Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-41 by David L. Hoffmann (review)

Abstract

MLRy 100.3, 2005 889 Hudspith does admit Dostoevsky's xenophobia, but there are aspects of Dosto? evsky's ideal of brotherhood which she leaves unmentioned, and which are now being explored by other critics, notably his anti-Semitism and his refusal, even in private correspondence not destined for publication, to accept fair-minded remonstrance. If Dostoevsky is to convince, let alone convert, it can only be through his fictional characters. The second half of this study is far more successful. It deals with the major novels, and very properly includes A Raw Youth (or The Young Bastard as Richard Freeborn wanted to call his English version), as of equal importance in reflecting Dostoevsky's thinking, if not his constructional talents. The ambiguous utterancesof Versilov,theiconoclastof^4 Raw Youth, related by the equivocal narrator and protagonist Arkadi Dolgoruki, illustrate the reason why Dostoevsky's fiction is far more thought-provoking than his journalism. For one thing, his characters are capable of thinking simultaneously from two points of view. For another, they fail to implement their ideology, and even perish in the attempt. Whether the antideists Stavrogin or Kirillov or the defenders of Orthodoxy Tikhon and Zosima, their complex personalities make their philosophies immune fromthe confrontational glibness that invalidates most of what Dostoevsky wrote outside the boundaries of fiction. Only in the tiresome satire of The Devils, when Dostoevsky insists that the Romantic liberals of the 1840s must bear responsibility for their sons, the nihilists of the 1870s?an assertion which Hudspith lets her author get away with?is the fictional world momentarily shattered. There are some excellent leitmotifs in this study. Khomiakov's contrast of Iranian (free will and monotheism) versus Kush (fatalism and monotheism) deserves to be revived as a benchmark. So does the idea that Dostoevsky, like many other writers, moves from analysis to synthesis, although some might see this as just progress from an open to a closed mind. Reading this study, we cannot help reflecting how bad a prophet Dostoevsky was. His concept of Russianness was hijacked by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. Those who modelled themselves on his heroes have been marginalized. Those he despised rule the world: Luzhin works for the IMF, Miusov for the UN. Hudspith hits a genuinely new perspective in her very last paragraph. She says: 'Russians today are again looking for a new direction'. An interesting continuation would be to see how Dostoevsky lives on, perverted in the rants of Zavtra and other 'red-brown' newspapers. Today, as a hundred years ago, calls for 'unity and brother? hood' imply firstof all a bloody victory,whether the conquest of Constantinople that Dostoevsky wanted or the extermination of Chechens that Limonov envisages. Less faith and more doubt would have made this a better book. Queen Mary, University of London Donald Rayfield Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, igiy-41. By David L. Hoffmann. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. 2003. xiv + 247pp. ?ll-9S- ISBN0-8014-8821-4. 'To describe Stalinism as a return to traditional Russian ways is to mischaracterize it in a fundamental way' (p. 187). This basic tenet underpins much of David Hoffmann's analysis of the establishment, development, and shifts in cultural values during the pre-war Stalinist years. Hoffmann sets out to debunk, once and for all, any linger? ing notion that Stalinist culture should be regarded as fundamentally retrogressive, representing a retreat from the heady radicalism of the early Bolshevik regime to the relative comfort of the more traditionalist, conservative values of Tsarist Russia. Thus fromthe outset Hoffmann cites two familiar interpretations of Stalinism: firstly, 890 Reviews Leon Trotsky's denunciation of Stalin and the Politburo as representing a kind of Soviet Thermidor, 'the triumph of the bureaucracy' (p. 2) as Trotsky himself put it (The Revolution Betrayed, 1937); and secondly, from the opposite side of the political fence, Nicholas Timasheff's notion of Stalinism as an explicit rejection of socialism (The Great Retreat, 1946). Hoffmann does not wish to dispute the fact that Stalinist culture advocated a traditional set of codes and values forsocial behaviour, supporting the patriarchal family,promoting clean living, and encouraging a healthy respect for both folk customs and...