Collectivization of the past – Weekend
[ad_1]
The publishing house “New Literary Review” is publishing a book by historian Vitaly Tikhonov, “The Useful Past,” a story about how historical science became a field of political battles during the era of the Stalinist USSR.
The expression taken by Vitaly Tikhonov for the title of the book is not of Soviet origin. It was first used in 1918 by the American literary critic Van Wyck Brooks. Brooks was not a politician, but rather a poetic thinker. Nevertheless, he gave an ideal formula for historical politics: history is not an alienated no-man’s land, a territory of facts and dates, it is an object of use, it needs to be processed, made useful, to grow on the soil of the past a future that is clearly visible to everyone around. For the United States, which entered big international politics after the First World War, this was an extremely urgent task. This intuition was even more urgent at that time for Soviet Russia, which had just appeared on the world map.
Tikhonov begins his narrative from the revolutionary era, when history, like other spheres of culture, became the subject of radical revision and rewriting on class grounds. In these new narratives, the tsars, emperors, and generals glorified by Karamzin, Solovyov, Klyuchevsky and other pre-revolutionary classics turned from titans into grotesque freaks, and the anonymous masses and impersonal social forces became the real protagonists. The leader of this trend was the old Bolshevik Mikhail Pokrovsky. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, the “red professors” of his school took over educational institutions, at times dealing with opponents from among the old professionals in the most unsavory ways (they actively supported, for example, the “academic cause” of 1929–1931, in the process of which several dozen historians were sentenced to death or imprisonment). Pokrovsky himself died in 1932, but in the following years his students and associates became victims of a new conservative turn in history. This twist is the main plot of Tikhonov’s book.
“Useful Past” was published in the popular science series “What is Russia.” This book is indeed written in an accessible way, but its subject – the history of history – may look a little esoteric, and it cannot be said that Tikhonov is trying too hard to make it more attractive to the outside reader. He describes in detail the technologies of science management: editing textbooks from edition to edition, meetings of academic councils, polemics between professional historians and politically engaged amateurs (who were often party favorites), distribution of Stalin Prizes for historical research. It’s easy to get lost in all these rather specialized details, despite the fact that the material itself is really interesting.
If avant-garde revolutionary culture thought of itself as a new beginning, a decisive break in time, abolishing everything that came before, then the ideologists of Stalin’s history – including Stalin himself, who was actively interested in this area of knowledge -, on the contrary, sought to restore the connection of times. Finding the continuity of eras after the revolutionary explosion meant inventing history anew – inventing a paradoxically consistent narrative in which empire and revolution, nation and class would not act as irreconcilable enemies, but would complement each other.
The most noticeable of the historical actions of Stalinist culture was the return of great people – the cult of leaders, thrown back from the present to the past. The main one, of course, was Lenin, invented as a historical figure precisely during the Stalin era. The Lenin cult legitimized Stalin as his disciple and sole authorized successor. Other similar heroes were Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible – two despots whose apology seemed to be poorly combined with veneration of the leader of the proletariat. Both the emperor and the tsar, who had recently been presented in Soviet historiography as exploiting monsters, became in new monographs, textbooks, and then in works of mass culture (like the epic of Alexei Tolstoy or the film of Sergei Eisenstein) bearers of charismatic strong power, collectors of lands, initiators relentless spurts of progress; their reigns provided historical analogies for the policies of the USSR during the Stalin era.
The genealogy of the state itself was also being reinvented. The construction of socialism in a single country, proclaimed by Stalin, instead of relying on world revolution, required an explanation of what kind of country it actually is, what unites its population besides random conquests and alliances. The Soviet nation imagined throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s was modeled on the equally diverse American nation, but Soviet ideologists had more chronological ambitions. The prerequisites for the unity of the peoples and tribes inhabiting the territory of the USSR, from the Far East to the Baltic countries included in it in 1940, should have been found in the most ancient past. Therefore, for example, research on Urartu, an ancient Asian state located on the territory of Georgia and Armenia, which successfully fought with Assyria and by its very existence proved the right of the peoples of the USSR to participate in world history from its very beginning, was held in great esteem.
Urartu was Stalin’s favorite, literally imposed by him on the historians of the ancient world. In a similar way, his guesses and considerations (such as the origin of the Russian language from the Kursk-Oryol dialect) became the impetus for a whole stream of research. As happens in history, random whim mixed with the pragmatics of the moment, and together they formed a remarkably stable narrative. Thus, developed in the early 1950s by the young star of late-Stalinist science Boris Rybakov, the concept of a previously unknown to scientists ancient Russian nationality, from which Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians developed, who were subsequently doomed to unite into a single Soviet people, having long survived the Stalinist and even Soviet era, continues to influence the unfolding political reality is before our eyes.
quote
Dictators usually love history because they love themselves in history. They imagine their own monuments, plump volumes of gold-embossed biography, rustling pages of textbooks with their portraits, cities and streets named after them, and other symbols of historical greatness. Dictators are almost always confident that they do everything in the interests of the citizens of their countries, so grateful descendants will not forget them. Never.
Vitaly Tikhonov. Useful Past: History in the Stalinist USSR. M.: New Literary Review, 2023
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
