Revolution Rekindled: The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography by Jones Polly (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 348 Jones, Polly. Revolution Rekindled: The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2019. ix + 296 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £74.00. The very last thing that the post-Stalin Soviet leaders wanted was the resumption of any revolutionary activity anywhere in the USSR. They were far too busy promoting revolutions in the Far Abroad and crushing ‘counterrevolutions ’ in the Near Abroad (notably in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland). In her meticulously researched (with just one exception — see the next two paragraphs) analysis, Polly Jones asks a highly relevant question. Why, during the 1960s, at exactly the same time as various dissident movements in the Soviet Union were beginning to take shape, did the main publisher of political literature, Politizdat, decide to commission and issue a huge series of largely sympathetic biographies of Russian and other revolutionaries while ‘the Kremlin’ was gradually leading the country towards the first stage of Communism, likely to be reached by the end of the century? Might not such biographies somehow encourage, even inspire, a few, or more than a few, pernicious anti-Soviet individuals and increase the number of ‘antagonistic contradictions’ in the period of ‘mature socialism’? In her Introduction, Jones mentions a little-known editor, Vladimir Novokhatko, who is, I think, regardless of his motivations and strategy, the real hero of this book. He is the person most responsible for the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ (it sounds better in Russian) series of 156 biographies that were published between 1968 and 1990 and competed quite successfully with another series, ‘Lives of Remarkable People’, for sales and popularity. Some younger readers of the Introduction may misunderstand the atmosphere in the USSR during this period because the author uses the term ‘late Soviet’ some thirty times here (and many more times during the rest of the book). We know now that she is perfectly correct, but hardly anybody sensed this at the time (Andrei Amal´rik is a rare exception, but he is mentioned in this book only once, in the Bibliography, and is not discussed at all). This is strange, because Jones mentions Alexei Yurchak’s book (Everything was Forever, Until It Was No More, Princeton, NJ, 2005) several times, but appears not to realize how greatly the misperception that the Soviet regime would not, could not, come to an end in their lifetime guided the tactics and strategies of nearly everybody. (And indeed, thirty years after the demise of the USSR, Russia, led by an unrepentant KGB officer, is in some important ways still in a neo-Soviet, rather than post-Soviet, stage of development.) Chapter one, ‘Politizdat’s Literary Turn After Stalin’, touches on the role of the individual in history — sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, and is centred on the partial ‘dethronement’ of Stalin’s personality cult in 1956 and later. The most amazing feature of this splendid book is that it REVIEWS 349 contains not a single mention of istmat, historical materialism, which most people in the USSR were obliged to study. The closest Jones gets to this is to state that ‘[b]iography was theoretically problematic for a regime based on an ideology of collective class consciousness and behaviour and on suprapersonal historical laws’ (pp. 49–50). This is inadequate, because, according to istmat, as crudely taught in the Soviet Union, the only way out from socialism was to progress into the first stage of Communism. A return to capitalism was theoretically inconceivable. The rest of this monograph is better, and I regret that I shall have to discuss it so briefly. Chapter two, ‘Authors, Editors, and the Niches of Late Soviet Literature’, starts with references to books by Boris Kagarlitskii and Vladimir Shlapentokh: ‘It has often been claimed that late Soviet intellectual life was primarily defined by collusion, compromise, and complicity with the state’ (p. 66). This is true, but I would add two more ‘c’ words, whose meanings are sometimes difficult to distinguish from one another: cooperation and collaboration by writers (and others) with the Soviet authorities. Some of the contributors to the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ series were completely supportive of the then authorities (so...