Talkers in stream

What did Soviet historians talk about and what do Russian historians forget?

“We are not chatterboxes,” my Moscow acquaintance V.V. told me. Altman, a very witty and knowledgeable person - but just talkative ... "R. Ganelin Soviet Atlantis with great speed - unnatural, it would seem, for her ...

* “We are not talkers,” my Moscow acquaintance V.V. told me. Altman, a very witty and knowledgeable person - but just talkative ... " * R. Ganelin

Soviet Atlantis with great speed - unnatural, it would seem, for its immense spaces and longevity - is sinking to the bottom, covered with an oceanic thickness of oblivion.

It's not just about generational change. Increasingly, one can hear from ex-Soviet people that “there were no executions”. And few of those who attend the church today will remember that the Bible could not be obtained anywhere within the borders of the fatherland. Its import was prohibited. And they told how, returning from a business trip abroad, at the local airports they put it in a trash can (!) - anyway, customs officers will take it away in their homeland, and with consequences. But the amnesia intensifies, and the whole Soviet life is twitching in the haze of oblivion.

The title of the book by the famous historian R.Sh. Ganelin, which will be discussed further, very clearly “reveals its content”, as Soviet teachers of literature expressed it: “Soviet historians: what they talked about among themselves. Pages of memories of the 1940s-1970s.

The gulf between the written (especially printed) and spoken word was huge. “ In the Fundamental Library of Social Sciences in Moscow, which was a few minutes walk from the Kremlin, on the site in front of the entrance to the reading rooms, from the second half of the 1940s, for twenty years, I observed a constant “push”, where specialists who dealt with the foreign world and international relationships, told each other what they could not write in their works .

The Soviet Constitution did not have that 29th article, part 5, which is not read and appreciated by today's people, and it was for them that the Constitution of the Russian Federation of 1993 was written. The article reads - "Censorship is prohibited." For this, people, pardon the pathos, gave their only life. They will say: “But it is violated!”. So let's break it.

... Not only in printed works - in private letters and diaries. " The controllability of the correspondence was known and undoubtedly determined its nature ." "Like this?" - ask the current young men and women who do not get out of LiveJournal. Yes, that's it. Sometimes " it was even used by the writers themselves to testify their loyalty to the government or its disposition towards themselves." From nowhere, except from oral stories, it was impossible to learn at least “about a peculiar form of rehabilitation” of I.M. Maisky, historian and diplomat, Soviet ambassador to Great Britain since 1932, and in 1943-46 - Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. He was arrested " shortly before Stalin's death as an English spy and, of course, confessed to it ." Then, not knowing anything about the death of Stalin and the new direction of the winds, “ he ended up in Beria’s office, who asked why he made his confessions, whether under the influence of unauthorized investigative methods. Shot wolf, I.M. Maisky, suspecting a provocation, replied that he had testified in good conscience. This, however, did not satisfy Beria, and with the same ease with which the investigator obtained confessions, he managed to get them rejected. However, before poor Maisky had time to enjoy his freedom, he was returned to prison. It turned out that he, an English spy, had been illegally released from custody by the chief resident of British intelligence, Beria, who had been declared such upon his arrest in June 1953. This put Maisky's rehabilitation into question. But keeping him in prison was ridiculous. He was taken to the cottage ... ". And then the director of the Institute of History A.L. Sidorov (who told the author of the book the whole story, “hardly hiding irony and annoyance”) “ was told by phone in a general’s voice: “You have an academician there - Maisky, so he will come, let him work.” State, however.

For those who yearn for her, what about the ease of obtaining any evidence from the person under investigation? .. Or do you think it will only affect others? Will you be exclusively among the guardsmen? You don't know your history well.

Not only during life, but also after death, people remained in the hands of the “party leadership”. A.L. Sidorov, the author narrates, " fell, as it was called, from the official clip immediately after his death ", in March 1966. When three St. Petersburg (then, of course, Leningrad) historians arrived at the institute directly from the train for a civil memorial service, “it suddenly became known that the permission for burial in a coffin had been canceled, but the burial of an urn was possible. The confusion was complete, in part because the cremation had not been ordered. In the end everything was overcome. At the wake, I was next to my brother A.L., a tractor driver from the Orenburg region. He was literally crushed by the death of his brother and the funeral epic. “In the morning I came to the cemetery, treated the gravediggers, took a spade from them and dug out a grave of a full profile, after all, my brother. How is it not possible, why? he wondered .

When in 1958 the defamated and never “rehabilitated” Zoshchenko died (his widow, Vera Vladimirovna, told me that he had been repeating everything for the past two years with bitterness: “They will rehabilitate everyone - they won’t rehabilitate me alone!”), His wife wanted to bury him in Sestroretsk, where they had half a day. “ But the leadership of the Leningrad branch of the Writers' Union, ” says R.Sh. Ganelin, - received permission from the regional committee to bury Zoshchenko on the famous Literary bridges of the Volkov cemetery and arrange a memorial service in the Writer's House.

However, the authorities did not like some of the speeches over his coffin. Right during the mourning ceremony (I ask you to evaluate the efficiency of the earlier officials), “ there was a refusal to be buried at the Volkovskoye cemetery and a gracious permission for the widow to name any other ... She, however, refused this, saying that she would bury her husband in Sestroretsk. One of the organizers turned to the driver of the funeral bus, which was supposed to depart from the House of Writers to the Volkovo cemetery, with a request to go to Sestroretsk instead. Hearing that it was impossible to bury on Volkovo, he replied: “It’s impossible, like Pushkin, that means.<…> We’ll take it, sit down with me for the gendarme .”

And eight years later, the longing for Stalin's time reached its highest point for some, and Pravda published an article by three authors about the unscientific definition of the "period of the cult of personality." They cared, of course, not so much about science. “ Attempts to slow down or even interrupt de-Stalinization, in particular in the historiographical sphere, provoked resistance from some of our colleagues at the Moscow Institute .” (Those were the times! Attempts to interrupt de-Stalinization aroused the resistance of the people of science!)

“ In February 1966, a party meeting, memorable not only for its participants, took place there, at which A.Ya. Avreha against attempts to return to Stalin. After the speech, the historian "was taken directly from the meeting to the hospital - such was the tension of his mental strength and the atmosphere of the meeting, at which for the first time something was heard that was widely discussed in private conversations" .

In my diary of 1966 there is a yellowed sheet with a pale typewritten letter to Brezhnev and signatures of Academicians L.A. Artsimovich, P.L. Kapitsa, M.A. Leontovich, I.M. Maisky, S.D. Skazkina, A.D. Sakharova, I.E. Tamma ... Eternal memory to them! They didn't let the wheel of history spin then. The director G.A. Tovstonogov also, like the current ones, had his own theater, and he also did not want to lose it. And he signed it!.. “No explanations and articles will make people believe in Stalin again…” the authors claimed. This is where the scientists made a little mistake: after all, by the nature of their activity, they sought to understand Russia with their minds.

In Ganelin's book there is also a lot of fun - a special, of course, fun. At one of the friendly parties, the Spaniard Pritzker interspersed singing Spanish songs with stories, in particular, about how “ during the evacuation of our people from Spain in 1938, a man who introduced himself as Levin from Odessa was assigned to his care as an interpreter and not only as an interpreter. According to D.P. Pritzker, he, with youthful maximalism, began to look for the errors of his companion in Spanish, Russian and even Italian. He dutifully agreed with everything, explaining the matter by the peculiarities of the Odessa speech, and when they sailed to the southern coast of France, a command was received to ensure the safe landing of Levin, who turned out to be Palmiro Togliatti.

Or - memories of the conference in Leningrad in 1959, " when they continued to discuss the question of the exploitation of Russia by foreign capital. One of the Minsk professors in his speech called a foreign capitalist by the name of Macdonald the worst enemy of the Belarusian people. V. Timoshenko, then still a graduate student, took the floor and said that it was a woman named Agrafena, the widow of the Volga first guild merchant. And where she got the name MacDonald, it was not possible to establish.

... I wanted to write: “Now to whom will you explain that courage was needed for such a performance?” - and suddenly, with some haste, I thought: "Won't it be needed again?"

So was this era or it was not? When A.A. Formozov, a well-known Russian archaeologist, brought to his institute the manuscript of the book “Russian Archaeologists in the Period of Totalitarianism: Historiographic Essays”, the management refused to print it, because “there was no such era.” The publisher was found (this is the meaning of the article that says "censorship is prohibited"). The author of the book, according to him in the preface, wants to " understand how our scientists lived, worked and managed to do a lot during the years of totalitarianism " - not only archaeologists. His starting point is ethical. He gives a real picture, rare in terms of the degree of openness, showing how the same people made discoveries in their field - and ruined people, how "the new leaders of the academy pushed the youth to attack teachers, colleagues, comrades ." And these attacks most often ended, which was known to the attackers, by the camp or a bullet in the back of the head. (One of the many such stories is devoted to a collection of documents compiled by R. Ganelin, just published in St. Petersburg - “What are you doing to me!”. How they were brought under execution: Documents on the life and death of Vladimir Nikolayevich Kashin.”)

Colleagues did not forgive him for this. For this and two subsequent books by Formozov (by the way, fascinating, like the book of Ganelin, written) in one of the issues of the journal "Russian Archeology" over the past year, 5 (five) different reviews appeared at once, in a familiar spirit.

And in the city of Kursk, under the stamp of the local medical (!) University, in the same year, a very sensible and nobly written brochure by the archaeologist S.P. Shchavelev under the scientific editorship of Doctor of Philology A.T. Khrolenko (I greet and thank my colleague for the deed!) “New books by A.A. Formozov on history and theory and Russian archeology (2004-2005).

The author shows how unskillfully they discredit the Formosan conception of the history of the humanities. But where is the alternative concept? In response to our author, one old treasury: “Everything has always been fine with us. And under the tsar-priest, and under Joseph Vissarionovich, and under Leonid Ilyich (1970s-1980s - by the way, the favorite time of many of our now living archaeologists and other humanitarians; they say, they didn’t imprison anyone, money went without delay to those scientists who played by Soviet rules, what else does our brother need?). Well, now everything is so beautiful that there is nothing to wish for, despite all the problems with the destruction of historical and cultural monuments, etc.

So shall we try to understand and describe the past era?

If not, the auspices are very sad. By no means belonging to people of a catastrophic mental and spiritual disposition, being of sound mind and sober memory, I believe Russia, drawn in Sorokin's "The Day of the Oprichnik", is one of (not the only one, of course!) Quite real, and not at all fantastic variants of a distant, but not too, the future of our country. When the stupid and bloodthirsty are active, and the best people are sluggishly ready for anything, nothing else can be expected. It's time to shake up. Maybe the books of my wonderful senior colleagues in the humanities will contribute to this.