But on the same Pravda pages as the trial coverage were other stories that stressed the damage done by the vigilance campaign. In January 1938, the Central Committee passed a resolution that tried to cool down the prevailing hysteria - and yet the leadership proved singularly unable to move past the metaphor of the hidden enemy within:
All these facts show that many of our party organisations and leaders still to this day haven't learned to see through and expose the artfully masked enemy who attempts with cries of vigilance to mask his own enemy status . . . and who uses repressive measures to cut down our Bolshevik cadres and to sow insecurity and excessive suspicion in our ranks.[369]
Pravda also printed resolutions from economic officials that say in effect: 'Yes, we know we have problems fulfilling our plan directives, but what can you expect, with all those wreckers running around? But now the wreckers have been caught and we promise to do better.' One can perhaps see in these stories the beginnings of a new approach to improving poor economic performance: tinkering with reforms rather than catching wreckers.
March 1938 was also the month of the Nazi takeover of Austria. Pravda stories about international tension were used to underscore the necessity of vigilance. But the shadow of the looming war also strengthened the desire of many to move beyond the internecine paranoia of the purification campaign.
The pages of Pravda were not exclusively devoted to the anxiety-provoking evils of two-faced wreckers, super-vigilant party officials, poor economic performance and international tension. Its pages in March I938 were also filled with a symbolic triumph of Soviet society: the return of Arctic explorers Ivan Papanin and his team from a dangerous and heroic expedition. As Papanin and his men travelled closer and closer to the capital, the stories about them became bigger and bigger. With exquisite timing, they hit Moscow only a few days after the trial closed and several issues of Pravda were entirely devoted to the ecstatic welcome they received. A smiling Stalin made an appearance in order to greet the heroes.
This sense of a triumphal progression after overcoming heroic difficulties was for many participants - including the top leaders - as much or more a part of the meaning of the 1930s as the traumas associated with collectivisation or the purification campaign. This way of remembering the 1930s should be kept in mind when we approach the speech given by Andrei Zhdanov in September 1946 which denounced the alleged pessimistic outlook of the great literary artists Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko. More than just a clamp- down on literature, this speech served as a signal that the political leadership was going to try to re-create the triumphal mood that it remembered before the war. The complex of hopes and illusions, disappointments and strivings generated in Soviet society by the anti-Nazi war stood in the way of this project and were therefore perceived as an unsettling and dangerous threat. Thus the key passage in the speech - undoubtedly reflecting Stalin's own preoccupations - is: 'And what would have happened if we had brought up young people in a spirit of gloom and lack of belief in our cause? The result would have been that we would not have won the Great Fatherland war.'
Zhdanov presented the Soviet Union as a traveller on a long journey in which the present moment lacked meaning. 'We are not today what we were yesterday and tomorrow we will not be what we are today.' Writers were enlisted as guides and leaders on the journey whose job was 'to help light up with a searchlight the path ahead'.
In this version ofthe constitutive Soviet narrative, 'class' has almost dropped out while 'leadership' remains. Thankfully, the spotlight is not directedtowards searching out hidden enemies. Yet an atmosphere of doubt and anxiety emanates from the speech: can we meet the difficulties ahead if the coming generation does not see itself as participants in a triumphal progression? Thus the core of the attack on Akhmatova was her concern with her own 'utterly insignificant experiences', her 'small, narrow, personal life' - a tirade in which 'personal' (lichnyi) is a synonym for 'small' and 'narrow'. The Stalin era is often called the era ofthe 'cult of personality [lichnost']', but it might just as well be called the era of the fear of a personal life.[370]
When the Stalin era came to an end in early 1953, things immediately started to change, and the leadership came face to face with a task which it never really solved: how to account for these changes within the framework of the overarching narrative? The key problem was brought up as early as June 1953 at the Central Committee plenum during which the Politburo (called Presidium during this period) announced and justified to the party elite the arrest of Lavrentii Beria, head of the NKVD. The archival publication of these deliberations in 1991 showed how the leadership had to face up to an embarrassing question (as formulated by Lazar Kaganovich): 'It's good that you [leaders] acted decisively and put an end to the adventurist schemes of Beria and to him personally, but where were you earlier and why did you allow such a person into the very heart of the leadership?'[371] The question is here a narrow one about individual leaders, but the same question was bound to expand to the much more difficult issue of why the Soviet system as a whole allowed Stalinism.
The June plenum revealed two different narratives about the downfall of Beria, one mired in the past and the other struggling towards the future. The paradigmatic examples of these contrasting narratives can be found in the speeches by Kaganovich and Anastas Mikoyan. Kaganovich insistently defined the present situation as another 1937. More than once he approvingly referred to Stalin's 1937 speech 'On Inadequacies in Party Work', a speech that served as a signal for the terroristic purification campaign of 1937-8. Using 1937 rhetoric, Kaganovich condemned Beria as a spy in the pay of imperialist powers. Accordingly, Kaganovich called for renewed 'vigilance' and 'purification'. 'Much of what was said in 1937 must be taken into account today as well.'
Mikoyan also employed 1937 rhetoric such as 'double-dealerism' (dvurush- nichestvo). But the spirit behind his use of such terms is almost comically opposed to the spirit of 1937. Here is Mikoyan's proof of Beria's double- dealerism: 'I asked him [after Stalin's death]: why do you want to head the NKVD? And he answered: we have to establish legality, we can't tolerate this state of things in the country. We have a lot of arrested people, we have to liberate them and not send people to the camps for no reason.' Mikoyan had no problem with this statement as a policy goal, but he argued that Beria was a dvurushnik because - he did not move fast enough during the three months since Stalin's death to introduce legality and release prisoners!
Kaganovich was genuinely angry at Beria, who 'insulted Stalin and used the most unpleasant and insulting words about him'. Beria's insulting attitude towards Stalin did not seem to bother Mikoyan - indeed, in his low-key way, Mikoyan made it clear that Stalin was mainly responsible for Beria's rise to power. Mikoyan rejected the 1937 scenario as simply irrelevant: 'We do not yet have direct proof on whether or not [Beria] was a spy, whether or not he received orders from foreign bosses, but is this really what's important?' He was clearly anxious to get past Beria and talk about issues of economic reform. He described the ludicrous situation in which the government offered unre- alistically low prices for potatoes, the kolkhozniki had therefore no economic interest in growing them, and government institutions sent out highly paid white-collar workers every year to plant them while 'the kolkhozniki look on and laugh'.
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Richard Kosolapov,
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The Plenum proceedings were first published in