What we are working on

Author and Presenter Vladimir Tolts

What we are working on

Vladimir Tolts:

Recently I received a couple of letters from Belarus. The author of one of them, praising the prosperity there, but at the same time demanding “don’t say my name,” politely asks what we are working on now.

Elena Zubkova:

Speaking seriously, modern Russian history, especially that which began after the death of Stalin, still continues to remain a kind of “terra incognita”...

Sergey Shekhovtsov:

The main problem in any education is the presentation of a phenomenon, in this case a historical phenomenon, as a whole.

Yuri Afanasyev:

Our entire history must be voluminous, but it must be so deep that we not only know the past of our Russia, but also understand it.

[...]

Vladimir Tolts:

So today I decided to talk about what we are working on. We are a fairly large group of historians, mathematicians, programmers, computer designers, teaching specialists, and journalists in Russia and the Czech Republic. And one more thing - part of this general work has already been done for us in the USA, England, France, Germany, Spain and a number of other countries. And we are now working on... - I don’t even know what to call it. Conventionally and officially, this is still called the “Information and Educational Program”. Well, in fact, we are talking about an attempt to comprehensively describe History using multimedia. So that in addition to ordinary text and hypertext, like on the Internet, where over time the results of our work, I hope, will appear, newsreels and videos would tell about the events of the past, so that our stories and those of the participants in the events of the past could be heard... And not only them, but also music, which has also become a relic of the past. So that all this is not only educational, but also exciting to watch, read and listen to.

You say: why do we need this? - Well, we would do one more (maybe more than one) cycle of broadcasts. They would write another book... (And the participants in this project, it must be said, have already written more than one: if you put them together, you get a small library on history.) But now they read books less. - In Russia, their circulation is smaller than before, prices are higher, and the structure of free time, as sociologists prove, in Russia and in the world has changed in such a way that less is spent on reading - television has replaced it. This comes first. Young people also have computers with the Internet. Of course, interest in the past does not go away. Statistically, it is at the same level as, say, 10 years ago. But now he is increasingly satisfied not by reading the scientific works of historians, but by surrogates such as “Secrets of the Kremlin Hospital”, “Empresses and Their Lovers”, films on historical topics, television series and the like. Well, what about radio broadcasts? - This is, after all, truly an ethereal creature. They called out and they are not there...

Perhaps it was this last circumstance that some time ago prompted the rector of the Russian State Humanitarian University (RGGU), Yuri Nikolaevich Afanasyev, to the idea of ​​​​creating a completely new type of teaching aid based on our radio programs. Before this, he had asked me more than once about our archives and kept complaining that their richest material (documentary sources that form the basis of the programs, recordings of the voices of people, many of whom are no longer alive, the painstaking work of journalists and editors to identify and record the opinions of unique specialists in a particular field) - all this is inaccessible to study by historians, that the results of many years of work are now in vain. It was Afanasyev who came up with the idea of ​​a joint project to create a new type of description of history, which would be based, among other things, on our “radio accumulations” that I just mentioned. An idea that was also supported by Radio Liberty-Free Europe.

But the matter is not limited to introducing new groups of historical sources into circulation. Today, Yuri Nikolaevich Afanasyev formulates the meaning of our joint (Radio Liberty and Russian State University for the Humanities) project, its goals and purpose much more broadly.

Yuri Afanasyev:

The most recent events associated with the adoption of the new symbols of Russia have once again very clearly shown how suddenly, spontaneously there is an outburst of sentiment, a storm of passions. And this happens all the time.

In order to study a Russia in which there is a split down to the very soil, that is, the soil itself is, Russian soil, this is a state of split. In order to study all this, it is not enough to just strain the mind; for this you also need a certain spiritual state.

And all this forces us to think about a fundamentally new, perhaps, set of teaching aids. Such a complex in which rational efforts would be complemented by emotional stress. To do this, our entire history must be so deep that we not only know the past, but also understand it.

Vladimir Tolts:

Today we are talking about a joint project between Radio Liberty-Free Europe and the Russian State University for the Humanities to create a fundamentally new multimedia complex for describing and comprehending historical knowledge.

It is worth noting once again that the resources and connections of Radio Liberty allowed us to involve historians, political scientists, and journalists in this work not only in Russia, the USA and the Czech Republic, where the headquarters of our Radio is now located. Already, our joint project accumulates the efforts of specialists from various countries and professions. The first result of these international efforts should be a CD for computers containing a description of key events in Soviet and world life in the mid-20th century. Or more precisely, the period 1953-56. It is based on a series of programs that I hosted in 1996. The first of them then began like this:

“When on February 25, 1956, the delegates of the 20th Congress of the CPSU began to sing along discordantly to the soundtrack of their party anthem, perhaps none of them even guessed that this “last and decisive” battle, which is still rumbling, began on that very day. Its first salvo was Khrushchev’s many-hour speech about the cult of personality, and the first springboard was excited minds and shaken faith communists of all countries."

We, Russian historians and I, did not choose this topic to begin our joint work by chance. Firstly, because we consider this period to be a turning point in the history of the twentieth century. And secondly, because, oddly enough, it is still far from being understood by researchers. My Moscow colleague on the joint project, Doctor of Historical Sciences Elena Yuryevna Zubkova, talks about it this way.

Elena Zubkova:

Speaking seriously, modern Russian history, especially that which began after the death of Stalin, still continues to remain a kind of terra incognita. And this despite the presence of a large number of historical studies, however, of different caliber and quality.

Even 10-15 years ago, during Gorbachev’s perestroika, there was enormous interest in this period; writing about the “thaw” was fashionable then. Historical parallels suggested themselves, illusions arose, including the illusion of understanding that now we know everything or almost everything about this time. Some were published from closed archival collections, some were told by eyewitnesses, but some were thought of by historians themselves.

Now let's see what the bottom line is: several documentary publications, including some very worthy ones, a dozen good articles and collections - the result of the collective efforts of historians. As for serious author's books, and it is they who make the difference in science, here, perhaps, we can only mention the book by Rudolf Pihoy, dedicated to the history of power in the USSR in the post-war period. That is, the total doesn’t seem to be that much.

Vladimir Tolts:

I should note that Professor Rudolf Germanovich Pihoya - the former chief archivist of the Russian Federation, the author of the monograph "USSR. History of Power" mentioned by Elena - was one of the main participants in our radio cycle "XX Congress" and, I hope, will take an active part in the current international project. But his most interesting work is devoted to only one side of history - the history of the elite, first of all.

Elena Zubkova correctly notes:

Elena Zubkova:

Our knowledge of the history of the 50s has one feature - it tilts towards big politics. Once upon a time, at the Kremlin court, this decade was called “great”, and then renamed “Khrushchev’s”. Perhaps Nikita Sergeevich is worthy of time being called by his name, although this still needs to be proven. But be that as it may, in addition to Khrushchev or Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich and even Shepilov who joined them, at least 200 million more citizens lived in the country, their lives were also part of history. In the end, it is a controversial question: what should be considered a sign of a “thaw”: the fact that newspapers stopped mentioning Stalin or the opening of a children’s New Year tree in the Kremlin? The fact that the words suddenly disappeared from the Soviet anthem or the fact that the whole country suddenly began to sing a frivolous song about lilies of the valley?

By the way, in the sphere of big politics there is still a lot of uncertainty. Starting, for example, with the circumstances of Beria’s arrest and ending with the history of the penetration of Khrushchev’s secret report into the West. There are many such problems. How to take them, that is, to reveal them - that is the question. One increment of information will clearly not be enough here. We need to come up with something else to make this information work...

We are, of course, not in a vacuum; we have documents from that era, published, and those that are still in the archives and just need to be taken. There are several decent historical studies, there are eyewitness accounts, contemporaries, from intellectuals to state security generals. There is, after all, the sound background of that time and what remains of it in pictures - photographs, newsreels. But for now it’s just a mosaic, some building material that needs to be collected to create an image of that time.

You can use the traditional principle, moving step by step - from year to year, from fact to fact. Or you can do it differently, choosing one focus, one central problem, from which, like ripples on water, the rest will disperse. For the “thaw” period, we chose the 20th Party Congress, a kind of symbol of the time, and not just a party event, as such a central point of reference. It would be possible to cling to something else, this is not so important, it is much more important to return the public’s interest to this segment of our history, which is much closer to us than it sometimes seems.

Vladimir Tolts:

I was once again convinced of the truth of these words by Elena Zubkova literally the other day, when selecting materials for the chronicle of world events, which, like an outline, will accompany our story about the life of the USSR in the mid-fifties. Looking through newspapers, magazines and newsreels of that time, I suddenly realized for the first time, for example, that at the very time when Soviet people were joyfully singing the “Lilies of the Valley” mentioned by Lena, in foreign everyday life, from which they were fenced off by the “iron curtain” that was beginning to decay, on the other side of it there were things, names and phenomena that came back to haunt Soviet life, Soviet culture and everyday life. - I’m not even talking now about such political events as the Budapest Revolution of 56 or Camus, unknown to the reading Soviet public, but about something completely different - about fashion and music, about the premiere of Fellini’s “The Road” and Elvis Presley’s first world tour - about names and things that we learned later than others, but which became part of our lives too.

And here a question arises that we must constantly solve in our joint work: How to convey all this diversity and multi-colored life of that time, how to combine, for example, stories about the Suez crisis and the fate of the Soviet economy, about the novel “By Bread Alone” and the young Romy Schneider who has just appeared on the screens? How to present phenomena and their relationships, as well as different points of view on this in such a way that the consumer of our product (I don’t dare call it traditionally - reader, listener, viewer - all at once) so that he can critically compare all this and himself develop his attitude towards the past shown to him.

One of the “theoretical pillars” of our international team, deputy director of the Scientific Center for Culture and Information Technologies, mathematician, Sergei Gennadievich Shekhovtsov says.

Sergey Shekhovtsov:

I want to say a few words about the form in which we intend to present this material. The fact is that the main problem in any education is the presentation of a phenomenon, in this case a historical phenomenon, as a whole. If you do not imagine it, then it is very difficult to talk about any understanding of history at all. And since we are forced to recognize any historical phenomena in their manifestations - in documents, in what specific people did, what events took place, seemingly unrelated, and then the thought of historians suddenly catches the connection between them. All this creates a huge array of materials.

It is very difficult to decide what is essential and what is less significant without seeing the phenomenon as a whole. Therefore, the main task that always faces when studying historical phenomena is to choose one aspect or another. What form of presentation of material can there be so that a person can try to collect the sometimes seemingly heterogeneous circumstances of a particular historical phenomenon into something whole? Now there is only one form that can intensify access to information - the use of new information technologies. That is why this product will be presented in the form of a “SD-rom”, which will allow the user to learn to navigate the world of circumstances and facts of this period, a very important period of Russian history of the 20th century, on their own. At the same time, many questions that the user may not be able to immediately pose for himself will be suggested to him, as if gradually, with the help of the mental work that historians will do for him, before the user. But this does not at all limit the independence of the user of this disk, because he will be able to gain access to everything that he was able to dig up. Moreover, in the end it is planned to make this environment open, it will be possible to supplement it with newly discovered circumstances. All this is completely impossible to accomplish using the traditional form of presentation, although this does not cancel it, but a person gains efficiency in using information.

Vladimir Tolts:

Today I am telling you about a joint project between Radio Liberty-Free Europe and the Russian State University for the Humanities. The first result of our joint work should be the publication of a CD containing a multimedia description of the events of 1953-56. In the Soviet Union and in the world.

It is clear that the 1996 cycle of radio programs “XX Congress”, which forms the basis for this part of our general work, requires significant processing and addition for use in a multimedia environment. And the point is not even that these are only words and sounds.

Over the past 4 years, quite a lot of information has appeared, sometimes quite significantly changing our ideas about what actually happened half a century ago.

I will give just a couple of examples concerning one particular episode - the history of the transfer of information about Khrushchev’s secret anti-Stalin speech to the West. In 1996, we talked about Reuters correspondent John Retti, to whom a certain man who introduced himself as Kostya Orlov, whose connections with the Lubyanka the British journalist suspected from the moment they met in March 1956, literally dictated his retelling of Khrushchev’s speech. Retti at one time suggested that this Kostya, by order of Khrushchev, was specially selected by the “authorities” to organize an information leak. - But here’s an important detail: this person was found after our program! It turns out that for many years later, the “authorities” pretty much tormented and crippled his life precisely for this unauthorized contact with a foreigner!

Or again: I was very glad that our program at one time featured Viktor Graevsky, the man about whom the Washington Post reported in 1994 that it was he who obtained for Israeli intelligence the text of Khrushchev’s secret report, which was later transferred to the US government and published by the State Department in June 1956. Even now I have no doubt about the story told by Graevsky. But 2 years ago, information was published in the United States that even before Israel handed over to the States the text received by Graevsky, the State Department had already received Khrushchev’s report, obtained by a long-term FBI agent and at the same time an important person in the Communist Party of the USA, its secret liaison with fraternal parties in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Canada and Cuba, Jack Childs! All of this, of course, as Elena Zubkova says, is “pebbles in a mosaic,” but in order for the overall picture to emerge, they need to be checked and put in place!

I'm not even talking about the sometimes very valuable historical evidence that was published after our “XX Congress” series aired. Here is just one example - the most sensible description I know of by an eyewitness of the “walker” on Trubnaya Square in Moscow on the day of Stalin’s funeral.

“I performed my official duties well, but automatically, only the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953 knocked me out of my normal rut. The grief and grief of all my colleagues was genuine. Social psychosis in those days overflowed its banks. Millions of people rushed to the Hall of Columns, where, finally calmed down, the “leader and teacher” lay. Together with a group of guys from the publishing house, I also crawled under military trucks and squeezed into the crowd somewhere between Petrovka and Pushkinskaya Street. It soon became clear that there was no progress, and the crowd began to sway dangerously on the sidewalk going downhill. The crowd was growing, a thick cloud of steam hung over the crowd. Screams were heard here and there.

I felt uneasy, the matter clearly could have ended in disaster: with great difficulty I could move my hands pressed to my chest, the buttons of my coat were half torn off, and the floors, captured by crushed bodies, dragged me into the abyss of the human whirlpool. The galoshes had long since disappeared from my boots, and the pain from people trampling on my feet was becoming unbearable. In addition, my feet were completely wet. The instinct of self-preservation left over from peasant life pushed me to the only correct decision - to give up the seemingly inalienable right to look at the dead person. With enormous effort, I “raked”, working with my elbows, from the human sea closer and closer to the shore and finally dived under the saving military trucks.

Having come to my senses, I climbed into the back of the car and looked back to where I had just gotten out. There was the threshold of hell. Individual screams were already merging into a general howl, the edges of the crowd were actively blurring, but in the center people with faces white with fear were vainly begging for help. There was nothing that could be done. And half a kilometer away on Trubnaya Square itself at that time a real tragedy broke out. Hundreds of people were knocked down by the unstoppable flow of the crowd and crushed. The cult of personality took several hundred of its latest victims to the grave. <...>

I myself was susceptible to social psychosis, so when I came home, I changed my shoes, dressed accordingly and again found myself on Pushkin Square, intending to walk through the basements or rooftops to the center. I wandered for a long time through the dirty catacombs of the dungeons, but never found the road. By this time, military units had been brought into the city and all the holes had been patched up. So I never said goodbye to “old man Hottabych,” as I called Stalin for his capricious omnipotence. At the moment of his placement in the Mausoleum, when all the beeps of factories, factories, and vehicles began to blare, I stood with a group of employees on the porch of the publishing house with tears in my eyes and thought that now things would be bad in our country, really bad.”

Do you know who wrote this? - Future KGB lieutenant general and prominent Soviet spy - Latin America specialist Nikolai Sergeevich Leonov.

In 1953, which Leonov recalls, he was only 25, he worked in a publishing house, but was already preparing for his first foreign business trip. - Do you feel tenacity of perception, memory, and ability to describe?..

When recently in Moscow I asked one “paramedic” of historical sciences why none of the Russian historians had yet appreciated these memoirs of Leonov, published several years ago, I heard in response something like “We don’t read this general’s literature” - Boring, they say. And one more thing: “The Chukchi is not a reader...”

Unlike these “writers,” our task is to read everything. And from this you can assemble your “mosaic”. Everything, including memoirs of both security officers and prisoners, works by samizdators and patented Soviet historians, “the day before yesterday” still praising Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinism, and then unanimously condemning him for “voluntarism” and an attempt to “denigrate and distort the glorious pages of the past”, opuses of yesterday’s “young communists”, who until recently wrote as an authorized revelation about the Bukharin alternative Stalinism, and now quoting Pobedonostsev with the same enthusiasm. And of course, we read the works of Western historians. And we want to introduce you to their view of the events of the time that is the subject of our consideration.

All of the above also applies to numerous interviews with participants and eyewitnesses of the events to which our work is devoted. With interested attention, we listened and talked with everyone at one time - with the Central Committee members and security officers, with communists and anti-communists, workers and academics, Russians and Georgians, French and Americans. By the way, now to create our multimedia “brainchild” we still need to conduct quite a few new interviews. And we do it.

Now I will introduce you to a fragment of one of these recent interviews - with the writer Georgy Vladimov (in the mid-50s, the Novomirsky editor of the sensational essay “Not by Bread Alone...” during the “Thaw”).

Georgy Vladimov:

When I came to the New World magazine in May, the head there was invited. department of prose by Boris Germanovich Zaks and was soon approved by Simonov, Zaks told me: “This is your desk, here in the left cabinet of your desk there is a novel, very interesting, but unpromising, we will most likely send it to the author, and in the right cabinet of the desk there is another novel, which you should now quickly read, because it will lead us to the general line.” The novel was unpromising - it was Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, which soon received the Nobel Prize, and the one that was supposed to lead to the general line was Dudintsev's novel, which was called Harsh Miles.

But in the “New World” there was such a tradition - it is necessary to change the names, so the whole editorial staff, the whole choir, we looked for this name and found it in the text of the novel itself, where the engineer Lopatkin says that man will not live on bread alone, and of course, some spirituality, ideologicalness and the same forbidden sincerity were implied. So this was my first editorial job, and after reading this novel I was simply horrified. I could not even imagine that such a novel could exist in Soviet literature at all, and I was surprised how and when the author, until now not a daring author, the author of such calm prose, far from sharp, how he dared to write such a novel, not only to write, but even to conceive it. And suddenly it turned out that there was an application for this novel, attached to the contract, back in 1952, that is, even under Stalin, it turns out that he conceived this novel under Stalin, that’s what was most surprising to me. I really think he really hoped that someday this would appear in the Soviet press. But Dudintsev, a rather naive man, said: “Yes, I assumed that this would be published and would go off with a bang,” and did not imagine that it would cause such criticism, such rabid persecution of this novel.”

Vladimir Tolts:

Georgy Nikolaevich, now, half a century after Dudintsev’s application, I would ask you to explain to your listeners, in general to a completely different generation, what exactly was the daring of this novel.

Georgy Vladimov:

Dudintsev, as he told me while working on editing this novel, he told me that he conceived it from the most honest Komsomol motives. He wanted to talk about how officials and bureaucrats interfere with the advancement of the new, interfere with progress, interfere with creativity, in this case, inventive creativity. He specialized in many essays in Komsomolskaya Pravda, where he then worked, he had written a lot before that, published such revealing materials. And all this passed through him, and he did not even think that collected together in one novel it would acquire, as they say, a generalization. That is, individual cases passed very easily, without much pain, but when all this was collected, and the reader really saw what life was like for an inventor in our God-saved fatherland, everyone was horrified.

But, of course, the main element of his crime was in the depiction of this galaxy of officials, starting from the smallest and right up to the minister. This was the main strength of the novel, and the main strength of Dudintsev as an artist, as a great prose writer, this image of the so-called “Kitezh-city”, that is, our institutions, some kind of bureaucratic mafias, groups, groupings. And this was done so masterfully, so impressively that, of course, the real Drozdovs and Tipikins could not bear it, especially since he even used real names, and a real persecution of the novel was organized. At that time, Vsevolod Kochetov, who was just beginning his editorial career, was at the head.

Vladimir Tolts:

Let me remind you that you are now listening to the memoirs of the writer Georgy Vladimov about the events of the mid-50s, which will be included in the multimedia program that we, Radio Liberty, are now working on together with the Russian State University for the Humanities.

Georgy Vladimov:

The novel was published, then there was a rather heated discussion about it in the Central House of Writers, in the central House of Writers, where a very bright speech was made by Konstantin Paustovsky. And at first everything was very decent, it was greeted with great enthusiasm, there were numerous reading conferences, and I was at them with the author and acted as the editor of this book, this novel. Very quickly, a contract was signed with the author for publication at the publishing house "Soviet Writer", it was published in thirty thousand copies, however, half of the circulation was put under the knife, but we later found out. And so everything looked very good, and they signed an agreement with him at the film studio; a very young director came to the editorial office and wanted to direct a film based on this novel. There were requests from theaters and radio shows, everything was a great success. The author bought a car and was given a new apartment.

But then a battle broke out, a battle broke out in Literaturnaya Gazeta, where Vsevolod Kochetov was, recently appointed, in my opinion, he was appointed in 1955 as editor-in-chief of Literaturnaya Gazeta. And so he began to publish devastating articles about this novel, then articles of the same kind appeared in Izvestia and Pravda. Well, gradually this criticism turned into a pogrom persecution of the novel. If you remember, in 1957 there was a festival, the International Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, and I only found out later that before this festival Dudintsev was asked to leave Moscow, because a pilgrimage of foreigners was expected to him, which was undesirable.

Vladimir Tolts:

In the second cabinet of the table lay “Doctor Zhivago” by Pasternak. Did you read it then? How can you remember the impressions that the novel made on you then?

Georgy Vladimov:

To my shame, I never read it, because it was “unpromising”, I read it after it was published in the West, the author received the Nobel Prize, was broken and wrote the famous letter to Khrushchev, where he was ready to refuse the Nobel Prize.

This is what just amazed me. I didn’t notice this when I was young, but I noticed much later that he didn’t give up on the novel itself. And this was also news, this was a novelty. Until now, all the authors have repented and promised to fix something, redo something, but Pasternak agreed to refuse the prize and only asked that he not be forced to leave his homeland. But this is the novel - that’s what it stood for. If you remember, even Solzhenitsyn abandoned his play “The Feast of the Victors,” saying that he wrote in such difficult circumstances, that is, there was criticism of his own work in his mouth. But Pasternak - no, he never repented until his death.

Vladimir Tolts:

Here, in a nutshell, is what we are working on. For us, the “XX Congress” computer CD is only the first attempt at a “multimedia pen”. We are already thinking about how we will work on post-war history (1945-52), no less mysterious for many, and describe the second half of Khrushchev’s rule and the “era of Brezhnev.” Well, I hope to continue my “Main Project” - the sounding history of the last 15 years of the 20th century.

But that's not all. We hope (and the sound resources of our Radio allow this; and there are authors - if only there were the means and good will!) to create, based on programs that were once broadcast once and loved by many, cycles about the history of world and Soviet cinema, Mozart and Salieri, “Naples in St. Petersburg.” And something completely new - about sports and politics in the twentieth century, about the half-century history of Radio Liberty-Free Europe. And much more...

As always, we count on the widest possible audience. - "From pioneers to pensioners." It will even expand - because now even hearing impaired people will be able to get acquainted with our “product” on computer screens. Well, and of course, schoolchildren, students and their teachers. Anyone for whom a computer is not only a tool for work and entertainment, but also a means of acquiring new knowledge. These are "our people". We work for them and count on their support.