remain in the country and in the first aftermath of the peace, their scholarly endeavour was allowed to proceed unimpeded. The general line of the Party with respect to all scholarship was defined as follows: for the time being, to tolerate the existence of the ‘old’ scholarship as a fact and let them hold the same posts they had held before the revolution until cadres of the ‘new’ were prepared and strengthened; then, to abolish the ‘old’ because of its complete uselessness, and in its place to establish the ‘new’.²

The revolution sealed the working careers of numerous historians. Many perished, a fifth of all historians in Russia, according to one source. The average age of death was 60 to 65 years, an age when most reach the height of creative development. Some professional historians like Paul Miliukov, George Vernadskii, Otto Struve and M.I. Rostovtzeff, primarily the younger representatives of the ‘old’ generation, emigrated after 1917, but the majority remained. Among those who remained some were highly critical of the Bolsheviks, like Academician Sergei Fedorovich Platonov, regarded by some as the most distinguished historian of Russian society since Kliuchevskii, and his former pupil S.V. Rozhdestvenskii. The majority of historians were at least prepared to co-operate with the regime by working in state or Party academic establishments. Even by comparison with the depleted ranks of non-Marxist historians remaining in the country, the number of Marxist historians in the years immediately following the revolution was small indeed. The Bolsheviks could in fact, boast of only one historian of real professional standing, M.N. Pokrovskii. Besides him, the only other Marxist historian was N.A. Rozhkov, and he had been a Menshevik Minister in the Provisional Government. Of younger established historians well set in their profession before 1917, only three were Bolsheviks: N.M. Lukin, a lecturer at Moscow University and a Bolshevik since 1904; S.A. Piontkovskii, from Kazan University, who joined the Party in 1919; and V.P. Volgin, also from Moscow, an ex-Menshevik, who joined the Party in 1920. Besides these, several Party intellectuals had historical works to their credit, such as V.I. Nevskii, M.I. Olminskii, F.A. Rothstein, D.N. Riazanov, and Iu. M. Steklov—but none had been primarily historians before 1917. And in the years immediately following the revolution, few were able to devote themselves exclusively to historical study. Bolsheviks in the main were too preoccupied with the making of history to be able to write it. Conditions for historical work in the immediate post-revolutionary years were uncongenial. The legalization of private trade in 1921 and the reanimation of private publishing houses sent the cost of books soaring, and rising publishing costs, paper shortages and heavy taxation kept books expensive throughout the NEP.³

The literature of the period unanimously speaks of the need to train a new cohort of historians, both professional researchers and school-teachers, to make up for the great shortage of historians. The principal objectives of the discipline during the 1920s were to infuse the historical profession with Marxist methods, to make documentary sources more widely available and to centralize the administration of the archives; they had, indeed, been brought under state control in 1918 as Glavarkhiv (The Main Archive Administration). Not only were formerly closed sections of the archives opened for research and students encouraged to mine their contents, but as the foremost Western authority on Soviet archives Patricia Grimsted has written ‘archival inventories and reference compilations prepared in those years extended scholarly pre-revolutionary traditions, and were still on a European standard.’⁴

Academic titles were preserved. It is curious that although scholarly degrees were abolished (and restored only in 1937), the new regime staunchly defended the title of Professor, albeit reserving it with very few exceptions, for those who had held it in the pre-revolutionary period. The title of Professor was almost the only one that remained from the old regime. The government was cautious in conferring it upon untested scholars of the new generation.⁵

History institutions sprouted in a monsoonal flurry, ephemerally however, as a storm was to raze them to the ground barely a decade later. In an early assertion of the proverbial bigger picture, the Soviet state somewhat understandably, drew them into its pastoral and tutelary embrace by placing Party leaders at their helm, like M.S. Olminskii in the Commission on the History of the October Revolution and the History of the Communist Party (Kommissia po istorii oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii i istorii partii, hereafter Istpart), L.B. Kamenev at the Lenin Institute or Iu. K. Milonov at the Institute for Trade Union History (Istprof) . The biggest role was played by M.N. Pokrovskii, who held no less than 19 posts during his career as elaborated below.

The first institution which was created for the purpose of laying the foundation for a new scholarship in general, and for the social sciences in particular, was the establishment of a Socialist Academy for the Social Sciences in 1918 under the supervision of M.N. Pokrovskii, which was soon renamed the Communist Academy. It fell under the Central Executive Committee of the Russian Republic (RSFSR) and was therefore, a state institution. This Academy was envisaged as a body that would supplant the prestigious Academy of Sciences. Staffed by pro-Bolshevik scholars who had not emigrated, it was more of a dominant force in training the so-called istmatchiki, the professional champions of historical materialism, to set ideological basics rather than advance historical research. Founded in 1921, RANION (Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia nauchno-issledovatel’skikh institutov obshchestvennykh nauk or the Russian Association of Scientific Research Institutions in the Social Sciences) was an array of a dozen or more institutes. Its faculty of Marxist and non-Marxist historians made it a testing ground for the quintessentially NEP strategy of ‘using non-Communist hands in the building of Communism’, and it aimed to train Marxist students for scholarly careers.⁶

Although leading non-Marxist historical journals faced closure from 1922—Dela i dni and Russkii istoricheskii zhurnal ceased publication in 1922, followed by Golos minuvshego in 1923, Annaly in 1924 and Byloe in 1926—books by non-Marxist historians continued to appear, and for some time constituted the majority of published historical research. In an attempt to reduce the predominantly bourgeois (non-Party) composition of university staff, prominent Marxist intellectuals were inducted into the universities and key administrative posts were given to Communists. Even after the Institute of History was transferred from Moscow University to RANION, which was closer to state management, it remained the leading site for collaboration between Marxist and non-Marxist historians. It included sections on ancient, medieval and modern history, Russian history and the history of the colonial peoples. Under the authority of the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narodnyi Kommissariat Prosveshcheniia (po Prosveshcheniiu) or Narkompros) it had a predominantly Communist leadership, but was mainly staffed by bourgeois scholars. In January 1928, five out of seven members of RANION’s governing body were Party members (though not its chairman, Petrushevskii), but only 15 of the 66 academic staff were Party members. Many of the leading figures in the historical world of the 1920s taught there, including, among Marxists, Lukin, Nevskii, Piontkovskii, Pokrovskii, Rozhkov, Riazanov and Volgin; and among non-Marxists, Picheta, Preobrazhenskii, Presniakov and Tarle. Despite its short life, RANION’s Institute of History was responsible for training a greater number of young historians than any other NEP establishment. In 1929, the final year of its existence, 31 students completed their research training. In 1929, RANION was replaced by a new Institute of history planned, organized and directed by Pokrovskii.⁷

RANION’s Institute of History was deliberately built on the principle of compromise and co-existence. By contrast, historical study at the Institute of Red Professors (IRP), founded by Pokrovskii in February 1921, and situated incongruously in a monastery in Moscow, had an emphatically Marxist character. Pokrovskii ascribed the original idea for IRP to Lenin, who told him that ‘all social science teachers should be set the task of studying the fundamentals of Marxism in the shortest time possible, so that in future, their teaching will be wholly in accordance with Marxist programmes’. The Commissariat of Enlightenment had started restructuring the schools of history, philology and law as social science schools during the Civil War—in Moscow, a faculty of social sciences (FON) was created after the law faculty and the historical section of the historical-philological faculty of Moscow University were closed down at the end of 1918—but Communist faculty were in short supply for them. Despite Lenin’s insistence that the old professors be given themes to teach ‘that will objectively force them to take our point of view … [and] require of each of them a basic knowledge of Marxist literature; announce that anyone who does not pass a special Marxist exam will be deprived of the right to teach’, the non-Marxist professors were never required to pass such an exam. In fact, a rich fare of covertly anti-Soviet courses was being taught in the early 1920s. Since proletarian origin was the prime criterion for admission to IRP, a sound competence in history was not ensured upon graduation; unsurprisingly, of the 236 students who completed the IRP course between 1924 and 1929, only 60 were historians while the rest were Party activists.

The History Section of IRP was headed by M.N. Pokrovskii, who was also the Rector of the institute. Many of the teachers here were Marxists. The institute was initially a state establishment, coming under the authority of first, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets (TsIK SSSR) and then, the Party Central Committee’s Agitation and Propaganda section (Agitprop) . The resultant atmosphere there was highly political, with students frequently being employed in political campaigns or even being seconded to work in the Party apparatus. The IRP did not offer the traditional post-graduate research course as RANION did, but aimed to train its students to an equivalent level. The fellows at this institute, the ikapisty, (IKP was the Russian acronym for IRP, from krasnyi for red) were typically young but politically experienced Party members who had already received higher education. During each of the four years spent at the IRP, a student would attend and deliver a paper at one or two seminar courses. These papers, which were often subsequently published, represented a significant part of Marxist historical research in the 1920s and the IRP produced a considerable proportion of the new generation of Soviet historians. During the 1920s virtually all the leading Marxist intellectuals taught at the Institute.⁸

Several other institutions were founded after the revolution to conduct work in historical subjects of particular relevance to the regime. Of these, the most distinguished undoubtedly, was the Institut K. Marksa i F. Engel’sa pri TsIK SSSR, or the Marx-Engels Institute (MEI). Established in 1919 and directed by the renowned David Riazanov, it amassed one of the richest collections of socialist literature in the world. Having worked assiduously in establishing a new archival system, discussed in the fifth chapter, Boris Nikolaevskii became its Berlin representative in 1924. In that capacity he hunted through Central and Western Europe, tracking down and collecting unique source material on the international workers’ and socialist movements, particularly on the periods of the 1848 revolutions and the First International, and on the activities of Russian revolutionaries abroad. Nikolaevskii assisted Riazanov in pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Inherited Traditions of Historical Scholarship
• 1 The Histories of History in the Soviet Union
• 2 The Impact of Glasnost’ on The Writing of History
• 3 Histories of the Communist Party as Histories of the Soviet Union
• 4 Depictions and Revisions: The Russian Revolution in History
• 5 The Historical Archive
• 6 History in Russian Schools
• A Select Bibliography
• Index