Russian Historians and the Soviet State

453 Pages·1962·12.64 MB·English

by  Konstantin Scteppa

Russian Historians and the Soviet State

Russian Historians
and the Soviet State
K O N S T A N T I N F. S H T E P P A
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY
Copyright © 1962 by Rutgers, The State University
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 61-10266
Manufactured in the United States of America by H. Wolff, New York
This book was written and translated under the auspices of the
Research Program on the USSR, an organization established by the
East European Fund of the Ford Foundation.
It was manufactured with the assistance of a grant from
the Ford Foundation to the Rutgers University Press.
Foreword
by Alexander Dallin
“My father, Feodosii Shteppa, was an Orthodox priest. My mother, Neolila,
descended from a Ukrainian family of noblemen, Labunsky.” So Konstantin
F. Shteppa began his “autobiography” when he came to the United States in
1952. Life—first in the Soviet Union, then as a refugee in Germany—had
taught him to have his life history ready.
He was bom on December 3 [15], 1896, in the town of Lokhvitsa, in the
province of Poltava (Ukraine), where his father’s family had settled, having
emigrated from Germany several generations earlier. At his father’s insistence,
the young Konstantin began his studies at the Theological Seminary in Poltava
(1910-1914) and went on from there to the University of Petrograd (1914-
1916). He had to interrupt his studies for military service as an infantry
officer, first in the tsar’s armies, then in the civil war with the “Whites.” He
was wounded and taken prisoner in November, 1920.
After the war, he settled in Nezhin, near Kiev, to complete his studies at
the local faculty of history and philology. In 1927 he was awarded a Doctorate
of Philosophy in history. His interest had, at an early date, turned to problems
of social history and particularly to antiquity. His publications were an indi­
cation of this preoccupation, as he rapidly advanced among the ranks of the
Soviet historians of the interwar period. From 1922 on he taught at the teach­
ers’ college in Nezhin, first as instructor, then as professor. In 1930 he was
appointed professor of ancient and medieval history at Kiev University. At
the same time he was Senior Research Associate of the Academy of Sciences
of the Ukrainian SSR, where he soon became chairman of the committee for
Byzantine studies.
The 1930’s constitute his main professional experience. Having first con­
centrated on demonology and ancient legends, he shifted his attention to
social revolts in ancient Rome and especially in Roman Africa. This subject
was to remain his especial interest for the rest of his life. At the same time he
reviewed the whole Marxist analysis of antiquity. Politics inescapably crept
into professional and personal life.
These were the years of victorious Stalinism, of purges and trials. Konstan­
tin Shteppa’s record was bound to look suspicious to the zealots of the NKVD.
In fact, there were curious vacillations which were not easily explained. He
had fought with the “Whites,” but could by no means be called a reactionary,
for he had a lively social conscience and a sense of compassion and progress.
He had come from a devout Orthodox milieu and had become interested in
Roman Catholicism, but he had also developed an expert understanding of
Marxism. For the officials of Stalin’s police, his father’s “social position” as
Orthodox priest was in itself a mark of unreliability, as was his “escapist” pre­
occupation with ancient and medieval history.
In February, 1938, at the height of the purges, Shteppa was arrested. He
was held as a political prisoner until after the outbreak of World War II, in
September, 1939. The experiences of that year and a half form, as it were, a
caesura in his life. If until then he was adjusted to Soviet life—whatever his
mental reservations and grievances—primarily absorbed in the pursuit of his
scholarly work, henceforth he was forcibly “politicized,” concerned with a
reassessment of his own values, with a search for answers to the bedeviling
dilemmas of intellectual life under totalitarianism. And, even though after his
release from prison he continued to write and publish until the German attack
on the USSR in June, 1941, he became alienated from the Soviet milieu.
In these terms his decision, made that summer, not to leave Kiev when the
Germans approached becomes intelligible. All had seemed lost under Stalinism
—including the hope for a better future. In the first days after the departure
of the Russians, he hoped that a new and freer life could begin. The remain­
ing colleagues elected him Rector of Kiev University. But the tragedy was soon
to unfold. The Germans closed the university. Arrests, abuse, shootings, and
hangings rapidly assumed proportions unprecedented even in the worst days
of Soviet terror. The next two years were to cause Shteppa the greatest amount
of anxiety and soul-searching, involving him in choices which most of his
friends found impossible to understand, and leading him to espouse positions
which were to net him public recrimination in later years. Having committed
himself initially to the imperative of collaboration with any system that was
willing and able to topple the Bolsheviks, he felt constrained to stick to his
commitment. He deemed it his duty to live up to his own earlier call to support
what he now realized was cruel, humiliating, and destructive of the fragile
life and phantom liberty that the citizenry possessed. He buttressed his argu­
ment by invoking historical precedents, such as the necessity of the Muscovite
princes to be vassals of the Tatar khan before attaining independence, and by
granting from the outset that collaboration with a foreign occupier was bound
to be a humiliating, self-sacrificing, and onerous experience. As editor of the
Kiev Russian-language newspaper under the Germans, he was in an exposed
position, attacked by, among others, both Ukrainian nationalists and Com­
munists.
Having broken intellectually and emotionally with what Bolshevism stood
for, and having by his wartime record cut himself off from the Soviet cause,
he left for Germany before the Red Army returned to Kiev in 1943. There
followed years of tribulation, occupied in menial jobs in university libraries
in West Germany and some capable journalism in the émigré press (under the
pseudonyms of N. Gromov and V. Lagodin). From 1950 to 1952, Shteppa
was Russian-language instructor at the United States Army school in Oberam-
mergau, while also serving on the Council of the newly established Institute
for the Study of the USSR in Munich. Under improving conditions, he was
returning to serious work, though in fields remote from his earlier professional
interests.
In September, 1952, he migrated to the United States. For the next three
years he was associated with the Research Program on the USSR, a subsidiary
of the East European Fund, Inc., established to help refugee scholars return
to scholarly work under American standards and conditions.
It was then that he wrote the manuscript which is the substance of this
book. While continuing to work on his old favorites (such as the slave revolt
in North Africa), Shteppa became increasingly absorbed in his efforts to re­
construct and understand the life and times of the Soviet historian and the
highways and byways of Soviet historiography. To this task he brought the
same unique combination of personal experience, surgical detachment, and
incisive analytical ability which, a few years earlier, had made his Russian
Purge and the Extraction of Confession (co-authored with F. Beck, under the
pseudonym of W. Godin) so remarkable a contribution to die study of the
USSR. His work on Soviet historiography yielded valuable results precisely
because of his ability to fuse meticulous research with personal experience.
It was these historical studies as well as essays on the nature of totalitarian­
ism which occupied him during the last years of his life, while he worked as
a research analyst for the American Committee for Liberation. He died in
New York on November 19, 1958.
The manuscript upon which this book is based had been completed at the
time of his death, and it was prepared for publication by William L. Blackwell
with the assistance of a grant from the Research Program on the USSR. With
a view to bringing the account up to date, two important recent statements of
the Communist Party concerning its view of the proper role of historical stud­
ies have been included as an Appendix.
A Selective Bibliography
of the Publications of Konstantin F. Shteppa 1
Books and Monographs
Narysy z istorii antychnoi i khrystyanskoi demonologii [Essays on the History
of Ancient and Christian Demonology]. 2 vols. Nezhin: Instytut Narod-
noi Osviti, 1926-1927. Vols. VI-VH of Zapysky Instytuta.
Selianski rukhy v rymskii imperii [Peasant Revolts in the Roman Empire].
Nezhin: Instytut Narodnoi Osviti, 1930.
Marks, Engels i problemy antychnoho sposobu produktsii [Marx, Engels, and
Problems of the Mode of Production in Antiquity]. Kiev: Academy of
Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, 1934.
Revoliutsiia rabov v antichnom mire [Slave Revolutions in the Ancient World].
Kiev: Politizdat, 1941.
[W. Godin, pseud., co-author with F. Beck], Russian Purge and the Extrac­
tion of Confession, New York: Viking Press, and London: Hurst and
Blacket, 1951.
[V. Lagodin, pseud.], Sovetskaia sistema upravleniia massami i ee psikholo-
gicheskie posledstviia [The Soviet System of Governing the Masses and
Its Psychological Consequences]. Munich: Institute for the Study of
the USSR, 1951.
1. Compiled with the assistance of Mr. Norman Saul.
Articles
“Problemy antychnoho religiinoho synkretyzma v zviazku z motyvamy staro-
ukrainskoi lehendamoi tvorchosty” [Problems of Religious Syncretism in
Antiquity in Relation to the Motifs of Early Ukrainian Folklore], Per-
visne uhromadianstvo ta ioho perezhytky na Ukraini (Kiev), Nos. 1-3
(1927), pp. 114-127.
“Pro kharakter peresliduvannia vidom v starii Ukraini” [On the Character of
the Persecution of Witches in Early Ukraine], ibid., Nos. 2-3 (1928),
pp. 64-80.
“Do ukrainskikh perekaziv pro sotvorennia pershoi liudyny” [Concerning
Ukrainian Explanations of the Creation of the First Man], in Iuvileinyi
zbirnyk na poshanu akademyka Mikhaila Serhiievicha Hrushevskoho
(Kiev, 1928).
“Problema klasovoi borotby v antychnii formatsii za Marksom i Engelsom”
[The Problem of the Class Struggle in the Social Structure of Antiquity
According to Marx and Engels], Naukovy zapysky Instytuta Istorii
materialnoi kultury (Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, Kiev),
I (1934), pp. 103-123.
“Vosstanie Stotsy, 536-546 gg.: K istorii rev[oliutsionnykh] dvizhenii v
Rimskoi Afrike” [The Revolt of Stotzas, 536-546: Concerning the
History of Revolutionary Movements in Roman Africa], Vestnik drevnei
istorii (Moscow), Nos. 3-4 (14-15) (1940), pp. 115-130.
“Mify i legendy pry vykladanni istorii Gretsii i Ryma” [Myths and Legends
in Accounts of Greek and Roman History], Komunistychna Osvita (Kiev),
No. 8 (1940), pp. 38-47.
“Das Dritte Rom,” Die Sammlung (Göttingen), IV (1949), pp. 422-430.
[V. Lagodin, pseud.], “O nekotorykh zakonomemostiakh ptolomeizma” [Con­
cerning Certain Regularities in Ptolemeism], Vestnik (Institute for the
Study of the USSR, Munich), I (1951), pp. 84-102.
“Stalin i ideologicheskaia borba v partii ko vremeni XIX-go syezda” [Stalin
and the Ideological Struggle in the Party at the Time of the Nineteenth
Congress], Materialy konferentsii . . . 22-22 marta 1953 g. (Munich:
Institute for the Study of the USSR, 1953), pp. 9-22.
“The ‘Lesser Evil’ Formula,” in Rewriting Russian History: Soviet Interpre­
tations of Russia's Past, ed. by C. E. Black (New York: Frederick A.
Praeger, for the Research Program on the USSR, 1956), pp. 107-120.