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Portrait of a Con Artist as a Soviet Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Golfo Alexopoulos
Golfo Alexopoulos*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of South Florida
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Extract

Vladimir Gromov was thirty-six years old when he was sentenced to death in 1935 for pretending to be someone he was not. Asserting the identity of a skilled engineer and award-winning architect, this man with only a middle school education once convinced the commissar of supply, Anastas Mikoian, to give him one million rubles. Now, the Moscow prosecutor and people's court insisted that he was a pretender, an impostor, a master con artist. Yet in his own mind, Gromov was an artist of a different sort. While in solitary confinement awaiting execution in Moscow's Taganka prison, Gromov wrote a play, complete with elaborate drawings and stage directions, which he submitted to the deputy procuratorgeneral of the USSR, Andrei Vyshinskii.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , Winter 1998 , pp. 774 - 790
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1998

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References

I am especially grateful to Sheila Fitzpatrick and Diane P. Koenker, who read several drafts of this article and offered me the benefit of their comments and suggestions. Giovanna Benadusi, Svetlana Boym, John Bushnell, Greg Carleton, Maria Gough, Armando Maggi, Christoph Neidhart, Valerie Sperling, Elizabeth Wood and the anonymous reviewers for Slavic Review also provided insights that were particularly useful and significant. My sincere thanks to the participants of die Contemporary European Culture Workshop at the University of Chicago and the Historians' Seminar at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University for their thoughts and remarks. I would also like to acknowledge Elena Grigoriadis and Matt Lenoe, who gave me generous and invaluable assistance with Vladimir Gromov's archival record.

1. Gromov's case file can be found in the USSR Procuracy collection (fond) of Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10. The file contains this handwritten play with its detailed drawings and stage directions, tens of Gromov's petitions, and more man fifty densely typed pages from Soviet authorities. The official record of the case and Gromov's petitions from detention at the Taganka cover the period from December 1934 to March 1935; a long period of silence ensues and then there are several petitions from January and February 1937 while Gromov was in forced labor in Murmansk. Due to the secrecy accorded NKVD and Procuracy records, especially individual case files, I could not gain access to other documents on Gromov, but I believe they must exist since the indictment refers to as many as six volumes of material on his case, with each volume in the hundreds of pages. The legal journal, Sovetskaia iustitsiia, does not mention his case and neither, apparently, does the general press. Finally, I was not able to find any record of Gromov in the amnesty and clemency files currently available at GARF for the 1930s-1950s, that is, ff. 3917, 7521, and 7863.

2. See, for example, Khlevniuk, Oleg V., 1937-i: Stalin, NKVD i Sovetskoe obshchestvo (Moscow, 1992), 153 Google Scholar, on how conservative behavior was common among party members who felt vulnerable to purge or denunciation; Graham, Loren R., The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 67–68 Google Scholar, on how a feeling of vulnerability prompted engineers in the early 1930s to remain silent and act discreetly; and “Diary of Andrei Stepanovich Arzhilovsky,” in Garros, Veronique, Korenevskaya, Natalia, and Lahusen, Thomas, eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York, 1995), 114 Google Scholar, on why it is safer “just to stand on the sidelines. “

3. Golfo Alexopoulos, “Rights and Passage: Marking Outcasts and Making Citizens, 1926–1936” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1996); Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia,” Journal of Modern History 65 (December 1993): 745–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fitzpatrick, , “The Problem of Class Identity in NEP Society,” in Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Rabinowitch, Alexander, and Stites, Richard, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington, 1991), 12–33 Google Scholar; Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar; Siegelbaum, Lewis, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, Eng., 1988).Google Scholar

4. Gromov's behavior reflected what David Joravsky calls “the new Stalinist mentality” in which realistic practicality was replaced by extreme willfulness. See his The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 40.

5. Tucker, Robert C., Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York, 1973), 462–87Google Scholar; Medvedev, Roy, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York, 1989), 313–19.Google Scholar

6. Levi, Giovanni, “On Microhistory,” in Burke, Peter, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, Penn., 1992), 93–113.Google Scholar

7. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 36 (the indictment [obvinitel'noe zakliuchenie] of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).

8. The average annual monetary wage for workers was 1, 427 rubles in 1932 and 1, 566 rubles in 1933. Zaleski, Eugene, Stalinist Planning for Economic Growth, 1933–1952 (Chapel Hill, 1980), 136–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Solomon, Peter H. Jr., Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 49–.Google Scholar

10. During this period of rapid industrialization, the Soviet Union faced a problem with false specialists. The undersupply of and high demand for skilled personnel led to employment invitations, not only for under qualified Russians, but for foreign “specialists.” Exacerbating the problem of false specialists was that those hiring them were also unqualified to judge their credentials. Thus, once false specialists were discovered, factories were reluctant to admit that they had hired them. A case from the early 1930s illustrates this point. A metal factory in the Moscow region hired a so-called specialist from America who claimed to be highly experienced in stamp production. After six months, the company discovered that the American had very little knowledge in this area. The false specialist was then fired, but he was also given a recommendation and transferred elsewhere, apparently in order to conceal the fact that the company had failed to adequately assess the man's credentials. Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Moskovskoi oblasti, f. 807, op. 1, d. 2431, 1. 5.

11. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 15 (sentence [prigovor] of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935). Gromov was granted amnesty in accordance with the decree of 2 November 1927 issued by the Tsentral'nyi Ispolnitel'nyi Komitet USSR. Under the provisions of this decree, he would have had to serve at least half of his two-year sentence before being eligible for amnesty. See Romashkin, P. S., Amnistiia i pomilovanie v SSSR (Moscow, 1959), 61–62 Google Scholar. His father-in-law testified that he was sentenced to three years in 1928 but “somehow maneuvered things and never served any time.” GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 36. Gromov claimed that he was sentenced in 1928 and 1930 according to articles 77 and 120 of the 1926 RSFSR Criminal Code. Article 77 carried a punishment of up to two years incarceration (lishenie svobody) for “deliberately appropriating the title or authority of someone in a position of responsibility as well as discrediting Soviet power or taking some kind of socially dangerous actions.” Article 120 similarly punished with up to two years incarceration crimes described as “forgery at work, that is, while on official duty and for the purpose of profit, deliberately inserting into official documents false information, forgeries, erasing or changing the date, including or removing false documents or inserting false signatures.” Ugolovnyi kodeks RSFSR Redaktsii 1926 goda (Moscow, 1927), 197, 304–5.

12. As Rosamond McKitterick has written, “a society which can produce a forgery … is one essentially appreciative of literacy and the power of the written word.” McKitterick, Rosamond, The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), 325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 100–104; David Hoffmann notes “the ease with which [peasants] acquired and used false passports” when moving to Moscow, at the same time that Gromov moved to Moscow on a bogus passport. See his Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca, 1994), 53. On the production of false party cards in the 1930s, see Arch Getty, J., Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge, Eng., 1985), 32–.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 16 (sentence of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935).

15. In the late 1920s, the average Russian worker changed jobs about once a year. In 1930, labor turnover sharply increased to 152.4 percent overall and 177.6 percent in Gromov's producer goods industry. See Kuromiya, Hiroaki, Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928–1932 (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), 209–Google Scholar. In construction, also Gromov's sector, labor turnover was nearly 300 percent in the early 1930s. See Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis, 207.

16. Gromov was not alone in his con. A German visitor to the Taganka prison in 1932 noted the following in her study of the Soviet penal system: “In Taganka, I heard a Russian engineer being tried. He was serving a three-year sentence because he had undertaken the management of some works in Siberia, had been given three months’ pay in advance and had squandered it in Moscow instead of going to his post.” Koerber, Lenka Von, Soviet Russia Fights Crime (New York, 1935), 56.Google Scholar

17. Stites, Richard, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 64–66, 73Google Scholar. See also Gleason, Abbott, Kenez, Peter, and Stites, Richard, eds., Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington, 1985).Google Scholar

18. Khlevniuk, Oleg V., Stalin i Ordzhonikidze: Konflikty v Politburo v 30-e gody (Moscow, 1993), 29–41Google Scholar; Khlevniuk, 1937-i, 41–42.

19. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 48 (the indictment of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).

20. Ibid., 1. 38 (the indictment of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).

21. Clark, Katerina, “Engineers of Human Souls in the Age of Industrialization: Changing Cultural Models, 1929–1941,” in Rosenberg, William G. and Siegelbaum, Lewis H., eds., Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization (Bloomington, 1993), 248–64.Google Scholar

22. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 17 (sentence of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935); ibid., 1. 35 (the indictment of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).

23. Khlevniuk, 1937-i, 12.

24. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 11. 48–49 (the indictment of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).

25. Joravsky, Lysenko Affair, 13.

26. Davis, Natalie Zemon, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 40–41, 60.Google Scholar

27. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 50 (the indictment of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).

28. I quote Peter Solomon in his description of most legal officials and local politicians in the USSR. Specifically, he notes that from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s most Soviet legal officials were uneducated and in experienced. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin, 51. John Scott also noted that in the 1930s “the Bolsheviks were forced to organize and run industry, finance, transport, and commerce with untrained, inexperienced executives and administrators.” See his Behind the Urals (Bloomington, 1989), 174.

29. Gromov took his cues from the state's obsession with subversion, wrecking, and plots in the 1930s, which is described in Rittersporn, Gabor, “The Omnipresent Conspiracy: On Soviet Imagery of Politics and Social Relations in the 1930s,” in Lampert, Nick and Rittersporn, Gabor, eds., Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath. Essays in Honor of Moshe Lewin (London, 1992), 101–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 49 (the indictment of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).

31. “Ob okhrane imushchestva gosudarstvennykh predpriiatii, kolkhozov i kooperatsii i ukreplenii obshchestvennoi (sotsialisticheskoi) sobstvennosti,” Sobranie zakonov i rasporiazhenii raboche-krest'ianskogo pravitel'stva SSSR, 1932, no. 62, art. 360, p. 584. Over 100, 000 people were sentenced under this law in 1933, the year in which it was most frequently applied. When Gromov was sentenced in 1935, however, the law's use had declined by roughly one-tenth. For an extensive discussion of this important law, see Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin, 112–29; Khlevniuk, 1937-i, 23.

32. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1.18 (sentence of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935).

33. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 25 (letter to Akulov, 27 January 1935).

34. Gromov explored many possible rhetorical avenues of self-defense common in the 1930s, but he avoided confession and relied heavily upon denunciation and boasts regarding his usefulness and corrigibility. See Graham, Ghost of the Executed Engineer, 106, on confession during the Industrial Party trial. See Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii (RTsKhIDNI), f. 613, op. 3, d. 170, for how confession or the acknowledgement of errors and mistakes was common among party members who had been purged in the early 1930s and were petitioning for reinstatement into the party. For other styles of appeal that were current in the 1930s and similar to Gromov's, see Alexopoulos, Golfo, “The Ritual Lament: A Narrative of Appeal in the 1920s and 1930s,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 24, nos. 1–2 (Spring-Summer 1997): 117–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Alexopoulos, “Rights and Passage,” chaps. 4—5. Like Gromov, younger de-kulakized and disenfranchised people who petitioned for rights often claimed that they lacked a defective nature, were corrigible, and could be potentially useful to Soviet power.

35. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 11 (petition to Vyshinskii, 24 February 1935).

36. Ibid., 1. 23 (petition to Akulov, 11 February 1935).

37. Ibid., 1. 27 (petition to Vyshinskii, 27 February 1935).

38. Ibid., 1. 18 (sentence of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935); ibid., 1. 33 (petition to the Moscow City Court, 3 January 1935).

39. Ibid., 1. 18 (sentence of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935).

40. Ibid., 1. 11 (petition to Vyshinskii, 24 February 1935). Gromov was not the only one who found himself in this predicament in the 1930s. On how those who wrote denunciations often became the victims of reprisals, see Alexopoulos, Golfo, “Exposing Illegality and Oneself: Complaint and Risk in Stalin's Russia,” in Solomon, Peter, ed., Reforming Justice in Russia, 1864–1994: Power, Culture, and the Limits of Legal Order (Armonk, N.Y., 1997).Google Scholar

41. Leonid Brezhnev continued the Stalinist practice of constructing a grand persona but took it to a higher level. He had a “passion for honors and awards” and accumulated in his lifetime more than Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev combined. Most of all, Brezhnev worked at forging a grand identity as a war hero, and he appropriated titles that were only awarded to military leaders who were responsible for major victories in battle. Medvedev, Roy, Lichnost’ i epokha: Politicheskii portret L. I. Brezhneva (Moscow, 1991), 292–93.Google Scholar Brezhnev also appropriated the status of a Soviet writer by having a book ghostwritten for him; Little Land described his role in a 1943 campaign. See Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 148.

42. Terts, Abram, “Grafomany,” in his Fantasticheskie povesti (Paris, 1961), 33 Google Scholar. On Soviet graphomania, see Boym, Svetlana, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 168–.Google Scholar

43. Boym, Common Places, 200.

44. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 5 (letter to Vyshinskii, 27 January 1935).

45. All citations from the play can be found in GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 11. 101–206.

46. Gromov's play has certain elements of socialist realist literature, but it does not focus on such standard themes as Soviet industrialization, the struggle to control the elemental forces of nature, or heroic martyrdom in the service of building socialism. On these official literary conventions of the 1930s, see Clark, Katerina, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981)Google Scholar; Gunther, Hans, “Education and Conversion: The Road to the New Man in the Totalitarian Bildungsroman,” in Gunther, Hans, ed., The Culture of the Stalin Period (New York, 1990), 193–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Frank J., Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk, N.Y., 1990)Google Scholar; Gasiorowska, Xenia, Women in Soviet Fiction 1917–1964 (Madison, 1968)Google Scholar.

47. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 3 (memo from the Moscow oblast NKVD at the Taganka prison to Vyshinskii, 14 March 1935). In the corner of this memo, Vyshinskii scribbled the note to Sheinin.

48. After a successful career as an investigator, Lev R. Sheinin became a prose writer and playwright. He co-authored the screenplay of the 1947 film, Vstrecha na Elbe (Meeting at the Elbe), for which he won the Stalin prize in 1949. His years in legal work informed his writings, and he made detectives the focus of many novels, short stories, plays, and films.

49. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 11. 1–2 (letter from Gaidovskii of the USSR Writers’ Union to Sheinin, 31 March 1935).

50. Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 56.

51. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 11. 2–3 (letter from Gaidovskii of the USSR Writers’ Union to Sheinin, 31 March 1935). Sheila Fitzpatrick describes how the privileges of the new elite were rarely mentioned in the newspapers of the 1930s because it was an awkward subject, as Gaidovskii's commentary demonstrates. See her “Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste,” The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 216–37.

52. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1.17 (sentence of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935).

53. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 84. Gromov asserts in this letter to Molotov of 22 January 1937, that two days after he wrote a letter to Stalin pleading for his life “our beloved and just leader, our dear I. V. Stalin, issued a personal instruction and my life was spared.” However, in a letter to the USSR Procuracy, he claimed that Vyshinskii initiated a protest before the RSFSR Supreme Court, which then commuted his death sentence to ten years’ deprivation of freedom. See ibid., 1. 89.

54. Nadezhda Mandel'shtam is quoted in “Lying as a Way of Life: The Soviet Union (A Conversation with Viktoria and Mikhail Schweitzer),” Berkshire Review 15 (1980): 62–83. In this transcript, Viktoria Schweitzer attributes to Vasilii Grossman the claim that “All Soviet life is a huge theatrical scene. Everyone is playing a role. “

55. Ginzburg, Eugenia Semionova, Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Stevenson, Paul and Hayward, Max (New York, 1967), 31.Google Scholar

56. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, 1. 95 (letter to Stalin, 14 January 1937).

57. Ibid., 1. 92 (letter to Stalin, 14 January 1937).

58. Ibid., 11. 98–99 (memos of 26 February and 25 March 1937).

59. Sartorti, Rosalinde, “Stalinism and Carnival: Organization and Aesthetics of Political Holidays,” in Gunther, , ed., Culture of the Stalin Period, 41–77.Google Scholar