Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, there has been an overwhelming outpouring of memoirs, diaries, and other personal accounts of life under the Soviet regime. The impulse to speak out arose with glasnost′, with its demands to uncover the Soviet past, especially the Stalinist terror. By the mid-1990s, those efforts lost official support and public prominence. But even as political discourse of memory has disappeared from the front pages of newspapers, stories of individual lives continue to appear in large numbers. The texts are many and varied, and so are their explicit goals and the functions they may fulfill for the reader. Even so, I see a common quality: in telling their life stories, concrete people present the Soviet past, or history, as personal experience. It is in this broad sense that I speak of personal (individual, private, intimate) accounts of the Soviet experience. This article attempts to map the evolving corpus of texts and suggests ways of interpreting them as a cultural trend. Performing in-depth analysis of specific texts and drawing distinctions among the ways in which they shape their interpretations is a different task (and an object of an on-going, larger study). Here, while highlighting details, I will point to commonalities and to patterns. Provided this outpouring marks a cultural situation ‐ the end of the Soviet epoch coinciding with the end of the 20th century ‐ what does it mean? Some answers are obvious. The authors and their readers might be driven by a need to commemorate the dead, repent, accuse, and denounce, or simply talk about traumatic experiences. There is also the writer’s imperative to write about himself, the scholar’s urge to make his life into an object of investigation, the public demand (or publisher’s commission) to disclose the lives of celebrities ‐ all encouraged by the new freedom of speech. In looking at personal documents from Soviet Russia, I have chosen to suspend, as far as possible, explanatory categories that have been readily available in Western academia. These include “memory” and “collective memory,” inasmuch as they create an alternative to “historical consciousness” and “history”; the twin notions “testimony” and “trauma,” inso* I am indebted to Laura Engelstein, Jochen Hellbeck, Eric Naiman, and Tobias Rees for reading and criticizing the draft of this essay, as well as to Caryl Emerson and Kritika’s anonymous reviewers. Expert research assistance was performed by Patrick Henry, Jane Shamaeva, and Boris Wolfson. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Russian are by Jane Shamaeva.