Abstract
This chapter takes us to another case of institutional and field turmoil: high Stalinism after World War II. The Blockade of Leningrad had claimed more than one million victims and disrupted the work of economists, especially those at Leningrad State University. Adjusting to post-war life was its own challenge, but by 1948, the Leningrad Affair heralded a new wave of Stalinist repression aimed at Leningrad elites who led the city through the wartime Blockade. Part of this dynamic took place in public “discussions” as a tool to discipline economists and professors to make sure their “science” did not challenge the authority of elite or ideology. The threat to power, it seemed, was local-level fields: a profession grounded in the search for Truth and intimately linked to Marxism-Leninism, an institution (the university), and “science” as practice and identity that was supposed to transcend social reality. High Stalinism was not only a matter of a suspicious elite rooting out competition; it had a complex dynamic that ran through combinations of institutions that, in this case, came together in the university.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
“Discussions” were held at regular or ad hoc gatherings as opportunities for particular speakers to criticize certain pieces of writing or to indoctrinate listeners in latest instructions from the highest authorities (e.g. the Central Committee of the Communist Party). Later, we shall consider them as a form of social control.
- 2.
A representative sample to these studies is presented at the Internet project of the S.I.Vavilov Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences: http://www.ihst.ru/projects/sohist/.
- 3.
This tends to be the stereotypical view of the history of Lysenko and genetics: an opportunist using Stalinism to “warp” proper biological studies.
- 4.
This shift in the understanding of interests and behavior (albeit with different conclusions) was characteristic of official Soviet official, unofficial Soviet dissident discourse, and Western Sovietology.
- 5.
According to Evgenii Primakov, who evidently received information from one of the participants in the event, “Stalin did not participate in heated discussions, but sat in his office and listened to the speakers through his headphones” (Primakov 2015: 19). Primakov’s access to this kind of knowledge is not in doubt—he headed Soviet and Russian foreign intelligence—but the reliability of many statements pertaining to Stalin cannot be verified. This statement, rather, reflects the general atmosphere of that period. In any case, it is hard to believe that any of the participants in the discussion could observe Stalin in his office. Undoubtedly, Stalin carefully studied the materials and transcripts of the meetings.
- 6.
There was, apparently, an unspoken elite consensus that the Leningrad Affair was unjust. An indication of this is the fact that the surviving victims of the trials began to return from the camps shortly after Stalin’s death, while the process of their rehabilitation started as early as 1954. We should note that the post-Stalin practice of returning victims of repression from the Gulag did not mean their automatic rehabilitation, that is, the right to have legal judgments against them lifted. The process of mass rehabilitations of victims of the “Great Terror” of the 1930s began only at the end of the 1980s.
- 7.
According to the sphere of debates, published texts as the subject for “discussions” could be replaced with pieces of art or music. However, the latter required certain authoritative interpretations, while the former directly provided materials for criticism in the forms of quotations (often out of context) aimed to vilify “mistakes” and “deviations” on the part of the author. Sometimes subjects for “discussion” were provided by publications in leading Party or professional media, directives of the Central Committee, interventions of Stalin, and so on. In such cases, debates lacked well-defined targets for criticism, and participants were required to perform acts of “self-criticism” in light of “valuable instructions” received from above.
- 8.
Andrei Zhdanov’s son and, for some time, Stalin’s son-in-law through his short-lived (1949–1952) marriage to Stalin’s daughter Svetlana.
- 9.
This was formally connected with the discussion of a book by an important party functionary, Georgii Aleksandrov, The History of Western European Philosophy, which had been awarded the Stalin Prize. The administrative result of the discussion was that Aleksandrov lost his position as head of the propaganda and agitation division of the Central Committee. He was replaced by Mikhail Suslov, a future influential member of the Politburo and main Soviet ideologist of the Brezhnev era, who happened to be present at this discussion.
- 10.
This applied not only to texts but also to other forms of utterances in the space of public discourse. For example, in February 1948, the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a resolution on the opera “The Great Friendship,” which gave rise to a campaign to combat “formalism” in Soviet music.
- 11.
OA SPbSU [institutional archive, St. Petersburg State University], fond 1, opis—personal files of employees dismissed in 1942–1949, sviazka 32, delo 1496, list 51.
- 12.
TsGA SPb [Central State archive, St. Petersburg], fond 7240, opis 14, delo 1614, list 2.
- 13.
OA SPbSU, fond 1, opis—personal files of employees dismissed in 1955, sviazka 6, delo 156, list 66.
- 14.
TsGA SPb, fond 7240, opis 14, delo 1493, list 3.
- 15.
TsGA SPb, fond 7240, opis 21, delo 58, list 3.
Works Cited
Andreev, D.A. 2008. “Krasniy student” i politika proletarizatsii visshey shkoli. NLO 90. http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2008/90/an5.html.
Barghoorn, Frederick C. 1948. The Varga Discussion and Its Significance. American Slavic and East European Review 7 (3): 214–236.
Berezhnoi, A.F. 2005. V pervye poslevoennye gody: 1946–1954. K istorii Leningradskogo-Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta. St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg University Press.
Demidov, V., and V. Kutuzov. 1990. “Leningradskoe delo.” Sbornik. Lenizdat: Leningrad.
Domar, Evsey D. 1950. The Varga Controversy. American Economic Review 40 (1): 132–151.
Eliashova, L.L. 1998. “Papa” Voznesenskii. Neva 10: 147–159.
Esakov, V.D. 1994. Novoe o sessii VASKhNIL 1948 goda. In Repressirovannia nauka, vyp. 2, 57–75. St. Petersburg: Nauka. http://www.ihst.ru/projects/sohist/books/os2/57-75.htm. Accessed November 5, 2017.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 2008. Revisionism in Retrospect: A Personal View. Slavic Review 67 (3): 682–704.
Ganelin, R.Sh. 2004. Sovietskie istoriki: o chem oni govorili mezhdu soboi. St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia.
Gorlizki, Y., and O. Khlevniuk. 2004. Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gouldner, Alvin. 2003. Nastupaiushchii krizis zapadnoi sotsiologii, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. St. Petersburg: Nauka.
Kolesov, V.P. 2011. Ekonomicheskomu fakultety 70 let. Moscow: TEIS.
Kojevnikov, A.B. 1998. Rituals of Stalinist Culture at Work: Science and the Games of Intraparty Democracy circa 1948. The Russian Review 57: 25–52.
Leningradskii universitet za sovietskie gody, 1917–1947. 1948. Leningrad: Izdatelstvo LGU.
Manevich, V.E. 1991. Stalinizm i politicheskaia ekonomiia. In Repressirovannaia nauka, ed. M.G. Iaroshevskii, 181–198. Leningrad: Nauka.
Paneiakh, V.M. 1993. Uprazdnenie Leningradskogo otdeleniia Instituta istorii AN SSSR v 1953 g. Voprosy istorii 10: 19–27.
Pereira, N.G.O. 2011. Post-Soviet North American Historiography of Russia. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 53 (2/4): 513–525.
Peshekhonov, V.A. 1998. Alma mater: stranitsy istorii. Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta, Seriia 5 3: 89–95.
Primakov, E.M. 2015. Vstrechi na perekrestkakh. Moscow: Tsentpoligraf.
Raleigh, Donald. 2002. Doing Soviet History: The Impact of the Archival Revolution. Russian Review 61 (1): 16–24.
Sidorovskii, L. 1990. Gde zhe sovest, professor? In Leningradskoe delo, ed. V.I. Demidov and V.A. Kutuzov, 386–399. Leningrad: Lenizdat.
Stalin, I.V. 1952. Ekonomicheskie problemy sotsializma v SSSR. Moscow: Politizdat.
Voznesenskii, N.A. 1948. The War Economy of the USSR in the Period of the Patriotic War. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
Yurchak, A. 2006. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Zhirnov, E. 2011. Posle rasstrela Berii Malenkov vso vremia ulybalsia. Kommersant Vlast, 33. August 22. http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1752481. Accessed November 4, 2017.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Melnik, D. (2018). Repressive Fields: Economic Theory in Late Stalinism and the Leningrad Affair. In: Hass, J. (eds) Re-Examining the History of the Russian Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75414-7_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75414-7_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-75413-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-75414-7
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)