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

Reviewed by: Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika by Barbara Martin Kevin M. F. Platt Martin, Barbara–Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 293. In late 1965, the historian Aleksandr Nekrich published a short book, aimed at a broad readership, concerning the Nazi invasion of the USSR entitled June 22, 1941. Nekrich held a position in the Institute of History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and was a member and sometime secretary of its Party Committee. His book was released by Nauka (Science), the authoritative publisher of the Academy of Sciences. Considering the politically sensitive nature of the topic, it had been subjected to extensive censorship and vetted by the KGB and representatives of the Soviet armed forces. Nevertheless, as a direct result of the publication of this slim volume, two years later he was expelled from the Communist Party "for the deliberate distortion in the book June 22, 1941 of the politics of the Communist Party and the Soviet Government on the eve and at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, which was used by foreign reactionary propaganda for anti-Soviet purposes" (p. 121). Although he kept his job, over the subsequent nine years, his career and activities were curtailed as he was forced by degrees into a condition of [End Page 223] "internal emigration," until finally, in 1976, he in fact emigrated from the USSR, landing eventually in the United States. Nekrich's story is a central example in Barbara Martin's informative monograph Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union. Martin tells the stories of four authors—Nekrich, along with the nonprofessional historians Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, Roy Medvedev, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—each of whom articulated nonconformist accounts of Soviet history that may be termed, to varying degrees and at various historical moments, "dissident." Over the past two decades, a number of scholars, including Serguei Oushakine in his 2001 Public Culture article "The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat" (vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 191–214) and Aleksei Yurchak in Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (2006), have argued that the Cold War conception of Soviet official discourse and dissent as opposites and implacable foes, locked in battle, should be revised in favour of a more nuanced understanding of their extensive middle ground, fuzzy borderlines, and entangled extremes. Martin's work presents just such a nuanced analysis. Martin's monograph includes eight chapters, chronologically organized, that follow the fates of these historians and of their works. Its historical arc begins with the post-Stalin "Thaw" under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, whose so-called 1956 Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (which, in short order, became anything but secret) legitimated (some) historical inquiry into the state-sponsored violence of the Stalin years and into the biographies of some (but not all) of its victims, who were now subject to rehabilitation, often posthumous. This era formed the context in which each of the figures Martin studies undertook research concerning the excesses of the Stalinist era and their place in Soviet history. The monograph proceeds through the moment of Khrushchev's ouster in 1964 and replacement by Leonid Brezhnev, which led to a partial reversal of official positions on the historical legacies of Stalinism and to policies of active repression directed toward those who, like Martin's subjects, continued inquiry into the darker pages of Soviet history. The middle chapters of the volume concern these processes of state repression, which led eventually to Solzhenitsyn's expulsion, as well as Nekrich's emigration, and also the response of all four authors to suppression of their works in the USSR: circulation of their works via the circuits of Samizdat (self-publication) and publication in the West (Nekrich, the most cautious, or conformist, of the four, took this step only following his emigration). The terminus of Martin's story is the reemergence of these authors and their works into publication and public life in the USSR during its final years, when Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of Perestroika and Glasnost led to a new and radical wave of public...

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