Writing the Stalin Era

Writing the Stalin Era

Writing the Stalin Era Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography Edited by Golfo Alexopoulos, Julie Hessler, and Kiril Tomoff palgrave macmillan

WRITING THE STALIN ERA Copyright Golfo Alexopoulos, Julie Hessler, and Kiril Tomoff, 2011. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edtion 2011 978-0-230-10549-2 All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-10930-8 ISBN 978-0-230-11642-9 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230116429 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Writing the Stalin era : Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet historiography / edited by Golfo Alexopoulos, Kiril Tomoff, and Julie Hessler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 2. Fitzpatrick, Sheila Influence. 3. Sovietologists United States Biography. 4. Historians United States Biography. 5. Soviet Union Historiography. 6. Soviet Union History 1925 1953 Historiography. 7. Stalin, Joseph, 1879 1953. 8. Soviet Union History. 9. Soviet Union Social conditions. I. Alexopoulos, Golfo. II. Tomoff, Kiril. III. Hessler, Julie, 1966 IV. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. DK38.7.F58W75 2010 947.084 2072 dc22 2010019027 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Preface vii 1 Writing Russia: The Work of Sheila Fitzpatrick 1 Ronald Grigor Suny 2 Sheila Fitzpatrick: An Interpretive Essay 21 Julie Hessler 3 The Two Faces of Tatiana Matveevna 37 Yuri Slezkine 4 Military Occupation and Social Unrest: Daily Life in Russian Poland at the Start of World War I 43 Joshua Sanborn 5 Seeing Like a Soviet State: Settlement of Nomadic Kazakhs, 1928 1934 59 Matthew J. Payne 6 Counternarratives of Soviet Life: Kulak Special Settlers in the First Person 87 Lynne Viola 7 Gender, Marriage, and Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union 101 Mie Nakachi 8 Collective Action in Soviet Society: The Case of War Veterans 117 Mark Edele 9 Shostakovich et al. and The Iron Curtain: Intellectual Property and the Development of a Soviet Strategy of Cultural Confrontation, 1948 1949 133 Kiril Tomoff 10 A Torture Memo: Reading Violence in the Gulag 157 Golfo Alexopoulos

vi Contents 11 Founding Fathers/Iconic Soviets: Public Identity, Soviet Mythology, and the Fashioning of Science Heroes in Soviet Times 177 James T. Andrews 12 Reminiscences 197 Peter Nicholls David Fitzpatrick Barbara Gillam Jerry F. Hough Efim Iosifovich Pivovar Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozlov Leora Auslander Alison Edwards Katerina Clark Kiril Tomoff Notes on Contributors 237 Index 241

Preface The present volume is dedicated to Sheila Fitzpatrick, Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Fitzpatrick s numerous studies of the first three decades of Soviet history have fundamentally shaped the way that historians understand the Soviet Union today. This volume approaches her career from three angles: the nature and evolution of her interpretation of Soviet history; the impact of her scholarship on a large contingent of students; and the interaction of personality and experiences in Fitzpatrick s career. The first two chapters comprise interpretive essays on Fitzpatrick s scholarship. That she has been a singularly influential historian of the Lenin and Stalin periods of Soviet history is noncontroversial, but as might be expected in the case of such a prolific and versatile scholar, her work lends itself to multiple interpretations. The two essays included here offer distinct views of Fitzpatrick s intellectual trajectory, the first emphasizing consistency and the second, variety; the first emphasizing her creative engagement with the larger historical profession and the second, her working through of questions that she had basically generated on her own. It may be germane to note that the essays were written by scholars who enjoyed very different relationships with Fitzpatrick, the one by a contemporary and colleague and the other by a former student. Many of the essays in chapters 3 through 11, as well as Ronald Grigor Suny s interpretive essay, came out of the Sheila Fitzpatrick Festschrift Conference, which took place on the first two days of the Melbourne Conferences on Soviet and Australian History and Culture, held at University of Melbourne during July 4 8, 2006. The conference brought together most of Sheila Fitzpatrick s former doctoral students, though, as luck would have it, two of the three organizers (now editors) were unable to attend the conference on account of the birth of a child. Participants were asked to prepare papers loosely related to one of Fitzpatrick s major areas of research: politics and culture, the state and social groups, and Soviet identities. These themes can still be discerned in the revised papers collected in this volume, while a further theme, also strongly inflected by Fitzpatrick s scholarship, has emerged as well: several contributors have framed their chapters around sources relating to the interaction between the ordinary citizen and Soviet power. The final panel in Melbourne was a roundtable on the question, Is there a Fitzpatrick school of Soviet history? To our surprise, roundtable

viii Preface participants largely agreed on their answer, to wit a soft yes, more sociological and methodological than interpretive, based on her students shared commitment to archival sources and sense of esprit de corps. This volume may allow readers to identify other areas of commonality between Sheila and her students, though admittedly we have stacked the deck by asking for essays related to Fitzpatrick s own research interests. Contributors have themselves commented, with varying degrees of explicitness, on the relationship between their scholarship and hers. Some have moved in a more policyoriented direction than Fitzpatrick herself, or focused on different periods (prerevolutionary, post-1953, the two World Wars), but the questions that she asks in her scholarship and in person, in her penetrating critiques of written work have exerted a formative influence on all the authors. Many of us still have the urge to send her the manuscripts of any significant writings. By showcasing the scholarship of Fitzpatrick s students, and particularly of the huge cohort, now 27 and counting, of historians who have completed their doctorates under her supervision at University of Chicago since 1990, these chapters underscore the tremendous role of advising and encouraging young scholars in Fitzpatrick s life s work. Chapter 12 shifts the lens from Fitzpatrick s contributions to Soviet history to her character and career. With the aim of introducing a personal dimension to the volume, we asked Sheila Fitzpatrick s friends and colleagues from various periods of her life to contribute a reminiscence about the Sheila they knew. Our model was the genre of reminiscences by contemporaries that one frequently encounters in Russian literary, cultural, and scientific life. Sheila s unusual family background as the daughter of a famous (perhaps notorious) leftist intellectual and activist; her journey from Australia to England to the United States, with long sojourns in Russia, Germany, France, and again Australia; and her experience as a woman who was critical of the Soviet Union but not hostile to it in a field dominated by strongly anti-soviet men, have no doubt contributed to the detached engagement that Ron Suny describes as a unique characteristic of her work. They also make for some good stories. Our intention in this section is not hagiographical, but rather biographical and psychological, as the contemporaries offer many insights into how Fitzpatrick reacted to her personal, geographical, and professional milieus. Preparing this volume has been a labor of love. As a scholar, a mentor, and a friend, Sheila Fitzpatrick has been a significant person in our lives and, indeed, in the lives of all the contributors. We hope that the volume will stimulate readers to think about this important historian in a new light, as well as to engage with recent research by some of her former students. Above all, we hope that Sheila herself finds it a fitting tribute to her remarkable scholarly career. GOLFO ALEXOPOULOS JULIE HESSLER KIRIL TOMOFF