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The Shattered Self of Komsomol Civil War Memoirs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Sean Guillory
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Abstract

The Russian civil war was a fratricidal climax of seven years of war and revolution that fractured Russian society. Its traumatic effects on postrevolutionary life are beyond measure. In this article Sean Guillory examines memoirs of Komsomol civil war veterans to illuminate the ways the war shaped their sense of self. Guillory argues that veterans' memoirs reveal a shattering of the self where their efforts to narrate their experience as agents of war was overshadowed by their transformation on the batdefield into instinctual beings, imprisoned by emotions, senses, nerves, and muscles. Guillory engages the scholarship on the Soviet self and subjectivity by calling attention to the ways trauma produces a “darker side” of the self, and in particular, how the body serves as a long-term depository for experiences of loss, disorientation, and deprivation.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , Fall 2012 , pp. 546 - 565
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2012

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References

I am indebted to many people for their time, comments, and insights in the development of this article. They include Arch Getty, Anne Gorsuch, Jared McBride, Karen Petrone, Christine Worobec, and Benjamin Zajicek. Special thanks to the anonymous readers for the Slavic Review, the participants of the Midwest Russian History Workshop, October 2010, Mark D. Steinberg, Lewis Siegelbaum, Sasha Steinberg, and especially, Maya Haber. Fulbright-Hays provided research funding.

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5. According to the Istmol worker L. M. Gurbich, “The material was collected very quickly within two or three weeks and part of it was taken from earlier publications. Everything that was used appeared as it was received without any changes or any kind of editorial corrections.” L. M. Gurbich, “V Moskovskom istmole (iz vospominanii),” in V. V. Dolgov and A. A. Galagan, eds., Pozyvnye istori (Moscow, 1982), 241.

6. It is difficult to know exactly how many recollections were published in the 1920s and early 1930s. They tended to be in small print runs and many now no longer exist. For this article, I examined dozens of veterans’ recollections published between 1926 and 1933 as excerpts in newspapers and journals, in books, or as edited collections. In addition, I also consulted a number of unpublished recollections found in the depository of Istmol, Komissiia po izucheniiu istorii iunosheskogo dvizhenie v SSSR pri TsK VLKSM, in the Komsomol archive Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. 26M. The authors range from members of the Komsomol Central Committee, to local activists, former unidentified members, and even the completely anonymous. Of all the cited memoirists, I know the fate of only one, D. Khanin, who was shot in 1937. For examples of civil war obituaries, see RGASPI, f. 26, op. 1, d. 39,11. 53, 86, 88. Many necrologies published during the war became the basis for a remembrance book of over 300 Komsomol martyrs. See Istmol, , Bezumstxm khrabykh poem my slavu (Moscow, 1929).Google Scholar Other examples are included in E. D. Stasova and T. V. Bataeva, eds., V kol'tse frontov: Molodezh' v gody grazhdanskoi voiny, sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1963). For examples of tributes to fallen Komsomol leaders, see Feigin, V., “Pamyati Gerasima Feigina,” Iunyi proletarii, 1923, no. 1–2 Google Scholar; Feigin,“Vechaia pamiat bortsam, pogibshim za delo proletariata,” Iunyi kommunist, 1921, no. 6; I. Skorinko, “Aleksandr Zinovév,” Iunyi proletarii, 1924, no. 7; Skorinko, “Vasia Alekseev,” Iunyi proletarii, 1924, no. 6.

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9. Khanin, D., Universitet moego pokolenie (Moscow, 1930), 34.Google Scholar

11. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 13.

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17. For the destabilizing effects of the civil war on the community in Saratov and on the narratives of the self that resulted, see Raleigh, Experiencing Russia's Civil War, chaps. 6 and 8.

18. A. Malovechkin, Bolshevistskoi tropoi: Vospominaniia starogo komsomoltsa (Kharbarovsk, 1933),4.

19. RGASPI, f. 26M, op. 1, d. 56,1. 125.

20. Nikolai Lunev, “Blind Faith in a Bright Future,” in Nikolai K. Novak-Deker, ed., Soviet Youth: Twelve Komsomol Histories (Munich, 1959), 25.

21. Il'ia Novskii, Tripolskaia tragediia (Moscow, 1928), 13. The Tripole Massacre occurred on 15 June 1919 when an estimated 80 members of the Komsomol were killed by Greens outside the town of Tripole in Ukraine.

22. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia's Civil War, chap. 8.

23. Some historians have read these winding roads to Bolshevism as a narrative of political maturation. It is important, however, to emphasize these as memories of confusion because these periods of disorientation influenced their understandings of the revolution and their place in it.

24. Corney, Telling October, 84.

25. Malovechkin, Bolshevistskoi tropoi, 5. A. Andreev described all the political speeches: “Everyone's tongues twirled—Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, Kadets, and others. As life went on and the days got noisier and bubbled over like a powerful river in a flood.“ RGASPI, f. 26M, op. 1, d. 56,1. 38.

26. M. Afonin and A. Iurtsev, eds., Na front i na fronte: Sbornik vospominanii (Moscow, 1927), 2.

27. Ibid., 70-71. On the rejection of Trotskii in the Komsomol, see Anne E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington, 2000), 8 5 - 86; Ralph Talcott Fisher, Pattern for Soviet Youth: A Study of the Congresses of the Komsomol, 1918-1954 (New York, 1959), 113-17.

28. Peter Holquist describes the sublimation of people's political behavior during the civil war as a result of the “social theory of representation” where “political movements cast themselves as the embodiment of particular social groups and imposed their own projects onto people's often very messy political behavior.” Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution, 143-57. I would add that violence played a vital role in this process.

29. Corney, Telling October, 85.

30. Malovechkin, Bolshevistskoi tropoi, 19-20.

31. Borodin, N. M., One Man in His Time (New York, 1955), 17–18.Google Scholar

32. Malovechkin, Bolshevistskoi tropoi, 22.

33. Novskii, Tripolskaia tragediia, 16.

34. Afonin, M. and Gurvich, A., eds., Boevye dni: Ocherki i vospominaniia komsomol'tsevuchastnikov Grazhdanskoi voiny (Moscow, 1929), 55.Google Scholar

35. Afonin and Iurtsev, eds., Na front i nafronte, 42.

36. Ibid., 74.

37. Leed, No Man's Land, 16.

38. Afonin and Gurvich, eds., Boevye dni, 56. R. Vasil'eva, Pervyi komsomolki (Moscow, 1932), 35. A. Andreev also noted the tears of the parents as their sons left for the front. RGASPI, f. 26M, op. 1, d. 56,1. 40.

39. Afonin and Gurvich, eds., Boevyedni, 124.

40. Ibid., 6.

41. Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York, 1975), 7.Google Scholar

42. Afonin and Gurvich, eds., Boevye dni, 108. Emphasis added.

43. Ibid., 7.

44. Balashov, A., Otriad v ogne: Istoricheskii ocherk o komsomolskom otriade epokhi grazhdanskoi voiny (Moscow, 1931), 21.Google Scholar

45. Afonin and Gurvich, eds., Boevye dni, 6.

46. Balashov, Otriad v ogne, 21.

47. Afonin and Gurvich, eds., Boevye dni, 112; Afonin and Iurtsev, eds., Na front i na fronte, 20.

48. Afonin and Gurvich, eds., Boevye dni, 20.

49. Afonin and Iurtsev, eds., Na front i nafronte, 67.

50. Vasil'eva, Pervyi komsomolki, 106-13; Stasova and Bataeva, eds., V kol'tse frontov, 63; Afonin and Gurvich, eds., Boevye dni, 86; A. Dorokhov, V shkole v revoliutsii (Moscow, 1931), 28.

51. Afonin and Gurvich, eds., Boevye dni, 127.

52. Ibid., 147.

53. Ibid., 23-24.

54. Tsentral'nyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Moskvy, Moskovskii komitet VLKSM, f. 634, op. 1, d. 98,1. 4.

55. Afonin and Iurtsev, eds., Na front i na fronte, 50.

56. Ibid., 133.

57. Ibid.

58. Khanin, Universitet moego pokolenie, 22.

59. Vasil'eva, R., “Komsomolki boevykh otryadov,” Molodezh’ v revoliutsii 1, no. 1 (1931): 91.Google Scholar

60. Hynes, Samuel Lynn, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York, 1997), 5.Google Scholar

61. Leed, No Man's Land, 126-30; Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, chap. 4.

62. Leed, No Man's Land, 126.

63. Khanin, Universitet moego pokolenie, 23, 25.

64. Afonin and Iurtsev, eds., Na front i na fronte, 46 — 48.

65. Afonin and Gurvich, eds., Boevye dni, 44.

66. Ibid., 23.

67. Afonin and Iurtsev, eds., Na front i na fronte, 121.

68. Khanin, Universitet moego pokolenie, 23-24.

69. Afonin and Gurvich, eds., Boevye dni, 78.

70. Ibid., 29, 31.

71. Afonin and Iurtsev, eds., Nafront i na fronte, 25.

72. Ibid. Eduard Dune gives a similar description of interrogation in Eduard M. Dune, Notes of a Red Guard, trans, and ed. Diane P. Koenker and S. A. Smith (Urbana, 1993), 161-69.

73. Afonin and Gurvich, eds., Boevyedni, 11-12.

74. Ibid., 13-14.

75. RGASPI, f. 26M, op. 1, d. 114,1. 11.

76. Hynes, Samuel, “Personal Narratives and Commemoration,” in Winter, J. M. and Sivan, Emmanuel, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 218.Google Scholar

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79. On the devastating effects of the period on Russian society, see Gatrell, Peter, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (2000; Bloomington, 2005)Google Scholar; Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation; I. V. Narskii, Zhizn’ v katastrofe: Budni naseleniia Urala v 1917-1922 gg. (Moscow, 2001); Merridale, Catherine, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (London, 2000).Google Scholar

80. Historians have unwittingly used the language of trauma to describe the period. Moshe Lewin wrote that the period caused “sudden shocks,” “shock waves,” and “waves of unsetding events.” In commenting on the demographic impact of the war, William Rosenberg, citing Carol Hayden, wrote tiiat the civil war “had an overwhelming traumatic effect on Russian society,” a premise, he noted, that few doubted. Haimson, “Civil War and the Problem of Social Identities,” 25; Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York, 1985), 296 Google Scholar; Rosenberg, William G., “Commentary: The Elements of Social and Demographic Change in Civil War Russia,” in Koenker, Rosenberg, and Suny, eds., Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War, 123.Google Scholar

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83. Anna Krylova suggests a similar perspective on Soviet man in Anna Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 138.