Khrushchev's Cold Summer

Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin

Miriam Dobson

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801457272
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Between Stalin's death in 1953 and 1960, the government of the Soviet Union released hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag as part of a wide-ranging effort to reverse the worst excesses and abuses of the previous two decades and revive the spirit of the revolution. This exodus included not only victims of past purges but also those sentenced for criminal offenses.

In Khrushchev's Cold Summer, Miriam Dobson explores the impact of these returnees on communities and, more broadly, Soviet attempts to come to terms with the traumatic legacies of Stalin's terror. Confusion and disorientation undermined the regime's efforts at recovery. In the wake of Stalin's death, ordinary citizens and political leaders alike struggled to make sense of the country's recent bloody past and to cope with the complex social dynamics caused by attempts to reintegrate the large influx of returning prisoners, a number of whom were hardened criminals alienated and embittered by their experiences within the brutal camp system.

Drawing on private letters as well as official reports on the party and popular mood, Dobson probes social attitudes toward the changes occurring in the first post-Stalin decade. Throughout, she features personal stories as articulated in the words of ordinary citizens, prisoners, and former prisoners. At the same time, she explores Soviet society's contradictory responses to the returnees and shows that for many the immediate post-Stalin years were anything but a breath of spring air after the long Stalinist winter.

I
RE-IMAGINING THE SOVIET WORLD AFTER STALIN, 1953–1956

I 1953

“The Most Painful Year”

We lost our great friend and father, our beloved and dear Iosif Vissarionovich, and the tears on our face were still not dry, the trepidation in people’s hearts over our children’s future had not calmed, when the stunning news spread, and the terrible thought pierced people’s brains—that enemies of the people are free.

—Anna Karob, letter to V. M. Molotov, 1953

When Stalin died, the most pressing matter for the country’s leaders was to lay his body to rest in a meaningful yet orderly manner. It was a daunting task. The new Kremlin bosses drafted every media resource, instructing photographers, writers, and journalists to produce images, poems, and articles for the radio and press. The Hall of Columns where Stalin’s body lay in state was transformed into a site for collective displays of grief, reproduced in grainy newspaper images for all those citizens far from Moscow. On the day of Stalin’s funeral, Muscovites and visitors to the capital thronged on the streets, forming a vast and overwhelming crowd.1 Over and over again, the press beseeched the nation to remain unified and called for especial vigilance against the nation’s enemies.2 According to Jeffrey Brooks, “Stalin’s final triumph was the enactment of his own funeral.” The first few days of March were Stalin’s final show, a finale that drew on “the metaphors of past decades, including the path, family, school, and construction, to bind the nation to him once more.”3

Citizens grieved in a variety of ways. In addition to the funeral rallies taking place on the streets and in the workplace, many also played out the drama through the act of letter writing, and newspaper editors and Stalin’s former colleagues were inundated with letters of condolence.4 Even as these writers sat alone at home, they presented themselves as participants in a national event. A Leningrad student described how people shared the experience through the radio broadcasts, writing “it was not possible for us all to be there at this hour in Moscow on Red Square, but in thought, with our hearts, we were all there at the Mausoleum.”5 The wireless set directed performances of grief within many homes across the Soviet Union. One housewife described how a group sat together around the radio, sleepless for five days.6 Another woman wrote to Molotov, saying: “There aren’t any words to express my warm feeling towards you! I cried so much listening to your speech on the radio and I cry now writing this letter.”7 Radio broadcasts, on one side, and condolence letters, on the other, constituted a dialogue between leaders and the people and, in the few days of national mourning, became a channel for intense emotion. Many letter writers expressed their own sense of inadequacy, claiming to have no words to convey their grief—yet they too participated in a kind of national graphomania. Referring to the heavy silence that had descended on the country, they nonetheless launched into prolix and often poetic articulations of their woe.

Official and individual formulations achieved remarkable harmony. Model letters published in the press and unpublished letters now preserved in the archives are strikingly similar, in terms of both the emotions expressed and the language used. The media constantly referred to Stalin as the nation’s father and depicted children offering flowers to Stalin, and citizens responded with appropriate lamentations of filial loss.8 One student wrote that she cried more over Stalin’s death than when her own father died in 1941.9 Another young woman told Molotov that she was raised in an orphanage and was personally grateful to Stalin for her upbringing.10 Other familiar tropes of Soviet culture found confident expression in these unpublished letters. A certain Bitiukov wrote that he, along with the whole city of Sverdlovsk, had sworn to build communism in gratitude to Stalin for having brought them to socialism and given them victory over the Germans.11 Another composed poetry in which he promised “we won’t turn from the correct path.”12 The struggle against enemies took a prominent place. While Pravda editorials reminded readers how Stalin taught them to be vigilant of their enemies, readers in turn promised to remain strong, to “sharpen their teeth,” and to be ever more ferocious with adversaries.13 Despite their sad tone, the letters suggested that the death of Stalin might serve to reaffirm the shared values of Soviet society.

In the first days after the death, letter writing was used primarily as a means to participate in this collective rite. Eager to preserve the practices of Stalinist culture, many offered their own ideas for rituals and symbols to honor the deceased ruler: Moscow to be renamed after the dead leader; a new military order to be created in his name; every adult citizen to give an oath of loyalty to the motherland.14 Death, they seemed to claim, should prove no impediment to Stalin’s capacity to unify the nation.</>

For some, of course, Stalin’s death promised sought-after change. Andrei Siniavskii described how a friend had called at his apartment, led him away from the neighbors and down to the basement: “I double-locked the door. We stood facing each other, our eyes radiant. We embraced silently.”15 Another memoirist, Janusz Bardach, a Jewish Pole and Gulag survivor, who at the time of Stalin’s death was a postgraduate medical student in Moscow, also remembered a closet celebration. With several close friends they gathered in his future wife’s apartment and hung drapes to hide their party, which included dancing, drinking, and toasts to a freer future.16

Less restrained forms of dissent could be dangerous. The Procuracy archives contain the cases of several men whose lack of caution in the days following Stalin’s death cost them dearly. In the Northern Caucasus oblast (region), for example, Iakov Shtyrmer, a twenty-year-old of German origin, attended the mourning session organized by the Chapaev Collective Farm but returned later in the night, tore down the poster of Stalin, and stamped it into the snow.17 Often incidents happened under the influence of alcohol and not infrequently occurred on trains or at railway stations. On a train traveling between Moscow and Iaroslavl′, passengers heard Sergei Drozdov, a pattern maker from the Academic Institute of the Ministry of Light Industry, say it was a day to be celebrated because there was now one bastard less in the world; the next day he would claim to be too inebriated to remember.18 On 6 March a rather drunk Nikifor Kurdenkov stood whistling on a station concourse, and when asked by a passerby to show some respect for the occasion, he too began to curse Stalin.19 In the petition letters they subsequently submitted to the authorities, these men sought to be reclassified as hooligans, not traitors, and they portrayed themselves as hardworking Soviet citizens, temporarily estranged from society and themselves by the dislocating act of travel—and the effects of alcohol. While dissenting attitudes toward Stalin’s life and death certainly existed in March 1953, their expression was possible only in the privacy of a locked basement, in the dead of night, or in the surreal world of the drunken train journey.

Initially few letter writers voiced any sort of critical sentiment.20 Over the coming months, however, such harmony would disappear, and the triumphant trumpeting of national solidarity in March proved premature. As the media clumsily groped for new formulations “after Stalin,” citizens were often surprised by the terms and ideas they encountered in the press. Until 1953 the figure of Stalin had functioned as the source of absolute knowledge and truth, a divinity who need obey no rules exterior to him; as one letter writer put it, in complete admiration, “his word was law.”21 With his death, Soviet culture was robbed of what Brooks has called its “prophetic authority.”22 Seeking a new mandate, party leaders did not identify a new figurehead but instead turned to the notion of lawfulness. Rather than relying on Stalin’s infallibility, the press now invoked the concept of sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost′ (socialist legality) to legitimize the new policies it was to introduce.

The term itself was not new but a product of both Lenin and Stalin’s rule: although initially Lenin had scorned the law as a weapon used by the old bourgeoisie to exploit the working class, he had come to recognize it as an essential arm of the revolutionary state during the Civil War, adopting the slogan “revolutionary legality” (revoliutsionnaia zakonnost′) in 1918;23 once Stalin had announced the transition to socialism in 1934, the term “socialist legality” coexisted alongside the older “revolutionary legality.”24 The Bolsheviks’ initial reservations about the status of the law did not disappear, however, and the term zakonnost′ has a checkered history. During the 1930s the Procuracy frequently called for Soviet justice to be administered in accordance with the law and for zakonnost′ to be fully observed, but such initiatives were submerged by the party’s own desire for swift revolutionary justice, and in the siege mentality that accompanied the purges, officials were expected to use their revolutionary instinct to unmask enemies, not to bury their heads in law manuals.25 And even though N. I. Ezhov, head of the NKVD during the Great Terror, was condemned for his abuse of legality in 1938, this did not mean that the rule of law triumphed afterwards.26 Indeed, in the 1940s the term zakonnost′ was used to signify the state’s commitment to ensuring all citizens acted lawfully rather than its own duty to follow due process: in 1948 a new wave of repression was justified as a sign of refortified zakonnost′. 27 In contrast, when the term was taken up once more in 1953, it accompanied the government’s admission that certain organs of state power had allowed miscarriages of justice to occur. The word zakonnost′ peppered newspaper articles, alongside reassurances of the Soviet regime’s immense respect for its citizens’ rights and its own great “humaneness.”

The term zakonnost′ was mobilized in relation to three of the most significant political events of 1953. The first was the release and acquittal of a group of doctors arrested in January 1953 and charged with poisoning the high-ranking patients they treated at the Kremlin infirmary. In April the newspaper coverage surrounding the repudiation of the notorious “Doctors’ Plot” saw a clear admission that legality had not been observed in recent years. Three months later, in July 1953, the term appeared again in the string of accusations laid against the now disgraced Lavrentii Beriia, whose crimes included abusing his position as head of the MVD and violating sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost′. The third event—the amnesty decree of 27 March 1953—was chronologically the first, but its impact was significant throughout the year. In a Pravda editorial that followed the decree in mid-April, the amnesty and the promises of criminal justice reforms that accompanied it were promoted as a sign that zakonnost′ was now restored.

Following so close on the heels of Stalin’s death, these three events were sensational. They indicated that the new leadership was determined to introduce radical change, particularly in terms of downsizing the Gulag and reforming the criminal justice system. They also suggested the emergence of a new political culture, founded on the law (rather than a single leader’s wisdom) and pride in the state’s own “humane” treatment of its citizens. This new political rhetoric was not always deployed consistently, however, and throughout 1953 the post-Stalin leadership failed to state explicitly the nature and scope of the changes it was initiating. This left many citizens in a state of anxiety, uncertain of how their own political beliefs fitted with the new formulations found in the Soviet media. Such concerns were redoubled when one of the reforms—the amnesty—led to a wave of crime in the summer of 1953. The popular mood, as recorded in the surveillance materials produced by the Soviet authorities at least, was not simply anxious but at times heated and angry. While some did welcome the restoration of zakonnost′, many citizens suggested that the new political course signaled an alarming breakdown in vigilance which placed the Soviet community at risk.

The Doctors’ Plot Reversed

On 13 January 1953 Pravda announced that enemies had been uncovered at the very core of Soviet power. A group of Kremlin doctors, several of them bearing Jewish-sounding surnames, were accused of murdering Andrei Zhdanov and Aleksandr Shcherb...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. RE-IMAGINING THE SOVIET WORLD AFTER STALIN, 1953–1956
• II. STALIN’S OUTCASTS RETURN
• III. A FRAGILE SOLUTION?
• Conclusion
• Bibliography