New books about secret Soviet history – Weekend – Kommersant
[ad_1]
Mark Steinberg “Proletarian Imagination”
publishing house Bibliorossika
Translation Irina Klimovitskaya
The proletarian writers, published in English in 2002 by Mark Steinberg, an American specialist on the revolutionary era, are proletarian writers: mostly forgotten workers’ writers who were an important part of the cultural and social life of the 1910s and 1920s. Only Andrei Platonov became a classic among them, with a stretch – Alexei Gastev (however, the fashion for him had not yet come when Steinberg wrote his book), philologists remember a few, most – no one. As Steinberg shows, the reason that most of the participants in Proletkult, Kuznitsa and other associations of proletarian writers were pushed to the sidelines of the literary process and gradually forgotten by the end of the 1920s was not only and not so much in the artistic weakness of their work. They were not their own neither for fellow travelers, nor for avant-garde artists, sophisticated in the literary struggle. And at the same time, despite their impeccable class origin, the literary workers did not at all live up to the expectations that the Bolshevik leaders placed on art. Dark romanticism shone through their utopianism, suffering fascinated them more than the promises of a new life, and instead of communist culture they built new myths, but they were too anarchic in this and competed with the official ideology.
Oleg Khlevnyuk “Corporation of Impostors”
publishing house UFO
We are accustomed to perceive the shadow economy as a phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s with their guild workers and black marketeers. In fact, it existed throughout the entire Soviet period, and its real heyday was the post-war years. Oleg Khlevnyuk, a specialist in the Stalin era, analyzes the structure of economic adventures of the late 1940s using the example of the activities of Nikolai Pavlenko. This former chairman of the cooperative artel created an underground corporation that functioned under the guise of the so-called military development department. The members of the organization had fake military IDs, Pavlenko himself introduced himself as a colonel and, using the resources that gave belonging to the army, he launched an active work on the construction of roads throughout the USSR, at the same time building a complex corruption network. The fictitious nature of the UVS was discovered only at the very end of the Stalin era. Shot in 1955, Pavlenko was not completely forgotten, but the texts about him still had a somewhat tabloid character. Khlevniuk investigates his life and machinations in as much detail as possible and uses them to sort out the nooks and crannies of the history of late Stalinism.
Sergey Plokhy “Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front”
publishing house corpus
Translation Vladimir Izmailov, Alexandra Lavreneva
Sergei Plokhy is a well-known Ukrainian-American historian, author of, among other things, a book about the Chernobyl tragedy that was published last year. Like Khlevniuk’s work, his new book is dedicated to a semi-repressed plot of the Stalin era, but this time a military one. We are talking about the activities of three US Air Force bases built in 1944 in the Poltava region. At these bases, American and Soviet pilots lived together and prepared bombing operations against Germany and Italy together. Plokhy describes this story as a kind of lost chance for cooperation between the two powers – the sprout of an alternative to the Cold War that did not happen. With the help of reports from the US military and for the first time available materials from the Ukrainian KGB, he reconstructs in the most detailed way the negotiations of politicians, the stories of friendship and enmity of ordinary inhabitants of the base, intrigues – hardware and even love, intrigues of special services and the circumstances of the actual military operations. Despite the fact that this is a large archival work, The Forgotten Bastards, like all of Plokhy’s books, is written in a deliberately fictional way.
Rustam Alexander “Closed”
publishing house individual
Translation Olga Bykova, Oleg Egorov
Relatively much has been written about homosexuality in the 1920s and 1930s. Rustam Alexander’s book is the first attempt to tell about the life of homosexuals throughout the Soviet era. It is arranged as a series of stories-episodes. Some of it concerns public policy, some concerns medicine, some concerns punitive actions, some concerns private life, but most of it all at once. A Karaganda psychiatrist is experimenting with the treatment of female homosexuality in the camps. A Scottish journalist writes a letter to Stalin, trying to get the notorious sodomy law repealed. A young actor arrives in the capital in the 1930s and explores the remnants of the homosexual subculture. A bath watchman seduces soldiers in a village in the Leningrad region until one of them hangs him on a belt. A Kharkiv KGB lieutenant flees the city after being scolded, takes several lovers at once, and then decides to invent and expose a homosexual gang himself in order to return to the service. Another famous psychiatrist, Jan Goland, treats homosexuality with hypnosis and pornography. And so on. “Closed” is written in an extremely free style. Alexander fantasizes about the thoughts of his characters, completing in his imagination the missing scenes in the documents. Sometimes it looks more like historical prose than actual research. However, the stories themselves are real and often surprising, and the book itself is truly groundbreaking.
Alexei Konakov “Evgeny Kharitonov”
New publishing house
Evgeny Kharitonov is one of the most radical authors of Soviet underground literature, an actor, director, teacher and theorist of pantomime and free dance. His influence was impressive in various fields: in poetry and prose, avant-garde theater, mass cinema (he put on dance numbers for Konchalovsky), rock music and even medicine (starting from his stage techniques, he invented his own method of treating stuttering). Kharitonov was both a nodal figure and an outsider to both the official and the non-conformist establishment. In his texts, he combined seemingly incompatible elements of provocative marginality: outright homoeroticism and nationalist conservatism. A brilliant book by the researcher of Soviet culture Alexei Konakov (author of, among other things, the recently published work “Declining World” – the history of the “Soviet incredible” from UFOs to psychics) combines a detailed and extremely fascinating reconstructed biography of Kharitonov with a careful analysis of his works. But the scale of the book is wider than the fate and work of one, albeit a brilliant author. The seemingly strange figure, unlike anyone else, turns out to be a way to retell the entire Soviet history from the 1950s to the early 1980s in a new way.
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
