Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika by Martin Barbara (review)

SEER, 98, 3, JULY 2020 590 it explain ‘why women would “try even harder” and why men, many of whom found themselves equally powerless, did not “try” at all’ (p. 81). In some ways, men did try — Stiazhkina’s chapter describes the ‘hunt’ for scarce goods as one way for men to display their role as breadwinner — but more often the male role seems to be to reaffirm their dominance even in cases where their wives held a more prestigious position by making sure those wives spent time in the kitchen (Gosha and Katia, in several of the chapters). This hints at another theme, one brought out by Diane Koenker in her afterword: the theme of class. For all that the Soviet Union was in principle an egalitarian, classless state, in reality it was heavily stratified. Some of that stratification was geographic, though as Koenker notes, agricultural workers and professional food sector workers are essentially absent in the various chapters (pp. 323, 327). In many of the chapters, however, it becomes clear that showing off one’s ability to manipulate the present reality of scarcity, through accessing goods and through creative cookery, became a way of persevering in a society that contained at its base ‘food and gender discourses [that] were hypocritical, even cruel’, in which a promise of plenty was belied by a reality of cabbage and potatoes and a promise of equality was belied by a reality of inequitable labour (p. 3). Department of History Alison K. Smith University of Toronto Martin, Barbara. Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2019. xv + 293 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Timeline of events. Bibliography. Index.£85.00. Tens of millions of people in the USSR with higher education were obliged to study not only diamat (dialectical materialism) but also istmat (historical materialism), which claimed, inter alia, to prove scientifically that capitalism would, in time, barring a worldwide catastrophe, be succeeded everywhere by socialism and even, eventually, by the first stage of Communism (though how many Soviet people really believed this is highly questionable). To oversimplify, ‘What is truth?’ (istina) could be supplemented by ‘What is historical truth?’ (usually pravda — see pp. 69, 155 and chapter 7), which involved the key concept of zakonomernost´ (see p. 79, Gesetzmässigkeit in German, no English one-word equivalent). Allegedly, one can talk scientifically about the laws of history. The role of the individual person(ality) could, however, be stressed in some cases, such as Lenin (and currently Putin), or overstressed, as was admitted in the case of Stalin shortly after his death. Although the USSR was in REVIEWS 591 the lead in the movement towards worldwide socialism, geomat (geographical materialism) was never treated as an academic subject but rather taken for granted, given Russia’s Byzantine and Eurasian origins. An outsider can, therefore, hardly overestimate the shock, after the counter-coup in Moscow in August 1991, when the population was told that they would now be resuming the building of capitalism instead of continuing to construct socialism. What had gone wrong? It might have been thought impossible, but in her fascinating and beautifully organized monograph, based on a huge amount of reading, Barbara Martin does not provide a single sentence about istmat. Instead, she discusses the writings of four Soviet historians — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Roi Medvedev, Aleksandr Nekrich and Anton Antonov-Ovseenko — who were writing in the post-Stalin periods of Thaw and Afterthaw about their country’s recent domestic and/or foreign policies. All of them, perhaps to their surprise, lived beyond 1991 and, in my opinion (but not the author’s), were victims, heroes and ‘anti-Party’ rather than ‘anti-Soviet’ in their outlook (but see pp. 9 and 40). Both then and earlier they had to face up to two (it seems to me) particularly tricky problems. First, when did things begin to go badly wrong? Here, Solzhenitsyn was ahead of the other three — it seems to have taken even Nekrich until the early 1980s to realize that with the forcible closure of the Constitutional Assembly in early 1918 the Soviet regime, to put it mildly, lacked legitimacy. On the other hand, suppose...

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