One Day We Will Live Without Fear: Everyday Lives Under the Soviet Police State

248 Pages·2016·2.779 MB·English

by  Mark Harrison

One Day We Will Live without Fear

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Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 665
Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University, Stanford, California 94305-6003
Copyright © 2016 by Mark Harrison
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Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8179-1914-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8179-1916-0 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8179-1917-7 (mobi)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8179-1918-4 (PDF)
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE: The Mill
CHAPTER TWO: Truth Hurts
CHAPTER THREE: Heretics
CHAPTER FOUR: The Mafia
CHAPTER FIVE: You Have Been Warned
CHAPTER SIX: A Grand Tour
CHAPTER SEVEN: One Day We Will Live without Fear
Conclusion
Afterword: Fact and Fantasy in Soviet Records
Endnotes
References
Index
To my sisters and brother: Elizabeth, Dinah and Joyce, and John and Anne
Preface
Remembering how in so strange a time
Common integrity could look like courage.
“Talk” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1960)1
“
P
eople in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the
Soviet Union have no heart, and those that do regret it have no brain,”
Russian President Vladimir Putin told German television viewers in 2005.2
His words suggested that to bring back the Soviet Union is desirable but
unrealistic.
What kind of a country was the Soviet Union? What was it really like?
No book could capture the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people
over several generations. But for some of those hundreds of millions on
some days, life was like this. They lived the stories in this book.
My stories tell of everyday lives in a police state. By accident or design,
ordinary people become entangled in the workings of Soviet rule. Famous
people step in and out of my stories, but the central characters are people
whose names will have been remembered only within their families: a
budding artist, an engineer, a pensioner, a government office worker, a
teacher, a group of tourists. The events are drawn from the 1930s to the
1970s. The first story takes place in the Far East on the Chinese border and
the last in the western borderlands of the Baltic region.
My stories are based on historical records. I found them while
investigating other matters in the Library & Archives of the Hoover
Institution, which holds many documents of the Soviet Communist Party
and state. I did not choose the stories by following a research design.
Rather, they chose me; they grabbed me and would not let me go. They
chose themselves for their humanity and their inhumanity, shining a clear
light on many tragic, funny, and bizarre aspects of Soviet life.
In every story, something happens that triggers an investigation. A
mistake is made, or is it something worse? Then, an investigation follows.
Who is to blame, and is the hand of the enemy at work in the events under
investigation? The evidence is often one-sided because the characters speak
only through the investigator. Some find a voice through witness statements
or interrogation summaries. Others find a voice when private conversations
are reported or intercepted. Some voices are not heard, but can be read
between the lines.
Chapter 1 (“The Mill”) takes place in wartime. An ambitious security
officer in a remote outpost plays a deadly game with local residents. His
superiors know and approve. Years later the story is uncovered. What sort
of vindication awaits the victims? The story provides background for later
chapters, including Stalin’s violent rule and the turn away from mass terror
after he died.
In chapter 2 (“Truth Hurts”), a woman comes back to work after sick
leave and is rushed into a decision that she gets catastrophically wrong. She
is a censor; the decision concerns a dubious political cartoon. Lots of people
suffer from her mistake—more than we know, probably, because this is
1937, the year of Stalin’s Great Terror.
Chapter 3 (“Heretics”) is set in Soviet universities and colleges in the
late 1940s. Each story begins with a denunciation. We see the many strange
ways in which teachers and scientists could get on the wrong side of each
other, their students, and the authorities. Every accusation is examined
minutely, no matter how ridiculous. The Paris Commune, potatoes,
genetics, relativity, and anti-Semitism all have their turn.
Chapter 4 (“The Mafia”) begins soon after Stalin’s death. Soviet life is
thawing. An old man with time on his hands writes to the local papers about
mismanagement and fraud on the local collective farm. At first he is
annoying; then he becomes a threat. The locals join forces against him: the
farmers, the party, the police, even the KGB. The old man ends up losing
everything. Then, Moscow steps in. But wait—whose side are you on?
By the time of chapter 5 (“You Have Been Warned”), the secret police
had learned to deal bloodlessly with dissent and deviance. It was cheaper
and kinder to frighten people than to kill them. A first line of defense was
the “preventive” interview. Some case histories are told from the 1960s and
1970s—straight, comic, and mysterious. This chapter dwells on the Kaunas
riots of 1972, a moment when secret policing failed.
Chapter 6 (“A Grand Tour”) recounts a visit by a group of Soviet tourists
to North America in 1970, seen through KGB eyes. It explains how Soviet
citizens got to travel outside their own country and the restrictions they
traveled under. Above all, it shows the trouble they could get into on their
travels. At any time they could bump into real or imagined spies or say or
do the wrong thing.
In chapter 7 (“One Day We Will Live without Fear”), an Israeli citizen
returns to Soviet Lithuania for a family reunion. The local KGB is
mobilized for her visit. The authorities call up past records, intercept letters,
tap phones, follow her in the street, interrogate neighbors, and call up
informants. What’s going on? The KGB asked the same question. We learn
something about the purposes of surveillance.
The book is laid out to meet the needs of more than one kind of reader.
The stories in each chapter can be appreciated by anyone, including those
with little previous knowledge of Russia or communism. For those who
come equipped with specialist knowledge or who wish to acquire it, every
chapter provides primary and secondary sources, including a list of archival
documents and what I have drawn from them in the context of the existing
scholarly literature. An afterword considers the reliability of Soviet archival
records and their relationship to historical truth.
From the 1930s to the 1970s, the Soviet police state underwent considerable
change. From something bloody and brutal it became sophisticated, refined,
and sparing. But the problem that the police state had to manage did not
change, and its underlying principles remained the same. These principles
are spelled out in chapter 1. In other chapters I refer briefly to these
principles from time to time, but I have tried to write in such a way that no
reader will feel obliged to flick back and forth between chapters in order to
follow the narrative.
In addition to this common message, the chapters of my book have a
common target, which is the human tendency to see the past as more
comfortable than the present. For memory has been kind to the Soviet state
and other states like it. Introducing his “inside story” of the secret police of
the German Democratic Republic (the GDR, or East Germany), Gary Bruce
wrote: