Stalinism, Suppressed Writers, and Double Standards

The way journalism is treated in today’s Russia, perhaps it is not surprising that one of its greatest practitioners continues to linger in obscurity decades after his death.

Yet The Guardian’s Luke Harding sees the hand of a new Stalinism behind the contemporary unpopularity of Vasily Grossman, the legendary war reporter and novelist whose Tolstoian epic, Life and Fate, chronicled both the people’s heroism in WWII and the abuses of Stalinism. He also wrote honestly and bravely about the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine.

But this one-sided view is far from the whole story.

It is certainly a tragic irony that, on the 65th anniversary of victory, Grossman and his work remain far less visible than the portraits of the despotic leader he had so eloquently and courageously denounced.

Yet Harding’s article, headlined Vasily Grossman, Russia’s greatest chronicler, awaits redemption: Russia holds biggest ever parades celebrating defeat of Nazis but turns its back on writer who witnessed it all, argues simplistically that the relatively modest popularity of Grossman in Russia compared to the recent flurry of interest in him in the West is due to ‘Stalin’s insidious return’.

This analysis is true in its limited scope, but misleading because incomplete.

Of course, there is no doubt that Putin has been quietly rehabilitating Stalin.

But it is not at all clear what that really means, something that Sean at Seans Russia Blog has so convincingly shown when he called Stalin “a metonym for the political struggles of the present”.

He writes:

What did Stalin mean [to the ordinary people carrying his portrait]? This is probably one of the most perplexing, yet mostly ignored questions.

It was clear what Stalin was not.  Stalin, for better or worse, was not the NKVD, terror, Gulag, or totalitarianism.  That’s what it meant to the people of Solidarity with its artsy display of Stalin portraits with red-blood vampire teeth.

But for a little old man holding a photo of Stalin?  For him, the dictator means something wholly different.  There is certainly a large element of historical nostalgia embedded in Stalin’s portrait.  Stalin is mostly about the USSR’s victory over the Nazis and a time when Russia was a superpower. 

The Stalin posters also signify a longing for an imagined past of stability, predictability, and ironically, a paternal state that dealt a measure of social and economic justice.

Stalin’s image, I think, is also about class.  Stalin is the antithesis of the oligarchs, the capitalists, the bureaucrats and the intellectuals–the very people that causes the Russian working class man seething hatred.

Stalin is also defiance.  People carry posters of Stalin simply because others tell them they shouldn’t. Hoisting Stalin to the sun is about the current war over memory.  It’s about saying without hyperbole: This is my Stalin and he has nothing to do with yours.  In this sense there is no historical Stalin.  The Stalin that is illuminated through documentary evidence and historical truth has no bearing.  Stalin is a metonym for the political struggles of the present.

Yet the very question of Stalin is perhaps less crucial than another:  Which Russian writers become popular in the West, and why?

Not why Grossman is slightly less popular in Russia than in the UK/US, but why is Grossman so much less popular than Brodsky, Solzhenitsin, Pasternak?

And why do such great writers of the era as Platonov and Shalamov, who also condemned the Gulag and Stalinism, remain virtually unheard of in the West?

Grossman’s translator, Robert Chandler, believes that the popularity of Russian writers in the West is determined not so much by literary merit as political considerations.

He writes in the London Review of Books:

Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn became famous in the West not because of literature but because of politics…Varlam Shalamov and Andrei Platonov, however, did not benefit from any major international scandal…and to this day they remain relatively unknown in the West, even though Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales is far more vivid and subtle an evocation of the gulag than anything by Solzhenitsyn

It is certainly an interesting coincidence that Platonov and Grossman (they were close friends), Soviet writers who fell victim to the regime but were not dissidents and preferred to work ‘from within the system’, were much less successful abroad than their stridently anti-Soviet counterparts.

And it is equally interesting that the anti-communist Grossman is more popular in the West than Platonov, who remained an independent communist his whole life.

So while Harding is right to condemn the chilling effects of Russia’s political climate on its literature, he fails to notice the similar ideological forces at work in the West, which continues to favour anti-communist and anti-Soviet politics over pure literary merit.