Women’s Rights and the Cold War – Re-approaching the Women’s International Democratic Federation’s Historical Role

By Yulia Gradskova

Even though the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) has disappeared from discussions on women’s rights since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, its history remains relevant to our understanding of state feminism and transnational women’s rights. Indeed, by the end of the Cold War, the WIDF—founded in Paris in 1945 by women from about 40 countries—became one of the world’s biggest transnational women’s organizations, known for its activity for women’s rights, peace, and anti-colonialism. However, the WIDF occupies an ambiguous position within the history of the women’s movement. While known to researchers as both an important actor in the struggle for women’s rights in a global context, it has been criticized for uncritically praising women’s emancipation under state socialism, while ignoring the double burden and lack of political freedom that women experienced there. The federation was thus an active participant within the Cold War and, during a certain period of time, its victim: accused by the American government of Communist activities between 1954 and 1967, the federation was deprived of its status as a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) in the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the UN.  

Figure 1. Cover of the WIDF magazine Women of the Whole World, 1985, Issue 2.

What were the organisation’s achievements and problems? And why did it eventually become almost invisible in historical accounts? In what follows, I propose a few answers to these questions. 

The third WIDF Congress, which took place in Copenhagen in 1953, adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Women. The Declaration demanded quite an impressive bill of rights for all women, regardless of their race, nation or class. These rights included, amongst others: the right to work and the right to choose a profession or occupation, equal pay for equal work, the right to the state protection of maternity and childhood, the right to education and the right of the peasant women to own land.^[1] Within their historical context, such demands were brave and challenging. Indeed, parts of Africa and of Asia continued to be occupied as colonies of European countries, where universal rights to education or maternity protection did not exist. In many European countries the principle of equal pay for equal work was far from being realized: in Sweden, for example, special salaries for women (kvinnolöner) ceased to exist only in 1960. Such a broad declaration of rights attracted many new supporters to the organization and, not least led to the WIDF becoming one of the initiators of the International Year of Women, 1975, and an important actor behind the UN’s adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). ^[2]   

On the other hand, looking at the history of the WIDF compels us to confront the problem of the ‘Soviet fronts’ (or, organizations sympathizing with the USSR, according to Peterson), and their fellow travelers.^[3] The question about how much the Soviet Union and other countries of the Eastern bloc influenced this organization continues to be asked by the historians even now, 30 years after the end of the Cold War^[4].

Figure 2. The WIDF’s foundation was controversial, due to its association with the Soviet Union. This WIDF communiqué condemns the French Government’s 1951 attempt to dissolve the WIDF.

The materials in the Moscow archive are particularly interesting in this respect. The files of the Committee of Soviet Women, a member of the federation, have preserved not only the protocols of WIDF board-meetings and congresses, but also a lot of classified reports that the representative of the Soviet Committee working in the WIDF Secretariat (from 1951 in East Berlin) wrote to Moscow. These reports suggest that Soviet expectations of WIDF activities included promoting a positive image of the Soviet Union and its foreign policy. The Soviet female employees involved in the work of the WIDF were organized through a hierarchical structure and received a salary from the Soviet state. 

Soviet employees in the WIDF were charged with informing the Soviet state about the WIDF’s internal operations and, in particular, individual opinions and conflicts with respect to the development of the organization and international politics. One report informed Moscow about the position concerning the ‘struggle for peace’ that was taken by one of the WIDF leaders, vice-president, Dr. Andrea Andreen from Sweden.^[5] According to the letter, Andreen:

Considers it important that while organizing cooperation with other women’s organizations we [the WIDF] should take the position that is different from one insisting that everything in the USSR is good and everything in the USA is bad. We have to criticize both. She also suggested to make an appeal to the governments of the USA, UK and the USSR demanding a ban of atomic weapons.^[6]

It is easy to suppose that such a position did not fully correspond to Soviet expectations. The report shows however, that in the case of Andreen, like in many others, the Soviet representatives did not have the power to give orders or demand certain behaviour from activists from different countries. Still, such classified information helped Moscow to choose their strategies, first of all with respect to cadre issues and the drafting of the WIDF’s official documents. 

During the 1960s, the WIDF underwent significant changes due to many factors, including increased membership of women from newly independent countries or countries involved in anti-colonial struggles. The 1970s-1980s saw the WIDF’s biggest international success in this regard. As previously mentioned, during this period the WIDF was active in the UN, in particular before and during the UN Decade for Women (1975-1985). The WIDF continued to be active not only at the first UN conference in Mexico, but in all further conferences until the end of the Cold War.^[7] For example, the WIDF’s General Secretary, Vire-Tuominen, in her report for the WIDF council in 1980, proudly stated that the WIDF had accomplished a lot during the NGO forum in Copenhagen: 

Figure 3. A 1975 Bulletin on the WIDF’s activities

WIDF organized 17 seminars, 2 film projections, and wide distribution of our printed materials including a special issue of our journal prepared during the forum. Our president, Freda Brown, chaired two panels, and our experts participated in several panels.^[8]

On the other hand, the development of mass, grassroots radical feminist movements in Western Europe and the USA, often referred to as ‘second wave feminism’, influenced changes in how gender differences were seen by society. In many countries, feminist activism led to changes of legislation on marriage, divorce, work, abortion, as well as on taxation, contributing to more gender equality, and recognition of LGBT rights.^[9] Due to these changes in legislation, practice, and grassroots mobilization, the language of the discussions around gender inequality and discrimination in many countries of Western Europe and North America became both more radical and more specific than that which the WIDF could offer. 

The growth of grassroots activism was also in contrast to the WIDF’s centralized structures. Thus, the federation was forced to confront criticism on its lack of internal democracy. In the 1960s such a critique was made by the Italian delegates, and in the early 1980s the organization of French women demanded more democracy in the WIDF’s working routines. The Declaration of the National Bureau of the Union of French Women addressed participants of the WIDF’s 1980 bureau meeting, expressing the French contingent’s discontent with the lack of democratic decision-making.^[10] The document also criticized the WIDF’s unlimited support for the viewpoint of the ‘socialist countries’, and the use of the experiences of these countries as a positive example for other countries to follow. The declaration stressed, for example, that the WIDF congresses had to be transformed into a real space for discussion and decision-making, while the role of the administrative bodies like the Secretariat should be diminished.^[11]

 After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the WIDF headquarters at Unter den Linden 13 in East Berlin was closed, the WIDF periodical ceased publication, and in the years that followed, the organization’s centre moved to Latin America. However, paradoxically, one of the last issues of the WIDF journal published in 1991 contains an article by Javier Perez de Cuellar, Secretary General of the UN, who noted that during all these years, the federation had played an important role in promoting equality of women’s rights and wished ‘all the success in your work’ to the WIDF on the occasion of its 45^th anniversary.^[12]  Thus, it is possible to say that the WIDF’s importance for international women’s rights became particularly visible internationally at the very moment when the Cold War confrontation, which had been crucial to the WIDF’s existence, came to an end. 

Yulia Gradskova is Associate Professor in History, Department of History, Stockholm University. She defended her dissertation in History in Södertörn University/Stockholm University in 2007. You can read more about the WIDF in her book, which is forthcoming through Routledge in 2021: The Women’s International Democratic Federation , the Global South and the Cold War. Defending the Rights of Women of the ‘Whole World’.

References:

---

^[1] Za ravnopravie, schastie, mir. Berlin: WIDF. 1953, 254-255.

^[2] de Haan, F., The Global Left-Feminist 1960s. From Copenhagen to Moscow and New York”. In: Ch. Jian, M. Klimke, M. Kirasirova et al. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties. Between Protest and Nation-Building (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 234-236.

^[3] Petersson, F. (2013). Caught Between Nostalgia, Anti-Colonialism, International Communism, Transnational Networks and Radical Spaces: A Re-Assessment on the Historiography of the League against Imperialism. CoWoPa – Comintern Working Paper, 28, pp. 1-31.

^[4] See for example, de Haan, F., Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organizations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), Women’s History Review, 19:4 (2010), pp. 547-73.

^[5] The Soviet government usually presented itself internationally as a country aspiring for peace and détente. However, as it is widely known the USSR also participated in arm race and the development of atomic weapons.

^[6] GARF 4 106, pp. 36-38.

^[7] Ghodsee, K., Revisiting the United Nations Decade for Women: Brief Reflections on Feminism, Capitalism and Cold War Politics in the Early Years of the International Women’s Movement, Women’s Studies International Forum, 33 (2010), pp. 3-12; Ghodsee, K., Second World, Second Sex (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

^[8] GARF 3 5077, p. 90

^[9] See Gildea, R., James, M. & Warring, A., Europe’s 1968. Voices of Revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

^[10] GARF 3 5077, pp. 268-279.

^[11] GARF 3 5077, p. 277.

^[12] Zenshchiny mira 1991 (1), p. 9.

Images are the author’s own. Figures 2 and 3 were taken at Arbetarörelsens Arkiv och bibliotek and IISH respectively, and should not be reproduced without the express permission of both Gradskova and the relevant archive.

World Revolution / Postcolonial Paradise: Utopian Visions of the “Soviet East” in the 1920-30s

Mollie Arbuthnot

Modernist re-imaginings of space and society were everywhere in the 1920s. Avant garde artists were captivated by the ideas of progress, utopia, and, especially in the Soviet Union, by revolution. Film, photography, and architecture all embraced the possibility of creating new worlds: politically, socially, and aesthetically. Soviet propaganda posters denounced the old and celebrated the radiant future awaiting the workers and peasants under socialism.

These visions of the new world were remarkably varied. This was really a period when competing visions of modernity emerged in many different places, from Paris to Moscow to Istanbul to Samarqand. Even within the scope of Soviet propaganda posters – which we might expect to represent the single, official voice of the state – there was a wide range of images and ideas, with influences from religious imagery, abstract art, and commercial advertising.

It’s hardly surprising, then, to find that there were almost as many visions of the utopian future as there were artists to depict it. Some focussed on the image of the “Soviet East.” They depicted the Bolshevik revolution as an anti-imperial uprising, and the non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union as postcolonial space.

Fig.1. TheLife of Peoples of the Soviet and Capitalist East. Signed “RiaM,” Samarqand, 1927. Reproduced from Russian Perspectives on Islam, accessed 31 July 2019,  http://islamperspectives.org/rpi/items/show/9936

One such poster [Fig.1] directly contrasts life for “peoples of the East” [sharq xalqlari (Uzbek), narody vostoka (Russian)] under Soviet and colonial rule. A bold geometric diagonal divides the composition between the Soviet and the colonised East in such a way as to make the Soviet East seem bright and open, in contrast to the crowded and oppressive capitalist world, which was populated by caricatures of grotesque and bloodthirsty colonialists and downtrodden peoples suffering under the colonial yoke.

The light of modernity shines upon the Soviet East, whose people are both much bigger in scale and fewer in number, giving them a sense of monumentality and implicit grandeur. This exaggerated scaleis echoed in the architecture; besides fruitful fields and urban landscapes, the Soviet side also features a huge fantasy structure. Its foundation is a red five-pointed star, and rises up in geometric tiers, like flattened scaffolding, to hold a giant hammer and sickle and the letters USSR (in both Cyrillic and Arabic scripts) in silhouette against the rising sun.

The message is clear: the Soviet East, having thrown off imperial rule, is free and fruitful, and serves as an exemplar to be emulated by other colonised peoples. It visualises, therefore, the Soviet government’s policy to exploit cross-border ties in the hope that if they overtly and ostentatiously promoted the interests of minority groups, it would attract the support of other “oppressed nations” abroad, and further the cause of world revolution.[1] The poster even depicts a small group of figures on the colonial side who look and gesture upwards at their Soviet counterparts as if in supplication.

Fig.2. Long Live Proletarian Revolution All Over the World!!! Vladimir Kaidalov, Tashkent, 1933. Reproduced from Russian Perspectives on Islam, accessed 31 July 2019,  http://islamperspectives.org/rpi/items/show/10015

Other images, too, stress the solidarity between the Soviet East and the colonised abroad. А1933 poster by Vladimir Kaidalov contrasts, in bold black and red, peaceful celebrations of the 15^thanniversary of the 1917 revolution with violence and starvation in the colonies [Fig.2], while another symbolically represents the Uzbek SSR as “the brightest lighthouse on the edge of the colonial east.” [Fig.3]. The metaphor of light – signified here by the lighthouse, but in other images by the sun, lightening, electricity or abstract rays of light – was extremely common, and not just limited to Eurocentric imagery. The rising sun in particular was used by Uzbek reformist Muslim intellectuals known as the Jadids as a symbol of their own brand of modernity and enlightenment.

Fig.3. The UzSSR is the Brightest Lighthouse on the Edge of the Colonial East. Semion Mal’t, Tashkent, 1934.

However, despite some shared aims with local reformists, Soviet developmentalism was underpinned by a fundamentally Eurocentric, teleological view of progress. The very concept of the “Soviet East” is based in Orientalist assumption: the idea of an intrinsic Eastern-ness uniting the Soviet East with the colonial subjects of European empires, irrespective of specific differences in culture or geography. It is also rooted in the Marxist-Leninist understanding of teleological progress, according to which societies are at different stages of economic development, and some are therefore more “advanced” or more “backward” than others. The “backward” nationalities, according to Soviet definition, were those who had been oppressed by Russian imperialism and lagged behind on the path of progress.

Soviet policy, therefore, despite its anti-imperialist bite, also revived and rationalised particularly crude categories of East (backward) and West (advanced) to justify its civilising mission.[2] To belong to the peoples of the Soviet East was to have a shared history of colonial oppression, to have been liberated by the October revolution, and now to be in the process of catching up. Or, to use the Soviet term of the time, to be “formerly-oppressed.”

In several ways, therefore, depictions of the “Soviet East” actually reveal the profoundly Eurocentric perspectives underlying Soviet cultural policy and propaganda. As the 1920s went on, temporary compromises made between the Soviet state and local elites began to wear thin: national cultures were to be celebrated only so long as they conformed to the party line on progress (without leaning towards “bourgeois nationalism” or “local chauvinism”), and liberation meant not just rejecting imperial power but also overthrowing traditions and social norms seen as backward. Soviet “postcolonialism” therefore operated within rigid boundaries.

This didn’t stop artists from representing the “Soviet East” as a paragon of liberty.

Fig.4. For the Soviet East!Vladimir Rozhdestvenskii, Tashkent, 1928. Reproduced from Russian Perspectives on Islam, accessed 31 July 2019, http://islamperspectives.org/rpi/items/show/10008

This poster [Fig.4], produced for the 10-year anniversary of the Red Army, does just that. It depicts a cavalryman riding a red horse directly out of the frame of the poster, towards the viewer, his gaze uplifted and his posture composed: he is literally the flag-bearer of Soviet order. He is also a romanticised figure, the mountain horseman depicted in monumental scale and vivid colour against a stylised landscape. The poster frames the Soviet East as ordered, militarised, mapped space, but emphasises too its agency and dynamism.

Others emphasised the brotherly harmony between the formerly-oppressed nationalities and the Russian proletariat, striding Together, As Friends, to Elections, to Work, and to the Soviets! [Fig.5]. Predictably, this image of a peaceful utopia glosses over real resentments and conflicts between workers of different nationalities. In Central Asia, conditions for local workers were often worse than for Russians, who nonetheless often expressed resentment at the preferential treatment afforded non-Europeans under the state’s affirmative action policies [korenizatsiia]. They expressed their mutual hostility in direct fashion on the shop floor: ‘in one Tashkent factory, European workers taunted Uzbeks by calling them women’s names, and Uzbeks dropped crowbars and bolts on Europeans as a “joke”.’[3] (It is interesting to note that, unusually, this poster is captioned only in Russian, perhaps indicating an intended audience among the predominantly-Russian industrial workers, and perhaps suggesting that the Russian workforce was thought to be the main cause of interethnic conflict).

Fig.5. Together, As Friends, to Elections, to Work, and to the Soviets!Unknown artist, 1920s. Reproduced from Russian Perspectives on Islam, accessed 31 July 2019, http://islamperspectives.org/rpi/items/show/10111

Images of the “Soviet East,” as created in posters of the 1920s and early 30s, were therefore utopian in more ways than one. The Soviet East was depicted as a beacon, a sunbeam, a ray of light; a model of postcolonial transformation, industrialisation, and interethnic friendship; and a paragon of freedom in vivid colour. Propaganda images hinted at some of the problems faced by Soviet nationalities policy in practice, such as in the reference to interethnic conflict, but largely present images of a postcolonial paradise. These posters show the diversity of Soviet propaganda images in the 1920s, before the ‘friendship of the peoples,’ an array of nationalities gathered around Stalin, became the defining metaphor of the Soviet body politic.

Mollie Arbuthnot is a PhD candidate in Russian Studies at the University of Manchester. Her dissertation focuses on propaganda posters in Soviet Uzbekistan, c.1920-1936, and examines propaganda images in the context of Soviet nationalities policy and contemporaneous theories about national identity, artistic heritage, and visual propaganda. Previously, she studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of Cambridge.

 

References

[1] Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001),9.

[2] Michael Kemper, ‘Red Orientalism: Mikhail Pavlovich and Marxist Oriental Studies in Early Soviet Russia’ in Die Welt des Islams, vol.50 no.3/4, A Muslim Interwar Soviet Union(2010), 435-476 (476).

[3] Shoshana Keller, To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941(Westport CA and London: Praeger, 2001), 213-214.

Summer Round-Up!: May-July 2019

Tom Shillam

Communism and State Violence

As the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre passes, it seems apt to begin this round-up by considering state violence. Writing in The Conversation, Chongyi Feng explores the divisions in the Chinese Communist Party of 1989 over how to approach the million-strong protests, which called only for mild government reforms. A ‘hard-line’ faction came to view the protests as symbolising ‘a conspiracy of hostile forces backed by Western powers to create turmoil and divide China’ while a ‘moderate’ faction welcomed them as ‘patriotic’.

On the topic of hard-line authoritarian leaders, Alan Taylor has compiled a brilliant series of photographs of ‘Cold War Bunkers’ in Albania which the increasingly paranoid head of state Enver Hoxha began to construct from 1968. These bunkers spanned the country and were intended as shelters from a potential Soviet attack or invasion by a neighbour. Many still stand, some nestled among high mountains and others grouped on seashores.

Moving towards popular experiences of Communism, Arnos Chapple constructs a similar photo archive which conveys everyday life in Hungary from the 1940s through to the 1980s. From bears visiting delis to divers on the Danube, we get a very broad picture of how ordinary citizens (and animals) laboured, loved and lived in Hungary during these years.  Finding creative outlets in song and dance, the population was nevertheless subject to relentless state surveillance throughout.

Indeed, authorities in communist Eastern Europe did not just monitor citizens but sometimes stole their stuff. Writing in The Art Newspaper, Catherine Hickley reports on a pilot project by the German Lost Art Foundation which considered the acquisitions of several Brandenburg museums between 1945 and 1989. It transpires that ‘between 1% and 8% of their inventories’ may have been ‘unethically acquired’ – books, sculptures, paintings and furniture which had often been taken from the homes of people who fled East Germany in the late 1950s subsequently found their way into local museums.

The visual history of the Cold War has also been discussed in great detail on our own blog by Agata Fijalkowski. In the final post in her series, she considers how, towards the end of World War Two, pro-Soviet forces in the Polish eastern territories looked to remodel the legal system. Photographs of new courts which the regime constructed ‘convey an air of watchfulness’ which was intended to keep judges in line with the ideological dictates of the new regime. The authorities distrusted pre-war judiciaries and created special schools to ‘train the new judges on aspects of people’s justice’.

Art, Culture, and Space

Considering the hit new historical dramatisation Chernobyl, The University of York’s Sam Wetherell asks why the bureaucratic doublespeak of the post-war Soviet Union sounds so familiar in a British accent. Though, as he suggests, the comparison should not be pushed too far, the authoritarianism of a state or social system can often be discerned through studying its use of empty abstraction and failed formulae. Wetherell draws interesting parallels between Soviet industrialisation – with its efficiency units and 5-year plans – and what cultural theorist Mark Fisher calls the ‘market Stalinism’ of the contemporary British state, with its relentless and stultifying resort to a complex of measures and metrics with which to evaluate university, school, and hospital performance.

Indeed, such moments frequently presage episodes of popular mobilisation and grassroots creativity. Once upon a time, before news of Stalin’s purges among other atrocities spread, the Soviet Union provided hope and inspiration to oppressed groups worldwide in its apparently progressive and inclusive political credentials. Owen Walsh describes how a significant group of African American writers, activists and journalists, frustrated with ‘white creative control and racial stereotyping’ in Hollywood, took up an invitation in 1932 to travel to the Soviet Union and produce a film about US racism. Unfortunately for the group, the plan failed – largely due to the governmental cynicism and economic rationalism discussed above. The Soviets needed American materials for their infrastructure projects and feared the geopolitical consequences of such a film being released.

Progressive artist groups later in the 20th-century – both within the Soviet Union’s borders and beyond – sought an escape from governmental and societal constraints on creative expression . Arianna Cantarelli studies how philosopher Timur Novikov acted as a ‘frontman for Russia’s wild youth’ during the 1980s and 1990s, experimenting with futuristic technology and art which was anathema to Eastern bloc realism. Of course, as formal dissent began to grow in the Eastern bloc from the 1960s onwards, subcultures and resistance movements also grew in the West. One of these was the LGBTQ movement. As the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots passes, Christopher Giola probes ‘grassroots organising’  among activists in the aftermath of the riots. George Lakey recalls how opportunities disappeared and doors shut when he came out in the US in the early 1970s, but that he also stepped ‘into a new place of freedom’, agreeing with the feminist injunction that ‘the personal is political’ and ‘the political, personal’.

Indeed, it was not just state and political violence which activists confronted as the 20th-century wore on but also private and domestic violence. Cara Diver pens a piece for History Workshop about Irish feminists in the 1970s who raised awareness of marital violence and ‘shattered the illusion that the home was always a site of safety for women (and their children)’. The problem had been side-lined with whispers about ‘troubled couples’, but various groups including ‘Women’s Aid’ now formed, which amplified the voices of abused wives.

Civil Society, Race and Internationalism

Vigorous civil societies provide one of the means by which oppressed groups can mobilise – even in dire social and political conditions. Harry Merritt, writing for Peripheral Histories, investigates Latvian Jews who served in the Red Army during the Second World War as part of the 201st Latvian Rifle Division. Facing hostility from gentiles who feared their presence, and soon to encounter horrific German atrocities against Jews upon retaking their homeland in 1944,  a ‘diverse and engaged civil society’ offered hope to Latvian Jews, even as the horrors of war took their toll. Among the ideas that moved them were socialism, Zionism, and fusions of the two ideologies.

Tiffany Florvil, for Black Perspectives, studies how Black Germans among other racialised communities, used international book fairs in the 1980s and 1990s as platforms through which to discuss ‘the return of German ethno-nationalism’ and racist politics and discourses more broadly. These annual fairs of ‘Radical Black and Third World Books’ allowed intellectuals from across different continents to come together and forge a Black internationalism which in turn drew on other internationalisms represented at the events.

For those more interested in the 19th century and in individuals rather than networks, Kevin Duong puts together a fascinating piece about little-known French feminist and internationalist Flora Tristan. Tristan self-published a successful book entitled The Workers’ Union, which argued for ‘workers of both sexes to come together to form a common international union’ in 1844. In the book, Tristan drew on utopian socialist currents in challenging ‘conventional ideas about women and social organisation’. Duong suggests that such internationalisms are neglected as compared with 20th-century liberal internationalisms associated with the UN among others.

If you have written a blog which pertains to any of the above themes and would like to be included in a future round-up, please tag us @authlanguage or me @tomshillam! Comments, advice and feedback all welcome. Thanks for reading!

Tom Shillam is PhD student at the University of York who holds a Departmental Scholarship from the Department of History. His research considers how mid-20th century South Asian intellectuals synthesised anti-authoritarian ideas of their own with those of writers elsewhere to propose a different decolonising politics to the dominant developmentalist dogmas of the time. Catch him on Twitter @tomshillam.

‘Outsider’ vs. ‘Our Own’: Confronting a Familiar Paradigm in the Pages of the Early Gulag Press.

By Mark Vincent

The rigid dichotomy of the ‘political prisoner’ vs. ‘common criminal’ continues to frustrate researchers of the Soviet camp system. Although accounts of late Imperial exile and hard labour have argued persuasively  in favour of studying a wider range of carceral experiences, this dichotomy remains unchallenged in studies looking to reconstruct daily life in the Gulag.[1]

Though an impressive achievement, the relatively recent volume edited by Michael David-Fox struggles to break down the reductive labels of ‘criminal’ and ‘political’ assigned to inmates.[2] While—on a purely personal level—this volume  proved incredibly helpful, as I was able find the activities of criminal gangs through terms such as urki (‘criminals’), vory (‘thieves’) or bandity (‘bandits’) in both survivor memoirs and archival documents, these inquiries raised the fairly obvious questions of who exactly constituted a ‘criminal’ in the Soviet Union in the first place, and what differences there might be within this broad category?

Looking for further ways of breaking down these labels and based on excellent advice by colleagues (special thanks to Miriam Dobson!), I began to look at prisoner newspapers from the 1920s The most prominent of these was the newspaper of the early Soviet ‘showpiece’ penal institution on the Solovetskii Archipelago in the White Sea – the inspiration behind Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous allegorical metaphor.

Photograph of inmates working on the camp newspaper taken from the excellent online exhibition and teaching resource: https://www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/visit/exhibitions/virtualexhibitions/beautyinhellcultureinthegulag/

Beginning in 1923, and running until the spring of 1930, the most renowned publication from the camp, Solovetskii Island, reached an impressive circulation figure of around 3,000 copies and was available both via subscription or at kiosks in Moscow, Leningrad and Kharkov.[3] Upon first glance, the all too familiar dichotomy of ‘criminal’ vs. ‘political’ prisoner looked to be even more pronounced here than in the Gulag memoirs that I consulted, particularly given that the vast majority of articles were written by prisoners hailing from the educated and cultural elite.

This was encapsulated perfectly in the title of the article “Frayera” i “Svoi” from the August 1925 edition of Solovetskii Island.^[4] In this sense, frayera is best understood as slang for an ‘outsider’ and svoi as ‘our own’, both implying a clear boundary of inclusion. These groups were consolidated further by the author of the article, a prisoner named ‘B. Borisov’ (pseudonyms were used by a number of authors ), who began the piece by depicting inmates from the 13^th Work Company looking down from the walls of the Solovetskii Kremlin, dividing the mass of prisoners in the gardens below neatly in half.

Borisov clarified that these were the aforementioned two groups, with ‘outsiders’ representing anyone who could be stolen from (my emphasis), with ‘our own’ meaning those who earned their livelihood through stealing. Although, they  stated, this divide could be clearly seen through physical appearance and mannerisms, the author also suggested that differences were not just external. As a self-ascribed ‘outsider’, Borisov explained how the opposing group viewed not just camp life but the entire world according to these rules, even lamenting that his  group lacked the strict ideology and moral code that ‘our own’ lived by!

‘‘Frayera’’ i ‘‘Svoi’’ from the August 1925 edition of Solovetskie Ostrova.

‘‘Frayera’’ i ‘‘Svoi’’ from the August 1925 edition of Solovetskie Ostrova.

While this initial sketch subscribed to the conventional political vs. criminal paradigm with which we are familiar, Borisov later began to break down the category of ‘one’s own’ into a hierarchy which demonstrated a more diverse constellation of criminal identities. At the top of this pyramid, in Borisov’s words the ‘aristocracy’, were ‘swindlers’ (those who engaged in profit-making scams), followed by a ‘large bourgeois’ of safecrackers and counterfeiters. The remaining masses comprised of pickpockets, house burglars and thieves who stole from shops or market stalls with the aid of their accomplices.^[5]

According to Borisov, the ‘have-nots, pariahs and shpana (habitual prisoners)’ who formed the bottom layer were driven by their ‘petit-bourgeois morality’. Interestingly, but not surprisingly given that it had to pass through secret police censors, the article had absorbed the language of the New Economic Policy which looked to crackdown on old, capitalist ways of life.[6] Although Borisov stated that criminal hierarches were full of ‘hypocritical traditions’, they  stated that more professional crimes such as ‘safe-cracking’ could not be compared to situational offenses, such as the wild, ‘feral’ activities which took place in Khitrovka – a famous Moscow district afflicted by its association with alcohol, drugs and prostitution, and which came to be used as ‘shorthand’ for these activities..

This analysis not only reflects discussions in contemporary criminology regarding the ‘hierarchy of crime’ where some activities have traditionally carried more esteem than others, but shows how the pejorative label Khitrovka could be prefixed to criminals, regardless of whether or not they actually hailed from that location.[7] Further interesting avenues this leads to could be to explore the interplay between incarceration and areas designated as ‘criminal spaces’ outside of penality; for instance the Odessan suburb of Moldvanka which appeared regularly in prisoner songs from the same period.

With criminals being designated a ‘Khitrovka pickpocket’ or ‘Khitrovka prostitute’ it also opens the possibility of looking at the differences between how male and female prisoners were discussed in the publication. Although, as suggested,  the problems of using the camp newspapers are manifold, the information they have provided goes far beyond the survivor memoirs from the Solovetskii camp, helping to break down this reductive binary. This, in itself, would seem like a worthwhile endeavour in looking to construct a more detailed and nuanced picture of prisoner society during the early years of the Soviet regime.

Based on themes from Dr Mark Vincent’s upcoming monograph, Criminal Subculture in the Gulag: Prisoner Society in the Stalinist Labour Camps (I. B. Tauris, 2019). Link to the Amazon pre-order: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Criminal-Subculture-Gulag-Prisoner-Stalinist/dp/1788311892.  Find Mark on Twitter at @VincentCriminal, or contact him at cultoftheurka@gmail.com

References

[1]See, in particular: Sarah Badcock, A Prison Without Walls? Eastern Siberian Exile in the Last Years of Tsarism (Oxford, 2016); Sarah Young, ‘Knowing Russia’s Convicts: The Other in Narratives of Imprisonment and Exile of the Late Imperial Era’, Europe-Asia, 65:9 (2013). Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09668136.2013.844509

[2] Michael David-Fox (ed.), The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation and Comparison (Pittsburgh, 2015).

[3] Gullotta, Andrea, ‘The ‘Cultural Village’ of the Solovki Camp:  A Case of Alternative Culture’, Studies in Slavic Cultures, XI (2010), p.12.

[4] Borisov, B, ‘‘Frayera’ i ‘Svoi’’, Solovetskie Ostrova, No.8, August 1925, pp.80-82.

[5] Definitions of criminal activities checked against: Vitaly von Lange, Prestupnyy Mir  Rossii: Moi Vospominaniya ob Odesse i Khar’kove (Odessa, 1906).

[6] See similar comments regarding prostitution in: Kowalsky, Sharon, Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia 1880-1930 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2009).

[7] Crewe, Ben, The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

‘An amoral lifestyle’ – criminalizing female sexuality in the Soviet 1960s

by Mirjam Galley

That the USSR did not turn out to be the utopia of gender equality that some revolutionaries had dreamt of in 1917 can no longer really surprise anyone. A glimpse into how the Soviet authorities dealt with juvenile delinquency allows us to fathom the extent to which boys and girls were thought of and treated differently. Looking at how deviance and sexuality were addressed in the 1960s also point to the limits of so-called ‘liberalization’ under Nikita Khrushchev.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet leaders were left with a difficult legacy. His successor Khrushchev had to find a way of reinventing Soviet socialism and removing the taint of Stalinist terror. To prevent the destabilization of the Soviet regime, Khrushchev needed to come up with a way to ensure public order and impose certain norms of behaviour without ubiquitous state terror.

The Soviet 1960s were shaped by a fear of deviance, a fear which was rekindled time and again by actual or perceived waves of juvenile crime. These fears were predominantly evoked around the image of unsupervised youths hanging out in the streets, in staircases, and in the dvory (courtyards), where they were thought to be drinking, smoking, and gambling, all seen as gateways into delinquency and crime.[1]

These anxieties were often personified by the ‘hooligan.’[2] The ‘hooligan’ was the concept most widely invoked in Soviet society to label deviant behaviour. As Brian LaPierre has shown, hooliganism was mainly a ‘crime’ committed by working class

Group of young people walking through Moscow, 1964 (courtesy of CREEES, UVA, via Wikimedia Commons)

men. This might suggest that in the Soviet Union, deviance was ‘male’. A closer look at convictions of underage boys and girls, however, shows that there was also ‘female’ deviance, and that Soviet notions of delinquency and deviance were deeply gendered. Archival documents reveal surprisingly conservative notions of gender roles and sexuality within the Soviet system of justice and even among youths.

At first glance, this seems surprising in a state claiming to have ‘freed’ women and reached the equality of the sexes. Instead, bureaucrats worked with crude impressions of ‘fallen women’ and resorted to victim blaming in cases of sexual abuse and rape. Although there were also girls who committed crimes, it seems like girls were mostly sent to institutions for delinquent minors (reform colonies or ‘special’ schools) for promiscuity (amoral behaviour), or even prostitution – if they could prove that money had been exchanged. Boys, on the other hand, would be sent away most frequently for hooliganism, theft, or assault.

To compare these gendered notions of deviance, I will look at two inspection reports from 1962 about so-called collection and distribution points (priemniki), one for boys in Leningrad and one for girls in Pushkin. Minors would be brought to these places by the police, and wait there to be transferred to an institution. The Leningrad priemnik mostly held boys waiting to be sent to a reform colony. These boys were accused of theft, hooliganism, drunkenness, and ‘refusing to study or work.’ The report also mentions particularly bad previous cases, such as stealing state property, breaking into apartments, organizing gangs, escaping from a colony, and rape.[3]

In contrast, the report about the 11 girls waiting in the Pushkin priemnik for their place in a colony shows most interest in their sexual behaviour, which is vividly described. The girls would either roam around at night or had left home to stay with some guy. The men in question are named as shady people, foreigners (in one case Swedish tourists), soldiers, delinquent people, ‘unknown’ men, people from the Jazz scene – covering every possible stereotype of a bad match for ‘good Soviet girls.’ According to the report, most of the girls were either skipping school, misbehaving or drinking and smoking. Five of them lived in a boarding school, two were students, four had dropped out or were between jobs. Their families (often single parents) are mostly described as drinkers, as leading ‘an amoral lifestyle,’ or as mentally ill.

The report emphasizes cases in which girls exerted a bad influence on their environment, either literally by catching (and potentially spreading) venereal diseases – two of them had been hospitalized for gonorrhoea – or more metaphorically by ‘having amoral conversations in her boarding school’s dorm,’ and ‘tainting’ the other girls at her school. Another common feature is the failure of other agencies to influence or re-educate them, be it schools, factory ‘collectives’, the Komsomol, the police or house committees.

Only one of the girls committed an actual crime; aside from all of her deviant acts, she committed a rather grim act of cruelty against animals.[4] Although the boys and

Young women walking through Revolution Square, Moscow, 1964 (image courtesy of CREEES, UVA, via Wikimedia Commons)

girls found themselves in similar institutions and came from similar social(ly destitute) backgrounds, they are convicted for very different offenses and could hardly have been described more differently.

Another such case demonstrating the gendered notions of deviance is the conviction of a 14-year-old girl to a reform colony for leading an ‘amoral life style’, which included running away from school and petty theft. The Latvian prosecution chose to protest against this conviction, as the story behind it is rather tragic, and the girl was not known for misbehaving. A 20-year-old man had (illegally!) started a relationship with this girl and was terrorizing her emotionally. When her schoolmaster found out that the girl was sexually active, he persuaded her mother to send her to a boarding school. The man continued pursuing the girl and threatened to break up with her if she did not come to see him at once.

Scared, she ran away from school, stole some clothes to wear, and went to meet him. She was picked up by the militsiia (police) and brought back to school, where the headmaster chose to put her in ‘quarantine’ for three weeks and then had her sent to a colony, bullying her mother into agreeing to this. At the time of the prosecution’s protest, the girl was stuck in a priemnik, awaiting transfer. The prosecutor demanded for her to be sent back, and for the security forces to charge the guy who had abused and pressured her instead, as seemingly no one had thought of this before. The commission in charge followed that recommendation, although this came quite late for the girl: the trail of documents suggests that between the decision to send her to a colony and its reversal a whole year had passed.[5]

The tendency to blame girls for having sex even goes as far as influencing the outcome of rape trials. In the 1960s in Latvia, a rapist was charged but not arrested, because the victim had been a ‘promiscuous’ girl – which is a gross, but sadly familiar, trivialisation of rape.[6] In a discussion about juvenile crime among senior Latvian education, health, and juvenile justice officials, a law scholar considers rape a serious problem amongst minors. He inexplicably links it to the phenomenon of uneducated single mothers, somehow implying that it is the father’s job in a family to tell his sons not to rape anyone, or that such basic moral ground rules require a certain level of schooling. To explain the status of rape among such youngsters, the scholar evokes the case of three boys being tried for raping a 26-year-old. Towards the end of the trial, one of the accused admitted that he actually did not take part in the crime, but asked the court ‘not to tell anyone because it would embarrass him in front of his friends.’[7]

These examples bear witness to an underlying culture of criminalizing female but not male sexuality, and of victim blaming in the case of rape – a culture so widespread and unquestioned that not to rape a girl could apparently be cause for embarrassment.

Mirjam Galley is a third-year PhD student in Sheffield’s History Department. Her doctoral research deals with children in care in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953, exploring both how the Soviet leadership sought to ‘form’ children in institutions into productive workers, and how children coped in these institutions. Her research interests include cultural history, especially the history of everyday life, of violence, and of marginalised groups. She is one of the co-founders of the Sheffield Modern International History Group. You can reach her on Twitter @M_E_Galley.

References

[1] Susan Reid, ‘Building Utopia in the Back Yard. Housing Administration, Participatory Government and the Cultivation of Socialist Community,’ in Karl Schlögel (ed.), Mastering Russian Spaces: Raum und Raumbewältigung als Probleme der russischen Geschichte (Munich, 2011), (149-186), pp. 171-172.

[2] Deborah Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York, 2007), p. 22.

[3] GARF, f. A385, op. 26, del. 203, ll. 126-133. (1962)

[4] GARF, f. A385, op. 26, del. 203, ll. 119-125. (1962)

[5] LVA, f. 270, ap. 3, lie. 1982, pp. 7-8. (1963)

[6] LVA, f. 270, ap. 3, lie. 2283, (86-115), p. 100. (1964)

[7] LVA, f. 270, ap. 3, lie. 2283, (86-115), p. 100-101. (1964)

Full Image Attributions

Image 1: By CREEES.UVA (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Image 2: By CREEES.UVA (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

The ‘Garrotted Renaissance’: language and nationalism in the 1930s

Almost exactly 80 years ago, on 3 November 1937, the NKVD executed the renowned Ukrainian theatre director Les Kurbas. Kurbas was not alone that day – a large group of Ukrainian writers and intellectuals were executed alongside him. The loss of so many of Ukraine’s cultural community resonated deeply with their compatriots, and those who had been executed became known in Ukraine as the ‘garrotted renaissance’.[1]

This execution was a tiny part of one of the most significant moments in Soviet history, a chain of events often referred to as the Great Terror.[2] As the Terror swept through Soviet society hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were arrested and executed, from

Les Kurbas, in his official ‘mug shot’ taken by the NKVD shortly after his arrest in 1933

the political elite down to the most humble worker.[3]

It was not uncommon for writers and thinkers to be executed or imprisoned during this period, although it was unheard of for so many to be executed together. To grasp why this was so, we need to understand a little more about the complex and varied reasons why writers were arrested or imprisoned.

For some Russian writers, it really was the words that flowed from their pen that were their undoing. Perhaps most famously Osip Mandelstam’s poem – characterising Stalin as ‘the Kremlin crag-dweller’ and comparing his eyes to cockroaches – led to his arrest and sentence to the Gulag. Mandelstam died en route to his destination.

In the case of the ‘garrotted renaissance’ it was not what they wrote so much as their Ukrainian nationality that was the key to their fate. This is confirmed when we examine the interrogation files of the writers in question. Within the pages of Mandelstam’s interrogation file, the focus was very much on the content of the writing, and possible interpretations. During his interrogation, Mandelstam’s interrogator, N.K. Shivarov, actually asked him to compare different drafts of his poem about Stalin and comment upon them.[4]

Even in the interrogation file of Isaac Babel, who was accused of conspiring with Trotskyists, there is much discussion of the former’s writing, and of the effect that his regular meetings with anti-Bolshevik editors and writers had on his work.[5] Babel was executed in January 1940.

In the interrogation files of Ukrainian writers, the focus on the actual creative output of the writers is almost entirely absent. Instead, these interrogations are largely focused on the possibility of the Ukrainians being members of anti-Soviet nationalist groups. The opening statement written by Kurbas in his interrogation file begins: ‘ I hereby… admit that I belonged to the counter-revolutionary terrorist organisation the UVO.’ His

1924 Poster from the Berezil Theatre

statement goes on to detail how his work at the Berezil theatre in Kyiv led him to join the UVO (in Ukrainian, the Ukrayins’ka Viys’kova Orhanizatsiya or Ukrainian Military Organisation).[6]

Why this change of emphasis? What was so different about the Ukrainian intelligentsia? Were they really all members of underground nationalist organisations, writing poems and plays by day, and plotting to murder Stalin by night? The answer lies in the broader context of the 1930s.  As the decade opened, Ukraine had become a problem for the Soviet leadership.

During the 1920s, Ukrainian language and culture had been recognised and positively encouraged by the Soviet leadership, as part of the policy of ‘Ukrainisation’, a pragmatic attempt to win over the peoples of the former Russian empire to the Bolshevik cause. However, by the early 1930s the policy was reversed, amid rising fears of anti-Soviet forces working within the Soviet Union.[7] Bordering Poland, Ukraine was considered both a conduit and breeding ground for spies, and as such allowing Ukrainian language and culture to thrive was seen as too great a risk.

Those who had held prominent roles in the creation of a confident, articulate Ukrainian culture – many of them writers, critics, and university professors – were now identified as enemies.[8] Their crimes were not rooted in their writing as such, but in their supposed nationalist aims. And on that day in November, this supposed threat was extinguished with one brutal blow – not just as a punishment, but as a warning to any other Soviet citizen who might be quietly nurturing nationalist hopes.

Does the nature of the execution matter? Is it even possible for us to compare the manner of one execution to another? Hardly. However, these subtle differences do shed a little light on the dynamics of the Terror: reminding us that it was not just one homogenous act of state violence but a complicated process, with small but important variances.

Polly Corrigan is a PhD candidate in the Department of War Studies, King’s College, London, where she is currently writing her thesis on the Soviet political police and their relationship with writers. She studied history at the University of Liverpool, and then completed an MA at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. You can find her on Twitter at @pollycorrigan

References

[1] Lavrinenko, Y, Rozstriliane Vidrodzhennia: Antolohiia, 1917-1933. Paris, 1959.

[2] For a useful discussion of the term ‘Great Terror’ see Ryan, J, The Sacralization of Violence: Bolsheviks Justifications for Violence and Terror during the Civil War, Slavic Review 74, no. 4 (Winter 2015), pp. 808-809.

[3] See Conquest, R. The Great Terror, London, 1968; Getty, JA, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938, Cambridge, 1985; Getty, JA & Naumov OV, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, London, 1999.

[4] Shentalinsky, V, The KGB’s Literary Archive, London, 1995, pp. 172-173.

[5] Ibid, pp. 30-31

[6] Archives of the SBU, F6, Op1, Spr75608, pp. 38-39.

[7] Harris, J, The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s, Oxford, 2016, pp. 178-179.

[8] Shkandrij, M, Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology and Literature, 1929-1956, Yale University Press, 2015, p. 272.

 

 

 

The Paris Commune and the Consolidation of the Leninist state

by Danny Bird

One morning in July 1920, representatives of the world’s Communist and revolutionary socialist parties gathered alongside an audience of 45,000 outside Petrograd’s Stock Exchange building. For three hours, an epic historical production titled ‘Toward the Worldwide Commune’ gripped their imagination. In one memorable scene, the red flag of the Paris Commune of 1871 was spirited away for future generations as counterrevolutionaries slaughtered its defenders.

A re-enactment of the October Revolution and the birth of the Comintern brought the performance to a close. As the audience rose to sing The Internationale, the socialist anthem, written by Communard, Eugène Pottier, the message of the whole spectacle was palpable. There was no doubting that the nascent Soviet regime was the Commune’s heir.

Spectators on Uritsky Square, Petrograd, during the 2nd World Congress of the Comintern, 1920.

The Commune’s bloody defeat had bequeathed vital lessons to revolutionaries such as Lenin and Trotsky. Following the Bolshevik seizure of power in autumn 1917, the party’s leaders obsessively measured their achievements against the Commune’s record. In January 1918, Lenin noted that the Soviet regime had outlived its predecessor by five days. Yet these small victories always begged the question of how long it could all last.

Indeed, just as a hostile adversary had besieged the Commune, so too Bolshevik Russia found itself confronting the same foe following October 1917. Though Lenin believed the Commune had been premature and ‘not understood by those who created it’,  their sacrifice offered a paradigm of what had to be done in order to avoid a similar fate: namely, the violent destruction of the proletariat’s class enemy, the bourgeoisie.

The Commune served as the archetypal proletarian state throughout Lenin’s writings. No doubt, Friedrich Engels’s assessment of it as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ championed by Karl Marx and himself, piqued Lenin’s interest. Disagreement over its legacy had contributed to the First International’s demise and would ultimately rupture the Second in turn. But for adherents to the Third, or ‘Communist’, International (Comintern), the Commune’s significance was indisputable.

Upon returning to Russia in spring 1917, Lenin had published his April Theses, in which he denounced the emergence of a parliamentary ‘bourgeois’ republic. Instead, he called for the creation of  ‘a state of the Paris Commune type’. Inspired by Marx’s epitaph to the events of 1871, The Civil War in France, and the role of class conflict within history, Lenin argued that the key to ending the First World War lay in each combatant nation imploding into civil war. This, he deduced, would eradicate imperialism, topple the bourgeoisie and lead to the eventual confluence of socialist regimes into a worldwide commune.

Lenin later elaborated on this in his pamphlet: Will the Bolsheviks retain State Power? Describing the state as the apparatus by which one social class oppresses another, he asserted that the socialist state’s principal duty was to obliterate the bourgeoisie, thus paving the way for a classless society. The Commune had been the untimely pioneer, whereas the Soviet regime was better prepared to enact this historical imperative.

Moreover, according to Leninist wisdom, the Communards failed because they had lacked the discipline and foresight of a resolute vanguard party. For Leninists, this was the greatest lesson of 1871. A ‘professional’ revolutionary elite would devise the strategy needed to crush the proletariat’s enemy. As Russia descended into civil war following the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks relished the prospect.

Against this backdrop, the party launched the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage: better known as ‘the Cheka’. Headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, it devoted itself to eviscerating the bourgeoisie. Lenin hailed its savage task as ‘directly exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat’. The harsh reality of ‘class struggle’, both on the battlefields of the Russian Civil War and on the home front, proved to the Bolsheviks that they were constructing a proletarian state in accordance with their ideology.

In March 1918, they rebranded themselves as the ‘Communist Party’. The resolution that

A Soviet postage stamp commemorating the date of the Paris Commune’s inception

authorised this also declared Soviet Russia to be: ‘a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat [and] … a continuation of those achievements of the world working-class revolution which the Paris Commune began’. Moreover, the lyrics of The Internationale were modified from the future to the present tense to reflect the advent of worldwide revolution.

The outbreak of the Red Terror in September 1918 further testified to the regime’s confidence barely a year after coming to power. Following an assassination attempt on Lenin, a catharsis of violence erupted across Soviet Russia. Dzerzhinsky ordered the execution of key tsarist dignitaries, as well as the incarceration of numerous bourgeois citizens.

For Trotsky, the distance between 1871 and the late 1910s appeared immaterial as he rationalised the bloodshed: ‘The Commune was weak. To complete its work we have become strong … We are inflicting blow after blow upon the executioners of the Commune. We are taking vengeance for the Commune, and we shall avenge it’.

In a still largely illiterate country, the Bolsheviks used agitprop to galvanise the masses and convey the ‘utility’ of violence in history. Statues dedicated to historic regicides helped trivialise the murder of the Romanovs, presenting it as part of a revolutionary tradition. Additionally, the demolition of tsarist monuments echoed the Communards’ most famous act of iconoclasm: the razing of the Vendôme Column.

Nevertheless, the Commune’s incorporation of multiple left-wing and radical groups appalled Lenin. Only a single, regimented party acting as the vanguard of the proletariat’s interests could ensure that workers transcended ‘trade union consciousness’. This principle underlay the expulsion of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries from the Soviet government in summer 1918. At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, Lenin imposed a ban on internal party factions. His approach became orthodoxy.

While this was happening, a mutiny on the Kronstadt naval base was being ruthlessly suppressed by Bolshevik troops. Kronstadt’s sailors had played a major role during the October Revolution, but grew disenchanted with the Communist regime’s brutality in the years after 1917.

Their rebellion threatened to undermine the Leninist state’s revolutionary probity. By chance, the mutiny’s defeat coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune’s inception. In a definitive act of expiation, the triumphant Soviet regime rechristened one of the rebel ships, Sevastopol, as the Parizhskaya Kommuna.

The Leninist state was forged by an ideological campaign of class conflict. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders considered their revolution to be a continuation of the Paris Commune. The Communards failed to secure a proletarian state because, according to Leninist theory, they had hesitated to wage war against the bourgeoisie. Therefore, the October Revolution was not conceived as a trailblazer, nor peculiarly ‘Russian’, but rather as the inheritor of a long revolutionary tradition, predicated on fulfilling the Commune’s aspirations.

Danny Bird is a History MA graduate of UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, for which he completed a dissertation on the topic of this blog. He also previously studied History at the University of Sheffield, graduating in 2009. His work has been published in History Today and TIME magazine. Twitter: @dannymbird

The Soviet Court as a Propaganda Instrument II: The Semenchuk Case, 1936

By Anna Lukina

As one of the most publicized and mysterious —yet surprisingly obscured— Soviet criminal cases, the Semenchuk case (1936) provides one of the most striking examples of the use of the Soviet court as an instrument of propaganda.[1] The Semenchuk case was, in many ways, a “rehearsal” for the subsequent infamous Moscow Show Trials; it focused on the supposed banditry of Konstantin Semenchuk, the head of a polar station on the Wrangel Island, and Stepan Startsev, his associate. They were accused of sabotage, mistreating the local population, destroying the winterers’ morale, and, finally, murdering Dr Nikolai Wulfson, who threatened to report their crimes to the higher authorities.

So far, the “plot” of the case does not seem extraordinary; unlike subsequent trials, there was no ‘plot’ to overthrow the Soviet state, just a minor local official abusing his position. Still, the case attracted a lot of attention at the time. The prosecutor was Andrey Vyshinsky, later on famous for his role in the Moscow Trials. The defence attorneys, Nikolai Komodov and Sergey Kaznacheev, were also some of the best and most prominent at the time. The trial was widely reported in the press (including Time magazine), cited in works of legal scholarship (such as Vyshinsky’s “The Theory of Soviet Evidence Law”), and even put into prose by Lev Sheinin, a criminal investigator and detective-writer. The case report (i.e., a transcript of all proceedings) was widely circulated among academics and professionals.

The trial of Semenchuk and Startsev (1936)

Why then did this case attract so much attention? There are two possible explanations. The first is that Semenchuk and Startsev were, essentially, scapegoats for deeper problems common to all Soviet polar stations. Historical records show that drunkenness and disorder were commonplace in these locations, as well as “imperialist” attitudes towards indigenous people. Whilst the government promoted their exploration missions, these ultimately failed. This was mostly due to the missions attracting the “politically illiterate” and others generally ill-suited to the role.

Exposing this failure would, however, be detrimental to the population’s morale, and so the state decided to follow its usual playbook and blame the structural failures on individual “wreckers” like Semenchuk and Startsev. The second objective was that by bringing the case to the public eye, the “Soviet legal narrative” could be used to solidify the perception the Soviet state and its agents wanted to create.

One of them was, as in previous cases, an appeal to the character rather than facts. Luckily for the prosecution, Semenchuk and Startsev seemed to fill almost “fairytale” archetypes. Semenchuk was presented as a self-centered, power-hungry mastermind of the whole conspiracy, while Startsev was his cowardly associate. Interestingly enough, the defence tried to absolve Startsev of his crimes by adding to the negative characteristics; apparently, Startsev was a “half-barbarian” and lacked individual agency, thus rendering him incapable of taking part in the conspiracy.

This shows that the technique utilized by the prosecutors was not to mindlessly tarnish opponents, but to make them fill a specific designated “role”. This also extended to creating “heroes” of the “story”; Wulfson and his wife were presented as loyal, selfless, and ideologically sound characters, as opposed to their assailants. This helped not only to create new role models for the public, but to also sway the court’s decision, given that the evidence was limited to the words of a “bad character” against those of a “good character”.

Similarly, the prosecution centered on the ideological character of Semenchuk’s and Startsev’s crimes. For instance, their treatment of the local population was discussed at length and criticized as “imperialist”. The prosecutor, however, made sure to let the court (and the wider audience) know that these attitudes were “relics of the past” and certainly not commonplace in the Soviet Union, therefore shifting the blame on the individual perpetrators. To a modern reader this, however, is not corroborated by the clichés used to portray the native population as naïve and easily governed; showing that concerns about the “colonialism” of Semenchuk were not genuine and used to deflect attention from the broader problem with the Soviet mode of governance and general attitudes.

Another ideological point considered the past of the perpetrators – Semenchuk and Startsev were found to be involved with anti-Revolutionary activities in the past, Startsev fighting in Kolchak’s army and Semenchuk being convicted of theft in the past. The question of how they were allowed to take on leadership positions afterwards, however, was conveniently ignored: probably to suit the overall trend of blame deflection.

While the defence tried, in some way, to alleviate the fate of Semenchuk and Startsev, they still acted as agents of the state in constructing and developing the narrative. Most of their input was to support the charges, add to the negative characterization of their “clients”, and even congratulate the prosecutor on his findings. One cannot, however, blame Kaznacheev and Komodov for failing to perform their duties as defendants, since this was the dominant model of defence in Soviet academia and legal practice.

Overall, the Semenchuk case is full of fascinating insights into how the Soviet court was used for propagandistic purposes: this is how a mundane criminal case became a cautionary tale for millions of Soviet citizens. The prosecution was tasked with writing “a perfect crime”, and they achieved this – consequently shaping Soviet legal culture for many years afterwards.

Anna Lukina is a 3rd year BA in Jurisprudence student in the University of Oxford. Her research has so far focused on legal narratives in the Soviet criminal case and Soviet conceptions of human rights(1). She plans to combine Soviet legal history, socio-legal studies and legal theory in her work. This blog post is partly based on her article, Anna Lukina, “The Semenchuk Case of 1936: Storytelling and Propaganda above the Law in the Soviet Criminal Trial”, Review of Central and East European Law, Volume 41, Issue 2, 2016, 63-116. http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/15730352-04102001

 

[1] For more on how the Soviet Court was deployed as an instrument of propaganda, please see my previous blog.

Doctor Zhivago as a Response to the Weaponization of Soviet Literature and Mass Culture

By Lonny Harrison

Almost from the moment they seized control in November 1917, the Bolsheviks nationalized the publishing industry and tightly controlled the press. Soviet authorities were never ashamed of their monopoly on media and culture, viewing them as weapons of class struggle. After all, media had been used by the bourgeoisie for their own exploitative purposes, they argued. Allowing freedom of the press to their enemies would have seemed ‘criminally stupid.’[1]

Nor was there any reason to curtail propaganda. Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution (1924), defined propaganda not as a nefarious trick, the way we might view it today, but as a form of education to bring political consciousness to the workers. Thus, the Bolsheviks made it their aim not only to seize power in the tangible sense, but to seize meaning. The Revolution had created a void which required a new way of defining the past, present, and future. To establish their legitimacy, the Bolsheviks needed to control public discourse and transform popular attitudes and beliefs through new symbols, rituals, stories, and imagery.[2]

Literature and mass culture served as the primary means toward that end. A Pravda critic wrote in 1924, ‘We can and should regard literature as a weapon, and an altogether powerful weapon to affect the reader’s consciousness and will.’[3] At the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Maxim Gorky famously stated that books were ‘the most important and most powerful weapons in socialist culture.’[4] Mass media and culture would wind through numerous permutations in the following decades, but government control and censorship remained a constant. The weaponization of media and culture would hold sway from the Great October Socialist Revolution right through the Cold War until the glasnost era and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Persecution of dissenters ratcheted up during mass arrests of the late 1920s, and through the Great Terror and purge of the Communist Party from 1936 to 1938. Labels like class enemy, petty bourgeois, Trotskyite, or cosmopolitan were levied against millions who were arbitrarily sentenced to prisons, penal colonies, or summary execution. Artists were particularly vulnerable to branding as a formalist or subjective idealist. Frequently the charges were announced in the press along with forced confessions and signatures of those pressured to denounce the ‘traitors’—often their own family, friends, or colleagues.

By the mid-forties, on the eve of the intensification of cultural repression known as the

Banner with portrait of Pasternak at the entrance to the Feltrinelli bookstore in Rome, 2012.

Zhdanov Doctrine (zhdanovshchina), Boris Pasternak, who had already faced years of criticism as a poet allegedly out of step with the times (despite enormous popularity at home and abroad) felt compelled to make a stand: ‘I need to do something dear to me and my very own, riskier than usual . . . I need to break through to the public.’[5]

This he did in his first full-length novel, Doctor Zhivago. A conspicuously apolitical work, it would earn him censure and endless invectives in the Party press. The author had anticipated that sort of fallout. Far from a blunder of novice or naïveté, Pasternak had come to see it as his mission to publish the book, at whatever peril it brought to himself or his family—some of whom were not in support of his decision. Indeed, his confidante and lover Olga Ivinskaya, whom the author acknowledged as an inspiration for his heroine Lara Antipova, would spend years in the Soviet GULAG because of her association with the author.

Yet upon finishing the novel in late 1955, he was evidently satisfied with what he had accomplished: ‘You cannot imagine what I have achieved! I have found and given names to all this sorcery that has been the cause of suffering, bafflement, amazement, and dispute for several decades. Everything is named in simple, transparent, and sad words. I also once again renewed and redefined the dearest and most important things: land and sky, great passion, creative spirit, life and death.’[6]

However, the novel was unpublishable in the Soviet Union. The editorial board of Novy mir hand-delivered a rejection letter to Pasternak in September 1956: ‘The thing that has disturbed us about your novel is something that neither the editors nor the author can change by cuts or alterations. . . . The spirit of your novel is one of non-acceptance of the socialist revolution. The general tenor of your novel is that the October Revolution, the Civil War and the social transformation involved did not give the people anything but suffering, and destroyed the Russian intelligentsia, either physically or morally.’[7]

To bring his work to the light, Pasternak was forced to smuggle it out of the Soviet Union, eventually securing a contract with Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Pasternak

Cover to the Italian first edition of Doctor Zhivago, 1957.

expressed his willingness to accept the consequences of such a risky endeavor. He wrote to Feltrinelli that he was willing to face ‘any kind of trouble’ as long as the novel was published, declaring, ‘Ideas are not born to be hidden or smothered at birth, but to be communicated to others.’[8]

His intuition proved correct, and he would be harassed by the Soviet authorities for the remainder of his days, until his death in 1960. When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, Pasternak was forced to decline the award, as it was interpreted by authorities as a political provocation from the West.

The novel’s great offense was its apoliticism. Contradicting the ideological program of Socialist Realism sanctioned at the 1934 Congress and subsequently imposed on all Soviet art and artists, it failed to glorify the Revolution and the New Soviet Man in a monochrome paean to Soviet power.

The hero Yuri Zhivago’s philosophy of life and art evolves. At first he welcomes the Revolution like the breath of a purifying storm, a spontaneous tide without cause or reason, for ‘What is truly great is without beginning, like the universe’ (182).[9] He paints it in quasi-religious terms: ‘An extraordinary sight! Mother Russia is on the move, she can’t stand still, she’s restless and she can’t find rest, she’s talking and she can’t stop. And it isn’t as if only people were talking. Stars and trees meet and converse, flowers talk philosophy at night, stone houses hold meetings. It makes you think of the Gospel, doesn’t it?’ (146).

He has a fervent desire to live honestly, productively, ‘to be a part of all this awakening.’ (147). But soon the Civil War devolves into violence and mayhem. Yuri witnesses it first hand when he is captured by partisans and forced to join the fight. Red and White atrocities rival each other. Proclamations of the regional Soviet threaten, ‘Anyone found hoarding food will be shot on the spot’ (377), and promise, ‘Only mass searches . . . only terror applied in all its harshness, down to the shooting of speculators on the spot, can deliver us from famine’ (381). The decrees make him feel ill: ‘What kind of people are they, to go on raving with this never-cooling, feverish ardor, year in, year out, on nonexistent, long-vanished subjects, and to know nothing, to see nothing around them?’ (381-82).

One of those people is his nemesis, Strelnikov (Pasha Antipov), ‘the famous non-Party military expert who was the pride and terror of the region’ (245). Lara’s husband and Yuri’s rival for her love, Antipov had been transformed by the Civil War into the cold mask of a revolutionary zealot. In search of purity forged by the Revolution, he winds up shelling villages from an armored train.

Lara herself gives some of the novel’s most impassioned pleas for humanity: ‘The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that’s left is the naked human soul stripped to the last shred.’ This resulted when ‘. . . untruth came down on our land of Russia. The main misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people’s notions.’

Although Pasternak himself, and the hero and heroine of Doctor Zhivago were enthralled by the tidal events and sea change wrought by the Revolution, the essence of the novel boils down to the right of a human being to stand alone, free of the rhetoric and the enforced, militant enthusiasm for the new social regimen. As a study in the perseverance of character in a time of political and social upheaval, there is perhaps no better.

Ironically, Pasternak’s novel would prove to be a powerful weapon of non-alignment with Party dogma. In Victor Erlich’s summation: ‘When culture is treated as a weapon and literature as a source of moral edification, poetic detachment smacks of sabotage. . . . When dry-as-dust abstractions of an official ideology are increasingly used to displace reality and explain it away, even such politically innocuous qualities as delight in the sensory texture of things are likely to appear as escapism.’[10]

In a fascinating twist, the book marched straight to the frontlines of Cold War cultural warfare: the CIA printed a Russian language edition and smuggled it into the Soviet Union in hopes that Soviet citizens would read it and turn against their own government.

Copy of the original Russian-Language edition of Doctor Zhivago, covertly published by the CIA.

The head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division wrote that exposure to Western ideas ‘could incrementally over time improve the chances for gradual change toward more open societies.’[11]

That said, Doctor Zhivago is hardly a political novel in any respect. It merely reclaims the personal; it vindicates the rights of an individual to live freely, outside of ideological dogma and conformism. In fact, Pasternak was distressed by the reduction of his novel to something akin to a political pamphlet indicting his home country. ‘I deplore the fuss now being made about my book,’ he said in late 1957. ‘Everybody’s writing about it but who in fact has read it? What do they quote from it? Always the same passages—three pages, perhaps, out of a book of 700 pages.’[12]

Pasternak’s point was not to write subversive literature. He merely defended the artist’s right to express his art freely while reclaiming the right of the individual to choose self-determination and perennial truth. Biographer Christopher Barnes records, ‘Shortly before the end, Pasternak talked of his life as spent in a duel between the forces of vulgarity and the free play of human talent.’

Pasternak’s own immense talent made him one of the greatest of chroniclers of the Russian Revolution. As the poet Marina Tsvetaeva described her friend Boris, ‘He walked alongside the Revolution and listened to it raptly.’[13]

Dr. Lonny Harrison is Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Texas at Arlington. His research interests include 19th-century Russian literature and philosophy, and 20th-century Russian literature, media, and mass culture. He is the author of Archetypes from Underground: Notes on the Dostoevskian Self, as well as numerous articles on the life and works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. He is currently researching Russian responses to authoritarianism in the 20^th century. Find him on Twitter at @lonnyharrison.

 

References:

[1] James von Geldern and Richard Stites, eds., Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917-1953 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. xi.

[2] Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 1.

[3] Jeffrey Brooks, Thank you Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 23.

[4] Garrand, John, and Carol Garrand, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union (New York: The Free Press, 1990), p. 42.

[5] Letter to S.N. Durylin, June 1945. Quoted in ed. Edith W. Clowes, Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), p. 6.

[6] Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book (London: Harvill Secker, 2014), pp. 83-84.

[7] The letter was published in Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette), October 25, 1958. It is reproduced in full in Robert Conquest, Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair (Collins and Harvill Press, 1961), Appendix II, pp. 136-63.

[8] Finn and Couvée 91.

[9] Page nos. here and below refer to Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958). Italics are added.

[10] ‘Introduction: Categories of Passion’ in ed. Victor Erlich, Pasternak: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), p.5.

[11] Meyer, Cord. Facing Reality: From World Federation to the CIA. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980), p. 114.

[12] Finn and Couvée 152.

[13] Quoted in Victor Erlich, Modernism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 72.

 

Full image attributions

Image 1: Fair use, via Wikipedia.com.

Image 2: By the Central Intelligence Agency [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Image 3: By Visarik [Creative commons], via Wikimedia Commons.

The Soviet Court as a Propaganda Instrument

By Anna Lukina

“The Soviet court should, above all, persuade, prove and subordinate the public attention to its moral influence and authority.”

Andrei Vyshinskii, “Theory of Evidence in the Soviet Law” (1946)

It is well-known that the Soviet court procedure, especially in the 1930s, can be characterized by its lack of due process, judicial independence, and fair outcomes. It remains unclear, however, why these legal institutions were preserved and, on the surface, respected at all. The core of Marxist-Leninist philosophy was suspicious of legal formalism, with early 1920s legal scholars such as Pashukanis and Krylenko advocating for the ‘withering away’ of the state and hence law.

Yet this position was fundamentally reversed in 1930s. This can be explained by the fact that Stalin saw the courts’ hidden potential as a political tool: not as an explicit source of power (since coercion could be, and was, applied via extralegal procedures), but as a mode of communication with the population.

Even before the 1930s “conservative shift”, Soviet society recognized this hidden meaning of judicial procedures. Some of the 1920s trials such as the Trial of the SRs (1922) and the Shakhty Trial (1928) were more like “trial-lectures” addressed to a wide audience of spectators. In the 1930s, however, this function was enhanced since the state, aided by the Show Trials prosecutor Andrey Vyshinskii as a chief reformer, invested in legal education, legal scholarship, and the reorganization of judiciary and related institutions. This was followed by a “refetishisation of the law” – an explicit acknowledgment of legal order as the cornerstone of socialism and a building force in Soviet society.

A photo from the trial of Semenchuk and Startsev (1936), which was characterised by strict adherence to Soviet legal narrative canons. Here, the defence attorney (who really acted as a ‘second prosecutor’) is addressing the court.

This, in turn, has increased the use of Soviet court for propagandistic purposes, creating what I call a “Soviet legal narrative”. It can be briefly described as a chronological account of the facts of a specific case, which was presented as the primary ‘story’ in the Soviet court. Even though the notion of a legal narrative is not unique to the Soviet legal system, and has been used to describe legal procedures in a variety of jurisdiction, its Soviet form was characterized by a number of distinct features.

Firstly, as mentioned above, the Soviet legal narrative was addressed to an unusually wide audience. While ordinarily a story presented in court is intended to influence the judge and the jury, the Soviet court was officially designated a function of educating wider population. This “education” did not only extend to ideologically neutral values such as respect for law, but covered instillation of more specific Marxist-Leninist values. It was disseminated via the openness of trials themselves, wide reporting in the (state-controlled) media, and even novels and short stories based on real-life trials. It can be partly attributed to the lack of adversarial procedures, which diminished the role of the court in the decision-making: when the outcome is pre-determined, there is no one to persuade.

Secondly, it can be viewed as an official agenda. The Soviet legal doctrine furthered an extremely idiosyncratic role of the court: educating the population as synonymous with establishing an objective truth. However, unlike similar (but more legitimate) concepts in contemporary civil law systems, the latter meant construing impressions as reality using materialistic dialectics – a strong ground for creating a narrative deviating from facts. Therefore, it can be argued that propaganda appeared to be an implied goal of the Soviet court in that period.

Thirdly, the Soviet narrative was characterized by a specific type of content. For instance, it presented the mens rea (the “mental” element of the crime – such as motives and intentions) as more important than the unlawful act itself. Anti-Soviet motives were considered as aggravating factors and therefore actively discouraged when the narrative was disseminated to the legal audience regardless of the objective impact of the defendant’s actions.

A Soviet propaganda poster from 1948. “Bourgeois court is the court of the rich, while the Soviet court is the court of the people!”

Moreover, many distinctly colourful assertions were made about the defendant’s character and their class standing, as well as the victim’s relative characteristics. These “portraits” created a story which was easily digestible by the audience, with clear protagonists and antagonists: a cautionary tale designed to shape the existing social norms. In addition, it represented class struggle, turning the trial not only into a battle of personalities, but a tension between the oppressor and the oppressed. This provided both a justification for coercion and a political lesson for the spectators to learn from.

Finally, the omnipresence of this particular variety of narrative was cultivated by the fact that the Soviet court structure was far from the “storytelling contest” seen in adversarial trials: both the court and the prosecution followed the same line from the very start. Even the defence was not exempt from repeating the official line, as defence attorneys were considered the servants of the state as much as prosecutors, and so were compelled to advance similar goals and ideas. In this sense, the Soviet legal narrative was hardly challenged by any competing stories, which solidified it in the audience’s minds.

Therefore, the Soviet legal narrative phenomenon and the use of the court as a propaganda device can explain many peculiarities of trials in that period. Even though the rule of law would have presented a challenge to the totalitarian leadership, a pretense of the rule of law was, ironically, central to its strengthening.

Anna Lukina is a 3rd year BA in Jurisprudence student in the University of Oxford. Her research has so far focused on legal narratives in the Soviet criminal case and Soviet conceptions of human rights(1). She plans to combine Soviet legal history, socio-legal studies and legal theory in her work. This blog post is partly based on her article:

Anna Lukina, “The Semenchuk Case of 1936: Storytelling and Propaganda above the Law in the Soviet Criminal Trial”, Review of Central and East European Law, Volume 41, Issue 2, 2016, 63-116. http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/15730352-04102001