The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization

Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era

Polly Jones, Polly Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134283460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Russische Geschichte

The Khrushchev era is increasingly seen as a period in its own right, and not just as 'post-Stalinism' or a forerunner of subsequent 'thaws' and 'reform from within'. This book provides a comprehensive history of reform in the period, focusing especially on social and cultural developments. Since the opening of the former Soviet archives, much new information has become available casting light on how far official policies correlated with popular views. Overall the book appraises how far 'Destalinization' went; and whether developments in the period represented a real desire for reform, or rather an attempt to fortify the Soviet system, but on different lines.

Part I
Responses to the Thaw(s)
De-Stalinization and public opinion

1 ‘Show the bandit-enemies no mercy!’
Amnesty, criminality and public response in 1953

Miriam Dobson

‘The end of the war and the transition from war to peace placed new tasks in front of the Soviet Union’, wrote G. Safonov, General Procurator of the USSR, in Pravda in 1948. He continued: ‘The successful completion of the five-year plan will be an enormous step on the path towards completing the construction of a classless socialist society and our country’s gradual transition from socialism to communism’.¹ Safonov’s millenarian approach seems typical of post-war rhetoric. Under Stalin’s guidance, the party’s ideologues and theorists promoted the fourth five-year plan not only as a chance to recover from the devastation of war, but also as a means for the country to advance to the next stage in the revolutionary journey.²

Yet the party was far from complacent. According to Stalinist doctrine, the revolution’s advance and the imminence of communism only served to make their enemies ever more deadly.³ Safonov’s article contained a cautionary message. In order for communism to be achieved, he claimed, the ‘reinforcement and the strictest adherence to socialist legality’ was imperative. He argued that the successful transition from socialism to communism necessitated a new campaign against crime. He produced an impressive catalogue of the criminal activities still plaguing Soviet society, which included theft of state property, substandard factory work, speculation, the divulging of state secrets, lapses in revolutionary vigilance, and violations of labour discipline. With no distinction between political, criminal, and labour offences, all were presented as actions of Soviet enemies that would prevent the building of communism. The General Procurator argued that the key to the revolution’s advance lay in the concept of ‘socialist legality’ (sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’), which he defined in terms of universal vigilance, intolerance towards transgressors, and strong state power.

In the first post-Stalin decade, the new party leaders became even more convinced that communism was within their reach. Khrushchev, in particular, was persuaded that within two decades the Soviet citizens would be enjoying life in the world’s first communist society. Like Safonov, Stalin’s successors also promoted the concept of socialist legality as the key to building this future paradise; however, the meaning they assigned to the term was to prove radically different. In a major shift, the new leaders seemed to suggest that the criminals and miscreants vilified within Stalinist culture in fact posed a much lesser threat to the revolution’s advance than had been feared. No longer invoked in order to attack wrongdoers, the notion of legality instead became associated with the regime’s new commitment to rescuing those who had erred.

As early as March 1953, Stalinist doctrines were tacitly revised. Three weeks after Stalin’s death, the modified version of ‘socialist legality’ was used to explain and legitimize the launch of major criminal justice reforms. On 27 March 1953 an amnesty was decreed and as a result, a total of 1,201,738 people were granted release; in one sweeping move, 48 per cent of the Gulag population was set free. The first clause of the decree released those with sentences under five years, while later clauses amnestied pregnant women, mothers with children under ten, children under 18, men over 55, women over 50, those convicted for certain offences committed at work or during military service, and those sentenced by laws now under review. The decree also halved sentences over five years (though some of the gravest crimes were excluded).⁴ In a subsequent editorial, K.P. Gorshenin, Minister of Justice, encouraged Pravda readers to view the amnesty decree, and the promises of further criminal justice reform that accompanied it, as evidence of ‘Soviet humanity’ and he suggested that this new, more compassionate, brand of ‘socialist legality’ was the correct way to ensure the country’s ‘transition from socialism to communism’.⁵

The coverage was not extensive, but the press did offer the Soviet public some guidance in making sense of this important shift. The first claim was that many criminals had been reformed during the term of their sentence. At least in theory, the prisoners to be released had shown a ‘conscientious attitude towards their work’ and no longer represented a danger to the state. According to Gorshenin, the amnesty decree was evidence of the fact that Soviet laws helped those who committed errors ‘to correct themselves’ (ispravit’sia) and then to return to the ‘path of honest labour’.⁶ Gorshenin’s comment piece thus revived the notion of redemption, so celebrated in the press in the early 1930s. Under Maksim Gor’kii’s tutelage, writers and journalists had once passionately embraced convict labour as a means to transform the erring individual, producing accounts of how social aliens were despatched to hard labour within the camp system, given intensive reeducation, thereby being ‘reforged’ as decent citizens; by the mid-1930s, however, the motifs of transformation and re-education retreated as prison sentences grew ever longer.⁷ Now in the spring of 1953, newspaper readers were once more encouraged to recognize the individual’s potential for conversion. They were encouraged to view Gulag returnees not as dangerous criminals, but as reformed characters.

The second claim concerned Soviet society itself. Readers were told that this massive release of prisoners was possible as a result of the ‘con- solidation’ of Soviet state and society (uprochnenie obshchestvennogo i gosudarstvennogo stroia). Soviet citizens had progressed: they enjoyed a better standard of living; they had become more ‘conscious’; they now displayed an honourable attitude towards their public duty; and their ‘cultural’ levels had been raised.⁸ Over the past decades of Soviet power, society had allegedly matured. Where once society might have been endangered by the presence of a few questionable elements in its midst, it was now healthy and robust.⁹ Having reached a new stage in its revolutionary development, Soviet society could now be trusted to deal with former offenders and deviants (admittedly, not yet all. In 1953, political prisoners – considered one of the most dangerous categories by the authorities – were not included in the releases, though they would be by the following year).

Despite the upbeat note of the press in the spring of 1953, the amnesty was to prove a major challenge for the Soviet regime. Returning zeks did not re-integrate into the Soviet family as easily as had been hoped; by August, senior officials were ready to identify the amnestied prisoners as the cause of a soaring crime rate.¹⁰ Perhaps more worrying still, Soviet society did not prove particularly receptive to the regime’s new commitment to ‘Soviet humanity’ and its policies of correction. While some intellectuals greeted the amnesty decree as the first indication of the reform they sought,¹¹ many Soviet citizens responded uneasily to the rapid and large-scale repudiation of the Gulag monolith and did not share the regime’s confidence in their ability to withstand the return of Stalin’s outcasts. Drawing on the language they inherited from Stalinism, members of the public aggressively articulated fears over the ‘bandits’, ‘gangsters’ and ‘enemies of the people’ who now threatened Soviet society.

I will first focus on the ex-prisoners, examining both the rising crime levels and the incidents of political unrest created by the returning zeks. Second, I examine the public response to the amnesty and argue that many citizens were resistant to the new beliefs promoted by the post Stalin press. Finally, I suggest ways in which the state responded to the problems generated by the amnesty and argue that the crisis of 1953 was highly significant in shaping the policies of the Khrushchev era.

The Gulag return

From the outset, the police realized that the mass exodus from the Gulag would be difficult to control. On 4 April 1953, an internal circular from the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, I.A. Serov, announced several measures to ‘safeguard social order and to prevent displays of criminal behaviour in places with a concentration of prisoners released by amnesty’. Local authorities were instructed to provide sufficient boats and trains so that those released did not congregate at stations and ports; police were to have a strong presence on trains carrying large numbers of ex-prisoners and at stations where prisoners transferred, so as to prevent them assembling in the parks and markets nearby; station buffets were to refrain from selling them spirits. Even before the releases were fully underway, returnees were regarded as a major threat to law and order. The measures enacted revealed a clear concern that the returnees would not go ‘home’ but would remain a migrant, menacing mass. The police were told to set up surveillance measures using the services of railways officers, local housing committees, caretakers and other trusted people. Special attention was likewise devoted to places where there was a concentration of returnees, including ‘apartment-traps, dens, doss-houses’, ‘attics, cellars, empty places, stairwells and entrances in large buildings’, and warehouses, dacha areas, and the ‘outskirts of towns and villages’.¹² In the authorities’ imagination, the returnees occupied liminal areas – on the edges of towns, up in the attics, down below ground. Although prisoners were in theory welcomed back into the Soviet family, Serov’s instructions suggested even leading government figures regarded them as outsiders destined to remain on the peripheries of society.

In the spring and early summer of 1953, the Council of Ministers realized the problem was still acute, and in late May 1953 a resolution was issued on ‘the elimination of inadequacies in the resettlement of citizens freed by the amnesty’. The challenge they faced was not insubstantial, for there were large numbers of new arrivals every week. A period of just ten days might see as many as forty or fifty thousand newcomers. Reporting to Khrushchev on the progress made by the beginni...