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Memory, Archives, Politics: The Rise of Stalin in Avtorkhanov's Technology of Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Michael David-Fox
Michael David-Fox*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park
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Slavic Review , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , Winter 1995 , pp. 988 - 1003
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1995

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References

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Harriman Institute in 1994. At various stages, Fred Corney, Peter Holquist, Cathy Popkin and Mark von Hagen provided valuable suggestions and criticisms. Research was supported by the American Council of Teachers of Russian.

1. See, for example, Bak, Janos, “Political Biography and Memoir in Totalitarian Eastern Europe,” in Egerton, George, ed. Political Memoir: Essays on the Politics of Memory (London: Frank Case, 1994), 300.Google Scholar

2. Paul Fussell's discussion of the “literary status” of Great War memoirs argues that “the memoir is a kind of fiction, differing from the ‘first novel'… only by continuous implicit attestations of veracity or appeals to documented historical fact” (The Great War and Modern Memory [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], 318).

3. Folkenflik, Robert, ed., The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 11–12.Google Scholar

4. Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, Tekhnologiia vlasti: protsess obrazovaniia KPSS: memuarno-istoricheskie ocherki (Munich: Izdanie Tsentral'nogo ob'edineniia politicheskikh emigrantov iz SSSR, 1959), translated as Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party: A Study in the Technology of Power (Munich: Institut zur Erforschung der UdSSR, 1959). Since the English translation contains inaccuracies, my own citations will be to the Russian original, cited hereafter as Tekhnologiia. Western scholars have invariably referred to the English version, cited hereafter as Technology.

5. George Egerton, “The Politics of Memory: Form and Function in the History of Political Memoir from Antiquity to Modernity,” in Egerton, 24.

6. See von Hagen, Mark, “The Archival Gold Rush and Historical Agendas in the Post-Soviet Era,” Slavic Review 52, no. 1 (Spring 1993), 96–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Conquest, Robert, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (New York: MacMillan, 1968), 569.Google Scholar See the “Bibliographical Note” for the most prominent of these memoirs and Conquest's approach to them.

8. Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with Jerrold C. and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), introduction by Robert Conquest, x, xii. For a devastating critique, see Powers, Thomas, “Were the Atomic Scientists Spies?” New York Review of Books (9 June 1994): 10–17.Google Scholar See also the articles and documents published in the fourth issue of the Cold War International History Project Bulletin (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center, 1994), as well as the bibliography on the Sudoplatov controversy, 93.

9. Robert Folkenflik, “The Self as Other,” in Folkenflik, 234.

10. Arch Getty, J., Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also the introduction to Gabor Tamas Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR 1933-1953 (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991).

11. Avtorkhanov, , Memuary (Frankfurt: Possev-Verlag, 1983), 643-44.Google Scholar

12. Avtorkhanov, Tekhnologiia, 9.

13. Ibid., 28-29, 62-63, 24-26.

14. For example, Tekhrwlogiia, 71, 126.

15. Avtorkhanov, Staline au pouvoir (Paris: Les lies d'Or, 1951), viii.

16. Memuary, 135, 138. The two-year preparatory section was created in 1924 as part of the effort to proletarianize IKP and was designed to train students to enter the Institute's regular departments.

17. Ibid., 272-78. The June 1930 date is made clear because Avtorkhanov attributes his departure from IKP to problems resulting from the publication of his article in Pravda, discussed below.

18. Ibid., 147.

19. Ibid., 155.

20. Ibid., 157-158, 200, 221, 253.

21. From IKP Istorii, one of a complex oifonds belonging to all the Institutes of Red Professors that were formed on the basis of the departments of the original IKP after 1929. The collection represents the extant records of the institutions and their administrations (with the exception of the records of their party organizations, housed in the former Moscow Party Archive), including lists of students admitted and the student personnel files (lichnye dela) kept by the administration. GARF thus contains two kinds of records comprising the students’ official biographies: those composed by the administration, and students’ own contemporaneous resumes and completed questionnaires submitted to the school. In an unpublished paper presented at die AAASS Conference in Philadelphia in 1994, Igal Halfin analyzed student autobiographies submitted to Soviet universities in the 1920s. Whereas such documents from the 1920s often contained lengthy stories about the evolution of students’ political beliefs, including their conversions to bolshevism, Halfin noted (and this is borne out in Avtorkhanov's file) that by the 1930s these documents had become much more succinct accounts of dates and occupations in the students’ records.

22. “Spisok kandidatov postupaiushchikh v Istoricheskii Institut Krasnoi Professury priema 1934 goda i predstavliaemykh na utverzhdenie TsK VKP(b),” GARF f. 5143, op. 1, d. 247, 1. 3. This sequence is also repeated in two short autobiographies and a questionnaire contained in Avtorkhanov's file from IKP Istorii from 1934-1937. Avtorkhanov dated two published works from Groznyi in May 1930 and March 1931: K osnovnym voprosam istorii Chechni (k desiatiletiiu Sovelskoi Chechni) (Groznyi: Chechizdatel'stvo ‘Serlo,’ 1930), 4; and Kratkii istoriko-kul'tumyi i ekonomicheskii ocherk o Chechne (Rostov na Donu: Severnyi Kavkaz, 1931), introduction.

23. “Avtobiografiia. Kopiia,” GARF f. 4143, op. 1, d. 255, 1. 2.

24. “Avtobiografiia. A. G. Avtorkhanov (IKP Istorii),” 14 March 1937 (GARF f. 5143, op. 1, d. 255, 11. 3-4). In the 1983 recollections Avtorkhanov unambiguously states that he supported the general line of the Party. In fact, in this account of the Groznyi rabfak in 1929 it is Avtorkhanov who drafts the party cell resolutions against the one communist who refuses to vote against the right opposition (Memuary, 156- 157, 646).

25. Memuary, 158-59; Kratkii istoriko-kul'tumyi i ekonomicheskii ocherk, 1931, 34-35.

26. Recently reissued as Aleksandr Uralov (A. Avtorkhanov), Ubiistvo checheno-ingushskogo naroda: Narodoubiistvo v SSSR (Moscow: SP “Vsia Moskva,” 1991), 21-26. A version of this pamphlet recently appeared in English as Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, “The Chechens and the Ingush during the Soviet Period and Its Antecedents,” in Marie Benningsen Broxup, ed., The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance Toward the Muslim World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992): 146-94. Here the 1952 pamphlet is identified as originally being a “special memorandum for the United Nations in 1948” (193, n. 1).

27. Ouralov (Avtorkhanov), Staline au pouvoir, viii-ix. In later works Avtorkhanov made no further claims to membership in the Pokrovskii school.

28. Tekhnologiia, 137-38.

29. Memuary, 241.

30. Ibid., 715-21.

31. Avtorkhanov, A., “Za vypolnenie direktiv partii po natsional'nomu voprosu,” Pravda, no. 170 (22 June 1930): 4 Google Scholar; and “Pis'ma v redaktsiiu,” Pravda, no. 182 (4 July 1930), 6.

32. Tekhnologiia, 165. Emphasis in original.

33. See the discussion of the 1930 Pravda debate in R.W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 324-27.

34. Avtorkhanov, “Za vypolnenie direktiv partii.“

35. “Vsem partorganizatsiiam natsional'nykh oblastei Sev.-Kav. kraia,” Revoliutsiia i gorets, no. 3 (17) (March 1930): 4; “O zadachakh partiinogo prosveshcheniia v natsoblastiiakh,” Revoliutsiia i gorets, no. 9-10 (23-24) (Sept.-Oct. 1930): 3.

36. In an article originally published in the ninth number of the journal Revoliutsiia i gorets from 1929, Avtorkhanov seemed to support the line later repudiated as “left excess” in the Chechen countryside, arguing for the existence of class differentiation among the mountain folk. “Recently we have been witnesses to a range of terroristic acts on the part of the class of kulaks-clergy (kulachestvo-dukhovenstva) against the representatives of the Party and Soviet power in the countryside … It is necessary to categorically emphasize that the clan struggle in the contemporary Chechen countryside is subordinate to the class struggle…” (“K nekotorym voprosam istorii Chechni” in K osnovnym voprosam istorii Chechni, 85-88).

37. Tekhnologiia, 45. Here I borrow from the colorful if loose translation in Technology, 43.

38. Ibid., 45.

39. Ibid., 48-49, 71.

40. Ibid., 43.

41. Ibid., 39-45 and passim.

42. “Protokol No. 5 obshchego sobraniia part“iacheiki IKP ot 18/1-1929 g.,” Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv obshchestvennykh dvizhenii g. Moskvy [RGAODgM, formerly the Moscow Party Archive] f. 474, op. 1, d. 9, 1. 1; “Protokol No. 29 zasedaniia Biuro iacheiki IKP ot 8/VI-1929,” RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 9,1. 105; also ibid., 11. 2-3, 50-54. This is apparently the same K.P. Soms who was named by the Orgburo in December 1928 as a member of the IKP admissions committee (“Vypiska iz protokola No. 89 zasedaniia Orgbiuro TsK VKP(b) ot 28.XII.28 g.,” RTsKhlDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 35, I. 39).

43. The review called the book “highly untrustworthy” on several other counts. See “O knige A. Avtorkhanova ‘Tekhnologiia vlasti,'” Politicheskii dnevnik, 1964-1970 (Amsterdam: Fond imeni Gertsena, 1975): 509-15. Avtorkhanov's response to the “false dissident (Uhedissidentu) Medvedev” is contained in “Predislovie ko vtoromu izdaniiu,” Tekhnologiia vlasti (Frankfurt: Possev-Verlag, 1976).

44. Tekhnologiia, 20, 22.

45. “O knige A. Avtorkhanova,” 511.

46. Catherine Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: The Communist Party in the Capital, 1925-1932 (Basingstoke: MacMillan in association with the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, 1990), 266-67 n. 74. C.I.P. Ferdinand's dissertation, citing Avtorkhanov's Proiskhozhdenie partokratii (Frankfurt: Posev, 1973), charges that Avtorkhanov incorrectly identifies the members of the Bukharin school, adding figures who actively opposed Bukharin in 1928 (“The Bukharin Group of Political Theoreticians,” [Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1984], 59 n. 1).

47. Tekhnologiia, 24-25.

48. Bailes, Kendall E., Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 69–74.Google Scholar In Robert Conquest's Great Terror, these paraphrased conversations comprise virtually the only information that the author considered important enough to include in a short section on the Shakhty trial (Conquest, The Great Terror, 549, 550 n. 2, citing Avtorkhanov, Technology, 29). The same account is repeated, without reference to Avtorkhanov, in Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (New York: Viking, 1991), 152.

49. “Ob ekonomicheskoi kontr-revoliutsii v iuzhnykh raionakh ugol'noi promyshlennosti,” appended to “Protokol No. 13 zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK ot 7-go marta 1928 goda,” RTsKhlDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. kh. 676, 11. 7, 11-12.

50. “Ob ekonomicheskoi kontr-revoliutsii,” 12. The special session, however, took place on 3 June 1928, long after the Shakhty arrests were made; the documentation remains in a “special folder” in the inaccessible Presidential Archive. At least four other Politburo considerations of Shakhty from spring 1928 remain in special folders: see RTsKhlDNI f. 17, op. 3, d. 676; d. 689, punkt 19; d. 693, punkt 13; d. 696, punkt 11. Sheila Fitzpatrick made a point of noting that Avtorkhanov's account was made “evidently on the basis of contemporary party rumors” (“Cultural Revolution as Class War,” in Fitzpatrick, ed. Cultural Revolution in Russia 1928-1931 [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978], 15).

51. In Stephen F. Cohen's biography of Bukharin, Avtorkhanov's memoirs are the most substantive of five sources on IKP recommended to readers (Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980], 431 n. 31; 296, 450 n. 118). Avtorkhanov is recommended as “a firsthand account of the campaign against Bukharinism at the Institute of Red Professors” in John Barber, “The Establishment of Intellectual Orthodoxy in the USSR, 1928-1934,” Past and Present (May 1979): 157 n. 76.

52. Rare documentation on students’ political discussions gathered by the party cell bureau at Sverdlov Communist University suggests widespread confusion as the campaign against Bukharin and the right unfolded, and as students scrambled for the mantle of orthodoxy—and therefore to bandy accusations of right deviationism—under rapidly changing circumstances. See, for example, “Materialy k Biuro iacheiki kharakterizuiushchie neponimaniia t.t. po 1-kursu,” RGAODgM f. 459, op. 1, d. 33, 1. 42 and passim; “Protokol No. 3 zasedaniia Biuro iacheiki Komuniversiteta Sverdlova sovmestno s partorganami ot 10/X-28,” ibid. d. 31,11. 62-65; “Protokol No. 5 obshchego sobraniia iacheiki Komuniversiteta Sverdlova ot 29/XI-1928,” ibid. d. 30, 11. 48-50.

53. Merridale, Moscow Politics, 46.

54. “IKP, po informatsii t. Fin'kovskogo na biuro R[ai]K[om], 3/XII [1928],” RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 9,11. 50-54; “Rezoliutsiia TsK o polozhenii v iacheike IKP,” no later than 18 January 1929, RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 9, 11. 2-3; “Vyvody po obsledovaniiu iacheiki [IKP] sostavitelei za vremia s 1/1 po l/X-29 g.,” RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 9, 11. 158, 160. See also “Protokol obshchego sobraniia iacheiki IKP ot 21 fevralia 1929,” Arkhiv RAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 21, 11. 94-101.

55. For one of the IKP cell bureau's protests to the Central Committee against this campaign, see “VTsK VKP(b),” undated, late 1929, Arkhiv RAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 21, 11. 163-180.

56. Reviews of Technology by Ralph T. Fisher, Jr., Journal of Modern History 33, no. 1 (March 1961): 93; Gordon Skilling, H., Journal of Politics 22, no. 4 (November 1960): 739 Google Scholar; Brzezinski, Z., Political Science Quarterly 125, no. 2 (June 1960): 277-78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57. See Sharlet, Robert and Beirne, Piers, “In Search of Vyshinsky: The Paradox of Law and Terror,” International Journal of the Sociology of Law 12, no. 2 (May 1984): 160.Google Scholar

58. In this work Avtorkhanov affirmed, among other things, that the October revolution had been arranged by a conspiratorial “party center” headed by Stalin, which was renamed the Cheka after the coup and which Stalin continued to run over its “nominal head” Dzerzhinskii (A. Avtorkhanov, Zagadka smerti Stalina: zagovor Beriia [Frankfurt: Possev-Verlag, 1976], 35). For Medvedev's criticism, see Medvedev, Roy A., On Stalin and Stalinism, trans. Kadt, Ellen de (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 14, 154-59.Google Scholar

59. Voprosy istorii, nos. 1-12 1991; nos. 1-3, 6-7, 10-12 1992; nos. 2-3 1993.