Bakhtin demonstrates, lastly, not only that the chronotope is ‘the indissoluble conjuncture of time and space’,13 but that we can also speak of different, specific chronotopoi. Following the chronotopoi he analyses in connection with the novel, we might speak of ‘Moscow, 1937’ as a chronotope. Its chief characteristics are arbitrariness, suddenness, shock, attacks out of the blue, and the disappearance and obliteration of the distinction between the real and the fantastic. Notwithstanding the differences between fiction and non-fiction, we can look with profit to the great novels, above all novels in an urban setting, for they have discovered the narrative forms that are able to do justice to the chaotic, opaque nature of life in a specific locality. Such novels are particularly instructive for the development of a ‘synchronous narrative’.14 We may well continue to cling to the conviction that historiography cannot dispense with narrative – and that narrative is not finished as the postmodernists have proclaimed but only a particular ideological version of the ‘grand narrative’. But even if we do, in the case of Moscow in 1937, we shall still be pulled up sharply at the limits of narrative history, all the more so since we are not speaking here of the history of a city in the usual sense.15
The ‘whirlpool of history’, the ‘maelstrom’, the ‘Witches’ Sabbath’, the ‘machinery of terror’ – all these images and epithets have been used by contemporaries or historians to express their bafflement. The way into them follows events and staging posts. They are subjective, but are not arbitrarily chosen. Probes have been positioned wherever thorough and lengthy preliminary soundings have led historians to suspect significant discoveries. What was crucial in selecting the staging posts and events – these correspond to the close on forty chapters or ‘scenes’ of this book – was not whether they were particularly drastic or exotic, but whether they were representative. Reading newspapers has been of the very first importance because the multifarious phenomena of life are all bundled together on the front pages – however selectively and subject to censorship they may have been. Newspapers and magazines took pride of place in my efforts to understand and reproduce the world not in terms of individual disciplines and one-dimensionally, but from an interdisciplinary standpoint that preserved the integrity of events. In many respects, newspapers are a key resource, one that is commonly underrepresented because the truth is always supposed to be lurking ‘beneath the surface’. The next step was to forge a path through the surface of historical incident so as to develop an architecture that would do justice to the course of events, with all its twists and turns, vortices and explosions. The table of contents is intended to provide some sense of what was involved here.
The journey begins with the flight of Margarita, the heroine of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel – but it is a flight back to the city from which she had escaped – and ends with the inspection of a building site at the spot where the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour had once stood and where, in 1937, the construction of the Palace of the Soviets was just getting under way. It follows events taking place between the end of 1936 and the end of 1938. In that period history is compressed, with past events running in parallel with those of the jubilee year celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Thus we look in on the great show trials, the celebrations of the Pushkin jubilee, the International Geologists’ Congress and the First All-Union Architects’ Congress. Spectacular events that held the entire Soviet public in thrall throughout the year – the flights to North America, the conquest of the North Pole, the passing of the new constitution and the elections to the Supreme Soviet – all these pass once more before the eyes of the observer. In the process we become familiar with certain scenes that provided the settings for the events of political and social life: the Bolshoi Theatre, the Gorky Central Park of Culture and Rest, Red Square, the dachas in the suburbs and the many jubilee exhibitions. But there are also other things integral to the Moscow of the time: the labyrinths of terror, the places of execution on the outskirts of the city, and the forced labour camps in the canal zone to the north. The inner core of power in which everything was discussed, resolved and made ready for implementation also formed an essential part of Moscow in 1937. Nevertheless, the year of the Great Terror included other things as well: the summer vacations, the beginning of the school year, sports facilities, cinemas, shop windows and dance venues. Many roads and paths led to Moscow in the 1930s, and Moscow was a city that did not yet form part of a divided world – as can be seen from the nature of the front lines in the Spanish Civil War, the World Exhibition in Paris and the numerous links with America. Moscow in 1937 is observed here from many different points of view – that of the émigré returning to his native land, the antifascist intellectual trying to make sense of what is happening all around him in the country where he has found refuge, as well as embassy workers and foreign journalists. Whether as participants or, even more, as victims, all of them find themselves swept up in one way or the other into the great movement in which they had become involved and which came to an end only in 1938. In these years, and this soon becomes apparent during these tours, the city was nothing but a great building site, a city in permanent upheaval.
A glance at the map can best show us what is meant by the synchronicity of events in a single place. Everything takes place in quick succession and in close proximity. The map displays in spatial terms what the organization of the book unfolds as a temporal narrative. But since the map cannot display the cumulative radicalization, the acceleration of events, it acquires its meaning only together with the legend – i.e., the narrative of events in succession. Only the two things together can produce that space– time matrix from which new insights can be gleaned.16
It is not hard to identify the source of the ‘additional historical knowledge’ that arises from this synthesizing process. It reproduces and lays bare the complexity that is concealed by the separation of events from the locations in which they took place. A history of violence isolated from its context becomes as misleading as a history of the cinema or the entertainment industry would be. The political decision-making processes that led to the terror did not take place in a vacuum, any more than we could conceive of a history of everyday life in those years independently of the ambush-like interventions from above and the targeted killings. So, when we speak of jumbled situations and the simultaneous presence of dream and terror, we are trying to evoke not a particular atmosphere superimposed on an otherwise dry analysis, but an epistemologically central fact: the creation of an experiential space as mediated by a common location. The effect of this space–time geography is not to produce a mere average, or to blunt or soften extremes, but, on the contrary, to accentuate them to the greatest possible degree. This is what is meant by a ‘synchronous narrative’. The meeting of the bosses in charge of the organized campaign of mass murder on the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Cheka in the Bolshoi Theatre, a place usually reserved for performances of Carmen or operas by Modest Mussorgsky, or the arrest of the men responsible for the building of the Moscow–Volga Canal at the moment of its grand public opening – such things are mere episodes in this single great narrative. The simultaneous occurrence, the merging, of the terror and the dream is perhaps best exemplified by the parallel events of the elections to the Supreme Soviet of 12 December 1937 and the mass arrests and killings of hundreds of thousands of people that started in August 1937 and that were originally intended to come to an end by the beginning of December. The preparations for ‘universal, free, direct and secret elections’ went hand in hand with the organized mass killings. The elections actually entailed the physical elimination of all those forces that might have posed a threat to the monopoly of the Communist Party. It is no accident that the publication in Pravda of the agenda for the elections coincided with Stalin’s plan for the launch of the mass killings. Both documents bear the date 2 July 1937.17
The idea behind this book of assembling such opposing experiences and manifestations of this year has not
been inspired merely by the wish to bring together things that all too frequently are left to stand on their own and to synthesize individual insights derived from the most diverse areas of research. My aim, rather, has been to resolve disagreements that were fully justified in a period of paradigm change, but have now become obsolete, and to make use of the explanatory potential where I found it, regardless of the school from which it came. Disputes between historians are only of biographical or specialist scholarly interest. The history of events, the history of ordinary life, the history of mentalities – all these are no more than different facets or emphases. ‘History from above’ and ‘history from below’, political history and the history of everyday life, the question whether the terror was centrally planned or blind and spontaneous without any discernible trend – all such questions must, wherever possible, be freed from unnecessary and sometimes misleading disagreements and be harmonized. Or, to put it somewhat loosely, the generalizations about the age which Hannah Arendt formulated in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism for the benefit of the generation that had escaped from both Nazism and Stalinism have to be combined with the insights arising from Sheila Fitzpatrick’s pioneering studies of Soviet social history.18 These studies have shed light on the fault lines in Russian society, without which we would be unable to comprehend the force and destructiveness of Stalinism. They tell us that there is now no way back to older notions of Stalinism as a merely political event. According to this change of paradigm, the matrix of historical understanding and analysis is quite different. Much that seemed previously to be the expression of omnipotent state power can now be seen as the desperate actions of an impotent state; what appeared to be the expression of a daring utopianism turns out to consist of panicky expedients without which a state power with the barest minimum by way of legitimacy could not have survived for a single day. What looks at first sight like a plan turns out on closer inspection to be a mixture of crisis management, improvisation, a merely reactive, tactical response and a process of living from hand to mouth. The ‘system’ stands exposed as a barely suppressed chaos, albeit a chaos that was unleashed again and again as a device to retain dominance. ‘Power’ – that was often little more than an alliance cobbled together by men tested and hardened in the battles of the Civil War, an alliance that could be unravelled at any moment. The time is long since past when the study of texts by Marx and Lenin could be thought to have much to contribute to an understanding of the great tumult that reigned in Russia during the twentieth century. To think of Stalinism merely as a question of total domination is as dubious as to see it purely in terms of social history. No system, no logic or idea can be expected to serve as an Archimedean point from which to explain everything – the realization of a plan, a utopia and the translation of an experiment into practice. All that is needed is an understanding of the interplay of the forces on the spot. For in reality what took place was a conflict between opposing forces, a battle of life and death.19
In Moscow in 1937 many disparate stories come together into a knot that at first sight seems impossible to disentangle. The first task is to make visible the confusing tangle of strands and threads. For the most part anything that has become an event has a lengthy prehistory. All actors have a prehistory – that explains why biographies are so extremely important. The only events culminating here are those that were begun in the 1920s and 1930s and had continued to accumulate. Narrated in sequence and subjected to analysis, these events exhibit a certain acceleration and radicalization, but nothing suggests a plan. Even those at the centre who do the planning and the directing are just one factor among many in an overwhelmingly powerful force field. As events unfold, they remind us less of the trajectory of an ‘experiment’ – even though the word is all too frequently used in this context – than of the almost natural progress of a war of all against all, whose end is anything but fixed in advance. Having advanced through its different stages, this book makes no claim to provide a conclusion; it has no thesis that holds everything together, but for that reason it remains focused on the enigma that distinguishes Moscow in 1937 from many other catastrophes of history.
After a prolonged, exhausting labour, one tends to be acutely aware of its flaws, the blank spaces that cannot always be explained or excused by blaming the inaccessibility of archives, but arise from the author’s angle of vision, his blind spots or simply his interest or lack of it. It is after all very surprising that we have no study of the chief propaganda and organizational activity of those years – the passing of the new constitution and the elections to the Supreme Soviet – even though there is an obvious connection between Stalin’s attempt to broaden the fragile mass basis of the regime and the purposeful elimination of thousands in mass killing operations. It is no less astonishing to see how rarely attempts are made to relate the terror within Russia to the approach of world war and how little Moscow is examined in the transnational, international context, an omission that presumably is a late consequence of the conflict between East and West and the division of the world, both of which have come to overlay the mental maps of the pre-war era. A further factor that became clear in the course of my work on this book is how little we have known hitherto about the productivity of the Soviet empire during the Stalinist period, without which we cannot even begin to speak of ‘total power’. By this I mean our knowledge of the infrastructure – transport, rail and communications. We are speaking here of the ‘analytical matrix’, which is needed if we are to map the political events of the day in a meaningful way. The problem is how to represent time and space in an empire that is infinitely vast, infinitely heterogeneous and riven, and whose population is infinitely distant from politics and the centre of power; an empire all of whose fixed structures had been dissolved in the course of a profound upheaval that had already lasted for two decades and in which migration – Russia in flux – had conspired to nip in the bud every attempt at consolidation.20 When you take a closer look at this matrix, you see very quickly just how baseless many of the comparisons with National Socialism are – comparisons which for that reason are explicitly not attempted here. Further lacunae – voids – might also be mentioned, for which we lack the conceptual apparatus as yet. How should we attempt to introduce ‘fear’ into the historiography of those years as a constitutive factor of the period? How should we conceive of ‘total exhaustion’ as a basic element in an infinitely intractable experience of everyday life, one without which it is not possible to understand the ways in which power made itself felt? Would we not obtain a far more precise picture of the times from research into the non-places of those years – the stations, black markets, queues, shacks and hostels – and what do we know about the specific forms of physical violence?21 To this day it is frightening to realize how little we know about the top and especially the middle leadership personnel – the stage seems to have been swept clean of all actors.22 The existence of these lacunae underlines the preliminary, fragmentary nature of the present book, which hopes to open up discussion rather than conclude it.
As to the fragmentary form of the present work, this is entirely intentional. It appeared to be the most appropriate form to dramatize the tumult and the violent clash of events. This book provides images which can then be assembled in the reader’s mind to form a panorama of a catastrophic series of events. Of prime significance is the number of quotations that have been included, since they frequently define situations better than any descriptions. The pictures, too, should do more than illustrate the text; they should play their own part. The aim was to show one and the same event from a number of different perspectives so as to create correspondences and sightlines, thus building up the space in which all the action took place. Despite this, the present text is not a montage in which everything remains suspended but a narrative pulled along by its own current. Thousands and thousands of innocent, hapless human beings were swept along by that current and destroyed. It should come as no surprise if a book attempting to follow these even
ts should likewise have been swept along by them.
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Navigation: Margarita’s Flight
You have to rise up into the air if you want a bird’s-eye view of a scene. Mikhail Bulgakov ends his novel The Master and Margarita with Margarita’s and the Master’s departure from Moscow and their flight to freedom. The scene of the last meeting with the magician, Woland, and his entourage is set in the Sparrow Hills, high above the city.
Moscow, 1937 Page 3
