Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
Jonas Vanderschueren
Resisting terror
Ideology and dissidence in Vasily Grossman's Zhizn' i sud'ba
Master thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master in
Comparative Modern Literature
2016
Supervisor
Prof. dr. Jürgen Pieters
Literature Department
Co-supervisor Prof. dr. Ben Dhooge
Department of Languages and Cultures
Acknowledgements
This research is the result of a long process in which I tried to better grasp the dynamic and
workings of ideology. First and foremost I’d like to thank both my supervisors, prof. dr.
Jürgen Pieters and prof. dr. Ben Dhooge. Without their thorough and complementary
feedback it would have been impossible for me to fully understand the dynamic workings of
ideology, not to mention how riddled with historical error this research would be. The
shortcomings that are still to be found in this research are therefore not the result of any
lack of supervision, but rather a lack of time to read all relevant research – an impossible
feat in any case.
Besides my supervisors I would also like to thank my dear friends Bjorn and Jan-Bart
for our endless discussions on literary theory, politics and history. Without their feedback
my argumentation would be ramshackle at best, or slightly absurd at worst. What this
proves is that any text not only comes into existence through the individual act of writing,
but instead constitutes a social act that is done collectively. This means that many more
people should be thanked for contributing indirectly to this research, but sadly that would
require a list far more extensive than I’m allowed to.
ii
Preface
Twenty-five years ago the Soviet Union collapsed. Out of its ashes arose fifteen new states,
profoundly reshaping the maps of Europe and Central Asia. Its collapse marked the
definitive end of Communism as a serious force in world politics and ended the Cold War. It
seemed as if a new era had begun in which free market capitalism and democracy would
liberate the world from poverty and authoritarianism. Yet the 1990s were not a period of
mass prosperity and libertarianism in the post-Soviet states: although the strict repression
and regulation of society disappeared, the subsequent enforced mass privatization of the
Soviet economy created widespread poverty, mass unemployment and even greater
corruption in all layers of society. Even though Communism had disappeared, the ruling
nomenklatura had not, and remained firmly in power. Everything had to change for
everything to remain the same.
Although the Soviet Union now seems a distant memory, its legacy remains a constant
shadow hanging over Central- and Eastern Europe. Communism has so discredited the
political Left that the region has for two decades been dominated by right-wing free-market
ideology, leaving little room for emancipatory and radical politics. The reasoning behind
this is clear: Communism suppressed the freedom of millions for decades, killed hundreds of
thousands of people, and reduced the region to a level of poverty that endures today. Yet
the fact that the Communist project turned out a disaster, especially in the Soviet Union,
does not mean we should reduce it to those disasters. The latter happens so frequently that
we often forget that Communism was a reality for those same millions, and that many of
those people firmly believed in its ideals and try to live according to its values. It is for this
reason that Zhizn’ i sud’ba is such a fascinating work of art: a dissident novel that criticizes
the system from within, which tried to save Communism from itself. In that sense a serious
study of the ideology in Zhizn’ i sud’ba also contributes to the wider field of Soviet ideology:
how did the Revolution of 1917 go so horribly wrong? Was it something inherent to
iii
Marxist-Leninist ideology, or was it mere circumstance and personality? The latter is
sometimes suggested by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who denounces Stalinism
yet at the same time defends the merit of Leninist ideology. Zhizn’ i sud’ba is a novel that
does not take this line, but instead unwittingly proves that it are the internal
inconsistencies of Marxist-Leninism itself which led to the gulags, and not just the
(supposedly) blood-thirsty nature of Stalin or some failed historical opportunity (for
example the early death of Lenin). If a radical politics is to emerge that wishes to abolish
Capitalism without resorting to violence, we must learn the lessons of Communism and its
strangulation of freedom and democracy. As Magar, a former revolutionary who ended up
in the gulag, says in Zhizn’ i sud’ba: ‘[freedom is] the base, the meaning, the foundation that
underlies all foundations. Without freedom there can be no proletarian revolution… ’ (Grossman
177). Today we could say that there can be no left-wing politics without freedom and
democracy at its core.
Now that ‘real existing’ Communism is no more and two decades have passed, it seems
possible to have a more nuanced view on the period, the ideology and its art. If we wish to
avoid the mistakes made during the Revolution and after, in which sincere Communists
managed to build a Totalitarian State, we must not just study the facts of the period but also
the underlying ideas. Given the politically charged nature of the intellectual in the
Communist bloc there is no better place to start this than the work of a writer such as
Grossman, who is now regarded as one of the finest Russian novelists of the 20th century.
iv
Table of Contents
Introduction
6
Chapter 1
Decoding Marxism Zhizn’ i sud’ba and the limits of ideology ..................................... 11
1.1
1.2
1.3
Confiscating dissidence: Zhizn’ i sud’ba and ‘the Thaw’ ............................................................... 11
Reading the master code: the Stalingrad myth ............................................................................ 14
Ideological horizons: a democratic Marxist-Leninism? .............................................................. 22
Chapter 2
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
Undermining the Totalitarian State............................................................................................... 25
Revolutionary endings: 1937 and the fate of Old Bolsheviks ..................................................... 29
Russia and the minorities: State Nationalism ............................................................................... 34
Jewishness in the Soviet Union ....................................................................................................... 37
Chapter 3
3.1
3.2
3.3
Cleaning the slate Violence, the Other and the Totalitarian State ................................... 25
Freedom and violence Suppression and individual identity ........................................... 41
Identification and an emerging Jewish identity .......................................................................... 41
Science and freedom......................................................................................................................... 49
The case of Krymov ........................................................................................................................... 52
Conclusion
59
Bibliography
64
(Words: 20.734)
v
Introduction
On March 5, 1953 Joseph Stalin died of a cerebral haemorrhage. For nearly thirdly years he
had been General Secretary of the Communist Party, the undisputed leader of the Soviet
Union and its peoples. His death led to widespread grief and sincere mass mourning, but
also a deep sense of fear: Stalin had seemed immortal, and now that he was dead people
feared that the search for a scapegoat would begin. Many feared another round of purges
and randomized mass terror. That this did not happen was due to a power struggle began
between members of the Central Committee as to which direction the Soviet Union should
take after Stalin.
By 1956 this struggle was firmly decided in the favour of Nikita Khrushchev, who
denounced Stalin in a Speech to the XXth Party Congress as a tyrant who’s ‘Cult of
Personality’ resulted in wide-spread abuse of power and a ‘perversion of revolutionary
legality’ (Figes 351). It were these perversions that had led to a series of disasters, such as
the purges during the late 1930s or the German successes during the early stages of the
Great Patriotic War. To put the Soviet Union back onto the ‘path towards Socialism’ the Cult
of Personality had to be rooted out. The subsequent ‘return to Leninism’ saw a renewed
ideological zeal released both in the Communist Party and Soviet society at large
(Loewenstein 1329). By trying to decouple Stalin from the ideological project of MarxistLeninism1, and by curtailing the State’s worst excesses, the new Party leadership hoped to
continue the march towards Socialism without any substantive ideological revision.
1
Marxist-Leninism as an ideological project took form in the 1920s. It rejects both world revolution (a
Trotskyite idea) and the gradual transition from Capitalism to Socialism (something Lenin had attempted with
the New Economic Policy) (Figes 181).
6
This was not how Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization was perceived however when it was
first launched. By denouncing Stalin and the excessive terror that characterized his tenure,
Khrushchev called the wider system in question as well. Through this act of self-criticism
and the end of mass terror expectations were raised to such a degree that people such as
the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman thought that this new openness could be transformed in
more structural changes to the Soviet system. Believing in the role of literature as a
medium to uncover truth, Grossman had spent most of his time between 19522 and 1960
writing a novel that would contribute to de-Stalinization. That novel became Zhizn’ i sud’ba
(Life and Fate), a panoramic take on Soviet society dealing with the tragedy of the Great
Patriotic War, the Holocaust and the immense violence wrought by Totalitarian States in
the 20th century.
Although it clearly tested the limits of the regime’s tolerance, it touched upon the
topics that Khrushchev had raised himself in his 1956 ‘Secret Speech’. The latter had
undermined the founding principle of the Soviet State (the omnipotence of that State), but
did not answer the questions that it had raised. Now that the State itself signalled that it
could fail, people started to ask tough questions about collectivization, industrialization and
the war. The State refused to answer and suppressed the public debate that emerged after
Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. When Zhizn’ i sud’ba was submitted for publication in 1960 it
was censured as well, and would not be published in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s
(Chandler xxvi).
Why was Zhizn’ i sud’ba regarded as a dangerous novel? It claimed not to be ‘a political
book’, but ‘about people, their grief, joy, delusions, deaths’ (Green 37). On the face of it this
is true: the novel did not offer any open dissidence, was not framed against the working
classes or Communism. It took the official Party line attacking ‘the Cult of Personality’
around Stalin and applied it with gusto, portraying him as a tyrant whose violent rule led to
the derailment of the Revolution of 1917 and the perversion of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
2
Interesting to note here however is that Grossman began writing Zhizn’ i sud’ba before Stalin died. This
suggests that his inner drive to write about truth could not be quelled, even if it threatened his life. This
nuances Grossman’s own rhetoric during the Khrushchev period, where he argued that Zhizn’ i sud’ba was
inspired by the Soviet leader’s ‘Secret Speech’. It most certainly emboldened Grossman to submit the novel for
publication, but Zhizn’ i sud’ba was clearly more than a contribution to de-Stalinization.
7
Yet a reader of Zhizn’ i sud’ba cannot help but feel struck by the frankness used in the
denunciation of Totalitarianism, Stalin and corrupt Party officials. Therefore it is necessary
to look into the realm of ideology, and the tensions between the intentions of the author
and the subconscious contradictions hiding behind those intentions.
The 1990s saw a lot of valuable research being done into the life and work of Vasily
Grossman, mostly by the American scholar John Garrard. However, although providing a
good starting point for this research, I reject the autobiographical approach predominant in
Garrard’s work. By reading his work through what Pasolini called ‘the long take’3, Zhizn’ i
sud’ba came to be seen as an unambiguous product of Grossman’s rejection of MarxistLeninism and the Soviet system towards the end of his life. By choosing a pre-Saussurian
focus on the ‘architectonics’ of the novel4 this early research does not take into account the
importance of ideology and the workings of the Ideological State Apparatus in any given
society. By only focussing on Grossman individually, and not on the ideological field in
which he worked, it misses a lot of the nuance that is present in Zhizn’ i sud’ba and explains
how a novel can be unconsciously dissident. Another problem is that a lot of this research is
written from the perspective of post-Cold War euphoria, meaning that political prejudice
sometimes takes the upper hand, such as when Garrard speaks of ‘the disasters wrought by
seventy years of Marxist-Leninist experiment’ upon the ‘troubled’ Russian soul (Garrard
1991, 346).
These issues I will try to avoid by focusing on the ‘political unconscious’ of the novel, and
the several levels on which how ideology functions within the text. In choosing this
approach I hope to give a more complex and nuanced picture of the workings of ideology in
Zhizn’ i sud’ba, and how it functioned in the literary field of the Khrushchev period. The
benefit of hindsight also means that I have tried to avoid the pitfalls of the early post-Cold
War period and try to avoid speaking of Marxist-Leninism as a priori an unprecedented
3
In his essay ‘Observations on the long take’ Pasolini argued that no life could be understood until it had
reached its conclusion: death (Pasolini 6).
4 The article I am referring to: Garrard, John. ‘Stepsons in the Motherland: The Arrchitectonics of Vasilii
Grossman’s Zhizn’ i sud’ba’ Slavic Review 50.2 (1991): 336-346. Print.
8
disaster. Instead it is seen here as a reality in which people lived for decades, and therefore
something which is not reducible to a single moral judgement.
One of the major aims of Grossman was to uncover truth, in whatever guise it hid and
whatever the obstacles he had to surmount to spread it (Chandler xxii). He realized that
clear moral judgements are hard to make in a Totalitarian reality in which everything and
everybody can be turned against you, and this realization constitutes one of the main
dilemmas of Zhizn’ i sud’ba: how to remain ‘untainted’ by the regime if even doing the right
thing can end up badly. It is this conflict between Totalitarian reality and the ideological
apparatus of Marxist-Leninism that constitutes the main field of tension in Zhizn’ i sud’ba.
Without taking into account the ideological field in which Zhizn’ i sud’ba was produced it is
not possible to fully understand how the text could both profess loyalty to Communism and
at the same time reject some of its central ideas. No work of literature is free from the realm
of ideology, and for this reason I will argue that Zhizn’ i sud’ba is a far more complex novel
than it usually credited for. Although it rejects Marxist-Leninism implicitly, it is not
intentionally or primarily directed against Communism. Rather it is directed against
Totalitarianism and the repression of freedom, and in this spirit it remained loyal to the
Soviet State and Marxist-Leninist ideology. We should heed ourselves for the ‘long take’ and
keep in mind that Grossman only rejected the regime after the treatment Zhizn’ i sud’ba
received (Chandler xxix).
To find out how this process exactly works, I will be asking three questions, each taking
up one chapter. The first of these is how Zhizn’ i sud’ba managed to be both a dissident novel
and loyal to the ideological tenets of Marxist-Leninism. To do this I will be taking a closer
look at the discursive field of the Khrushchev period and the workings of Marxist-Leninist
ideology. The second chapter will concern itself with the conflicts between Marxist-Leninist
ideology and the Totalitarian reality of Soviet life in the 1930s and the 1940s: how is it
possible that a Marxist-Leninist regime violently violates the tenets of its own ideology –
and keep its consistency? This I will try to understand by looking at how ideology needs an
‘Other’ to define itself against, and how the shifting of the Other in the eyes of the State is
also reflected in Zhizn’ i sud’ba. Finally, I will look at the relationship between the State and
the individual, and how identity becomes a vital tool for both dominance and resistance
under a Totalitarian regime.
The goal of these questions is not only to answer the question whether or not Grossman
was ‘truly’ a dissident: the State clearly regarded him as such after his submission of Zhizn’ i
9
sud’ba for publication. What is more interesting is how that dissidence worked, and how it is
possible that Grossman himself was only partially aware of this. This research will take the
view that only a serious study of how ideology functions can help to understand how Zhizn’ i
sud’ba could be an ‘unconscious’ dissident novel. Without taking into account the internal
contradictions of the ideological environment in which Grossman worked, it is impossible
to fully grasp how his novel – in essence a form of discourse or a speech act – could carry
the political weight that it did. This will be done in the following chapters.
10
Chapter 1
Decoding Marxism
Zhizn’ i sud’ba and the limits of ideology
‘But the word, the free, intelligent word has great power.’
- Zhizn’ i sud’ba (Grossman 109)
‘Stalin’s role in the preparation and execution of the Socialist
Revolution, in the Civil War, and in the fight for the construction
of socialism in our country, is universally known. Everyone knows
it well.’
- Speech to the XXth Party Congress (Khrushchev 1956)
1.1
Confiscating dissidence: Zhizn’ i sud’ba and ‘the Thaw’
On February 14, 1961 KGB officials arrived at Grossman’s Begovaya Street apartment to
confiscate all manuscripts of Zhizn’ i sud’ba (Garrard 1996, 260). The ‘arrest’ of his novel
came entirely unexpected to Grossman. In the preceding year, he had sent the manuscript
for publication in the literary journal Znamya (Banner). Its chief editor was initially
enthusiastic about publishing the novel, and signed a contract with Grossman including a
substantial advance. However, when the journal’s editorial board read the novel in full, it
was decided to put the editorial process on hold and alert the authorities (Garrard 1996,
258). Grossman only learned of the editorial board’s decision to suspend publication a full
month after it was reached (Garrard 1996, 259). Disappointed at his treatment, he sent off
several furious letters to the journal’s editorial board. What he did not expect, however, was
that the State regarded his life work as such a menace that it ‘could not be published in 250
years’ (Green 37). Not even a letter addressed directly to Khrushchev, invoking freedom of
conscience as one of the main reasons why he wrote Zhizn’ i sud’ba, proved to any avail. The
experience left Grossman embittered and disillusioned with the Soviet system. He died only
three years later, in 1964, of stomach cancer (Garrard 1996, 263).
It might seem strange that Grossman should receive such a treatment at the hands of
the Soviet State. Not only was he a well-respected writer and journalist, widely known for
his journalism during the Battle of Stalingrad, but he was also a loyal Communist (although
11
not a Party member), firmly believing that the October Revolution had emancipated the
peoples of the Soviet Union from poverty and Tsarist repression (Garrard 1996, xvi). Zhizn’ i
sud’ba was written in the language of Marxist-Leninism5 and fitted in the socialist-realist
tradition. Moreover, it echoed the rhetoric of its time, a period of relative liberalization of
Soviet society now known as ‘the Thaw’6, and more specifically the rhetoric of Khrushchev’s
‘Secret Speech’ to the XXth Party Congress (Loewenstein 1329).
In the latter, Khrushchev denounced Stalin to a closed session of the Party Congress.
He attacked the ‘Cult of Personality’7 that had grown up around Stalin and the ‘[…] whole
series of exceedingly serious and grave perversions of Party principles, of Party democracy,
[and] of revolutionary legality’ (Khrushchev 1956) that it had given rise to. Although
acknowledging the role of Stalin in ‘constructing socialism’ and various other
achievements, the speech accused him of being personally responsible for the failure of the
Soviet Union to properly prepare itself for the Great Patriotic War. It was ‘his intolerance,
his brutality and his abuse of power’ (Khrushchev 1956) that led to the waves of Stateorganized mass terror starting in the 1930s, which Khrushchev held responsible for the lack
of morale and discipline in the Red Army during the opening stages of the war.
The public perception of Stalin as an infallible, God-like figure was shattered by
Khrushchev’s speech. Even though the new Soviet leader announced a ‘return to Leninist
principles of democracy’8 (Green 37), it was not made clear what this actually meant. And
although the speech was supposed to stay secret, it only took a few days before most of the
5
Marxist-Leninism was the name given to the official ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It
gave the works of Marx and Lenin canonical status. The Party’s interpretation of their combined work became
Marxist-Leninism, and as such the ideological consequences of the ideology shifted throughout the Soviet
period (Figes 181)
6
Named after the eponymous 1954 novel of Ilya Ehrenburg. The periodization of ‘the Thaw’ depends heavily
on the emphasis placed by various historians, either ending at the end of 1956 (after a secret directive issued
to Party members forbidding criticism of the Party line), or roughly spanning the time that Nikita Khrushchev
was General Secretary of the Communist Party (Loewenstein 1330). Here we use the term in the latter sense.
7
Grossman directly refers to this in the following passage on Viktor Shtrum: ‘What had made Viktor
particularly indignant was the way even Lenin’s name had been eclipsed […]’ (Grossman 753)
8
The vagueness of this assertion ‘also facilitated a wider ideological discourse that quickly proved threatening
withing a political system that was essentially focused on consolidating and preserving gains already acquired
by the revolution’ (Hornsby 6)
12
country became (roughly) aware of its contents (Hornsby 6). For the first time since the
1920s, a form of public opinion began to develop, when Khrushchev’s speech was debated in
meetings throughout the country (Loewenstein 1332). This was done in a spirit of loyalty to
the regime and Marxist-Leninism, in the belief that ‘input from below’ would help the
regime to steer clear from the mistakes made under Stalin and stay ‘on the course towards
socialism’ (Loewenstein 1330). Zhizn’ i sud’ba was firmly coated in this language of
denunciation and reform, even referring directly to several points raised in the Secret
Speech9. Although it contained politically sensitive passages on the Holocaust and the
Party’s conduct during the war, it was expected by Grossman that these would be
airbrushed out by the censor in preparation for the novel’s final publication (Garrard 1996,
258).
Khrushchev’s speech had substantially raised expectations for a whole range of
reforms, not in the least a liberalization of the Soviet press, and people began to seize the
seemingly new climate throughout 195610 (Dobson 5). Even though the Party rejected the
idea of ‘input from below’ at the end the year, firmly reasserting its monopoly over public
opinion (Hornsby 1), controlled reform of Soviet society became one of the main political
themes of the Khrushchev period (Dobson 4). It is important to note here that this ‘rejection
of public opinion’ was never made public, since that would have been self-defeating and
would have shown the repressive character of the Soviet government (Loewenstein 1341).
The perception of public opinion, however, was allowed to continue, since this fitted
Khrushchev’s agenda of trying to ‘humanize’ the system by ending mass terror and
restoring a sense of legality11, something which had been completely absent during the
heights of Stalinism (Dobson 5).
9
For example, in this passage on Lenin: ‘Had he [Lenin] really written a testament that Stalin had kept secret?’
(Grossman 734). Khrushchev confirmed the existence of Lenin’s testament – the denial of which had become a
cornerstone of Soviet historiography during the height of Stalinism - in his Secret Speech (Figes 351).
10
Suddenly, moribund organizations such as Party meetings or the Soviet Writers’ Union became active for a
again. A famous example of this was the meeting of the Moscow Chapter of the Writers’ Union in October
1956. There, a discussion of Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone attracted huge crowds to denounce the
corruption of the ruling bureaucracy (Loewenstein 1338).
11
Alternatively referred to as ‘socialist’ or ‘revolutionary legality’. (Figes 348)
13
If Zhizn’ i sud’ba is seen as an attempt to assist the regime to ‘stay on the course
towards socialism’, as a form of ‘input from below’ – in a country in which writers were
traditionally seen as the conscience of the people (Garrard 1996, vi), then a beginning has
been made in the attempt to grasp why the novel was dissident, even though Grossman
firmly believed it was not. A conflict emerges between the ideological implications of his
writing and official Marxist-Leninist ideology. To put it simply: he writes the right words,
but the semantic meaning behind them betray semantic disagreements that go to the heart
of the Party’s ideological project. This helps to understand why he did not grasp that the
regime did not offer fundamental reform12, but merely denounced Stalin as a means of
asserting its control over society and the State machinery 13 (Figes 347). It had no intentions
of reducing the Party’s role in life and granting more freedom to the individual. In fact,
calling for such a move was perceived as deeply hostile to the Party’s position in society and
the aims of its ideological project. Anything leading away from the ‘building of Socialism’
was perceived by them as dissident, so in that sense making use of the political discourse of
the time therefore was not enough to ensure publication. Grossman, in writing Zhizn’ i
sud’ba did not contribute to the building of Socialism, because he didn’t just denounce
Stalin, he implicitly denounced the entire Soviet system.
1.2
Reading the master code: the Stalingrad myth
The concept of ‘the ideology of form’ can help to understand how Zhizn’ i sud’ba functions.
In essence, Marxist-Leninism functions as a ‘master code’ (Jameson 88) in which a ‘mode of
production’14 (Jameson 36) is reproduced which tries to give a Tolstoyesque panorama of
Soviet society during the turning point of the Great Patriotic War: the Battle of Stalingrad
(Garrard 1991, 337). This panorama can be read as highly critical of the Soviet system, to a
point that it suggests an alternative to Marxist-Leninism, which is something Grossman
12
In fact, Khrushchev’s speech framed the Party as the victim of Stalinism, not an accomplice (Figes 351).
13
‘Like Stalin, Khrushchev built up his support among the regional Party secretaries.’ (Figes 347)
14
‘[…] the synchronic system of social relations as a whole […] nowhere empirically present as an element, […],
but rather the entire system of relationships among those levels’ (Jameson 36)
14
himself did not seem fully aware of. Although it was not his conscious intention he
managed to write a novel whose ideological implications go far beyond mere personal
criticism.
A master code is the shared medium of a common discourse through which various
classes and social groups articulate their ideological struggles (Jameson 88). In the Soviet
Union of the 1950s this was Marxist-Leninism. However, this should not be seen as
something that was imposed from the top down, but rather as something that emerged
from the antagonisms between a variety of social classes, that formed an ‘all-embracing
unity of a single code which they must share and which thus characterizes the larger unity
of the social system’ (Jameson 89). What this means for this research, is that what matters is
not merely the form which Zhizn’ i sud’ba takes (which is Marxist-Leninist discourse), but
the semantic substance it lends to that form. Inversely, however, this also means that the
form of Marxist-Leninism restricted the options Grossman had in criticizing the system
without leaving the Marxist-Leninist ideological universe (Eagleton 1996, 300).
To unearth the ideology underlying Zhizn’ i sud’ba, the notion of the ‘political
unconscious’ proves to be very helpful in our attempt to restore ‘to the surface of the text
the repressed and buried reality’ of ‘history as class struggle’15 (Jameson 20). Because a
literary text ‘bears inscribed within it the marks of certain determinate absences which
twist its various significations into conflict and contradiction’ (Eagleton 1996, 317), there is
a form of ‘internal distance’ between the significations used by the writer and the
ideological ‘concepts’ hidden behind those silences (Eagleton 2006, ix). To make those
silences eloquent again, to produce the underlying ‘concept’ hidden in any given literary
work through the terms of a particular interpretative master code (Jameson 10), is to
unearth the ideological workings of a literary text.
In Zhizn’ i sud’ba the national myth surrounding Stalingrad is challenged. The official
narrative after the Great Patriotic War held that Stalin was the sole architect of the Red
Army’s strategic victory, aided by the Party’s resilience (Khrushchev 1956). This view is
firmly rejected by Grossman, who argues the exact opposite: it were the purges of the 1930s
15
This should not be seen as a Lukácsian attempt to read Marxist concepts into a text, or an attempt to read a
text merely through the prism of the modern working class struggle. Rather, what ‘history as class struggle’
indicates is that social antagonisms structure any given mode of production.
15
which left the country woefully underprepared for a military conflict with Nazi-Germany.
Even the notorious apparatchik Getmanov, whom is described as a ‘true Stalinist’, holds this
view:
Getmanov made a gesture of despair. “We received a bulletin from the General Staff today. It’s
quite appalling. The Germans have almost reached Mount Elbruz, and at Stalingrad they’re
forcing our troops into the river. And let me say this straight out: those lads are partly to
blame for all this. They shot our own men, they destroyed our own cadres.” (Grossman 203)
Before the war Stalin initiated several purges, which effectively destroyed the Red Army’s
military leadership. Nearly all commanders were killed in this round of mass terror. This
was seen by Grossman as one of the reasons why the Red Army was fighting at Stalingrad in
the first place: the incompetence of the Soviet leadership decimated the army to such a
degree that they carry the responsibility for the German advance. This is why Stalingrad is
not seen by Grossman as the corner stone of a new foundational myth for the post-war
Soviet Union, why it is not a symbol standing alongside the October Revolution (Figes 334).
Instead Zhizn’ i sud’ba represents it as a missed opportunity to build post-war freedom:
The soul of wartime Stalingrad was freedom. […] Here, ten years later, was constructed a vast
dam […] – the product of the forced labour of thousands of prisoners (Grossman 782)
The near-encirclement of Stalingrad resulted in the fact that the soldiers fighting on the
right bank were not merely cut off from reinforcements and supplies, but in some cases also
from the most stringent forms of political control. A spirit of freedom took hold in the city,
a spirit which Grossman credits as being the single most important element in winning the
battle.
A prime example of this is House 6/1: almost completely surrounded, for weeks
Captain Grekov and a motley crew of soldiers stubbornly resist an unrelenting German
assault. By holding out, they prevent the Germans from launching a wider assault on the
right bank, in the process allowing preparations for the Soviet Operation Uranus to go
ahead. However, the absence of political commissars and the stringent political controls
that were normal in the Red Army made it possible for an egalitarian spirit of freedom and
comradeship to develop. This spirit is centered around Grekov, ‘the house-manager’, and
his beast-like ‘fighting spirit’ (Grossman 402). The political commissar Krymov is sent out to
again ‘establish Bolshevik order’ (Grossman 403). This the latter fails to do, since Grekov
shoots him in his sleep. Krymov is evacuated to a military hospital, and only after the
complete destruction of House 6/1 is he capable of reporting of Grekov’s treason. This
16
report, however, is seen as a liability: now that Grekov and his men are gone, they have
become useful as a propaganda instrument to boost the Red Army’s morale. All of a sudden,
Krymov has become subversive: since he knows the truth about house 6/1, he could do
harm to the Party’s hold on power. Because of this he is arrested and sent to the Lubyanka.
What this example suggests, is that the Party is merely concerned with its own
prestige and its position of power, not the high-minded values of Communism or the wellbeing of the peoples of the Soviet Union. This is starkly different from a critique of the ‘Cult
of Personality’ surrounding Stalin: the entire system is implicated. This points to a bigger
failing of the Party, being the fact that after the XVIIth Party Congress16 there was no longer
any organised opposition to Stalin – either internal or external (Figes 239). The following
years saw mass terror reach heights previously unseen in Europe, a process which
Grossman encapsulates in his many references to the year 1937 – the peak of the Great
Purge (Figes 265). The remains of the Soviet society were destroyed and a new relationship
towards the State was established: that of the atomized individual whom is totally
dependent on the State for his existence (Arendt 315). This is something Grossman bitterly
ironizes when he makes Nyeudobnov – another apparatchik - lecture the ‘politically lesseducated’ Colonel Novikov:
That’s not what comrade Stalin says. Comrade Stalin tells us that nothing is more precious
than men. Our men, our cadres, are the most precious capital of all. One must watch over them
like the apple of one’s eye. (Grossman 490)
The irony here is that a seemingly ‘humane’ statement can have such inhumane
consequences. Here, humanity is reduced to mere ‘capital’, meaning it is something
expendable, something that can be exchanged for something different. Novikov himself
seems to sense this, remarking: ‘How strange. Now they all think of me as a brute and
Nyeudobnov as someone who looks after his men’ (Grossman 490). Evidently the latter is
not the case, since earlier on we learned that Nyeudobnov ‘had whole lists of men
liquidated’ (Grossman 203). Human ‘capital’ is only precious in the sense that not too much
should be ‘spent’ on any given operation, because that could peril the course of the war –
and the position of power of the Party.
16
This Party Congress was held in 1934 and was dubbed ‘the Congress of Victors’ due to the economic
successes of the 1st Five Year Plan (Figes 238).
17
This fits a wider criticism to be found in Zhizn’ i sud’ba, which tries to unmask the
ideological hypocrisy of the Party. Although it keeps using the language of MarxistLeninism, in its attempts to sustain its hold on power it is more than prepared to use the
‘remains of older sign systems’ (Jameson 89) to mobilize the country and win the war.
Grossman saw Stalingrad as a turning point in the birth of a renewed Russian nationalism.
The experiences of war had made it possible for the nomenklatura – now also having military
experience - to build a power base not entirely at Stalin’s mercy17. Russian nationalism
became a prime legitimizing force to them after the war, more so than the ‘proletarian
internationalism’ that came before. Although nominally still using the language of MarxistLeninism, its semantic content came to denote something radically different: Russian
imperialism (Hosking 521)18. Again Getmanov forms a telling example. In discussing an
appointment with Novikov, he pleads with him to choose a Russian over a Kalmyk. When
Novikov points out that from a military point of view nationality is irrelevant, Getmanov
launches into an angry tirade:
Quite frankly […] all this makes me want to vomit. In the name of the friendship of nations we
keep sacrificing the Russians. A member of a national minority barely needs to know the
alphabet to be appointed a people’s commissar, while our Ivan, no matter if he’s a genius, has
to ‘yield place to the minorities’. The great Russian people’s becoming a national minority
itself. I’m all for the friendship of nations, but not on these terms. I’m sick of it! (Grossman 205)
The remarks of Getmanov reveal a reactionary attitude, talking about the ‘friendship of
nations’ in a racialized way, as a form of benevolence going out from the ‘superior’ Russian
people to the other nationalities. That benevolence only lasts, however, as long as the
Russian people remain dominant. If that dominance is affected, then the benevolent
17
This was something Stalin was painfully aware of. After the Great Patriotic War a new round of purges
occurred – not as violent as the 1930s, but nonetheless stifling the more independent spirit flourishing after
the war. These purged were centered around the classes who had gained a greater degree of autonomy during
the war (the Red Army and the nomenklatura) and who had the possibility to emigrate (from 1948 onwards
Jews could expect support from Israel) (Hosking 524).
18
There is even a suggestion that this was inevitable, given the ruthless behaviour of the Bolshevik
revolutionaries during and immediately after the October Revolution (speaking in the following passage is a
Nazi interrogator): ‘[…] Lenin considered himself a builder of internationalism while in actual fact he was
creating the great nationalism of the twentieth century…’ (Grossman 386).
18
attitude of the Russian people towards the national minorities should stop immediately.
This explains why Getmanov acts as if Novikov were part of a conspiracy trying to
undermine ‘Russian greatness’ by forcing them to ‘yield place to the minorities’. Colonel
Novikov finds these remarks from Getmanov puzzling: he is not able to square them with
Getmanov’s loyal Stalinism. What is implied here, however, is that there is no juxtaposition
between being a loyal Stalinist and a Russian nationalist: these positions complement each
other. As stated earlier, whatever force strengthened the grips of Stalin and the Party was
harnessed. The war showed that nationalism was a potent force for the Party to mould
society in its image, building further on centuries-old traditions of authoritarianism and
anti-Semitism. The same passage includes an example of just that, when Getmanov exclaims
that ‘[w]e’re certainly not having synagogues and meeting-houses in our tank corps. We
are, after all, defending Russia’ (Grossman 205).
In a sense this nationalism is ironized by Grossman in the scene where Stalin calls the
Russian-Jewish scientist Viktor Shtrum. The latter is firmly Russified, yet is considered a
Jew by the State. Stalin, a Georgian, is seen as the ‘Father’ of the Soviet Union, eclipsing
even the Tsars that he replaced19. Yet, after their telephone call, Grossman lets Shtrum
imitate Stalin to his wife: ‘”I wish you success in your work,” said Viktor with a strong
Georgian accent’ (Grossman 747). The irony is palpable: the ‘Father’ of this new Russian
nationalism is himself not a proper Russian. This reveals two things, firstly being that the
concept of nationality and race was at the mercy of the State. This is something that also
happens to Shtrum, when after his phone call to Stalin he is no longer seen as a Jew, but as
‘a Russian […] a true Soviet citizen!’ (Grossman 818). Being a ‘true’ Soviet citizen is to be a
Russian, which indicates the imperial superiority of Russia over the other ‘brother-nations’
inside the Soviet Union. However, assimilation was possible to a certain degree, pointing
out that this Russian nationalism was a form of cultural racism, a cultural nationalism 20
19
‘For a thousand years Russia had been governed by an absolute autocracy, by Tsars and their favourites. But
never had anyone held such power as Stalin’ (Grossman 754)
20
‘Pride in the military victory of 1945 had given rise to a type of cultural imperialism. The Soviet Union (for
which read Russia) portrayed itself as the savior of Europe and the world.’ (Figes 334)
19
focused on the perceived superiority and dominance of the Russian language, literature and
culture – fused with pride in the achievements of Stalinist Communism (Hosking 520).
This nationalism fused with the Totalitarian creation of an atomized society forms the
ideological heart of Grossman’s critique of Stalinism. By singling out the nomenklatura, his
critique goes further than merely naming the abuses of Stalin: he attacks one of the central
ideological claims of the Soviet State, namely that it represents the working class. What
Grossman makes clear, is that State terror and Russian nationalism have displaced the
categories of class struggle: a divide is opened up between the State and the workers, which
goes to the heart of the ideological justification for Communism. A telling example is the
case of Stepan Spiridonov, director of the Stalingrad Power Station. The only director to
stay on the right bank of the Volga during the height of the Battle of Stalingrad, when it is
finally destroyed by German bombers he decides to evacuate his workers. However, after a
long time waiting for an evacuation order for himself, he decides to leave out of his own
accord to care for his daughter in Leninsk. Because this show of initiative, the Party brands
him a traitor and transfers him to a small power station in the Urals. To the Party his
bravery was only of secondary importance: what mattered more, was his unconditional
loyalty to their directives and demands. This is not the case for the workers whom he led
throughout the Battle. When leaving for the final time, he begs forgiveness from one of his
assistants. Bewildered, the man asks him: ‘What do you mean, Stepan Fyodorovich? We
workers are on your side’ (Grossman 850). The workers prefer Spiridonov above the Party
hacks denouncing him, implying that he is a honest, hard-working Communist – and that
the Party nomenklatura is not. If we expand our scope here, the broader point seems to be
that the Party is actively working against those who defend the working class, only to
defend its own interests.
Not only does Zhizn’ i sud’ba unmask the Soviet State as not truly representing the
working class, he also accuses it of being a Totalitarian government on par with NaziGermany. He even puts them on the same side by framing Stalingrad as ‘a struggle for
freedom against enslavement’ (Garrard 1991, 337):
The great Rising in the Warsaw ghetto, the uprisings in Treblinka and Sobibor; the vast
partisan movement that flared up in dozens of countries enslaved by Hitler; the uprisings in
Berlin in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and in the labour-camps of Siberia and the Far East after
Stalin’s death. (Grossman 200)
20
In the essay-like chapter from which this passage originates the narrator turns directly to
the reader to discuss the horrors of Totalitarianism. Here, he names the partisan
movements against Hitler in the same breath as he does uprisings in the Eastern bloc after
the Great Patriotic War. What is remarkable here, however, is that when talking of Soviet
Totalitarianism he only speaks of uprisings happening after the death of Stalin 21. This is a
direct indictment of the Soviet system, saying that it was not merely Stalin that initiated
terror, but the whole State structure, whom he denounces as Totalitarian. By this he means
a State who sacrifices its humanity in the name of progress,
[…] the hypnotic power of world ideologies […] [that] call people to carry out any sacrifice, to
accept any means, in order to achieve the highest of ends: the future greatness of the
motherland, world progress, the future happiness of mankind, of a nation, of a class (Grossman
199)
A narrative is constructed in which man is born free, but then enslaved by the State, which
tries to dominate and instruct his entire being, which results in complete obedience
towards that same State22. Man becomes a mere instrument in its hands23. These two
passages are no longer implicitly criticizing the Soviet system, but directly accusing it of
oppressing the freedom of its own people. In doing this, Grossman directly challenges the
legitimacy of the nomenklatura as a governing class, and the narrative unfolding in Zhizn’ i
sud’ba can then be read as testimony against that nomenklatura, not just as a critique of
Stalin.
21
This seems to indicate that Grossman thought he was supporting Khrushchev’s drive for de-Stalinization.
The Berlin Uprising of 1953 was blamed Beria, whom was deposed in a secret coup and executed (Figes 347)
22
This notion of the Soviet State as a Totalitarian ‘enslaver’ is something which is discussed in greater detail in
the next chapter.
23
It is in this light that we should see the earlier example of Nyeudobnov talking about the importance of
‘human capital’: it is the only resource which is virtually unlimited, given the large population and large birth
rates in the Soviet Union. This enabled mass terror – the strongest weapon underpinning a Totalitarian
government - without causing mass depopulation (Arendt 322).
21
1.3
Ideological horizons: a democratic Marxist-Leninism?
Seen in this light, the question whether or not Grossman’s attack on the events
happening after 1953 (such as the Hungarian uprising) can be read as an attack on
Khrushchev seems irrelevant. Although it seems more likely that Grossman was appealing
to the Soviet leadership to rid the country of the nomenklatura through democratic reforms,
its danger lies not in what it attacks, but in the ideological implications. At the beginning of
this chapter, it was stated that Grossman’s aim was to demystify the national myth
surrounding Stalingrad, and reconstruct it as a radical call for freedom inside MarxistLeninism. This call is also to be found in his 1961 letter to Khrushchev:
Dear Nikita Sergeyevich, it is now often written and said that we are returning to Leninist
norms of democracy. At a time of severe civil war, occupation, economic devastation and
hunger, Lenin created rules of democracy, which during Stalin’s era were deemed overly
ambitious. […] The strength and courage with which you did this give good grounds to think
that the rules of our democracy will grow […] Indeed, the growth of democracy and freedom
[…] constitutes the essence of the new society (Green 38)
On the surface it seems that Grossman calls for a return to the more liberal 1920s, the time
of ‘Leninist norms of democracy’, when society flourished and a form of public opinion was
allowed to exist (Loewenstein 1330). However, given the violence of the preceding decades
and the extensive corruption of which he accuses the Party’s nomenklatura, it seems unlikely
that ‘freedom and democracy’ can be achieved within contemporary State structures.
The letter does contain a hint of ideological disagreement when he defends the
‘objectivity’ of Zhizn’ i sud’ba24 by arguing that it ‘expresses the inner world of the writer, his
feelings, his intimate images’, or in other words: by arguing that it is fundamentally
subjective. This makes for an interesting ideological argument, for it not only goes against
the socialist-realist doctrine imposed by the Soviet Writers’ Union (source), but also echoes
a warning made by a State committee, led by Leonid Brezhnev and Georgii Malenkov, in a
secret letter to Party members in 1956:
24
What is meant by this, is that Grossman implied that he could have an alternative take on Soviet society and
Stalinism that was not political. His usage of the word ‘political’ implies that his view is more objective, since it
reflects Soviet society without the interference of propaganda.
22
[…] there are certain 'communists' who hide behind 'party-mindedness' (partiinost'), flying the
flag of the fight against the consequences of the cult of personality, and then moving to an
anti-party position, allowing demagogic attacks against the party, calling into question the
correctness of its line… (Loewenstein 1341)
It seems unlikely that Grossman was aware of this directly, but it is clear that this warning
was the prism through which the Party read Zhizn’ i sud’ba – and not without reason, for it
did contain stern criticism of its workings and ideological practices. Ironically, the
‘subjectivity’ that so antagonized the Party is exactly the argument Grossman makes:
My book is not a political book. In it I wrote, to the best of my limited abilities, about people,
their grief, joy, delusions, deaths. I wrote about love and human compassion. There are bitter,
painful pages in it, which address our recent past, the events of the war. […] Your report to the
XX Congress gave me confidence. After all, a writer’s thoughts, feelings, pain, contain particles
of universal thought, pain and truth. (Green 37)
Ideologically this seems to be because it implies to see ‘beyond’ ideology: by claiming it is
not political, it creates a ‘political’ sphere which is then separated from different spheres of
life, therefore negating the view that Marxist-Leninism structures everything in social life.
By doing this, it exposes the ideological limits of Marxist-Leninism, and therefore implicitly
leaves the ideological universe in which it stood, opening up a new space in which
alternatives can grow (Eagleton 1996, 330). This goes to the heart of why Zhizn’ i sud’ba was
dangerous: without intending to do so, it exposed Marxist-Leninism as what is was,
ideology, a system through which reality is viewed and which pretends to have a rational
answer to any question. The harsh criticism made of Stalinism can make one wonder that if
freedom and democracy were allowed to grow, there would still be a Marxist-Leninist
system in place. This seems highly unlikely, given the fact that Grossman also makes the
argument in Zhizn’ i sud’ba that the harshness of the Communist revolutionaries – including
Lenin himself – gave birth to the nightmare of Stalinism. This argument is explicitly
contradictory to Grossman’s aim of achieving freedom inside Marxist-Leninism. Rather, it
seems to suggest that democratic reforms would open a path towards liberation from a
stifling ideological experiment. This opens up the possibility of formulating an ideological
alternative, but Grossman does not take this beyond a vague faith in the strength of
humanity, freedom and democracy. There is no call for a Western-style democracy, which
23
would seem the logical alternative25. Rather, he opened the doors for Marxist-Leninism to
come up with an alternative to itself. In that sense Grossman remained loyal, even though
his own interpretation was so different from official orthodoxy that we should object to it
still being called Marxist-Leninism. It seems more proper to see it as a democratic Marxism,
or a Marxist humanism, given his use of Marxist language and class analysis to undermine
the Soviet State.
In the next chapter the focus will be on how Grossman exposes these ideological
limits by giving a voice to social strata and classes that were normally left out of Soviet art
and official discourse. This will be done by firstly discussing the official narrative
concerning Soviet life, how this narrative was used by a Totalitarian State, and finally how
the portrayal of Old Bolsheviks26, national minorities and Soviet Jews served to undermine
that narrative.
25
Given the bipolar world of the 1950s, Western democracy might seem like the logical ideological alternative
(although what exactly constitutes ‘Western democracy’ brings with itself a whole host of problems).
However, given the circumstances of the Cold War, and the ‘cosmopolitan campaign’ still fresh in people’s
minds, this could have been regarded as high treason.
26
Members of the Party who joined before the Revolution (Figes 266).
24
Chapter 2
Cleaning the slate
Violence, the Other and the Totalitarian State
‘Life has improved, comrades. Life has become more joyous.’
- Joseph Stalin (Figes 255)
‘The methods, aimed at keeping secret all that happened to my book were not methods of
dealing with lies and defamation. This is not how lies are combatted. It is how truths are
combatted.’
- Vasily Grossman (Green 38)
2.1
Undermining the Totalitarian State
Grossman’s letter to Khrushchev ends with an appeal to truthfulness:
I wrote it [Zhizn’ i sud’ba] and I did not renounce and do not renounce it. […] I still consider that
I wrote the truth, that I wrote it loving, pitying, and believing in people. (Green 38)
The previous chapter has shown that remarks like these form a highly potent critique of the
heart of the Soviet State: that is not ‘merely’ a Socialist one, but first-and-foremost a
Totalitarian State. In this chapter the aim is to show how that critique actually functions.
The ideological project of the Soviet State is undermined through the fact that Zhizn’ i sud’ba
gives a voice to the Other (Said 7). That Other takes on the shape of a variety of minority
groups, among which stand Old Bolsheviks, national minorities and Jews. The Other is seen
as something that could potentially liberate humanity from Totalitarianism, since being
different is one of the most powerful ideological weapons against the State: it shows that
25
ideology cannot structure or understand everything, a point that was already demonstrated
in the previous chapter.
It can be useful to expand upon this insight by linking it with the term ‘ideologeme’,
which is the ‘pseudoidea’ or ‘protonarrative’ (Jameson 87) that underlies any given class
discourse and is seen as natural (Mitchell 1989, 93). Ideologemes are kernels of the narrative
structure by means of which the group that uses the ideologeme tries to understand and
structure material reality. In doing this they add depth, or ‘space’ (Mitchell 92), to the ‘form’
of the discourse used. This means that ideologemes are a key concept to understand how a
similar discourse can obscure widely divergent ideological concepts, and why subtle
differences in use can carry such significance.
The Other functions as an important legitimization for the Totalitarian State to use
mass terror. The protonarrative of Marxist-Leninism is centred around revolution: not
merely a radical change of society, but its complete destruction to achieve tabula rasa and
rebuild society from scratch (Sloterdijk 107). The Totalitarian State further radicalizes this
idea into the concept of permanent revolution: the use of violence remains necessary even
after the principal aims of the revolution have been achieved. It holds out the prospect of a
world in which everything that is different, everything that is defined – something
unwittingly – against (certain aspects of) the State becomes the Other. That Other is the
reason why the State’s attempts at Socialism remain frustrated: if only the ‘enemies of the
people’ would disappear, the peoples of the Soviet Union would immediately arrive in a
Communist utopia. It is important to note that this process of selecting an eliminating the
Other is not a conscious process, but something that follows logically out of MarxistLeninism: if Socialism will be built through the elimination of ‘enemies of the people’, it
must mean that the hard progress in achieving Socialism is caused by ‘saboteurs’ hiding in
the shadows. Only when those elements have been eliminated will Socialism be achieved. In
that sense the ever escalating violence of the Totalitarian State is seen as ‘natural’, in that it
flows from the Marxist-Leninist worldview.
Because of this the State expends enormous effort in trying to subdue and
extinguish any form of collective or personal identity that is not in line with the Party at
any given moment (Arendt 314). It destroys society in any meaningful sense of the word,
instead establishing a direct relationship between the State and the atomized individual
(Arendt 320). The irony is that mass terror only becomes necessary after society has been
fractured (Arendt 319). Once any realistic form of opposition has been neutralized, the State
26
needs to search for a new Other to haunt down and eliminate. If it fails to do this, it loses its
legitimation to use violence as a tool of governance, but since it is a State built by bloodied
hands, such a loss would strike at the heart of the entire system. Without any serious
opposition, the State starts targeting new (or manufactured) minorities at random. This
arbitrariness is the only way in which the State can strike even the hearts of its supporters
with fear for the consequences if they ever fall on the wrong side of the fence (Arendt 321).
The ‘pseudoidea’ or utopian vision around which this arbitrariness is structured, is the wish
to rebuild society from scratch, but this is only possible when the necessary conditions have
been met1. This means that ‘the building of Socialism’ and the elimination of ‘enemies of the
people’ run largely parallel, meaning that full Communism will be achieved the moment all
forms of the Other have been destroyed. Then history will ‘come to an end’, because the
State will have built Communism and will ‘wither away’, which in Marxist-Leninism is seen
as the teleological end-point of history (Figes 200)
In the meantime, governance should be relinquished to the State, which represents
the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. In order for the State to know which individuals could
pose a threat to the progress of Socialism, it needs to build an extensive surveillance
apparatus that desires to know everything, see everything and steer everything2. This is
necessary because everyone – even a loyal Party member – forms a potential threat to the
State, since any form of (semi-)organization that is separate from it could expose the limits
of its ideological project. The State tries to claim in materiality the omnipotence that it also
claims in the ideological sphere for Marxist-Leninism.
This attitude of violent progress is an important motivation for individual Party
members, especially for the Old Bolsheviks who fought during the Revolution and the Civil
War. Ideological rigidity is seen by them as an important virtue, since it speeds up the
progress towards Socialism by violently sweeping away anything that obscures that
progress. Even when they end up in the gulags they themselves helped create they refuse to
1
One of the goals of ‘building Socialism’ is to achieve economic prosperity and prepare the way for full
Communism. That state of economic prosperity can only be reached by rooting out of ‘enemies of the people’
that ‘sabotage’ that economic progress.
2
The title of Zhizn’ i sud’ba can be read as a play on the way the State decides the ‘life and fate’ of each and
every individual.
27
waver in their faith: if they are imprisoned, it must be because they unwittingly erred
against the State and Marxist-Leninism. An example of this is Abarchuk, an Old Bolshevik
sent to Siberia during the Great Purge of the late 1930s. The same ideological extremism
that led him to execute and denounce scores of people, now helps him to survive in the
harsh conditions of camp life:
Abarchuk had always been uncompromising with opportunists. He hated all double-dealers
and socially-alien elements. His spiritual strength, his faith, had always lain in his right to
make judgements. He had doubted his wife – and had separated from her. […] He had damned
anyone who wavered; he had despised all grumblers and weak-minded sceptics. […] It was
sweet to be unshakeable. In passing judgement on people he had affirmed his own inner
strength, his ideals, his purity. This was his consolation and his faith. (Grossman 169)
He minimizes his personal suffering through his unshakeable belief in the victory of
Socialism. If that victory means that he himself must be raised to the ground, so be it. This
cannot be relegated to being merely the human instinct for self-preservation, but rather
seen as the logical consequences of the ideological stance that Party members take: if they
have the right to denounce and execute anyone whom they regard as an ‘enemy of the
people’, it also means that they themselves can become such an enemy. In that case, their
personal arrest can even be seen as an example showing that the system works.
Alternatively, they assume that there are ‘enemies of the people’ inside the State apparatus
itself and that they have become the victim of ‘saboteurs’. An example of this is the fate of
Krymov, who cannot believe that he has been sent to the Lubyanka after uncovering the
ideological betrayal by Grekov.
Violent progress and ideological rigidity are combined with complete obedience
towards ‘the collective’, which given the destruction of society means the State. Although
that obedience is enforced over the atomized society through mass terror, ideology remains
the primary way through which Party members are persuaded to support the State, even if
that obedience goes completely against previous actions or the Party’s own ideological
arguments. An example of this is when Nyeudobnov, an apparatchik whose only intellectual
talent seems to consist of reproducing the Party line, explains to Novikov why the
surveillance apparatus of the State should not be criticized:
People don’t get arrested for nothing. Twenty-five years ago we concluded the Treaty of BrestLitovsk with the Germans – and that was Bolshevism. Today comrade Stalin has ordered us to
annihilate the German aggressors who have invaded our Soviet homeland – and that’s
Bolshevism too. (Grossman 320-321)
28
The irony is that the seemingly arbitrariness of the State’s suppression is defended through
an argument emphasising the random character of its actions: ‘Obey the State, it knows
exactly what it does, since it acts in the State’s interests’. Those interests shift so often,
however, that it almost always unclear what is meant and who exactly is the new ‘enemy of
the people’. This form of psychological terror is used to create the impression that anyone
can be or become the Other, to create a sense that even absolute loyalty to the State cannot
exempt an individual from the possibility of being an ‘enemy of the people’.
2.2
Revolutionary endings: 1937 and the fate of Old Bolsheviks
By the late 1920s all (semi-)organized opposition against the State had been crushed or
exiled3. Without any credible opposition, however, the State had to manufacture new
enemies to combat, because otherwise it would lose its legitimation to absolute rule. Given
that the 1920s and the early 1930s were focussed on conflicts within the Party, it may come
as no surprise that once all major opposition had been liquidated the Party would turn
against itself. Until the early 1930s most terror had been concentrated against fairly welldelineated groups, whom were labelled as ‘Trotskyites’, ‘kulaks’, ‘former people’, and the
like. After these groupings no longer formed a credible threat, ever vaguer targets were
found. The rhetoric remained the same, but the targeting became even more arbitrary than
it had been before: suddenly everyone could be a Trotskyite, kulak or ‘enemy of the people’
(Figes 241). The ‘little terror’ of the preceding years gave way to mass terror, in which
everyone could be branded an enemy and disappear in the Gulag, or could be given ‘ten
3
The 1920s saw the expulsion of the Left and Right Opposition from the Party. After they were expelled, the
Party was remolded in Stalin’s image, with the ruling bureaucracy becoming the ideological core of the Party
(Figes 202).
29
years without right of correspondence’4. This was a logical consequence of Marxist-Leninist
ideology: if ‘enemies of the people’ hold back the building of Socialism then they must be
eliminated. There was broad consent towards this process of ever escalating violence
against the Other.
One group stood out, however: Old Bolsheviks. The terror they suffered during the
Great Purge crystalizes in Zhizn’ i sud’ba in the quasi-mythical references to the year 1937,
the height of the Purge. They were the loyal Communists who joined the Party before the
Revolution, fought against the Whites during the Civil War, and helped to fight the internal
oppositions during collectivization and the first Five Year Plan. The latter point is vital to
understand why they were targeted by mass terror: they were the hands who helped
establish the Totalitarian power of the State, and many of them were close to denounced
former leaders such as Trotsky, Bukharin or Zinoviev (Figes 241)They were the ones who
ruthlessly administered violence against groups as diverse as the peasants of the Ukraine or
their fellow Communists. Having outgrown their usefulness however, and potentially
dangerous given their fanatical adherence to Marxist-Leninism, they now become the
Other. Now that they are no longer useful, the last act of loyalty they can perform is to
accept their own death. This is exactly what is asked of Krymov when he is in the Lubyanka:
If you are genuinely capable of sincere repentance, if you still feel any love at all for the Party,
then help the Party with your confession. (Grossman 761)
This confession is needed for several reasons: it gives the terror used by the Party legality,
since those imprisoned and executed have confessed to the crimes they are accused of. At
the same time it breaks the accused psychologically, achieving the State’s aim of
4
This was newspeak for execution.
30
eliminating any individual initiative or identity5. The latter is exactly why the Old
Bolsheviks, for all their loyalty to the Party and the State, have become the new Other: they
are different from the vision the State has for the nation. This is something Krymov feels
acutely and clearly:
He knew the new type of Party official very well – those who had replaced the Old Bolsheviks
liquidated or dismissed from their posts in 1937. They were people of a very different stamp.
They read new books and they read them in a different way: they didn’t read them, they
‘mugged them up’. […] They knew no foreign languages, were infatuated with their own
Russian-ness – and spoke Russian ungrammatically. Some of them were by no means stupid,
but their power seemed not to lie in their ideas or intelligence, as in their practical
competence and the bourgeois sobriety of all their opinions. […] Krymov could understand
that both the new and the old cadres were bound together by a great common goal […]
Nevertheless, he had always been conscious of his own superiority over these new people, the
superiority that was his as an Old Bolshevik. (Grossman 761)
He defines himself against the new Party member, the archetypal apparatchik who is
completely depended on the State and therefore represents the latter’s ideal. Krymov feels
that his intellectual capabilities are far greater than those of the new Party members who
form the backbone of the State’s power. This is precisely why Old Bolsheviks become the
new Other: since they are the creators of the new State, they have too much knowledge and
too much experience. Fearing that one day they might become dangerous, the State strikes
pre-emptively and destroys nearly all Old Bolsheviks during 1937. This act of parricide is at
the same time, however, the founding moment of a new identity for the State, based on a
fusion of Russian nationalism with Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, a cocktail designed to
5
Ironically this was something that many Old Bolsheviks did not have a high regard for themselves. They were
afraid of what people hid ‘behind their masks’, and therefore tried to destroy any form of individual identity
or privacy (Figes 200).
31
strengthen the State’s power and solidify the atomization of society. The Old Bolshevik
Magar is acutely aware of this on his deathbed in a Siberian labour camp:
This is my last duty as a revolutionary and I must fulfil it... […] We made a mistake. And this is
what our mistake has led to. Look! […] We didn’t understand freedom. We crushed it. Even
Marx didn’t value it – it’s the base, the meaning, the foundation that underlies all foundations.
Without freedom there can be no proletarian revolution… (Grossman 177)
Magar realizes that as an Old Bolshevik he carries direct responsibility for the mass
expansion of randomized terror. On his deathbed he comes to understand that crushing the
freedom of others, or even the Other itself, meant crushing their own freedom in the end.
This is why he wants to speak to his old comrade Abarchuk, who is in the same labour camp:
to spread this realization, in the hope of awakening his former revolutionary comrades to
the dangers of Totalitarian fanaticism:
We go through the camp, through the taiga, and yet our faith is stronger than anything. But
this faith of ours is a weakness – a means of self-preservation. (Grossman 177)
The message delivered here is clear: their ideological zeal made them capable of great feats
such as overthrowing the Kerensky-government, defeating the Whites during the Civil War
and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. At the same time, however, it meant
destroying society and establishing a State capable of maintaining that destruction. This is
what Magar means with the ‘crushing of freedom’. Yet, it seems that Magar believes that,
although the situation is desperate, freedom can still be saved if only the people would
wake up to the dangers of ideological fanaticism and the self-imposed blindness of Old
Bolsheviks to the violence they have inflicted upon their fellow human beings. In this way,
Zhizn’ i sud’ba sees an emancipatory possibility in the crimes of Old Bolsheviks: they can still
turn their revolutionary energy towards the restoration of freedom and the correction of
their erroneous ways. It is not clear though if this is meant as a serious possibility: it is
32
precisely because the State feared realizations such as those of Magar that it struck preemptively.
Read in this way, the fate of the Old Bolsheviks comes to symbolize the definitive
end of the revolutionary process set in motion with the Revolution of 1917. The Party
cadres that established the Soviet Union after the Revolution have been mostly swept away
after 1937, being replaced by new cadres that are far more technocratic, have received less
education are totally dependent on the State. It has fractured and destroyed society to such
a degree that no organized opposition is possible, and through the use of permanently
randomized mass terror it tries to solidify the atomization of Soviet society. The destruction
of the Other becomes a permanent fixture of Soviet life, making the ‘building of Socialism’ a
permanent process frozen in time. Not even the new apparatchik can feel safe in his
position, since anyone can become the Other at any time. This creates a permanent sense of
insecurity, which reduces individuals to mere instruments and removes any incentive for
personal initiative. Even Nyeudobnov, a prime example of a Party hack with a longstanding
record of absolute loyalty, feels this as he commands an army at the front:
Alone in the hut that served as Corps HQ, he had felt helpless. His usual ways of controlling the
world had become suddenly ineffectual. What if the enemy appeared? After all, they were only
sixty kilometres from the front line. What would he do then? It would be no good threatening
to dismiss them from their posts or accusing them of conspiring with enemies of the people.
[…] Nyeudobnov was struck by something blindingly obvious: here at the front, the terrible
rage of the State, before which millions of people bowed down and trembled, was of no effect.
(Grossman 483)
Although he fears a German counterattack, that is not the main reason why Nyeudobnov
feels helpless when thinking of how he should act in such a situation. What strikes more
fear into his heart, is the idea that he could bungle the response of his unit (Novikov’s Tank
Corps) and therefore be called upon his responsibility by the Party. This would mean a loss
of prestige, a loss of position, or even the loss of his life. Nyeudobnov reaction seems to
33
symbolize the fear the Party had of the German invaders: not only that they would occupy
Soviet territory, but that they would expose that the State’s power – although immense – is
not absolute, that there are ways of undermining and defeating it. The Great Patriotic War
therefore became the ultimate test for the Totalitarian State, a test to which it (eventually)
responded very well. Although the situation was at times critical, the State proved that it
was flexible enough to adapt and relinquish control where needed to strengthen its position
in the long term. This insight helps us understand how it is possible that Colonel Novikov is
placed above General Nyeudobnov: although the latter has clear Party credentials and a
higher rank, he does not have the military skills needed to avert disaster. The Party
therefore temporarily loosens the reins, knowing that doing this will strengthen its hold in
the longer term. It is in this light that the State’s introduction of ‘State nationalism’ should
be situated: while boosting morale, it at the same time introduces a new Other that can be
permanently prosecuted: national minorities.
2.3
Russia and the minorities: State Nationalism
The Revolution of 1917 swept away the class system of Tsarist Russia. According to
Marxist-Leninst ideology, this should have been enough to establish a tabula rasa on which a
new, classless society could be built. This task was begun by Lenin in the early 1920s (Arendt
319), but reversed under Stalin during the latter part of the decade and the 1930s. Soviet
society was virtually destroyed, and through mass terror and a permanent search for the
Other that atomized society was prevented from rebuilding itself. Instead of Communism, a
Totalitarian void was established which was ideologically justified by the displacement of
class struggle onto racial division, an ideological feat ironically accomplished through the
language of Marxist-Leninism. ‘State nationalism’ became the Communist variety of an
34
older Russian nationalism that was reborn during the war (Hosking 521). By reclassifying
the world in nationalist terms, a new contrast was born: that of the Soviet Russian versus
‘the nationalities’, meaning every other people living in the Soviet Union. The latter now
functioned as an additional category shaping the Other, as being member of a national
minority automatically made an individual more suspect of being a ‘saboteur’ or ‘enemy of
the people’. The protonarrative of State nationalism holds that the Russian language, its
culture and its people are superior to the culture of other Soviet minorities. At the same
time, through its fusion with Marxist-Leninism, it holds that the Russian people are the
most ‘properly socialist’ of all the Soviet peoples. This explains why national minorities
were automatically regarded with more suspicion, such as in this passage:
‘But one should always give preference to a Russian if possible. The friendship of nations is
something sacred – but you must realize that there is a considerable percentage, among the
national minorities, of people who are unreliable or even positively hostile.’ (Grossman 320)
‘The friendship of nations’ is here invoked by Nyeudobnov to make a racist point about
non-Russians: they are inherently ‘unreliable or positively hostile’, indicated that they have
been relegated to permanent Other status. Although they can be co-opted into the Party
and the State, this is only because it fits a strategy of divide-and-rule strengthening Russian
rule. The other Soviet peoples are treated more or less as colonials, whose domestic needs
are irrelevant to the needs of Soviet Russia – whose interests automatically coincided with
those of the entire Soviet Union. The fact that Marxist-Leninism was reduced to a rhetorical
tool to hide a relationship of colonial servitude inside the Soviet Union is something that
Zhizn’ i sud’ba attacks directly:
This new social order – this order which had triumphed during the period of collectivization,
industrialization and the year 1937 with its almost complete change of leading cadres – had
preferred not to renounce the old ideological concepts and formulae. The fundamental
characteristic of the new order was State nationalism, but it still made use of a phraseology
that went back to the beginning of the twentieth century and the formation of the Bolshevik
35
wing of the Social Democratic Party. The war accelerated a previously unconscious process,
allowing the birth of an overtly national consciousness. The word ‘Russian’ once again had
meaning. (Grossman 649)
Zhizn’ i sud’ba, however, portrays these minorities as potential harbingers of freedom
precisely because they are repressed minorities. The excessive violence of the State towards
the Kalmyk people for example, which destroyed their traditional institutions and their
traditional way of life, turns them into martyrs. The little identity they have left becomes
more cherished than the potential material benefits of Russification. Although the novel
projects such freedom onto the Kalmyk people, it mostly consists of a vague nostalgia for a
time and a culture long gone. A clear example of this can be seen in the meeting between
Lieutenant-Colonel Darensky and a member of the local Kalmyk people:
The steppe has one other unchanging characteristic: day and night, summer and winter, in
foul weather or fine weather, it speaks of freedom. If someone has lost his freedom, the steppe
will remind him of it... Darensky got out of his car and looked at a horseman on top of a small
hill. Dressed in a long robe tied by a piece of string, he was sitting on his shaggy pony and
surveying the steppe. He was very old; his face looked hard as stone. Darensky called out to the
man and then walked up to him, holding out his cigarette-case. The old man turned in his
saddle; his movement somehow combined the agility of youth with the thoughtful caution of
age. He looked in turn at the hand holding out the cigarettes, at Darensky’s face, at the pistol
hanging by his side, at the three bars indicating his rank, and at his smart boots. Then he took
a cigarette and rolled it between his fine, brown, childlike fingers. […] Darensky watched. One
word pounded like blood at his temples: ‘Freedom… freedom… freedom…’ Yes, he was envious
of the old Kalmyk. (Grossman 277)
The Kalmyk is portrayed as being both physically strong (‘the agility of youth’), wise and
mature (‘the thoughtful caution of age’). He represents a spirit of freedom that draws back
upon the ancient nomadic lifestyle that characterizes the region. Although a tension
between a free past and an enslaved present is clearly there, the novel does not point to
emancipation. There is no solace to be found in a nostalgic return to the pre-Soviet past.
What is does seem to suggest, is that in the preservation of what little cultural identity the
Kalmyk people have left, they silently resist the domination of the State. In that sense, they
36
preserve the flame of freedom for later generations, who might be more fortunate to
liberate themselves from atomization and domination.
2.4
Jewishness in the Soviet Union
Amongst the groups that form the Other in Zhizn’ i sud’ba, there is one group that clearly
stands out: Soviet Jews. Unlike national minorities such as the Kalmyk people, or the
peoples of the other Soviet Republics, Soviet Jews were not regarded as a national minority
in any meaningful sense6. This meant that they had even less institutional representation
than the other peoples of the Soviet Union, since they were regarded as destined to
assimilate (Ro’i 3). This made them the perfect target for the State, who could also play up
centuries-old traditions of anti-Semitism that still lay dormant in the Russian cultural
conscious. The fact that many intellectuals and Old Bolsheviks 7 were Jews only added to the
mistrust the State felt towards them. Because of this Zhizn’ i sud’ba portrays their fate as a
type of barometer indicating the state of freedom inside the Soviet Union. The novel links
their fate inextricably with the power of the Totalitarian State, both in abstract terms and
in the character of Viktor Shtrum.
The link between anti-Semitism and freedom is one of the most important points
made in Zhizn’ i sud’ba. It exposes the fact that the State needs an Other to maintain its
dominance of society:
6
With the exception of the Jewish oblast Birobidzhan, there was almost no recognition of Soviet Jews as being
a socially cohesive group with its own distinctive culture and language. Because of this they only received
temporary ‘transitory’ rights that were aimed at assisting their assimilation into Soviet Russian life (Blank 54).
7
The most prominent of these was Leon Trotsky, leader of the Left Opposition during the 1920s.
37
Anti-Semitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet
to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and State systems.
Tell me what you’re accusing the Jews of – I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of. (Grossman 468)
Zhizn’ i sud’ba makes the typically Marxist point that anti-Semitism is an example of the
displacement of class struggle onto other categories, here being religion and race. It is seen
as something that has a long precedent in Russian history:
Even a genius like Dostoyevsky saw a Jewish usurer where he should have seen the pitiless
eyes of a Russian serf-owner, industrialist or contractor. (Grossman 468)
Later on he states explicitly that anti-Semitism mainly serves as a powerful tool to elicit
support for the State, a type of racism that he calls ‘State anti-Semitism’:
Thirdly, in totalitarian countries, where society as such no longer exists, there can arise State
anti-Semitism. This is a sign that the State is looking for the support of fools, reactionaries and
failures, that it is seeking to capitalize on the ignorance of the superstitious and the anger of
the hungry. (Grossman 471)
The link between power, Totalitarian terror and anti-Semitism is made explicit here.
Although Grossman is speaking about the Nazi-regime, the implication is clearly that the
Soviet State acts in exactly the same way since they are both Totalitarian and aim for a
similar domination. This chapter can therefore be seen as a direct attack on the ideological
claim by the State that it ‘put an end to anti-Semitism’ (Blank 53). It demystifies the way in
which Jews serve as the Other and how their demonization serves as another element
legitimizing the use of mass terror against the own population.
Interesting, however, is that in Zhizn’ i sud’ba the narrator claims that eventually the
use of mass terror becomes a legitimization itself:
The violence of a totalitarian State is so great as to be no longer a means to an end; it becomes
an object of mystical worship and adoration. How else can one explain the way certain
intelligent, thinking Jews declared the slaughter of the Jews to be necessary for the happiness
of mankind? That in view of this they were ready to take their own children to be executed […]
(Grossman 199)
38
Although Totalitarian domination was at first needed to remove any obstacle on the path
towards Socialism, once that tabula rasa has been achieved randomized violence becomes
the aim itself, since the State keeps radicalizing its hold on power and keeps moving the
goalposts for utopia.
It is in this light that the treatment of Viktor Shtrum by the State should be seen
when he refuses to renounce his own research. When he returns to Moscow from being
evacuated to Kazan, he has to fill in a questionnaire that asks for the respondents’
nationality. After the State identifies him as being a Jew, he starts experiencing escalating
racisms from his ‘Russian’ colleagues8. Ideology brings him into conflict with the Party
apparatchik Shishakov, who is appointed to the head of the Moscow Institute to guard the
‘purity’ of Soviet science. Being designated a Jew means that he is also identified as being
subversive by definition, which means that even the slightest quarrel leads to denunciation.
This is exactly what happens:
The final part of the article was about the unfortunate fact that there were certain individuals
in this healthy and fraternal collective who lacked a sense of responsibility to the People and
the Party – people who were isolated from the great Soviet family. (Grossman 650)
An article appears on the notice board of the Institute denouncing Viktor in everything but
name. This is done in Marxist-Leninist terms, but in a highly racialized and anti-Semitic
way: it is because Viktor is Jewish that he is ‘isolated from the great Soviet family’. He is
isolated not merely because of his deeds, but because of his race. Being Jewish is equated
with a ‘lack of responsibility to the People and the Party’. This is a clear case of how
Jewishness is used as a way of dividing and dominating an atomized society: Viktor’s dissent
8
The word ‘Russian’ being bracketed here to indicate that Viktor regarded himself as a Russian as well, since
he was completely assimilated.
39
against academic decisions by Shishakov is quelled by reverting to anti-Semitism coated in
the language of Marxist-Leninism. However, by demystifying this process, Grossman
manages to open a way for rehabilitation of Jews inside the Soviet Union. The collective
oppression suffered by the Jewish people is seen as a process that raised their collective
awareness, and for the first time created a social class that identified itself more consciously
with their Jewishness. Being marginalized to such a considerable degree makes them not
only the ultimate Other, but also carries of a spirit of intellectual and spiritual freedom that
is not attributed to other groups.
The next chapter will expand further on the relationships between Totalitarian
domination and individual identity. This will be done by looking at two cases, the first being
the intellectual growth of Viktor Shtrum and how his relationship to the State influences
his scientific work. The second case will be the treatment of Krymov at the hands of the
NKVD after he becomes a liability to the State he used to loyally serve. There I will look at
how becoming a victim of the methods Krymov himself used to administer changes his
attitudes towards the State.
40
Chapter 3
Freedom and violence
Suppression and individual identity
‘But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted
on.’
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Krausz 480)
‘Meanwhile thousands of people were making new paths,
ordinary paths that didn’t wind about in great loops or hug the
walls of ruins.’
- Zhizn’ i sud’ba (Grossman 781)
3.1
Identification and an emerging Jewish identity
The previous chapter pointed out how Totalitarian destruction aimed at creating a tabula
rasa on which a utopian vision of society was then to be realized. It tried to achieve this by
focusing on randomized mass terror which destroyed early Socialist society and established
a direct relationship between the State and the atomized individual. In this chapter, I will
show how that relationship functions and in which ways that functioning provides (limited)
opportunities for individual emancipation from State suppression. That limited
emancipation is however seen as something crucial, because it preserves a spirit of freedom
that Zhizn’ i sud’ba portrays as the inevitable end-point of historical progress, thereby both
staying loyal to and challenging Marxist-Leninist teleological thinking.
41
On the individual level the ideological struggles discussed in the previous chapters
can be found in the self-identification of individuals and the construction of their identity
through cultural, social and political classes (Jameson 79). Individual identity can be seen as
a means of producing the abstract ideological concepts propagated by those classes in the
Self. This is one of the reasons why mass terror was so important under Stalin: it induced a
psychological fear to not only stay in line, but also to believe in the ideological system
imposed by the State. Through violence the State not only tried to force adherence to
Marxist-Leninism, it also tried to force people to believe in it and identify with it, so that
they would become the homines sovietici that the State saw as crucial for the building of
Socialism. This is because the State had a fundamental distrust in the people it governed,
not believing that their outward faith in Marxist-Leninism was a reflection of their inward
thoughts. Just as it tried to achieve a tabula rasa on the level of class, it tried to achieve the
same effect on the level of the individual psyche.
The destruction of Soviet society also served this end. By severing all social ties not
dependent on the State, it undermined all independent forms of class, cultural and ethnic
self-identification. If the individual was to exist, it was only to exist as an extension of the
all-encompassing State. Only following the absolute guidance of the Party line would enable
the individual to emancipate itself from ‘bourgeois’ and ‘reactionary’ influence and become
a ‘proper socialist’. To achieve this, the individual was to be isolated from everyone around
him, so that only the State and the State alone would decide what that individual’s fate
could be1. The individual was instrumentalized and subordinated to the needs and interests
of the State through a process of isolation. Once the isolation is complete, the individual has
1
This is ironized on p. 266: ‘Socialist Realism is the affirmation of the uniqueness and superiority of the State
[…] The perfect State has no time for any others to differ from it.’ (Grossman 266)
42
no other chose than to bow down to the State or perish. A clear example in the novel of how
this individual isolation was instigated, is the formal denunciation of the Russian-Jewish
physicist Viktor Shtrum. As mentioned in the previous chapter, this was preceded by a long
run-up in which Shtrum was slowly isolated from his closest colleagues. This process is long
and drawn out because it underscores the immense power the State possesses:
He [Viktor] could feel quite tangibly the difference in weight between the fragile human body
and the colossus of the State. He could feel the State’s bright eyes gazing into his face; any
moment now the State would crash down on him; there would be a crack, a squeal – and he
would be gone. (Grossman 652)
This passage underscores the way in which self-identification is vitally important in the
tactics employed by the State: Shtrum is well aware that the article that he has just read,
which denounced him without mentioning his name, is the beginning of a long process in
which he will become painfully aware of how the State slowly destroys his work, his life and
his family. This awareness makes him feel as an insignificant being, as if he were a mere
insect that could at any moment be squashed by the almighty, panoptic State. This is
underscored by the fact that everyone at work starts ignoring him:
He said jokingly that an epidemic of shortsightedness had broken out in the Institute; people
he knew would look straight through him and passed by without so much as a word.
(Grossman 653)
The reason for this is that once a person was denounced by the regime, it was his close
associates who would be in the firing line first. To avoid suspicion being drawn to
themselves, or to suffer a similar fate of denunciation, one’s closest friends all of a sudden
became one’s closest enemies, usually spontaneously sharing all information they had on
the denounced person. This explains why Shtrum starts to distrust Sokolov when the State
starts isolating him: he suspects that he’s informing on him. The reason for targeting close
associates was to avoid a denounced individual finding solace with his friends or family.
43
This way the terror of the State was not merely physical, but also psychological: even
surrounded by his wife and children, Shtrum feels immensely isolated and depressed. This
way the State tries to make him repent for his ‘mistake’ of conducting original research.
What is interesting in this process, however, is that it shows how important
instrumentalization is. The State does not hold Shtrum’s research in high regard, but needs
all the scientists inside the Soviet Union to focus on the war effort. For this reason he is not
immediately fired or imprisoned. Instead he is put under immense pressure to retract his
latest research as being ‘un-Soviet’. If he does that, he may resume his work at the Institute
and proceed with his life:
‘Viktor Pavlovich, there’s going to be an open meeting of the Scientific Council next week. I
think you should say something.’
‘What about?’
‘I think you need to make some explanations. To be more precise, you must make a confession
of error.’ (Grossman 655)
To underscore both Shtrum’s isolation and the fact that he brings doom upon himself, this
news is brought to him by his former friend Sokolov – the same man whom Shtrum suspects
of betraying him to the authorities. This perceived betrayal becomes both fuel for his
depression and his defiance. Shtrum refuses to write a repenting letter because he knows
full well that this would make him complicit in the crimes of the regime. As long as he was a
scientist merely doing his scientific work, he could argue that he himself carried no blame
for the crimes of the regime – crimes which he was very aware of. In the past he never
denounced anyone, managing to steer clear from the Great Terror at the end of the 1930s.
However, what becomes clear at this point in Zhizn’ i sud’ba is that Shtrum was capable to
stay ‘morally clean’ because the might of the State was never aimed against him directly.
Although writing a repentance letter is a relatively easy thing to do, which would save his
material comfort and spare his family (at least temporarily) a fate similar to his own, he
44
refuses to do this. The reason for that is that Shtrum is very aware that once he sends such a
letter, he becomes personally involved in a system that has the blood of many thousands on
its hands. This lands him into a great psychological and moral dilemma:
But an invisible force was crushing him. He could feel its weight, its hypnotic power; it was
forcing him to think as it wanted, to write as it dictated. This force was inside him; it could
dissolve his will and cause his heart to stop beating; it came between him and his family […] He
began to feel that he really was untalented and boring, someone who wore out the people
around him with dull chatter. (Grossman 656)
The State demands that he shows obedience. If he refuses, it is clear both he and his family
will suffer greatly. This moral stance is something his wife, Lyudmila, reproaches him for:
‘She felt very sorry for Viktor, very anxious about him, but she couldn’t forget his faults,
least of all his egotism.’ (Grossman 657) Although she understand and sympathizes with the
moral torment he goes through, she does not like the way Shtrum places his entire family
on the line for his personal conscience. This reproach shows clearly the great strain – and
the great success – of the methods used by the State to ensure obedience of the individual,
and how those methods affect the self-identification of those individuals. Their entire
personal environment is greatly affected by a State which seems omnipresent. The power
that fear of the State extracts is so great that it can destroy even tightly knit families, such
as the Shtrums. Viktor and his wife become estranged from each other, Lyudmila’s son
Tolya is killed during the war, and Viktor’s daughter Nadya starts dating with a man whose
political views are highly subversive and might end them up in the Lubyanka. This is not
only caused by the distress of the war, but also by State policy to loosen family ties and
strengthen the isolation of the individual (Figes 196). This was done for example by letting
children denounce their own parents, something Viktor is afraid of with Nadya and her
‘dangerous’ liaison:
45
Somehow, the way Nadya was looking at him [Viktor] reminded him of Shishakov. He
had watched Viktor with the same calm self-confidence, looking down from his
position of academic and political grandeur; his clear gaze had at once brought home
to Viktor the futility of his indignation, the futility of his protests and ultimatums.
The power of the State read up like a cliff of basalt. (Grossman 572)
It is nearly irrelevant whether Nadya would denounce Viktor or not. His fear of the State is
so great, and the State is so omnipresent, that it is impossible for him not to fear the
possible consequences. This makes him unable to reassert his paternal authority over Nadya
in this passage, because he automatically thinks of Academician Shishakov and the dangers
of arguing with a representative of the State. Even at this basic level of an argument
between a parent and a child, the State’s presence is to be felt.
The denunciation of Shtrum mentioned earlier underscores the random nature of the
suppression employed by the State. It also emphasizes how highly personalized and
sophisticated methods are used to terrorize the individual. It is no coincidence that Shtrum
is attacked as ‘anti-Soviet’ whose research is worthless: he is a proud man and thought he
was about to be nominated for a Stalin Prize. Hybris about his scientific success is countered
with humiliation heaped on him both by the Party and his fellow colleagues. It shows that
the establishment of a direct relationship between the atomized individual and the State
doesn’t have to be physically violent, but that psychological terror can be equally (or far
more) powerful.
The fact that Shtrum is a Jew provides for another interesting example of how the
State tried to weed out any form of independent identification. The creeping introduction
of State anti-Semitism is something that makes Shtrum far more aware of his Jewish origins
than he had been at any point in the past. This awareness is significantly raised by the
subtle anti-Semitic remarks he keeps finding in his direct environment. An example of this
46
is when Shtrum is talking with his wife after falling out with the new head of the Institute,
Academician Shishakov:
‘Well, Lyudmila, it’s happened. I’m leaving the Institute.’ Lyudmila was very upset, but she still
managed to say something wounding. […] ‘Besides, why can’t your Landesman go to the Front?
Otherwise it really does look to a prejudiced observer as though one Jew’s looking after
another.’ (Grossman 569)
Even his wife starts seeing Shtrum as primarily a Jew, and the tone in which she speaks
about Jewishness betrays that she views the Jew as an Other that is to be avoided, or at least
to be suspicious of. It is subtle anti-Semitic remarks like this that fuel the flames of a raised
Jewish self-awareness. The latter is something the State is very wary of, which provokes
ever harder suppression of Jews. The irony is that suppression and anti-Semitism cause a
new Jewish identity to develop that is defined against that same suppression, but that that
identity causes suppression to intensify. Suppression forces the individual to recognize
himself as a Jew, even if he did not do so in the past. In that way a long-time assimilated
individual such as Viktor Shtrum suddenly finds himself forced to re-identify with a
religion which before suppression did not really matter to him. In this way suppression and
identity formation become a self-reinforcing circle, which can only be broken through
either an end to suppression or an escalation to mass terror and destruction of the Jews
inside the Soviet Union.
It is in fact the fate of Shtrum’s mother that makes Shtrum see his Jewishness in a new
light. She is arrested during the first days of the Nazi invasion of the Ukraine, imprisoned in
a ghetto and shot. Before getting killed, however, she manages to smuggle a final letter to
her son. It is this letter that makes a defining impact upon Shtrum, because it makes clear to
him in a very personal way the horrific experiences of Soviet Jews in occupied territory.
From that point onwards he feels properly Jewish in a way that he did before:
47
Never, before the war, had Viktor thought about the fact that he was a Jew, that his mother
was a Jew. Never had his mother spoken to him about it – neither during his childhood, nor
during his years as a student. Never while he was at Moscow University had one student,
professor or seminar-leader ever mentioned it. (Grossman 78)
What this makes clear is that Shtrum’s new Jewish awareness is not something he chose for,
but something that was enforced upon him through external events such as the execution
of his mother by the Germans or the anti-Semitism he experiences at the Institute. The
singling out of the Jewish people as a type of special Other, designated to be persecuted and
destroyed, created a new identity based on the shared experiences of both the Shoah
(perpetrated by the Germans) and persecution by the Soviet State. This identity however
does not form the basis for a new type of collective organization, because the isolation of
the individual is such that there is no possibility for communicating with others who have
had similar experiences. In this way even dissent becomes a powerful tool for the State.
Although it pushes certain individuals beyond the thresholds of believing in MarxistLeninism proper, it does manage to isolate them to such a degree that their rage and new
sense of identity only leaves them embittered and lonely, and therefore beyond serious
dissent. This is why Shtrum is not capable to share his anguish about his Jewishness with
Chepyzhin, the former head of the Institute keeps in touch even after Shtrum’s
denunciation:
Viktor’s eyelids had started to twitch.
‘Where can I find faith, strength, determination?’
He was speaking very quickly and with a strong Jewish accent.
‘What can I say? You know what’s happened – and now I’m being persecuted just because…’
He jumped up without finishing the sentence; his teaspoon fell to the floor. His hands were
trembling; his whole body was trembling. (Grossman 677)
Shtrum leaves immediately after this episode, not even daring to look Chepyzhin in the eye.
Fear is a hurdle too great for him to surmount, he is not capable to conquer his distrust and
see what Chepyzhin thinks of the situation. This leaves Shtrum fundamentally isolated. His
48
fear for the State is so great that he even lapses back into a Jewish accent he had not used
since childhood. The aggressive attempts of the State to label him a Jew have forced him
into an identity fundamentally alien to him, which only aggravates the sense of anxiety that
overcomes him.
3.2
Science and freedom
Earlier on in Zhizn’ i sud’ba, however, the point is made that overcoming this anxiety for
thinking freely can be a great liberating force and a catalyst for human progress. This is not
only so in the political sphere, but also in the scientific one. For months Shtrum is not able
to overcome theoretical problems related to atomic physics. The data he gets from the tests
he runs at the Institute do not match the predictions based on the theory. This discrepancy
makes him desperate, because it disproves the omnipotence of theory and leaves a large
theoretical hole. This occurs while the Institute is still evacuated from Moscow because of
the war. Most of his evenings he spends at the Sokolovs discussing about science, life and
the arts. One evening however two people unknown to him are also present, and they have
a heated discussion about politics. One of them, Madyarov, holds a passionate plea against
Stalinism, but is cut off by Sokolov. Shtrum greatly admires the ‘few bold words’ (Grossman
272) that Madyarov utters, and it makes him remember a vow he had made in his student
days:
Viktor had taken a vow either to remain silent and not express dangerous thought or else say
what he thought without funking it. He had not kept his vow. He had often flared up and
thrown caution to the wind – only to suddenly take fright and attempt to snuff out the flame
he himself had lit. (Grossman 272)
49
Shtrum regards himself as a coward for not speaking his mind freely and for condoning a
regime with which he disagrees. By not speaking out he passively supports the State and its
policies, but his self-perceived cowardice goes further than that: he actively censors his
own thoughts out of fear for the State and its security apparatus. Zhizn’ i sud’ba however
makes a clear parallel between thinking and self-censorship: because Shtrum does not allow
himself to think freely in the realm of politics and society, he is also not capable of thinking
freely in the realm of nuclear physics either.
This is why this dissident conversation is so important for Shtrum: it reminds him of
his vow for honesty and purity, and shows that free thinking is still possible. While walking
home, he is struck by a burst of inspiration that drives him to his new theory:
Viktor’s sudden inspiration, the idea that had come to him on the street that night, formed the
basis of an entirely new theory. The equations he worked out over the following weeks were
not an appendix to the classical, generally accepted theory; nor were they even an
enlargement of it. Instead, the classical, supposedly all-embracing theory had become a
particular instance included in the framework of a wider theory elaborated by Viktor.
(Grossman 330)
The parallel is clear: free thinking is necessary not only for scientific discovery, but also for
the well-being of the individual and society at large. Freedom becomes the central tenet on
which a wider, ‘entirely new theory’ for Soviet society could be based, which would reduce
the State to a part of a larger, all-encompassing society. It is in this light that the
interdependence of Shtrum’s raised Jewish awareness, scientific discovery and free thinking
should be seen: taken together, they provide possibilities for leaving the ideological
universe of the State and creating a new type of relationship between individuals and ideas
not based on the one-on-one relationship between an atomized individual and the State
(guided by Marxist-Leninism). An example of this is the platonic love affair between Shtrum
and Marya Ivanovna, which is seen as a pure and untainted relationship. This is because it is
not consummated, and by keeping the physical out of it they manage to steer clear from all
50
the consequences such an affair would entail, leaving room only for a deep emotional and
intellectual connection. The point here is not a moral one about chastity, but rather that
the lack of physical contact leaves them only with the realm of free exchange of emotion
and thought:
He had been for a walk with her in the park; he had enjoyed looking at her and had
liked the way she understood him so quickly and so perfectly. […] Now Viktor felt that
she had been with him all the time; that she had only appeared to be absent. […] There
was nothing surprising about this discovery; it seemed natural and self-evident.
(Grossman 686)
The secrecy of their affair is what makes it private, and in that sense platonic love is seen as
a way of very small and silent resistance against the omnipotence of the State. The broader
message implied is that abandoning State dogma will unleash the peoples of the Soviet
Union from terror, and that freedom is a far broader base on which to build Socialism.
This highly individualized experience of Shtrum, coated in the language of physics,
shows that the violence perpetrated by the State not only suppresses and destroys identity.
It can also create new types of identities and new forms of self-identification, here based on
a firm belief in freedom, because it violently pushes the individual beyond the thresholds of
Marxist-Leninism and its loyalty to the State. What this shows, is that tabula rasa cannot be
achieved without the destruction of humanity, because at a certain point excessive violence
will bread an identity that defines itself against the State and the violence it uses.
This is not necessarily a positive message. When he is denounced, Shtrum chooses to
remain true to his vow and speak his mind. He refuses to write a repentance letter and
instead chooses to keep a clean conscience. This changes after Stalin calls him: having
realized Shtrum’s importance to the State’s efforts to defeat Nazi-Germany, he is not only
restored in his former position but elevated to one of the select few inside the Soviet Union
51
that lead a life of luxury. This does not mean, however, that he has now achieved freedom.
Exactly the opposite is the case: now that he receives the favour of the State, he has to
participate in its acts of violence and denounce fellow scientists:
Viktor felt overwhelmed by disgust at his own submissiveness. The great State was breathing
on him tenderly; he didn’t have the strength to cast himself out into the freezing darkness…
He had no strength today, no strength at all. He was paralyzed, not by fear, but by something
quite different – a strange, agonizing sense of his own passivity. (Grossman 819)
When Shtrum was persecuted, there was a possibility for him to achieve freedom, because
the State forced him into the position of the Other. Now that he is no longer the Other,
however, he still does not receive freedom. Although he is no longer considered a Jew, but a
‘a Russian [and a] true Soviet citizen’ (Grossman 818), he still has to obey the State. The only
difference is that the methods used have become a lot softer. Psychological terror is still the
means by which the State keeps control over him, but now they achieve their goals through
providing him with luxury goods and prestige, not by denouncing and humiliating him.
3.3
The case of Krymov
The exact opposite happens with Krymov. Right up until his arrest he was a political
commissar attached to the Red Army, and before that he used to be an officer in the NKVD.
He was at the heart of the political and security organs of the State. Yet, as discussed in the
previous chapters, he has outlived his usefulness by knowing the truth about the Grekov
myth and by virtue of being an Old Bolshevik. Unconsciously, Krymov has become a threat
to the State he used to serve. Unlike Shtrum however, who was first forced into the position
of the Other before being accepted by the State, Krymov makes the opposite movement and
loses his identity as a representative of the State. Unwittingly he is forced into the position
52
of the Other. This means that the consequences for his self-identification are vitally
different from those that befell Shtrum, because ironically this change only strengthens
Krymov’s conviction that the cause of Marxist-Leninism is correct and just. If he happens to
fall victim to that cause, so be it. The almighty State must have a valid reason for him to be
in the Lubyanka.
Again psychological terror is the most effective method employed. At the Lubyanka
his clothes are taken away and replaced with sterile, prison-like garments. When he is first
interrogated, Krymov believes the officer sitting opposite him to be a novice, someone
inferior to him by virtue of his age and his comparative lack of education. Dispelling this
belief is one of the first ways in which the NKVD tries to break his psyche.
He knew now how a man could be split apart. After you’ve been searched, after you’ve had
your buttons ripped off and your spectacles confiscated, you look on yourself as a physical
nonentity. And then in the investigator’s office you realize that the role you played in the
Revolution and the Civil War means nothing, that all your work and all your knowledge is just
so much rubbish. You are indeed a nonentity – and not just physically. (Grossman 826)
At every interrogation, the interrogator reveals more knowledge about Krymov, until he
believes that they know everything about him – even things that he does not know himself.
He is made to feel insignificant, as if his dedication to the Revolution and the Party means
absolutely nothing to the State. In the controlled environment of the Lubyanka the State
manages to reduce Krymov as close to the level of docility of an animal without him
becoming useless to them. By humiliating him to this extent, the State takes away the
bedrock of his self-confidence: his fanatical faith in Marxist-Leninism and the power of the
State. Although he had his doubts, he always managed to dispel them and prove his absolute
loyalty. Being sent to the Lubyanka destroys this illusion and forces him into a new identity:
that of the dissident, someone working to undermine the State. The effect of this form of
terror is two-fold: it creates great uncertainty in the mind of the individual undergoing it,
53
yet also strengthening his own internal fanaticism. If the latter was not the case, Krymov’s
entire adult life would turn out to be a lie.
In creating such a controlled torture-environment as the Lubyanka, the State tries to
perfect the techniques that it can use only in a mass form on the atomized whole of Soviet
society. A former NKVD-officer and fellow in-mate, Katsenelenbogen, claims exactly this
while talking to Krymov in their cell:
Life inside the camps could be seen as an exaggerated, magnified reflection of life outside. Far
from being contradictory, these two realities were symmetrical. Now Katsenelenbogen spoke
not like a poet, not like a philosopher, but like a prophet. (Grossman 828)
Katsenelenbogen dreams of the world as one giant concentration camp in which there no
longer is any need for the Lubyanka, because the State will exert complete and total control
over every single individual. In that way Katsenelenbogen becomes a prophet of
Totalitarianism, of a world in which the surveillance State ceases to exist because
surveillance has become the norm. This he legitimizes through Marxist-Leninist discourse
by claiming that this would enshrine the principle of reason above anything else. Freedom
is irrelevant to him:
If one were to develop the system of camps boldly and systematically, eliminating all
hindrances and shortcoming, the boundaries would finally be erased. The camp would merge
with the world outside. And this fusion would signal the maturity and triumph of great
principles. For all its inadequacies, the system of camps had one decisive point in its favour:
only there was the principle of personal freedom subordinated, clearly and absolutely, to the
higher principle of reason. This principle would raise the camp to such a degree of perfection
that finally it would be able to do away with itself and merge with the life of the surrounding
towns and villages. (Grossman 829)
The Marxist-Leninist ‘end of history’ gets a very specific concretization here, in the form of
a perfect camp-society in which Totalitarianism will wither away, and where personal
freedom will be replaced by surveillance and ‘reason’ as the most important human values.
54
Scarily enough Katsenelenbogen’s vision for society is far closer to that of the State than the
‘official’ Marxist-Leninist narrative of an abundant and free society.
His fanaticism scares even Krymov, even though they both share the same
fundamental belief: the State has the right to control everything, including the psyche of its
inhabitants. Yet the fact that Katsenelenbogen is such a zealot only confirms Krymov in his
own righteousness:
‘You’re mad,’ said Krymov. ‘That’s not the heart of the Revolution. That’s not its soul. People
say that if you work for a long time in a psychiatric clinic you finally go mad yourself. Forgive
me for saying this, but it’s not for nothing you’ve been put inside. You, comrade
Katsenelenbogen, ascribe to the security organs all the attributes of the deity. It really was
time you were replaced. (Grossman 830)
For Krymov the ideas of Katsenelenbogen represent an aberration from the proper
interpretation of Marxist-Leninism. He fails to grasp that Katsenelenbogen understands the
workings of the State far better than he does, since Katsenelenbogen understands that the
aims of the State are to subdue any form of individuality, not to stimulate or support it.
Katsenelenbogen only confirms Krymov’s conviction that the State is right and that only
Marxist-Leninism provides a path towards freedom and prosperity. He does not understand
that by being put inside the Lubyanka he has ceased to be a representative of that State and
become the Other. Confronted with his own inconsistencies does he doesn’t even realize
that he did not understand how the State truly functions:
‘The man’s neither brave enough to declare firmly that Hacken’s an honest Communist, nor is
he cowardly enough to level accusations against him. So he worms his way out of saying
anything.’
The investigator took his hand away and showed Krymov his own signature next to the date,
February 1938. They both fell silent. (Grossman 760)
Krymov was speaking here, defending a comrade he denounced himself during the height
of the purges in the late 1930s. The fact that he forgot that he had denounced the man
shows that denunciations are usually fabrications used to legitimize the actions of the State.
55
This proves that under the State the truth is only as true as to the extent that the State is
willing to recognize it as such. Yet even after this comes to light, Krymov refuses to accept
that the State is wrong. It tries to push him into the position of the Other, but these
attempts are recuperated by him and actually reinforce his faith. This results in a peculiar
detachment from reality, in which the physical and psychologic violence wrought on him
results in an even stronger faith in the Party than was previously the case:
He [Katsenelenbogen] looked searchingly at Krymov. He couldn’t understand how a man with
Krymov’s yellow, sallow face, a man with hollow sunken eyes and clots of black blood on his
chin, could possibly be smiling so calmly and happily. (Grossman 774)
Besides the fact that his fanaticism increased by the experience of interrogation, what also
strengthens his resolve is the fact that his wife, Yevgenia Nikolaevna, has returned to
Moscow to care for him. Although they cannot see each other, each day she goes to the
Lubyanka to submit parcels for Krymov to the prison staff. This happens after they haven’t
seen each other in years, and after she had begun a relationship with Colonel Novikov.
What this suggests, is that love between two individuals can be strong enough to partially
replace the much broader freedom that Shtrum strives for. Without the knowledge that his
wife is waiting for him, Krymov would most likely not be capable to maintain himself much
longer. Yet the moment he knows she is there after having received her parcel, he finds
renewed strength to undergo interrogation and prove that he is innocent of treason:
Krymov read through the list of contents: onion, garlic, sugar, white rusks. The handwriting
was familiar. At the end of the list was written: ‘Your Zhenya’. ‘Oh God, oh God.’ He began to
cry.
The combination of Yevgenia’s love and his quasi-religious zeal make it so that Krymov is
capable to withstand the most brutal assault on his physical and psychological integrity.
The message here seems to be that even under the harshest conditions of Totalitarian
56
terror, love is a form of freedom that can never be fully extinguished by the State. In that
way, Zhizn’ i sud’ba manages to carry a message of freedom even at the harshest of times.
This points to a larger point that both the fate of Shtrum and Krymov illustrate: the
State goes to great lengths to suppress and crush freedom, but this is fundamentally
impossible. Even though the violence the State uses becomes exceedingly gruesome, it
cannot succeed in its goal to reduce the individual to a tabula rasa on which to build a new
homo sovieticus. It is this core message that makes Zhizn’ i sud’ba fundamentally dissident to
the State, because it proclaims that the project of the Soviet State is by definition doomed to
fail, because achieving tabula rasa is impossible without the destruction of humanity.
Instead, the novel proposes a different path oriented towards freedom and democracy. Both
in the struggle for Shtrum to develop a new scientific theory, as in the struggle for Krymov
to stay alive in the harsh conditions of the Lubyanka, it cannot be fully crushed. Whether it
is the freedom of free thought or the freedom to love, it are these experiences, ideas and
values that form the path that Zhizn’ i sud’ba seems to suggest: a path of freedom. This is
something that can also be found in one of the many essay-like chapters:
Man’s innate yearning for freedom can be suppressed but never destroyed. Totalitarianism
cannot renounce violence. If it does, it perished. Eternal, ceaseless violence, overt or covert, is
the basis of totalitarianism. Man does not renounce freedom voluntarily. This conclusion holds
out hope for our time, hope for the future. (Grossman 200)
This fundamental belief in the eventual victory of freedom over terror does not mean
however that that victory is imminent. In fact this freedom is seen as a teleological
necessity, just as the eventual victory and subsequent ‘end of history’ through Communism
is seen as inevitable in Marxist-Leninist ideology. This leaves a very ambiguous message
emanating from Zhizn’ i sud’ba: Totalitarianism is destined to fail, yet its fall is postponed
indefinitely. History is determined to move into the direction of freedom and democracy,
but that ironically echoes the same belief of the Party and the State that eventually
Communism will be victorious. Again this points to the fact that Zhizn’ i sud’ba sits firmly in
the Marxist-Leninist tradition and does not propose any concrete alternative to the
57
ideological tenets that Marxist-Leninist suggests. Yet what this also does, is to propose an
alternative teleological end-point of history, and in doing this it inadvertedly undermines
the central point of Marxist-Leninism: that history will end in Communism.
So Zhizn’ i sud’ba demolishes one of the main ideological claims of Marxist-Leninism,
but does not propose any concrete alternative. In a sense it does not have to do this,
because of its belief that freedom and democracy will inevitably be victorious in the end.
Once that end-point arrives it will become clear what freedom and democracy look like, all
that needs to be done is keep a clean conscience and prepare for its arrival. Again this
echoes the thinking prevalent in Marxist-Leninist ideology, proving that Zhizn’ i sud’ba is
both a child of Communism and opposed to it. Through the largely unconsciously
ideological operations that are produced in the text it proves Grossman’s claim that ‘the
free, intelligent word has great power’ (Grossman 109): the assumptions behind the text
have a highly subversive potential, precisely because it subconsciously undermines several
central ideological assumptions of Marxist-Leninism.
58
Conclusion
Zhizn’ i sud’ba was finally published in the Soviet Union in late 1980s during glasnost and
perestroika, when the questions Grossman tried to raise were finally debatable (Grant 2006,
xxvi). It is telling that the then General Secretary of the CPSU, Mikhail Gorbachev, started
his campaign to revitalize the Soviet Union by returning to Leninist principles of discipline
and democratic centralism, just like Khrushchev had done. As the decade wore on, however,
Gorbachev came to realize that if the aspirations of Marxist-Leninism were to be realized,
freedom and democracy would have to take centre stage. And like Grossman, he eventually
finished this train of reasoning and moved away from Marxist-Leninism towards a firm
belief in Scandinavian-style social democracy (Figes 352).
This parallel between the Soviet leader and Grossman is informative, because it tells
us a lot about the ideological thinking behind Zhizn’ i sud’ba and the logical consequences
that it entailed. This paper intended to show that Zhizn’ i sud’ba was a dissident novel
without wanting to be dissident, and that is precisely because it asks the questions the
Soviet State could not answer. One of the most prominent of these was the questioning of
the Stalingrad myth that was built after the Great Patriotic War. By arguing that it wasn’t
Stalin’s genius that turned the tide against Nazi-Germany, but the Soviet people and the Red
Army, he undermined one of the founding myths of the Soviet State after the war. Instead
of seeing Stalingrad as a strategic masterstroke, he pictured it as a missed opportunity for
the Soviet people to shed themselves of the yoke of Totalitarianism and to rebuild a free
and democratic Soviet society. The latter he saw in Marxist-Leninist terms, but I have
shown that if this would have been carried through to its logical conclusion, we would find
ourselves in a rather different ideological space.
By asking those questions, it undermined the omnipotence of Marxist-Leninist
ideology, also undermining its claim to have the one and only path towards a bright and
prosperous future. Yet it was not intended to undermine Marxist-Leninism: Grossman still
believed that freedom and democracy could be achieved inside Marxist-Leninism, writing
Zhizn’ i sud’ba in its ideological master code. In doing this he did not finish the logical
consequences of his own thinking, since the introduction of ‘freedom and democracy’ in the
Soviet State of the 1950s would have altered it beyond recognition, raising the question how
Marxist-Leninist Grossman’s Marxist-Leninism actually was. This was, however, not the
59
result of a conscious attempt to undermine Marxist-Leninist ideology, but the unconscious
logic of the conflicting ideals he tried to reconcile. The fact that Zhizn’ i sud’ba reveals such a
conflict is more important than what that conflict exactly entails: by undermining the
omnipotence of ideology, it exposes ideology for what it is, opening up an alternative space
beyond the dominant ideology in which new ideas can flourish and expand. Given the fact,
however, that a substantial part of the legitimation of the Soviet State was built upon the
fact that it was a Marxist-Leninist State building Socialism, this could prove to be mortal for
the State itself. One could argue that the fate of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev shows
exactly this point in dramatic fashion: the moment that the State no longer sees MarxistLeninism as the one-and-only truth the peoples of the Soviet Union use the ideological
opening to search for alternatives on their own2
In the second chapter I demonstrated how Grossman moved beyond MarxistLeninism: by giving a voice to the Other. A defining characteristic of the Totalitarian State is
that it uses excessive force and mass terror to try and create a tabula rasa on which to build
utopia. To legitimize this use of force it needs an Other against which the State can define
itself, yet at the same time the stated goal of the State is to destroy that Other. This results
in an ever larger escalation of randomized terror: once the stated Other has been
eliminated, a new and vaguer category is created under which new ‘enemies of the people’
can be found and persecuted. This is fuelled by a concept of permanent revolution in which
everything that is – even unwittingly – defined against the State becomes the Other and
must therefore be eliminated. What this results in is the end of organized society and its
replacement through a direct relationship between the State and the atomized individual.
The underscore this point I looked at three groups persecuted by the State: Old
Bolsheviks, national minorities and Soviet Jews. The first group are Party members who
joined before the Revolution and fought during the Civil War to establish the Soviet Union.
During the 1920s and early 1930s they virtually destroyed all serious opposition against the
State and within the Party, believing that only that way utopia could be built. They were the
2
This is a controversial point to make for several reasons. First of all a lot of the demands made during
glastnost and perestroika was for the Soviet State to live up to its own ideology, its own promises and its own
Constitution. Secondly, one could also argue that Marxist-Leninism received a mortal blow to its legitimation
after the denunciation of Stalin and the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.
60
vanguard of the Party and helped to execute Stalin’s policy of collectivization and forced
industrialization through the Five Year Plans. They become the new Other only because all
serious opposition has been crushed, and so parricide becomes a logical next step in the
ongoing process of permanent revolution.
The other two groups fall victim to the renewed doctrines of State nationalism and
Soviet anti-Semitism. To diffuse potential social unrest caused by its policies, the State
began to displace the categories of class struggle onto racial division. That racism was
largely cultural, based upon a violent Russification of the national minorities. The irony
here is that this racism was coated in the language of Marxist-Leninism to hide the
relationships of colonial servitude inside the Soviet Union between Russia and the other
constituent republics. The same thing happens when the State uses anti-Semitism as a way
of diffusing social unrest: Jews are not recognized by the State as a national minority and
therefore cannot claim any of the benefits a national minority gets for its language and
culture. They are relegated to the status of a permanent Other, because even if they are
entirely assimilated (such as the Russo-Jewish scientist Viktor Shtrum) they are still pushed
into the role of Jew by the State and the people around them. Yet at the same time it is this
persecution and this enforced Otherness of these groups that turns them into potential
harbingers of freedom in Zhizn’ i sud’ba. Because they are violently forced by the State into
an outsider position, they develop a sense of identity which the novel sees a potential way
to build bonds of solidarity against the State. This is, however, something that is postponed
into the future, because the violence of the Totalitarian State destroys any attempt at
solidarity.
In the final chapter the workings of identity were further developed by looking at the
relationship between Totalitarian violence and the atomized individual. The State tries to
crush any form of self-identification that is not solely based upon its interpretation of
Marxist-Leninism. Just as it tries to achieve tabula rasa on the level of society, it also
attempts to do this at the individual level, where it tries to create a homo sovieticus. Again
this process is done violently through the establishment of a surveillance apparatus which
tries to sustain the isolation of every individual through a complex system of denunciations.
Zhizn’ i sud’ba sees this as one of the grossest violations of the Totalitarian State: that it not
only crushes civil freedom, but also tries to destroy the individual’s freedom of conscience.
The fate of Viktor Shtrum perfectly illustrates this: persecuted by the State because of his
Jewish background and independent spirit, when he is rehabilitated by Stalin himself he is
61
forced to participate in a denunciation. This underlines the fact that no individual’s fate is
separate from that of the State: the latter decides everything, whether it be good or bad
fortune. Shtrum might have become one of the most well-respected scientists in the Soviet
Union, this only means that the freedom of conscience he still enjoyed while being
denounced has now also been taken away. He is fully instrumentalized for his scientific
knowledge, and although he enjoys a new-found material wealth, his psychological wellbeing is ruined through his complicity for a regime whose violence he despises. The only
freedom he gets is to obey the State, which he does through his scientific research.
The final case discussed is that of Krymov, whose fate shows that even absolute
loyalty to the State can’t save you from the Lubyanka and psychological terror. The
treatment he receives is a textbook case of how the State tries to mentally break the
individual into absolute submission. The irony of Krymov’s fate, however, is that even the
most loyal Party member cannot be fully broken by the State: his internment only
strengthens his fanatical belief that the Party is right and that the new society can only be
built through violence. This shows that even fanatical Party members carry a spirit of
freedom inside them, suggesting that freedom cannot be fully extinguished, even if it is
reincorporated into the larger plan of the State as is the case for both Shtrum and Krymov.
The subversive point here is that the project of the Totalitarian State – a tabula rasa on
which to build Communism and the homo sovieticus – is doomed to fail.
Zhizn’ i sud’ba therefore carries a very complex and ambiguous political message:
freedom and democracy can be achieved through Marxist-Leninism, but the logical
consequence of this is that Marxist-Leninism will cease to exist since it cannot survive
without the violence of Totalitarianism. That violence, and the Totalitarianism that is a
result of it, is a logical consequence of the tabula rasa that the ideology strives for. This not
only has to do with the fact that any State needs a repressive apparatus, but also with the
fact that Marxist-Leninism presents this as a natural and logical next step in the ‘building of
Socialism’. One of the reasons that Zhizn’ i sud’ba was seen as subversive by the State, is that
it displaces the teleological end-point of Marxist-Leninism with a new end-point of its own:
freedom and democracy. This new teleology is both faithful to the abstract principles of
Marxist-Leninism and undermining those principles. It are contradictions like this that give
Zhizn’ i sud’ba its highly charged political meaning.
This is the point I tried to demonstrate in the previous three chapters. Yet it should be
underlined that this is only a sketch trying to provide a new direction in the research into
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Zhizn’ i sud’ba: it is a very complex novel whose rich texture is only touched upon here.
Every one of the topics touched upon here, such as Totalitarianism, dissidence, identity and
Jewishness, etc., could form the topic of more specialized research. The aim here was to
prove that ideology provides an overarching interpretation of Zhizn’ i sud’ba through which
all the other elements achieve additional – and more complex – meaning. In a society in
which everything was so drenched in ideology as was the case in the Soviet Union it is vital
to touch upon ideological questions and the debates raging at the time. It would do injustice
to Grossman’s work not to read it in this way, because that would leave out most of the
issues he had to face both personally and politically and reduce Zhizn’ i sud’ba to a mere warnovel or a novel on Jewishness. Although it is both these things, it is far more than that, as it
is a text dealing with freedom and democracy, human nature, terror and repression. By
looking at the underlying assumptions, principles and ideas, it is possible to read it for what
it is: a novel advocating freedom. Even though it might take decades for that freedom to
emerge, eventually it will arrive and liberate the individual from Totalitarianism and
violence.
63
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