Pomnit' po-nashemu: Sotsrealisticheskii istorizm i blokada Leningrada by Voronina Tat'iana (review)

Abstract

SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 784 Alexander Vatlin’s Agents of Terror, ably translated by Seth Bernstein, shows howNKVDofficersintheMoscowsuburbofKuntsevoimplementedthedeadly massacre. Working under the pressure of daily quotas for interrogations and ‘socialist competitions’ between branches for the highest number of arrests, confessions, etc., agents resorted to extraordinary shortcuts. They wrote up ‘confessions’ even before meeting arrestees, then beat the latter until they signed. In the ‘family method’, officers saved time and effort by arresting entire families at once. Another device was ‘staff witnesses’, who regularly provided ‘evidence’ for multiple cases. Vatlin finds that the Kuntsevo NKVD cycled through three types of charges. From the summer of 1937 until early 1938 agents tended to charge arrestees with ‘counterrevolutionary agitation’. In the spring of 1938 NKVD chief Ezhov mandated ‘the spy turn’, as officers investigated suspects for links with foreign intelligence services. The spy turn overlapped with a final phase, the arrests of elderly citizens who had belonged to non-Bolshevik political parties during the revolutionary years. This came about simply because the NKVD ran out of other criteria for arrests. Vatlin’s book complements Harris’s in its emphasis on widening circles of fear. NKVD officers worked frantically in dread that they themselves might be arrested if they did not meet quotas; neighbours denounced neighbours out of terror that they might themselves be denounced. AgentsofTerrordoesnotquitedeliveronthepromiseofitssubtitle—‘Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin’s Secret Police’. The investigation files on which it is based do not allow a detailed psychological portrait of perpetrators, of the sort that Hannah Arendt undertook of Adolf Eichmann. It is, however, the most detailed account of NKVD investigation procedures we are likely to see coming out of Russian archives for decades to come. Since its writing the Russian Federation has re-classified NKVD operational files. The only pre-war operational files now accessible are in Ukrainian archives. Department of History Matthew Lenoe University of Rochester Voronina, Tat´iana. Pomnit´ po-nashemu: Sotsrealisticheskii istorizm i blokada Leningrada. Biblioteka-zhurnala ‘neprikosnovennyi zapas’. Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Moscow, 2018. 273 pp. Notes. R312.00. Tat´iana Voronina’s Pomnit´ po-nashemu brings new evidence and a fresh perspective to bear on how and why the master-narrative of the Leningrad Blockade has endured to shape public attitudes and political discourse in both the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. Voronina has long been a scholar REVIEWS 785 of the Blockade and an authority on historical memory. She began recording oral histories with siege survivors in the early 2000s. Pomnit´ po-nashemu showcases her expertise in using such sources. She masterfully demonstrates how individual stories become enveloped in collectively-formulated concepts while remaining personally meaningful. Spanning the years 1941 to 2006, this remarkably succinct book uses a combination of historical, anthropological and literary methods to argue that the master-narrative or myth of the siege has its roots in Socialist Realism. This phenomenon began during the war years, when professional writers wellversed in Socialist-Realist aesthetics deliberately incorporated them into their novels, poems and articles. The post-war repression of Leningrad’s wartime leadership silenced discussions of the siege during the late 1940s and early 1950s, but when this moratorium lifted under Khrushchev’s Thaw, historians, politicians and survivors continued to recount the blockade by drawing — deliberately or unwittingly — on structural features and textual devices from Socialist Realism, which now seemed self-evident (p. 199). At the same time, the myth of the Blockade has not been static. Voronina demonstrates how it evolved, especially during the Thaw, perestroika and Soviet collapse. However, even as the political landscape shifted and censorship was lifted, the masternarrative endured. Voronina’sconceptualizationofSocialistRealismisbasedonthemorphology outlined by Katerina Clark in The Soviet Novel (Chicago, IL, 1981). Among the mode’s defining traits is the positive hero, who overcomes formidable obstacles to achieve a socially significant feat. The hero struggles, but his struggle is always meaningful and it proves his steadfast commitment to his mission. In Socialist-Realist accounts of the Blockade, the hero might be a soldier, party official, or civilian who willingly and ‘wholeheartedly’ sacrifices himself to defeat the besiegers (p. 160). Heroism — not trauma or victimization — comprises the core of historical memory about the siege. This explains why, Voronina...