Living Soviet in Ukraine from Stalin to Maidan: Under the Falling Red Star in Kharkiv 1498523404, 9781498523400

Citation preview

Living Soviet in Ukraine from Stalin to Maidan

Living Soviet in Ukraine from Stalin to Maidan Under the Falling Red Star in Kharkiv By Michael T. Westrate

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Westrate, Michael T. Title: Living Soviet in Ukraine from Stalin to Maidan : under the falling Red Star in Kharkiv / Michael T. Westrate. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016007138 (print) | LCCN 2016010661 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498523400 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781498523417 (Electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Kharkiv (Ukraine)—Social life and customs—20th century. | Kharkiv (Ukraine)—Social conditions—20th century. | Kharkiv (Ukraine)—Biography. | Soldiers—Ukraine—Kharkiv—Interviews. | Soldiers—Family relationships—Ukraine—Kharkiv—History—20th century. | Communism—Social aspects—Ukraine—Kharkiv—History—20th century. | Ethnicity—Political aspects—Ukraine—Kharkiv—History—20th century. | Social change—Ukraine—Kharkiv—History—20th century. | Interviews—Ukraine—Kharkiv. | Oral history—Ukraine—Kharkiv. Classification: LCC DK508.95.K53 W47 2016 (print) | LCC DK508.95.K53 (ebook) | DDC 947.7/5—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007138

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Colonel Viacheslav Mikhailovich Romanenko, circa 1989.

Dedicated to the memory of Colonel Viacheslav Mikhailovich Romanenko Who lived in such a way that, even in death, his good name and reputation opened the doors and made the connections without which I could not have begun this project, much less finished it. Эта работа посвящается памяти полковникa Вячеславa Михайловичa Романенко Тому кто жил так, что даже после смерти, его доброе имя и репутация открывали двери и завязывали знакомства, без которых я не смог бы ни начать этот проект, ни тем более его закончить.

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

ix

Note on Transliterations

xiii

Preface xv Acknowledgments xvii 1 Introduction

1

2 Lived Environment, Lived History: Kharkiv and the Academy

31

3 Men and the Military: “New Soviet Military Men”

65

4 Women and Gender: “That’s Women’s Work!”

103

5 Ethnicity and Nationality: “My Address Is the Soviet Union!”

135

6 Religion: “Ours Is the Religion of Our Grandmothers”

155

7 Conclusions: Living Soviet

179

Epilogue 185 Appendix A: Interviewees

187

Appendix B: Questionnaire for First-Round Interviews

189

Appendix C: Questionnaire for Follow-Up Interviews

195

Bibliography 201 Index 223 About the Author

231 vii

List of Figures

Figure I.  Colonel Viacheslav Mikhailovich Romanenko, circa 1989. (Romanenko Family Collection.)

v

Figure 1.1. VIRTA officers and graduating cadets, 1969. Graphic highlights Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev. (Chikatev Family Collection.)

5

Table 1.1.  Interviewees, Breakdown by Category of Primary Identity for Interview Purposes.

15

Figure 1.2. VIRTA officers on parade in Dzerzhinskii Square, in front of the academy building, circa 1970. (Chikatev Family Collection.)

20

Figure 2.1. Kharkiv Ukraine, Geographical Position. (Map courtesy of Matthew Sisk, Center for Digital Scholarship, University of Notre Dame.)

33

Figure 2.2. Dzerzhinskii Square, as seen from above Shevchenko Park. The VIRTA academy is on the right, the Gosprom building is in the center, and Kharkiv State University (now V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University) is on the left. The statue of Lenin (installed in 1964) is at the lower right. This is essentially how the square has looked since the 1950s; it still looked like this in 2014. (Wikipedia Commons, open source use [2007]. http:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AKharkov_ Freedom_Square.jpg). 38 ix

x

List of Figures

Figure 2.3.  The Gosprom building, as seen from the VIRTA academy building. (Photo by Michael T. Westrate, April 5, 2011.)

39

Figure 2.4.  Dzerzhinskii Square, circa 1966. The VIRTA academy is on the right of the statue of Lenin, the Gosprom building is in the center, and Kharkiv State University (V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University) is on the left. A person standing on the square at the lower right provides a sense of scale. (Chikatev Family Collection.)

43

Figure 2.5.  The VIRTA academy building (now part of V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University), April 2011. (Photo by Michael T. Westrate, April 5, 2011.)

48

Figure 2.6.  VIRTA officers take it easy, circa 1970. (Chikatev Family Collection.)

50

Figure 2.7.  VIRTA cadets and their “foot soldiers” listen to rules in Gor’kii Park prior to war games, 1967. (Bolodian Family Collection.)

50

Figure 2.8a. “My Papa,” Tat’iana Vladimirovna Fikse, 1986. (Ovcharenko Family Collection). This is from a scrapbook that features all of Tat’iana’s immediate family members; descriptions of the others are not as focused on professional achievements.

51

Figure 2.8b. Translation of “My Papa” in figure 2.8a. The above details about military sports are from N.F. Lodiaev, Voennoe troebor’e (Moscow: Boenizdat, 1978).

51

Figure 2.9.  This warning was painted years ago on the back of a shed that forms part of the fence around the VIRTA sports complex. It is adjacent to the playground outside of the “family dormitory” at Prospekt Lenina #22a. It reads: “Comrade Parents! Do not allow your children onto military territory! It is dangerous to their lives!” (Photo by Michael T. Westrate, April 5, 2011.)

53

Figure 2.10. On the left is the “family dormitory” at Prospekt Lenina #22a, on the right is one end of the large apartment building that from its completion in 1988 until the mid-1990s was populated entirely by families of VIRTA faculty and staff, rank Lt. Colonel and higher.



List of Figures xi

Many of my respondents still live in this building. Photo taken from in front of what had been the VIRTA sports complex, April 2011. (Photo by Michael T. Westrate, April 5, 2011.) Figure 2.11. Officers parade, VIRTA sports complex, 1973. (Ovcharenko Family Collection.)

54 55

Figure 2.12. VIRTA cadets hydrate after the annual autumn cross-country race, mid-1970s. (Ovcharenko Family Collection.) 56 Figure 2.13. Cadets kick up dust marching through the park, mid-1970s. (Ovcharenko Family Collection.)

58

Figure 3.1.  A freshly graduated VIRTA officer kneels to kiss the Soviet flag, 1970. (Ovcharenko Family Collection.)

82

Figure 3.2.  Anatolii Vladimirovich Garev, retired Soviet Colonel. He and his VIRTA colleagues had spent their careers protecting the USSR from possible attack by the USA; one of his department’s specialties was defense against the American Minuteman missile. On a trip in 1995, he brought his old Soviet uniform all the way from Ukraine to Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois, just so that he could take this picture, “flipping off” an actual Minuteman missile. (Garev Family Collection.)

95

Figure 4.1.  Liudmila Petrovna Chikateva, career woman and wife of a VIRTA colonel, circa 1965. (Chikatev Family Collection.) 109 Figure 4.2.  Elena Petrovna Ovcharenko, homemaker and wife of a VIRTA colonel, circa 1965. (Ovcharenko Family Collection.) 119

Note on Transliterations

Russian and Ukrainian transliterations herein are spelled according to the respective Library of Congress system for each language, unless an author has already converted his or her name into English, in which case I follow that transliteration. For some place names, I have dropped the soft sign from both the Russian and the Ukrainian. Thus, Khar’kov in Russian is here spelled “Kharkov”; Donets’k in Ukrainian is spelled “Donetsk.” Otherwise, the Library of Congress systems are followed throughout. “Kharkiv” is the Ukrainian name; “Kharkov” is the Russian. I use the transliteration from Ukrainian, because that is the accepted convention in English-language scholarly work today. However, all of my subjects use the Russian name, so in quotations from Russian-language interviews, it appears as “Kharkov.”

xiii

Preface

It is unavoidable that we bring our preconceived notions with us to other countries, even when we go there specifically to study a society’s particular characteristics. We bring not just our preconceived notions about that country, its peoples, its culture, and its history, but also about how the world works and how it should work. These ideas inevitably, inexorably, color not only what we choose to study and whom we choose to interview, but also the questions that we ask and the way in which we ask them. Thus, if we really want to understand the history of a place and its peoples, our first task is to subdue our own understandings—even our worldviews and frames of reference—and try to comprehend the world as it is seen by our subjects. This ideal is not only a difficult goal; it is an impossible one to achieve. That does not mean that we should not try. If real understanding is the goal, rather than a scholarly work driven by political, ideological, or religious motives, then striving diligently to subdue our biases, especially while we are at the research stage, is essential. Once we have reached better understanding, then we can bring our own conceptions back for the analysis phase. While I held to this theoretical goal throughout my project, the people of Kharkiv taught me just how difficult is its practical application. I went to Ukraine to study military officers as representatives of the Soviet “middle strata”; I now understand that they were actually elites, paragons of Soviet values and personifications of the state. I went to Kharkiv to study their wives as a subjected group; I now understand that many had considerable power, even as they lived in a patriarchal society. I went there to study Russians in Ukraine; I came away understanding that, to them, they are still Soviets. I went to study atheists; I came to realize that many were actually religious, and had been even during the Soviet period. xv

xvi

Preface

The individuals of this study have helped me to see the degree to which they have been forced into boxes that do not fit, marked with labels that are inappropriate. This project is intended to help my readers understand Kharkiv’s people in their own words, on their own terms. I provide history and historiography as background, and I do analyze their responses, but I also do my best to let the sources dictate the conclusions. Overall, I hope that this study can contribute to a better understanding of the historical lives and living memories of eastern Ukraine—an understanding that rests not on preconceived notions, but on the notions of the people who live there.

Acknowledgments

This project could not have been started, much less finished, without an enormous amount of help. The assistance I received falls into two categories: in the first are those people without whom the project could not have been done at all; the second category includes all of the people and organizations without which this project would have been much different—and not as good. To all of you, I owe a deep debt of gratitude. The first category begins with Slavic Romanenko and includes all of the individuals interviewed for this project, especially the three who have since passed away. Special thanks go to those who made calls for me, set interviews, vouched for me, and generally shepherded me through the process—including my Ukrainian “little sister” and those who assisted with my transcriptions— you all know who you are, and spasibo bol’shoe! Without access to the ARTA-VIRTA archive and collection, now housed at the Ivan Kozhedub Air Force University museum in Kharkiv, verification of facts gleaned from my interviews would have been difficult, and in many cases impossible. The facility is a closed military museum, intended only for the use of Ukrainian military personnel. Thus, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Colonel Valerii S. Afanasenko, although I never met him in person, because he gave me permission to enter the museum as well as document and use the materials contained within it. The young officer who Afanasenko assigned to assist me in the museum was incredibly helpful, unusually thoughtful, and wonderfully personable—velyke spasybi! I do hope that neither of these officers experiences any difficulties because they helped me. My PhD advisor and dissertation committee chair, Semion Lyandres, provided essential wisdom and guidance at every step of the process. Most importantly, without his insights into Soviet history, I would have been unable to understand the context of my sources. Throughout my PhD studies, xvii

xviii

Acknowledgments

he never failed to challenge me—and my interpretations. All of his students know the question that he asks, over and over, about the books on our reading lists: “What’s missing from this book?” The answer is always the same, and provides the frame within which my analyses of Soviet history are now always bracketed. Semion Mikhailovich also showed me, by example, how to properly analyze oral history sources. Lastly, he allowed me to write the dissertation that I wanted to write, and for that I am truly grateful. The input of the rest of my dissertation committee was also essential to this project. During many long and enjoyable discussions, Jayanta Sengupta helped me to understand, incorporate, and employ effective research theories and strategies in order to illuminate and then analyze the “subterranean” within the lives of my respondents—and thus within Soviet society. Alexander Martin read the chapters as they were written—several of them multiple times—and gave invaluable feedback and insight at each step. Robert Fishman is owed my gratitude for his graciousness and willingness to sit on a committee for a student whom he had never met, in a department to which he is not attached. My family is also firmly in the first category. My mother—who read virtually everything I wrote during graduate school, including multiple drafts of every chapter of this book—is unfailingly supportive; she is my “secret weapon.” My father helped me work through many of the trickier bits of analysis; he also helped to keep me on track with my writing. My mother-inlaw took care of my daughters so that I could work the necessary long hours; she also helped in myriad ways that only she and I know. My daughters, Anastasia and Alexandra, provided the good humor, joy, and inspiration necessary to sustain those long hours without them. Most of all, my wife gave me everything I truly needed to complete both my graduate studies and this dissertation—including, but not limited to: nagging, assistance, support, and most of all, love. Thank you, Busia! To begin the second category, I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Notre Dame who were members of the Modern European History Writing Group with me. They each read multiple versions of all but one of these chapters and gave invaluable feedback. I would especially like to thank our mentor Alexander Martin, but also Nathan Gerth, Andrew Hansen, and Stephen Morgan. Without them, Alex and Stephen in particular, I likely never would have come to understand that my military officers were indeed part of the Soviet elite—and that they were elite in a particular and interesting way. Laura Carlson, Xiaobo Sharon Hu, John Lubker, and Brian Flaherty in the Notre Dame Graduate School gave me the time and flexibility I required to finish this project. Shari Hill Sweet cheerfully helped me to make sure the final product is formatted correctly; she and the rest of my friends in the Gradu-



Acknowledgments xix

ate School gave me the moral support that I definitely needed as I neared the finish line. Thanks to all of you! I would also like to thank the participants of the University of Notre Dame-Bielefeld University Exchange Workshop and the Midwest Russian History Workshop, who read different chapters of this dissertation (chapters 4, 5, and 6) at multiple meetings. From the ND-Bielefeld Workshop, I would especially like to thank Dietmar Wulff, Stephan Merl, Malte Griesse, Frank Wolff, and Gleb Albert. From the Midwest Russian History Workshop, I would specifically like to thank Bill Chase, Julia Fein, Ben Ekloff, John Bushnell, and Sergei Zhuk. Thanks also to the attendees of the panels on which I presented at the annual conferences of the American Historical Association, the Danyliw Research Seminar on Contemporary Ukraine, and the World History Association. I presented an early version of chapter 6 at the AHA; I benefitted greatly from the comments by Elizabeth Wood (Chair) and Abbott Gleason (Commentator) as well as those of my colleagues Maria Rogacheva and Sean Brennan. I presented a revised chapter 6 at the Danyliw Research Seminar; as Discussant for my paper, Frank Sysyn provided excellent feedback. At the WHA, where I presented a much-revised version of chapter 5, Beverly Knudsen and the other participants gave superb advice. Beyond feedback at formal events, this project has benefited from personal conversations with several extraordinary scholars. On visits to Notre Dame, Jehanne Gheith, Elizabeth Wood, Asli Baykal, Rex Wade, Gary Hamburg, Jan Gross, and Ron Suny all gave me vital input that improved both this dissertation and my understanding of Soviet history generally. I am also indebted to Volodymyr Kravchenko, whose warm willingness to help a student of Kharkiv’s history is greatly appreciated. His immense body of work on the city and its history provided many of the facts and much of the analysis of Kharkiv’s history that is reproduced here. Special thanks go to Sarah Hamilton, Hong-Ming Liang, and the other editors and reviewers of The Middle Ground Journal: World History and Global Studies [http://themiddlegroundjournal.org], who helped me to refine chapter 5, a version of which they published as an article in the spring of 2014. Professor Liang then allowed me to reprint it here, with few modifications. To Brian Hill and Eric Kuntzman, my editors at Lexington Books, as well as their peer reviewers, I send my thanks for care, flexibility, and reasonableness. I only wish that I could have followed all of the excellent advice I received through the process. For their warm and generous hosting, I would like to thank the faculty and students of V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, especially those in the School of Foreign Languages.

xx

Acknowledgments

Multiple sources of funding have made the research and writing of this manuscript possible. My thanks go to the Fulbright Program of the United States Department of State in Ukraine (Research Fellowship, 2010–2011), especially Inna Barysh, who always made me feel supported. The staff at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies (Dissertation Year Fellowship, 2011–2012) also has my enduring gratitude, especially Sharon Schierling, who bent the rules, and Denise Wright, who gave me a wonderful place to work for as long as I needed it. Other thanks go to: the Notre Dame Writing Program (Graduate Teaching Fellowship, 2013), the Nanovic Institute for European Studies (Graduate Initiative Grant, 2010), the Notre Dame Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (Graduate Student Research Award, 2010), the Notre Dame Graduate School (Berner Fellowship, 2013; Zahm Research Travel Grant, 2010; Grant for Advanced Language Study, 2009), and Indiana University–Bloomington (Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, 2009). Of course, despite all of the assistance mentioned here—which is present on every single page—any errors or omissions are my own.

Chapter One

Introduction

Because of the collapse, I have lived, in fact, two lives . . . On the one hand, we were born not in the best time period, and not in the best country . . . but on the other hand, I must tell you that, in general, I am satisfied with my life.1

What was it like to live in the Soviet Union? What was it like to live Soviet, to be Soviet? I have been asking these questions since I was a teenager during the Cold War. Attempts to answer them led me to history as a profession and Soviet history as a specialty. Having since studied Soviet political and intellectual elites, including researching and publishing about dissidents, I came to realize that those groups only represented tiny minorities in a very large and populous country. I wanted to know what life had been like for the rest of Soviet society—not just leaders and dissenters, but also the vast population who usually supported the regime, mostly accepted the rules, essentially internalized the ideology, and generally made the same choices as their neighbors and friends. These, for me, are “the Soviets”; it was they who lived Soviet lives. A solid foundation in historical theory has led me to focus on change over time, but the influence of postmodern ideas in history has allowed me to understand that sometimes continuities during times of upheaval can be even more important. Thus, in 2006—when I was in Kharkiv doing research for a different project—the fact that so many people described themselves as “Soviet,” even fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union, struck me as significant. Following from that realization, this project is an effort to answer the dual questions: What was it like to live Soviet in the Soviet Union from the 1960s on? What was—and is—it like to live Soviet in eastern Ukraine after the Soviet Union ceased to exist? This project examines a group of the last two Soviet generations from Kharkiv, Ukraine, covering their lives from childhood to the present. The 1

2

Chapter One

older individuals were born during the decade encompassing the Great Patriotic War (WWII, but for the sake of authentic tone, the Soviet label is used herein). Their children, most of whom were born in the 1970s, reached adulthood just as the Soviet Union crumbled—and are therefore members of what is arguably the last generation that can truly be called “Soviet.” The Brezhnev era, during which both generations came of age, was perhaps the most stable for the Soviet peoples; since then their world has turned upside-down more than once. By the 1970s, Kharkiv’s military professors and their families—the primary subjects of this book—had achieved lives of comfortable economic circumstances, professional prestige, and political influence as part of the upper stratum of a superpower. In the mid-1980s, their lives began to crumble along with the country that they had sworn to protect. In the 1990s, both their country and their lives fell apart. They were members of an elite group in the USSR; after its fall these men and their families suddenly found themselves adrift and fighting to survive. Today, many of them are part of Europe’s largest ethnic minority—Russians in Ukraine. Having always considered themselves Soviets, they woke up one morning to find themselves in a new and “foreign” country. Since the objective was to understand the lives of those who had most fully embraced the Soviet identity, my core group of interviewees are army colonels—professors and researchers from a Soviet military graduate school— along with their families. The bulk of my research has come from conducting face-to-face “life history” and follow-up interviews with these men, and also with their wives, children, and civilian contemporaries. Specifically, I studied the families of the military professors who taught at one of the elite post-baccalaureate military academies in the USSR. This academy, named The Marshall Leonid Aleksandrovich Govorov Higher Academy for (Air Defense) Radio Engineering [Voennaia inzhenernaia radiotekhnicheskaia akademiia imeni Marshala Sovetskogo Soiuza Govorova, L.A.], is called “VIRTA” or “Govorova” in common parlance. For the sake of consistency, “VIRTA” is used throughout this study. The academy is located in Kharkiv (“Kharkov” in Russian),2 the secondlargest city in the second-largest country in Europe; it is now the largest Russian-speaking city outside of the Russian Federation. In 2010–2011, I conducted sixty-five “life history” and follow-up interviews with a group of VIRTA officer-professors and their families, as well as fifteen interviews with their civilian counterparts from diverse social arenas, for a total of eighty interviews. The recorded question and answer periods averaged two hours and ten minutes each. The 3,000-plus pages of transcripts generated from these interviews provide the core of my evidence. Supplementing those sources with materials gleaned from personal, family, and institutional archives,



Introduction 3

I investigate how these families endured shifting social, cultural, and political realities—and show what those experiences have to offer the study of both Soviet and post-Soviet history. The intention in each chapter is to bridge the temporal and geographic boundaries created by the events of 1991, in order to better understand the themes that remain alive in the histories and memories of Kharkiv’s citizens. 1.1 METHODOLOGY: MICROHISTORICAL “PEOPLE HISTORY” Overall, scholarly work on Soviet history has tended to privilege the histories of Soviet leaders: apparatchiks, intelligentsia, and dissidents. While workers, farmers, and the USSR’s minorities have had attention paid to them by social historians, other groups in Soviet society have had less coverage. In my opinion, these kinds of studies are important and interesting, but they are only part of any societal picture. For example, if my Ukrainian friends want to know about the United States, I do not simply suggest that they read biographies of presidents and study demographic statistics about labor groups and farm yields. In addition to recommending written histories of these sorts, I tell them about my own life and how I live it. Starting from that basic stance, methodologically I endeavor to understand what it was like to be an individual in an historical time and place. When studying any historical period, the kinds of questions I ask are: •  What was life like for “normal” folks? •  What was considered “normal” in that time and place? What was “abnormal”? •  What did people consider to be “exemplary,” and how did that affect their definitions of “normal” and “abnormal”? •  How did individuals join together, and how did they relate, both as individuals and as groups, to the society as a whole? Inversely, how did society and its groupings relate to specific individuals? Since these are the primary questions that I seek to answer, this project is what I call a “people history,” or a “history of individuals.” In many ways, I am following the goals of Alltagsgeschichte [the history of everyday life], which are to study the down-to-earth, basic experiences of ordinary people in a society, and to find and prove the links between them and the broad cultural and socio-political changes which occur in that society. Since this is such a massively broad endeavor, it can only feasibly be practiced on the most

4

Chapter One

minute of scales. Therefore, it is a form of microhistory. Indeed, narrowing the scale is a vital part of the methodology, because by changing the scale of analysis and focusing on individuals and their personal relations within networks, microscopic observation can reveal factors previously unobserved, allowing us to explore the roles of social interaction and individual agency.3 This truly is history from the bottom-up. First and foremost, I am interested in people as individuals within networks, rather than as constituents of any group or society. After all, even those who were stalwart supporters of the Soviet collective were still individuals. This understanding of microhistory well suits a study of Soviet citizens, as it came first from Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi, who argued in War and Peace that history is made not by the deeds of great men and women but by the ensemble of collective actions of all those individuals involved in events.4 Writing about his theory of history, Tolstoi used the epic Battle of Borodino—which turned the tide against the French army during their invasion of Russia—as an example. He observed that the outcome “was not decided by Napoleon’s will but occurred independently of him, in accord with the will of the hundreds of thousands of individuals who took part in the common action.” Drawing a lesson from these events, Tolstoi concluded, “to elicit the laws of history we must leave aside kings, ministers and generals, and select for study the homogeneous, infinitesimal elements.”5 Tolstoi puts this as a top priority, given that previously historians had devoted only “one-millionth” of their attention to the actions of regular people.6 For current practitioners, “In the best of circumstances, microhistorical studies reveal in fine-grained detail how larger processes operate.”7 So, following Tolstoi’s understanding and the current practices of microhistory, I am interested in people as individuals—that, for me, is the foundation of their involvement in any network or society. Let us take a look at an example. Figure 1.1 shows the 1969 graduating class of Soviet military cadets from the VIRTA academy. Now, the history of Ukraine is itself an interesting topic, the Soviet army is an interesting topic, military education is interesting, and these men as a group are interesting. But what if we break it down to the level of the individual? Take the man circled in the picture as an example. His name is Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev, “Kolia” to his friends. He is a resident of Kharkiv, and in this picture, he was a recently graduated Soviet military officer. But what were his other identities? He was also an outdoorsman, a lover of sports, a tourist, a friend, and a son, brother, and cousin. Over time, he became a highly trained radar operator and a valued Soviet officer, sworn to uphold international communism and its citadel, the Soviet Union. By middle age,

Figure 1.1.  VIRTA officers and graduating cadets, 1969. Graphic highlights Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev.

6

Chapter One

Kolia had achieved elite status as a military professor and a decorated colonel. Then, overnight in 1992, he became an unemployed alien in a newly foreign country. In the years that followed, he transitioned from staunch atheist to agnostic believer. In 2010–2011, he was a mid-level government administrator. By 2011, he was once again economically comfortable, but he would never again be professionally elite; he was still Soviet, but he lived in independent Ukraine. A study of the lives of such men over time, along with those of their families and civilian contemporaries, can give us a better understanding of what it was like to live Soviet in Ukraine during the late Soviet (1960s–1991) and post-Soviet periods. Although they were from all areas of the USSR, these officers and their families lived, worked, and played together; this integration of the professional and personal was imposed on them by state planners who used this model across the Soviet Union. One’s profession often defined one’s peer group, and the families of VIRTA serve as an excellent example. These men personified the Soviet state both in the official propaganda before 1991, and in their memories during the decades that followed. They lived as elites in the Soviet Union and suffered greatly during and after its collapse. 1.2 METHOD: ORAL HISTORY Once I decided to write about individuals, oral history interviews and private archives were the obvious sources. Several general considerations contribute to the continuing importance of oral history in studies on the Soviet Union. First is the fact that the challenges of research on the USSR have not diminished since the fall of the communist regime. In particular, the issue of sources remains problematic despite the “archival revolution” that began during Gorbachev’s glasnost’.8 Throughout the Soviet period, imperfect archival conditions, neglect, and war all led to losses in the historical record. At least since the 1980s, “purges” of documentary evidence carried out by members of the KGB and others have led to even more losses—and because they were deliberate erasures, those losses were perhaps even more important.9 The second reason that oral history remains critical for studies of this type is the dubious nature of many written sources produced under the communist regime. In 1992, three recently ex-Soviet historians, Daria Khubova, Andrei Ivankiev, and Tonia Sharova, wrote an article that has since become canonical. In it, they expressed a truism about Soviet sources: “It is sometimes said, and it is almost true, that ‘for us the documents are subjective, and the only things which might be objective are the memories.’”10 For this reason, even for those who privilege archival and other written evidence, oral sources have



Introduction 7

long had a prominent place in the historiography of the USSR—both behind and beyond the iron curtain.11 Still more difficult for researchers of Soviet life is the issue that written records of many types never existed. For example, uncensored newspaper articles, candid diaries, and personal letters written without fear of reprisal are rare indeed in the former Soviet Union, even in private collections. Soviet citizens seldom created, even for themselves, wholly frank documentary records except for those that they knew would be unthreatening to the regime. This is especially true of records detailing repression, but in reality, gaps like this exist throughout the historical record of the Soviet people. According to Khubova et al., “The Soviet Union is perhaps the most remarkable case of all: a society, probably unique in the whole world, where remembering has been dangerous at least since the 1920s. The cumulative effect of fear of public remembering [including written records], together with the fact that so many families had members who were politically oppressed, and so had bitter memories, is very difficult for Western historians to understand.”12 The historiographies of other authoritarian societies undoubtedly have similar issues, but the Soviet case need not be unique for the problem to be real: repression affected every Soviet generation from the first to the last. While political and social histories have benefitted from new access to existing archives, there is still little reliable evidence about Soviet citizens as individuals, especially in terms of topics such as subjective identities and family life. The personal collections found in the state and party archives usually came from well-known public figures in the world of politics, science, and the arts. These people carefully selected their documents for donation to the state. The memoirs published in the Soviet Union were also generally unrevealing about the private lives of their authors, although there are some exceptions, particularly among those published after 1985.13 Memoirs by prominent dissidents and émigrés from the Soviet Union are no less problematic, although many scholars have treated them as the “authentic voice of the silenced.”14 By the 1980s and the height of the Cold War, the Western image of the Soviet regime was dominated by these intelligentsia narratives from dissidents that promoted a liberal idea of the individual as a force of internal opposition to Soviet oppression. This moral vision also had a powerful influence on the amateur memoirs written in massive numbers after the collapse of the regime.15 While these memoirs are representative of thousands of individuals who lived in the Soviet Union—particularly those who were committed to the ideals of individual freedom—they do not represent the millions of Soviet citizens who shared neither the desire to dissent nor a commitment to individual liberty.

8

Chapter One

One of the primary purposes of the creation and preservation of oral history is “to give voice to the voiceless.” What makes this task both imperative and difficult in the Soviet case is that the vast majority of the population was without a public voice—and therefore left no personal record behind. Even now, that legacy lives on, constraining individuals who self-censor out of habit or lingering fears of political persecution. In Ukraine, historians have turned increasingly to oral history. “The focus of Ukrainian [history] researchers is now on the reality of what narrators say—in fact this is extremely valuable, as it represents the restoration of historical justice and history in contrast to totalitarian ideology.”16 Therefore, despite the “archival revolution,” oral sources on the Soviet period remain essential—and the further 1991 recedes into the past, the fewer people remain who remember life in the USSR. Over the last twenty years, several scholars have risen to the challenge of creating new oral sources and historical analyses from the memories of former Soviet citizens, sources that are vital to a complete understanding of Soviet history.17 The timing is already becoming critical for potential sources who can remember living through the Stalin period. Since the recording of the memories of the Stalin generation is so urgent, scholars like Jehanne M. Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck, as well their counterparts in the former USSR, are working diligently with the oldest former Soviet citizens. However, even as the task of recording the eldest living generation continues, the memories of those born in the 1940s are also disappearing. While scholars such as Dalia Leinarte and Paola Messana are doing research that spans generations, Donald J. Raleigh and Sergei I. Zhuk are among the very first in any language to record the memories of what Raleigh has dubbed the “Sputnik Generation,” and the “Soviet Baby Boomers.” These scholars served as my oral history mentors by example; their works served as exemplars for this project. Despite their various foci, what connects oral historians such as these is the scholars’ desire to capture the voices of individuals of the former Soviet Union; what differentiates these scholars is the form they choose for their books. Narratives created by oral historians and their respondents are a particular kind of source that can take several shapes. Interviews are usually recorded by an audio or video recorder, and then transcribed later. For this project, I used a small voice recorder to make a record of every interview; they were transcribed in the months that followed my return to the United States. The decision of how to organize and present oral history interviews in published form is perhaps the most important decision that an oral historian must make. As one theorist of oral history put it, “the narrative created by the respondent is often only the first stage of a process by which the historian



Introduction 9

is intent on producing another narrative for an academic audience, one that weaves together the interview material gathered into a coherent and persuasive story of a different kind for a very different group of hearers.”18 An academic narrative of this type, based on oral sources, usually takes one of two general forms. An oral history book is typically either a primary source reader or it is an analytical monograph. Source readers such as Gheith and Jolluck’s Gulag Voices (2011), Messana’s Soviet Communal Living (2011), and Raleigh’s Russia’s Sputnik Generation (2006) typically present transcript texts that have been selected and edited; they also include introductory information and notes to provide some background and context for the intended audience. Analytical monographs such as Raleigh’s Soviet Baby Boomers (2011) and Zhuk’s Rock and Roll in the Rocket City (2010) foreground the contextualization, giving more of the scholar’s knowledge and organizing the source material to fit the scholar’s objectives and arguments. While the publication of transcript excerpts in a source collection allows readers to draw more of their own conclusions, well-executed monographs can provide depictions that are simultaneously more inclusive and more indepth. Of course, both categories have within them wide variations, and often an oral history project will result in both types. Sometimes, the sources are collected before the scholar knows the form that they will take; more often the historian creates sources to fit the planned result. From the beginning, my intention has been that this project be of the analytical monograph type, utilizing interviews with a select group of former Soviet citizens to discover answers to my broad research questions and to allow for an analysis of those answers in historical context. I developed the final questionnaires for this project by following the principles and “best practices” of oral history and then refining the questions through trial and error. The questionnaires, both for first-round life histories and for follow-up interviews, are included here in the appendices. These are the questions that I eventually used for the majority of the interviews. However, life history interviews— when done well—are not rigid, formal affairs, but rather informal, comfortable conversations.19 Thus, while these questions represented starting points for the conversations and reference points for the themes, not all of the transcripts include answers to every question or even to every type of question. 1.3 THE ISSUE OF REPRESENTATIVENESS Oral history today is primarily qualitative; its practitioners generally do not seek systematic investigations designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why oral history research,

10

Chapter One

unlike interview-based research in the social sciences, is generally exempt from review by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs).20 In oral history, the raw number of interviews matters less than the selection of interviewees, the questions asked, and the presentation and analysis of the results. However, the generalizability for relatively homogenous groups has a low numerical threshold for effective sample sizes. Studies in the sociobehavioral sciences have concluded that, “For most research enterprises in which the aim is to understand common perceptions and experiences among a group of relatively homogeneous individuals, [six to] twelve interviews should suffice.”21 If a “well-defined cultural domain” is the goal, then twenty to sixty interviews will provide more than adequate evidence.22 According to sociobehavioral scientists, these ranges apply to all qualitative work of this kind, including historical analysis. Like all scholars who engage in qualitative research, oral historians can expand the scope of their studies by widening the net that they cast, but this is difficult to accomplish without sacrificing some detail and focus. Thus, both sociobehavioral and oral history “best practices” recommend similar ranges. The number of fifteen civilian comparison interviews completed for this study is above the required range “to understand common perceptions and experiences among a group.”23 The sixty-five interviews (sixty useable) conducted with the military group for this study constitutes a “well-defined cultural domain.”24 Whether a work can be called “representative” is also conditioned by where, and how, a researcher’s sources are collected. In terms of the selection and analysis of sources, oral historians are no different from those who work with documents—all must strike a careful balance between representing the distinctiveness of individuals and groups while simultaneously addressing issues of historical significance. Many of the most recent oral histories of the Soviet Union—including those by Raleigh and Zhuk—could have benefitted from a slightly different research conception, one that augmented the oral sources from their primary groups with a few interviews from outside it. This move could have helped them better define and delimit the representativeness of the core group of respondents—and thus of their conclusions about Soviet society. Even—and perhaps especially—when an oral history project is focused on a particular group, collecting and using comparison interviews helps to define the relationship of the individual interviewees and their small groups to the larger society and history, both at the moment of recording and at the time of the remembered events. This is a central concern because only by understanding and elaborating that relationship can oral historians fully contextualize their respondents’ stories. Such contextualization is necessary for defining the ability to generalize from remembered experiences and for untangling



Introduction 11

distinct personal memories from those that are incorporated into—and conditioned by—public memories.25 It was with this understanding that I included comparison interviews in my research for this project.26 Despite all of the preceding arguments, I do not claim that my respondents were representative of any group beyond the immediate “well-defined cultural domain” of VIRTA officers and their families. The comparison interviews, which are not a separate domain, serve to contextualize and better understand the core group. However, while these interviewees are not representative of all Soviet lives, they are representative of a particular kind of life. According to both oral history theory and that of microhistory, a study of such individuals can provide valuable insights into the functioning of the society as a whole. A microhistorical study enables us to view issues from a different vantage point and thereby allows us to explore the harmonies and tensions among individuals within their social networks.27 Thus, in the pages that follow, a study of these men, their families, and their contemporaries provides insights into Soviet society and the continuing transition of that society in eastern Ukraine, especially in the areas of gender, ethnicity/nationality, and religion. 1.4 MEMORY AND METHODOLOGY In the introduction to his book, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, Alessandro Portelli articulated the meaning of memory as opposed to remembered facts. He began by quoting Hans Magnus Enzensberger: “History is an invention which reality supplies with raw materials. It is not, however, an arbitrary invention, and the interest it arouses is rooted in the interests of the teller.”28 Portelli then went on to argue convincingly that this is why “wrong tales” are “so very valuable.” Wrong statements are nevertheless psychologically true.29 Oral sources, he admitted, “are not always fully reliable in point of fact. Rather than being a weakness, this is however, their strength: errors, inventions, and myths lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings.”30 Indeed, oral sources are special because “they tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did.”31 Because of these insights, The Death of Luigi Trastulli has become canonical for oral historians everywhere—so much so that many of the most recent oral histories of the Soviet Union quote it directly. Portelli’s insights are especially valuable in the Soviet case, where many citizens actively self-censored not only their public expressions but also their

12

Chapter One

private ones; where the state worked diligently through indoctrination and repression to overwrite memories and control thoughts; where, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, “We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.”32 As Raleigh succinctly put it, in the Soviet Union “ideology was meant to replace memory.”33 Furthermore, people in all societies have layered identities that change depending on the person or people with whom they are interacting. Many of those layers in the former Soviet Union are conditioned by oppression, present fears, and continuing silences. As post-Soviet memory expert Irina Sherbakova wrote, “For the Soviet regime, memory itself was intrinsically a serious threat.”34 According to Catherine Wanner, Soviet citizens’ lifelong individualized struggles against an authoritarian bureaucracy “cultivated practices of deceit as individuals bent, twisted, and hardened the habit of the ‘two personalities’ syndrome, of secretly knowing one thing but saying another.”35 As James Scott has argued, “the more menacing the power, the thicker the mask.”36 Although the Soviet regime is now defunct, its former citizens are still habituated to creating and wearing masks, including situations in which they are asked about their memories. In the words of Khubova et al., “It is not just the political impact—although recording memories in Russia certainly has had and still carries political implications—but also the dramatic long-term effect on personal remembering.”37 For obvious reasons, this phenomenon can have numerous effects on oral histories. For example, Raleigh’s interviewees were mainly from the highest echelons of Soviet society and reached adulthood in the 1960s, after which the people of this social status were relatively safe from direct oppression. However, even among this group, eight of Raleigh’s interviewees—almost 15 percent—refused to let him use their real names. Cohen kept most of his sources anonymous unless they had passed away. Zhuk named many, but not all. Most of Messana’s respondents remain anonymous. As she wrote: “Many did not want to go further than their first name and their patronymic name, and others in the end preferred to remain anonymous, refusing even to meet me. And as many people as wanted to tell their kommunalka experience, I was also able to determine how many were held back by modesty, by fear, and sometimes even by shame.”38 That so many interviewees insist on anonymity indicates that a portion of those who did allow their names to be used in recent oral histories of the Soviet Union may have censored themselves during their interviews, knowing that their testimonies would become public. Not wanting to disappoint the Western scholars—who are also, in many cases, their personal friends—



Introduction 13

formerly Soviet interviewees are certainly capable of communicating just as much as they feel is appropriate, and nothing more. Raleigh makes much of the fact that his interviewees were willing to “speak openly” with him because most allowed him to use their real names. Doing so is a possible methodological mistake, however; one shared by other oral historians.39 Soviet citizens developed multiple layers of personal identity in order to deal with their environment; in the post-Soviet world, these habits die hard. It is possible—perhaps likely—that respondents, when on the record, do not tell the interviewers as much, or speak as openly, as they would have if they had been guaranteed anonymity. For example, Leinarte found that many of her interview transcripts were unusable beyond what they could tell her about memories and their absences. This is the case, she writes, “when the storyteller withholds details about Soviet era events, appears to lie about them, and seems incapable of providing a coherent narration of her own life story.”40 During the interviews for this study, I discovered some of the same issues. I completed eighty interviews, but ultimately did not use five of them, as each of those respondents exhibited at least one of the behaviors described by Leinarte above. Thus, I did not use those interviews in any way, not even for statistical purposes. Leinarte concludes that neither “fear of the stranger” nor “previous censorship and persecution” can fully explain the situation. “Ultimately,” she concludes, “Soviet memory no longer has a place, nor any significance, in this world.”41 However, Leinarte’s interpretation is too strong; she does not give enough weight to the power of the fear caused by past—and possible future—repression. I believe that, in all five of the cases in which I decided not to use the interviews for this project, fear of future repression—or, at least, indeterminate fear—caused the interviews to be untrustworthy. Several of the interviewees (whose interviews I do use) mentioned that they were “absolutely sure” that the products of my research would be read by some form of “the government.”42 Anatolii Vladimirovich, who has lived in the West for more than ten years and therefore has nothing to fear for himself and his family, expressed great concern for his friends in Ukraine and Russia. “You have to understand,” he said, “that the secret services will read everything you publish. At a minimum, Russian military intelligence will read it.”43 Furthermore, in at least one case, there was likely some worry that contemporaries, colleagues, and work superiors might hear about the respondents’ participation and disapprove. These fears, as well as the possible fear of public embarrassment, can be avoided by a promise of anonymity for a preset time—as has been used by oral historians of several other topics, such as undocumented workers.44

14

Chapter One

Although professional scholarly conventions require verifiability and therefore proper citations and access to sources, this rule can be satisfied if oral historians simply donate their transcripts to an archival repository along with a confidential key to pseudonyms that will be made public after a preset interval.45 Such a system has allowed oral historians to overcome respondents’ fear, shame, and embarrassment in other fields. Following these conventions, I gave all of my respondents guaranteed anonymity for a preset time. While they know that transcripts of their interviews will be available at the University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Library Rare Books & Special Collections, they trusted the judgment of their friends— those who introduced me to them—that I would not release their names until well after their deaths. A list of the interviewees for this project can be found in appendix A; this list includes birth years and primary identities for each respondent, and corresponds to a list of the interviewees’ real names. The full list, including both sets of names, will be included with the interview transcripts upon donation to Notre Dame. It will become public record after the preset time limit.46 Raleigh asserts that the use of real names “distinguishes oral history from anthropology.”47 According to many specialists, however, the primary differences between oral history and the other social sciences have little to do with anonymity. Unlike most social scientists, oral historians ground their sources in a particular time and place, contextualizing them within the larger stream of history; they also generally record and preserve their transcripts for posterity in an archival repository.48 Oral history is “both the act of recording and the record that is produced.”49 Using interviewees’ real names in a published work means little if the transcripts of their interviews are unavailable to future scholars. 1.5 THE INTERVIEWEES Who are the people featured in these pages? The largest group—the focus of this project—are military officer-professors who taught at the VIRTA academy during the late Soviet period. This respondent pool also includes many of the interviewed officers’ wives and children, as well as widows whose officer husbands passed away prior to their interviews. Together, the transcripts of my interviews with “military folks” make up the majority of my research base; sixty of seventy-five useable interviews were with individuals from this group. This number of interviews and respondents is on par with those collected by the oral historians discussed above. The primary reason I chose this particular group of individuals was because, prior to beginning this project in 2010, I already had strong personal

Introduction 15



connections with several of them. As you might imagine, former Soviet military officers are very reluctant to speak to scholars, especially while being recorded. In my case, the only reason any of them were willing to speak with me was because I had a personal introduction to each from one of my already existing contacts. As I did more interviews, I met more people, and those people made introductions for me as well. In my follow-up interviews, I asked why they had agreed to meet with me. Every one of them told me that it was because I had been introduced to them by someone whom they respected and trusted, and that they would not have talked with me otherwise. After I had been in Ukraine a few months, I realized that I would very much like to have some “comparison” interviews with non-military individuals; I wanted to understand how different life was for those inside and outside of the military. Thus, I also completed comparison interviews with fifteen individuals from outside the core group. I sought out five civilian professors who were contemporaries of the military professors, and who lived and worked in the same district of the city—all but one of them worked at the civilian university just across the square from VIRTA. I also selected representatives of a broader group that is more diverse in terms of profession and background. In order to have a full family comparison, four of these interviewees also comprise a working-class family. Together, these comparison interviews proved invaluable to help define the relationship of the individual interviewees and their small groups to the larger society and history, both at the moment of recording and at the time of the remembered events. Both within and without the military group, the interviewees come from the last two Soviet generations—the “sixties generation” and their children. I think that the second age group—who in this book are the children of the first—were the last generation that truly can be called “Soviet,” for they were the last generation to reach adulthood before the fall of the Soviet Union. For interviewees born on or before December 31, 1964, I use both first and middle names (imia and otchestvo) in this text; for those born after that date, I use first names only. I do this so that one can see, without checking the appendix, the approximate age of each respondent. Table 1.1.  Interviewees, Breakdown by Category of Primary Identity for Interview Purposes. Military Group

Comparison Group

VIRTA Colonels VIRTA Wives VIRTA Children

21 11 13

Civilian Professors Other Civilians

5 10

Total

45

Total

15

16

Chapter One

Originally from all over the USSR, members of the core military group and their families came to Kharkiv because the men were assigned to teach at the VIRTA academy. It was one of only two military graduate schools in the Soviet Union where a student could study advanced antiaircraft technology and tactics, as well as computer-based defense and military intelligence systems (the other was the Zhukov Military Academy in Kalinin, now Tver’). Because of the specialized nature of their educations, many of the men graduated from the VIRTA academy themselves at the undergraduate or graduate level, and then after being stationed elsewhere were sent back—with their families—to Kharkiv to finish out their careers as professors. Most of these officers and their wives were born in the 1940s and 50s (though a few were born well before the Great Patriotic War); most of their children were born in the 1960s and 70s. Take the Chikatev family, for example. The father, Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev (the “Kolia” mentioned earlier), was born in a small city in the Pskov region of what was then the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic (Russian SSR), just as the Great Patriotic War came to an end. His father, a career military man, died during the war; his mother died young in the early 1950s.50 Several others of the older interviewees, both men and women, came from similar backgrounds, with fathers who had been professional soldiers. Orphaned at age eight, Nikolai Petrovich was sent (by the state) to one of the elite Suvorov Military Schools (primary/secondary).51 These new military boarding schools were intended to serve two main purposes. The first was to give father figures to war orphans, and the second was to provide boys of school age—particularly those from military families—with a solid ideological and military education that included practical training as well as academic and ideological learning.52 These boys were to become shining examples of the “New Soviet Military Men” discussed at length in chapter 3. A perfect Suvorov school candidate, Nikolai Petrovich was selected to be a cadet and therefore grew up in this environment, with officers and teachers who consciously and conscientiously strove to produce New Soviet Military Men. Two of my other interviewees also attended Suvorov schools, one as an orphan and the other as the son of a living war veteran. Upon high school graduation, Nikolai Petrovich tried to enter an aviation engineering academy, but they had no room at that time. Since his only other choice was training as an infantry officer (which he did not want to do), he matriculated at the VIRTA post-baccalaureate military academy in Kharkiv, which was temporarily accepting cadets at the undergraduate level (at times when the military needed more junior officers, post-baccalaureate academies were required to produce them). Nikolai Petrovich studied radar operations.53 While attending a communist youth (Komsomol, for youths age sixteen and



Introduction 17

older) meeting one night in Kharkiv, he met his future wife, who was attending another university in the city at the time.54 Upon graduation, Nikolai Petrovich was sent to two postings that were “in the woods” at top-secret (SS-level) antiaircraft installations.55 From there he was sent, as a junior operations officer, to a small town in a central region of the Russian SSR, then to teach radar technology for a short time at a undergraduate military school (vysshee uchilishche), then back to Kharkiv to matriculate at VIRTA academy again, this time for graduate studies. After his graduation with an advanced degree (kandidat nauk, discussed at length in chapter 3), the institution’s administration retained him to teach at the academy. During the upheaval of the 1990s, he retired from the academy and eventually acquired a job as a mid-level government administrator.56 On Defender of the Fatherland Day (February 23)—which is roughly equivalent to Veterans’ Day in the United States and is still a formal holiday in Russia, but not in independent Ukraine—Nikolai Petrovich invariably waxes nostalgic and sings songs late into the night, remembering both his Russian ethnic heritage and his fallen comrades.57 He describes himself as an atheist who nevertheless believes that there might be something “out there.” He has traveled widely in the Soviet Bloc, loves to swim, and cannot think of anything that he would rather do than spend time with friends at his dacha (a small country cabin).58 Many of the men interviewed for this project, of both generations, have much in common with Nikolai Petrovich in the areas of career, ethnicity, and religion; these topics are discussed in detail in later chapters. His wife, Liudmila Petrovna, was also born just after the war, in the medium-sized provincial city of Riazan’ in the Russian SSR. Raised in a family with very close and involved parents (both survived the war), as well as a large extended family, she had five healthy siblings and two loving grandmothers who lived nearby. She describes her childhood as “idyllic.”59 However, her father—who was not conscripted into the army due to his skills as a worker in an aircraft factory, which may explain his wartime survival—died quite young, at thirty-eight, from a treatable disease; there was no penicillin available at that time. A decade later, two of Liudmila Petrovna’s brothers got into a fight, and one of them killed the other. Her mother, who “was unable to survive such a thing,” died shortly thereafter.60 Already a young adult by that time, Liudmila Petrovna left her home city to matriculate at one of the institutes in Kharkiv, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in media production. After meeting and marrying Nikolai Petrovich, she finished school and then moved with him on all of his various postings, working in whatever jobs she could find. After he was assigned back to graduate school in Kharkiv, she acquired a job working as a technician at a technological institute, from which she retired.61

18

Chapter One

Liudmila Petrovna has always been a very social person. In 2010, she had three mobile phone accounts in addition to her home phone—so that all of her friends and family could call her at no additional cost. She described herself as a television enthusiast (as both an avid watcher and a professional technician), a Christian, and a very optimistic person.62 Similar to her husband, Liudmila Petrovna exemplifies many of the beliefs and behaviors of her peer group. The Chikatevs have two sons, Andrei and Viktor.63 Andrei was born just after his parents moved back to the Russian SSR on his father’s first assignment, in 1964. A good student, he decided upon high school graduation to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the army. He attended an undergraduate military school, then worked as a junior officer until the breakup of the Soviet Union, when he decided to leave the service and go into business. After many ups and downs, he has settled into a successful middle-class life. He has been married and divorced twice, and has two children. Although he now lives in the Russian Federation, he visits Ukraine often to do business and to see his parents and brother. Andrei likes to watch sports, tell jokes, and play with his kids.64 His parents are both very proud of him.65 Andrei’s younger brother Viktor, in contrast, is something of a disappointment to his folks.66 Born in Kharkiv in 1976 after his father was already teaching at the academy, he has never moved or even traveled much. Not an accomplished student, he was lucky (through his parents’ connections) to get into a two-year technical institute in Kharkiv, where he learned a hands-on trade. However, he has never been able to hold down a job for more than a year or two. Despite many attempts at living separately from his parents, including two failed marriages, he has lived at home with Nikolai Petrovich and Liudmila Petrovna the majority of his life. He considers himself a happy-go-lucky and devil-may-care kind of person, and he lives his life that way. A strong supporter of the Russian Federation and its leadership, Viktor is content to live in Kharkiv, a “Russian city” in Ukraine, even if he would prefer that it were located across the border in the Russian Federation. Viktor says that he has been agnostic for as long as he can remember, and does not see much point in thinking about religion or philosophy. His favorite activity is spending time with friends.67 While the Chikatev family—like any family—is unique, many of the other families discussed herein are quite similar. While the individuals of the older military group (including the women) constitute a cohort, the younger generation of interviewees (the children of the older generation) are not a cohesive group. Andrei’s and Viktor’s lives have many commonalities with the other children of VIRTA officers up to 1991, but since then they have taken such divergent paths that none of them could be considered “typical” of the group—for the main thing that unites them is that their fathers used to be Soviet colonels at VIRTA.



Introduction 19

In contrast, the older generation of military individuals (the majority of the interviewees) are indeed a cohort, and Nikolai Petrovich and Liudmila Petrovna are typical. All of the officers were members of the Communist Party; so were many of their wives. They and most of their children were Pioneers (the Communist Party analog of the Boy/Girl Scouts), and then Komsomol members (the youth wing of the Communist Party), before joining the Party proper.68 All of the officers I spoke with eventually attained the rank of colonel; the majority retired from the academy during the upheaval of the 1990s.69 The experience that most unites them is the officers’ service at the academy and the corresponding impact on the lives of their families. This group of people lived together (even after they received their own apartments, they lived in the same buildings), studied together (as did their children), did Party activities together, worked together, played together, cooked together, ate and drank together, built and then relaxed at dachas together, and retired together. They went through the transition of the 1990s together. The majority still live in their Soviet-era apartments, shop at the same stores and bazaars, and continue to socialize with each other. These commonalities, in addition to their shared identities as Soviet officers, are what have made—and still makes—them a coherent cohort. Although the military respondents are a cohesive cohort, they are also quite diverse—at least in terms of birthplace and background. Only 10 percent of them were born in the city of Kharkiv, and most of these were children of officers as well as officers themselves. Indeed, on the list of my military respondents’ birthplaces, nearly every Soviet republic is represented—from the Baltics to Kazakhstan, from Moldova to Tajikistan. Those born in Ukraine and Russia represent every major city and area—from Lviv to Sakhalin Island. One of the interviewees was even born beyond the borders of the USSR, in Poland. This diversity is partially due to the military profession of the men in this group. The army recruited them from all over the Soviet Union and they traveled widely on military assignments, finally settling in Kharkiv on their last Soviet army posting before the breakup of the USSR. The officers often married women while on assignment in the other republics, so their wives also tend to have diverse birthplaces and backgrounds. During the postwar period, the city of Kharkiv had a significant Jewish population, even after tens of thousands died in the Holocaust. However, in the early years of the Soviet Union, a considerable number of ethnic Jews changed their family names, often to “Russified” versions, in order to demonstrate their commitment to internationalism. After the war, many did so in order to avoid discrimination.70 A large number of Jews emigrated from Kharkiv during the 1980s, as soon as new policies made exit visas available,

Figure 1.2.  VIRTA officers on parade in Dzerzhinskii Square, in front of the academy building, circa 1970.



Introduction 21

and emigration has been a preferred method of avoiding economic hardship for them since. Furthermore, Soviet military policies in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s were discriminatory toward those of Jewish background. For all of these reasons, there were very few Jewish military men left in Kharkiv by the time of my interviews, and virtually none of their family members still lived there. Their children and grandchildren had emigrated to the United States, Canada, Israel, or Germany.71 Despite the low population of possible respondents, I was able to interview a few extraordinary people of Jewish origin, including one colonel who is especially well-respected by his peers. Because of these interviewees, as well as two lengthy and informative written memoirs they gave me, I am able to include a discussion of the Jewish experience in the Soviet military (in chapter 3), in the context of the USSR’s identity policies (in chapter 5), and in the area of religious belief (or lack thereof, in chapter 6). However, the interviews, memoirs, and archival materials which these respondents provided have led me to conclude that the full experience of my Jewish respondents calls for an extended project of its own, one that is outside the scope of this book’s themes.72 Whether Jew or Gentile, Ukrainian or Russian, the officers had served in locations all over the world—in every republic of the Soviet Union and in every country of the European Soviet Bloc. They served in peacetime Cuba, Iran, China, and North Korea as well as in wartime Vietnam, Egypt, Libya, Angola, and Afghanistan.73 They seldom served with their future VIRTA colleagues together abroad (they had similar exceptional specialties, and so were widely dispersed). However, sometimes their wives, along with their children, were able to join them abroad in peacetime—they went with their husbands to Cuba, for example, but not to Vietnam. Within the Soviet Union and the other Warsaw Pact countries, the women went with their husbands virtually everywhere that they were posted. The wives and children in the group have varied work histories—while some were receptionists and factory workers, others were professors and plant managers. Only one of the couples from the elder generation has moved to the West. A few of their former colleagues have also tried—but failed—to make that transition.74 The younger generation, in contrast, has been both more enthusiastic about emigrating and more successful; including the daughter of the couple who emigrated, twelve of the officers’ children now live in NATO countries, and their grandchildren are even further spread across the Western world. The officers and their families are not the only interviewees whose lives are examined here. This book also features interviews with five civilian university professors and with ten others, including one with the son of a former

22

Chapter One

KGB colonel, one with a taxicab driver, one with an eminent Ukrainian dissident, one with a computer programmer, and another with the pastor of a growing Protestant church that had more than 2,000 members in 2011. Compared to the military group, a larger proportion of the civilian respondents were born and raised in Kharkiv, but a much smaller proportion of this group were members of the Communist Party. The interviews they granted me have proven invaluable—especially through comparison—in figuring out those experiences and identities that are common to many individuals in Kharkiv and differentiating them from those that are unique to military life. They have also been quite useful in more fully fleshing out what it meant to live Soviet in Kharkiv in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Kharkiv itself—as the city where all of the respondents spent most of their lives—is the only commonality that unites all of them. 1.6 CHAPTER OVERVIEWS In order to understand what is most important to my respondents, I let their interests guide my research. Therefore, the chapters that follow are thematic, and cover military, gender, ethno-national, and religious experiences—considered simultaneously as the lived histories and the living memories of the respondents. In the process of understanding and analyzing these historical memories, I realized that each theme needed background in order for the significance of the information in the interviews to become clear. Consequently, each thematic chapter (besides the second chapter) begins with the history and existing scholarly literature on the theme at hand. Chapter 2, “Lived Environment, Lived History,” examines the environments of my respondents by first exploring the material city of Kharkiv and its histories, then narrowing the focus to the built VIRTA academy and its history. Both the built environments themselves as well as their histories are vitally important in the lives and memories of my interviewees. For my respondents, the city is their home and the stage on which their lives played out, the academy was the focal point of most of their lives, and the histories of both loom large in all of the interviewees’ memories and identities. Chapter 3, “New Soviet Military Men,” examines the military officers of VIRTA, a military graduate school staffed by accomplished and highly educated individuals. The officers who taught and did research at the academy in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s were considered—both by themselves and by the public—to be paragons of Soviet society, pillars of the state, teachers of the young, and defenders of communism worldwide. They were highly visible



Introduction 23

personifications of the Soviet Union, supporting and supported by a regime that valued them highly. In chapter 4, “That’s Women’s Work!” I use a comparison of two individual women to explore the possibilities available to them in the post-war and post-Soviet periods. In the mature Soviet Union of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, conflicting sets of discourses vied within both official and unofficial rhetoric, delimiting the conditions of possibility for action by individual Soviet women. Two of the most powerful discourses were also the most contradictory—that which glorified working women and that which lionized mothers. Chapter 5, “My Address is the Soviet Union!” explores the extraordinary complexity of ethnic, national, transnational, and supranational identities in Kharkiv. I recount how the identities of my interviewees are layered, often with an inbuilt fluidity that flows toward the centers of power but away from nationalist politics. Both the creation and the territorial additions to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) during the twentieth century, as well as the suddenness and manner of the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, combined to leave interesting possibilities for both new and resurrected identities. In chapter 6, “Ours is the Religion of Our Grandmothers,” I address the seemingly explosive return of Christianity in the former Soviet countries of Ukraine and Russia. I argue that, for many formerly Soviet citizens, the “explosion” of Christian belief in the 1990s was not something new—rather, it was something that was no longer hidden. While it is true that the official projection of Soviet society was atheistic, the claims of the regime did not match the reality, especially outside the metropolitan centers. Even educated, urban professionals were still often connected to the villages, and many of their grandmothers had not given up faith. I do not argue that Soviet Ukraine was “religious”; I do suggest that it was not as atheistic as many observers have thought. Each thematic chapter (besides the second) includes a “History and Historiography” section, in which I engage the existing literature on the theme at hand, showing how my respondents’ experiences confirm, refute, or complicate the extant scholarship. While much of this literature was not written by historians, contemporary history can benefit greatly from the insights of other specialties. Regardless of their academic discipline, all of the scholars cited here were writing history, consciously or unconsciously. Thus, in this context, whether they are anthropologists, political scientists, military scholars, economists, or sociologists, the work of these scholars is indeed historiography. Each chapter also shows how the fall of the Soviet Union looked from

24

Chapter One

within; they detail, from different thematic angles, what it was like to live through the “wild” [likhie] years of the 1990s and what came after.

NOTES 1.  Leon Abramovich Stoliarskii, interview with author, March 23, 2011. 2.  “Kharkiv” is the Ukrainian name; “Kharkov” is the Russian. I have chosen to use the transliteration from Ukrainian, because that is the accepted convention in English-language scholarly work today; Ukrainian is now the sole official language of independent Ukraine. However, all of my subjects use the Russian name; I suspect that a few will be surprised that I use the Ukrainian transliteration in my writing. 3.  William J. Chase, “Microhistory and Mass Repression: Politics, Personalities, and Revenge in the Fall of Béla Kun,” Russian Review vol. 67, no. 2 (July 2008): 454–483. I owe Professor Chase a debt of gratitude for discussing microhistorical methods with me during his visit to Notre Dame (for the Midwest Russian History Workshop) in 2009. See also Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, 2nd ed. (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001). 4.  This insight comes from John Walton, James F. Brooks, and Christopher R. N. DeCorse, “Introduction,” in Brooks, Decorse, and Walton, eds., Small Worlds: Method, Meaning, & Narrative in Microhistory (New York: SAR Press, 2008). 5.  Lev Tolstoi, War and Peace, quoted in Brooks, Small Worlds, 3–4. 6. Brooks, Small Worlds, 3–4. 7.  Ibid., 5. 8.  For an excellent (albeit impressionistic) picture of the “archival revolution,” see the first fifty pages of Russian Review vol. 61, no. 1 (2002), in which four prominent historians—Norman M. Naimark, Donald J. Raleigh, Lynn Viola, and Stephen Kotkin— analyzed the “historiography of the Soviet period in post-Soviet perspective.” 9.  For more on these types of losses, begin with Daria N. Khubova, “Imprisoned History: The KGB Archives,” Journal of the International Institute vol. 1, no. 1 (1994). See also the essay by Norman M. Naimark, Russian Review vol. 61, no. 1 (2002). 10.  Daria Khubova, Andrei Ivankiev, and Tonia Sharova, “After Glasnost: Oral History in the Soviet Union,” in Luisa Passerini, ed., Memory and Totalitarianism (International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories. Vol. 1) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 96. Many of the most recent oral histories on the Soviet Union either quote these lines directly or reference them. 11.  Systematic efforts in the United States began with the Harvard Interview Project of 1951–53, whose members carried out over 1,000 personal interviews with former Soviet citizens. Among the project’s members were a number of prominent scholars in the field of Soviet studies, including Alex Inkeles, Merle Fainsod, Alexander Dallin, Raymond Bauer, Mark Field, and Paul Friedrich. These scholars—as well as dozens of others from around the world—have since used the project’s oral sources to great effect. See http://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/research_portal/emigre html. See also the Soviet Interview Project of 1979–85 at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/



Introduction 25

studies/08694/detail. In the Soviet Union, Maksim Gor’kii and others collected oral source materials during the 1920s and 30s. Gor’kii led two projects in the late 1920s, but completed most of his collecting in the 1930s after his return to Moscow, including projects about the Russian Civil War and a history of the Russian labor movement [istoriia fabrik i zavodov]. Besides work on the Great Patriotic War, there was a “dry spell” in oral history research during the latter part of Stalin’s reign. Then, in the late 1950s and early 60s, some intrepid Soviet historians began to collect oral testimonies. However, many of them were arrested after Khrushchev’s ouster. Oral history was not openly attempted again until the mid-1980s, when an avalanche began that has not stopped since. See Khubova et al., “After Glasnost,” 91–93. Unofficially, of course, Soviet dissidents never stopped recording oral memories. For unofficial oral historiography, the watershed moment was the domestic publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in the November 1962 issue of Novyi Mir. Although Ivan Denisovich is a novel, its official publication sent a strong message that remembering and discussing such things had become acceptable. Despite the fact that the regime quickly clamped down again, the genie was out of the bottle. 12.  Khubova et al., “After Glasnost,” 89. 13.  Orlando Figes, “Private Life in Stalin’s Russia: Family Narratives, Memory and Oral History,” History Workshop Journal no. 65 (2008): 117–137. 14. Figes, “Private Life,” 119. This literature is voluminous. See, for example: Anatoly Marchenko, My Testimony, trans. Michael Scammell (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969); Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter (London: Andre Deutsch, 1978); Natan Sharansky, Fear No Evil, trans. Stefani Hoffman (New York: Random House, 1988). 15.  Figes, “Private Life,” 120. Again, there are too many to list; no fewer than fifteen such memoirs were published (in English!) in just the years 2010–2012. For two fascinating examples of this type, see Yuri Tarnapolsky, Memoirs of 1984 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993) and Tamara Petkevich, Memoir of a Gulag Actress, trans. Yasha Klots and Ross Ufberg (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). 16. Volodymyr Sklokin and Iryna Rebrova, “Sna istoriia v Ukraini: zapovnennia «bilyx pliam» ch i metodologich nii perevorot? Retsenziia na chasopis [Ukraina moderna—2007—no. 11],” East-West, a scientific, historical, and cultural journal no. 11–12 (2008): 393. These scholars are oral historians working at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. 17.  For excellent examples, see Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003); Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, trans. Kieth Gessen (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005); Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson, and Anna Rotkirch, eds., On Living Through Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 2004); Stephen F. Cohen, The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin (New York: PublishingWorks, 2010); Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007); Jehanne M. Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck, Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Dalia Leinarte, Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality: Life Stories of Lithuanian Women, 1945–1970 (Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi, 2010); Paola Messana, Soviet Communal

26

Chapter One

Living: An Oral History of the Kommunalka (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Donald J. Raleigh, Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about Their Lives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dnipropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 18. Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 128. 19. Abrams, Oral History Theory; see also Oral History Association, “Principles and Best Practices” (October 2009), http://www.oralhistory.org/do-oralhistory/ principles-and-practices/. 20.  David H. Mould, “Legal Issues,” in Donna M. DeBlasio et al., Catching Stories: A Practical Guide to Oral History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 79. 21. G. Guest, A. Bunce, and L. Johnson, “How Many Interviews are Enough? An Experiment with Data Saturation and Variability,” Field Methods vol. 18, no. 1 (2006): 79. 22.  H. Russell Bernard and Gery Ryan, Analyzing Qualitative Data: Systematic Approaches (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2010), 306. See also M. G. Morgan, B. Fischoff, and C. J. Atman, Risk Communication: A Mental Models Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 23.  Bunce and Johnson, “How Many Interviews are Enough?,” 79. 24.  Bernard and Ryan, Analyzing Qualitative Data, 306. 25.  Valerie Raleigh Yow, Recording Oral History: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 185–186. See also Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), xi–xv. 26.  I owe special thanks to Professor Alexander M. Martin for encouraging me to carry out these comparison interviews. 27.  Chase, “Microhistory and Mass Repression,” 457. 28.  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Der kurze Sommer der Anarchie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), quoted in Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 2. 29. Portelli, Death of Luigi Trastulli, 51. 30.  Ibid., 2. 31.  Ibid., 48. 32.  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation I–II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 299. 33. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers, 5. See also Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience. 34. Irina Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory,” trans. Paul Thompson, in Passerini, Memory and Totalitarianism, 103.



Introduction 27

35. Catherine Wanner, Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1998), 205. Wanner was one of the first Western scholars to do systematic oral history research in the former Soviet Union, and she was the first to do so in independent Ukraine. 36.  James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), quoted in Wanner, Burden of Dreams, 205. 37.  Khubova et al., “After Glasnost,” 89. 38. Messana, Communal Apartment, 4. 39.  It is possible that these scholars were constrained by their respective institutions’ Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). 40. Leinarte, Adopting and Remembering, 15. 41.  Ibid., 16. 42.  This opinion was held by VIRTA colonels and civilians alike. Aleksandr Nikolaevich Pletnev, interview with author, February 24, 2011; Vsevolod Afanas’evich Sneshkovoi, interview with author, March 16, 2011. 43.  Anatolii Vladimirovich Garev, interview with author, November 16, 2010. 44. Yow, Recording Oral History, 134, 142. See also Karen Frances and Margaret McLeod, “A Safety Net: Use of Pseudonyms in Oral Nursing History,” Contemporary Nurse no. 25 (2007): 104–113. 45.  Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 126–127. 46. A few other factual details, unimportant for the readers of this book, have been changed judiciously to further protect the anonymity of the respondents. If a photograph herein includes only one person, that person either has passed away or is now living in the West. 47. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers, 12. 48.  Oral History Association, “Principles and Best Practices.” 49. Abrams, Oral History Theory, 2. See also Oral History Association, “Principles and Best Practices.” 50. The details of Nikolai Petrovich’s life are verified by items in his family archive, including Soviet employment histories, medical records, scrapbooks, photo albums, and other biographical documents. Chikatev Family Collection. The imprecise nature of the citation is due to the fact that the family holdings are unprocessed and inaccessible. Please see the bibliography for a general description of the family collections as well as a specific description of each collection, including the Chikatev family’s. 51.  Interviews with author, verified by biographical documents in the Chikatev Family Collection. 52.  Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, Speech at the opening of the first Suvorov Military School (1946), quoted in “Stranitsy Istorii,” Suvorov Higher Military School Alumni Website, http://www.svu ru/ index.sema?a=articles&pid=10. 53.  Interviews with author, verified by biographical documents in the Chikatev Family Collection. 54.  Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev, interview with author, October 5, 2010.

28

Chapter One

55.  There were six levels of state secret in the Soviet Union. In order from minimum to maximum, they were: Confidential (Dlia sluzhebnogo pol’zovania, DSP), Secret (Sekretno, S), Top Secret (Sovershenno sekretno, SS), Special Importance (Osoboi vazhnosti, OV), Special Folder (Osobaia papka, OP), and Top Secret/ Special Folder (Sovershenno sekretno/osobaia papka SS/OP). L. A. Mel’nikova, “Sovershenstvovanie zakonodatel’stva po okhrane gosudarstvennoi tainy,” Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo no. 6 (1989): 123–131; E. M. Giliarov and A. V. Kudriashov, “Institut voennoi tainy—Problemy stanovlenia i razvitiia,” Nauchnaia sessiia MIFI no. 14 (2006): 60–63. 56.  Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev, interview with author, October 5, 2010. 57. Personal observation by the author, corroborated by Liudmila Petrovna Chikateva, interview with author, October 5, 2010. Invited by Nikolai Petrovich, I saw his personal celebration firsthand on February 23, 2011. 58.  Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev, interview with author, October 5, 2010; follow-up interview with author March 20, 2011. For more on dachas, see Stephen Lovell, Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710–2000 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 59.  Liudmila Petrovna sadly passed away a week after the first draft of this chapter was written in 2012, less than two years after our interview. The details of Liudmila Petrovna’s life are verified by items in her family archive, including Soviet employment histories, medical records, scrapbooks, photo albums, and other biographical documents. Chikatev Family Collection. 60.  Liudmila Petrovna Chikateva, interview with author, October 5, 2010. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63.  The details of Andrei and Viktor’s lives are verified by items in their family archive, including Soviet employment histories, medical records, scrapbooks, photo albums, and other biographical documents. Chikatev Family Collection. 64.  Andrei Nikolaevich Chikatev, interview with author, March 6, 2011. 65.  Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev, interview with author, October 5, 2010; follow-up interview with author March 20, 2011; Liudmila Petrovna Chikateva, interview with author, October 5, 2010. 66.  Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev, interview with author, October 5, 2010; follow-up interview with author March 20, 2011; Liudmila Petrovna Chikateva, interview with author, October 5, 2010. 67.  Viktor Nikolaevich Chikatev, interview with author, September 10, 2010. 68.  For an excellent, concise description of the Pioneers and the Komsomol, see Sevket Hylton Akyildiz, The Young Pioneers and the Komsomol of Uzbekistan: Soviet Citizenship and Values (London: Creataspace, 2012); see also George Avis, The Making of the Soviet Citizen: Character Formation and Civic Training in Soviet Education (London: Croom Helm, 1987). 69.  Many details of the professional lives of the interviewee officers are verified by items in the VIRTA archive and exhibit, including student and faculty yearbooks, student lists, historiographical exhibits, scientific and military journals, commemorative publications, and the like. The VIRTA archive and exhibit is now held in the museum of the Kozhedub Air Force University, Kharkiv, Ukraine. The imprecise



Introduction 29

nature of the citation is due to the fact that these holdings are unprocessed and largely inaccessible. Please see the bibliography for a general description of the Kozhedub Air Force University Museum as well as specific descriptions of the VIRTA archive and exhibit. 70. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 71.  Leon Abramovich Stoliarskii, interview with author, March 23, 2011. 72.  I plan to complete a publication on this subject in the future. 73.  Verified by items in the VIRTA archive and exhibit, including pictures, museum memorializations, and documentary evidence. VIRTA archive and exhibit, now held in the museum of the Kozhedub Air Force University, Kharkiv, Ukraine. 74.  Some details of these attempts are verified by items in family archives, most importantly correspondence between VIRTA officers and Western university professors, government agencies, and private company representatives. These were all potential— but ultimately uninterested—employers. Family Collections of the Babich, Chikatev, Manukian, and Ovcharenko families.

Chapter Two

Lived Environment, Lived History Kharkiv and the Academy

Let me tell you, I have always loved Kharkov. Here in Kharkov, things did not revolve around the bureaucracy. Plus, there’s the contours of the city and its history . . . Kharkov, in general, has always been considered “the third city” [after Moscow and Leningrad]. It is in no way worse than Kiev, I have always said . . . Kiev is beautiful, perhaps even more beautiful. But in terms of its people, history, and culture . . . I appreciate Kharkov more. It is superior . . . and for us, of course, in everything, location makes a very big difference. Very. There was a very big difference between the standard of living in Moscow, Leningrad, and the hinterland of Russia; between the level of life in Kharkov, Kiev, and Ukraine’s hinterland. This difference does not exist in America. I’ve been to America, including in very small towns. Albany [NY] is a small city, but in the store you can buy all the same things that you can buy in the Center—in Washington DC—or indeed in any city. There is no difference over there. There certainly was—and is—a difference here. Culture is different, education is different, the standard of living is different—all depending upon location . . . Kharkov was one of the best locations.1

Through the interviews conducted for this project, an interesting phenomenon emerged: the memories of the respondents were conditioned, first and foremost, by their built environments and their personal understandings of history. Each story, each anecdote, each example, each event—all had a setting, a backdrop. Furthermore, each story had a place in history, whether it be the person’s individual history, family history, or the history of their workplace, city, region, or country. By necessity, this is true for all memories; events take place in space as well as in time. And both space and time are constructed—the first with bricks and mortar; the second with memories and histories. 31

32

Chapter Two

This chapter explores the lived environments of my respondents by first exploring the material city of Kharkiv and its histories, then narrowing the focus to the built VIRTA academy and its history. Both the built environments themselves as well as their histories are vitally important in the lives and memories of my interviewees—without an understanding of the setting, the information in the chapters that follow would not be rooted in the soil of the respondents’ memories. For these respondents, the city is both their home and the stage on which their lives played out, the academy was the focal point of most of their lives, and the histories of both loom large in their memories and identities. Like many of its military residents, Kharkiv has had a long history of both distinct ethno-national identities and intimate political ties to the tsarist Russian and the Soviet imperial capitals. When my respondents first came to Kharkiv (by birth or by assignment), it was a city in the heartland of their country, a showcase of Soviet futuristic architecture, and a regional center of culture, education, transportation, and administration. Overall, however, Kharkiv’s history is that of a city between, a Russian-speaking city surrounded by mixed-ethnicity villages, shifting over time between being a military stronghold on the edge of empire and being a heartland city, a center of economic and cultural activity. At the time of this writing, Kharkiv is once again on the border between Ukraine and Russia, and its residents continue to claim a uniqueness that differentiates the city both from Kiev and from Moscow. The people interviewed for this study are no exception. Whether they lean politically and culturally toward independent Ukraine or the Russian Federation (or both, or neither), they all agree that Kharkiv and its history are a blend of both Ukraine and Russia—and that this blend is vitally important to who they are. Many of my interviewees referenced the importance of the unique character and heritage of the city, and it is this commonality that unites all of the respondents—it is the earth in which their living histories are rooted. It is birthplace to some of them; it is “home” to all of them. For example, in a letter to a friend in 2005, Ol’ga Nikolaevna wrote, “Why do the young people do things like this [dress in a certain way]? It’s because they are Kharkovites, as are we all. This city, it defines us.”2 In the wake of the Great Patriotic War, a new military graduate school was built in the city that was a major step in fulfilling the goal of better protecting the homeland from invasion. The buildings of the academy became part of the Soviet heart of Kharkiv, a centerpiece of the project to produce the New Soviet Person, and the focus of the lives of the military men interviewed for this project. It has its own history, bound up with the histories of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, Kharkiv, and the lives of the men who passed through its doors during the last four decades of the Soviet period.



Lived Environment, Lived History 33

Figure 2.1.  Kharkiv Ukraine, Geographical Position.

2.1 THE CITY Kharkiv (“Kharkov” in Russian) is the second-largest city (1.5 million) in Ukraine and the capital of the Kharkiv Region [oblast’]. It has long been one of the most populous cities in Eastern Europe—over the span of the last three centuries, it has been similar in size and population growth (even if it was

34

Chapter Two

otherwise dissimilar) to Vienna, Warsaw, and Minsk.3 It was the sixth-largest city of the Russian imperial heartland in 1897.4 It was consistently the fifthlargest city in the European portion of the Soviet Union; in 1989, it was the tenth-largest city in the entire Soviet Bloc.5 Located at the confluence of three rivers, the city has been an important transportation, military, and administrative location for hundreds of years. Over time it has been: the center of the Kharkiv military-administrative unit, the capital of the region and province of Sloboda Ukraine (Free Ukraine),6 and the capital of the Ukrainian SSR from 1920–34.7 For most of the two hundred years leading up to 1991, Kharkiv was a “heartland city” of both the tsarist Russian and the Soviet empires; since then it has reverted to what it was at its founding—a “borderland city.”8 Today it is less than thirty kilometers from the Russian Federation; thus, it lies on what many now call “the new border between West and East.”9 This history, with Kharkiv located in both the heartland and the borderland, is keenly felt by many of my interviewees.10 Originally populated by deserters and refugees fleeing the devastation of the Khmelnytsky Uprising in western Ukraine during the mid-1650s, Kharkiv became a magnet for “free settlers” [slobozhany], people who moved from the surrounding states to take advantage of the opportunity to own land without restrictions. The military-administrative settlement that they formed was granted semiautonomous status under the protection of the Russian government; it had rights and privileges that distinguished it from the neighboring Russian and Cossack regions. This legal status, along with the settlement’s pro-Russian political orientation, provided the basis for a distinct local identity that (from then on) would be pointed to and refashioned by both local and imperial metropolitan elites in efforts to keep Kharkiv’s identity distinct—especially from Kiev, but also from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other cities of the imperial heartland.11 Strategically located in the steppe borderland between Russia and the Crimean Khanate, the Cossack Hetmanate, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sloboda Ukraine (with Kharkiv as its capital) became a key military unit of the Russian frontier, along with the Zaporizha and Don Cossack units.12 As the Russian empire grew, Kharkiv remained a vital military center on the way from Moscow to the Crimea, an outpost of Russian expansion toward the Black Sea. In Russia, “Kharkiv acquired the enduring image of a stronghold in the ‘Wild Steppe,’ of a fortress-protector of the ‘Motherland’ and the Orthodox Church against their eternal enemies: nomads, Cossack ‘traitors,’ ‘infidels,’ and others.”13 This militarized mythos has been adopted, modified, and maintained by Kharkiv’s residents over the ensuing centuries; vestiges of it remain to this day. Indeed, the “military town” mythos was repeated by several of my respondents, especially in relation to the fact that academy personnel have been ubiquitous over the last four decades in Kharkiv.14



Lived Environment, Lived History 35

From the point of view of the neighboring independent Cossack Hetmanate, a Russian-leaning Kharkiv represented a permanent threat. For the Hetmans, Kharkiv was peopled by “traitors,” political dissidents, and deserters. Several Hetmans attempted to liquidate, absorb, or subjugate Sloboda Ukraine, but all of these attempts failed.15 This mythos has been resurrected recently, adopted by those who see the loyalty to Russia of many people in Kharkiv as a threat to independent Ukraine. During the large-scale administrative reforms of the late eighteenth century, Catherine the Great revoked the special status of the military-administrative units of Sloboda Ukraine. It became a province of the empire, still named Sloboda Ukraine and still with its capital in Kharkiv. While there were dire consequences of imperial incorporation for the previously free lower classes (e.g., military settlers were reduced in standing to state peasants), the city as a unit “experienced no negative consequences—quite the opposite.”16 This had much to do with major changes in the geopolitical configuration in the region—the Cossack Hetmanate, the Crimean Khanate, and the Polish Commonwealth all ceased to exist by the end of the eighteenth century, and most of their territories were taken by Russia. Thus, Kharkiv no longer stood on the frontier; it was now at the crossroads of trading and administrative routes from Moscow to the new southern regions of the Russian empire. As the city’s strategic military importance waned, its economic, social, and cultural importance grew in much larger proportion.17 In 1805, the first university in Russian-ruled Ukrainian territory was opened in Kharkiv (now V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University).18 The city became the administrative center of a large educational district that included neighboring territories in Russia, the former Cossack areas, the Crimea, and even the Caucasus.19 In 1835, the province of Sloboda Ukraine was reorganized into the Kharkiv Governorate (guberniia), again with the capital in Kharkiv. Also in that year, the city became the seat of the GovernorGeneral for Kharkiv, Poltava, and Chernigov Governorates.20 From its imperial incorporation to the 1890s, Kharkiv was the center of a sprawling military district. This continued Kharkiv’s high proportion of military personnel and their families among the city’s population, as well as its militarized mythos. After the legal reforms of 1867, Kharkiv became the seat of a high court whose jurisdiction went well beyond the Governorate’s boundaries. These transformations contributed to the idea of a newly imagined region that bore the semiofficial title of “South Russia,” with Kharkiv at its center.21 In 1869, a railroad connection was established with St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Rostov as well as with regions to the south and east; Kharkiv became one of the principal transportation hubs of the Russian empire. During the latter part of the century, Kharkiv began a rapid transformation into

36

Chapter Two

the largest industrial, financial, scientific, educational, and cultural center of “South Russia,” and became one of the most densely populated cities in the empire. Motivating this transformation was the establishment and development of the Donets Coal Basin (the Donbas), which supplied coal and metal ore to the imperial centers and increasingly to developing industries in Kharkiv.22 As the city industrialized, it increased in importance as a center for engineering and investment. It also served as a transfer point, staging ground, and socio-economic center for the multitude of workers employed in Donbas enterprises. Although Kharkiv had a reputation as a dirty, polluted city, by the end of the nineteenth century, much of the city was paved, plumbed, and lit with gas streetlights.23 Kharkiv’s rapid development led, within the Russian empire, to contemporary comparisons with Chicago.24 The city even had its own historical narratives by the end of the nineteenth century. Predominantly written by local historians, the first history of the city integrated both the Russian and the Ukrainian national historical narratives.25 However, during the years of imperial rule, Russian culture had flourished and spread. By the late nineteenth century, many people considered Kharkiv a “Russian” city; others considered it a “Russified” city (different opinions of the same trend). The population was predominantly Russian-speaking; no more than a quarter of the city’s residents considered Ukrainian their native language.26 This linguistic breakdown remained essentially the same throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.27 This fact has much to do with the alienation felt by many of my interviewees in response to the “Ukrainization” efforts of twenty-first-century political elites, discussed at length in chapter 5. During the chaos of 1917–1920, Kharkiv again became strategically important from a geopolitical and military standpoint. During its brief stint in power, the Russian Provisional Government refused to view Kharkiv as part of Ukraine or to put it under Kiev’s control, basing their position on the Russo-centric political preferences of Kharkiv’s citizens. The Central Rada in Kiev competed for control of the city based on the cultural and political history of Kharkiv as the former capital of the “Ukrainian” Sloboda region. Indeed, Kharkiv—which had long been located on fault lines of competing identities—now “became a battlefield of political projects as well.”28 Between February and December 1917, a protracted and complex political struggle was waged within the city. A non-Bolshevik leftist coalition initially reigned; the local Bolshevik Red Guard vied with Ukrainian nationalists in mostly nonviolent political maneuverings. Then, in early December, Bolshevik expeditionary units from Petrograd tipped the balance in an armed seizure of power and proclaimed the establishment of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic with its capital in Kharkiv.29 This was a move calculated to establish a Bolshevik-led Ukraine opposed to the non-Bolshevik Ukrainian People’s Republic, which had its capital in Kiev.



Lived Environment, Lived History 37

From 1918 to 1919, Kharkiv changed hands several times. First occupied by German forces, then held in quick succession by the Soviets, the Ukrainian National Republic, and General Denikin’s White Army, the city was recaptured by the Red Army in December of 1919.30 For the remainder of the civil war, Kharkiv was on the border once again—this time as a fortified outpost of the Bolsheviks on their Ukrainian frontier. From 1920 to 1934, Kharkiv was the official capital of Soviet Ukraine, and continued as the main economic, educational, and administrative center for the region. Its population exploded from less than 300,000 to over 800,000.31 The Ukrainian Communist Party headquarters and the main offices and publications of all of the republic-wide organizations were located in Kharkiv during this fourteen-year period. From 1923–1933, the Soviet leadership followed a policy of Ukrainization—the local version of the all-Union policy of nativization (korenizatsiia)—that was intended to enhance the national profile of state and party institutions and thus help to legitimize Soviet rule in all of Ukraine. A new generation of Ukrainian intellectuals, who worked to adapt national ideas to the challenges of the communist center, flourished in Kharkiv. Foreign diplomatic missions and consulates were opened in the city. More than twentyfive institutes of higher learning were either opened or expanded, including a Ukrainian military academy (which was subsequently closed in 1934 after the policy of Ukrainization ended). This period also saw a proliferation of theaters, opera houses, ballet venues, and other cultural establishments.32 In the Soviet Union, “architecture was a symbol of the state, a product of its centrally planned economy, and a major tool of its propaganda.”33 In the case of Ukraine in the mid-1920s, its leadership hoped that the republic would develop into a strong and proletarian, yet autonomous, state. There was belief in forthcoming social progress, trust in Western technology, and an evolving struggle for the development of an independent and contemporary Ukrainian culture. These were the primary considerations reflected in Kharkiv’s planning and design programs. While the region’s construction industry was primitive, “to its citizenry the capital’s modern architecture represented progressive society and symbolized a new world.”34 With the new buildings, “the designers were able to create a geometrically powerful ensemble, conceived for utility and efficient production, and programmed to shape the New Man of the socialist Society.”35 Unique architectural structures in the constructivist style augmented the cultural landscape of the city, which gained a new symbol in the brand new, highly stylized central city square. Named after Felix Dzerzhinskii, the founder of the Soviet secret police, the square became the new Soviet heart of the Ukrainian capital. The centerpiece of the monumental square was the government office building called Derzhprom in Ukrainian and Gosprom in Russian. Built between 1925 and 1929, the Gosprom building was a marvel by any standard. At

Figure 2.2.  Dzerzhinskii Square, as seen from above Shevchenko Park. The VIRTA academy is on the right, the Gosprom building is in the center, and Kharkiv State University (now V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University) is on the left. The statue of Lenin (installed in 1964) is at the lower right. This is essentially how the square has looked since the 1950s; it still looked like this in 2014.

Figure 2.3.  The Gosprom building, as seen from the VIRTA academy building.

40

Chapter Two

63 meters (207 feet), it was the tallest “skyscraper” in all of Europe at the time, a shining example of the accomplishments of socialism in Ukraine.36 While Gosprom and other new buildings were erected in the 1930s to showcase the new socialist capital, others were torn down to safeguard its new ideology. Many of Kharkiv’s historic architectural monuments were destroyed, including most of its baroque churches (at least four important cathedrals were leveled). The destruction was not limited to buildings, however. Although the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church thrived in Kharkiv until 1926, in that year the city’s archbishop was arrested by the Soviet secret police and severe repressions of all religious groups followed.37 This was a presage of things to come, as the famines of 1932–33 (the Holodomor), the end of Ukrainization (the beginning of a new Russification), and the Great Terror together decimated the Kharkiv population, especially the ranks of the new national-modernist Ukrainian leadership.38 Having lost much of its population, Kharkiv also lost its status as the republic’s capital (to Kiev) in 1934. Even so, the city remained an important industrial, scientific, and cultural center.39 Between 1933 and 1935, the party leadership moved to replace the massive numbers of Ukraine’s citizens who had died in the early 1930s. According to Soviet archival records, the AllUnion and NKVD (the precursor to the KGB) Resettlement Committees forcibly relocated over 220,000 Soviet people—mostly demobilized soldiers and their families—to eastern Ukraine, with a large number ending up in the Kharkiv and Donbas regions.40 Compulsory resettlement was augmented by free internal immigration, as the opportunities available in the city drew tens of thousands more new residents. By 1939, Kharkiv once again had a population of over 800,000 people, despite the loss of the unknown thousands that had perished in collectivization and the purges.41 By May 1941, the city had swelled to over 900,000.42 When the Great Patriotic War began, Kharkiv initially housed hundreds of thousands of evacuees, but as the Wehrmacht approached, the population dwindled. For example, Valerii Ivanovich, one of the interviewees for this project, who had been born in Kharkiv and was eight years old at the time of the German invasion, was evacuated with his entire extended family, with orders to move to Uzbekistan. However, on the train, he fell ill with the scarlet fever, and his mother had to leave the rest of his family with his aunt and get off of the train at a makeshift “medic’s clinic,” where they spent the six weeks of his necessary recovery. Not knowing the location of the rest of their family, they went then to a small village in Kazakhstan, three kilometers from the Chinese border. They spent two years there with “exiled, dispossessed Kulaks,” making boots and sending them to the front. In 1943, they made



Lived Environment, Lived History 41

their way to the Rostov region of Russia, where his mother had originally grown up, and from there back to Kharkiv, where they finally were reunited with the rest of their family.43 The reason that Valerii Ivanovich and his fellow Kharkivites had to evacuate was as simple as it was terrifying to the city’s residents. Kharkiv had once again become a strategically important, highly militarized location—this time on the “eastern front” of history’s bloodiest war. For Valerii Ivanovich, the war was devastating. “I am a long-suffering child of war, and this is how I feel about it—it was a fire-bombing, utter destruction.”44 Prior to the first German occupation of the city, the retreating Soviets either evacuated or destroyed major industries in and around the city. There were four major battles for Kharkiv, each of which killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Estimates for the first battle alone, fought during October 1941, number over 96,500 Soviet military casualties.45 As during the Russian Civil War, the city changed hands more than once. The Wehrmacht occupied the city from October 1941 to June 1942 and from March to August of 1943. The Germans also understood the importance of symbols. They changed the name of Dzerzhinskii Square during both of their occupations—in 1942 to “German Army Square,” and in 1943 to “Leibstandarte SS Square.”46 Although the civilian casualty figures are not definitive, we do know that almost half a million of Kharkiv’s civilians perished during the first occupation alone.47 Many died of starvation, disease, and cold. The Germans executed more than 100,000 people and transported 60,000 more to Germany as forced laborers. The Gestapo shot and hanged thousands of real and suspected Soviet and nationalist partisans (as well as their supporters). More than 70,000 Jews were murdered, both within the city and in the surrounding countryside. On a single day, December 15, 1941, over 15,000 urban Jewish Kharkivites were marched to a ravine on the outskirts of the city and killed by weapons fire.48 By the time of the Red Army’s second recapture of the city in April 1943, less than 190,000 civilians—of any ethnicity—remained in Kharkiv.49 But that was not the end of the suffering. In the months and years following, Soviet special police squads shot or imprisoned real and suspected German collaborators and Ukrainian nationalists (as well as their supporters).50 At the same time, in 1943, the Soviet leadership convened the very first international military tribunal—a precursor of the Nuremberg Trials—to investigate the crimes of the German occupiers in Kharkiv.51 As they retreated, the Germans had demolished what little was left of the city’s infrastructure. By 1943, the war had reduced roughly 70 percent of the city to rubble. More than 500 factories had disappeared, including all of Kharkiv’s major production plants. The railroad stations and junctions, power

42

Chapter Two

stations and major electrical lines, and telegraph and telephone connections had all been destroyed, along with most government buildings and medical facilities. In addition, almost two million square meters of housing had been laid to ruin. The only well-known structure that survived to any significant extent was the Gosprom building; its extremely thick and durable ferroconcrete skeleton stood up to the numerous German attempts to demolish this symbol of Soviet power. The skyscraper remained to help shape the “New Soviet Person” of the socialist society in Kharkiv once more in the postwar period.52 Despite the scantiness of the remains, reconstruction of both the Gosprom building and the rest of the city began almost immediately after the German retreat. Numerous new apartment subdivisions were built from scratch according to Soviet standards of the time—along with the factories that produced the building materials necessary to undertake the monumental restoration of both Kharkiv and its neighboring regions. Some of the reconstruction was completed by the forced labor of German POWs and civilian internees, including several buildings in the city center.53 From the war years until the early 1950s, Germans—captured soldiers and kidnapped civilians—labored throughout the Soviet Union, and Kharkiv was no exception. The Soviet leadership saw these forced laborers as contributing to German reparations; they were also, at least in part, forced to work as retribution for the German seizure and use of Soviet citizens in similar ways during the war. According to Soviet records, as of January 1, 1946, there were four German labor battalions in Kharkiv, numbering over 2,400 internees.54 Several of my interviewees remember the Germans working in Kharkiv, and felt both satisfaction and pride that defeated Germans had been forced to help rebuild the city (this is discussed further below).55 However, the reconstruction task was so monumental that forced laborers could not do even a fraction of the work; thus, new Soviet residents of Kharkiv completed the majority of the reconstruction. The late 1940s and 1950s saw the population of the city explode once again, bringing in the necessary workers to reconstruct the city, then filling it in order to rebuild and staff its myriad educational institutions and massive industrial plants. By 1959, the non-transient population of the city again exceeded 900,000 citizens; by 1962, it was over a million.56 The majority of the older respondents interviewed for this project were born during or just after the war, some of them in Kharkiv. The native Kharkivites remember the 1950s and mid-1960s as a time of rebuilding, hope, and prosperity, despite (and perhaps partially because of) the physical reminder of the wartime ruins of destroyed neighborhoods, many of which remained until the mid-1960s. For example, the current main building of Karazin University (called “Kharkiv State University” during the Soviet period) was not reopened until 1962.57

Figure 2.4.  Dzerzhinskii Square, circa 1966. The VIRTA academy is on the right of the statue of Lenin, the Gosprom building is in the center, and Kharkiv State University (V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University) is on the left. A person standing on the square at the lower right provides a sense of scale.

44

Chapter Two

However, the vitality of this period for Kharkiv’s residents was not due solely to rebuilding and expansion. Municipal services also improved steadily over the ensuing three decades. In the mid-1950s, buildings were supplied with natural gas; new water reservoirs and aqueducts were constructed; new tram, bus, and trolleybus routes were built. From 1968 to 1975, the first line of the Kharkiv Metro was constructed; expanded steadily over the ensuing years, by 1978 it was the sixth largest subway system in the Soviet Union.58 In the 1960s and 70s, social and medical services were improved; by 1976 there were seventy hospitals and over 7,000 doctors in the city. Many clinics, resorts, and sanatoriums were opened in and around Kharkiv. Virtually all of the city’s colleges, universities, institutes, and academies were rebuilt; others were constructed and staffed for the first time.59 Indeed, the wide range of educational choices made Kharkiv a magnet for young people seeking higher education. In the words of one of my respondents, “I decided to go to a university, and Kharkov was the best city to go to because there were about twenty-two [civilian] universities—we call them institutes, but they are universities anyway. And there were many, many choices; you could select any of them, and it was very convenient to go back and forth between my town and Kharkov. There was transportation; we used the railroad. It took one night to go, and this was very convenient. All of the young people from my town chose either Kharkov or Kursk . . . I chose Kharkov.”60 One of the new educational institutions built in the wake of the war was The Marshall Leonid Aleksandrovich Govorov Higher Academy for (Air Defense) Radio Engineering (VIRTA). It is this academy that unites the majority of the respondents interviewed for this project. It was the center stage and defining institution of their lives; it is thus the situational focal point for this study, defining the respondents’ lived environment. 2.2 THE ACADEMY Military defeats and much waste of life and material during the Great Patriotic War made it clear to the Soviet leadership that the country was not properly prepared to defend against aerial attack. The military needed a technology and operations overhaul, especially in the area of homeland defense. During the final years of the war and the first stage of the Cold War, Soviet military leaders had several interconnected goals: they wanted to be able to detect sea, ground, and airborne targets at longer ranges and at higher elevations; they needed systems to collect and analyze radar surveillance data; they needed to improve both ground-based antiaircraft weapons and the communications systems to connect and coordinate them.61



Lived Environment, Lived History 45

New technologies of several types were required; as were competent, educated technicians to operate the cutting-edge equipment to be developed. An integral part of solving both of these problems was the creation of a new military academy designed to train specialists in radar technology, radio communications, and antiaircraft defense. Although the military did hurriedly set up a training academy of sorts for these specialties during the war (which had several locations from 1941–1945), it was not until after victory in Europe that the leadership was able to establish a truly permanent academy.62 Thus, in 1946, the military graduate school dedicated to these areas of research, development, and training, which had moved around during the war, was permanently settled in Kharkiv. It was the first of its kind in the Soviet Union. Originally named the Kharkiv Academy for Artillery Radar, in June of 1948 the academy was renamed the Order of the Patriotic War Artillery Radio Engineering Academy of the Armed Forces, and in 1949 it was incorporated into the new Air Defense Forces [Voiska protivovozdushnoi oborony, voiska PVO, V-PVO, literally “Anti-Air Defense Troops,” translated herein as “Air Defense Forces”], which had been created as a separate service branch the year before.63 During the late Soviet period, the Air Defense Forces were officially ranked third in importance among the Soviet military service branches, behind the Strategic Rocket Forces and the Ground Forces, but ahead of the Air Forces (unlike in the Unites States, offensive and defensive air forces were separate in the Soviet Union), the Navy, and the Civil Defense Forces.64 Several of my interviewees mentioned this fact, and are proud of the official ranking of their service branch.65 The academy became part of an extensive system of military education that was expanded dramatically in the wake of the war, which included the Suvorov high schools described above. Besides primary/secondary military schools, postsecondary education in the post-1960s Soviet military was basically divided into institutions of three types. The first, called “Courses for Second Lieutenants,” allowed cadets to be commissioned after just a one- or two-year course of study. Not an education of university (or college) level, these were frowned upon by career officers in the late Soviet years and were generally attended only by students who wished to be reserve officers or those who were too old to make the age cutoff (mid-twenties) for the university-level academies.66 The second type, a “(higher) military school” (vysshee uchilishche), was for incoming officers. The program of study at these universities was essentially equivalent to undergraduate programs at civilian institutions (specialist), and normally accepted students from seventeen to nineteen years of age that had just completed civilian or Suvorov high schools or had already begun a course of study at a civilian institute or university. The (higher) military schools commissioned young officers after four or five years of instruction, depending upon the specialty.67

46

Chapter Two

The third type of military educational institution, the only type to be called an “academy” (akademiia), was at the graduate school level, and was for experienced officers of higher rank only. VIRTA was one of these post-baccalaureate academies.68 Despite the fact that they occasionally educated undergraduate cadets during periods of rapid military expansion, the academies were not undergraduate academies like those in the United States; (higher) military schools, not academies like VIRTA, were the best analogues of West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy. Rather, the academies were primarily graduate schools focused on research, continuing education, and advanced technical and leadership training.69 Many graduates from the academies received the equivalent of an American Master’s degree (magistr). The academies also bestowed the advanced, research-oriented kandidat nauk degree, which is roughly equivalent to a Western PhD in terms of research, but without the coursework. A kandidat nauk diploma was required for filling faculty positions at defense research institutes and (higher) military schools. Academies also trained advanced candidates for the prestigious doktor nauk degree (essentially equivalent to the habilitation in Germany). This degree was normally a prerequisite for filling full professor positions in all educational institutes of higher learning.70 In early 1946, with most of Kharkiv still in a state of ruin, the new VIRTA academy was allocated space on Rudnev Square, including part of an administrative building and a small military barracks on Moskovskii Prospekt. The building housed the offices of the academy command, the colleges, and the departments, as well as classrooms and training rooms. The dilapidated barracks, which had been built more than a hundred years prior as housing for tsarist imperial soldiers, initially accommodated staff department offices. After the Great Patriotic War, these facilities were quickly made serviceable, but they were never very comfortable. According to the memoir of a graduate student who took the very first classes offered by the academy, “Our study began on 10 October [1946] in a building on Rudnev Square, #36. The premises were in decline and were not well heated in the winter. The temperature in the classroom never rose above 7.5 degrees [45 degrees Fahrenheit]. In class, we sat in overcoats.”71 Clearly, the academy needed new facilities. Upon the arrival of the new commander and requests to the military command in Moscow, it was decided that the academy would be relocated to Dzerzhinskii Square, next to the Gosprom building and across from Karazin University. Together, the buildings of Dzerzhinskii Square would once again inspire the citizens of Kharkiv to become the New Soviet People desired by the communist leadership—this time with a military graduate school to teach officers and to inspire respect in the citizenry. Prior to the war, there had been a small undergraduate military



Lived Environment, Lived History 47

and economic institute in this location, but the planned central building had yet to be completed by 1941; the two six-story buildings that had housed the school had been severely damaged. Construction on what was to be the new VIRTA academy building began in February 1947.72 Special dedicated construction crews were brought in to do the bulk of the work, including German labor battalions.73 At first, there was “a certain satisfaction” that defeated Wehrmacht soldiers had contributed to building the new Soviet academy, but as time wore on, “it became more about pride in the structure itself. The fact that Germans had a part in building it meant that it was a better building—because, as everyone knows, the Germans really know how to build things.”74 Pride in the structure did not come only from the perceived superiority of German construction labor. The officers of the academy—faculty and students alike, as well as noncommissioned and non-military academy staff members—provided countless hours of construction work as volunteers.75 This was a normal situation during the frenetic postwar years in many parts of the Soviet Union that had been laid waste—people helped out both at home and at work, for they wanted their built environment (and thus their living and working conditions) to “return to normal” as soon as possible.76 And this return to normal did indeed come soon in the case of the new VIRTA building. On the Soviet national first day of school, September 1, 1947, academy classes were offered in the new location, just six months after work had begun. Although the building was not yet finished, by that first day of the fall semester, all of the academy officers and staff had already relocated to the new building, which by that time included twenty-four classrooms, eight training rooms, several laboratories, offices for the administration and all of the departments, and preliminary space for the library holdings.77 To those who helped build them, the new facilities were well worth the effort, as they were a significant improvement.78 While the academy retained control of the buildings on Rudnev Square, improving them over time and using them when necessary for training space, as well as expanding into facilities elsewhere in the city, its main offices and operations remained at Dzerzhinskii Square #6 for the remainder of its existence. The building became part of the heart of Kharkiv, a centerpiece of the project to produce the New Soviet Person and the focal point of the lives of the military men interviewed for this project. “Of course, the academy building is unique,” Fedor Borisovich said, “The building is steeped in history. The entire Soviet Union helped to create this building. Well, you know what it is like inside. This is a very excellent building, like a capitol building. The walls were something like a meter and a half thick. In summer it is cool inside; in winter it is warm. And in this building,

Figure 2.5.  The VIRTA academy building (now part of V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University), April 2011.



Lived Environment, Lived History 49

moreover, many unique technological advances were made—some of global significance—by our researchers and professors . . . And very many scientific inventions were made inside the academy—all within this building’s laboratories, in its classrooms.”79 VIRTA was the only graduate academy in Kharkiv, but the city also boasted five baccalaureate-level military schools during the late Soviet period: the Guards of the Red Star Kharkiv (Higher) Tank Command School (the famous military defector Viktor Suvorov graduated from this academy), the Grtisevets Kharkiv (Higher) Military Aviation School (independent Ukraine’s first Minister of Defense, General Kostiantyn80 Morozov, graduated from this academy), and three others. Many of these schools’ open-air activities and exercises, including those by the instructors and students of VIRTA, were carried out in Kharkiv’s two largest green spaces. Shevchenko Park, which has long housed the sprawling Kharkiv Zoo among many other public attractions, is located just across Dzerzhinskii Square from the main academy building, behind Karazin University. Gor’kii Park is located 1.5 kilometers northwest, and is connected to both the Botanical Gardens and a much larger forested area to its north. The residents of central Kharkiv, especially those living and working on the routes between VIRTA and Gor’kii Park, became quite used to the sight of cadets and officers marching to and from training exercises. Local schools provided children as foot soldiers for academy war games in the park and forest north of it (see figure 2.7). Young women went on dates with academy personnel that included meals, ice cream, Komsomol and institutional events, and long strolls in these parks. Dressed in their uniforms and often carrying weapons, academy officers— professors and cadets alike—were visible pillars of the community, acknowledged defenders of both the homeland and of international communism, and a fixture of life in Kharkiv. As one daughter of an academy colonel put it, “We were proud of our fathers, and everybody knew it . . . our classmates knew who our fathers were—they wore uniforms, and went on trips, and brought us things from Moscow, Leningrad, and abroad. Everyone knew that my father was an academy officer, and the whole city knew who the VIRTA officers were.”81 This was true not just in Tat’iana’s recollections years later, but at the time, as well. When she was twelve years old, in 1986, she made a family photo diary and scrapbook. A page of that scrapbook is pictured and translated in figure 2.8. In her description of her father, it is clear that Tat’iana’s personal perception of him was defined by his service to the state and his professional achievements. This included his sporting achievements, which were part of most model Soviet officer’s professional lives.82

Figure 2.6.  VIRTA officers take it easy, circa 1970.

Figure 2.7.  VIRTA cadets and their “foot soldiers” listen to rules in Gor’kii Park prior to war games, 1967.

Figure 2.8a.  “My Papa,” Tat’iana Vladimirovna Fikse, 1986. (Ovcharenko Family Collection). This is from a scrapbook that features all of Tat’iana’s immediate family members; descriptions of the others are not as focused on professional achievements.

Figure 2.8b.  Translation of “My Papa” in figure 2.8a. The above details about military sports are from N.F. Lodiaev, Voennoe troebor’e (Moscow: Boenizdat, 1978).

52

Chapter Two

2.3 LIVING CONDITIONS Despite the power and prestige they enjoyed, the living conditions of the officers who came to the academy—for permanent professors, researchers, and staff, but especially for students—were quite difficult. From the beginning (and continuing throughout its existence) the waiting list for apartments for professors and other officers of the permanent staff was one to three years. Officers who came as students were not provided housing close to the city center. For the majority, the only option was to rent rooms or apartments on the outskirts of the city, far from both classroom and training locations. In 1952, the academy leadership addressed this issue by having a “family dormitory” built in a prestigious area of the city center, only 1.5 kilometers from Dzerzhinskii Square, at Prospekt Lenina #22a. From that time on, most faculty officers below the rank of lieutenant colonel lived in this dormitory with their families. Each family had a single room of 18 square meters (194 square feet, the size of a typical American living room) that was shared by all members of the family, with no internal walls to separate living spaces. The rooms opened onto a u-shaped corridor that ran the length of the four-story building. Each floor had thirty such family apartments opening directly onto the main corridor, each housing another family. At the ends of the corridors was an exit. Near each end were four toilet closets (with space big enough for one toilet); eight toilets for thirty families. Each floor had two sink rooms, with six small hand sinks and three large laundry sinks. On every floor were five communal kitchens, with five or six families sharing each. Families had their own kitchen cabinets, but shared the single sink and two stove/oven combinations that were in each kitchen. Refrigerators were kept in the family apartments, so food had to be carried to the kitchens. The sink rooms and kitchens had plumbing for cold water only; only the showers had hot water. The showers, which were also communal (large open spaces with shower heads and drains), were in the basement of the building. Use of the showers was assigned on alternating days—men and boys one day, women and girls the next.83 Upon promotion to lieutenant colonel, the officers could get on the waiting list for one of the new single-family apartments that were built in the city in great numbers in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. These new apartments are 60–80 square meters in size (650–850 square feet, the size of an average American one-bedroom apartment). They typically include one to three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a toilet closet, and a bathroom. Some apartments have storage and/or coat closets, others do not. Many have balconies. Almost all apartment complexes have some playground equipment in the space between buildings. Most of the buildings were designed with multiple entrances, struc-



Lived Environment, Lived History 53

Figure 2.9.  This warning was painted years ago on the back of a shed that forms part of the fence around the VIRTA sports complex. It is adjacent to the playground outside of the “family dormitory” at Prospekt Lenina #22a. It reads: “Comrade Parents! Do not allow your children onto military territory! It is dangerous to their lives!”

tured so that each entrance was a distinct address with its own stairwell and (if included) an elevator. For each building, there were five to eighteen floors, and four to six apartments opened off each staircase landing. At first, the VIRTA officers’ apartments tended to be on the outskirts of the city, with long commutes hampered by the fact that the public transportation system had been destroyed during the war. As the public transportation systems were completed—bus (mid-1950s), trolley (late-1950s), and metro (mid-1970s)—and later expanded, travel within the city became much easier. Then, in the 1980s, the academy acquired and developed the neighborhood (mikroraion) surrounding the dormitory at Prospekt Lenina #22a. There, a large single-family apartment complex was built whose residents were all academy officers. Other VIRTA officers lived in nearby buildings built during the same time period, along with non-academy military officers, officers of the KGB, and mid-level Communist Party functionaries.84 It is to this neighborhood that the majority of the people interviewed for this project moved in the 1980s; most of them still live in the same apartments. Others, who were promoted either before or after the 1980s, live further from the city center and are more dispersed. However, while holding the rank of

Figure 2.10.  On the left is the “family dormitory” at Prospekt Lenina #22a, on the right is one end of the large apartment building that from its completion in 1988 until the mid-1990s was populated entirely by families of VIRTA faculty and staff, rank Lt. Colonel and higher. Many of my respondents still live in this building. Photo taken from in front of what had been the VIRTA sports complex, April 2011.

Figure 2.11.  Officers parade, VIRTA sports complex, 1973.

56

Chapter Two

major or below, almost all of them lived in the family dormitory at Prospekt Lenina #22a. After the men were promoted to lieutenant colonel and moved to single-family apartments, their families remained connected to the “academy village” on Prospekt Lenina through personal and professional ties, as well as the necessity to attend ideological and cultural events in nearby locations, and to pursue physical training at the academy’s sports complex there.85 In 1957, in the courtyard of the “family dormitory” at Prospekt Lenina #22a, construction of the sports complex began. The first portion of the complex was opened in 1962, including a swimming pool. Expanded over the years, by the early 1970s it included a paved running track, three outdoor sports fields, and two indoor gymnasiums.86 The VIRTA leadership paid close attention to the cultural, ideological, and physical well-being of their officers—faculty, staff, and students alike. During the 1950s, an academy officer’s club was located in a small building at Sumy Street #55. Used for theatrical and musical performances, visual exhibitions, official ceremonies, and as a dance hall, the club became an important part of academy officers’ lives. It was moved to the main building in 1958.87 Party work was ubiquitous for the academy’s officers and their families. In addition to the army political officers (zampolit) assigned to the academy and its officers, numerous divisions of the Communist Party and the Komsomol were located at the academy over the years, with myriad activities.88

Figure 2.12.  VIRTA cadets hydrate after the annual autumn cross-country race, mid1970s.



Lived Environment, Lived History 57

Movies, including current Soviet and foreign films, were shown free of charge in the academy officer’s club, both to the officers and to their families. On New Year’s Eve every year, the academy would throw a major party, memories of which are still very much alive in the minds of the officers and their (now adult) children. “The first time I ever saw Mickey Mouse was on New Year’s Eve at the Academy,” Tat’iana recalled, “They showed us a whole bunch of cartoons from the West, and we sat there, transfixed for hours, watching them. We made them play the cartoons over and over. We were the only kids in Kharkiv who got to see them, as far as I know. When you attended a party at the academy, you knew that your father was special— and that, in a certain way, made us special too.”89 At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, VIRTA had more than 300 professors and technicians involved in teaching, research, or both. Between 1946 and 1991, the academy conferred more than 80 doktor nauk degrees, more than 1,000 kandidat nauk degrees, and thousands of degrees at the Master’s and undergraduate levels. Many of these graduates later served as high-ranking administrators at the academy itself, as well as several other military and civilian universities. Dozens more worked at research institutes, both military and civilian.90 Of course, the bulk of their graduates were either in military administration or “in the field,” commanding soldiers and equipment in the defense of the Soviet Union and international communism. In January of 1992, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declaration of Ukrainian independence, VIRTA was reorganized and renamed the Kharkiv Military University of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Since the new Ukrainian military saw much less need for developing research in advanced antiaircraft technology and military computer systems, the academy was reorganized in 1992–1993, this time to transform it into a baccalaureatelevel military school.91 This restructuring precipitated a period of decline in which many officer-professors left voluntarily. The reorganized school was finally closed in 2003. Between 2003 and 2010, all of the academy’s real estate holdings outside of the main building were privatized, including the family dormitory and sports complex at Prospekt Lenina #22a. The dormitory has been sectioned off and sold; in 2010–2011 it was being remodeled apartment by apartment. The sports complex is still in operation, now as an expensive private health club. In 2010, the main academy building on Freedom (formerly Dzerzhinskii) Square was given to Karazin University, which has moved several civilian academic departments into the building and is slowly remodeling it. The closing of the academy and the demilitarization of its buildings has had a profound effect on the military officers and their families in my group of respondents, and not simply because of the loss of access to comparably first-rate facilities. Indeed,

Figure 2.13.  Cadets kick up dust marching through the park, mid-1970s.



Lived Environment, Lived History 59

the personal identities of the officer-professors who worked at VIRTA were intimately bound up with that of the academy itself. 2.4 CONCLUSIONS Kharkiv has had a long history of both distinct identities and intimate ties to the tsarist Russian and the Soviet imperial capitals—a history very much alive in the minds of its current residents, as discussed in later chapters. When my respondents first came to Kharkiv (by birth or by assignment), it was a city in the heartland of their country, a showcase of Soviet futuristic architecture, and a regional center of culture, education, transportation, and administration. Since 1991, however, it has once again become a border city on the peripheries of both Kiev and Moscow. What it will be in the future is difficult to predict, but regardless of its geopolitical position, Kharkiv’s residents will doubtless remain conditioned by—and deeply committed to—the various and often contradictory architectural statements and historical narratives of the city and its region. VIRTA, a centerpiece of that history for over half a century, was an elite military graduate school staffed by accomplished and highly educated individuals. The officers who taught and did research at the academy in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s were considered—both by themselves and by their society—to be the highly visible protectors of the Soviet Union. This situation was central both to their identities and to the daily welfare of their families. By the middle of the 1960s, they lived in relatively comfortable surroundings in the very heart of a large and important Soviet city, and they had facilities and cultural opportunities unavailable to those around them. It is to those men that we now turn. NOTES 1.  Tat’iana Petrovna Stoliarskaia, interview with author, March 27, 2011. 2.  Ol’ga Nikolaevna Gareva, letter to a friend (November 12, 2005), Gareva Family Collection. 3.  Comparison of census data found online; for statistics used for Russia and the USSR, see the following notes. 4.  Kharkiv was the ninth largest if one includes Helsinki, Warsaw, and Lodz. N. A. Troiinitskii, Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi Imperii, 1897 g. (St. Petersburg: Izd. tsentral’nago statisticheskago komiteta Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1899–1905). 5.  Depending upon the year (and therefore the cities included), Kharkiv was the sixth-, seventh-, or eighth-largest city in the whole of the USSR. Chauncy D. Harris,

60

Chapter Two

“Ethnic Groups in Cities of the Soviet Union,” Geographical Review vol. 35, no. 3 (July 1945): 466–473; Theodore Shabad, “Population Trends of Soviet Cities,” Soviet Geography vol. 26, no. 2 (1985): 109–153; Itogi vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1989 goda [1989 USSR Census] (Minneapolis, MN: East View Publications, 1996) CDROM; U.S. Bureau of the Census, USA/USSR: Facts and Figures (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991). 6. The region consisted of five Cossack polky (military-administrative units or regimental districts). For an excellent synthetic history of the region, see D. I. Bahalii, Istoriia Slobids’koi Ukrainy (1918; repr. Kharkiv: Osnova, 1990; also available online, http://dalizovut.narod.ru/bagaley/bagal_so.htm). 7.  Kharkiv was the Bolshevik capital, in contrast to Kiev, the capital of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which after 1918 was in opposition to the Bolsheviks under Lenin, see below. 8.  No book-length histories on Kharkiv or northeastern Ukraine exist in English. However, for the political significance of the region, see Terry Martin, “The Empire’s New Frontiers: New Russia’s Path from Frontier to Okraina 1774–1920,” Russian History vol. 19, nos. 1–4 (1992): 181–201; Andreas Kappeler, “The Russian Southern and Eastern Frontiers from the 15th to the 18th Centuries,” Ab Imperio no. 2 (June 2003). For the remainder of this section, I am indebted to Volodymyr Kravchenko, whose body of work on this subject provided many of the facts and much of the analysis of Kharkiv’s history that is reproduced here. For a very concise and readable English-language summation of Kharkiv’s history up to the Great Patriotic War, see Volodymyr Kravchenko, “Kharkiv: A Borderland City,” in John Czaplicka, Nida Gelazis, and Blair A. Ruble, eds., Cities after the Fall of Communism: Reshaping Cultural Landscapes and European Identity (Washington, DC and Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). See also Volodymyr Kravchenko, Ukraina, Imperiia, Rosiia: Vybrani tsitaty z modernoi istorii ta istoriografii (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2011); Vladimir Kravchenko, Khar’kov/Kharkiv: Stolitsa Pogranich’ia (Vil’nius: Evropeiskii Gumanitarhyi Universitet, 2010); V. V. Kravchenko, “Universytet dlia Ukrainy,” Skhid-Zakhid (2005): 120–166; V. V. Kravchenko, “Kharkivs’kyi universytet u pershii polovyni XIX stolittia,” in Kharkivs’kyi natsional’nyi universytet imeni V. N. Karazina za 200 rokiv (Kharkiv: Folio, 2004), 6–124; V.V. Kravchenko, “Rehional’na identychnist’ Slobozhanshchyny v istorytchnii perspektyvi XVIII—potchatku XX st.,” in Ukrains’ko-rosiis’ke porubizhzha: Formuvannia sotsial’noho ta kul’turnoho prostoru v istorii ta suchasnii politytsi—Zbirnyk materialiv seminaru Kyivs’koho proektu Instytutu Kennana ta filosofs’koho fakul’tetu Kharkivs’koho natsional’noho universytetu imeni V.N. Karazina, 11 kvitnia 2003 roku (Kyiv: Stylos, 2003), 44–48. 9.  “In the imagination of many, the new border between West and East is now between Ukraine and Russia, even if Ukraine and Russia (and Belarus and Russia) share cultural, linguistic, and historical attributes.” Michael McFaul, “Russia and the West: A Dangerous Drift,” Current History: A Journal of Contemporary World Affairs vol. 104, no. 684 (October 2005): 307. This border status has not changed in the recent past. See Steven Pifer, “Ukraine’s Perilous Balancing Act,” Current History: A Journal of Contemporary World Affairs vol. 111, no. 743 (March 2012): 106.



Lived Environment, Lived History 61

10.  Several interviewees mentioned this fact, including Elena Mikhailovna Popova, interview with author, February 21, 2011. 11.  Kravchenko, “Kharkiv: A Borderland City”; Kravchenko, “Rehional’na identychnist’ Slobozhanshchyny.” 12.  Kravchenko, “Kharkiv: A Borderland City,” 220. 13.  Ibid., 221. 14.  Several interviewees mentioned this fact, including Inna Viktorovna Petrova, in interview with author, October 7, 2010, and Svetlana Viktorovna Rybalko, in interview with author, February 20, 2011. 15. Kravchenko, Kharkov/Kharkiv, 120–128. 16.  Kravchenko, “Kharkiv: A Borderland City,” 220. 17. Kravchenko, Kharkov/Kharkiv, 231–250. 18.  The charter was drawn up in November 1804, on the initiative of the prominent educator V. N. Karazin and in accordance with the charter of Tsar Alexander I. “Historical Background,” V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University Official Website, http://www.univer kharkov.ua/en/general/our_university/history. See also Kravchenko, “Kharkivs’kyi universytet,” 6–24; Kravchenko, “Universytet dlia Ukrainy,” 120–126. 19.  Kravchenko, “Universytet dlia Ukrainy,” 120–145; Kravchenko, “Kharkivs’kyj universytet,” 6–55. 20.  Kravchenko, “Universytet dlia Ukrainy,” 145–166; Kravchenko, “Kharkivs’kyj universytet,” 56–110. 21.  Kravchenko, “Kharkiv: A Borderland City,” 221. 22.  Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–70. 23.  A. N. Iarmysh, ed., Istoriia goroda Khar’kova XX stoletiia (Kharkiv: Folio, 2004), 5–150. 24.  Kravchenko, “Kharkiv: A Borderland City,” 223. 25.  D. I. Bahalii and D. Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar’kova za 250 let ego sushchestvovaniia (s 1655-go po 1905-yi god), 2 vols. (Kharkiv: V. N. Karazin, 1905, 1912). 26. Iarmysh, Istoriia goroda Khar’kova, 95–110. See also Kravchenko, “Kharkiv: A Borderland City,” 223. 27. Iarmysh, Istoriia goroda Khar’kova. See also Harris, “Ethnic Groups in Soviet Union,” 466–473; Shabad, “Population Trends,” 109–153; Itogi vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1989 goda [1989 USSR Census]. 28.  Kravchenko, “Kharkiv: A Borderland City,” 226. 29.  Rex A. Wade, “The Revolution in the Provinces: Khar’kov and the Varieties of Response to the October Revolution,” Revolutionary Russia vol. 4, no. 1 (June 1991): 132–142. See also Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 239–274; Mark Baker, “Rampaging Soldatki, Cowering Police, Bazaar Riots and Moral Economy: The Social Impact of the Great War in Kharkiv Province,” Canadian-American Slavonic Papers vol. 35, nos. 2–3 (Summer–Fall 2001): 137–155. 30.  I. K. Rybalka, Khar’kov v gody revoliutsii i Grazhdanskoi voihy, 1917–1920 (Kharkiv: Prapor, 1983). See also Baker, “Great War in Kharkiv Province,” 137–155.

62

Chapter Two

31. A. V. Skorobogatov, Kharkiv u chasy nimets’koi okupatsii, 1941–1943 (Kharkiv: Prapor, 2006), 14. 32. Iarmysh, Istoriia goroda Khar’kova. 33.  Totus D. Hewryk, “Planning of the Capital in Kharkiv,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies vol. 16, nos. 3–4 (December 1992): 326. 34. Ibid. 35.  Ibid., 331. 36.  A. Leibfreid, V. Reusov, and A. Tits, eds., Khar’kov: Arkhitektura, pamiatniki, novostroiki: Putevoditel’ (Kharkiv: Prapor, 1987). 37. Iarmysh, Istoriia goroda Khar’kova, 511–526. For more on religion and its repression, see chapter 6. 38.  Vasyl Markus, Roman Senkus, and Ihor Stebelsky, “Kharkiv,” Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2006), http://www .encyclopediaofukraine.com/next.asp?bottomMenuDisplay=pages\K\H\KhanenkoMykhailo htm&KidNumer=5554. See also Iarmysh, Istoriia goroda Khar’kova, 185–203. 39.  S. Yekelchyk, “The Making of ‘Proletarian Capital’: Patterns of Stalinist Social Policy in Kiev in the Mid-1930s,” Europe-Asia Studies vol. 50, no. 7 (November 1998): 1229–1244. 40.  Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR, trans. Anna Yastrzhembska (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2004), 88–90. 41. Due to internal migration, lack of recordkeeping, and the clandestine and/ or haphazard nature of much of the killing, accurate numbers of the dead are unavailable. See Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 42.  N. I. Rudnitskii (Colonel), “Voenkomaty Khar’kova v predvoennye i voennye gody,” cited in Valerii Vokhmianin, “Chernyi Sentiabr’, 1941,” Sloboda (October 15, 2006): 74. 43.  Valerii Ivanovich Onoprienko, interview with author, February 25, 2011. 44. Ibid. 45.  Of the total, 75,720 were killed in action and 20,789 were wounded or missing. G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Rossiia i SSSR v voinakh XX veka: Poteri vooruzhennykh cil, Statisticheskoe issledovannie (Moskow: Olma-Press, 2001), 347; see also V. K. Vokhmianin and A. I. Podoprigora, Khar’kov, 1941 (Kharkiv: Raider, 2009), 104. 46. Skorobogatov, Kharkiv 1941–1943, 77. 47.  Ibid., 69. 48.  On the murder of Jews in Kharkiv during the war, see V. P. Lebedeva and P. P. Sokol’skii, Skazhi, Drobitskii Iar…: Ocherki. Vospominaniia. Dokumenty (Kharkiv: Prapor, 1991). See also the Kharkiv Holocaust Museum website at http://holocaustmuseum kharkov.ua/. 49. “Istoriia: bez belykh pyaten,” Khar’kovskie izvestiia nos. 100–101 (August 23, 2008): 6. 50.  Markus et al., “Kharkiv.”



Lived Environment, Lived History 63

51. Iarmysh, Istoriia goroda Khar’kova, 309–374. 52. Ibid. 53.  Petr Borisovich Medvedev, interview with author, February 25, 2011; Polian, Against Their Will. 54. Polian, Against Their Will, 277–279. 55. Boris Khachaturovich Babaian, interview with author, February 18, 2011; Evgenii Vladimirovich Gvozd’, interview with author, March 21, 2011. 56.  N. T. D’iachenko, Ulitsy i ploshchadi Khar’kova (Kharkiv: Prapor, 1977), 8. The millionth Kharkivite was born on the first of November 1962, and was named “Iurii” after Iurii Gagarin. “Millionnyi khar’kovchanin otmetil 46-letie,” Golos Khar’kova no. 29 (November 2008): 5. 57.  Kravchenko, “Universytet dlia Ukrainy,” 164–166. 58.  Henry W. Morton and Robert C. Stewart, eds., The Contemporary Soviet City (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1984), 186. 59. Iarmysh, Istoriia goroda Khar’kova, 451–579. 60.  Ol’ga Nikolaevna Gareva, interview with author, November 6, 2010. 61. V. N. Kubareva, ed., Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova: Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk (Kharkiv: VIRTA, 1980), 16–27. This is a history textbook intended for internal use at the academy only; 400 total copies were printed. Only one copy survives in the academy archive holdings. 62. VIRTA staff historians date the academy’s founding to 1941, as this was the year that the military first chartered a graduate school dedicated to research and training in advanced antiaircraft defense. Indeed, because of the consistency in vision, goals, and faculty, the wartime training center was the precursor to what the academy was to become after 1946, even if it was hastily organized and rudimentary in comparison to its later incarnations and despite the fact that it was not located in Kharkiv until after the second German occupation of the city was repelled. Kubareva, Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, 22–24. 63. Kubareva, Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, 26. 64.  Viktor Suvorov, Inside the Soviet Army (New York: MacMillan, 1982), 61. 65.  For example, Leonid Ivanovich Grabov, interview with author, March 6, 2011. 66.  E. S. Williams, The Soviet Military: Political Education, Training and Morale (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 118–120. 67. Ibid. 68. Depending upon the needs of the central command, the higher academies might also occasionally accept and train a cohort of undergraduates, conferring the baccalaureate-equivalent degree of specialist. Kubareva, Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, 73–104. 69.  The United States does have some rough analogues, for example, the Naval Graduate School in Monterey, California, and the Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. 70. Williams, Soviet Military, 118–120. See also Captain John K. Boles III, “The Interrelation between Personnel and Training in the Soviet Armed Forces” (Garmisch, Germany: US Army Russian Institute, 1981); Kubareva, Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova.

64

Chapter Two

71.  B. V. Naidenov (Colonel), “Vysshaia voennaia shkola PVO stala akademiei,” in IU.M. Medvedev, ed., “Iubileinoe izdanie: 50 let akademii imeni L.A. Govorova,” (Kharkiv: VIRTA, 1991), 4. “‘Imeni Govorova’: Razovaia iubileinaia gazeta Voennoi inzhenernoi radiotekhnicheskoi akademii PVO imeni Marshala Sovetskogo Soiuza Govorova L.A.” This is a commemorative newspaper intended for internal use at the academy only; 205 total copies were printed. A copy survives in the personal papers of Petr Borisovich Medvedev. 72.  “50 let akademii,” 1. 73.  Several interviewees mentioned this fact, including Boris Anatol’evich Belyi, in interview with author, September 15, 2010, and Viktor Grigor’evich Rybalko, in interview with author, December 9, 2010. 74.  Aleksandra Valentinovna Pirogova, interview with author, September 6, 2010. 75.  Kubareva, ed., Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, 5–26; “50 let akademii,” 3–5. 76.  Naidenov, “Vysshaia voennaia shkola,” 3. 77.  Kubareva, ed., Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, 54–56. 78.  “50 let akademii,” 3–10. 79.  Fedor Borisovich Kotov, interview with author, October 13, 2010. 80.  This is the Ukrainian transliteration that General Morozov uses for his name when he publishes in English. 81.  Tat’iana Vladimirovna Fikse, interview with author, March 30, 2011. 82.  According to many of the officers, their wives, and their children, sports were indeed integral to Soviet officer’s lives. See especially Petr Alekseevich Litaev, interview with author, September 17, 2010; Aleksandr Nikolaievich Pletnev, interview with author, February 24, 2011. See also Kubareva, ed., Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, 211 and following. 83.  Since the building has undergone complete internal restructuring and renovation, this description was pieced together from visiting the building myself as well as descriptions by several of its former residents, including Liudmila Nikolaevna Donets, in interview with author, November 28, 2010. 84. Several interviewees mentioned this fact, including Viktor Nikolaevich Chikatev, interview with author, September 10, 2010. The range of neighbors is verified by items in family archives, most importantly contemporary journals and scrapbooks. Family Collections of the Chikatev and Romanenko families. 85.  Almost all of the military interviewees discussed this building and its neighborhood, including Ekaterina Mikhailovna Kaziuta, interview with author, January 27, 2011. Details are verified by items in more than half of the family archives, most importantly photographs. 86.  Kubareva, ed., Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, 157–161. 87.  Ibid., 162–164. 88. Ibid. 89.  Tat’iana Vladimirovna Fikse, interview with author, March 30, 2011. 90.  “50 let akademii,” 1. 91.  Kharkivs’kii viis’kovii universitet, “10 rokiv: Kharkivs’kii viis’kovii universitet” (Kharkiv, 2001). This is a commemorative magazine intended for internal use at Kharkiv Military University only.

Chapter Three

Men and the Military “New Soviet Military Men”

The academy years were probably the best years of my life . . . it was a really bright, good time. We were surrounded by care and attention; they created the conditions for true learning . . . We were in a very privileged position, especially because the academy was the only one like it in the Union. We stood out; we wore a uniform quite different from any other kinds of clothing. So one stood out. All of us were remarkable—and noticed. The attitude of others was, “Those people, they are the elite, quite exceptional.” I am grateful to the academy, because it was everything to me.1

If we want to understand the lives of Soviet citizens, what can military history provide? What can a study of military men tell us about the Soviet people more generally? What drove the Soviet Union to build and maintain the largest military of its time? Was the Soviet officer corps professional? This chapter seeks to answer these questions by considering the military men of the VIRTA academy. This project is not a military history, but it does begin with the premise that research on elite Soviet military individuals and their families can yield important insights into the history of the Soviet people and their life experiences.2 To begin, one must understand the history of the military in the Russian and Soviet empires, and how important the officer corps was to both the tsarist and Soviet regimes. As prominent historians have pointed out, for the tsars, “the army was the creator as well as embodiment of the stability and legitimacy of the Russian Empire.”3 As Peter Struve wrote, “The army—this is the live personification of the official being of Russia.”4 This was no less true for the leaders of the Soviet Union than it was for the tsars. In the USSR, the state and the military were intertwined so closely that the formation of New Soviet Military Men became a project to provide 65

66

Chapter Three

leadership for the larger group of intended New Soviet People. Professional military officers personified the state’s ambitions—both in official propaganda and in their own conceptions of themselves. Although some have argued that ideology was becoming irrelevant to the officer corps in the lead-up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, my research suggests that this was not the case, and supports the opposite position, held by a few scholars, that “it was increasingly internalized” by the officers in particular.5 From the 1960s on, these officers and their comrades made up a volunteer, professional, and cohesive officer corps that was dedicated to the defense of their state, was highly trained and educated, and was insistent on high standards of performance. Their lives were so intertwined with the state and its ideology that, for the officers of VIRTA, the wild times of transition and collapse started not in 1989 or 1991, but with Gorbachev’s perestroika. Then, in January 1992, the lives and identities of these men and their families were turned completely upside-down. Overnight, they went from a close-knit cadre of leaders in the upper echelon of a superpower to jobless aliens in a newly independent country. The officers of VIRTA were living personifications of “the official being” of the Soviet Union; thus, a study of these men provides valuable insight into the late Soviet period and the continuing transition of eastern Ukraine. 3.1 HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY For the entire period from the end of the war until the end of the union (1945 to 1991), the USSR maintained the largest armed forces in the world. During the last two decades of its existence, it sustained over four million men in active service, with a reserve pool of over fifty million.6 Ukraine was an important base for many of these soldiers. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were between 750,000 and 1,000,000 active duty military personnel stationed in the Ukrainian SSR, with hundreds of thousands more stationed just beyond the internal and external borders.7 From its beginnings, the Soviet Union required universal male conscription. The 1936 Soviet Constitution declared military service the “sacred duty” of all male citizens. The postwar demobilization of the Soviet Armed Forces (reduced from thirteen million men) was completed in 1948. In 1949, a new service law went into effect that required three years of service in the army or four years in the navy for all males. In 1967, the requirements were lowered to two years in the army or three years in the navy. All able-bodied men were subject to the draft at the age of eighteen, but service could be postponed in the case of continuing education. Even in civilian universities, students were required to take military training and to become reserve officers.8



Men and the Military 67

The Soviet Union did not rely on civilian reserve officers, however. Beginning in the immediate postwar period, a massive expansion of the military education system at all levels began to produce highly trained and well-rounded professional career officers. From the 1960s on, a new, younger, and well-educated officer corps led the Soviet Armed Forces. Although one prominent military historian of the Russian and Soviet armed forces has argued that the Soviet army officer corps lacked professionalism throughout its existence, right up until its end,9 in section 3.3 of this chapter, I argue that this was not the case in the mature Soviet Union of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. By the early 1980s, the Soviet military was quantitatively the largest in the world by every possible measure—in manpower, in numbers of weapons, in variety of weapons, in mobilization potential, and in the size of the country’s military-industrial base. Although it lagged behind US and NATO forces in the quality of numerous kinds of weapons and equipment, the USSR was ahead in all quantitative measures, and equal to—or ahead of—the United States and its allies in some important qualitative categories, such as fundamental research on radar systems.10 Because of the way in which industry and the military were interwoven, as well as the questionable nature of military—and especially Soviet—statistics, defining the percentage of the Soviet economy dedicated to maintaining such a massive military is, at best, an educated guess. Some experts have estimated military expenditures at 10 to 15 percent of GDP in the mid-1960s, rising to 13 to 17 percent in the late 1980s.11 However, military spending was a single line item in the state budget that reflected only operations and maintenance costs. Given the size of the military establishment, the fact that the amount spent on research and development was an especially well-guarded state secret, and the reality that other military spending—including training, military construction, and arms production—was concealed within the budgets of all-union ministries and state committees, the actual figure was undoubtedly higher (some have estimated much higher).12 Overall, the question of how much was spent on the Soviet military remains what it was at the time: “a briar patch of complexity.”13 Whatever the exact number, experts agree that military spending was by far the largest component of the state budget throughout the late Soviet period. The question as to why the Soviet system produced and maintained such an extraordinarily large and costly military has plagued Western intelligence officers and scholars for decades. This larger question is no less “a briar patch of complexity” than the issue of identifying accurate military expenditures. However, when understood in terms of history and ideology, it is quite illustrative of larger historical currents, and provides valuable insight into Soviet society between 1945 and 1991 as well as what came after.

68

Chapter Three

Myriad factors contributed to the size of the Soviet military during the Cold War. Perhaps the most popular explanation has been that the USSR was simply reacting to the United States in an “arms race.” By this logic, the Soviet Union was primarily reacting to actions on the part of the United States.14 This was true in some particular cases, and was certainly a centerpiece of both propaganda in the communist world and peace campaigns in the West. However, when analyzed over time, the specifics of Soviet military growth—and their possible relationship to US actions—do not bear it out. As former US Secretary of Defense Harold Brown observed at the time, “When we build, they build; when we stop, they build.”15 Secondly, Soviet spokesmen and some historically minded Western analysts have argued that repeated experience with foreign invasion required the USSR to have more military power than might have seemed necessary to an outside observer. This, too, was a factor, but it was not an explanation—the tsarist Russian and Soviet empires invaded other countries more often than they themselves were invaded. As an example, the Great Patriotic War began not with an invasion of the USSR, but with an invasion by the USSR, together with Nazi Germany, of Poland.16 The third influential explanation of the consistently colossal size of the Soviet military has to do with ideology; it is also the official reasoning that was offered by the leaders of the USSR, both to their people and to the wider world. According to the Marxist-Leninist logic that prevailed in the Soviet Union, war is the consequence of private ownership of property, which divides people into classes. As long as private property existed, then the “objective conditions” for peace did not exist; true peace would come only with its worldwide abolition. As the guides of the communist world, the Soviet leaders were required by their ideology to ensure an overwhelming number of “peace-loving” forces. According to the 1973 edition of Military Pedagogy: Textbook for Higher Military and Political Schools, which was published in 150,000 copies in its first year alone and was recommended for every Soviet officer’s bookshelf by the 1974 Calendar of a Soldier, “the party and its central committee constantly hold at the focus of attention the problems of military construction and of increasing the strength and combat capability of the Soviet Armed Forces. Increasing the defensive might of our Homeland in every way possible and instilling in the Soviet people a spirit of high vigilance and constant readiness to defend the great achievements of socialism should continue to remain one of the most important tasks of the party and nation.”17 For Soviet military pedagogues in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, “The main goal of upbringing [vospitanie] in Soviet society is to prepare comprehensively developed individuals who are active builders of communism and defenders



Men and the Military 69

of the Homeland. The purpose of education also forms the foundation for the training of personnel of the Soviet Armed Forces, which meets the objective requirements of a socialist society and reflects the vital interests of the entire Soviet nation.”18 As one notable Western military expert put it, “Whether or not one accepts this official reasoning as the actual motive for Soviet policy, it certainly did guide the building of institutional arrangements” that existed until the fall of the Soviet regime.19 A fourth, and more recent, scholarly analytical explanation uses the logic of “subjectivity,” applies postmodernist theory, and rests upon Max Weber’s insight that a state is “a compulsory political association with continuous organization [whose] administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.”20 The conclusion from this group of scholars is that communist revolutionary ideology and practice combined with the realities of total war and produced a Soviet state in which order required not just a monopoly on violence and the policing of it, but also the continual performance of violence. In this analysis, the Bolshevik leaders of the early Soviet Union (like the leaders of other modern nation-states) made “the performance of violence a constitutive civic act while making the state the only body that can legitimize such acts.”21 For the scholars who hold this viewpoint, the importance of the Soviet military—especially universal military conscription—was that it was the mechanism by which Soviet elites concluded the process, begun by Russian leaders in the last part of the nineteenth century, of “nationalizing” the Russian people. While tsarist Russian leaders had used the officer corps and the universal draft of individuals to inculcate Great Russian nationalism, Soviet leaders used the draft and military officers to inculcate “class as their primary national category, and acted upon their populations according to similarly superficial assumptions about ‘natural’ behaviors and political loyalties. They created national pariahs on a class basis and defined their class nation ‘inclusivity’ by attempting to subsume several different Marxist classes under the rubric of ‘toiler,’ just as prerevolutionary officials had attempted to bring many different ethnic groups under the umbrella designation of ‘Russian’ (rossiiskii).”22 A more complete and useful explanation is one that combines all of the above strains of analysis, but rests upon the second (ideology) and third (subjectivity) scholarly analyses, detailed above, as pillars. What is missing from the ideology explanation, it seems, is the significance of the performance and control of violence—which comes through clearly in the subjectivity analysis. What is missing from the subjectivity analysis is a correct reading of Marxist-Leninist ideology—the Soviet leadership was not, ultimately, trying to build and control a nation-state. They were trying to export their form of ideology worldwide, while simultaneously maintaining a monopoly on

70

Chapter Three

violence in those territories under their control. Soviet marxist ideology—unlike the majority of nationalist ideologies—was millennial and allowed for no competition.23 “Both the party’s and the military’s ‘professional ethic’ was to ensure progress in the international class struggle, eventually overthrowing the bourgeois international order, not merely to ensure the security of the Soviet state within that order. Soviet political and economic organization reflected this shared ethic.”24 In 1986 General Dmitri Volkogonov, then Director of the Soviet Institute of Military History, wrote The Army and Social Progress, a book that was distributed worldwide, in multiple languages. Under the heading of “The Defense of Socialism and the Destiny of the World,” he declared: “The defense of socialism, as an objective law, is reflected today in the fact that the USSR, possessing a strong defense potential, has created the necessary guarantees for the security of socialism and the preservation of peace on earth . . . A high level of combat readiness reflects the ability of the Armed Forces to use their tremendous combat capability in the interests of defending socialism and peace . . . The socialist armed forces’ external function is extremely important not only for the USSR and the other countries of the socialist community but for mankind as a whole.”25 This understanding of how the military “professional ethic” related to ideology came through strongly during the interviews for this project. “We lived in a very definite social environment then.” Sergei Nikolaevich, who in 2011 was still an avowed communist, explained, “and for me, joining the Party [in 1968] was simply the natural thing, as there were no other options. We all had the same upbringing, and it was determinative. I, for example, was studying at the academy, so I knew that every officer should strive to become a communist. And when I was there, my friends all joined the Party, same as I did. A senior cadet said one day: ‘Come on, join the Party.’ So I took it as natural. For me, it was natural. No, there was no consideration of how it would help my career, not at the time. It is a universal ideology, you know? Yes, indeed, everyone should be in the Party.”26 During the interviews, several of the VIRTA colonels discussed their military service abroad, and some of them explicitly tied that service to ideology. “We served at the academy,” Aleksandr Nikolaevich said, “but we also served our international duty [to world communism]—for some of us, that service was in Vietnam. One of our [VIRTA] generals was involved in trying out our weapons there, when we were fighting the Americans—trying them out against the Americans. Sorry about that! [A tongue-in-cheek apology to me, because I am an American, followed by chuckles.] They tried out our weapons there. And we tested their weapons, too, as they were our enemy. We were in Vietnam during the war, at the time of the fighting. This aspect of



Men and the Military 71

participation by [Soviet] academic officers, doing our international duty during hostilities abroad, it needs to be told more widely. We had many officers who were not only in Vietnam and Egypt, but they participated in other places as well, and it’s the same thing. Wherever air defenses were needed, several of our officers were there.”27 “I know a wonderful story about this, it has to do with . . . the Egyptian war.” Aleksandr Nikolaevich continued, “Well, there were three military actions there. During the first battle, the Egyptian army suffered heavy damage from Israel. It was decided [in 1968] to assist them—materially, technically, and with professionals. And we took a lot of our equipment there. Along the Suez Canal were our air defenses, missile installations, and our fighters— MIGs that were equipped with all of the latest gear. On the other side—on the Israeli side they used Phantoms [McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II]—the most modern aircraft manufactured in the USA at the time. And here again [as in Vietnam] there was an ongoing confrontation between the technicians and the strategy and tactics of both sides. Also, both sides were testing weapons against each other.”28 “And when they [Israel and the United States] started to apply the tactic of low-flying attacks—it turned out that we had nothing to counter this. And so they set the problem in front of Iakov Davidovich Shirman [a VIRTA colonel and radar scientist]29 and his team—all of them doctor nauk scientists, this was such an important task—and told them to urgently come up with a weapon that could shoot down low-flying targets. And so [in 1968] they came up with the Strela-1 and the Strela-2 mobile missile systems. These missiles, which are shown in the movies very often because of their subsequent wide proliferation, are the brainchild of Iakov Davidovich.”30 The Strela-1 (Soviet military designation 9K31; NATO designation SA-9 “Gaskin”) was eventually chosen as the more practical of the two systems. It consists of two pairs of 9M31 missiles mounted on a BRDM-2 amphibious vehicle.31 Used in all Warsaw Pact countries, these missile systems are still operational in the militaries of over thirty countries worldwide. Besides the Arab-Israeli conflicts, they have been actively deployed in the Western Sahara conflicts, the Yugoslav wars, the conflicts in Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq War, and by Iraq in both US-Iraqi wars.32 According to Aleksandr Nikolaevich, the USSR “designed these systems in just three months, and they were put into production just two months after that. Six months later, they were used in Egypt [1969]. And it caused a terrible shock for the Israelis and the Americans—they did not expect that in such a short period of time we could design and manufacture such weapons . . . Later, I was an officer during the second war [Yom Kippur War, 1973], and I recruited a company to go there. I was so eager to go there, but the battalion commander

72

Chapter Three

would not allow me to go . . . You think we did this to safeguard the Soviet homeland? Nah—what Soviet territory is there in North Africa, in South Asia? None. There’s no Soviet territory there; there’s no Soviet people. American officers might have thought in those terms, but not us. We did such things as our international duty, pure and simple, our international duty for the triumph of socialism.”33 Furthermore, for the VIRTA officers, the spread of communist ideology was as much a domestic duty as it was an international duty. As General Volkogonov put it, “A socialist army also performs an educational function.”34 Petr Borisovich, another colonel, spent over thirty minutes during our first interview attempting to explain the role of the military officer corps in Soviet society. Ultimately, he said, to understand it one must understand that the state and society composed a system—a system with communist ideology at its core. “Society had its own system. This system must be understood from the inside; it is necessary to understand the communist way of thinking. And if you first understand these systemic issues, then it will be very easy for you to put down on paper all of the domestic issues that you wish to write about.”35 Petr Alekseevich, a senior scientist and colonel, put it more succinctly: “The main objective was this: to introduce into the consciousness of Soviet people faith in the ideology pursued by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”36 As Aleksandr Nikolaevich put it, “The herd has to have a shepherd. I think so. Then the herd will be normal.”37 Properly understood, the universal male draft in the Soviet Union—and the large and well-trained officer corps necessary to lead the massive army it produced—were at once a mechanism for domestic control, a militarized educational infrastructure of ideological indoctrination, and the international defender of “toilers” worldwide against the violence supposedly inherent in capitalism. As one expert put it just before the fall of the USSR, “Each year, the same number of men are released into civilian life at the end of two years during which 30 percent of their military training time has been allocated to political studies [the Soviet term was ‘indoctrination’]. The Soviet Armed Forces may thus be seen as a vast seminary where the education of Soviet youth is set in a framework of military reality. In this way the Armed Forces must have an enormously persuasive and pervasive effect on Soviet society as a whole and by logical extension, upon the climate of international relations.”38 3.2 THE NEW SOVIET MILITARY MAN The “vast seminary” of the Soviet armed forces needed an elite “priesthood” to teach and lead the troops, and under the watchful eye of political officers



Men and the Military 73

(zampolity), the career military officer corps served that role. This assessment is borne out by the sources, both oral and published. As one of the colonels put it: “Most important for officers was that they whole-heartedly believed in the triumph of the Communist Party; believed in the Soviet destiny. Yes, in its destiny; and for a military man, that ‘I am standing on guard for a great country’ . . . This was sacred, absolutely sacred, especially for the older generations.”39 The authors of the Military Pedagogy textbook describe, in detail, “the inseparable tie between the indoctrination of Soviet soldiers and the people,” and the role played by Soviet pedagogy, which the authors called “the science of Communist education.” They proclaimed: “Since its inception, the Soviet Army has become not only a school for training armed defenders of the Homeland, but also a school for improving general education and political development . . . the barracks should become ‘the focus not only of purely military training, but also of general education and political indoctrination.’”40 Even for the military leadership of the mature Soviet Union in 1973, Soviet military pedagogy had “the role of making a most important contribution to the fulfillment of one of the main tasks of Communist construction—the development of a New Man.”41 By the time Military Pedagogy was first written in the early 1960s, the project of creating a “New Man” had been going on for over five decades.42 “When it became obvious that the overthrow of capitalism had failed to liberate man’s ‘communal nature’ or to produce a new and satisfactory class consciousness in the workers, it was decided that the New Man must be created through a system of comprehensive, total indoctrination carried out by interminable propaganda, organized ideological pressure, and an appropriate system of penalties and rewards.”43 The early Bolshevik leadership and the succeeding generations of Soviet leaders all “sponsored ambitious initiatives to transform, remake, and perfect their populations,” to fulfill “a fundamental commitment to producing a higher human type.”44 Military education—whether at the primary, secondary, university, or postbaccalaureate levels—was a core component of this project. Producing competent and ideologically committed military officers was vitally important, as it was they who would then train the millions of men who passed through two or three years of conscription in the military before entering adult life. Since they served such an important function, the training of career officers in the mature Soviet Union began early and continued in an intensive lifelong process.45 The elite Suvorov Military Schools (primary/secondary) are a good example of the kinds of initiatives developed and carried out by the Soviet leadership in order to produce a cadre of loyal and effective military officers. These boarding schools, which were named after the famous eighteenthcentury imperial general Aleksandr Vasil’evich Suvorov, were chartered in

74

Chapter Three

1943 at the height of the war. Originally, six schools were opened; by 1991 there were eleven, several of which are still in operation today. They were intended to serve two main purposes. The first goal, according to Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, speaking at the dedication of the original Suvorov school, “was one of the urgent measures to restore the economy in the areas liberated from the German occupation.”46 Many of the Suvorov schools’ students were war orphans whose fathers had been soldiers. For Kalinin and the other supporters of the Suvorov schools, it was necessary “to ensure that they do not feel abandoned . . . We need to think about how to provide father figures for these children.”47 The second goal was to provide boys of school age—particularly those from military families—with a solid ideological and military education that included practical training as well as academic learning. In Kalinin’s words, “Our task is to create a Soviet citizen, to bring to life humans who are truly Soviet, consciously fighting for Soviet life . . . [this] is not just limited to the creation of a New Soviet Man. We must create a New Soviet Military Man.”48 Three of my respondents were deemed excellent candidates for a Suvorov education and went through the entire course of study, from childhood to graduation; two were war orphans and the other was the son of a living war veteran. These future colonels thus grew up in an extraordinary environment, with officers and teachers who consciously and conscientiously strove to make them into New Soviet Military Men. The development of the Suvorov schools was part of the massive expansion of military education in the immediate postwar period that included the creation, refinement, and expansion of military institutions in myriad specialties. VIRTA serves as an excellent example of how this process worked. At first, in the 1940s, there were not enough military officers to fully staff the academy, so several of the professors came from civilian institutions. However, by the early 1950s, all of its professors were officers who had themselves graduated from post-baccalaureate military academies; civilian professors ceased teaching VIRTA classes. In 1954–1955, as part of an army reorganization that included major changes to the configuration of the air defense system and command structure, the academy’s research and educational subjects were expanded to include new technologies with corresponding increases in instructors and staff (e.g., the modernization of the Soviet air defense system to account for jet aircraft and atomic weapons). In 1955, the academy was renamed in honor of Marshall Leonid Aleksandrovich Govorov, who had died earlier that year, a few months after being appointed as the first Deputy Defense Minister for the Air Defense Forces.49 During the 1950s and 60s, the staff and faculty of the academy developed a program of classroom education and practicums designed to help students



Men and the Military 75

acquire and improve their methodological skills in several broad areas, including research fundamentals, foreign languages, and general education as well as the special technical training (in radio-electronic engineering and anti-aircraft weaponry) that they could only acquire at VIRTA or its counterpart in Kalinin. Each required course of study included extra-academic activities, such as the development of teaching and leadership skills (political indoctrination, conducting interviews, developing and writing reports, leadership, and pedagogical theory), as well as training sessions for the various specialties.50 In the late 1950s, the academy began to produce original research that corresponded to its training activities. Throughout the following two decades, it improved the qualifications of its professors and researchers both through requesting new faculty and through sending existing faculty to acquire more education. Laboratory and experimental facilities were created and expanded. The library grew exponentially. VIRTA received one of the first Soviet mainframe computers, an Ural Mark I, in 1959; an M-20 supercomputer was installed in 1961.51 By 1959, all of the departments were staffed entirely by military officerprofessors who held either a kandidat nauk or doktor nauk degree. By 1960, the academy had colleges (fakul’tety) for the social sciences, physics and mathematics, foreign languages, general engineering, special engineering, and operational and tactical training, as well as departments (kafedry) of antiaircraft weaponry, air defense organization and methods, field artillery, and radar science.52 In accordance with a 1964 declaration of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the USSR Council of Ministers titled “On further development of Research in Higher Education,” the academy increased its focus on the development of several additional areas of research, addressing a number of topical issues that required long-term studies. In addition to the subjects already mentioned, a need developed in the 1960s and 70s for computer-based communications, defense, and military intelligence systems as well as strategic missile defenses and automation. In the 1980s, advanced radar techniques became more and more necessary as high-flying and stealth aircraft designs were developed in order to thwart existing systems, and the academy’s researchers met that demand.53 VIRTA’s professors were at the forefront of Soviet research in all of these areas, many of which were at the top-secret (SS) level of clearance and above. VIRTA experts began to publish papers and longer works on these topics, as well as hosting conferences and short-term training for military colleagues working in these fields. The academy published its own well-respected journals, and by the middle of the 1980s, it was preeminent in the subjects of cutting-edge radar technology and computer-assisted military intelligence gathering and analysis.54

76

Chapter Three

The academy’s reputation attracted many bright students to VIRTA. According to Oleg Vladimirovich, “When I came to the academy, of course, I already knew its reputation. The academy, it was Olympus for us. Indeed, it provided . . . a brilliant education in science . . . the atmosphere was such that it was impossible not to learn. I do not know of any university that provided a better atmosphere. I talked with many of my friends which graduated from other institutions—including the General Staff Academy [Voroshilov General Staff Academy, Moscow]—and after they visited the academy [VIRTA], they always said, ‘This situation is nowhere to be found . . . where, in short, you can learn in a truly favorable environment.’ They said this because they saw, in the first place, the dedication of the teachers and how they treated us. They laid everything out for us, as we say, ‘on a silver platter.’ In general, the atmosphere was just, well, magnificent. It was very difficult even just to pass through and not see that.”55 From the late 1960s to 1991, VIRTA was an exclusive military graduate school, staffed by elite individuals, supporting and supported by a regime that valued their work, whether it be cutting-edge research or the formation and indoctrination of New Soviet Military Men. Their position as elite educators was central to their identities. “We were the elite,” Oleg Petrovich said matter-of-factly, “and nobody could deny it. Not anywhere.”56 “VIRTA was the second-best military educational institution in the entire Soviet Union, and the best of its type,” Petr Borisovich said, “Everyone knew that, and I loved it.”57 Whether or not its (obviously biased) officers were correct about the academy’s overall subjective ranking within Soviet military education, post-baccalaureate military academies like VIRTA were fewer in number than their civilian counterparts. There were never more than thirty-five of these military post-baccalaureate schools in the USSR, and plenty of junior officers wished to apply. Thus, these schools accepted and employed only the best officers in their various areas of research and study.58 Indeed, even though the entrance exams were very difficult, competition for admittance was quite strong. According to the interviewees, in most years fewer than one in ten qualified applicants were accepted at VIRTA.59 Since the competition for post-baccalaureate military education was so stiff, especially in the more scientifically focused academies, the requirements to matriculate at the graduate level were very strict. The maximum age was twenty-eight to matriculate as an onsite student and thirty-three to study by correspondence. An officer must already have completed an undergraduate degree, either military (preferred) or civilian (in which case his degree should have been in a relevant subject). Those who had received their commissions by completing a shorter, yearlong “course” for second lieutenants



Men and the Military 77

were not eligible unless they possessed an additional five-year diploma. An officer had to have a good service record, be conversant in at least one foreign language (usually German, English, or French), be physically fit—and pass entrance exams to attest to all of the above, plus exams in at least one relevant specialty subject area.60 At the time of application, an officer’s position typically had to correspond to (or exceed) the authority of the regular rank of major, meaning the equivalent of a battalion commander’s deputy chief of staff, helping to organize and lead between 500 and 1,500 soldiers. Officers at the rank of captain—company commanders, for example—or any lower rank were not usually eligible to apply. Some of these requirements could be overridden if the officer had special status in a formal sense (e.g., a holder of the Hero of the Soviet Union award) or in the informal sense (e.g., the son of a general).61 As both the army and VIRTA expanded, unless an applicant’s qualifications were far above the rest of the applicant pool, a recommendation of admission from his potential VIRTA graduate advisor was often necessary before the academy would accept an otherwise qualified applicant.62 The post-baccalaureate military academies definitely discriminated based on the applicant’s sex; female commissioned officers were not eligible to apply unless, under special circumstances, a very high-ranking official interceded. Although none of my respondents remember any female students at VIRTA, some did know of women who attended post-baccalaureate military academies in Moscow.63 Some confirmation of the recollections of the interviewed officers is provided by the complete list of VIRTA’s gold medal winners (those who received perfect grades for an entire course of study) for the twenty-eight years between 1952 and 1980; there are no women on the list.64 Since the gender discrimination could have affected grades without rising to the level of outright exclusion, a better verification is provided by a careful examination of student yearbooks from the 1960s and 70s. In these comprehensive volumes of student experience, no women students are pictured or mentioned.65 In contrast, (male) Soviet citizens of every ethno-national background were admitted on a regular basis, despite the fact that the entrance exam system privileged those who were fluent in the Russian language. Most of the Soviet Union’s many ethno-national minority groups are represented in the VIRTA student yearbooks.66 While the group of VIRTA officers that granted interviews for this project is not particularly diverse in terms of ethnicity, it does include men from several ethnic backgrounds besides Russian and Ukrainian, including Armenian, Azerbaijani, Jewish, Karelian, Latvian, and Lithuanian.

78

Chapter Three

Even though there were men from numerous ethnic backgrounds in the Soviet officer corps and at VIRTA, they did not have quite the same opportunities as their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts. Those of Jewish background, for example, faced significant discrimination. During the interviews for this project, more than half of the officers—regardless of their own ethnicity— mentioned that “the best of the best of us” were Iakov Davidovich Shirman67 and Leon Abramovich Stoliarskii, both of whom had been department heads at VIRTA. As more and more of their peers talked about Shirman and Stoliarskii, it became clear that these men had been the very best at VIRTA because they had not been promoted to general and moved to higher positions in Moscow—as they should have been, according to my other respondents. According to several of my respondents, they were “stuck” at the academy because they had hit a glass ceiling—colonel was the highest rank someone of Jewish background could attain in the military of the mature Soviet Union.68 Thus, the careers of both Iakov Davidovich and Leon Abramovich are excellent illustrations of this glass ceiling. Unfortunately, Iakov Davidovich passed away in April 2010, just before I arrived in Ukraine to carry out my research. However, Leon Abramovich graciously agreed to meet with me several times, and was a wealth of information on this and other topics. Iakov Davidovich received his doktor nauk degree in 1960. He authored over 400 scientific works, including articles, books, textbooks, and teaching aids. At VIRTA, he personally directed the successful education of twenty doktor nauk students and more than sixty kandidat nauk students. He was granted the State Prize of the USSR five times, was Honored Scientist of Ukraine, and earned several other awards—from the Soviet government as well as from the post-Soviet Ukrainian and Russian governments. He was an expert in several fields, but his specialty in the 1960s was detection of rapid aircraft and rockets. In 1969, Shirman was awarded “Honored Worker of Science and Technology of the Ukrainian SSR” for an unnamed accomplishment, possibly for leading the development of the Strela mobile missile launchers discussed earlier.69 Iakov Davidovich’s record was sterling, his science was world-class, his network was vast, he had connections at the highest levels, and his students and colleagues admired him. Those who worked in his lab as research scientists idolized him. However, Iakov Davidovich was Jewish, so he was not promoted above colonel. As was often the case for those of Jewish background, he had entered the military and earned his higher education before the war. After the war, he was discriminated against, and the discrimination



Men and the Military 79

continued until 1991. It was not until the collapse of the USSR that Shirman was promoted to the rank of “Marshall General” by the military of independent Ukraine, in recognition of his body of work and the fact that, during the Soviet period, he had been consistently passed over for promotion due to his Jewish background.70 Leon Abramovich Stoliarskii71 is also extraordinarily well regarded by his peers. Since he is still alive, to give the same amount of personal detail would be to give away his identity. However, suffice it to say that his professional credentials are no less impressive than that of his colleague Iakov Davidovich. Born to Jewish parents during the Russian civil war, he graduated with honors from a top Soviet university. He fought in the People’s Militia until 1945, when he entered the regular army. From then until his retirement, he was one of the foremost Soviet experts in his field. He earned his kandidat and doktor nauk degrees, and was the head (chair) of his department at VIRTA for many years. He trained hundreds of students, at all educational levels. He is still regarded as a world leader in his field.72 Despite all of these achievements, Leon Abramovich was never promoted beyond the rank of colonel. According to him, “In the mid-1930s, there were some benefits for us, the minorities, and the Jews were beneficiaries of these benefits. Because of the benefits, so many Jews came from Belarus and Ukraine to study in Leningrad and Moscow . . . and they even had special groups that were taught in Hebrew. So, before the war, things were great . . . Unfortunately, the times began to change with the beginning of the war . . . Well, there were a few factors that contributed to this [change]. I think that one of those factors was the German propaganda. I came across it as the years of war developed— such rabid antisemitic leaflets. So that was the German factor. The first reason. The second reason was that in 1942 the ardent antisemite Shcherbakov came to power over the army [Aleksandr Sergeevich Shcherbakov].73 He’s the second reason. And finally, it seems, there emanated a crisis from Stalin, the boss. That is, before the revolution and before the war, he could blame his opponents for everything. Apparently after 1942, however, he had dealt with all of his opponents; they were all gone. And although it’s hard for me to judge, as I am not an historian, it seems to me that his mind, to some extent, had been infected with antisemitism. To a certain extent. These were the factors.”74 Thus, in 1942, “antisemitism began to grow rapidly in the army. And I felt it myself, it was out in the open. I felt it against myself and in the army generally. I’m telling you, the progression was such that when the war began, the rise [of antisemitism] was extraordinary.”75 The antisemitism that rose during the war did not abate. “The hard times, which began here in 1942, continued to get worse . . . it would have been even

80

Chapter Three

worse if Stalin had lived longer,” Leon Abramovich said. “Unfortunately, antisemitic sentiment in this society was entrenched during those years, and remained for a long time at the state level. For a long time. And, maybe, government antisemitism slowed down only with the advent of Gorbachev. Yes, during those times. Sometime during the 90s it ended. As for me, I came to the academy after serving in the army. It was a wonderful academy. I worked there for over thirty years. And, for myself, I did not feel the effects of overwhelming antisemitism, but, in the little things, I felt it. In the little things. When we finished the first level of graduate school, all of my friends that I had studied with received the appointment of Senior Lecturer; I was just a Lecturer, for some reason. And so on, and so on . . . Furthermore, I graduated during the only year when Jewish officers were taken into military graduate school. And then, for many years, admission to graduate military school, and, in general, prestigious universities in Moscow and Leningrad . . . were restricted; Jews were generally not allowed . . . some got in, if they displayed enough, as they say, ‘persistence’ . . . However, these restrictions were felt for a very long time.”76 After his retirement from the army, at first Leon Abramovich had trouble finding work at his level, partially because of antisemitism. However, through all of our discussions, he never failed to be gracious to his society, his city, and his colleagues. As he said, “everything depended on the person. If he was a decent person, he made the decision [whether to discriminate or not]. And if he was scared, afraid, he turned away from the decision. And it was the 80s then. See how this whole campaign dragged on.”77 The academy was discriminatory in other ways, as well. Only officers of the Ministry of Defense could hold faculty positions in the higher academies. However, some academies did admit, as graduate students, officers from other ministries such as the KGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. These students were usually formed into separate cadres, and normally were not allowed to mix with army officers, though they generally received the same classes and training. Some post-baccalaureate academies also admitted foreign officers from Soviet-allied countries, but these students often would be taught substandard information and skills; knowledge and techniques at the “Secret” (S) level of clearance and above were withheld. However, since the entirety of the VIRTA academy and its research was classified at the “Secret” (S) level or above, foreign students were not allowed to attend there. Indeed, even Soviet citizens who were admitted without the higher levels of secret clearance were restricted not only in subjects for study, but also were excluded physically from several sections of the academy buildings.78 As military scientists, engineers, and teachers, the VIRTA professors straddled two of the largest of the subgroups within the Soviet technical



Men and the Military 81

intelligentsia—academics and military officers. The officers’ professional connections were primarily military, but they also had connections with civilian professors, party officials, and government functionaries. Prior to the 1990s, they were elite members of the armed forces. This made them members of the upper strata in Soviet society, and they thought of themselves that way. In terms of self-perception, a military officer was a bastion of Soviet society, a defender of the homeland. In terms of public perception, a high-ranking military officer was both ideologically correct and wellconnected, otherwise he would not have been able to rise within the Soviet military hierarchy. These officers were personifications of the ideological Soviet New Man, simultaneously products and defenders of the communist vision for humanity. The military professors, their wives and children, and their civilian counterparts all had similar answers to my questions on the topic of status, regardless of whether or not they considered themselves “elite.” A topnotch professional military identity meant prestige, power, and privilege. It meant money in one’s pocket and nice clothes on one’s back. It meant (eventually) having a nice apartment near the city center or a metro station. It meant exclusive access to a sports facility, going to the doctor at the academy instead of an open clinic, watching movies for free in the officers’ club, and sometimes being able to come up with consumer goods when others could not. Most importantly, it meant more individual agency—the ability to better control some of the major events in one’s life, and even in the lives of others. To many of those who went into professional military service, it was a privilege. “To be a Soviet officer,” Viktor Nikolaevich said, “it was very prestigious. If a young man had not served in the army, the attitude towards him was unfriendly, even from young girls, you know. That’s the first thing. And second, we can say that men that had been in the military had been ‘vaccinated’ with a great dose of vaccine—a sense of homeland. It was great to be vaccinated; it was believed that serving in the army made a man. Therefore, serving in the army was very prestigious, even if he might be killed before his service was up. Today, military service is a burden; at that time [before 1991], it was a privilege.”79 To be effective leaders in the defense of the homeland and in the spread of communism worldwide, and to simultaneously be integral to the process of indoctrinating the Soviet people, it was understood that military officers needed to be a coherent elite force—set apart by their uniforms, their living conditions, and their educations. This suggests that the officer corps of the late Soviet Union was indeed a cohesive and professionalized stratum within Soviet society, which is the topic that we turn to next.

Figure 3.1.  A freshly graduated VIRTA officer kneels to kiss the Soviet flag, 1970.



Men and the Military 83

3.3 PROFESSIONALISM IN THE SOVIET OFFICER CORPS Soviet Military Oath, 1960 I, ____________, a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, joining the ranks of the Armed Forces, take the oath and solemnly swear to be an honest, brave, disciplined, vigilant warrior, to strictly keep military and state secrets, and to unconditionally fulfill all military regulations and orders of commanders. I swear to conscientiously study military science, to martially and fully protect public property and to the last breath be loyal to my people, my Soviet homeland and the Soviet Government. On the orders of the Soviet government, I will always come to the defense of my country—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and, as a soldier of the Armed Forces, I swear to defend it courageously, skillfully, with dignity and honor, not sparing their blood and most life to achieve complete victory over the enemy. If I break this my solemn oath, let me suffer the severe punishment of Soviet law and the universal hatred and contempt of the workers. [Approved by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on August 23, 1960.]80

Military “professionalism” in an officer corps, as defined by Samuel Huntington and refined by William Fuller and Roger Reese in the context of Russian and Soviet military history, has several criteria: responsibility (to defend the state), expertise (special knowledge and skills), corporateness (cohesion based upon shared values), insistence on improvements (standards of performance and military special interests), autonomy, and voluntary membership. Reese has argued that the Soviet officer corps never met the criteria, right up until 1991. For Reese, “both the violation of voluntary membership and the politicization of the officer corps inhibited the development of professional identity, cohesion, and autonomy.”81 His argument is convincing, but only for the period prior to the 1960s.82 However, even if one uses his criteria for professionalism (built on those of Fuller and Huntington), his argument is less convincing for the late Soviet period. There is an abundance of evidence—both from my respondents and from the historical record—that the officer corps in the mature Soviet Union was indeed professional, even by the “Western standards of professionalism” employed by Reese.83 I will address each of the criteria in turn.

84

Chapter Three

It is clear from my research that every one of the officers to whom I spoke had taken their responsibility to defend the Soviet Union very seriously. Indeed, it was so deeply engrained, even twenty years after that state had ceased to exist, that several officers who declined to interview with me did so because, as one officer told me, “I took a sacred oath, and—no offense intended, young man—I still consider you Americans the enemy.”84 Perhaps even more telling were the opinions of the officers who have long since left the post-Soviet space and moved to the West. Now a civilian professor in the West, Anatolii Vladimirovich, for example, spoke at length about how seriously he had taken his duty to the Soviet Union, and about how, at the time, he would gladly have died defending it.85 In terms of education and expertise, throughout both tsarist Russian and Soviet history, there had been a perpetual shortage of professional, educated officers—but by the mid-1970s, that was no longer true. By the early 1980s, over 75 percent of all career officers had a four- or five-year “higher or specialized education,” from one of the more than 160 post-secondary military schools. A significant portion of the higher-ranking officer corps had advanced degrees from one of the military post-baccalaureate schools such as VIRTA. By the mid-1980s, there were over 150 (higher) military schools equivalent to West Point and over 30 post-baccalaureate academies similar to VIRTA. This compared to fewer than 1,000 civilian institutes of bachelor’s-level education in the entire USSR and fewer than 75 civilian post-baccalaureate schools. Thus, military schools made up more than 15 percent of post-secondary institutions and roughly half of all institutions granting post-baccalaureate degrees. Although civilian institutions had larger student populations—often more than triple the 400–1,200 students in each (higher) military school—the military institutions received a disproportionately large percentage of the educational expenditures in the country.86 As for the merits of such an education, most Western military scholars agree that, in terms of knowledge and expertise, a Soviet military education was not inferior to its Western analogue. My respondents would certainly agree. This issue came up, quite spontaneously, in several of the interviews. In terms of research, the interviewees have confirmed what many Western military scholars argued during the 1970s and 80s—that Soviet military research was not inferior. Indeed, in some areas, the Soviets were ahead of the West.87 Anatolii Vladimirovich, who in the 1980s worked in a VIRTA research lab developing mathematical methods for automated analysis of military intelligence data, is now a professor in the West. While at VIRTA, he developed methods to filter facts from different military human and signals



Men and the Military 85

intelligence sources and to match them against substantive areas. “For example, a person is sent to a missile system deployed in Germany, and people are watching—what is he doing? If we have some manifestations, some data, intercepted by electronic intelligence, how do we interpret it? How to decide if this is a military training exercise, or they are about to strike? I developed methods for putting the pieces together and recognizing what was happening . . . the technology that I developed, it is useful now in analyzing data collected from the internet, spying . . . The NSA is doing that job now. But I was already doing it more than twenty years ago. I was on the spearhead. Really—since I have been in [the West], I have investigated this. I have discovered what American scholars were doing. I was ahead of them by twelve years. Twelve years later, they performed some of my findings, but not all of my findings.”88 Excellent research also set the stage for solid training. As Petr Borisovich argued, “Our system of training military officers—this is what you should write your dissertation about; it would be creating new knowledge in the United States, to be sure, so it is a topic about which you could write a defensible dissertation. Why? Let me explain why. First, the American officer, he knows one thing very well; but it is just one thing. For example, he knows how to target and shoot well. Or logistics, or airplane repair. A Soviet officer may not know how to do one thing quite as well, but whatever he does, his brains are involved. His brain; his consciousness. He thinks for himself, and he has his own knowledge. And this knowledge always helps him to be ahead of the rest. He will be ahead, then, in war too. That is how the level of training of Soviet officers was significantly higher than the American, German, British—it was much higher, the level of training. Training, I tell you, study our training.”89 Other Soviet military officers agree on this point. General Kostiantyn P. Morozov90 was a military jet pilot, a Soviet General of the Air Forces, and was later the first Minister of Defense of the newly independent Ukraine. In his memoir, which was published by the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University in 2000, he was exceedingly critical of the Soviet Union in almost every respect. However, he was very positive about Soviet military training. As the top military official of a friendly Ukrainian government, he had numerous opportunities to observe Western military training and technology in the United States, France, Great Britain, and elsewhere, and he used the firsthand knowledge gleaned from those trips to compare Western and Soviet performance and training. Few people have been in such an excellent position to make a comparison, and in his opinion, based upon his Soviet experience and his later visits to Western military bases as an invited guest, “The Western technology rated very high indeed. This

86

Chapter Three

direct experience, however, only increased my respect for our own flight personnel . . . In spite of difficult circumstances our pilots achieved results which were in no way inferior—and in some respects they were superior—to those of pilots using more advanced equipment. This achievement resulted from their excellent physical condition and endurance, their psychological preparation, and the level of their training. Although our electronics, guidance systems, and information systems may have been inferior, our overall performance was not. Indeed, I believe that our [Soviet] military schools could stand shoulder to shoulder with the best training schools in the West in preparing young recruits . . . When I look back at the way my colleagues and I were trained, I am very pleased with the professionalism and high standards we were asked to meet.”91 In addition to the level of training, passing this expertise on to enlisted men, from the 1960s forward, was much easier than it had been in the prewar period; for the first time, the enlisted ranks were all literate, although not necessarily in Russian, the universal language of the Soviet military higher ranks.92 A common language was not the only thing that united the Soviet officer corps. Indeed, the cohesion based upon shared values, at least among the VIRTA colonels, was incredibly strong. Every officer to whom I spoke had numerous stories about their colleagues and comrades. When they spoke of their experiences, they routinely used the plural “we” rather than “I” when describing their careers. This was especially true when they were describing the cadre of VIRTA officers. Oleg Vladimirovich’s sentiments are representative of many of his comrades: “The academy was a very tight knot. There were no superfluous people, because they could not survive here. Laziness and unprofessionalism did not survive. You could not buy yourself in with money; you could not get in because someone pulled a string—well, almost never. One needed intelligence, diligence, and so on and so forth. Here [the VIRTA officers], we formed a golden nugget, because ‘bad eggs,’ so to speak, they simply did not survive. We were a living organism; they were like a foreign body, and they were just simply pushed out of our unit here.”93 Another possible test of the cohesion among the Soviet officer corps is to examine whether they have continued as a cohesive officer cadre, even after the collapse of their military, the disappearance of their state, and the disintegration of their country. Odnoklassniki [Classmates], one of the Russian competitors to Facebook, now has dozens of separate, active pages dedicated to the Soviet military that are created and maintained by its former soldiers. These serve as online places to meet old comrades, to exchange poems, prose, and photos, and most importantly, to collectively remember the military ex-



Men and the Military 87

perience. The number of members is impressive, especially considering that Soviet military men are now over forty years old at their youngest, that many of the sites require proof of veteran status before they allow an individual to join, that many people of that age in the former Soviet Union do not have personal computers, and that social media is new technology. The Odnoklassniki page Veterans of the Armed Forces of the USSR [Vererany VS SSSR] has over 16,000 members,94 but since each of the former Soviet services also has its own page, it is one of the smaller groups. For example, the Air Defense Forces [Voiska PVO strany], of which VIRTA and its officers was a part, has over 23,000 members on its page.95 VIRTA even has its own page, to which its moderator tightly controls access—he only allows academy staff, graduates, and immediate family to join; an existing member must vouch for each applicant. Despite these restrictions, the page has over 1,700 members, many of which are quite active on the site.96 Besides the pages on Odnoklassniki and other meeting sites like VKontakte, there are dozens of blogs and websites that serve former Soviet officers as meeting points and methods of exchange for information and memories. Besides the annual holidays Defender of the Fatherland Day on February 23, and Soviet Victory Day on May 9 (which are both celebrated by veterans dressing in their Soviet uniforms, and often forming parades and reunions), there are other events, held throughout the year in Ukraine and beyond, to which Soviet officers go to reconnect and remember. In the case of VIRTA, numerous events and reunions have been held since 1991, including wellattended reunions in 2005, 2009, and 2011. At the reunion in 2009, VIRTA officers were given a copy of a book by Marshall IU.P. Bazhanov, who had been the Soviet commander of VIRTA from 1973 until his death in 1975. Titled Our Military Youth: From Solider to Marshall [Nasha voennaia molodost’. Ot soldata do marshala], this book was edited by a retired general and published in Kharkiv in 2008. It was a specially printed commemorative book, intended only for those connected to the academy (500 total copies). My copy, given to me by one of the officers, is hand-signed by four dozen officers in a fashion similar to how American students sign each other’s high school yearbooks. I was told that this signature phenomenon occurred at the VIRTA reunion in 2009. At the reunion in 2011, held to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the long-defunct academy, over 300 former staff, faculty, and graduates gathered at Dzerzhinskii (now “Freedom”) Square. Cohesion—even twenty years after the collapse of their military—was still strong among the Soviet officer corps. One question related to professionalism remains: Was the Soviet officer corps volunteer, or was it not? The answer is that it depended upon the time

88

Chapter Three

period. During the Russian Civil War and in the 1930s and 40s, it is certainly true that the Red Army did not have a volunteer officer corps—many officers were forced into service and coerced into continuing to serve. However, this does not mean that officers thirty or forty years later fell into the same category; they did not. From the close of the Great Patriotic War right up to 1991, the Soviet officer corps was made up of volunteers. It is true that resignation was not a viable option for most officers (even in the 1980s, they were usually only allowed to resign due to medical reasons, dishonorable discharge, age, or years of service). However, these men were still volunteers; when they signed up they knew the situation in advance. Treating their experience as equivalent to previous conscripted generations, as Reese does, seems to be an error. As one colonel’s wife put it, “If you want to understand the historical aspects of the military; then you need to consider the historical strata. Let’s say, if you are interested in the history of the psychology of the military man in the Soviet Union after its collapse, you must consider the years of Soviet rule, with each of its layers, and the changing mentalities of military men. Before the war was one mentality. During the war years was a completely different mentality. The postwar years was yet another. The 1960s to the mid-70s was still another. Since the mid-70s to late 80s, as you’re already aware, there came Afghanistan, so that was another stratum—you understand? And since the late 80s, and I think somewhere up to 2004–2005, was yet another.”97 We turn now to that historical stratum which included the collapse of the USSR and was the darkest period of most of my respondents’ lives. For the officers, the wild times did not begin in 1991, but rather in the late 1980s, with the restructuring of Gorbachev’s perestroika. It was in the period that began in the latter half of the 1980s that the military officers and their families had their lives begin to tip; in 1992 they turned upside-down. 3.4 TIPPING: “CRACKS IN THE SYSTEM” When I was in Ukraine in 2006, doing research on a different project, I had a chance to speak with one of the colonels who would later be a key respondent for this study. As one of my questions, I asked him: “What do you remember about the upheavals of the transition period?” He replied with, “What years do you mean?” “Oh, say 1989 to the mid-nineties,” I clarified. “Well, 1989 doesn’t bring anything to mind for me. I think that you mean 1985, don’t you? That’s when everything started falling apart.”98



Men and the Military 89

For the officers of VIRTA, the dark times of collapse and transition started with Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, which they date at his rise to General Secretary, in 1985—and not when his perestroika policies actually began, in 1986–87. Some of the major events often associated with the downfall of the Soviet Union from an outsider’s perspective are barely remembered by the military men. The fall of the Berlin Wall is not recalled as particularly significant; visits by President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher are often not remembered at all. What is remembered, and quite clearly, is the activism of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers in the late 1980s against military hazing [dedovshchina]—and the mishandling of both hazing and the mothers’ activism by the top military leadership.99 The military men remember Western literature, music, and movies starting to have a visible effect on their children during the 1980s. They remember the introduction of market-like reforms and limited private property; they also remember thinking that these were bad ideas. While all of my respondents recall the social upheaval and economic collapse of the 1990s as a period of great hardship—similar to living memories of the Great Depression in the United States—for the VIRTA officers, the period began sooner, climaxed in 1991, and for many, was still ongoing in 2010–11. Economics makes up only part of their impression. Even more important, for them, was the loss of the ideology that defined them, the military to which they owed allegiance, and the state that they had sworn to protect. “Soviet” was so much a part of what it meant to be a New Soviet Military Man that, when the Soviet Union fell, so did its officers. What is the opinion of the officers, twenty years later, as to the causes of the Soviet collapse? Their views are mixed; their various explanations involve a combination of corruption at the highest levels, inefficiency, and the over-expansion of openness. Several of the officers discussed the importance of both ideology and the military to the legitimacy of the Soviet regime; and how, when the ideology ceased to determine the actions of the leadership of both the regime and the army, things quickly fell apart. As Oleg Vladimirovich put it, “I think the main thing here is, when the Soviet Union collapsed, it all started because the foundational ideology began to crumble . . . As they say: ‘God forbid you live in a time of change.’ And at the beginning, the changes were very strong. These changes began under Gorbachev first. And my opinion is that, in fact, Gorbachev served as the source of the collapse of the Soviet Union. That’s my private opinion. The changes came, but they sometimes did not lead to where we should have gone, what it was necessary to strive for. All of these changes, I would say they were distorted in some way—not quite right, not quite thought out.”100

90

Chapter Three

Such a view confirms an analysis of history that recognizes MarxistLeninist ideology as the foundation of the Soviet state’s legitimacy, and the military as its personification. According to Andrzej Walicki, “without Gorbachev (as he himself has stressed) a semitotalitarian Soviet regime might have survived for much longer. Gorbachev’s reforms led to the full disclosure of the ideological bankruptcy of the system, to its thorough delegitimization, and thereby to its final collapse.”101 In the words of eminent military scholar General William Odom, “Arm-in-arm, the Communist Party and the generals went to their demise together.”102 Tat’iana, who was the twelve-year-old daughter of a VIRTA colonel in 1986, remembers the process well. “First came the [Western] books, then the music and movies, then the material stuff. We young people, we ate it up, as if we had been starving; we shoveled it in. One of the first things I got—I don’t know how—was a Duran Duran pin.103 I wore it because it was Western (I thought that it was American at first), and because the young man on it was cute. Only later did I find out that he was ‘Jeff’ something, the lead singer of a famous English rock band. This was the process in which we consumed as much as we could, whenever we could. Only later did we develop our likes and dislikes for particular Western stuff. At first, we liked it all. By ‘we’ I mean young people, not everyone. Indeed, opposite from us, our fathers disliked it all from the start, but not because of anything’s intrinsic value, but because these things—and kids’ love of them—represented cracks in the system, threats to their way of life. When the Union began to tip over, the officers saw that it was leaning, and held on even tighter. When the Union finally fell, so did they.”104 3.5 FALLING: CLIMAX OF COLLAPSE In the immediate wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declaration of Ukrainian independence, one of the first issues facing independent Ukraine was what to do about the 800,000-plus Soviet soldiers stationed within its new borders. On September 3, 1991, only a week after Ukraine’s Supreme Soviet declared independence, General Kostiantyn P. Morozov was confirmed as its first Minister of Defense. Morozov, who claims that he grew up thinking that he was half Russian and half Ukrainian, now states that he has, since the late 1980s (and the rediscovery of his birth certificate), proudly considered himself 100 percent ethnically Ukrainian and an antiSoviet patriot. He now remembers the late 1980s and 1990s as his period of “reukrainization.”105 For the reukrainized Morozov, the Soviet period in his country can be defined, first and foremost, as “nearly 80 years of rule, occu-



Men and the Military 91

pation, and suppression by a more powerful neighbor.”106 His memoir begins with a chapter-long statement of Ukrainian nationalism and is imbued with nationalist sentiment throughout. During his first month in office as independent Ukraine’s Minister of Defense, one of his first acts was to inform the officers stationed in the country that if they were born in Ukraine or “had family roots in Ukrainian soil and considered Ukraine rather than some other republic as their homeland, then they would be treated as patriots of Ukraine and have our full trust.” Those who did not have these qualifications would not necessarily be distrusted, but they would not be trusted, either. “We adhered to the principle that patriotism was not simply a slogan, but that it should be supplemented either with service for a considerable period of time in Ukraine or with direct family ties.”107 The next step in the process of “Ukrainization” of the new military of the independent state was to require that its officers take a new oath—this time to the Ukrainian government and people. For Morozov, this was a vital step in building an independent Ukraine. In his words, “Taking an oath of loyalty is important not only from a legal point of view and as a sign of a military officer’s allegiance to a particular state, but also from a moral point of view. The act imposes a moral and civic responsibility on those taking the oath, linking them to the soil and the people they have sworn to defend. One’s formal duty to defend the state is underlined in the legislation of those states that require all young men, even in time of peace, to serve in the military. Furthermore, the oath of loyalty adds an important moral component to one’s formal duty, emphasizing the responsibility to serve one’s people and obey the orders of those to whom the country’s defense has been entrusted.”108 Morozov was the first former Soviet officer to take the new Ukrainian oath, just after its adoption by the independent Ukrainian parliament on December 6, 1991. According to his memoir, he remembers it well. “There were no official ceremonies, no letterhead, no television cameras in the parliamentary chambers to record this event for history, but I had studiously transcribed the oath, signed my name, and written the number ‘1’ on the document—the first out of thousands of others that we would begin administering in January. I saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime act, an event that had profound historical significance . . . In that heady moment I recall embraces and handshakes on all sides as the deputies congratulated me and each other on having taken such a giant step forward affirming our new independence . . . December 6, the day I swore allegiance to my newly independent country, has been designated Ukrainian Armed Forces Day. It is a day I will never forget.” 109 The oath is reproduced below.

92

Chapter Three

UKRAINIAN MILITARY OATH, 1991 I, ____________, upon entering military service, solemnly swear to the people of Ukraine always to be faithful and devoted to them, to conscientiously and honestly execute my military duties and the orders of my superiors, to steadfastly uphold the Constitution and laws of Ukraine, and to safeguard state and military secrets. I swear to defend the Ukrainian state and to firmly stand for its freedom and independence. I swear never to betray the people of Ukraine. [Approved by the Ukrainian Parliament on December 6, 1991.]110

The next month (January 1992), under Morozov’s direction, the VIRTA academy was reorganized and renamed the Kharkiv Military University of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and immediately its officers had to decide either to swear allegiance to the newly formed Ukrainian national army or to quit their jobs and find work elsewhere. Approximately 20 percent resigned immediately, rejecting the new oath. This was higher than the percentage in the larger military community. According to Morozov, approximately 15 percent of the military officers and conscripts who remained on Ukrainian territory refused to take the oath. Many of these men, VIRTA officers and army conscripts alike, subsequently moved to the new Russian Federation or other former republics; some resumed their commissions in those other newly independent states.111 For some, whether or not they took the new oath was partially an economic decision. “In early 1992, nobody had clearly informed us, the VIRTA officers, about possible options of becoming either Ukrainian or Russian citizens depending on taking the oath of allegiance to Ukraine. This became clear only months later. In January 1992, it looked like there was no choice. So virtually everyone took the oath of allegiance to Ukraine. Later on, I found out that two or three generals did not do so, but this was not publicized, just rumored. My personal major concern was about my military pension. Ukraine was moving very fast with offering hefty pension benefits for retired officers, while Russia was dragging her feet. After a while, as you know, [some officers] found it prudent to assume Russian citizenship and collect the military pension from Russia, which turned out to be bigger than the pension from Ukraine. But all this had become clear only in the end of 1992, or even later.”112



Men and the Military 93

For many who swore the new oath to Ukraine in 1992, including all but two of my military respondents, the process of joining the army of independent Ukraine was very difficult. Theirs was an allegiance to the supranational Soviet state; their ethnic nationality meant little to them, especially in the military context (see chapter 5 for a detailed discussion of ethnicity and nationality). Petr Borisovich’s experience was typical. “After the collapse of the Soviet Union” he told me, “there was a process that led to the end of the academy. The president and politicians of [independent] Ukraine tried to convert all of the military capabilities and potential from the Eastern to the Western way . . . This is how the academy was destroyed by the first and second presidents of Ukraine—it was all destroyed . . . And that same thinking, that same process, applied to the social strata here, to the officers and their wives. In conditions of economic transition, they found themselves knocked down by the trajectory of Westernization.”113 “This came first at VIRTA, when we were forced to take an oath—an oath in the Ukrainian language—to the Ukrainian army. I took it, and after that, I continued to teach at the academy . . . Then, the process of—let’s call it the process of nationalism—set in . . . soon after the reorganization of the academy, I began to feel humiliated by the junior officers . . . they mocked us, they demanded to be taught in the Ukrainian language . . . I was forced to resign [by this process, not by his superiors]. This is my deepest, most purely psychological self that I am telling you about now, letting you see. This is why I retired in 1994 from the army. I was disgusted, disgusted [long pause]. I’m a little bit overwhelmed at the moment—why don’t we take a break?”114 After the break, Petr Borisovich resumed: “And that was the problem. What was the biggest blow for us at the academy, and for the academy itself?” It was the replacement of the highly decorated Russian-speaking commandant. “The Deputy Minister [of Defense] came and made the decision. He liked everything to be Ukrainian. When he arrived, I was present at the meeting. That’s all [he said after the announcement of the change in command], now we’ll constitute the parade. I won’t accept anything else.’ The generals were humiliated, and after this meeting, 20 percent of the generals and officers wrote their resignations immediately.”115 Since the new Ukrainian military saw much less need for developing research in advanced antiaircraft technology and military computer and software systems, the academy was reorganized in 1992–93, this time to transform it into an undergraduate-level military academy. My interviewees unanimously opposed this reorganization. As Oleg Vladimirovich told me, “I think that the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and the Ukrainian state in the

94

Chapter Three

first place did not understand what a gem they got. They failed to appreciate what an extraordinary institution . . . fell from the sky into their hands. And when it was decided to merge several of Kharkov’s military universities into one, the first wrong decision was to change the name. Because the academy—it was a brand. It was a brand that was well known; it was even known in the United States. Voice of America [US radio broadcast into the Soviet Union] very often reported the news of what was happening at the academy, reported it immediately . . . graduates of the academy around the world were known to be worth their weight in gold. Because they really were great experts, great teachers, great academics, and they were produced from within the walls of this academy. And look here—I say the first mistake was to change the name of the academy; you know what it means to change a brand. Take any world-famous brand, even a car, and label it differently, what will it be? Nothing. Isn’t that correct? Because nobody would know it. That’s how it was with the academy.”116 In Fedor Borisovich’s memory, “People almost cried when they discarded—broke up and discarded—the academy. Those people who had already retired, those who had served and worked in the academy as instructors, we almost cried. Of course, it was painful to watch them breaking it down, to know that Ukraine thought it did not have a need for it. This is certainly a shame . . . All of us, the academy employees—the academy is now in the past, and we, the members of our academy, are in the past, too.”117 After 1993, the academy went into a period of decline in which many professors left voluntarily; it was finally closed in 2003. Oleg Nikolaevich retired during this time. “One of my friends congratulated me on this sad occasion [retiring from the academy], and I still remember what he said: ‘The hardest part will be that this will be the first time when your phones will not be ringing. They will be silent. You will not like this.’ This lack of demand, this lack of having someone need you—this is perhaps the grimmest. Back before the reorganization, before 1991, I was in high demand. My phone was colored green, but by the end of the day it was always red [hot], because it rang continuously. The door to the office was always opening and closing. I was needed. I was doing the right things; the right things for the country. Maybe that sounds braggadocios, but it really is the truth. And not for nothing was the academy one of the best schools, one of the best higher educational institutions of the military. So we can only regret that time. Shit! 1991 was the biggest disappointment of my life; indeed, that year and the twenty years that followed it have been a complete disappointment.”118



Men and the Military 95

Figure 3.2.  Anatolii Vladimirovich Garev, retired Soviet Colonel. He and his VIRTA colleagues had spent their careers protecting the USSR from possible attack by the USA; one of his department’s specialties was defense against the American Minuteman missile. On a trip in 1995, he brought his old Soviet uniform all the way from Ukraine to Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois, just so that he could take this picture, “flipping off” an actual Minuteman missile. (Garev Family Collection.)

3.6 CONCLUSIONS The military officers of VIRTA personified the Soviet state’s ambitions—both in the official propaganda and in their own conceptions of themselves. From the 1960s on, these officers and their comrades made up a volunteer, professional, and cohesive officer corps that was dedicated to the defense of their state, was highly trained and educated, and was insistent on high standards of performance.

96

Chapter Three

These men internalized Marxist-Leninist ideology, and were committed both to safeguarding the Soviet state and spreading communism worldwide. Indeed, for the officers of VIRTA, the dark times of transition and collapse started in their lives in the mid-1980s, when “cracks in the system” became harbingers of the end. In January 1992, when the nationalistic representatives of the newly independent Ukraine forced them to take a new military oath, the lives and identities of these men were completely turned upside-down. As New Soviet Military Men, these officers were the living personifications of the Soviet Union, elite leaders who assisted with the indoctrination of millions of young Soviet conscripts—not just in how to defend their country, but also in how to export revolution abroad. A study of these men—as individuals as well as members of the officer corps—provides valuable insights into Soviet society and the continuing transition of that society in eastern Ukraine, such as discussed in this and the following chapters. We turn now from military topics to thematic chapters on their wives, their ethnicities, and finally, their religions. NOTES 1.  Valentin Grigor’evich Zhivets, interview with author, February 16, 2011. 2. The corpus of scholarly work on the Soviet military is vast, especially that which was published during the Cold War. As just a few examples, see Robin Higham and Frederick W. Kagan, eds., The Military History of the Soviet Union (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); William Odom, Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Roger R. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991 (London: Routledge, 2000); Reese, Red Commanders: A Social History of the Soviet Army Corps, 1918–1991 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005); Jacques Sapir, The Soviet Military System, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Harriet Fast Scott and William F. Scott, The Soviet Control Structure: Capabilities for Wartime Survival (New York: Crane, Russak, 1983); Williams, Soviet Military; Yosef Avidar, The Party and the Army in the Soviet Union (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1983); A. A. Babakov, Vooruzhennye sily SSSR posle voiny, 1945–1986: Istoriia stroitel’stva (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo ministerstva oborony SSSR, 1987); Boles, “Interrelation between Personnel and Training”; Ellen Jones, Red Army and Society: A Sociology of the Soviet Military (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1985). 3. Odom, Collapse, 389. See also Richard Pipes, Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). 4.  Peter Struve, quoted in Odom, Collapse, 388. 5. Odom, Collapse, 389. See also Jones, Red Army and Society, 148–171; Sapir, Soviet Military System, 263–265; Williams, Soviet Military, 179–180.



Men and the Military 97

6. Odom, “Soviet Military Doctrine,” Foreign Affairs vol. 67, no. 2 (Winter 1988): 115. 7.  Kostiantyn P. Morozov, Above and Beyond: From Soviet General to Ukrainian State Builder (Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University Press, 2000), 175. This is the memoir of independent Ukraine’s first Minister of Defense. It is discussed at length below. 8. Williams, Soviet Military. 9. Reese, Red Commanders, 1. 10. Odom, Collapse, 1. Evidence for this statement is supported by the exhibits at the Kozhedub Air Force University Museum. 11. Sapir, Soviet Military System; “World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers (WMEAT), 1985–1995,” U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Report, 1996; “World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1998,” U.S. Bureau of Verification and Compliance Report, 1998. 12.  Federation of American Scientists, “Russian Military Spending,” https://www. fas.org/nuke/guide/russia/agency/mo-budget htm. 13.  Rush V. Greenslade, “The Many Burdens of Defense in the Soviet Union (CIA confidential working paper, 1970),” CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence Archives vol. 14, no. 2, released 1994. 14.  See, for example, the argument put forward in Max Frankel, High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004). 15.  Quoted in Odom, “Soviet Military Doctrine,” 115. 16.  Odom, “Soviet Military Doctrine,” 157. 17.  Col. A. M. Danchenko and Col. I. F. Vydrin, Military Pedagogy: Textbook for Higher Military and Political Schools (Moscow: Ministry of Defense Military Publishing House Order of Red Banner of Labor, 1973), trans. U.S. Air Force and published in English (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 1. This textbook for officers was first published in 1966; both the 1966 and 1973 editions were republished several times. Here, the authors are quoting from Materials of the 24th CPSU Congress, 1971. 18. Danchenko, Military Pedagogy, 7. 19.  Odom, “Soviet Military Doctrine,” 157. 20.  Quoted in Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002), 207. 21. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 207. 22. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 205. 23.  Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 205. National Socialism shared these characteristics with Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology, but it was primarily based on the constructed category of race, instead of the (also largely constructed) category of class. 24. Odom, Collapse, 389–390. While some military scholars have argued that the Soviet military was therefore of a fundamentally different type from Western militaries,

98

Chapter Three

Odom convincingly argues that all militaries in advanced and post-industrial countries are so entwined with their governments and economies that the USSR was not, in fact, unique in this way. Full “military autonomy,” in his understanding, may only be possible in early stages—or very different paths—of development. 25.  Dmitri Volkogonov, The Army and Social Progress (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987), 59–67. 26.  Sergei Nikolaevich Romanov, interview with author, March 19, 2011. 27.  Aleksandr Nikolaevich Babich, interview with author, December 4, 2010. VIRTA officers’ service in Vietnam and elsewhere is corroborated by other sources, as well. See Iakov Davidovich Shirman, interview by D. V. Atamanskii, “Kafedra Teoreticheskikh osnov radiolokatsii—60 let!” (Kharkiv, 2006). This is a documentary film produced, apparently for television, by interested journalists in Kharkiv. Evidence for this story is also provided by the exhibits at the Kozhedub Air Force University Museum. 28.  Aleksandr Nikolaevich Babich, interview with author, December 4, 2010. 29.  Iakov Davidovich Shirman is not a pseudonym. Famous among my interviewees, Iakov Davidovich passed away in April of 2010, just before I arrived to conduct my interviews. See discussion of his career later in this chapter. 30.  Aleksandr Nikolaevich Babich, interview with author, December 4, 2010. This story may or may not be true, as the records of the development and engineering of this weapon and its various systems are still classified. However, Shirman and his team do seem to have been capable of it. See discussion of his career later in this chapter. Especially considering the fact that such research at VIRTA was rated the highest level of state secret, the role of a military researcher such as Shirman would not have been openly recognized. It is entirely possible that Shirman directed the research that went into the detection equipment and/or guidance technology of the Strela missile systems; however, it is very unlikely that he directed the overall development project. Regardless, what is most interesting for the purposes of this study is how the VIRTA officers perceived their efforts in military engagements abroad. 31.  “SA-9 GASKIN; 9K31 Strela-1,” Federation of American Scientists, http:// www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/row/sa-9.htm. 32. Ibid. 33.  Aleksandr Nikolaevich Babich, interview with author, December 4, 2010. 34. Volkogonov, Army and Social Progress, 74. 35.  Petr Borisovich Medvedev, interview with author, September 10, 2010. 36.  Petr Alekseevich Litaev, interview with author, March 9, 2011. 37.  Aleksandr Nikolaevich Pletnev, interview with author, February 24, 2011. 38. Williams, Soviet Military, 5. 39.  Aleksandr Mikhailovich Donets, interview with author, November 29, 2010. 40. Danchenko, Military Pedagogy, 7. Here, the authors are quoting V. I. Lenin in a speech at the 8th Party Congress. 41. Danchenko, Military Pedagogy, 7. 42.  K. A. Collias, “Striving for Homo Sovieticus: Making Soviet Citizens: Patriotic and Internationalist Education in the Formation of a Soviet State Identity,” in D. E. Huttenbach, ed., Soviet Nationalities Policies: Ruling Ethnic Groups in the USSR (London: Mansell, 1990).



Men and the Military 99

43. Walicki, Marxism and the Leap, 504. 44.  Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany,” in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009), 302. 45.  IU.P. Bazhanov, Nasha voennaia molodost’. Ot soldata do marshala (Kharkiv, 2008), 80–108. This is a specially printed commemorative book, intended only for those connected to the academy (500 total copies). 46.  Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, speech at the opening of the first Suvorov Military School (1946), quoted in “Stranitsy Istorii,” Suvorov Military School Alumni Website, http://www.svu ru/index.sema?a=articles&pid=10. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49.  Kubareva, ed., Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, 28–56. 50.  Ibid., 64–66. 51.  Ibid., 67–77. See also the articles and interviews in Medvedev, Iubileinoe izdanie. 52.  Kubareva, ed., Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, 4. See also the articles and interviews in Medvedev, Iubileinoe izdanie. 53.  Kubareva, ed., Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, 67–77. 54. Ibid. See also Shirman, interview by D. V. Atamanskii, “Kafedra Teoreticheskikh.” For an explanation of Soviet state secrecy classifications, see the detailed note in chapter 2. 55.  Oleg Vladimirovich Nosov, interview with author, December 7, 2010. 56.  Oleg Petrovich Taratorkin, interview with author, December 15, 2010. 57.  Petr Borisovich Medvedev, interview with author, September 10, 2010. 58. Kubareva, Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, 83–103. 59. Several interviewees discussed this fact, including Oleg Vital’evich Zdorovenko, who was himself an administrator of the admissions process, interview with author, February 9, 2011. This is corroborated by student lists in the VIRTA archive. 60. Kubareva, Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, 83–103. 61.  Several interviewees discussed these exceptions, including Aleksandr Fedorovich Kotov, in interview with author, February 9, 2011, and Anatolii Vladimirovich Garev, in interview with author, November 4, 2011. 62. Several interviewees mentioned this fact, including Aleksandr Fedorovich Kotov, in interview with author, February 9, 2011, and Oleg Petrovich Taratorkin in interview with author, December 12, 2010. 63. Several interviewees mentioned this fact, including Oleg Vladimirovich Nosov, in interview with author, December 7, 2010, and Aleksandr Nikolaevich Pletnev, in interview with author, February 24, 2011. 64.  For the complete list of gold medalists, see Kubareva, Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, 188–191. 65.  Student yearbooks for 1962–63, 1963–64, 1965–66, 1968–69, 1972–73, 1975– 76, 1977–78, VIRTA archive, now held in the museum of the Kozhedub Air Force University, Kharkiv, Ukraine. 66.  Ethno-national and gender issues are discussed at length in subsequent chapters.

100

Chapter Three

67.  This is not a pseudonym, and since Iakov Davidovich passed away in April of 2010, he was not one of my respondents. 68.  Several interviewees discussed this fact, including Oleg Vladimirovich Nosov, in interview with author, December 7, 2010, Anatolii Vladimirovich Garev, interview with author, November 6, 2010, and Leon Abramovich Stoliarskii, interview with author, March 23, 2011. 69. Kubareva, Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, passim; “90 letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia,” Zhurnala uspekhi sovremennoi radioelektroniki no. 10 (2009). 70.  “90 letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia,” Zhurnala uspekhi sovremennoi radioelektroniki no. 10 (2009). 71.  This is a pseudonym, though it will be quite easy for those who want to do so to discover his real name—and he does not mind. However, in the interests of consistency, I am using a pseudonym here. 72. Kubareva, Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova, passim; “90 letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia,” Zhurnala uspekhi sovremennoi radioelektroniki no. 10 (2009). Numerous additional public sources confirm the details of Leon Abramovich’s life and career. I do not list them here, as his real name would then be obvious. 73.  Shcherbakov was secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and head of the Soviet Information Bureau and the Department for International Information of the CPSU. He was also made the head of the political directorate of the army (with the rank of colonel general) in 1942. For more on antisemitism in the Soviet Union during the war years, including confirmation of Shcherbakov’s antisemitism, see Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, eds., The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). 74.  Leon Abramovich Stoliarskii, interview with author, March 23, 2011. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78.  Several interviewees discussed this fact, including Viktor Nikolaevich Koshelev, in interview with author, September 14, 2010. For an explanation of Soviet state secrecy classifications, see the detailed note in the previous chapter. 79. Viktor Nikolaevich Koshelev, interview with author, September 14, 2010. This opinion is not confirmed by all of the non-military respondents. In the words of Viktor Grigor’evich, the Soviet military was “really a huge army which had nothing to do . . . people tried to get into the army to survive. They knew they’d get money, they’d get food, and they’d get accommodations . . . But it was not prestigious.” Viktor Grigor’evich Belov, interview with author, October 8, 2010. 80.  In 1977, a promise “to abide by the Constitution of the USSR and Soviet laws” was added in the first paragraph, and the last word of the oath, following “universal hatred and contempt of ” was changed from “workers” to “Soviet people.” Obshchevoinskie ustavy vooruzhennykh sil SSSR (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo ministerstva oborony SSSR, 1983). 81. Reese, Red Commanders, 5.



Men and the Military 101

82.  Which makes good sense considering that Reese is an expert on the tsarist Russian imperial and early Soviet armies. 83.  I have great respect for Professor Reese and his impressive body of work on the tsarist Russian and Soviet militaries. However, on the issue of professionalism in the Soviet officer corps in the late Soviet period, I respectfully believe that he is mistaken. In his book Red Commanders, he spends only twenty-one pages on the time period 1964–82; in those pages, he concentrates on Brezhnev and the high command, not on the officer corps itself. 84.  Phone conversation with a retired general who declined to grant an interview, January 27, 2011. 85.  Anatolii Vladimirovich Garev, interview with author, November 6, 2010. 86. Williams, Soviet Military, 118. 87. For example, see Williams, Soviet Military, and Odom, “Soviet Military Doctrine” and Collapse. 88.  Anatolii Vladimirovich Garev, interview with author, November 6, 2010. 89.  Petr Borisovich Medvedev, interview with author, February 25, 2011. 90.  This is the Ukrainian transliteration that General Morozov uses for his name when he publishes in English. 91. Morozov, Above and Beyond, 31, 30. 92.  Odom, “Soviet Military Doctrine,” 115. 93.  Oleg Vladimirovich Nosov, in interview with author, December 7, 2010. 94. http://odnoklassniki.ru/veterany.vs.sssr. 95. http://odnoklassniki.ru/group/42568303837339. 96. http://odnoklassniki.ru/group/42798281916517. 97.  Liudmila Nikolaevna Donets, interview with author, November 28, 2010. 98. Viktor Nikolaevich Koshelev, interview with author, Kharkiv, March 12, 2006. This was an interview for an entirely different project—my Master’s thesis at St. Cloud State University. The record is my handwritten notes. 99. Several respondents believed that the military’s response to the mother’s activism was a major blunder. This provides confirmation for the conclusion laid out by Julie Elkner in “Dedovshchina and the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers under Gorbachev,” The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies 1 (2004). http://pipss revues.org/243. 100.  Oleg Vladimirovich Nosov, interview with author, December 7, 2010. 101. Walicki, Marxism and the Leap, 539. 102. Odom, Collapse, ix. 103.  British pop music group popular in the 1980s. 104.  Tat’iana Vladimirovna Fikse, interview with author, March 30, 2011. 105. Morozov, Above and Beyond, 15–16. 106.  Ibid., 173. 107.  Ibid., 180. 108.  Ibid., 191. 109.  Ibid., 189–190. 110. Morozov, Above and Beyond, 189.

102

Chapter Three

111.  Ibid., 192. 112. Anatolii Vladimirovich Garev, email correspondence with author, August 15, 2014. 113.  Petr Borisovich Medvedev, interview with author, September 10, 2010. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid. 116.  Oleg Vladimirovich Nosov, interview with author, December 7, 2010. 117.  Fedor Borisovich Kotov, interview with author, October 13, 2010. 118.  Oleg Nikolaevich Petrov, interview with author, December 17, 2010.

Chapter Four

Women and Gender “That’s Women’s Work!”

The day I got married, I was unable to fry an egg . . . I was not ready for this at all—family life as a woman. I did not know how to do it . . . how to sew, how to wash, how to knit . . . I did not know how to do any of it. And when I suddenly got married and my husband saw that I did not know how to do it, he said: “I’m going to help” . . . Those two years, when we lived in cooperation—they were the only two happy years of my life in all of my forty years of marriage . . . I washed and cooked, he would peel the onions and potatoes; he helped me. But as soon as we arrived in Kharkov and he began to study here . . . then he came home just to sleep, and all the housework was on me. This became the norm; and it still is, right up to today . . . “That is women’s work! And if you want to work outside the home, that’s your problem. And if you want a career, that’s your problem, too.”1

What was expected of the wives of officers in the Soviet Union of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and what expectations did women have for themselves? Did those expectations change in the 1990s, and if so, how? How did realities match up with expectations? What possibilities were available, and what did it take for women to realize their own goals? What shaped their identities as women, and how did their careers develop? With this chapter, I seek to suggest answers to these questions by exploring the remembered lives of two exemplary “military wives.” I will describe their backgrounds and trace the interrelated trajectories of their careers and their marriages. Through this lens, I seek to contribute to women’s history and gender studies by recovering, revealing, and comparing two women’s lived experiences, and to ground those experiences in particular places and times. The autobiographical story in the quotation above, told from Valentina Viktorovna’s individual perspective, reflects a shift, a betrayal—both in her marriage and in the society in which she lived. Having begun with the 103

104

Chapter Four

intention to revolutionize the family (along with everything else), the Bolshevik leadership offered the same promise to its women that Valentina Viktorovna’s husband had offered. As Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaia had famously predicted, the socialist marriage would be “a shared life . . . devoid of its bourgeois traits, which are the domination of the man and the suppression of the woman under the burdens of domestic work.”2 That promise, for most, never materialized. In the mature Soviet Union of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, conflicting sets of discourses vied within both official and unofficial rhetoric, delimiting the conditions of possibility for action by individual Soviet women. Two of the most powerful discourses were also the most contradictory—that which glorified working women and that which lionized mothers. These were mediated by a third powerful discourse that narrowed the scope of work into “men’s work” and “women’s work.” These discourses clearly constrained the paths that women could take. The cronyism that pervaded much of the power structure also served as a vehicle to reinforce and stratify traditional differences in the division of labor. At the same time, socialist imperatives and consumerist demands did drive major improvements in childcare, medical care, housing, and education. Thus, by the end of the 1970s, women could fully take advantage of these benefits to ease some of the heaviest responsibilities that came with the “double burden” of home and job. Even so, “men’s work,” such as upper management, remained principally the province of men. It was not until Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) and what followed that women acquired the dubious opportunity—because of economic necessity—to fill roles in many of the trades and professions that previously had been barred to them. Several of my respondents then took jobs that had been “men’s work”—in department store management, for example, or in the fields of shipping freight and building construction. Although these women experienced the new jobs as a mixed blessing—the jobs paid well but were difficult—a few of them, particularly among the military wives, now retrospectively understand those new careers as having been emancipatory. Role reversals within the family were common during perestroika and the upheavals that followed. Although some of the families have returned to more traditional roles since then, several of them continue with the wife working in jobs that are more demanding, have longer hours, and are more financially rewarding than her husband’s. For some, this situation has made their marriage relationship suffer; for others, it has strengthened their bond. As a consequence of the relative openness in the economic and political spheres, combined with what social infrastructure is left over from the old system, the women interviewees who



Women and Gender 105

are now in their thirties—those who came of age just as the Soviet Union fell—have considerably more and better options than their mothers had, and they are taking advantage of them, despite the sexism that is still prevalent in their society. “The difference,” Tat’iana said, “is that the society is no longer the same thing as the state, so the sexism of our men is no longer systemic. We can handle our men. Before, it was the totalitarian state, controlled by men, that our mothers couldn’t overcome.”3 Through a close examination and comparison of two individual lives— supported by evidence from other sources—I seek to illuminate and explore the possibilities and realities for officers’ wives in late Soviet and post-Soviet Kharkiv. I conclude that women had clearly defined boundaries at home and at work, and that transcending those boundaries took skill, extraordinary drive, and a considerable amount of effort. Even within traditional boundaries, however, women were able to exert influence and achieve personal goals. Career opportunities did expand during the period of change that began with Gorbachev’s perestroika, and the discrimination in many professions has declined, improving prospects for the younger generation. Even so, important continuities in gendered perceptions continue to constrain the achievements of women. 4.1 HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY The outlines of the broad history of women in the Soviet Union have been largely settled in the historiography. Thus, the literature on women in the Soviet Union has developed into “a standard narrative,” with scholarly surveys of the subject following a “usual modeling of Soviet developments.”4 This canonicity exists despite the tremendous volume of the literature, especially for the period prior to the Great Patriotic War.5 Thus, it may reasonably be concluded that gender historians and generalists alike are agreed about the general contours of Soviet women’s history, even if many specific topics— like those covered later in this chapter—are debated energetically. From the beginnings of Leninism, well before 1917, Lenin and his followers tied the emancipation of women both to the success of the revolution and to freedom from housework. In 1918, Lenin wrote that, “the status of women up to now has been comparable to that of a slave; women have been tied to the home, and only socialism can save them from this.”6 Indeed, from the beginnings of the Soviet Union, its leaders saw women, their careers, and their family responsibilities in terms of the larger goal of building socialism.7 In Krupskaia’s words, “To be sure, the emancipation of women is inseparably bound up with the entire struggle for the workers’ cause, for socialism.”8

106

Chapter Four

Socialism would save women from their status as slaves in the home; thus women must sacrifice to build socialism. Ideologues, policymakers, and propagandists alike drove home this message. To many in the Soviet leadership, women were “the most backward” of workers.9 Even so, “the real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding state power) against this petty housekeeping, or rather when its wholesale transformation into a large-scale socialist economy begins . . . Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating woman, she continues to be a domestic slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labor on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying, and crushing drudgery.”10 The New Soviet Person [novyi sovetskii chelovek] is usually translated as the “New Soviet Man.” However, although chelovek is a masculine word and can signify an individual male, in this context it is better translated as “person,” as here it is a linguistic equivalent to the universal “Man” in English, “human being.” In this historical context, the Soviet leadership aimed at developing new people of both sexes.11 Translation of the phrase into English as “New Soviet Man” adds a layer of gender meaning that is not (usually) in the original Russian, even though the New Soviet Person was generally visualized as male in print and media representations. The New Soviet Woman, like her male counterpart, was a super-person,12 simultaneously ordinary and transcendent, who emerged from the ideological “awakening” of the Soviet proletariat.13 In an effort to cultivate and produce the New Soviet Woman, the Bolsheviks in power almost immediately granted women the rights of divorce, abortion, and other forms of birth control. Sex was not vilified, and women were encouraged to find sexual fulfillment.14 Efforts were made in new communal living experiments, childcare improvements, and women’s health care.15 Then, during the 1930s, the leadership dropped much of its experimental agenda, including sexual and familial freedom and experimentation, “in favor of ‘the new Soviet family,’ which bore a startling resemblance to a bourgeois family, complete with material status symbols, a dutiful housewife, and many children. In the new Soviet family, however, the mother also worked full-time outside the home. As industrialization and its practical need for labor swallowed the utopianism of the 1920s, women fell increasingly under the burden of the double shift.”16 The “withering away” of the family was no longer a goal of socialist progress. The new party line was that the family—like the state—was to grow stronger with the full realization of socialism. Massive propaganda campaigns linked the joys of motherhood with the benefits of Soviet power.17



Women and Gender 107

Following the Great Patriotic War, necessity, culture, and custom united with state goals and demands to create impossible expectations for women. Women had to work; the distribution of food and consumer goods was tied directly to the workplace.18 Women had long held the responsibility for caring for their homes and families. Soviet policymakers reinforced this tradition with their repeated decisions to emphasize state-funded support facilities to help women with housework rather than encouraging men to recreate the family on a more equal basis.19 Even when those facilities materialized, traditional household roles remained largely unchanged.20 Both traditional Russian and new Soviet norms valued children and encouraged women to have families.21 While a few women did opt to devote themselves entirely to their careers, defying both Russian tradition and Soviet exhortations to “fulfill their destinies as mothers,” most married women did have children, despite the complications of caring for a family under the conditions of economic hardship following the war.22 In the postwar period, as women faced the conflicting responsibilities of rebuilding the economy and repopulating the Soviet Union, the state press bombarded them with images of women who successfully fulfilled state expectations, both in the home and in the workplace. This continued until the fall of the USSR.23 “In the absence of adequate support facilities, economic reality shaped women’s lives more profoundly than state demands, and most women attempted to balance their duties by privileging domestic concerns over professional advancement, limiting family size, and developing strategies to deal with the difficulties of postwar life.”24 The most recent work on Soviet gender explicitly follows historian Jeanne Boydston’s fresh call for the further complication of the male/female binary, “a formulation that relies upon the assumption that gender is something we can analyze in and of itself, as an analytical discrete category.” It includes an admonition “to ground the concept [of gender], as we are defining it, in place and time.” Boydston’s overall goal was to encourage historians that use gender as a category of historical analysis to write histories “of gender as historical process.”25 Numerous new studies in Soviet history have sought to answer this call. Of particular note is historian Anna Krylova, who in her most recent work argues that any version of gender identity is particular to a time and place. This is especially true in the case of the Soviet Union, which produced a major sociocultural transformation of society and continuously reproduced contradictory ideological stances that did not allow any Soviet subject to simply mirror or reject Soviet official policy and culture.26 Oral history is an excellent method to ground gender identities in their historically contingent times and places. It is also, perhaps, still the best way to

108

Chapter Four

amplify the voices of the women of the Soviet Union.27 According to the editors of the book series Gender in History, the original, inspirational project of women’s history was, and still is, “to recover and reveal the lived experience of women in the past and the present.”28 There is sometimes tension between women’s history (e.g., the work of Lynn Abrams) and current gender history (e.g., Boydston), but I do not believe that their primary goals—as described above—are contradictory. Indeed, with this chapter, I seek to accomplish both goals for the women of VIRTA: to recover and reveal their lived experiences, and to ground those experiences in particular places and times. The two individual women featured here exemplify two potential paths for married women in the military group. The first woman described here is quite unusual; she personifies the extreme end of the spectrum of possibilities for “military wives.” The second woman is much more typical; her story illuminates how wives sacrificed their careers in order to achieve vicariously through their husbands. Whether they considered their careers independent or dependent, however, these women exercised power both inside the home and beyond it. Indeed, like several other women interviewees, they both claimed to hold “control” over the careers of their husbands, and described themselves as “the real head of the family.”29 4.2 CAREER WOMAN Valentina Viktorovna, the woman quoted at the beginning of this chapter, has always considered herself a “career woman,” as opposed to what she called the “the housemothers” who either did not work outside the home, or worked primarily to supplement their husbands’ incomes. As such, she is one of the exceptions whose story helps to illustrate the norm.30 However, it is important to note that this division is arbitrary. It is primarily a division of self- and peer-group perceptions rather than actions. Although Valentina Viktorovna and many of her peers considered her a “career woman,” separate in many ways from homemakers, she did have children, and the “housemothers” did have careers. Even so, while this is a subjective distinction, it is real to the women who make it. Valentina Viktorovna’s life as a career woman began in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where she grew up, in her words, as a “Russian with elements of Eastern upbringing.” Her family was highly educated, including several individuals with advanced degrees. All of the members of her family, including Valentina Viktorovna herself, considered themselves members of the “intelligentsia stratum” of society.31 Her parents and grandparents did not teach her how to cook, clean, or sew—these skills were unimportant to her family members— but they did teach her “how to think and to learn.”



Women and Gender 109

Figure 4.1.  Liudmila Petrovna Chikateva, career woman and wife of a VIRTA colonel, circa 1965.

Her childhood dream was to be a doctor. She worked hard, and at age eighteen she passed the entrance exams and was admitted to medical school. However, upon visiting the morgue the first day of classes and seeing a dissected human cadaver, she dropped out. She had discovered that, “I was afraid of the dead . . . That was when I realized that medicine was not the career for me.”32 It was also at this point in her life that she married her husband. After working various temporary jobs while she and her military husband moved around the country on his postings as a junior officer, Valentina Viktorovna attended a regional Institute of Trade. When she graduated from the institute, she acquired a job in the local administration of the city of Voskresensk, near where her husband was stationed at the time. She worked there a month in supervisor training, at the end of which she was offered the position of Deputy Director for Personnel in the State Trade Division. “I was the third highest person in the city trade office—and this was in the district center. And I had a salary higher than that of my husband’s, fifty percent higher. A very high salary. And the advantages were endless. That is, I could buy anything—basics, finished goods, and food—I had my choice to buy anything I wanted. And we were given a one bedroom apartment with only two children [this was better than the norm, which was an apartment with no separate bedroom; see note].”33

110

Chapter Four

With Valentina Viktorovna’s successes as a goad, her husband wanted to advance his career as well. He wrote several applications to military graduate academies, and she supported his attempts, particularly when the academy he applied to was in a large city, as they had been living in provincial cities or towns for several years. Then, when he was accepted at the VIRTA academy, she had a difficult decision to make. “At that time, I did have a very good career . . . but many officers who were unable to fulfill their individual potentials began to ruin themselves with drink. Very many had no ambition, and if their women did not support them to realize their potential—did not start them down the right path—they started to ruin themselves with drink. It usually started with being denied entry into the academies, or by some similar disappointment.”34 The mentality of “guiding” the careers of military husbands is not unique to Valentina Viktorovna. “Our mothers knew what they were doing,” Tat’iana said, “they may not have had a career of their own, but they guided the careers of their officers. Did they! For example, if a woman liked Kharkov—and they usually did—she would push her husband to excel at the academy and aim to continue graduate studies there as long as possible. If he was able to pull that off, she would then push him to do so well that the faculty would want to keep him on staff. And you have talked to these men—even if (God forbid!) they never mentioned the support of their wives—isn’t that the career path that many of them took?”35 Indeed, Tat’iana’s description is accurate for a significant portion of the colonels in the interview group. According to Oleg Vladimirovich, “I think that at least 60 percent of the credit for what I have achieved should go to my wife. It is her accomplishment. It was because of her and my family; because without their support, without their help and guidance—their careful mentoring—I would probably not have made it, would not have become who I am.”36 In Valentina Viktorovna’s case, she did not want her husband to go to graduate school in Kharkiv, because she already had an excellent, rewarding career. Even so, she did see her choice in terms of guiding and supporting her husband, and ended up sacrificing her job as a deputy director for him and his career. “He came to me for advice. ‘Valia,’ he said to me, ‘I was accepted into this program. Do you think we should go?’ I knew what this would mean. I realized that we were again going to have to live in prison-like conditions—again live in a family dormitory. I had no idea if I could get a good job in Kharkov or not. But at the moment of truth, in a moment of personal clarity and self-realization, I replied, ‘Slavik, your career, your education is more important than mine, and of course, we will go to Kharkov.’ And so we started all over again.”37 Valentina Viktorovna was not the only woman among the interviewees to make such a sacrifice. Indeed, some women who had planned careers stopped



Women and Gender 111

even thinking in terms of a rewarding job outside the home, as a sacrifice for their husbands’ careers.38 Others gave up promising careers when they had their first or second child, taking less demanding work closer to home or, in one case, quitting work outside the home altogether.39 During Valentina Viktorovna’s first few months in Kharkiv, her husband stopped helping her with housework, and told her—regarding both domestic work and a career outside the home—“that’s your problem” (see the quotation at the beginning of this chapter). As she remembers it, “he broke his promise to help me in life.” Despite this betrayal, and despite her other sacrifices, she did not divorce him—but she still wanted a career.40 She developed a new dream. “I wanted to be at least a department manager—if not the general manager—of a department store. This was my primary goal . . . I just knew that I could do this job. Unfortunately, back then it was like this: If you want to be a leader, you must be a member of the Party. Before that time, during the 60s, as I recall, wives of officers were members of the Party—almost without exception. It was like a rule. But later—I think that this started in the 60s—it was not so automatic. Therefore, I was not a communist, even though I was the wife of a communist officer. And to be in upper management, you definitely had to be a Party member. And to be a communist, you should be a worker or collective farmer [in terms of background]. That is, the intelligentsia stratum had a very small quota of people who were allowed to become Party members. It took connections to get into the Party [for a member of the intelligentsia, like Valentina Viktorovna]. In short, if a person had connections, she could be in the Party; if she was in the Party, she could rise in terms of career. It was natural to become a Party member under these conditions. But I had no connections, so I was not a member of the Party at that time.”41 Unlike several other wives of officers,42 Valentina Viktorovna had not been able to join the Communist Party in her younger years.43 Thus, she was assigned to the local government administration, where she worked as an economist in the trade division for several years. Twice during those years, she was invited by department store general managers to take the position that she had “dreamt about, to be a department manager in a store.” However, both times, “my bosses would not let me go, as I was too good a worker to be released. They said that I was needed in government administration more than in a store.” In the Soviet system at that time, such employment transfers had to be approved—and hers were not. “If the shakeup hadn’t occurred, I would probably have had to work there for the rest of my life, and retire as an economist. But the reorganization did happen; Gorbachev came to power, and that was the beginning of perestroika . . .”44 “The shakeup,” “the reorganization” that Valentina Viktorovna refers to here encompasses more than the perestroika of the mid-1980s. This is perestroika

112

Chapter Four

(literally “restructuring”) in its general connotation. For Valentina Viktorovna and most of my interviewees, this “reorganization,” or period of transition, began in the mid-1980s and ran through the late 1990s, from Gorbachev’s rise to power, through his radical reforms (labeled “perestroika” and “glasnost”), to the fall of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. While the scholarly tendency is to divide the “transition period” at 1990 or 1991 and to separate Gorbachev’s perestroika from the longer period of social, economic, and political upheaval, my interviewees do not remember such a break. For them, the periodization ran from the mid-1980s to the turn of the new century. That, for them, is “when everything fell apart.” While Gorbachev’s perestroika marks the beginning, “the reorganization” did not end for my respondents until the Ukrainian economic recovery that began in 2000–1.45 For many of them, it was still ongoing in 2010–11. It was during this time that economic and career situations changed drastically for all of the interviewees, especially those in the military group. Since many of their husbands lost their jobs or voluntarily switched careers, women often had to “pick up the slack” in order to feed their families. Most interviewees remember this period as “the wild times,” “the dark times,” “the upheaval,” or “the restructuring that caused things to fall apart.” However, the reorganization also opened up space for women of abilities and ambition, and a few of the women seized the opportunity to finally achieve their dreams as “career women.” When Valentina Viktorovna’s supervisor was promoted and was about to leave the city government, she decided that she might be able to escape it herself, and looked for open positions in department stores. Since the reforms of 1986 had shuffled many people and positions, a department management job was indeed available at a local store. When she saw the job vacancy, she said to herself, “Valentina, do you want to go for this job? I was then forty years young, fit, and not a drinker or a heavy smoker . . . and I say to myself ‘Yes, no sweat! Let’s do it!’ . . . I go to the general manager of the department store, and I say, ‘Here I am, willing to be the head of a department.’ He just stood there, with his mouth hanging open. He did not believe it. He says, ‘Valentina, you cannot handle the job.’ I say, ‘I can manage.’ He says, ‘You know, you are such a classy and educated woman, and the men you’ll have to work with—the haulers—are all drug addicts and alcoholics. It is necessary to fight with them; they won’t even hear a manager unless he shouts at them!’ I reply, ‘I can handle this job.’ In truth, this wasn’t really self-confidence on my part, it was not really self-confidence at that time. It was hopelessness. I simply . . . knew that if I did not get the job there, I would remain unemployed . . .”46 “Well, the general manager has no desire to accept me, and tries everything to talk me out of it. I understand that he really does not want me there. So I go



Women and Gender 113

back to my boss at the time (in the government), and I tell my boss’ boss, the head of the department, ‘Before, you did not let go of me when I was invited to work as a department manager in a store—which was a higher position, by the way. So now, I’ve decided that I am not going to work at all unless I can go to work as a retail department manager.’ He says to me, ‘Well, well, so it is like that, is it?’ . . . He says, ‘Valentina, go—and don’t worry.’ He then calls the head of the personnel division and tells him, ‘Call the store and find out what it would take to get them to accept Manukian.’ And in this way I was, well, ‘hired’ (so to speak) as a retail manager . . . The times had changed dramatically, thanks to Gorbachev’s perestroika.”47 Although her job at the store began just as difficult, loud, and dirty as she had been promised, she loved it. According to her, such positions were usually rife with corruption, and the store and its employees would suffer because the men holding similar management positions would be skimming money and goods for themselves. Such dishonesty by managers encouraged stealing by their underlings. Instead of taking the opportunity to steal for herself, Valentina Viktorovna offered the general manager a compromise—she would not skim, and she would stop the theft by everyone in her department. In exchange, she wanted the freedom to pay her workers additional wages from the money and goods saved. He agreed, “and because of this, I had the opportunity to manage people based on incentives—we say ‘material interest.’ I quickly got rid of the bad haulers, the alcoholics. I hired normal guys . . . As a result of my incentive program, the department began to work well.”48 In order to qualify for this job as a manager, Valentina Viktorovna had to join the Communist Party, which she was able to do in 1986 because her husband had since acquired better connections. Then, four years later, she decided that she had to leave the Party for ideological reasons; as an ex-Party member, she also had to leave her job. “I made the decision to leave both my job and the Party in 1990, after the [1989 Congress of People’s Deputies], the one in which Gorbachev ridiculed Sakharov. During that Congress, I discovered that I had to restructure myself, too, just as everything else was being restructured—I realized that we had to restructure our selves. When you write about this, I want you to include this comparison: We were, as we now know, canaries. They say, ‘A caged canary cannot be set free; if you release it, it will die.’ However, people only say that if they don’t know about canaries, if they don’t know that there is a place, the Canary Islands, where these birds live in freedom. Canaries do know what freedom is! But our canaries do not know what freedom is, they were bred as prison animals. We, here, the Soviet people, are like canaries in a cage. We have become people-canaries. That is, we know the world only as canaries know a cage. And we’re fine with our gilded cage.”49

114

Chapter Four

“I remember a time [in the late 1970s] when they showed Angela Davis50 on television . . . Soviet television was always reporting on strikes by starving people in the United States, especially blacks. And I remember my thoughts on this, I thought, ‘My God, what fools Americans are! Wow, they are having such troubles! Why do they not carry out a revolution like ours? . . . In the Soviet Union, all are equal, all are equal.’ That is, I had a sincere belief that our system was the best in the world, the best. We lived better than anyone . . . We did not know how people lived in the West, we had no idea, not really. And those who traveled there, they did not tell us, because they signed legal agreements here that they would not disclose such information upon their return. So I really thought that we lived very well in comparison . . . And even when Khrushchev denounced Stalin, it was just Stalin . . . I believed that our country was of course, well, good. And 1990 was when the deputies began to speak openly at the Congress, when they first began to talk openly, truthfully, about the various problems in our country. That’s when it was revealed that we—in everything, in facts—we had been deceived. Of course, then I was terribly disappointed in everything.”51 “In May of ’91, I think, I left the store, maybe even a little earlier. My career in state trading was over. Although there was still a little time left for self-supporting state trade, I realized that everything like that had come to an end . . . I realized that the country was doomed . . . What was coming, was private ownership in business . . . And so I went into private business then, in ’91. And from that time on, I have made my career on real trade . . . I went to work with a pioneer in the new trading industry, which concerned itself with energy, etc. . . . At first, it was really flourishing, then something went wrong with the management . . . And I offered to exchange my shares in the parent company to buy one of their subsidiaries, which had been ‘zeroed out’ [assets transferred out to private ownership] . . . I had to pick it up, pick it up, a little bit at a time, out of the ruins.”52 “And in general, I recreated the company. And I headed up that company until ’99, seven or eight years. But our tax system here was just—I cannot even find the words to describe it—well, the mafia was plundering their own businesses, I’ll just say that. No private company could survive for long, because the work was almost criminal . . . Yes, if you did not run it like a criminal, it was not worth doing. But not necessarily criminal in everything, just tax evasion, mostly. Just hiding, hiding company revenues in the underground economy. And if you were unwilling to work in the underground economy—well, in two months you were gone. Even if you had been in business five or six years, two months and you were gone. Therefore, if you worked in an informal business, then there came a time when you needed to close it and open a new one. Because if you had accumulated wealth and



Women and Gender 115

grown your business, you were just waiting for the horror that there will be an audit that will reveal all your doings, and you’ll end up living on scraps. Certainly, no one wanted that. Because of this, it was necessary to close and reopen. And so there came a point when I realized that my company had to be closed.”53 “In private business, you put your own money into it, your own intellect, your own assets. Everyone wants to take everything away. And you do not want to give it, because it was not given to you. Even if you took a dead company and revived it, provided order out of chaos, and repaired the company, it still did not belong to you. As before, it belonged to the state. You have invested, done everything for your income, and you have everything taken away, such that you can’t even pay your employees properly . . . And so there comes a time . . . boiling, boiling, boiling, the steam builds up, it just bursts the whole thing. I then closed the firm, and opened another company . . . The tax system had changed somewhat, and besides payroll regulations, everything else you could earn as you saw fit . . . But the better tax code was for small businesses only. My prior company had been a big business . . .”54 Corruption such as Valentina Viktorovna describes, as well as related shifts in the tax codes of independent Ukraine, is well documented in the secondary literature.55 “Then I finally got rid of everything,” Valentina Viktorovna said, “as I had already decided that since my kids had each chosen their own path, their own activity, they should not give up those paths. When I started the business, I was hoping that one of my children would take it over, that I could pass it on. And later I realized that no one needed it—that my husband had his own job and my children had their own work. I realized that this was not necessary. I had worked for twenty years, and the years before that. It made no sense for me to strain myself at this point—running around, not sleeping at night, nervous all the time. It did not make sense, with no one to which I could leave it.”56 “I am glad that I was able to achieve in life what I set out to pursue. That is, during the adjustment period—that was my time, when I was finally able to achieve the self-satisfaction of my personality, my self-gratification. Because before that, I was a person who was defined by my lack of self-satisfaction. And so I was finally able to really work, and I worked a lot, and I made money and could afford all this. [She holds out her arms in an expansive gesture that encompasses the expensive, recent remodeling which has been done on her apartment.] I like to say—and I am able to say—that I have done everything it took to ‘make it,’ and I earned it. To overcome all of the obstacles, I have done it. And I never let anyone tell me it was impossible. I have proven it—I can do it. And I think that this is a great joy. In contrast, if you are being honest, a man can do what he wants, thus if he achieves some success in his field, it is not the same thing as a woman doing it.”57

116

Chapter Four

Other women had similar experiences. Ekaterina Ivanovna’s personal achievements were academic. “My doctorate in sociology was my greatest personal achievement, you see? Because this was the result of individual hard work over many years. And, by the way, nobody helped me. Nobody.”58 When asked directly about sexism in the workplace, Valentina Viktorovna’s response was unequivocal: “We say that there were two sets of ‘equal rights,’ one for men and one for women. Women did have an advantage in some careers. For example, there were always women who were able to lay claim on positions in education. But, of course, even there the men were first. It was only if a position could not easily be filled by a man that a woman had the chance to take it. In principle, living as a career person was much harder to pursue for a woman than for a man—much more difficult.”59 Other interviewees are of a similar opinion. Elena related a story about how men were repeatedly promoted above her. After she had complained to her superior about this, he “told me that men are better than women in the workplace, because no matter how thick they are in the head, they are always more impressive. Of course, I didn’t understand that, and I still don’t. I guess it means that Soviet equality in the workplace meant equality for men.”60 Indeed, living life as a career women was so difficult that Valentina Viktorovna did not live a typical life, neither within this group of interviewees nor within the society as a whole. Instead, she represents the extreme end of the spectrum of possibilities for women in the mature Soviet society. In her words, “I honestly believe that I am probably one of a small percentage of the population that was affected favorably by the restructuring.”61 “I am different from many women, and those many women were insanely jealous of me, thinking about me and talking about me with each other.”62 In fact, although I was careful to never mention other individuals during interviews, several women respondents did independently name Valentina Viktorovna as a model of a “career woman,” often disparagingly.63 Thus, she is an exception that helps to define the norm—a norm discussed further in the next section. 4.3 HOMEMAKER Ekaterina Mikhailovna’s life, as she remembers it, was much different from that of Valentina Viktorovna. This is despite the facts that they were born within a year of each other, were both married to VIRTA colonels, had children of the same sex and virtually the same age, and by 2010 had lived across the street from each other for more than twenty years. Ekaterina Mikhailovna was born in a small town in the Riazan Oblast’ of Russia, and grew up in the city of Ul’ianovsk. She was a “child of the military,” as her father was



Women and Gender 117

a military officer in the ideological branch. During Ekaterina Mikhailovna’s childhood, her mother did not work. One of the first major events she remembers from her youth is the process by which she began dating her future husband. “We knew each other from school, although we were not in the same class. He was a year older than me. He was the star of the school, the best athlete in the school . . . a friend of mine, a poet, was infatuated with him. She wrote poems dedicated to him. This girl was romantic. And I read, I listened to, the poems, and it did something to my soul. Even though I was not in love, I said ‘Okay, let’s go for it!’ . . . I went to him and said, ‘Let’s go out!’ So we did . . . I was sixteen and he was seventeen.”64 A few years later, upon his graduation from high school, she and her fiancé were married. Although he wanted to be a sport trainer, a coach, he almost immediately joined the army instead, and left for officer training. In Ekaterina Mikhailovna’s words, “My father was an officer; he even attended a postbaccalaureate academy. And my brother was later a military man, too—he died serving. Then my husband became a soldier; we say it was a ‘dynasty.’”65 Many young Soviet women in the 1960s, especially in the Russian and Ukrainian republics, found military husbands to be a prestigious match. Even according to career woman Valentina Viktorovna, “Although this was not true in Tashkent, after I became a military wife, when we had moved to Russia, I realized that in Russia it was very prestigious to be an officer’s wife. It was a special elite group, officers and their wives.”66 When her husband went off to military school, Ekaterina Mikhailovna stayed behind in her parents’ home. At that time, a group of her friends decided to apply to Moscow State University (MGU) together. This was quite a challenge, because MGU was one of the most selective universities in the country. Ekaterina Mikhailovna and several of her friends thought that they were talented enough to pass the school’s stringent entrance exams in mathematics. “Then there was a big competition among us, and all of the others got in [to MGU]. I passed the math and physics portions, and I wrote brilliant essays, as I always have. But I did not get half the points, which was the number necessary. For me this was such a tragedy, that I did not go to [MGU]. I decided instead to go to a local pedagogical institute for teaching mathematics, because it was easier to pass the exams. This was so hard to live through, to experience; it was such a tragedy for me.”67 While Ekaterina Mikhailovna was studying at the institute, her husband was stationed near Moscow. They visited each other often, especially on weekends and holidays. Her last year at the institute, she became pregnant. “I took the final exams and passed in June, and later the same month gave birth to a son. I then moved to live with my husband ​​ near Moscow, on a

118

Chapter Four

military base there.”68 Although her husband seemed to enjoy life there, she was miserable. “Living on that military base just killed me. I kept repeating to myself, ‘I do not want to live like this . . .’ It was very hard, very bad, and not just the physical life. I remember when my children would later say something was ‘hard,’ I would tell them ‘you don’t know what hard is,’ and I was thinking about life on that base . . . We lived in a small, rural house without central heating, without a toilet, and without a dumpster in the yard. We had one room and a tiny kitchen, tiny. The kitchen floor was a slab of cement. I arrived with a baby, and I had to make sure to wash everything, to make sure everything was sterilized, disinfected. There was only water to clean with, but the water had to be carried a long distance from a central well—how much water I hauled! With a child’s needs to care for, and only a stove for heat. It was more than just bad, it’s a wonder that I survived it at all. And my husband was on a watch duty rotation—he would be home for a week and gone for a week. And I was with this little infant, dragging the water, bathing him every day, as it should be done. I didn’t surrender; I didn’t retreat one step, but I do not know how I did it.”69 “Twice a year, my son’s health deteriorated so much, and he was in such a bad condition, that we had to take him off base to a hospital and get medicines for asthma and choking fits. I believed that this whole situation was caused by the ignorance of the doctors on base. And so I said, ‘We’ll leave here! I do not want to live here.’”70 The physical challenges were only part of Ekaterina Mikhailovna’s suffering. “There was an oppressive, pack-like mentality. The pecking order among the women of the military was structured according to the ranks of their husbands. On that base, there was an atmosphere of barking, gossip. If your husband was a major, you were at the top of the social ladder. If your husband was a captain, you were nothing. And if you were just a lieutenant, as we were, then you were less than nothing. Even the lines at the store were arranged that way: the first wife in line was always a major, and so on according to rank . . . I told my husband, ‘I cannot live here, it’s a swamp, it’s a scary, eerie swamp where the most important person is only the wife of a major. Even so, she is commanding everyone. This is so stupid!’”71 It is interesting to note that during Ekaterina Mikhailovna’s description of life on the base above, she shifts from describing husbands and wives to describing married couples by rank—from “if your husband was a captain” to “if you were a lieutenant, as we were.” Soviet military life was a status-conscious system, and wives’ social identities were ordered according to the army rank of their husbands. Ekaterina Mikhailovna’s experience was similar to many other “military wives” who had to overcome comparable challenges on military bases and in military community housing across the country.72 According to Liudmila



Women and Gender 119

Nikolaevna, who later became a very successful business manager in her own right, “I lived in a dormitory as a student—a civilian—and I also lived in a dormitory as a military wife. Let me tell you about the very big difference between a civilian dormitory and a military dormitory. I already told you that I am a highly adaptable person; I am perfectly comfortable everywhere I go, without conflict. But, in the military dorms, it was very difficult, very difficult. There was a clear pecking order—who is your man? Is his military rank above my man’s, or below it? That means that the lower the rank of your husband—the lower you were. And when I had to put myself in this situation,

Figure 4.2.  Elena Petrovna Ovcharenko, homemaker and wife of a VIRTA colonel, circa 1965.

120

Chapter Four

there were six families using one kitchen, and ‘they’ were all officers, and ‘I’ was just a cadet. I respected them, meekly . . . But it is a hard environment. This is a very difficult environment, very much so! The military dormitory, being a military wife—it is a very difficult environment. Quite.”73 Valentina Viktorovna put it another way: “It was virtually a caste society.”74 While living in this society on base, Ekaterina Mikhailovna worked as a teacher in a local primary school, where she found a group of friends that helped her to survive those years. “It was a rural school, very rural. I taught physics and mathematics. And we walked. All of the teachers at the school lived in a town nearby. That was my only real company; we were friends. Not like the wives of the warrant officers, the lieutenants, and the wives of majors. We teachers did not distinguish among each other. I just couldn’t live in that atmosphere, when there were illiterate wives all around me. They had no clue about reality. Not to mention the lieutenant colonel [she calls the wife of the highest ranking officer by her husband’s rank], that was just like being the premier. Separate from that group was my real company. We walked four kilometers on foot together to school, each way, every day, over dirt roads that turned into swamps when it rained . . . I remember once going in rubber boots, and pulling my feet out, and the boots remained hopelessly stuck there in the mud. And I stepped straight into the mud, up to my knees. I got to the school barefoot, barely, barely making it. Now, that’s walking to work.”75 “So, since I simply couldn’t live there anymore, I pushed my husband to apply to the academy. I used this as a way out, naturally. I gave him an ultimatum. He put in an application [to VIRTA] and got accepted—and we got to leave that horrible place. I’m proud of myself for that, because I produced it. I didn’t just plan it, I was the ideologue behind it, so to speak—the mastermind. He did not want to do it. He said, ‘But what I do here, I like it. What else can I do?’ . . . But, of course, he was a very good pupil—of mine. He obeyed me in everything; he served [me]. He was my best pupil . . .”76 “I deserve 70 percent of the credit for his academy degree . . . I cooked it up. I’m a mathematician by education. So I prepared my husband. He was my best pupil. And I prepared him; every day, I worked with him. I gave him a program of training. He had been a bad student in school. But it was better when we were preparing for his academy exams. He was so responsive, diligent, listening to me about everything. And I prepared him in mathematics and physics; math even more. And he passed his final exams, and it was just wonderful. I was even flattered. When he passed, they told him that he had been very well prepared. He even received a ‘5’ [a perfect score] on one of the exams! And then he immediately reverted to playing sports.”77 It was through her husband’s career that Ekaterina Mikhailovna felt the most success. Like many military wives, she worked but did not consider it



Women and Gender 121

a career, choosing instead to guide her husband’s profession and raise their children. As one of the younger generation said, “Our mothers, the military wives, had their own special ranks—and within our homes, they outranked our fathers, believe me. Many of the academy officers came to the academy because their wives wanted to live in Kharkov. Many of them scrambled to keep positions there because of pressure from their wives. The women of that generation, they lived through their men—and now through us, their children.”78 Many of the interviews support this statement. In Ekaterina Mikhailovna’s words, although she was “the mastermind” of her husband’s career, “I never made ​​a career myself; I raised children. I worked, but a career and kids are not compatible, not at all. I had no mother, mother-in-law, or grandmothers nearby to help me; I never had. Therefore, the responsibility was on me. My husband didn’t help me either. I never even attempted to have a career.”79 In the words of another of the interviewees, “Motherhood—that is happiness for a woman. Nothing more. For women, this is happiness. A woman is born to become a mother. If she—God forbid, of course—does not have children, I think, well, then she loses a lot in this life. Because children are children. Yes, that’s life. We live through our children.”80 For Ekaterina Mikhailovna, guiding her husband’s career also had unintended consequences, in a way similar to those experienced by Valentina Viktorovna. For both the homemaker and the career woman, life took a turn for the worse because of their “guiding.” However, since so much more of Ekaterina Mikhailovna’s personal identity was wrapped up in her husband, the repercussions were much more severe for her than for Valentina Viktorovna. As it turned out, her husband was not really up to the task of advancing academically. In “preparing” him, she had propped him up artificially. Since his math and physics abilities were not up to par, and because Ekaterina Mikhailovna’s knowledge base did not go beyond the level of a Master’s degree, they were never able to write a higher-level dissertation in engineering, even together.81 Her husband therefore worked the rest of his career as a laboratory technician; without further education, he could not rise above the rank of lieutenant colonel (most academy professors retired as full colonels). He never forgave her for putting him in this position—in a dead-end job from which he was unable to escape. They divorced in 1990, and he died a few years later. Although she only alluded to her divorce in our first interview, in the followup meeting Ekaterina Mikhailovna was more forthcoming. “Since he was a sportsman, not being able to compete in the academic environment—to win— this caused him all sorts of psychological problems. We wanted somehow to get a promotion, but the dissertation?82 Well, we were not scientists, and I

122

Chapter Four

could not become one. And then they began to push, saying that a dissertation was mandatory. My man broke. By this time, by the age of forty, his results in sports were not what they used to be . . . Then we got divorced . . . He suffered, suffered, and to me he was pitiful, and what could I do? I could not help him. I could not do a dissertation for him—I knew nothing about such things. I could not help, and he could not do it, he simply could not. He played sports all his life. Science and sport are completely different, completely different things . . . his psyche was broken . . . As a result, our family split up . . . I was devastated, and I still am.”83 “And for the children, it caused real grief. Everything was gone. It was the collapse of my life. You want to know the worst thing in my life? That was it.”84 When asked, at the end of our last meeting together, whether she felt that her life had gone as she had expected it to, she replied: “Let me answer a slightly different question. If I had it to do all over again, would I have gone down this path? Yes, I guess, since my life fits my character, I’d take almost exactly the same path. However, I would change enough so that my husband would come back to me.”85

4.4 MEMORY AND THE MARRIAGE DYNAMIC Although my chosen methodology required that I interview respondents individually, there were circumstances in which I found myself interviewing married couples together—either formally and for the entirety of the interview, or informally and sporadically in situations beyond my control. During four of the interviews, the respondent’s spouse would enter the room occasionally. While these interruptions were usually only for a few seconds or minutes at a time, they reminded me—and the interviewee—that the wife or husband could probably hear us from elsewhere in the apartment. In all but one case, it was a wife who was interrupting, not a husband. Since I was able to complete follow-up interviews with the respondents (of both sexes) from all but one of these interrupted interviews, I tactfully made sure that we were alone the second time that we met. One of the things that I wanted to learn from these particular follow-up interviews was whether the respondent’s answers would be different without the presence of their spouse—and they seemed as if they were different, both at the time and later in listening to the interviews and preparing the transcripts. I first encountered this issue while interviewing the Chikatevs. For them, the difference between interviewing together and singly was stark, at least in the case of the husband’s answers. Liudmila Petrovna was one of my first interviewees, and I was able to conduct the interview while her husband was

Women and Gender 123



at work. She gave no obvious signs of self-censorship (such as pauses, roaming eyes, nervous gestures, or second-guessing). She seemed self-confident, assured, and open. But after the interview, she was one of only two people out of all of my respondents who called me wondering if the interview had been “all right.” She wondered aloud if she had been “too gloomy” or “too honest.” When I assured her that her interview had been both informative and pleasant—“just right”—she agreed to let me keep and use the results of her interview.86 However, when I contacted her (multiple times) to arrange for a follow-up interview, she politely declined. In fact, out of the sixteen respondents that I asked to do a second interview, she was the only one who demurred. In contrast, her husband Nikolai Petrovich granted me both a first and a second interview, and both followed my meeting with his wife. During the first ninety minutes of his first interview, we were alone in their apartment. In that first hour and a half, Nikolai Petrovich deployed a penetrating wit in a nearconstant barrage of social satire and scathing denunciations of Soviet life. Then his wife came home, and his responses changed—not just in tone, but apparently in content. When his wife was in the apartment with us, Nikolai Petrovich measured his words carefully, eyes flicking toward the other room where Liudmila Petrovna was located. The humor was almost gone from his replies, and his answers seemed muted in comparison to the ebullience of the first segment of our time together. When his wife came—uninvited—into the room with us, sat next to him, and put her hand on his knee, he became sullen and dispirited. She repeatedly interrupted him, smiling at us both and occasionally tightening her hand on his knee. The following reveals the kind of spousal censorship that she employed. Q:  And how about your dacha [small plot of land in the countryside, often with a cottage]?87 Was it difficult to acquire, to buy it? I do not know much about this process, and I would like to know. NP:  Sure, it was difficult! Yes. For some. I could not get a dacha site during Soviet times . . . LP:  [Interrupting] Well, Mike . . . NP:  But in the nineties . . . LP:  [Interrupting] Ahh . . . NP:   No, it’s . . . LP:   [Interrupting] You didn’t want a dacha. NP:   I am trying to say . . . LP:   [Interrupting, turning from her husband] He just did not want one before!

124

Chapter Four

NP:   [Sullen, sighs] I did not want one. But in the nineties, when I was laid off, I approached them, “Give me a piece of land.” I was told that “No, everything has already been distributed,” and so on. Well, as it happened, some employees had abandoned their land, so we took it . . . LP:   [Interrupting forcefully, mocking] Come on! How? How did we do that? We just took it? Ha! NP:   Luda . . . [at a loss for words] Well . . . LP:   Look here! We all shared equally. NP:  [Curtly] Well, nothing here is equal! So, no we didn’t!88

After a few more questions, I wrapped the interview up and removed myself as tactfully as I could. While I can only speculate as to her motivations, it is clear that Liudmila Petrovna was deliberately interfering with Nikolai Petrovich’s interview and attempting to influence his responses. After listening carefully to both spouses’ interviews again during the transcription process, my best hypothesis as to her motivations is that Liudmila Petrovna had “interview remorse” regarding our first meeting. It should be noted that, technically, what Nikolai Petrovich was trying to describe above (his seizure of unused land for private use) was illegal. If it became known to the authorities, the land could conceivably be repossessed for public use. At a fundamental level, I believe that Nikolai Petrovich either trusted me to guarantee his anonymity or was unafraid of the possible consequences of telling me the truth, regardless of what I would do with the information. In contrast, Liudmila Petrovna—after her interview was completed—may have decided that she had perhaps told me too much, or that I was not going to be careful enough with their information. Although she did not go back on her promise to let me use her interview, she may have tried to influence her husband to be more circumspect than she felt she had been. Nikolai Petrovich’s reaction to his wife’s interference was to sullenly do what she wanted while she was present—and then to meet with me later in a place where he would be free from her influence. He agreed to meet with me for a follow-up interview, this time held in my apartment rather than theirs. Once again, he seemed comfortable, was jovial in tone, and seemed to be answering fully and freely, without any obvious signs of conscious selfcensorship. I took that opportunity to ask some of the same questions again that I had asked in our first meeting, after his wife had come into the room. Nikolai Petrovich’s answers during the follow-up interview (including those in answer to my new inquiry about acquiring land for a dacha) were more complete and unconstrained.89



Women and Gender 125

During the three instances where I interviewed married couples together, I would ask a set of questions (five to fifteen questions) of first one spouse and then the other, alternating between them. This gave them more time to think through their own responses, as well as to modify their responses based upon the answers given by their spouse. While this was not a result I desired, with both husband and wife in the same room at once it was unavoidable. Thus, these are not really interviews with separate individuals; rather, they are interviews with couples. However, I discovered that the transcripts from those interviews can be useful in a unique way; they provide other examples of how spousal memories can have an effect on the responses of individuals—and even illustrate some of the ways that those effects manifest themselves. One of these couples was of the older generation; the other was of the younger generation. In the first case, I was able to do a follow-up interview with each of them individually; in the second case, both the first interview and the second were conducted as “couple” interviews. In both cases, when their wives were present the men were more likely to speak of their children, of the home, and of holidays. The men were careful to bring up sexism and paternalism when discussing the lives of the women in their lives, and their language was noticeably freer of obscenities and impoliteness than that of their contemporaries who were interviewed singly. Although they seemed comfortable and open, they often deferred to their wives and went back to questions asked earlier in order to include more information about their families. Overall, they seemed to want to please their spouses and to give answers that emphasized the effect of their families on their lives. This was markedly different from the behavior and answers of the men interviewed singly, including the man whose first interview was a couple interview and second interview was solo. On the other hand, the women in the couple interviews—including the woman whose second interview was unaccompanied—seemed to be affected little in their own responses by the presence of their husbands. Far from deferring to them, several times the wives corrected what they perceived to be mistakes in their husbands’ factual statements. In the case of the older woman, she also repeatedly interjected to clarify or more fully explain something that her husband had said. Neither man seemed at all put off by this behavior. Indeed, they both thanked their wives for their help. It seemed natural, unforced, and unthreatening for both spouses. Throughout the research for this project, I asked every respondent (individuals and couples alike) the question: “What was the happiest time in your life, and why?” The answers became predictable, falling along gender lines. Almost all of the time, when a female respondent had a child, she answered this question either with, “The birth of [name of oldest child]”

126

Chapter Four

or with something related to her children. In stark contrast, almost all (86 percent) of the male respondents replied with a milestone event in their careers—unless there was a possibility that their wives could hear them. In three of the seven total interviews where the husband knew or might have suspected that his wife was listening to his response, he said that “The birth of [name of oldest child]” was the happiest time in his life. Overall, it appears that among my interviewees, the women were less concerned about the possible implications of the interview process (and the resulting dissertation, book, and archival repository) within their marriages. The men altered their behavior and their responses more in reaction to the presence of their wives. However, it also seems that at least one of the women was more concerned than her husband about the possible implications of the interview process and its results upon their family from outside forces.

4.5 THE YOUNGER GENERATION While the interviewees were evenly split about whether raising children was easier during the Soviet period or in 2010–11, all of them agreed that the social services—the most important being childcare, schools, health care, and maternity leave—that were developed in the late Soviet period were excellent. Indeed, the career women and the homemakers alike repeatedly stressed that they could not have pursued their goals without that support, and pointed out that those services were free of cost prior to the mid-1990s. Even Valentina Viktorovna, our career woman, grudgingly admitted that these services allowed her to build her career—while simultaneously maintaining that she could have paid for such things. Even though many of those services now cost money, sometimes considerable percentages of a working woman’s income, the infrastructure built during the Soviet period is still serving the women interviewees who are now in their thirties—those who came of age just as the Soviet Union fell. However, today they also have considerably more and better options than their mothers had, and they are taking advantage of them, despite the sexism that is still prevalent in their society.90 As “career woman” Valentina Viktorovna put it, “The worst time of my life was my youth . . . Right now I myself am a happy person, I feel happy. Precisely because of the differences in living between now and when I was young, I am much happier than when I was young. Because I’m happy that my children do not have to live as I did. They live, well, much better. They can afford to go wherever they want. Not only that, but they have the freedom to go and buy a ticket and leave. That is, the legal possibility. And there is also the money. I am happy that they do not really know about the difficul-



Women and Gender 127

ties that their mother suffered, thank God. So there. I am happy that they have good—very different, dramatically different—partnership relationships with each other as spouses. These are relationships that are not determined by some insanely primitive conventions [as they had been in her generation]. For example: Here’s what a man should be like, but a woman can only be like this. And why? Why, where is it written? So there. In short, human relationships have changed, so I’m happy.”91 Valentina Viktorovna seems to be correct. Even though most of the younger women interviewees mentioned sexual discrimination and cultural sexism, when asked directly, only one of them believed that she had been denied a job due to her sex.92 Even when her husband pointed out discriminatory policies, Natal’ia felt that such discrimination had not affected her own career. Q:  Natasha, how is your career life as a woman? As you heard, Vladimir [her husband] said that women in general always seem to receive less pay. Do you? Right now, today, in your work, do you feel as if you may have a situation that is not quite what it would be for a man? A: No. No! I think that such things depend entirely on the person.93

Elena, my youngest respondent, had not quite turned thirty when I interviewed her. Although she is from the comparison group, something occurred during her interview that is illustrative of the change over time that has affected all of my respondents as well as their larger society. Just before her husband closed the door to the living room so that our formal interview could begin, she asked him in a pleading voice if he would cook dinner since she was going to be occupied for the next hour or more. “Nah, that’s women’s work!” he replied, “But I will go out and pick up some sushi.”94 4.6 CONCLUSIONS In the last three decades of the Soviet Union, women had clearly defined boundaries at home and at work. Transcending those boundaries took skill, extraordinary drive, and a considerable amount of effort. This was not unique to the Soviet experience. However, what sets this case apart is that in both the USSR’s official and unofficial rhetoric, conflicting constructions of gender competed and together delimited the conditions of possibility for action by individual Soviet women. Two of the most powerful of these gender constructions were also the most contradictory—that which glorified working women and that which lionized mothers. These were mediated by a third that narrowed the scope of work into “men’s work” and “women’s work.” These

128

Chapter Four

conflicting but powerful discourses constrained the paths that women could take, delimiting them within clear boundaries. Valentina Viktorovna, the career woman, is not representative of the women interviewed for this project. Instead, she is included here as a personification of the outer limits of the possible, an example of those few women in the mature Soviet Union who were able to break free of limitations in the workplace. Even within traditional boundaries, however, women like Ekaterina Mikhailovna were able to exert influence and achieve personal goals. Ekaterina Mikhailovna exercised power both inside the home and beyond it. Indeed, career women and homemakers alike claimed to wield “control” over everyone in their households, including their husbands. In the context of the oral history process, this did seem to be the case. Beyond the home (but via the home), women also remember controlling the careers of their husbands. Thus, women who did not have rewarding careers often found fulfillment in those of their husbands. This is an interesting insight, particularly when one considers that these were the wives of highly accomplished military leaders— high-ranking officers, accomplished scholars, and successful athletes that can be described as “men’s men.” Overall, there is nothing unique to the Soviet Union with regard to intelligent women using their energies and talents to help their husbands get ahead. Nor was the experience of multiple burdens on women unique, even in the latter half of the twentieth century.95 What is perhaps unique to Soviet history is the fact that these women had been promised, by the founders of their state, that such things would fall away. In fact, the reverse was often true. Even though domestic work is extremely important even if unpaid, and for many of my respondents it was immensely rewarding, the opportunities outside the home that Soviet women were promised were never delivered. Throughout this period, important continuities in gendered perceptions continued to constrain the achievements of women. The cronyism that pervaded the power structure at all levels also served as a vehicle to reinforce and stratify traditional differences in the division of labor. At the same time, leading up to the 1970s, socialist imperatives and consumerist demands did drive major improvements in childcare, medical care, housing, and education. The new career opportunities that opened up during the restructuring that began with Gorbachev’s perestroika were usually a mixed blessing—the jobs paid well but were difficult. Few of the women who pursued careers in the 1990s, particularly among the military wives, now retrospectively understand those new careers as having been emancipatory, despite the fact that role reversals within the family were common during perestroika and the upheavals which followed. Perhaps this is partially due to the fact that “men’s work,” such as upper management and military service, remained principally the domain of men.96



Women and Gender 129

Although some of the families have returned to more traditional roles since the economic recession of the 1990s, several of them continue with the wife working in a job that she considers a “rewarding career.” For some, this situation has made their marriage relationship suffer; for others, it has strengthened their bond. As a consequence of the relative openness in the economic and political spheres, combined with what social infrastructure is left over from the old system, the women interviewees who are now in their thirties— those who came of age just as the Soviet Union fell—have considerably more and better options than their mothers had, and they are taking advantage of them, despite the sexism that is still prevalent in their society. The Leninist promise of freeing women from sexism and “drudgery” was never fulfilled in the Soviet period. Indeed, even in 2010–11 the majority of women interviewees still spent a significant portion of their time in housework, shopping (at open-air markets), and cooking—but not Valentina Viktorovna. She has a housekeeper, shops in the newest Western-style grocery and department stores, and regularly eats at fine restaurants. And no one, especially not her husband, gave any of this to her. “I have done everything it took to ‘make it,’” she told me with pride, “and I earned it.”97 NOTES 1.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 9, 2010. 2.  N. K. Krupskaia, “Brachnoe i semeinoe pravo v Sovetskoi respublike,” (1920) in Pedagogicheskie sochineniia, vol. 11 (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1963), 434. 3.  Tat’iana Vladimirovna Fikse, interview with author, March 30, 2011. 4.  David L. Ransel, “Review of Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700– 2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),” Journal of Modern History 77, no. 4 (December 2005): 1168–1170. 5.  This literature is vast. For examples, see Elena Shulman, Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire: Women and State Formation in the Soviet Far East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Roger D. Markwick and Euridice Charon Cardona, Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Lynn Attwood, Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 149–165; Greta Bucher, “Struggling to Survive: Soviet Women in the Postwar Years,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 137–159; Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Wendy Z.

130

Chapter Four

Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, eds., Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989); Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin, and Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, eds., Women in Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977). 6.  V. I. Lenin, “Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women” (1918), in Lenin’s Collected Works vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 180–182. 7. Bucher, “Struggling to Survive,” 137. See also Engel, Women in Russia, 149–165; Goldman, Women, State, and Revolution; Buckley, Women and Ideology. 8.  N. K. Krupskaia, “Preface” (1933), in The Emancipation of Women; From the Writings of V. I. Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 2011), i. 9.  Krupskaia, “Preface,” iv. 10.  Lenin, “Heroism of the Workers in the Rear: ‘Communist Subbotniks’” (1919), in Lenin’s Collected Works vol. 29 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 408–434. 11. Attwood, Gender and Housing, 1–39. 12.  Barbara Evans Clements, Daughters of Revolution: A History of Women in the USSR (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1994), 72–73. 13.  These tropes were changeable. Indeed, the New Soviet Person—of whatever sex—was a set of shifting images and expectations laid out in myriad ways in ideological discourse and propaganda as well as art and ordinary speech. For more on the New Soviet Person, see the previous chapters. 14. See Clara Zetkin, “Reminiscences of Lenin” (1924), in The Emancipation of Women; From the Writings of V. I. Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 2011), x–xv. 15. Attwood, Gender and Housing, 22–86. See also Engel, Women in Russia, 107–165. 16.  Bucher, “Struggling to Survive,” 138. In a footnote, Bucher also points out that “since employment in this period increased dramatically overall, the percentage of women workers rose only from 27 percent to 39.3 percent between 1927 and 1937.” Here, Bucher is citing Norton T. Dodge, Women in the Soviet Economy: Their Role in Economic, Scientific, and Technical Development (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 176. 17. Engel, Women in Russia, 153. 18.  Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 41. 19.  Bucher, “Struggling to Survive,” 137. 20. Engel, Women in Russia, 209–230. 21.  Bucher, “Struggling to Survive,” 138–139; Engel, Women in Russia, 209–230. 22.  Bucher, “Struggling to Survive,” 138. 23.  Bucher, “Struggling to Survive,” 138–139; Engel, Women in Russia, 209–230.



Women and Gender 131

24.  Bucher, “Struggling to Survive,” 138. 25.  Jeanne Boydston, “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis,” Gender & History vol. 20, no. 3 (November 2008): 558–583. Emphasis in the original. 26. Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat, 13–26. 27.  Khubova et al., “After Glasnost,” 96. See also Leinarte, Adopting and Remembering, 1–15. 28.  Lynn Abrams, Cordelia Beattie, Pam Sharpe, and Penny Summerfield, statement of purpose for Gender in History series, http://www manchesteruniversitypress. co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?series=23 (and at the front of any of the books in the series). 29.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 8, 2010. See also Ekaterina Mikhailovna Kaziuta, interview with author, January 27, 2011. This statement, and the conclusions which precede it, are confirmed by several other interviewees of both sexes, for example Elena Petrovna Ovcharenko, interview with author, July 3, 2010; Liudmila Aleksandrovna Pirogova, interview with author, September 14, 2010; Aleksandr Fedorovich Kotov, interview with author, September 16, 2010; Aleksandr Mikhailovich Donets, interview with author, November 28, 2010. 30.  Details of Valentina Viktorovna’s description of her life, such as places lived and jobs held, are verified by documents held in her family archive, including Soviet employment histories, medical records, scrapbooks, photo albums, and other biographical documents. Manukian Family Collection. 31. The exact phrase Valentina Viktorovna used is “na intelligentsiiu, na ee prosloiky”—“in the intelligentsia, in its stratum.” 32.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 8, 2010. 33.  Ibid. The norm at that time for such families—to use the American lexicon—was a studio apartment. A “one bedroom” apartment had a full separate kitchen, a separate living room, and a bedroom with a door as well as a toilet closet and a bathroom. 34.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 9, 2010. 35.  Tat’iana Vladimirovna Fikse, interview with author, March 30, 2011. 36.  Oleg Vladimirovich Nosov, interview with author, December 7, 2010. 37.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 9, 2010. 38.  For example, Elena Petrovna Ovcharenko had wanted to be a chemical plant middle-manager; she gave it up entirely when she got married. She only did office work after that. Interview with author, July 3, 2010. 39.  For example, Liudmila Nikolaevna Donets temporarily gave up a burgeoning career in management to raise her children; she then went back to it when her last child went off to college. Interviews with author, November 28, 2010, and February 27, 2011. 40.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 9, 2010. 41.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 8, 2010. 42.  Elena Petrovna Ovcharenko, interview with author, July 3, 2010. 43.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 8, 2010. 44. Ibid. 45.  Ukraine experienced a deep post-independence economic recession that continued until 2000, with peaks in negative growth and unemployment in 1994 and 1999. The recession included hyperinflation and a drastic fall in economic output.

132

Chapter Four

In 1999, at the lowest point of the economic crisis, Ukraine’s per capita GDP was roughly half of the reported per capita GDP before independence. See the “Bulletins” and “Annual Reports” of the National Bank of Ukraine at http://www.bank.gov.ua/ control/en/publish/article ?art_id=57793&cat_id=37350. 46.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 8, 2010. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 9, 2010. 50.  A leader of the Communist Party in the United States. 51.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 9, 2010. 52.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 8, 2010. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55.  See John Round, Colin C. Williams, and Peter Rodgers, “Corruption in the Post-Soviet Workplace: The Experiences of Recent Graduates in Contemporary Ukraine,” Work, Employment & Society (2008): 22–149. See also Michael Johnston, Civil Society and Corruption: Mobilizing For Reform (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005); W. Miller, A. Grodeland, and T. Kosechkina, A Culture of Corruption? Coping with Government in Post-Communist Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001); Louise Shelley, “The Political-Criminal Nexus: Russian-Ukrainian Case Studies,” Trends in Organized Crime vol. 4, no. 3 (1999): 81–107. 56.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 8, 2010. 57.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 9, 2010. 58.  Ekaterina Ivanovna Butova, interview with author, February 26, 2011. 59.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 9, 2010. 60.  Elena Mikhailovna Popova, interview with author, February 21, 2011. This respondent is the daughter of artists. In 2011, she was a university professor and a professional musician. 61.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 8, 2010. 62.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 9, 2010. 63.  Since these are still her neighbors and friends, I will not even mention their pseudonyms in this context. 64. Ekaterina Mikhailovna Kaziuta, interview with author, January 27, 2011. Some details of Ekaterina Mikhailovna’s life, including details of her husband’s career, are corroborated by correspondence in the Babich Family Collection and the student yearbooks in the VIRTA archive. 65.  Ekaterina Mikhailovna Kaziuta, interview with author, January 27, 2011. 66.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 8, 2010. 67.  Ekaterina Mikhailovna Kaziuta, interview with author, January 27, 2011. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid.



Women and Gender 133

72. Liudmila Nikolaevna Donets, interview with author, November 28, 2010; Elena Petrovna Ovcharenko, interview with author, July 3, 2010. 73.  Liudmila Nikolaevna Donets, interview with author, November 28, 2010. 74.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 8, 2010. 75.  Ekaterina Mikhailovna Kaziuta, interview with author, January 27, 2011. 76. Ibid. 77.  Ekaterina Mikhailovna Kaziuta, interview with author, March 5, 2011. 78.  Tat’iana Vladimirovna Fikse, interview with author, March 30, 2011. 79.  Ekaterina Mikhailovna Kaziuta, interview with author, March 5, 2011. 80.  Elena Nikolaevna Kosheleva, interview with author, October 8, 2010. 81.  In this context, Ekaterina Mikhailovna referred to the dissertation required at the level of Candidate of Science [kandidat nauk]. See chapter 3 for an explanation of advanced degrees in the Soviet Union. 82.  See previous note. 83.  Ekaterina Mikhailovna Kaziuta, interview with author, March 5, 2011. 84.  Ekaterina Mikhailovna Kaziuta, interview with author, January 27, 2011. 85.  Ekaterina Mikhailovna Kaziuta, interview with author, March 5, 2011. 86.  Liudmila Petrovna Chikateva, interview with author, October 5, 2010. 87.  For more on dachas, see Lovell, Summerfolk. 88.  Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev, interview with author, October 5, 2010. 89.  Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev, interview with author, March 20, 2011. 90.  These conclusions are supported by current scholarly literature. See, for example, Tat’iana Zurzhenko, “Strong Woman, Weak State: Family Politics and Nation Building in Post-Soviet Ukraine,” in Kathleen Kuehnast and Carol Nechemias, eds., Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism (Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 23–43. 91.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 9, 2010. 92.  Elena Mikhailovna Popova, interview with author, February 21, 2011. 93.  Natal’ia Vital’evna Shevchenko, interview with author, October 10, 2010. 94.  Elena Viktorovna Rybalko, interview with author, September 28, 2010. This respondent is from the comparison group; both of her parents were factory workers. 95.  As examples of scholarship that reflects the widespread nature of these issues, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1989); Charlene Gannagé, Double Day, Double Burden: Women in the Garment Industry (Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1986); Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1998). 96. The exclusion of women from careers in military leadership is covered in depth in chapter 3. 97.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 9, 2010.

Chapter Five

Ethnicity and Nationality “My Address Is the Soviet Union!”1

I consider myself a Russian—well not a Russian, actually, but a Soviet . . . I am a Soviet. I was born in the Soviet Union; I lived my entire life in the Soviet Union; I am Soviet.2

What can cause a person to think of herself as something other than a member of a nation, a citizen of a nation-state? What does it mean for an individual to be “transnational?” Do any identities go beyond the transnational? In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Ukraine has been “a laboratory of transnational history.”3 By studying individual Ukrainian citizens, we can gain insights at the grassroots level. We can learn how ideological, ethnic, and national imperatives—as developed and transmitted by elites—are internalized, transformed, or rejected by the rank and file. We can study, at the micro level, how the ethnic and national identities of people in eastern Ukraine developed and changed over time, and how that process relates to the parallel nationbuilding projects pursued by the leaders of their country. The processes by which the Ukrainian citizens in this study accepted or rejected various national and ethnic identities were open-ended, fluid, and indeterminate. Since the breakup of the supranational Soviet state, several specialists have concluded—following theories of nationalism that assert that the strongest social identity is the national—that the primary divisions in the newly independent country fall along national “fault lines” between Ukrainians in the western part of the country and Russians and “Russified” Ukrainians in the eastern and southern regions. However, such assertions ignore or downplay Ukraine’s long history as part of the supranational Russian and Soviet empires. Thus, even though studies of Ukrainian nationalism have recently become not only legitimate but fashionable,4 “the sharp increase of academic production in this field has not yielded a satisfactory explanation of the current Ukrainian situation. 135

136

Chapter Five

Post-communist developments in Ukraine present a set of paradoxes that seriously undermine the major theories in nationalism studies.”5 Indeed, until very recently, Ukrainian elites have seldom been driven (or supported) by domestic nationalisms, but rather by other events, pressures, and incentives.6 Since independence in 1991, Ukrainian political elites have often pursued a monocultural nation-building project, but such moves have seldom been what they seemed—rather, they were elite political maneuverings rarely driven by popular demand. For example, although the openly proRussian Leonid Kuchma (President of Ukraine from 1994–2005) promised to make Russian an official language alongside Ukrainian, he reneged on that promise and even went so far as to write a “nationalist Ukrainian” book titled Ukraine Is Not Russia. Yet things are not as they might seem: even while he was the president of Ukraine, Kuchma wrote this book using the Russian language and had it published in Moscow.7 While politicians, pundits, and historians project the “East-West Divide” onto Ukraine,8 the lived experiences of individuals and families at the grassroots level complicate this conception. My research indicates that the reality in Ukraine is not an oppositional binary between Ukrainian (West) and Russian (East), nor is it necessarily regional (western Ukraine versus eastern and/or southern Ukraine). Neither does it line up with nationalist politics: few of the individuals I interviewed want either the Ukrainian or Russian language, history, or culture to dominate to the exclusion of the other. Indeed, for many of my respondents, it was their reaction against such initiatives that first caused them to take on an identity that is recognizably “national.” For my respondents and others in similar circumstances, their first and most important social self-identification was not with a nation, but rather with the supranational Soviet state—a country that both accepted and superseded the national. They have ignored the pushes and pulls of nationalism, except when government elites institutionalize one type of nationalism over another. For people who value both their own personal supranationality as well as the transnational, multiethnic, and multilingual traditions of the territories that are now Ukraine, institutionalized nationalism can become a threat to peace and political stability. 5.1 HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY Everyone living in the Soviet Union, in legal terms, had both a citizenship and an ethnicity.9 Both were designated by their internal passports, and the two identities were distinct from each other.10 At the beginning of Soviet rule, if a citizen was issued an internal passport, she could choose her own ethnicity—



Ethnicity and Nationality 137

the state was more interested in a person’s economic background.11 However, Stalin’s regime began to pay more attention to ethnicity in the 1930s. In April 1938, the new Passport and Visa Service of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) issued a decree directing registrars to write, on the fifth line of the internal passport (known infamously as “line five”), the ethnicity of at least one of the recipient’s parents—not the self-defined ethnicity of the recipient. If the recipient’s parents were of different ethnicities, she could choose between those two ethnicities—but only those. If her parents were of the same ethnicity, she was stuck with that one. A passport recipient was henceforth required to provide, for verification, either a birth certificate (which included the parents’ ethnicities) or other comparable official documents.12 During the Great Patriotic War and its aftermath, the Soviet government used these designations to carry out large-scale deportations based upon ethnicity. Although such persecution subsided after Stalin’s death, discrimination against many groups—particularly Jews—continued, and the potential for abuse was always there13 (see chapter 3 for a detailed discussion of discrimination toward those of Jewish background). “Line five” (ethnicity) remained in Soviet internal passports until the end. As one expert has observed, “The Soviet experience is truly amazing in illuminating the devious potential of ethnic categories administered by the state.”14 Even during the late Soviet period during which my respondents reached adulthood, the system served to restrict movement, especially for certain ethnic minorities. In ideological (and propaganda) terms, each citizen also had a supranational Soviet identity, an identity that was simultaneously international in the present and universal in the ideologically assured future. From the beginning, the leadership of the USSR was supposed to protect both its nationalities and its “alien” ethnicities.15 In the 1930s, the ideological line became “The USSR: Fraternal Union of Peoples,” with “the blossoming of the national cultures of the USSR, national in form and socialist in content.” “Soviet patriotism” was supposed to be the unifying force.16 Then, in 1961 at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev declared: “In the USSR, there is a new historical community of people of diverse ethnic groups that share common characteristics. It is the Soviet people.”17 With the Resolution of the 24th Congress of the CPSU in 1971, “the Soviet people” was declared to be the result of the strong unity of all classes and strata, nationalities and peoples. Many of the characteristics that official doctrine had formerly ascribed to various ethnicities were now attributed to the all-encompassing Soviet entity. Russian was recognized as the “core ethnicity” and the common language, in recognition of “the role played by the Russian people in the fraternal family of Soviet peoples.”18 However, “the Soviet people” was declared a “new historical, social, and international community

138

Chapter Five

of people having a common territory, economy, and socialist content; a culture that reflects the particularities of multiple nationalities; a federal state; and a common ultimate goal: the construction of communism.”19 Despite this history, prevailing trends in the existing scholarship dismiss or discount these efforts by the Soviet leadership, and conclude that the Soviet supranational identity was never fully developed. Furthermore, many historians argue that rampant nationalism in the republics was the primary cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ronald Grigor Suny, a leading scholar of Soviet history and nationalism, has stated that “ironically, despite the aims of Marxism-Leninism to move beyond the era of nationalism, the Soviet federal state, with its ethnic republics and regions, provided a nursery for nations that in turn became the focus of identity and loyalty for much of the Soviet population.”20 Additionally, “the greatest threat to both the Soviet state and its potential for reform would be the emergence of mass nationalist movements.”21 Other scholars have challenged these conclusions, arguing that although nationalism contributed to the fall of the USSR, it was not a main cause.22 My research supports the latter view, and suggests that the Soviet identity was in fact a viable supranational identity, especially among the military officer corps, but also in spheres of life that ranged from those of uneducated laborers to those of civilian academic professors. Furthermore, my respondents—military and civilian alike—had multiple, multi-faceted ethnic and national identities. My interviewees appear to have consciously taken on politically centered national identities (identities that do fit the categories of nationalism theory) well after the Soviet collapse—and only because political circumstances forced them to choose between alternatives. Indeed, for many people, the supranational Soviet identity still survives, coexisting comfortably with the “Ukrainian” and “Russian” national identities called into use by political necessity. 5.2 THE EXPERIENCE OF EMPIRE Although there is no apparent difference in ethnic identities between the sexes, I find that there is a generation gap: the youngest members of my interviewee group—those who lived the Soviet identity for less time—seem to be more committed to a new, chosen national identity (whether Ukrainian, Russian, or other) than do those born before the late 1970s. In contrast, my oldest interviewees were the least committed to any post-Soviet national identity. When asked his nationality, Andrei, my youngest male respondent, said “Russian—of course!” and waxed eloquent on the subject of “Russianness.”23



Ethnicity and Nationality 139

Elena, my youngest female interviewee, explained: “I refer to myself as a Ukrainian . . . I think of myself as a Ukrainian woman.”24 However, even these young respondents registered some ambivalence. For example, Elena was quick to point out that “I’m probably never going to go out there with flags to defend [Ukrainian] independence. It’s just that, well, I decided for myself: If I was born here, then this is my country. Even so, my grandmother told me that her great-grandmother was a Polish girl, and my grandfather was Roma.”25 In contrast to the new (albeit vague) national identities of my youngest respondents, my oldest interviewees—especially those who were born before the Great Patriotic War—have complex identities that have much less to do with today’s political realities. When asked what his nationality had been on “line five” of his passport, Boris Anatol’evich replied with a smile. “In the Soviet passport, I was Russian,” he said, “But now I do not know what I am, [chuckles] because today there is no such line [in current passports] . . . At the academy, we all felt that it was all-Union, of course—the locality we came from didn’t matter.”26 When asked the same question, my oldest respondent replied with the concise (but not at all simple) statement: “I am a Ukrainian Soviet of Jewish blood and no religion.”27 Thus are national identities constructed and reconstructed—adopted and rejected—in the newly independent country of Ukraine. The generation gap in subjective identities notwithstanding, my respondents share a wide diversity in their birthplaces. Only 20 percent of my interviewees were born in the city of Kharkiv. Indeed, on the list of my respondents’ birthplaces nearly every Soviet republic is represented—from the Baltics to Kazakhstan, from Moldova to Tajikistan. Those born in Ukraine and Russia represent every major city and area—from Lviv to Sakhalin Island. One of the interviewees was even born beyond the borders of the USSR, in Poland. However, in terms of their legal ethnicity (as reported on “line five” of their internal passports), my interviewees are less diverse than their birthplaces might suggest. Nearly all have at least one, if not three or four, “Russian” and/or “Ukrainian” grandparents. Most are either “Russian” or “Ukrainian” themselves.28 In practice, when a citizen’s choice was between these two ethnicities, few gave much thought to which one they would choose to have on their passports.29 As Svetlana Viktorovna remembered: “They asked us: ‘What will you put for your ethnicity?’ This smart girl who was in our group—Alla—said, ‘We need to put down what our papas are. My papa’s Russian, so I’m putting down Russian.’ Then I said, ‘My papa’s Ukrainian on his passport, so that’s what I’ll write—Ukrainian.’”30 What, according to the interviewees, accounted for the lack of ethnic diversity among them? Their most frequent answer was simply to reference the

140

Chapter Five

commonly known demographics.31 According to the last Soviet census, ethnic Russians and Ukrainians made up two-thirds of the Soviet population; the remaining third was made up of more than a hundred other ethnic groups.32 However, in Kharkiv, this lack of diversity was more than a reflection of population statistics. Almost everyone who self-described as either Russian or Ukrainian pointed out, at least once during their interviews, that they liked Kharkiv because it was/is “a Russian city.” This characterization has little to do with official geography or elite politics. For my respondents, Kharkiv is “Russian” on their own mental maps—maps that mark out places by language and culture, not by politics. The above reasons notwithstanding, one of the most important explanations for the apparent lack of ethnic diversity among my group of interviewees was something that they did not verbalize. During the interviews, I asked a series of questions that led up to asking them what the “line five” designation had been in their passports, followed by some questions about ethnic identity and nationalism intended to get subjective responses. But to begin the interview (right after asking them their birthplace and date of birth), I specifically asked about the birthplaces, backgrounds, and lives of both of their parents, all four of their grandparents, and sometimes even more ancestry—as far back as they had knowledge. What I found is perhaps not surprising, but it does seem significant. In every case (going back in every interviewee’s family tree), when a person had the choice between either a Ukrainian and/or Russian ethnicity (based on the ethnicities of their parents) and a non-Ukrainian and/or Russian identity, they chose to be designated as one of the two main ethnicities—or at least their descendants classify them that way. Thus, the “core imperial” ethnic identities (Russian and Ukrainian) had a very strong attraction. While both the Russian and Soviet empires had quite a bit of fluidity to their “ethnic regimes,” it seems that the identities they produced tended to flow in the direction of the metropole. However, between the two core imperial ethnicities, Russian and Ukrainian, there seemed to be little difference. Again going as far back as possible in the genealogies of my interviewees, nearly half of those who had both a Russian and Ukrainian parent chose the Ukrainian ethnicity over the Russian. As for the last two Soviet generations, most of my non-Jewish interviewees remember being completely unconcerned—and uninterested—about their “line five” designation prior to the 1990s. This is likely due to the fact that none of the ethnically “Russian” or “Ukrainian” interviewees remember ever feeling a real distinction between the two ethnicities in the context of the Soviet Union. To them, these were ethnic—not national—identities, and prior to 1991, the difference between



Ethnicity and Nationality 141

being Russian or Ukrainian had no political significance. As Tat’iana put it: “The Russians were the first among equals in ‘The Friendship of Peoples,’ but we Ukrainians were a very close second; it simply didn’t matter.”33 In terms of collective identity, what mattered most to the majority of my respondents—and still does, outside of political exigencies—was their Soviet identity, an identity that was not specifically Russian or even Slavic. Instead, it was ideologically international and fundamentally supranational. 5.3 THE SOVIET AND GREAT RUSSIAN IDENTITIES Many of my interviewees went to great pains to explain how their primary national identity was the Soviet identity—and several explicitly connected that identity to the supranationalism of official ideology. “I truly internalized the ideological line,” Oleg Vladimirovich said, “I was Russian in ethnicity but Soviet in nationality—and I felt Soviet, I still do.”34 This should come as no surprise, for the Soviet propaganda ministries were often quite creative— and therefore effective—at building popular foundations for elite ideological positions. In support of the new ideological definition of supranational Soviet ideology following the 24th Party Congress, a pop song was released in 1972 that proved to be quite popular, titled “My Address Is the Soviet Union.” The repeated lines that conclude the refrain are as follows: “My address is not a building or a street. My address is the Soviet Union!”35 In answer to my questions about ethnicity and national identity, several of my interviewees referenced, quoted—or even sang—this song.36 This is an excellent example of how ideological positions taken by the leadership were projected through music and consumed (and often internalized) by the people.37 However, as specialists in Soviet and post-Soviet political culture have noted, while elites have the capacity to frame certain ideas, their efforts “will resonate only if they allow individuals to make sense of their own experiences.”38 Furthermore, the official ideological position was often transformed through the process of consumption by individuals, becoming something other than what was originally intended. As an example, for Nikolai Aleksandrovich, the lines of this song’s refrain are “ironic.” Even though the point of the song was to inculcate a communist supranationalism unbounded by territory, for him they actually represent a dual meaning: “There is a kind of irony here in these song lyrics. Because my mother—my biological mother—and my motherland, that’s the same thing, with no problems. And so one can say that my mother is the mother earth [the physical land]. Can you say that about

142

Chapter Five

the Union and at the same time say that it has no address, that is, no building and no street—that it is everywhere? Well, we do say so.”39 A few of my interviewees gave me a glimpse into one of the primary differences between the military officers and those that had minimal or no military experience—both within their families and among their civilian counterparts. When speaking about ethnicity and nationality during the interviews, the officers were more likely to reference ideology, ideological texts, or propaganda. Although they did not hold positions or have identities that were ultimately different from their civilian family members and non-military counterparts, they more often couched their description of those identities in ideological language. An important insight into this phenomenon came not from an officer, but from one of their daughters. “The officers were always more aware of the currents of ideology. This was because of the presence of the political officers (zampolit),40 who were there—always there—even at the company level. Soldiers were therefore more up-to-date—and more thoroughly indoctrinated— in ideology than the rest of us, even those of us who are the children of officers.”41 As discussed in chapter 3, military officers were not just defenders of the homeland, they were defenders of worldwide communism and leaders of the political indoctrination of the Soviet people. They were the New Soviet Military Men, and many of them subjectively continue in that role, long after their state has ceased to exist. While many interviewees identified their national identity as “Soviet”— juxtaposing it with their Russian or Ukrainian ethnicity—others, especially in the younger generation (people who were born in the late 1960s and 1970s), thought in terms that are reminiscent of Great Russian supranationalism. “Well, for me it was not essential [at age sixteen], to register my Russian ethnicity [on line five].” Aleksandra said, “At that time, I lived in the Soviet Union. I was brought up on Russian literature, Russian history, and in general I am Russian—I always was Russian, until suddenly Ukraine appeared.”42 Despite her personal proclamation of Russian identity, it is interesting to note that Aleksandra’s mother is from western Ukraine and speaks Ukrainian as her first language. Furthermore, Aleksandra’s older brother chose, for his “line five,” to identify himself as a Ukrainian. In the words of Inna, another colonel’s daughter: “When I received the passport I was already living here in Kharkov. Still, my ethnicity is Russian. I could choose. My mother is a Russian; my father is a Ukrainian. I chose Russian. Because Russian is my native language. I understand Ukrainian perfectly, but I think like a native Russian. Yes, this comes from my relationship to the great country where we were born—at least my family. I thought I was a Russian. It was more about social status, I think, than the national. And any-



Ethnicity and Nationality 143

way, we were all Russian. Well, at least I can see myself so.”43 The younger generation often spoke in these terms during the interviews. For them, the Soviet supranational identity has been transformed back to the Great Russian ethnic identity under the pressures of living in an independent Ukraine. The older generation has a somewhat different perspective. Valentina Viktorovna, for example, was born and raised in Uzbekistan to parents of mixed ethnicity. Even though she also considers herself Russian, she sees herself as different from Aleksandra and Inna. “On this subject [ethnicity/nationality], I never became a Ukrainian, and my position on this is never going to be smothered. In mindset, I am a person with a real Eastern Russian upbringing. That’s how we say it, yes. Russian with elements of Eastern upbringing. And in some ways, I have a sort of an Eastern cultural identity. Yes, that is present in me. The crux of this is the Eastern part. But I want to say that I love the Russian people, it is a proud culture, I know her well, and I know her literature well. Since childhood, I have done a lot of reading in her books and I am proud of my people and I love my people. I am a true patriot—to the Russian culture and people.44 Others of the older generation have a view of ethnicity that also brings to mind a Great Russian gaze, but from a different vantage. In response to the question: “And you consider yourself to be a Russian?” one colonel replied, “Well, I guess so. The fact is, the very notion: ‘A Russian, not a Russian’—in general this is a vague notion, indeterminable. When I was a kid and I went to visit my grandmother, I learned the Karelian language . . . There was even, at one time, a Karelian-Finnish Republic45 . . . So in general, what is my notion of who I am? Am I Karelian, or Russian, or, so to say, ‘a mixed person’? This, in general, is my opinion—that this does not matter. If we have a search for a clean, pure Russian, we might find one and say: ‘Here’s an ethnically Russian man.’ But if we investigate deeply into his roots, it is my guess that it would be hard to find such a man. Because there have been so many mixed relationships, so many mixed marriages. How can we find such a man? If you look at all the branches of his roots, you’ll find two tribes, three tribes, and on, and on. I think that it doesn’t really matter what was written there [on line five], and it had no effect on my life. None.”46 For others, their ethnic Russian identity was a matter of linguistic practicality. By the mid-1960s, “government policies and statements made it clear to the population that in the Soviet Union, socialism spoke Russian.”47 Several of my respondents mentioned this fact, basing their discussion of identity around it. As Liubov’ Vladimirovna said: “I currently live as a Russian person in Ukraine, just as I lived as a Russian in Kyrgyzstan. Although it is now becoming difficult, before [the breakup of the USSR] it was not. We did not notice. Because we all spoke in Russian, it was the official language . . . Somehow, even the

144

Chapter Five

Georgians spoke to us in Russian. This is why the Chechens, who live here [Kharkiv] now, they also speak with us in Russian, the Armenians speak in Russian, and the Latvians who live here, they also speak in Russian . . . it was the international language, just as English is today. Right now, English makes more sense than Russian. We taught ourselves Russian because we knew that we needed to know it to communicate . . . Now we have our grandchildren instructed in English.”48 Viktor, one of the younger interviewees—a man who now carries a passport from the Russian Federation but also has an official residence in Ukraine and does business internationally—was quick to see political overtones in the question: “So, you think like a Russian?” His answer speaks volumes, both about the Soviet period and about ex-Soviet citizens in the twenty-first century: “That’s a provocative question! . . . Yes it is, and not just a little bit, it is provocative. I always answer this question, even if just with humor. We have a good song: [singing aloud] ‘My address is not a building or a street, my address is the Soviet Union!’ Yes, I am an ethnic Russian, but I was born in a particular country [the USSR]. And I do not, even now, think that there is a Belarus, a Russia, a Kazakhstan—out there. See? I do not think that they are different countries. So just consider me a citizen here, of this particular territory.”49 Notice how Viktor shifted meanings during his answer, from ethnicity to transnationality to citizenship as tied to the land. He is expressing not a nationalistic nor an imperialistic mentality, but rather a position common to many of my respondents—an identity grounded in the supranational Soviet experience. 5.4 POST-SOVIET IDENTITIES With the breakup of the USSR, all Soviet citizens suddenly became residents of smaller countries—and some of those countries, Ukraine included, had never had independence in the form and within the borders as they were set in 1991. Shortly thereafter, in January of 1992, VIRTA was reorganized as the Kharkiv Military University of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and its officers had to decide either to swear allegiance to the newly formed Ukrainian national army or to quit their jobs and find work elsewhere. Since they were high-ranking military officers, those who chose to resign or retire eventually were allowed to become either Ukrainian or Russian citizens.50 However, their family members, like the majority of the Ukrainian population, did not have that option, so among my group of interviewees are several families in which the father is officially a Russian citizen while the mother and children are now citizens of Ukraine. In all of these changes, their legal ethnicities



Ethnicity and Nationality 145

were quite irrelevant. In 1995, the government removed ethnicity from Ukraine’s internal passports altogether; the Russian Federation followed suit in 1997.51 Even so, subjective ethnicities do continue to play an active role in society. For many of these new citizens—both within and without the military academy’s community—their new international passports do not make them “Ukrainians.” The approximately 11 million Ukrainian citizens who today identify themselves as “Russian” (about 22 percent of the population, depending upon the statistics followed)52 make up the largest national minority group in Europe—at least when ethnicity is cast in the mold of nationality. They have become transnational, but not through any action on their part— like many others throughout the former Soviet space, they did not even need to travel to become part of a new diaspora. However, not until recently has their status been cast in nationalist terms. In 2001, when I first interviewed people in Kharkiv, I asked the question: “Are you Russian or Ukrainian?” The answer I received was universal; people thought this a meaningless question without a valid answer. Indeed, I often received the answer: “Pshaw! I am Soviet.”53 During my latest round of interviews (a decade later), I asked the same question and discovered a radical reversal in the answers; a mere ten years later, the vast majority of my respondents now had a definite answer, one way or another. Many still told me that they used to be Soviet, and still think of themselves that way, but most had also adopted a definite national identity during the intervening years (Ukrainian, Russian, Lithuanian, Armenian, etc.). Sergei will never forget the point at which his identity “changed”; for him as well as many others, it was when the ethnic and the political started to coincide in nationalist politics. Born in 1975, he received his internal passport in 1991, just before the breakup. “At age sixteen, I went to get my internal passport. It was still the Soviet Union then, but this whole mess and state building had already started. I just instinctively wrote [on line five] that I am Ukrainian. This is what every Ukrainian [resident] thought at that time: we knew that something was coming. So, I had to write ‘Ukrainian.’ And it was not in vain . . . because we still have a separate state. And why cause problems when I felt that it [ethnicity/nationality] was a non-issue for me, personally? Well, in the Baltics—well, there were problems . . . in Latvia and Estonia, the ethnic Russians who had that ethnicity recorded in their passports—all of them were denied citizenship. In Ukraine, too, it could be like that. That’s it, that’s why I chose ‘Ukrainian.’”54 Through dozens of comments, a majority of my interviewees made it abundantly clear that it was not until they were confronted with ideological nationalism that they took on either a “Ukrainian” or a “Russian” national

146

Chapter Five

identity. And even so, these new identities exist alongside their previous ethnic identities and their supranational Soviet (and/or Great Russian) identities. Tat’iana articulated these feelings most clearly and concisely: “I never thought of myself as ‘Russian’ politically—not until those damn western Ukrainians (zapadentsy)55 started shoving themselves down our throats. For four hundred years, this [Kharkiv] was a Russian city in terms of language, culture, and ethnicity. Our signs were in Russian, our school classes were in Russian, our books were in Russian, our rallies were in Russian, our thoughts were Russian—in Russian. Why the hell does that all suddenly have to change, just because we now live in an independent country? And yet I am just as Ukrainian as I am Russian. They’re not incompatible [a Russian city/ person and the country of Ukraine]! They’re not!”56 According to Tat’iana, she had always thought of herself as a Ukrainian with Russian cultural and linguistic heritage. She first began asserting a Russian national identity in the mid-2000s, in exasperated response to nationalistic policies emanating from Kiev. Ukraine’s nation-building initiatives can be an aggravation to people who are ethnically and/or linguistically Russian—moves like replacing the Russian-language signs in the public transit systems with Ukrainian-only (or bilingual Ukrainian/ English but not Ukrainian/Russian) signs. Between 2006 and 2007, the government gradually made the dubbing of all movies into the Ukrainian language compulsory.57 If a film was in Russian or a foreign language (e.g., English), a certain portion of the copies sold in Ukraine had to be dubbed into Ukrainian, and those copies not dubbed had to have Ukrainian subtitles. Before this change, movies also often had Russian or other language subtitles, but non-Ukrainian subtitles were prohibited from 2007–12.58 For Russian speakers, watching foreign films during that period was therefore quite an annoyance. Several of my respondents—regardless of their own ethnic identity—mentioned that the works of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin are now taught in Ukrainian translation in schools throughout the country. For my interviewees, this is considered the height of absurdity. Several, particularly those who had been Soviet officers, deplored the efforts by former president Yushchenko to grant veterans’ benefits to Ukrainians who fought against the forces of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War. Indeed, the military officers in my group were the first to experience the Ukrainian nation-building efforts emanating from the new central government in Kiev. The January 1992 renaming and reorganization of the academy was mentioned by many of my respondents, and none of them remember it fondly. Like many of his fellow officers, Anatolii Ivanovich, a colonel at VIRTA, spoke at great length about this topic and left little doubt that Kharkiv’s mili-



Ethnicity and Nationality 147

tary elites often had a much closer encounter with institutionalized Ukrainian nation building in the early 1990s than those outside of the army: “That’s when it started, the jeering, so to speak, over the army, you know, the collapse of the army. Here in Kharkiv officers were attacked, yes, attacked. They were attacked by nationalists, yes, those were motivated by nationalism . . . rabid nationalism was everywhere. And we were crushed, and people began to fear. Just, you know, afraid that something might happen . . . it was just a nationalist hysteria, you know? There were beatings . . . Oh, such a terrible thing! That was such a crazy wave of nationalism, you know? I think that, these days, the wave has passed. But those days it was a wave of nationalism that was terrible, terrible, yes.”59 In the words of one of the younger military officers, “These issues arose primarily because of a hysteria on the part of the government, which makes [nationalism] the root of all life—well, they are trying to make it so, anyway.”60 The post-communist process of nation building was somewhat different outside of the military, at least in the 1990s. As one of the civilian professors told me, although the domestic process did have an effect on her, it was primarily the experience of traveling abroad that changed her perspective. “My selfidentification, in terms of nationality, changed during the nineties because I am very much a part of the [civilian] university and of the city. But no, probably it was communicating with foreigners that first made me aware of my nationality as Ukrainian—my self-identification . . . So probably that was the first push . . . I think that made me aware of my nationality . . . Please understand that when I was communicating with people of a different nation . . . being a representative of Ukraine, I came to identify myself as a Ukrainian. I am now an ‘ambassador’ of a country. I had been a Russian; this process changed me into a Ukrainian.”61 Apart from the “Ukrainization” efforts of politicians, all of the individuals I spoke with—regardless of ethnicity, generation, or profession—see no problems in their interpersonal relationships arising from differences in nationality, ethnicity, or language. As Elena Nikolaevna put it: “We have no problem with national differences. It is not as if, here and now, Ukrainians don’t understand the Russian language and Russians don’t understand the Ukrainian language. There is no problem with this. It is only a problem in the political world. Among the people, there are no problems in this regard. We are all—one people—Ukrainians, this country is Ukraine. We were born here; this is ours. They can say what they want, but we don’t care—we are one people.”62 The nationwide and regional polls confirm that those from my interview group who still self-identify as “Soviet” are far from alone. In a set of polls developed by an interdisciplinary and international team of scholars and conducted in 1994 and 2004 in both Lviv (western Ukraine) and Donetsk (eastern Ukraine), respondents were asked to choose one identity—from a list of

148

Chapter Five

four—with which they would prefer to identify themselves. The four choices were “Ukrainian,” “Russian,” “Soviet,” and “other.” One of the scholars on that team has written that since some earlier research had suggested “that Russians in large cities outside the Russian Federation tend to identify themselves in just such terms [Soviet] . . . it was natural to expect that such an identity would also find adherents in these two cities. In the case of Donetsk this expectation was greatly exceeded by the survey results. Indeed, in 1994 the Soviet identity proved most popular, certainly more so than Ukrainian or Russian identity.”63 Even in Lviv—the bastion of Ukrainian nationalism—5 percent of the population identified more strongly with the Soviet identity than with any other. Although its popularity was reduced in the 2004 survey, “Soviet” was still a significant identity in Ukraine.64 Furthermore, in Donetsk, “Ukrainian nationalists” were identified as the group most disliked by respondents—not ethnic Ukrainians, not Ukrainians per se, but Ukrainian nationalists.65 The political group that was in power in 2010–11, led by President Yanukovych, seemed to understand this situation well. “Anti-nationalism” had been one of its platforms since 2004. However, the Yanukovych government proposed a return of Imperial Russian and Soviet historical narratives, Soviet memorializations, and anti-Ukrainian Russian mythologies66—and this suggests a fundamental flaw in the logic of its “ethnic regime.” The citizens of eastern Ukraine that I spoke with are not, generally, Soviet or Russian nationalists; neither are they anti-Ukrainian. Indeed, they often describe themselves as “Soviet,” “Ukrainian,” or “Russian” with the expressed reason of avoiding nationalist politics altogether. Overall, they want a harmonious Ukraine, not a “Russian” or “Soviet” Ukraine.67 This lends support to the position that monocultural nation building—whether Ukrainian or Russian—has not been the most productive route to creating a stable and unified Ukraine. 5.5 CONCLUSIONS The individuals described in this chapter did not move across borders; rather, the borders moved across them. As their history shows, a diaspora is not always created by dispersion, and it is possible to be a transnational individual without ever traveling. These are not individuals who had to divest themselves of “natural” national feelings; rather, they were supranational individuals who became transnational and had to learn the mentalities of nationalism in order to survive. While the majority of my respondents did not wish to take on a political identity aligned with a particular nationality—even after the breakup of the Soviet Union—they were forced to do so in the face of the elite nationalizing project in the new independent Ukraine.



Ethnicity and Nationality 149

In a world where governments everywhere are struggling to promote integration and pluralism, there is much to be learned from the current citizens of Ukraine. Rather than imposing categories and advocating for policies that foster one ethnic/national identity over another, scholars could profitably look to Ukraine for models of transnationalism and supranational identities— models that are grounded in both collective history and individual experience and followed by people who refuse to allow nationalism to be anything more than political, even since the autumn of 2013.68 Indeed, the process continues by which many of my respondents change their identities as a reaction against nationalism. When the Lenin statue in Kharkiv was removed in late 2014 by the local government (discussed in the epilogue), Elena told me she “wept for days.” While she had previously identified strongly with Ukrainian nationalists, after the events of 2013–14 she was not so sure. For her, “the Soviet Union was a huge part of all of our histories. That statue was a reminder of our history and a beautiful piece of our city. What is the point of this destruction? It is the action of barbarians.”69 The lives and experiences of my respondents show that successful supranational identities have existed in the past, do exist in the present, and can be just as powerful as national identities. Both theorists of nationalism and scholars of transnational historiography should better integrate supranational histories into their lines of inquiry. Such work would help to take transnational history beyond its current status as a “dimension” of world history— especially since such histories provide a useable past for the global future. NOTES 1.  Special thanks go to Sarah Hamilton, Hong-Ming Liang, and the other editors and reviewers of The Middle Ground Journal: World History and Global Studies (http://themiddlegroundjournal.org), who helped me to refine this chapter, a version of which they published as an article in the spring of 2014. Professor Liang then allowed me to reprint it here, with few modifications. 2.  Valerii Nikolaevich Ezhov, interview with author, January 30, 2011. 3.  This is a reference to the title of Georgiy Kasianov and Philipp Terr, eds., A Laboratory of Transnational History: Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2009). 4.  As only a few examples, see Roman Szporluk, ed., National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994); Andrew Wilson, Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s: A Minority Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Taras Kuzio, Ukraine: State and Nation Building (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000); Paul

150

Chapter Five

Robert Magocsi, The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism: Galicia as Ukraine’s Piedmont (Toronto, London and Buffalo, NY: University Press Toronto, 2002). For a recent critical overview, see Jaroslaw Hrycak, “Die Formierung der modernen ukrainischen Nation,” Österreichische Osthefte vol. 42, no. 3–4 (2000): 189–210. 5.  Yaroslav Hrytsak, “On the Relevance and Irrelevance of Nationalism in Contemporary Ukraine,” in Kasianov and Terr, Laboratory of Transnational History, 225. Hrytsak is writing from his position as Chair of Slavic History at Lviv State University in Ukraine; he therefore has a view from the personal level himself. 6.  It is important to note that grassroots political nationalism played a minor role in Ukrainian history up to and including the 1991 declaration of Ukrainian independence and the 2004 orange revolution. “Contrary to the claims of Ukrainian historiography, Ukrainian nationalists have rarely managed to mobilize significant numbers of inhabitants in any region—with the sole exception of western Ukraine, which was formerly Polish (1340–1772 and 1919–39) and Austrian (1772–1918).” Hrytsak, “On the Relevance and Irrelevance,” 227. See also Wilson, A Minority Faith. 7. Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine Is Not Russia [Ukraina—ne Rossiia] (Moscow: Vremia, 2003). 8.  In a fascinating recent article, Karina V. Korostelina has mapped five distinct categories of national identity in Ukraine. “Mapping National Identity Narratives in Ukraine,” Nationalities Papers vol. 41, no. 2 (2013): 293–315. 9.  For a detailed survey of official Soviet identity, as well as an argument—with which I disagree—that this identity constituted a class-based national identity, see Ivan Szpakowski, “‘Socialism in One Country’: Promoting National Identity Based on Class Identification,” Janus, The University of Maryland Undergraduate History Journal (Spring 2007): 24–33. 10.  This designation began in 1932. Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review vol. 53, no. 1 (1994): 414–52. 11.  See resolution of TsIK and Sovnarkom USSR, “Ob ustanovlenii edinoi paspotnoi sistemy v SSSR,” (Dec. 27, 1932), quoted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 78. 12.  Furthermore, if even one of the person’s parents had an ethnicity that “belonged to a foreign state,” then the registrar was required to provide the ethnicity of both parents in the passport. For example, even though many ethnic Germans had lived in the Russian and Soviet empires for generations—and even had their own autonomous republic within the borders of the USSR (the Volga German ASSR)—this did not matter. Their children were registered as having been born to an ethnicity that “belonged to a foreign state.” Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 294. 13.  For details on these purges, see Alan Fisher, The Crimean Tatars (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 165–79; Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 311–343; Slezkine, Jewish Century, 312–313.



Ethnicity and Nationality 151

14.  Sener Akturk, “Continuity and Change in the Regimes of Ethnicity in Austria, Germany, the USSR/Russia, and Turkey: Varieties of Ethnic Regimes and Hypotheses for Change,” Nationalities Papers vol. 35, no. 1 (March 2007): 37. 15.  At the end of 1922, Lenin wrote his famous letter “On the Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomy.’” In it, he declared that “the question of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” could be boiled down to this: “It would be unpardonable opportunism if we, on the eve of the debut of the East and the beginning of its awakening, were to undermine our authority among them by even the slightest rudeness and injustice to our own aliens. The need to rally against the imperialists of the West, who are defending the capitalist world, is one thing . . . It is another thing when we ourselves lapse, even if only in trifles, into imperialist attitudes towards oppressed nationalities (narodnost’), thus undermining all our principled sincerity, all our principled defense of the struggle against imperialism.” V. I. Lenin, “On the Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation,’” (December 31, 1922), first published in Kommunist 9 (1956), http://transformations russian-literature.com/node/61. 16. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 292. 17.  “22nd Party Congress (October 17–31, 1961): Transcript” (New York: Gospolitizdat, 1962), http://publ.lib ru/ ARCHIVES/K/KPSS/_KPSS html#022. 18.  “The 24th Party Congress (March 30–April 9, 1971): Transcript” (New York: Gospolitizdat, 1971), http://publ.lib ru/ARCHIVES/K/KPSS/_KPSS.html#024. 19.  “24th Party Congress Transcript.” 20.  Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 463. See also Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). See also Martin, Affirmative Action Empire. 21.  Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 2. Although Suny has since modified his position to include a more subtle and accurate understanding of how identities worked in the Soviet Union, these quotations are from two of his most influential works; they thus hold more sway than his subsequent essays on this subject. I wish to thank Professor Suny for discussing this issue with me in person, and for directing my attention to his newer publications. See, for example, “Affective Communities: Making Nations in the Russian Empire” (paper prepared for the Conference Commemorating the 25th Anniversary of Imagined Communities, October 2008, at the University of Chicago); see also his “Contradictions of Identity,” in Mark Bassin and Catriona Kelly, eds., Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 17–36. 22.  As Francine Hirsch has argued, for example, “Neither nationalisms nor national tensions caused the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.” Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 324. This is also a conclusion laid out by several scholars in Dominique Arel and Blair A. Ruble, eds., Rebounding Identities: The Politics of Identity in Russia and Ukraine (Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 23.  Andrei Nikolaevich Chikatev, interview with author, November 27, 2010.

152

Chapter Five

24.  Elena Viktorovna Rybalko, interview with author, September 28, 2010. 25. Ibid. 26.  Boris Anatol’evich Belyi, interview with author, September 15, 2010. 27.  Leon Abramovich Stoliarskii, interview with author, March 23, 2011. 28.  Many interviews bear this out, so do many of the biographical documents (particularly birth certificates and internal passports) in the family collections. 29.  This is similar to the experiences of comparable (intelligentsia) elites in Saratov, Russia. See Raleigh, Russia’s Sputnik Generation, 8–9. 30.  Svetlana Viktorovna Rybalko, interview with author, February 20, 2011. 31. Inna Viktorovna Petrova, interview with author, October 7, 2010; Evgenii Vladimirovich Gvozd’, interview with author, March 21, 2011. Other respondents also explicitly referenced demographics. 32.  Ethnic Russians were the majority, composing 50.8 percent of the population (145 million). They were followed by Ukrainians, at a much smaller 15.4 percent (44 million). Uzbeks came third at 5.8 percent (16 million). State Statistics Committee of the USSR, “Peoples of the USSR according to the 1989 Census,” Journal of Soviet Nationalities vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 158–159. See also Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, “Growth and Diversity of the Population of the Soviet Union,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science vol. 510, no. 1 (1990): 155–177. 33.  Tat’iana Vladimirovna Fikse, interview with author, March 30, 2011. These types of opinions are similar to those of non-military elites in Saratov. One of Donald J. Raleigh’s interviewees, for example, explained: “Regarding nationality, it’s worth noting that we simply didn’t think about such things back then. Even now I can’t say with any assurance who belongs to what nationality.” Soviet Baby Boomers, 73. 34.  Oleg Vladimirovich Nosov, interview with author, December 7, 2010. 35.  “My Address Is the Soviet Union [Moi adres—Sovetskii Soiuz],” (1972), music by David Tukhmanov, lyrics by Vladimir Kharitonov. 36. Catherine Wanner also references this song. Wanner, Burden of Dreams, 49–50. Several adaptations and parodies of the song have since been written. For example, the Russian ska punk band “Leningrad” released a parody of the song in 2002, specifically for the web, in which the singer replaces the word “Soviet Union” in the original with the band’s website address: “www.leningrad.spb.ru.” The song was featured on their album Piraty XXI veka [Pirates of the Twenty-First Century], Gala Records, 2002. 37.  For an excellent elaboration of this process, including a discussion of “My address Is the Soviet Union,” see Vera Vital’evna Leleko, “Mifopoetika sovetskoi massovoi musykal’noi kul’tury (vtoraia polovina 1950kh—nachalo 1980kh godov)” (Kandidat Nauk dissertation, St. Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts, 2011). 38.  Dominique Arel, “Introduction,” in Arel and Ruble, Rebounding Identities, 7. 39. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Lotov, interview with author, December 1, 2010. Nikolai Aleksandrovich sadly passed away just three weeks after our interview. 40. “Zampolit” is the short form for the title “Deputy Company Commander for Political Affairs.”



Ethnicity and Nationality 153

41.  Tat’iana Vladimirovna Fikse, interview with author, March 30, 2011. 42.  Aleksandra Valentinovna Pirogova, interview with author, September 6, 2010. 43.  Inna Aleksandrovna Donets, interview with author, December 15, 2010. 44.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 8, 2010. 45.  The Karelian-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic was conceived soon after the outbreak of the Winter War in 1939–40 and was downgraded back to the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (within the Russian SSR) in 1956. In 1991, it became the Republic of Karelia within the Russian Federation. 46. Aleksandr Nikolaevich Babich, interview with author, December 4, 2010. Much of this account is confirmed by biographical documents in the Babich Family Collection, including residency permits and employment histories. 47.  Dmitry Gorenburg, “Soviet Nationalities Policy and Assimilation,” in Arel and Ruble, Rebounding Identities, 279. 48.  Liubov’ Vladimirovna Kotova, interview with author, September 22, 2010. 49.  Viktor Nikolaevich Chikatev, interview with author, March 6, 2011. 50.  The officers did not know this in early 1992. When it was allowed (later in 1992), Russian citizenship required the officer to have an address in the Federation. Thus, they needed either a residence of their own or someone willing to let them “reside” at their address for the purpose of the required residency permit (propiska). In practice, many officers continued to live in Ukraine, but got their official citizenship in Russia using family members’ addresses there. 51.  Dominique Arel, “Fixing Ethnicity in Identity Documents: The Rise and Fall of Passport Ethnicity in Russia,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism no. 30 (2003): 127. 52.  In the face of vague and imprecise definitions as well as census numbers that have been called into question, the percentage of “Russians” is difficult to gauge. The most conservative number (8.5 million, 17 percent) comes from the CIA World Factbook, 2010 edition, and is based on the politically charged numbers generated by the last official census in Ukraine, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/theworld-factbook/. However, others use much higher numbers. The higher number used here is more plausible than smaller numbers, especially when one considers the current pro-Russian political leanings of a large percentage of the Ukrainian population. Mérove Gijsberts, ed., Nationalism and Exclusion of Migrants: Cross-National Comparisons (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 71. 53.  These were interviews for an entirely different project—my Master’s thesis at St. Cloud State University. I did not record these interviews; the records are my handwritten notes. 54. Sergei Petrovich Zolotarev, interview with author, January 20, 2011. This respondent is the son of a VIRTA colonel; he was also a graduate student at the academy himself and worked there after graduation for several years. 55. “Zapadentsy” is a derogatory slang term used by several of my respondents when referring to (what they think are) nationalists from western Ukraine. 56.  Tat’iana Vladimirovna Fikse, interview with author, March 30, 2011. 57.  The final step in this process was a decision of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine issued on December 20, 2007. Taras Shevchenko, “Constitutional Court

154

Chapter Five

Obliges to Dub All Films in Ukrainian,” IRIS, Legal Observations of the European Audiovisual Observatory vol. 3, no. 19–20 (2008), http://merlin.obs. coe.int/ iris/2008/3/article29.en html. 58.  In 2012, under the Yanukovych government, these rules were changed. The first step was Cabinet of Ministers Regulation No. 168, “On Making Amendments to the Regulation on the State Certificate Granting the Right to Distribute and Show Films,” issued on February 1, 2012. It not only permits Russian-language dubbing and voiceover in Ukraine, it also opens the way for films dubbed in Russia to be brought into Ukraine. Larisa Masenko, “Why Ukrainian-Language Dubbing Rubs the Authorities the Wrong Way,” The Ukrainian Week International Edition (April 18, 2012), http://ukrainianweek.com/Columns/50/47729. 59.  Anatolii Ivanovich Bol’shakov, interview with author, September 12, 2010. 60.  Vladimir Ivanovich Shevchenko, interview with author, October 10, 2010. 61.  Nadezhda Iur’evna Letova, interview with author, February, 15, 2011. 62.  Elena Nikolaevna Kosheleva, interview with author, October 8, 2010. 63.  Hrytsak, “On the Relevance and Irrelevance,” 239–241. 64.  Ibid., 231. 65.  Ibid., 232. See also the 2007 survey numbers cited by Taras Kuzio, “Soviet Conspiracy Theories and Political Culture in Ukraine: Understanding Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies no. 44 (2011): 223. 66. Taras Kuzio, “Ukrainian Nationalism Again Under Attack in Ukraine,” Eurasia Daily Monitor vo. 7, no. 138 (July 19, 2010), http://www.jamestown.org/ single/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=36643. 67.  Petr Razulevich Bolodian, interview with author, January 23, 2011. This respondent is a VIRTA colonel who was born in Lithuania, raised in East Germany, and had “Russian” inscribed on “line five” of his internal passport. 68. Informal face-to-face, phone, and Skype conversations by the author with several people previously interviewed for this project, 2013–15. 69.  Elena Viktorovna Rybalko, interview with author, November 1, 2014. This respondent is the daughter of factory workers.

Chapter Six

Religion “Ours Is the Religion of Our Grandmothers”

Our grandmother always went to church—always. Our baba1 went on all the holidays, and often just went to worship. Even when everyone everywhere was solidly atheist, she believed in God. And she stayed true to the end of her days. When she died, we drove her to the church and gave her a funeral, as she wanted. I have memories from childhood like this: we were always waiting for Baba to come, waiting for her to bring us consecrated cakes, eggs, beautiful things . . . for beautiful holidays. The church was nearby—it still is. It left an impression on me, on my whole life. And the ringing of the bells, the ringing, we heard it. The church was just two stops on the trolley from our place, and we could hear the bells. We were waiting for Baba . . . Aha! Ringing! That means Baba is coming—with beautiful eggs, with a delicious cake. These are my childhood memories . . . In fact, my grandmother raised us.2

When the dust settled from the fall of the USSR, many revelations about Soviet society came to light. Perhaps one of the most puzzling was the “return” of religious identities among the peoples of the former Soviet Union. Their country had been officially atheist for over seventy years. Several organs of the regime had actively worked to undermine religion worldwide; within the Soviet Union, both the persecution of believers and anti-religious propaganda were not only accepted, they were official policy.3 For several decades leading up to the fall of the regime, even well-informed scholarly experts saw the Soviet people as thoroughly secular, if not overwhelmingly atheist. Most research by Soviet social scientists in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s put the number of “believers,” defined simply as those individuals who believed in the existence of God, at between 15 and 20 percent for the entire adult population.4 The number of believers among urban residents of the Russian and Ukrainian Soviet republics was represented as much lower in such studies, often below 10 percent (with correspondingly higher numbers 155

156

Chapter Six

in some rural areas and in non-Slavic republics).5 Thus, it came as a surprise to many that by the mid-1990s a third of the citizens of independent Russia and Ukraine professed a belief in God; in 2010, two short decades later, over 70 percent of Ukrainian citizens described themselves as “believers.”6 Faced with this apparent reversal in the number of religious identities, a trend that coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, many experts on religion reframed their conclusions.7 “Most specialists . . . were almost totally unprepared for dealing with the importance of religion in the former USSR at the end of the twentieth century.”8 The self-defined religious identities of former Soviet citizens have been understood variously as a “return,” a “rebounding,” a “resurgence,” or a “triumph of belief.” Most regional specialists have used the word “return.” Some experts in religious studies have labeled it a “triumph”; some have even argued that “a moral and religious revolution preceded and explains the overthrow of communism.”9 More balanced scholarly treatments of the subject have used the terms “rebounding” or “resurgence.”10 This chapter addresses the seemingly explosive return of Christian identities in Ukraine. I argue that these identities are not new—rather, they are no longer hidden. By closely examining the subjective identities of my respondents, I seek to answer three main questions: Why did Christian identities survive more than seventy years of persecution and propaganda in the USSR? Why did the large number of Soviet believers come as such a surprise in the early 1990s? Finally, what were the characteristics of my respondents’ various religious identities, and have those identities changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union? Liudmila Petrovna Chikateva was the source of the quotation that began this chapter. Her mother was a nurse and her father a factory worker. As an adult, she joined the Communist Party, married a military officer, and worked as a technician until her retirement. During her entire life—since early childhood— she has also believed in God. Because of the testimony of Liudmila Petrovna and her contemporaries, my research supports the argument that the number of believers in the USSR was always quite strong; it further suggests that “the Babushka phenomenon,” or grandmother-grandchild transmission, kept Christian identities alive even when the society seemed to be entirely secularized.11 The secrecy that surrounded religious identities was also quite strong, actively promoted by policymakers who followed an ideology requiring an atheistic society; this helps to explain the “return” of such identities. Whether they now consider themselves atheist, agnostic, or Christian, the “folk Orthodoxy” of their grandmothers had a profound impact on my respondents’ religious identities, both before and since the fall of the Soviet Union.12



Religion 157

6.1 HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY There are good reasons why experts were unprepared for the clearly religious identities of many former Soviet people, and why it has been difficult for historians to understand and describe the situation. From the beginning, one of the Bolsheviks’ basic goals was the elimination of all religion from the territory under their control. Their anti-religious stance was not accidental or temporary, but logically resulted from their ideological beliefs.13 Karl Marx had written that “Communism begins from the outset with atheism,” and Russian socialist leaders took this principle seriously.14 Lenin and the Bolsheviks took the idea even further, for they had “inherited the view” from the revolutionary Russian intelligentsia, “that the destruction of faith in God was a predicate (not a consequence) of successful revolution.”15 Thus, in 1917, the Bolsheviks came to power with an anti-religious program already sketched out. It was designed to supplant faith in God with faith in science, spiritualism with materialism, and the Church with the Party.16 As one expert recently put it, “This, ultimately, was Lenin’s aim—to create heaven on earth—and it could not be accomplished without overthrowing God.”17 The Bolsheviks immediately acted to carry out their ideological program. Between December 1917 and the end of 1923, the period of the worst direct persecution of the religious, thousands of religious professionals and dedicated laity were executed. In 1918, the communist leadership formally separated church and state, and decreed that churches could no longer own property—instead, all property for religious purposes had to be leased from the state.18 On the basis of this decree, some 6,000 churches and monastic buildings were confiscated; bank accounts belonging to religious associations were seized. Many churches were demolished, others were repurposed. Much of the gold in icons and other artifacts was sold to finance the civil war and other activities of the state. Church bells and crosses were melted and the metal reused.19 At the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (RCP) in 1920, the party amended their official program. The new Article 13, which remained in force for the rest of the Soviet period, reads in relevant part: “As far as religion is concerned, the RCP will not be satisfied by the decreed separation of Church and State. The Party aims at the complete destruction of links between the exploiting classes and the organizational capacity for religious propaganda, while assisting the actual liberation of the working masses from religious prejudices and organizing the broadest possible education and antireligious propaganda. At the same time, it is necessary carefully to avoid any insult to the believers’ feelings, which would lead to the hardening of religious fanaticism.”20

158

Chapter Six

The Party program, especially considering the last sentence of Article 13, thus allowed for some flexibility within official policy. “Whenever [the warning to avoid insult to believers’ feelings] is ignored, active persecutions mount; they subside when for some internal reasons the warning is suddenly remembered and reappears in a party policy statement.”21 Thus, there were fewer executions after 1923; imprisonment or exile became the preferred method of dealing with clergy and others who insisted on the dissemination of religion. At the same time, the government strengthened its anti-religious propaganda until it permeated every area of state activity. From primary school instruction to feature films, from leaflet distribution to the League of Militant Atheists, the Soviet propaganda campaign to replace religion with ideology left no room for any kind of faith—other than faith in communism and the Bolshevik leadership. Beginning with Lenin’s rule, agitation gave rise to a new communist demonology and hagiography, propaganda that drew explicitly from religious motifs.22 During the Great Patriotic War, Stalin’s regime deliberately manipulated the Russian Orthodox Church for both domestic and foreign policy reasons. At home, Stalin used the Church “to ensure the loyalty, or at least submission, of subjects,” like the tsars had before him. Furthermore, the Church served as “one of several instruments for countering and disarming non-Russian, and anti-Soviet, nationalism” particularly in the Western borderlands. Abroad, Stalin’s regime used his temporary alliance with the Church to build and preserve a façade of religious toleration in order to ensure Western alliances and monetary support, as well as to counter the influence of the Vatican.23 The anti-religious campaigns of the 1960s and 70s—when most of my interviewees came of age and began their careers—emulated, and in some respects even exceeded, the pre-war campaigns. Since Stalin’s policies had inadvertently fueled religious revival, the leadership of the regime decided once again to crack down. Beginning in the late 1950s, persecution of nonOrthodox believers presaged a reintensification of campaigns against all religious believers. In 1960, a new “full-scale attack on religion ensued.”24 Again, massive numbers of churches, including many that had been allowed to reopen during and after the war, were closed. The Russian Orthodox Church had numbered over 60,000 sanctuaries prior to 1917; in 1953 there were 15,000. Between 1960 and 1964, half of the remainder were forcibly closed, leaving less than 7,500 churches to minister to the Orthodox faithful.25 New articles were added to the Criminal Code that criminalized any religious activity that might attract minors to religion or promote “the impulse of citizens to give up social activities or perform civic duties”; conviction for either offense carried a five-year sentence.26 Children under eighteen were



Religion 159

prohibited from attending religious services. Right up until the collapse, religious believers were harassed, interrogated, and often expelled from their jobs, schools, and homes.27 The use of physical repression did wax and wane, coming in unpredictable cycles, but anti-religious propaganda continued to permeate all levels and types of education. According to a leading expert on religion in the Soviet Union, “It can be safely stated that although there were differences in the individual Soviet leaders’ approaches to the anti-religious struggle, it was not a question of moderation versus extremism . . . but a choice of methodology, strategy, and tactics of how to liquidate religion most effectively and ‘safely.’”28 Thus, it is easy to see why nearly everyone, both within and without the USSR, saw the country as rather monolithically atheistic. However, as the polling statistics in the 1990s continued to confirm the religious component of Soviet and post-Soviet identities, scholars began to understand the reality. Two prominent historians, in the introduction to their comprehensive edited volume on religion in Soviet society, wrote recently that “Socialist modernity, as a facet of modernity at large, was assumed to result in an ever more circumspect role for religion in social and political life. The rationalization and disenchantment of the world, the displacement of religion from the center to the margins of public life, and the domestication and privatization of religion all seemed to describe the inexorable forward march of the modern. Most scholars now understand how fanciful this narrative was—for modernity in general and for Soviet society in particular.”29 Of my interviewees, about two-thirds say that they are now religious; half say that they have been religious since childhood. This is a lower number relative to those in the polls of the general population cited above, but it is no less surprising considering that a majority of my respondents were members of the Communist Party—in contrast, only about 10 percent of the adult general population was Party members during this time. Furthermore, since the core of my group is composed of the families of military colonels who were also highly educated scientists, their faith seems even more unexpected. One of the most unanticipated statistics from the VIRTA colonels and their families is that 90 percent of the group had been baptized as children. While this does not make them “believers,” it does suggest that religious traditions remained important, even for the families of the military intelligentsia. Recent studies of religion in the Soviet Union have established that the situation was actually far more complex than previously thought.30 However, these studies have focused on specific components of Soviet society that remained un-secularized—few studies have sought to answer why religious identities remained so strong, especially in the general population. Some scholars have convincingly argued that evangelicalism has been extraordi-

160

Chapter Six

narily successful, especially in Ukraine.31 Although the success of evangelicalism is significant, it is only a partial answer. In both Russia and Ukraine, less than 3 percent of believers are evangelicals.32 Formerly Soviet Christians are overwhelmingly Orthodox, and this number is increasing relative to the percentages of other Christians—including those with effective evangelism campaigns.33 Several scholars have suggested that Soviet social scientists often deliberately skewed statistics to show a smaller number of believers and a larger number of atheists than the reality.34 Thus, the “return” of religious identities after 1991 can be partially explained by the fact that formerly Soviet social scientists no longer felt a need to alter statistics to bolster anti-religious party activity. Other scholars of religion have argued that the Soviet secularization campaigns were primarily unsuccessful because they were “fundamentally insipid, the result of an atheistic monopoly that never questioned itself or addressed the concerns of its would-be converts.”35 While these insights, if true, provide some explanation for why religious identities remained widespread before the collapse and seemingly “returned” after it, my research suggests an additional explanation. 6.2 OURS IS THE RELIGION OF OUR GRANDMOTHERS According to my respondents, intergenerational practices, especially in the countryside, continued the traditions and beliefs of Christianity in the heart of the USSR. Even educated, urban professionals were still connected to the villages, where basic forms of faith remained strong. Children from the city who spent holidays and summers with their grandparents often learned a love of God and a veneration of traditions at the same time that they learned how to cut hay. Back in the cities the rest of the year, they did not display their religious identities; unlike the use of farming skills, open expressions of belief could carry stiff penalties. Thus, many of my respondents remember having a private religious identity handed down from their grandmothers, in addition to an atheist identity that they maintained for public and professional reasons. Virtually all of my respondents stressed that they only learned about religion from their immediate families. They did not learn about religion anywhere else in their society—not in school, not from their friends or neighbors. According to Nikolai Petrovich, in the public sphere “religion was simply absent.”36 Andrei was more emphatic. When asked if he had heard anything about religion in school, he answered, “No, no, no, no. It was the Soviet Union! Nobody was interested. I was never told anything about religion!”37 A few interviewees did remember hearing about religion at school or univer-



Religion 161

sity—but not in the form of religious instruction. As Dmitrii recalled: “At the university, we had a series of lectures, called ‘the law’—‘jurisprudence,’ something like that—‘on religion.’ Well, we first heard about it there, the general framework. It was just a mention, really. They taught us that religion had been replaced by Marxism and Leninism.”38 I asked all of my interviewees the following questions: “What are your first memories of religion?” “When did you first hear about God or Church?” and “In terms of religion, who was the most important influence on you, and why?” I followed these questions with others on religion, spaced throughout the interview, as well as follow-up questions where appropriate. Almost universally, my interviewees’ first exposure to religion was before the age of ten. Many of these first experiences occurred in a village. The overwhelming majority of my respondents name one, or both, of their grandmothers as the foremost influence concerning God and faith. Sometimes they include their grandfathers in this part of the discussion; usually they do not. The following is from Fedor Borisovich, one of the VIRTA colonels, and it is representative of the group as a whole: “Grandma was very religious. My mother wasn’t very religious in her younger years. But in her old age, she became very devout. I had it all to observe, to analyze. I would not say that I am an atheist completely. I respect the faithful. They believe in the Manger; this belief is their life, they need it and it helps them. They believe it. But it is necessary to believe in something, in good forces. Because all around us in life there is so much negativity that somewhere there must be a bright ray of light. Right! We must believe in something good—that’s what my family believed. Yes, in my family we have always done so. And we had a happy family. Everything was normal.”39 Regarding their first exposure to religion, there does not seem to be any significant difference between the experiences of men and women; neither does there seem to be a divide between the experiences of older and younger respondents. Valerii Ivanovich, one of my oldest respondents, explained that, “During the evacuation of Kharkov during the war, my grandmother returned to religion, and took the steps necessary to rededicate herself. During the evacuation, I worked for the priest in the church, served and helped. These are memories from when I was a child of nine [he was born in 1932]. All of this was in the village. Then [after returning from evacuation to Kharkiv after the war] there was a gap in my religious instruction. There was no time for it and no one to do it. My grandmother died, so there was nobody to teach me on this subject.”40 Elena, my youngest respondent, had a similar experience even if her knowledge of her grandmother’s faith is less complete. “My grandmother, who had me baptized . . . never did go to church, and so I am not sure why she had me baptized. Well, probably because of inertia, you know? Tradition?”41

162

Chapter Six

Understandably, those who now consider themselves strong believers tend to give longer, more involved answers to questions about their religious backgrounds. “I remember how my grandmother always kept our holidays, how we celebrated the holidays, especially in the village,” Elena Petrovna said, “Especially the feast day for Saint Nikolai, because my father was named ‘Nikolai.’ Guests coming, relatives celebrating. This is what I remember. But church? We did not have it . . . My grandmother told me the things that she remembered from when she was ten years old, before the churches were destroyed. She passed on the education that she had gotten every week as a child, when they went to church and listened to the sermons that told them what is good and what is bad, what you can do, and what you cannot, and why you should not do such things . . . And I still do not do those things.”42 Those who are now atheists are no less descriptive of their grandmothers’ influence. Sergei Nikolaevich, a colonel who has always considered himself an atheist, related his family’s religious history: “In general, my family was not religious, despite the fact that we were all baptized. This was baptism by my grandmother, because our parents were Party members; they looked at it like this [holding his hand up to his face, fingers spread], through their fingers. My grandmother baptized me and my brothers. But discuss religion? Talk about faith? We never did—ours was a purely atheistic family.”43 According to Vitalii, one of the younger atheist respondents, “I first heard about faith from my grandmother, my father’s mother. She was a pious woman. And she told me—passed on—a love of God. My great-grandmother on my mother’s side, too—the same thing . . . And my grandfather told me about it too, I still remember, even though I was just a kid of four or five. I had a working mother. Young parents back then were—were always running. So I was often left with my great-grandmother and great-grandfather. Well, my great-grandfather read the scriptures. I remember him reading aloud about angels, although I was just a small child.”44 When asked about his first memories of religion, Evgenii Mikhailovich recalled: “We had a church close by. Naturally, I was baptized. And I remember going to this church with my grandmother. I even went with my mother before she died. I went with my grandmother when I was about two and a half, three years old. I remember the columns, and the darkness of the church. My grandmother was truly good. She basically replaced my mother. I always paid attention to my grandmother, so I learned about religion.”45 Petr Razulevich has a similar story, set in a different Soviet location: “When I was a child, we lived in Lithuania, where there were many churches, churches of the Catholic faith. My mother and father were communists, so they did not believe in God. My great-grandmother quietly had me baptized, and told my parents afterwards.”46



Religion 163

For Valentina Viktorovna, who has always considered herself agnostic, religious instruction is both traditional and matriarchal. “When I think about it, I realize that when it comes to faith, it was the same thing as when a person is taught that this is a table, this is a chair—sit down and eat. We are taught from childhood to use household items, and taught from childhood what is good and bad. Correct? Religion is taught in the same way. That is—here we have a child; he should be taught. That is, he should be taught the subject of learning how to behave according to the Bible. What the Bible is, what God is. It’s all according to what came before, drunk with our mother’s milk. You understand? All of it.”47 As Protestant pastor Aleksandr Grigor’evich said, “I received the faith not through education, but because we were brought up in the Blood [of Christ]. Since it was in the breast milk of our maternal grandparents, for us Christianity was life. And for us it was a complete life. Therefore, I cannot tell you my ‘first’ memory of religion. We lived inside it, it was our home.”48 On one level, the importance of grandmothers in late Soviet Ukraine was simply demographic. Wars, mass terror, and famine had decimated the male population, and to a lesser extent, the population of younger women.49 On another level, grandmothers were important because they were perceived to be “outside Soviet control. To a certain extent, they were ‘expendable.’ They could no longer contribute as workers and so they were immune to the pressures that applied to those who wanted to succeed and advance in their jobs. And the women’s position outside the workforce, combined with their age, could be used by others, their relatives for example, to excuse them and to explain why they did not grasp Soviet efforts at building the workers’ paradise.”50 With this in mind, my research suggests that intergenerational cultural transmission is an important key to understanding not only religious identities in particular, but Soviet and post-Soviet society in general—a key that has thus far been missing from most historical studies. Even those who have discovered this fundamental feature have barely mentioned it in their analyses. For example, in an engaging moral portrait of an educated Soviet woman (based upon interviews with her), one oral historian has recently written: “Like many others of her generation, it was from her grandmother that Aleksandra Vladimirovna learned as a child some of the basics of Christianity, which laid a foundation, so she claims, for her attraction to the high moral standards of Communism and eventually to Orthodox Christianity in the 1990s.” However, the historian does not explore this further, nor does he seem to find it particularly important, even though his stated main goal is to explore and analyze his interviewee’s subjective moral code.51 In contrast to historians of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Ukraine, anthropologists and social scientists in other specialties have long recognized

164

Chapter Six

the importance of studying such trends. In 1964, two sociologists wrote a pioneering article on grandparent roles in which they assessed key dimensions of the grandparent-grandchild relationship.52 Since then, studies have elucidated a wide range of possibilities for grandparent relationships, ranging from alienated family member to substitute parent. The connection between grandparents and grandchildren varies based on social circumstances, gender, race, location (urban vs. rural), and culture.53 While most historians have ignored “the Babushka phenomenon,” generations defined by age cohort—as both “imagined communities” and as objects of analysis—have long been recognized in the history of the tsarist Russian empire. Members of the intelligentsia often translated their representations of key oppositions into binaries of old versus new, fathers and sons.54 At the same time, family transmission of culture was considered a lower-class, peasant phenomenon, hailed by Slavophiles and denigrated by Westernizers. When it came to religion that was passed down in this way, many social historians of Russia—following earlier social science models—held positions reminiscent of debates among the intelligentsia. As a leading scholar argued, “Sociologists (Weber) and ethnographers (Malinovskii) taught that religious beliefs and systems are products of societies and of status groups (or social classes). If they are right, then we can assume a priori that official denominations never express reality in matters so complex. We are therefore allowed to hypothesize that as long as peasants live in conditions and an environment that set them apart from other social groups in society, they will certainly develop and stick to their own way of believing.”55 When the vast majority of the members of the new elite were only one or two generations removed from peasants—as is the case with my respondents—the peasant “way of believing” was no longer separated from those of other social groups; rather, it constituted the mainstream. Under those conditions, the grandmotherly transmission of “folk Orthodoxy” should become an important object of analysis. If historians of the Soviet Union wish to understand why cultural trends—especially religion—endured in the late Soviet period, we would do well to take a cue from newer research in the social sciences and seriously explore the category of intergenerational familial relationships. For example, such relationships—when properly understood in their Soviet context—can help explain why so many citizens of Soviet Ukraine were baptized, even against the wishes of their parents. As Tat’iana, one the younger interviewees, explained: “Deep education in the specifics of the Orthodox faith was unavailable to the average woman, both before and after the revolution. Before 1917, almost none of them could read; after, the system prohibited it—religious education, I mean. That’s why their faith was



Religion 165

so basic. For example, both of my grandmothers believed—and my living grandmother still believes this—that simply baptizing a child put him on the road to heaven. Even though my husband and I are now Protestants, my grandmother insisted that we baptize our two girls in the Russian Orthodox Church. Baba cried and cried, prayed and prayed, until we finally did it. Now she is happy. It doesn’t matter to her that we are not Orthodox; it doesn’t matter that we won’t raise them Orthodox; what matters is that our girls were properly baptized—Orthodox. Now, as far as Baba is concerned, they will go to heaven. That’s the way it is; that’s the way it was. No wonder so many of us were baptized, even in secret. It is the result of the simplistic faith of our grandmothers. Ours is the religion of our grandmothers.”56 6.3 NOT PROHIBITED, BUT DEFINITELY NOT RECOMMENDED The explosion of openly Christian identities after 1991 was indeed a “return” in many respects. However, it was also a resurfacing. Descriptors like “return” focus attention on a perceived upsurge in religious identities after the collapse of the USSR. In contrast, I argue that “resurfacing” is a better way to describe the actual situation. The number of believers in the Soviet Union was always quite strong; the official, smoothly secularized façade was also so strong that it fooled even the most well-informed experts on both sides of the iron curtain.57 Why did widespread religious identities among the former Soviet peoples come as such a surprise in the 1990s, even to experts? The first answer from my respondents is that those who had a religious identity often hid it, even from family and close friends. In addition, the secular and the religious overlapped in significant ways, with atheist and traditional religious identities coexisting, more or less comfortably, in many individuals’ personal worldviews. As Elena Petrovna said, “We were all atheists. At a certain level. All atheists, but everyone baptized their children. Almost no one went to church. And my husband also did not go to church, but he was never against it, that I had been baptized. He himself was baptized because his mother was a believer— even though she was in the Party, all her children were baptized. And my children were baptized; but baptized secretly. Because if they learned about this at the academy . . . [Q: If they learned about it at the academy, then what?] I don’t know. I just know that it would not have been good. That’s why we did not advertise such things; we did not make them public. If someone in a family was in the Party, and if there was a baptism, then it was done secretly [even from the family member in the CPSU]. My grandmother had everyone

166

Chapter Six

baptized secretly. Because my grandfather could not—he was also a military man—it was impossible that he would baptize children before the command allowed it. Well, in the 70s, 74, say, no 1980—the persecution was not like before, but even so, it was not made public.”58 Many of my interviewees, whether or not they themselves were religious, said similar things about the role of religion in society. “We were all atheists, but the beliefs were here.” Aleksandra said, “Even die-hard communists were still secretly baptized by their grandmothers.”59 In fact, most of my interviewees were baptized in secret. This was apparently the norm for those whose parents and grandparents wanted to secure the future for their children in the secular world, while still safeguarding them in the possible afterlife by inducting them into the Church. As Vitalii said, “Well, it was the times. Because we were all atheists. Pioneers, Octobrists, Komsomol—Communists should not believe in God. That is to say, well, I was baptized quietly, so nobody knew. Even my father did not know at the time. My mother took me quietly to the Church and had me baptized to make sure that if there was a heaven, I might have a chance to go there.”60 “In particular, we as officers—we were the elite of this society,” Petr Borisovich stressed. “Naturally, we could not be religious, we had to be atheists. I was baptized, baptized in secret by my mama. And when I went to Latvia in 1976, my wife baptized my son in a church in Latvia, and kept it a secret from me. Christened him without telling me. Religious faith was present in all families—grandmother and grandfather to mother and father, and so on. But it was nowhere in the open.”61 As early as the 1920s, this kind of public-private dichotomy was noted by policymakers in the Soviet Union. “As some educationalists admitted, once in school, the scientific explanations of natural phenomena to which children were exposed could serve to supplement rather than to supplant supernatural understandings of the social world, producing what I. Flerov called a ‘duality of views’ (dvoistvennost’ vo vzgliadakh). It was thus possible for children— like many adults—to hedge their bets, to allow the new to sit—more or less comfortably—alongside the old.”62 Continued persecution of belief shifted the scientific portion of dual worldviews to the public persona, while the supernatural was often buried deep within the personal self, hidden from the public. As previously mentioned, there was still persecution in the 1970s and 80s. Individuals who were openly religious—including some of my respondents—were fined, interrogated, beaten, and forced to relocate. They were often awarded lower grades in school than they deserved; institutes of higher learning refused to give them the degrees they had earned; they were denied good jobs and passed over for promotion.63



Religion 167

Most of my military interviewees, including their wives, chose not to discuss the persecution of believers. However, their children were more forthcoming on this issue. For thirty-five-year-old Sergei, the son of one of the VIRTA colonels, the memories of his first exposures to religion are framed by his memory of the persecution of believers. “[Q: Who first told you about religion?] My grandmother, who else? The same was true for everyone . . . Who else could tell me about it? Not mom and dad. Necessarily only grandmothers. [Q: Were you baptized?] Yes . . . Well, it happened the same way with all children, as a rule. That is, I was told that I was baptized on a dark night, in secret. No one was there and no one knew about it. Well, that is the way we were all baptized. Then we all pretended as if we were all for the Pioneers, the Komsomol. [Laughs] . . . That’s the way it was. I can tell you more. We have a holiday here, Easter . . . And when I was little, in the small village of Marina [in the early 1980s] . . . there were two schools there. The church was located where a church usually is, in the center of the cemetery. Running through the middle of the cemetery was a big mall. [On Easter night] the path to the church on one side of the mall was lined with teachers from one school, and lining the path on the other side stood teachers from the other school. Their task was to catch all the students who went to worship on the holy night of Easter. Catch them along with their parents. [Q: Why? And then what?] Well, as for anyone—some would be excluded from the Pioneers, some kicked out of the Komsomol.”64 Another of my interviewees offered a more comprehensive opinion on why Soviet people hid their religious faith, but he is not from the military group. Raised by openly practicing Protestants in Kharkiv in the 1970s, Aleksandr Grigor’evich decided early on in life to follow his parents’ and grandparents’ religious beliefs. Openly Christian since childhood, he is now the pastor of a “mega-church” with more than 2,000 members in Kharkiv and the surrounding area. To him, religious persecution in the Soviet Union resulted from “the system” in which everyone—even the members of his own church—took part. “[Q: Many historians and sociologists in the West have concluded that in Soviet times, people were pretty much all atheists—that is, up to ’91. And then there was a revival of religion. What do you think?] I hold the view that it was a resurfacing of something that had always been there, beneath the system. The system forced people to see themselves as atheists. But, people, after all, our people—this is an Orthodox nation. Deep down, they still believed, but the system forced them to say that they were atheists. And the system forced them to act. When I returned [after 1991] to my school, where I had studied, I was approached by six teachers, and all of them asked me for forgiveness. They wept; asked for forgiveness. They asked me to forgive them for allowing the system to force them to give me grades lower

168

Chapter Six

than I had earned, to force them to persuade the children to beat me, to taunt me, to call me names. It was all a conspiracy. But they did not want to do these things, they were forced by the system; they were supposed to live according to the system . . . This was the KGB. The KGB. The Church and the KGB, it was the same thing—the first believed in God, and persecuted believers; the second did not believe in God, and persecuted believers. In the end, everyone was watching everyone else. When I was seventeen, I went to the movies here in Kharkov. The next day I was summoned to the church for some ‘brotherly’ advice on the proper way to live. Someone had informed on me. I had been noticed. This was the system—the people of the church were persecuted, as the church was persecuted. When my sister changed her hairstyle, the church took note, and shunned her—it was a terrible thing . . . The KGB taught even pastors and priests how to control people. This system was very strong.”65 When it came to religious belief, Soviet citizens were disconnected from each other in profound ways—from their friends, neighbors, coworkers, and even their families. Natal’ia recounted a revealing story: “In my ninth grade class, in 1989 . . . I clearly remember the moment when my friend Natasha . . . came to class and said quite openly: ‘You know, I have wondered about religion’ . . . and the teacher said to her: ‘Well, you know, religious people are ignorant, kind of like peasants.’ Silence in the classroom; we were all interested. Then Natasha retorted, ‘Actually, no they’re not. And furthermore, it’s impossible to stop me from confessing my faith, here and now— even by force.’ She then proceeded to tell us that she was herself a sinner in the eyes of God. For me it was such a revelation, that a person could get up in front of the class and be recognized! I was always too terrified to confess such things myself. Then Natasha stood up. I was so affected, so impressed, that I thought about it every day for probably a year. I was so proud that I had a friend who could stand up there without fear, and freely, absolutely confess her sins and confess, first of all, in her weakness. For me it was all such an incredible revelation . . . It came as a revelation for many of us that there were those who did not hide their faith, and those whose parents did not hide their faith.”66 Through the process of helping me contact more interviewees for this project, Anatolii Vladimirovich, who is an atheist, learned—for the first time—of the deep religious convictions of one of his lifelong friends. “I talked to Sasha two days ago about your project and he granted his consent . . . And [through discussing the question categories] he admitted to me that now he is a religious person.”67 Aleksandr Mikhailovich, “Sasha” for short, has been friends with Anatolii Vladimirovich since their own undergraduate military academy days. They worked closely together as professors at VIRTA for



Religion 169

over a decade; they have spoken to each other at least weekly ever since their retirement in the 1990s. And yet, Anatolii Vladmirovich had no idea—he was very surprised—that Aleksandr Mikhailovich was not a committed atheist. Indeed, Sasha has never been an atheist. In his words, “I am an Orthodox Christian, keeping the faith of my grandparents, even my great-grandparents . . . strictly speaking, throughout my life, I have felt God’s guidance and the hand of God on myself all the time . . . And now my belief is even stronger. But it was, strictly speaking, always the core of my life . . . And I cannot hide any longer. I’m a man of God, and I—what evil can befall me, if I am a man of God? . . . I am no longer afraid.”68 Others hid their faith not just from their classmates and friends, but also from their spouses and their children. As Tat’iana Petrovna related: “Yes, I was baptized . . . I have never told this to anyone, but maybe it is interesting. So when we [Soviet society] tried to take away the faith, my mother was bereft; for her it was a terrible shock. She lost weight, about 20 kg, when she was pregnant with me. At some point during her pregnancy, my older sister saw the Bible lying under her mattress . . . and her faith was exposed to my sister. My mother died soon thereafter . . . That is how my sister came to the faith, despite everything. For my sister, that one glimpse of my mother’s faith grew into a dream—a dream to become a nun. Fifty years later, she did become a nun.”69 As one ethnographer has observed, “In the Soviet period, people hid folk Orthodoxy from authorities as much as they hid any allegiance to the organized church, and one big change that came with the fall of the Soviet Union is people’s willingness to discuss their faith.”70 As atheist colonel Nikolai Petrovich put it, “If somebody believed in something—in God etc., this belief was kept hidden, sealed away behind seven seals. No one knew about it, except perhaps his wife, his mother, and so on. Your larger family circles could not know. Especially if you worked in any organization—God forbid you were even a Party member—and you went to church somewhere, then this would be the end of it, of your career. It is not that religion was prohibited, no. But it was definitely not recommended.”71 6.4 OUR FAITH IS SIMPLE ON THE SURFACE, BUT IT IS ACTUALLY COMPLEX To more fully understand religion in the USSR and its successor states, we need to investigate not only the existence of “believers,” but also the content of the beliefs that they held. What does being a “believer” mean to my respondents? How have those beliefs changed since the collapse of the Soviet

170

Chapter Six

Union? For most, theirs is a “simple” faith—an emotional belief in a higher power, a belief that has elements of both faith and science, Christianity and communism. It is simultaneously a “duality” of beliefs and a “peasant way of believing.” “Folk Orthodoxy” is an apt description. As Oleg Vladimirovich put it, “In the villages in Siberia, for example, there were many believers there, like my grandparents. My grandfather—he was a secret priest out there. The village had no church, but he went to old people and read the burial service. And he had something special. There was, and still somewhere in my uncle’s house there is, a Bible there—an old, old one, bound in bronze, with bronze clasps, velvet frames, and paper that was sort of glazed, such as there is nowhere now. And Grandpa taught me—when I was little—to read the Cyrillic alphabet using Old Church Slavonic in that Bible. Well, I was very small, but I still remember that experience. Now of course I have forgotten how to read it, although perhaps I could still recall it if pushed. But all through life, of course, I was, and am, an atheist. Well, I simply deny the existence of God; however, there may be something there. I think the main thing here is when the Soviet Union collapsed, it all started to crumble—the ideology of the beginning . . . Many fled to the church then. But I think that is wrong. Look here [long pause] I believe that God must be in my heart. And not necessarily there to pray to, so to speak, and to go to church for, and so on. First of all, God has to be in the soul of a man. And I think that even if there is a God, I, well, I’ll be more sinless before him, than those others that run to pray and then engage in obscene matters afterwards. It is clear that those canons of religion that are held by Christianity and almost all religions, they are pretty much the same canons . . . The first thing a person should do [by those canons] is always keep God in one’s heart. And then don’t do wrong. Well, that’s my opinion.”72 Several others have voiced disgust at those who have “run to” organized religion since the fall of the USSR—an action that many of my respondents see as hypocritical. According to Evgenii Mikhailovich, “Well, in general, I respect people who believe. It helps them to live. I have even envied those who had the possibility of a very strong faith, which used to help people to manage their behavior. But in principle, I believe that possibility has changed. I mean, I used to think that religion is, of course, necessary. However, in the form to which it has now transformed, it is all about business. They disgust me. Those pot-bellied, Lexus-driving, Prada-carrying churchgoers! People do not realize that they can get the same pleasures without losing respect for themselves! I see this kind of ‘faith’ as worthless.”73 Valerii Nikolaevich’s response was framed differently: “I have always regarded religion as indoctrination . . . my grandmothers were atheists, my parents do not believe. [Long pause] Of course, I consider myself a Christian,



Religion 171

yes, here [points to heart]. Well, so God is here, for me, rather than there in a church, and needing worship . . . It is the same operation with the priests as with all the others . . . as with the commissioners and the indoctrinators in the army, you understand? This is exactly the same; it is ideology, even if the church has an ideology of their own.”74 A few of my respondents are what an outside observer would call an “atheist.” For example, Petr Razulevich related that “In a time of personal reflection, I attempted to read the Bible, and I decided that I cannot read it. I still cannot. However, I respect people who believe. I understand them and treat them with tolerance . . . I’m an atheist. Sometimes I speak to God, but that does not mean that I believe in him. I’m not a militant atheist, neither am I a supporter of religion . . . and I do not pay it much attention.”75 “Of course, I don’t believe in a God,” Elena said with a grin, “Why, do you? Religion is no part of my life; it never has been and I doubt it ever will be.”76 My ethnic Jewish respondents together make up a subgroup among the atheists. They did not question the non-existence of God during the late Soviet period, nor do they remember Jewish religious prayers, services, or holidays—not, that is, since the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War. However, unlike the majority of the respondents whose grandmothers considered themselves Christians, the Jewish respondents’ grandparents and many of their parents had perished either in the purges of the 1930s or in the conflagration of the Holocaust. This is, perhaps, another indicator of the importance of the Babushka phenomenon in the continuance of religious faith among their non-Jewish comrades. Despite their personal backgrounds and beliefs, several of my atheist and agnostic respondents, like Valentina Viktorovna, support organized religion. “A society without religion is nowhere. Just nowhere. Because religion is what restrains people from reverting to cavemen.”77 According to Oleg Petrovich, the oldest son of a successful VIRTA general, “Although I was a militant atheist before, now I’m not totally committed to this attitude. I enjoy visiting church sanctuaries. [During the Soviet period] I did not, but now my attitude has changed . . . I cannot say that I am a believer, or that I ever have been. I was a militant atheist; but now I am tolerant. Even before, I did accept, on occasion, the baptism of children. This is perhaps the main thing I can say on this issue . . . the glorification of God is not a bad thing.”78 Very few of my respondents who identified themselves as “believers” cited any canonical requirements of their respective faiths. Virtually all were quick to point out that they are not what they call “fanatics.” Most spoke of observing religious holidays, praying regularly, and reading the Bible. Not unlike

172

Chapter Six

many believers in prerevolutionary Ukraine, Liudmila Nikolaevna spoke of her religious faith as miraculous: “I’m alive here before you because I have three times experienced a miracle. Salvation from death. It is with God’s help that I am alive.” Liudmila Nikolaevna was pronounced dead in childbirth, has been in a severe motorcycle accident, and most recently fell in the metro and thinks that she should have suffered a skull injury. She believes that she was saved each time by a miracle of God. “So,” she said, “that means I need to do something; to observe the rituals in order to thank God.”79 The distinction between those respondents that describe themselves as an “atheist” and those that describe themselves as a “believer” can be quite unclear. “Ours is the faith of our grandmothers.” Tat’iana explained, “It is not what I would call high-level faith, but though it is simplistic, it is complex. It is atheism; it is not atheism. It is religion; it is also something less. While the beliefs are pure, they are held within our anti-religious scientific educations and in addition to our feelings about ‘fanatical’ ideologues and believers alike. Again, even if our faith is simple on the surface, it is actually complex.”80 Overall, as scholars have written of believers in the first Soviet generation, “The very attempt to measure such beliefs may be misguided in societies where belief is internal to social practice . . . rather than being articulated as propositions that can be held up to scrutiny. And in the case of Orthodox Christianity, this may be particularly misguided, since faith has always been expressed more through the performance of ritual rather than through the knowledge of a corpus of doctrine, ritual being the social drama through which the meaning of Christian doctrine was enacted.”81 6.5 CONCLUSIONS The number of believers in the USSR was always quite strong. Among those who were the grandchildren of Christians, “the Babushka phenomenon” kept faith alive even when the society seemed to be entirely secularized. In order to better understand the enduring strength of traditional religious identities in the Soviet Union, historians could profit from following the social science research that studies intergenerational family relationships. The secrecy which surrounded religious belief was also quite strong during the Soviet period, actively promoted by policymakers who followed an ideology requiring an atheistic society. Believers and non-believers alike were parties to the system of persecution; even church leaders followed the methods of secular leaders in disciplining their flocks. The “return” of religion after 1991 was partially a resurfacing of previously hidden beliefs. In post-Soviet Ukraine, even though the majority of



Religion 173

citizens describe themselves as “believers,” poll results do not necessarily make the country “religious.” On the other hand, the ambiguity of religious belief—even among people who claim a solidly atheist identity—seems to further confirm that Soviet Ukraine was never as secular as many observers have thought. NOTES 1.  The Russian word for grandmother is “babushka,” “baba” for short. 2.  Liudmila Petrovna Chikateva, interview with author, October 5, 2010. 3. Following Marx, Soviet leaders had held that “Religion is the opium of the people”; according to Lenin, “this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion.” Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion,” Proletarii (1909) in Lenin Collected Works vol. 15, trans. Andrew Rothstein and Bernard Issacs (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 402. Lenin here references Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right.” 4.  E. Duluman, B. Lobovik, and V. Tancher, Sovremennyi veruiushchii (Moscow: Publishing House for Political Literature, 1970), 31, quoted in William C. Fletcher, Soviet Believers: The Religious Sector of the Population (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1981), 69. 5. Fletcher, Soviet Believers, 57–73. Here Fletcher is drawing from a wide range of Soviet sociological works, including R. G. Baltanov, Sotsiologicheskie problemy v sisteme nauchno-ateisticheskogo vospitaniia (Kazan’: Kazan’ University Press, 1973), 180; M. F. Kalashnikov, ed., Nauchnyi ateizm: Voprosy metodologii i sotsiologii (Perm: Perm State Pedagogical Institute, 1974), 22–23; V. D. Kobetskii, Sotsiologicheskoe izuchenie religioznosti i ateizma (Leningrad: Leningrad University Press, 1978), 24. 6.  The above statistics are a compilation of several sources: S. V. Filatov and D. E. Furman, “Religiia i politika v massovom soznanii,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 7 (1992), 3–12; L. M. Vorontsova, S. V. Filatov, and D. E. Furman, “Religiia i politika v sovremennom massovom soznanii,” in Religiia i politika v postkommunisticheskoi Rossii (Moscow: Moskovskii Institut filosofii RAN, 1994), 33–98; “Statistika RPTs: skol’ko veruiushchikh v Rossii,” Newsland (November 27, 2009), http://www newsland.ru/news/detail/id/438189/; “Statistika rosta veruiushchikh v Rossii za poslednie gody,” RIA Novosti (November 15, 2006), http://www hermogen. ru/kms_community+index+id-2.html; “Verim li my v Boga?” All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) in Moscow (March 30, 2010), http://wciom. ru/index.php ?id=268&uid=13365; “Church-state relations in Ukraine: features and trends,” Razumkov Centre in Kyiv (February 8, 2011), http://www.razumkov.org.ua/ eng/expert.php?news_id=2597; M. Burdo and S. B. Filatov, eds., Sovremennaia religioznaia zhizn’ Rossii: Opyt sistematicheskogo opisaniia (Moscow: LOGOS, 2003); L. I. Soskovets, Religioznye organizatsii i veruiushchie v Sovetskom gosudarstve (Tomsk: TML-Press, 2008).

174

Chapter Six

7. For example, Michael Bourdeaux—expert on religion and self-described champion of the Christian cause under communism—found it necessary to revise, update, and re-title his 1990 book Gorbachev, Glasnost & the Gospel (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990). The newer 1991 title of the manuscript is The Gospel’s Triumph over Communism (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1991). See also Mark D. Steinberg and Catherine Wanner, “Introduction: Reclaiming the Sacred after Communism,” in Steinberg and Wanner, eds., Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008). 8.  Serhii Plokhy and Frank E. Sysyn, Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2003), ix. 9.  Niels C. Nielsen Jr., “Introduction,” in Niels C. Nielsen Jr., ed., Christianity after Communism: Social, Political, and Cultural Struggle in Russia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 1. 10.  Arel and Ruble, Rebounding Identities; Steinberg and Wanner, Religion, Morality, and Community. 11.  The idea of a “Babushka phenomenon” comes from Niels C. Nielson Jr., “Introduction.” Sadly, neither Nielson nor the contributors to his volume elaborated on the concept. 12.  The concept of “folk Orthodoxy” comes from Natalie Kononenko, “Folk Orthodoxy: Popular Religion in Contemporary Ukraine,” in John-Paul Himka and Andriy Zayarnyuk, eds., Letters from Heaven: Popular Religion in Russia and Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 13.  Many current historians now hold this view. See Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light, Class Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Walicki, Marxism and the Leap. However, this position is certainly not new. See Nicholas Klepinin, “The War on Religion in Russia,” Slavonic and East European Review vol. 8, no 24 (March 1930): 514–532. 14.  Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Mulligan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), 39. 15. Victoria Frede, Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 212–213. 16.  See Lenin, “Attitude to Religion.” See also Dimitry V. Pospielovsky, A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory and Practice and the Believer, esp. vo1. 1: A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti-Religious Policies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). 17. Frede, Doubt, Atheism, Intelligentsia, 213. See also Nikolai Berdiaev, The Origin of Russian Communism, trans. R. M. French (London: Bles, 1937). 18.  Council of People’s Commissars, “Dekret o svobode sovesti, tserkovnykh i religioznykh obshchestvakh [Decree on the freedom of conscience, the church and religious societies]” (January 2, 1918), http://www.law.edu.ru/norm/norm. asp?normID=1119186. 19. Pospielovsky, History of Soviet Atheism, vol. 1, 27–68. 20.  Russian Communist Party (RCP), “Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury vos’moi s, ezd RKP/BU,” (March 1919) in Protokoly i stenograficheskie



Religion 175

otchety s’ezdov i konferentsii Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow: Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri TsK KPSS, 1959), 326. 21. Pospielovsky, History of Soviet Atheism, vol. 1, 29. 22. Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 64. See also Mark D. Steinberg, “Workers on the Cross: Religious Imagination in the Writings of Russian Workers, 1910–1924,” Russian Review vol. 53, no. 2 (April 1994): 213–239; Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 23.  Steven Merritt Miner, Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 24. Fletcher, Soviet Believers, 3. 25. Fletcher, Soviet Believers, 3. See also Pospielovsky, History of Soviet Atheism. 26.  Article 227 of the Criminal Code of the Russian SFSR (Moscow: Juridical Literature Press, 1964), 91; Article 209 of the Criminal Code of Ukrainian SSR (1965), http://search.ligazakon.ua /l_doc2.nsf/link1/ed_1965_04_26/an/ 481222/KD0006. html#481222. 27. Fletcher, Soviet Believers, 2–5. See also Pospielovsky, History of Soviet Atheism. 28. Pospielovsky, History of Soviet Atheism, vol. 1, 2, 5. See also Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 227. 29.  Steinberg and Wanner, eds., Religion, Morality, Community, 1. 30.  Steinberg and Wanner, eds., Religion, Morality, Community contains the most recent work. See also Juliet Johnson, Marietta Stepaniants, and Benjamin Forest, eds., Religion and Identity in Modern Russia: The Revival of Orthodoxy and Islam (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005); Miner, Stalin’s Holy War; David C. Lewis, After Atheism: Religion and Ethnicity in Russia and Central Asia (Avon: Curzon, 2000); Kimmo Kääriäinen, Religion in Russia after the Collapse of Communism: Religious Renaissance or Secular State (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998). 31. Catherine Wanner, Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); Wanner, “Explaining the Appeal of Evangelicalism in Ukraine,” in Arel and Ruble, Rebounding Identities, 243–272; Wanner, “Missionaries of Faith and Culture: Evangelical Encounters in Ukraine,” Slavic Review vol. 63, no. 4. (Winter 2004): 732–755. For the best arguments of this type, see Wanner, Communities of the Converted. 32.  See VTsIOM, “Verim li my v Boga?” and Razumkov Centre, “Church-state relations.” See also Wanner, “Appeal of Evangelicalism,” 244. 33. For statistics on the increase in the number of Orthodox believers, see in particular VTsIOM, “Verim li my v Boga?” and Razumkov Centre, “Church-state relations.” 34. Fletcher, Soviet Believers, 65; Pospielovsky, “General Introduction to the Three-Volume Work,” in History of Soviet Atheism, xi–xv. 35.  Paul Froese, “Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an Atheistic Monopoly Failed,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion vol. 43, no. 1 (March, 2004): 48.

176

Chapter Six

36.  Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev, interview with author, October 5, 2010. 37.  Andrei Nikolaevich Chikatev, interview with author, November 27, 2010. 38. Dmitrii Vital’evich Olenev, interview with author, October 10, 2010. This respondent’s father was a mechanic and his mother worked in the textile industry; in 2010 he was a computer programmer. 39.  Fedor Borisovich Kotov, interview with author, October 13, 2010. 40.  Valerii Ivanovich Onoprienko, interview with author, February 20, 2011. This respondent is the son of factory workers; he retired as a factory engineer. 41.  Elena Viktorovna Rybalko, interview with author, September 28, 2010. This respondent is the daughter of factory workers; at the time of this interview, she was in mid-level management at a retail company. 42.  Elena Petrovna Ovcharenko, interview with author, July 3, 2010. 43.  Sergei Nikolaevich Romanov, interview with author, December 8, 2010. 44.  Vitalii Nikolaevich Pashkov, interview with author, November 29, 2010. 45.  Evgenii Mikhailovich Ivanov, interview with author, January 29, 2011. 46.  Petr Razulevich Bolodian, interview with author, January 23, 2011. 47.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 9, 2010. 48.  Aleksandr Grigor’evich Konev, interview with author, October 13, 2010. This respondent is the son and grandson of Protestant pastors. In 2010, he was a pastor himself. 49. See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2011); see also Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 50.  Kononenko, “Folk Orthodoxy,” 48–49. 51.  Jarrett Zigon, “Aleksandra Vladimirovna: Moral Narratives of a Russian Orthodox Woman,” in Steinberg and Wanner, Religion, Morality, Community, 89. 52. Bernice L. Neugarten and Karol K. Weinstein, “The Changing American Grandparent,” Journal of Marriage and the Family no. 26 (1964): 199–206. 53.  The literature on this subject is vast. See, for example, Maximiliane Szinovacz, ed., Handbook on Grandparenthood (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998). See also the Journal of Intergenerational Relationships, published by Routledge and hosted by the University of Pittsburgh. http://jir.ucsur.pitt.edu/news.php. 54.  The concept of intergenerational intellectual transmission can be traced back to Ivan Turgenev’s generation, and his influential 1862 novel, Fathers and Sons. For more on this topic, see Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, trans. Francis Haskell (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1960); Marc Raeff, The Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966); Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979). 55.  Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 59–60. 56.  Tat’iana Vladimirovna Fikse, interview with author, March 30, 2011.



Religion 177

57.  This argument was first developed by other scholars. For example, see Miner, Stalin’s Holy War, 2. “It is the contention of this book that, despite decades of determined Soviet atheistic campaigns, religious belief, especially in combination with nationalism, remained a crucial social and political force throughout the Soviet era.” See also Fletcher, Soviet Believers; Pospielovsky, History of Soviet Atheism; and Froese, “Forced Secularization.” 58.  Elena Petrovna Ovcharenko, interview with author, July 3, 2010. 59.  Aleksandra Valentinovna Pirogova, interview with author, September 6, 2010. 60.  Vitalii Nikolaevich Pashkov, interview with author, November 29, 2010. This respondent is the son of a KGB colonel. 61.  Petr Borisovich Medvedev, interview with author, September 10, 2010. 62.  S. A. Smith, “The First Soviet Generation: Children and Religious Belief in Soviet Russia, 1917–41,” in Stephen Lovell, ed., Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 96. See also W. B. Husband, “Godless Communists”: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 118. 63.  This list is based on my interview with Protestant pastor Aleksandr Grigor’evich Konev. It is corroborated by many of the works referenced in this chapter. 64.  Sergei Petrovich Zolotarev, interview with author, January 20, 2011. 65.  Aleksandr Grigor’evich Konev, interview with author, October 13, 2010. 66.  Natal’ia Vital’evna Shevchenko, interview with author, October 10, 2010. 67.  Anatolii Vladimirovich Garev, interview with author, November 6, 2010. 68.  Aleksandr Mikhailovich Donets, interview with author, November 28, 2010. 69.  Tat’iana Petrovna Stoliarskaia, interview with author, March 27, 2011. 70.  Kononenko, “Folk Orthodoxy,” 48. 71.  Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev, interview with author, October 5, 2010. 72.  Oleg Vladimirovich Nosov, interview with author, December 7, 2010. 73.  Evgenii Mikhailovich Ivanov, interview with author, January 29, 2011. 74.  Valerii Nikolaevich Ezhov, interview with author, January 30, 2011. 75.  Petr Razulevich Bolodian, interview with author, January 25, 2011. 76.  Elena Mikhailovna Popova, interview with author, February 21, 2011. This respondent is the daughter of artists; in 2011, she was a university professor and a professional musician. 77.  Valentina Viktorovna Manukian, interview with author, September 9, 2010. 78.  Oleg Petrovich Taratorkin, interview with author, December 12, 2010. 79.  Liudmila Nikolaevna Donets, interview with author, November 28, 2010. On the mentality based on miracles (and the relevance of that mentality to later periods), see Roman Holyk, “The Miracle as Sign and Proof: ‘Miraculous Semiotics’ in the Medieval and Early Modern Ukrainian Mentality,” in Himka and Zayarnyuk, Letters from Heaven. 80.  Tat’iana Vladimirovna Fikse, interview with author, March 30, 2011. 81.  Smith, “First Soviet Generation,” 87.

Chapter Seven

Conclusions Living Soviet

We are living in a completely different country now. I am a military man, But these days, I travel abroad, and not just for my duty. If we still lived in the Soviet Union, the question could not be whether I would go to Egypt on vacation, but whether I would be sent to Egypt to defend ideology. Now, I can buy a ticket and go to Egypt, to Turkey, to the Canary Islands or the Bahamas—a ticket to anywhere. But I have no money to buy a ticket, that’s the problem today. And in the Soviet times, no matter how much money or “pull” you had, and officers had more than average, you could not be released from the country just to travel. So both countries—both lives I have lived—have had their positive and negative sides.1

What was it like to live Soviet? For many Westerners who grew up during the Cold War, such a question conjures up Orwellian visions of privation, bleak subsistence, desperate struggles bound up with a lack of free choices, and ever-present state surveillance. And so it was—at certain times (e.g., wartime) and for some Soviet citizens (e.g., dissidents and several ethnic and religious groups). But for many, if not most, of the 280 million-plus people who lived in the USSR in the late Soviet period, life as they experienced it was neither bleak nor desperate. In speaking with the interviewees for this project, I came to realize that—both while they were living it and in their recollections—life in the Soviet Union was profoundly normal. Joy and heartbreak, triumph and failure, daily life and professional lives, economic struggle and ever-present repression—these made up the framework of daily, normal, Soviet life. Through the process of interviewing these individuals, I came more fully to understand that historians should ask not whether a society is normal or abnormal, but rather what that society understood as normal or abnormal, in that time and place. “Normal” is a particularity. 179

180

Chapter Seven

Following this conception, standing in line for meat can be understood as that which one normally does after school; those who have special grocery stores are the abnormal ones. Atheism can be understood as second nature; those who openly espouse religion are outsiders. While some in the West see the Soviet experience as having been daily infused with repression, for many individuals this was simply not the case. For the most part, what one had to do in the post-Stalin Soviet Union to escape repression was to avoid certain topics and practices, to keep heretical ideas and actions to oneself. Since the official ideology made everything political, one had to be ever-vigilant to know the prevailing ideological positions (on everything from military education to teen haircuts), and avoid those topics and follow the norms—at least in public.2 All but two of my interviewees did so, and the majority thus led lives only indirectly affected by repression. Of course, those who did speak or act openly in opposition to, or in defiance of, the current “Party line” were ostracized both by their society and by the state. The threat of repression was always there, and scholars have been right to argue that this produced a society of “whisperers.”3 My respondents’ experiences—especially those of the officers—were defined by ideology and its application in their lives. A normal, happy life in the USSR, right up until the end, did not include open discussion in the public sphere, and it did not include memories that disagreed with official history. On the other hand, the threat of repression in certain circumstances and a constant fear of repression are not the same thing; if a citizen followed the rules, kept one’s opinions to oneself, did one’s job reasonably well, and caused no serious problems, that person could live a normal, happy life.4 Whether remembered as “happy” or not, my respondents’ lives included jokes and sports, Grandma’s canned goods and Mama’s Easter cakes, paychecks and pensions, metro rides and dating. While life in the mature Soviet Union often included “deficits” (shortages) of meat and fresh fruit, it seldom included shortages of bread or tea. While it included compulsory farm work for students at certain times of the year and teenage military conscription, it also included free higher education. While it included indoctrination of schoolchildren, it also included free daycare. To an outsider, many of these are interesting dichotomies. To a Soviet citizen, they were simply normal. Since Soviet life was normal for them, everything that has happened since 1991 is abnormal— and the consequence of not understanding this phenomenon causes mistake after mistake in conceptions and policymaking, both in Ukraine and beyond. 7.1 KHARKIV AND THE ACADEMY The experiences of my respondents are grounded in Kharkiv and its history as a militarized city. Kharkiv is a fortress, depending upon the circum-



Conclusions 181

stances, that has been located at different times on the borderland and in the heartland—all without moving. The built VIRTA academy and its history is also vitally important in the lives and memories of my interviewees. For my respondents, the city is their home and the stage on which their lives played out, the academy was the focal point of most of their lives, and the histories of both loom large in all of the interviewees’ memories and help to define their identities. 7.2 MEN AND THE MILITARY What can a study of military men tell us about the Soviet people more generally? What drove the Soviet Union to build and maintain the largest military of its time? Was the Soviet officer corps professional? The officers of VIRTA personified the Soviet state’s ambitions—both in the official propaganda and in their own personal identities. From the 1960s on, these officers and their comrades made up a volunteer, professional, and cohesive officer corps that was dedicated to the defense of their state, was highly trained and educated, and was insistent on high standards of performance. These men internalized Marxist-Leninist ideology and were committed to safeguarding the Soviet state, indoctrinating its conscripts, and spreading communism worldwide—the three most important reasons that the Soviet leadership maintained the world’s largest military from 1945 to 1991. These were the New Soviet Military Men, and their lives were so entwined with the state they served that when it fell, so did they. A study of these men, their families, and their contemporaries—as individuals—here provides insights into Soviet society and the continuing transition of that society in eastern Ukraine, especially in the areas of gender, ethnicity/nationality, and religion. 7.3 WOMEN AND GENDER What was expected of the wives of officers in the Soviet Union from the 1960s on, and what expectations did these women have for themselves? Did those expectations change in the 1990s, and if so, how? How did realities match up with expectations? What possibilities were available, and what did it take for women to realize their own goals? What shaped their identities as women, and how did their careers develop? In the mature Soviet Union, women had clearly defined boundaries at home and at work. Transcending those boundaries took skill, extraordinary drive, and a considerable amount of effort—but it could be done, both at the workplace and in the home. Throughout this period, important continuities in

182

Chapter Seven

the construction of gendered roles continued to constrain the achievements of women. At the same time, socialist imperatives and consumerist demands did drive major improvements. The new career opportunities which opened up during the reorganization that began with Gorbachev’s perestroika were a mixed blessing—the jobs paid well but were difficult. Few of the women who pursued careers in the 1990s now remember those new careers as having been emancipatory, despite the fact that role reversals within the family were common. Perhaps this is partially due to the fact that “men’s work,” such as upper management and military service, remained principally the domain of men. 7.4 ETHNICITY AND NATIONALITY What can cause a person to think of herself as something other than a member of a nation, a citizen of a nation-state? What does it mean for an individual to be “transnational?” Do any identities go beyond the transnational? The individuals described in this study did not move across borders; rather, the borders moved across them. As their history shows, a diaspora is not always created by the movement of individuals; in post-Soviet Ukraine, it was possible to be a transnational individual without ever traveling. These are not individuals who had to divest themselves of “natural” national feelings. Rather, they were supranational individuals who were forced into transnationality by circumstances. In the post-Soviet period, they learned the mentalities of nationalism in response to nationalist initiatives from others. 7.5 RELIGION Was religion alive and well in “the atheistic empire,” or did it blossom virtually overnight in the ashes of that empire? The number of believers in the USSR was always quite strong; grandmothers kept baptizing babies and whispering prayers even when the society seemed to be entirely secularized. The secrecy that surrounded religious belief was also quite strong, demanded by an ideology that required an atheistic society. Thus, the “return” of religion after 1991 was largely a resurfacing of previously hidden faith. Although the majority of citizens now describe themselves as “believers,” poll results do not necessarily make the country “religious.” On the other hand, the ambiguity of religious belief seems to confirm that Soviet Ukraine was never as secular as many observers have thought.



Conclusions 183

7.6 OVERALL The Soviet political and intellectual elite, including both apparatchiks and dissidents, made up only tiny minorities in a very large and populous country. What was life like for the rest of Soviet society? What was it like for the vast population who usually supported the regime, mostly accepted the rules, essentially internalized the ideology, and generally made the same choices as their neighbors and friends? Viktor Grigor’evich, one of my “comparison” interviewees, a civilian professor who worked at Kharkiv State University just across Dzerzhinskii Square from VIRTA and its officers, offered a glimpse into Soviet existence that puts both his own life and the lives of military officers into societal context. It is a short story, but it speaks volumes about living Soviet. “When I was appointed head of my [university] department . . . they were looking for someone to fill the position. They found me because: 1) I am a man—you see, 95 percent of the people in this position union-wide were women at that time; 2) I had been in the army; 3) I was a good little bee, a good citizen. Their only dismay was that I was not a member of the Communist Party. So, they urgently made me a member of the Communist Party. [Q: Did your responsibilities increase when they made you a member of the Party?] No. There were some more boring meetings, that’s true. On the other hand, one did (and does) have some official meetings, noncommunist, which were very boring, too. It was the usual thing—one more boring meeting, more or less.”5 “Here’s something about those meetings, however, and maybe it will help you. At the end of each meeting—and really, at the more important events in the [Soviet] Union—some ambitious person would start to clap, then everyone would clap. One of the dissidents wrote about this phenomenon—Solzhenitsyn, I think, you can look it up.6 And it would sometimes go on for a long time, this clapping, partially because we were being watched, but also because there were some people in the room who liked clapping for such things. Your military people—they were the kind of people who clapped enthusiastically. The officers didn’t start the applause—that was the apparatchiks. The army guys certainly didn’t stop the clapping, either—that was the dissidents. Your military people, however, they clapped because it was natural for them, they clapped enthusiastically like this right up until the end, clapped for the [Soviet] Union and its ‘destiny.’ And, I must admit, the rest of us clapped along with them. That’s how it was . . . Everybody creates his own world in his mind. He lives in it and he thinks that other people live in the same world.”7

184

Chapter Seven

NOTES 1.  Oleg Vital’evich Zdorovenko, interview with author, February 9, 2011. 2.  Perhaps because so many people in NATO countries are addicted to daily discussing politics and religion in the public sphere (in America, this has been true for quite some time, see the works of Alexis de Tocqueville), we thus sometimes see other societies—or individuals—as abnormal if they avoid these topics in public. 3. Figes, Whisperers. 4.  For my politically active dissident and openly religious respondents, the overall threat did become constant repression and fear; for them there was no normal, happy life. Nikolai Efimovich Gubskii, interview with author, March 26, 2011; Vsevolod Afanas’evich Sneshkovoi, interview with author, March 16, 2011; Aleksandr Grigor’evich Konev, interview with author, October 13, 2010. 5.  Viktor Grigor’evich Belov, interview with author, October 8, 2010. 6. Several dissidents have written about the “phenomenon” of Soviet clapping. Solzhenitsyn wrote and spoke about it numerous times, and there were many jokes regarding it among the general population. What Viktor Grigor’evich is most likely referring to here is a famous vignette from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago: “Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With makebelieve enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter . . . Then, after eleven minutes [of clapping], the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: ‘Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.’” Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956, vol. I, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 69–70. 7.  Viktor Grigor’evich Belov, interview with author, October 8, 2010.

Epilogue

In 1993, Dzerzhinskii Square—the Soviet heart of Kharkiv and the location of the VIRTA academy main building—was renamed “Freedom Square.” However, as of this writing, most other place names in Kharkiv still retain their Soviet labels, including the central city administrative district where most of my respondents still live, which has been officially called “Dzerzhinskii District” continuously since 1926. Regardless of the central square’s current official name, the massive statue of Lenin continued to dominate it until late 2014. In November of 2013, some Ukrainian activists publicly vowed to topple the statue. Soviet veterans and other pensioners then turned out in a sizeable crowd (over fifty people) to guard the statue around the clock. Younger “separatists” eventually joined them. For many of those gathered, Lenin, VIRTA, and the Soviet military are all part of who they were—and who they still are. By the end of January 2014, a large banner reading “Glory to the Soviet Army!” decorated the base of the statue. The banner remained for some time after the celebration of Defender of the Fatherland Day on February 23. For eight more months, the statue stood as a testament not just to the Soviet history of Kharkiv, but also to the long memories of its people. On September 28, 2014, the governor of Kharkiv region signed an order to dismantle the statue, and it was toppled later that night. These incidents were part of the extraordinary chain of events in Ukraine that played out as I was finishing the final revisions of this manuscript, in 2013–15. Along with the rest of the world, I watched in captivation as Kiev, then Crimea, then Donetsk and the surrounding regions, erupted into chaos. As friends, family, and colleagues began approaching me for insight on the upheaval, I grappled to understand what was happening in—and to— Ukraine. As I watched events with morbid personal fascination and avid academic interest, I slowly realized that the themes covered within these pages 185

186

Epilogue

were being played out on the streets of Simferopol, Slovyansk, Donetsk, and Kharkiv. What the world was witnessing was the cumulative effect of history and memory in the lives and minds of eastern Ukrainians: the unresolved anger of those individuals, like Petr Borisovich, who had been set adrift in a new, “foreign” country; the frustration of those, like Valentina Viktorovna, who had their businesses destroyed by ineffective and corrupt government regulations emanating from Kiev; the local backlash to the nationalist politics played out in the halls of the Ukrainian parliament and stamped on the signs in Kharkiv. It is histories and memories like these that background, frame, and motivate the politics of the present. The 2013–14 demonstrations in Kharkiv, complete with commemorative banners glorifying the Soviet military and even Stalin, were a testament to the continuing importance of these issues for many individuals who live there, whether they lean toward Kiev, Moscow, both, or neither. Whatever the future holds for Kharkiv and eastern Ukraine, their past holds valuable insights into the late Soviet and post-Soviet experience—both lived and remembered. That lived and living history is determining the present in Ukraine, and will continue to determine the future.

Appendix A

Interviewees

Name (Pseudonym) Babaian, Boris Khachaturovich Babich, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Belov, Viktor Grigor’evich Belyi, Boris Anatol’evich Bolodian, Petr Razulevich Bol’shakov, Anatolii Ivanovich Butova, Ekaterina Ivanovna Chikatev, Andrei Nikolaevich Chikatev, Nikolai Petrovich Chikatev, Viktor Nikolaevich Chikateva, Liudmila Petrovna Donets, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Donets, Inna Aleksandrovna Donets, Liudmila Nikolaevna Donets, Petr Aleksandrovich Ezhov, Valerii Nikolaevich Fikse, Tat’iana Vladimirovna Garev, Anatolii Vladimirovich Gareva, Ol’ga Nikolaevna Grabov, Leonid Ivanovich Gubskii, Nikolai Efimovich Gvozd’, Evgenii Vladimirovich Ivanov, Evgenii Mikhailovich Kaziuta, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Konev, Aleksandr Grigor’evich Koshelev, Viktor Nikolaevich Kosheleva, Elena Nikolaevna

Birth Year 1967 1953 1952 1936 1945 1938 1950 1976 1946 1964 1945 1945 1971 1945 1967 1947 1974 1947 1950 1950 1954 1949 1945 1945 1958 1942 1945

187

Primary Identity for Interview Purposes Civilian Taxi Driver VIRTA Colonel Civilian Professor VIRTA Colonel Son of a VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel Civilian Professor Son of a VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel Son of a VIRTA Colonel Wife of a VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel Daughter of a VIRTA Colonel Wife of a VIRTA Colonel Son of a VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel Daughter of a VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel Wife of a VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel Civilian Professor Civilian Airline Pilot VIRTA Colonel Wife of a VIRTA Colonel Civilian Protestant Pastor VIRTA Colonel Wife of a VIRTA Colonel

188 Name (Pseudonym) Kotov, Aleksandr Fedorovich Kotov, Fedor Borisovich Kotova, Liubov’ Vladimirovna Letova, Nadezhda Iur’evna Litaev, Petr Alekseevich Lotov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Manukian, Valentina Viktorovna Medvedev, Petr Borisovich Nosov, Oleg Vladimirovich Olenev, Dmitrii Vital’evich Onoprienko, Valerii Ivanovich Ovcharenko, Elena Petrovna Pashkov, Vitalii Nikolaevich Petrov, Oleg Nikolaevich Petrova, Inna Viktorovna Pirogova, Aleksandra Valentinovna Pirogova, Liudmila Aleksandrovna Pletnev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Popova, Elena Mikhailovna Romanov, Sergei Nikolaevich Rybalko, Elena Viktorovna Rybalko, Svetlana Viktorovna Rybalko, Valentina Petrovna Rybalko, Viktor Grigor’evich Shevchenko, Natal’ia Vital’evna Shevchenko, Vladimir Ivanovich Sneshkovoi, Vsevolod Afanas’evich Stoliarskaia, Tat’iana Petrovna Stoliarskii, Leon Abramovich Taratorkin, Oleg Petrovich Zdorovenko, Oleg Vital’evich Zhivets, Valentin Grigor’evich Zolotarev, Sergei Petrovich

Appendix A Birth Year 1973 1943 1945 1956 1938 1946 1947 1947 1952 1973 1932 1950 1965 1945 1973 1973 1943 1950 1973 1947 1980 1969 1946 1939 1975 1973 1950 1945 1919 1954 1968 1948 1976

Primary Identity for Interview Purposes Son of a VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel Wife of a VIRTA Colonel Civilian Professor VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel Wife of a VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel Civilian Computer Programmer Civilian Factory Engineer Wife of a VIRTA Colonel Son of a VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel Daughter of a VIRTA Colonel Daughter of a VIRTA Colonel Wife of a VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel Civilian Professor VIRTA Colonel Civilian Businessperson Civilian Chef Civilian Factory Worker Civilian Factory Supervisor Wife of a VIRTA Colonel Son of a VIRTA Colonel Civilian Human Rights Leader Wife of a VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel Son of a VIRTA Colonel VIRTA Colonel Son of a VIRTA Colonel

Appendix B

Questionnaire for First-Round Interviews1

Family History 1.  What is your full name?  2. When and where were you born?  3. When and where were your parents born?  4. When and where were your grandparents born? [and so on; great-grandparents, etc.]  5. Do you have any brothers or sisters? – When were they born?  6. What did your parents do for work, and where?  7. Did you know your grandparents? – What can you tell me about them?  8. What can you tell me about your great-grandparents?  9. What nationality was recorded in your Soviet passport? – To which nationality/ethnic culture do you belong? – How did it affect your life? 10.  What else can you share with me about your family? – Any unusual events or famous people? – Were there any famous people in your family? 11.  Did the Stalinist purges have any impact on your family? 12.  Did the Great Patriotic War (WWII) have any impact on your family?

1.  Translated from Russian.

189

190

Appendix B

Childhood 1.  Where did you grow up? 2.  Let’s talk about your first memory. How old were you then and what do you remember about yourself? 3.  Who took care of you and your brothers and sisters, and how did they do it? 4.  What are your first memories of religion? – When did you first hear about God or Church? – In terms of religion, who was the most important influence on you and why? 5.  How would you sum up your childhood? School 1.  In what year did you go to school and how did you finish up?  2. I would like you to remember some incident in school that you remember well; what happened?  3. While you were growing up, did you have any sense of your family’s economic and social circumstances, and what would you say now about your family’s circumstances when you were growing up?  4. What were your grades?  5. How did you spend your summers?  6. How did you and your family relax?  7. Did you do any kind of sports or extracurricular activities?  8. What social group did you belong to in high school what kind of kids did you associate with?  9. Who were your best friends during high school, and did you stay in contact with any of them after school? 10.  Did religion play any role in your school years? [If yes, how and why?] 11.  Did you graduate from high school? 12.  If you could have changed one thing about your school years, what would it have been? Adulthood 1.  When did you leave home, under what circumstances, and where did you go? 2.  Where (what places) have you lived during your adult life? 3.  What did you do between the time you (left home/graduated) and the time you got married? 4.  Who did you date during this period of your life?



Questionnaire for First-Round Interviews 191

[If] Higher Education 1.  D  id you attend any college or vocational school after high school? [If no, skip to the military section] 2.  [If yes] When, where, and why did you decide to go there? 3.  What kind of education was it? 4.  Which subjects and/or teachers did you particularly like? 5.  Did you graduate? [If] Military Service 1.  Did you serve in the armed forces? [If no, skip to the section on career] 2.  When and under what circumstances?  ow was it? (conditions of service, life, cultural life, the material side, 3.  H the impact of official propaganda, how you performed your duty to the homeland) Career 1.  What was your [first, second, etc.] job? 2.  Did you like this job? [Repeat the above two questions as necessary to get up to the present] 3.  What in your working life has brought you the most satisfaction? 4.  What would you change in your career, if you had the chance? Marriage [Skip this and the children section if talking to someone who’s never been married.]  hat is the name of your spouse, and when, where, and how did you meet? 1.  W 2.  What did you do on your first date? 3.  What was your courtship (dating) like? 4.  How long had you known each other before getting married? [If more than one marriage] How did the marriage end? 5.  W  hat would you say was the most important thing for you in choosing a spouse? 6.  What were your expectations of marriage? Children [If you’ve ascertained that the person’s never had children, skip 1–4, ask 5.] 1.  When did you have kids and what are their names? 2.  I would like you to remember the day when the first child was born. And your second child? [etc.]

192

Appendix B

3.  What memories do you have of your children’s education? 4.  What was the most joyous moment in parenting, and what was the most difficult? 5.  Do you think parenting was more difficult in the Soviet era, or harder now? [If] Academy 1.  W  hen did you (your husband) enter/receive an assignment to the academy?  2. What did you think of the assignment at that time?  3. Where did you live after joining the Academy and then in subsequent years?  4. When did you move to the place where you live at the present time? How did you get that apartment/house? Was there a queue?  5. Do you have a dacha? When and how did you receive it?  6. Tell me how it was to be a teacher/officer/employee/wife (of) an officer?  7. When did you (your husband) resign from the Academy? [If still there before closing] What was the closing of the Academy like? What do you think (how did you react) to this process?  8. What can you tell me about military life in the USSR that I might not already know?  9. What can you tell me about the Academy? 10.  C  an you please describe your life while studying at the Academy, and compare it to your earlier military service and what came after? Interests 1.  Do you like to travel? Where have you visited? 2.  What are your interests and hobbies? What do you do for fun? 3.  To what organizations have you/do you belong? (membership in the Communist Party, the reasons for becoming a member of the Party, how many years they were a member, what they believed, etc.) 4.  Is politics important to you? Transition 1.  What do you remember about the events of 1990–91? – How did they affect the lives of you and your family? – What were you and your family doing at that time?



Questionnaire for First-Round Interviews 193

2.  Inflation was a serious problem in 1990. How did you cope with such a difficult situation? 3.  I know that “connections” are important now, and were important in the Soviet era. Please tell me how it has changed over time. 4.  W  hat about the time from 1991 to now? What happened in your life? 5.  W  hat are you doing now for work? What are you doing, and where? Taking Stock and Summation 1.  N  ow, summing up, please tell me: has your life turned out as you imagined it would?  2. What is your greatest achievement?  3. What is your biggest disappointment?  4. What is most important for you in life right now?  5. What role does religion play in your life now?  6. How has that role (religion) changed over time?  7. What was the happiest time in your life, and why?  8. What was the most difficult period in your life, and why?  9. How do you see the future of Ukraine? 10.  What would you like to add or say to finish the conversation?

Appendix C

Questionnaire for Follow-Up Interviews1

To begin, I would like to thank you very much for both your previous conversation and your willingness to meet again today. I would like to encourage you to tell me more stories that illustrate your answers. The stories, the real-life examples, are the very best part of my research. Your stories from our first conversation are wonderful—please give me even more stories this time, whenever you can. Last Interview 1.  T  hinking back on our last conversation, is there anything that came to you after we spoke that you would like to add? ***Specific questions for this person, based on the last conversation.*** Everyday Life 1.  P  lease describe a typical day as a cadet, from beginning to end [or, for wife or child of a cadet, as a university student]. When did you get up, what did you eat, what did you do all day, when did you go to sleep? Follow this with probing questions, like “and then . . . ?” “and after that . . . ?” “what did you usually have for breakfast/lunch/dinner?” etc.  ow was your routine different on Saturday and Sunday [as a cadet, or, 2.  H for wife or child of a cadet, as a university student]?

1.  Translated from Russian.

195

196

Appendix C

3.  Please describe an average weekday as a professor [or, for women, as a mother; for a child of a colonel, today]. When did you get up, what did you do all day, when did you go to sleep? Follow this with probing questions, like “and then . . . ?” “and after that . . . ?” “what did you usually have for breakfast/lunch/dinner?” etc. 4.  How was your routine different on Saturday and Sunday [as a professor, or, for women, as a mother; for a child of a colonel, today]? Communal Living 1.  I am interested in the family dormitory. You lived there, right? 2.  What was the address, again (please remind me)? 3.  You lived there in what years, and for how long? 4.  What was it like sharing kitchen, toilet, and shower with others? 5.  Would you say that your neighbors at that time were a positive or negative influence on your family life? 6.  Did you feel like you had some privacy? 7.  How did you [your parents] manage to find private time with your [their] spouse? 8.  Was there anyone in the building that you knew or suspected was an informant? 9.  Thinking back, did you consider this type of living complicated at the time? Family Apartment 1.  When did you get your own apartment? 2.  Where was/is it, again (please remind me)? 3.  How many rooms did/does it have? 4.  What was the process by which your family was assigned an apartment? 5.  How did you end up at that address, with those neighbors? Did you [your parents] have any choice in the matter? 6.  Thinking back, how did you feel about receiving your family’s own living space at the time? 7.  How important were/are your neighbors in your family life? 8.  And what about privacy and informants? Food and Essentials I am also interested in the supply of food and essentials. 1.  What is the first deficit you remember? 2.  I know that, as a child, Natasha waited in one line (usually for meat) while her mother waited in another. How did you manage the lines for food? 3.  Do you have any stories that would show me what the lines were like?



Questionnaire for Follow-Up Interviews 197

4.  Could someone “hold” a place for someone else (a friend, a sibling)? 5.  A  s army people, did you have opportunities to buy products that others did not have? 6.  D  id others (Party officials and the like) have opportunities that you did not have? 7.  H  ow did you, personally, feel about the supply of food and essentials? Thinking back, were you often dissatisfied? Alcohol 1.  T  hinking about alcohol, what do you like to drink? 2.  D  id you always prefer to drink [_________]?  uring Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign, starting from May 17, 1985, 3.  D from where did you get your alcohol? 4.  H  ave you [your husband] ever made wine or moonshine yourselves?  id you ever have a friend or family member fall victim to alcoholism? 5.  D 6.  H  ow did Soviet society manage alcoholics? 7.  Is there a difference between the Soviet and Ukrainian society today in terms of attitudes to this problem and ways to solve it? Health Care I am also interested in the health care system, both then and now.  hat can you tell me about the health care system at the Academy? 1.  W  2. Was there a doctor or nurse physically at the academy building?  3. If you had bronchitis, for example, where did you go for help, and what was done about it?  4. And if one of your kids was sick?  5. If you broke a bone, where would you go for help, and what was done about it?  6. And if a similar situation occurred with your kids?  7. When the army sent you somewhere not close to a city, how did officers get medical care?  8. How was it?  9. Overall, was the care different for officers as compared to common soldiers [or, in the reverse, the generals and top officers]? 10.  D  o you remember any deficits in medicine (pills, drugs)? 11.  W  hat remedies, taught to you by your mother/grandmother/neighbors/ friends, did you use? 12.  H  ow important was “home medicine” to you and your family? 13.  A  nd what about now? What is your opinion of the current health care system (medicine)?

198

Appendix C

Pioneers 1.  Were you a Pioneer? 2.  When were you admitted? 3.  Do you remember the oath? “I, (last name, first name), joining the ranks of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization, in the presence of my comrades solemnly promise: to passionately love and cherish my Motherland, to live as the great Lenin bade us to, as the Communist Party teaches us to, as require the laws of the Pioneers of the Soviet Union.” 4.  What was it like being a Pioneer? Did you like it? 5.  Do you have a story you can tell about your time in the Pioneers? 6.  How seriously did you take your Pioneer oath and activities? 7.  Did you ever go to Pioneer camp? Please tell me about it (when and where and details). 8.  How did you get to go to camp? Who was chosen to go to Pioneer camps? Did one’s parents’ “connections” help kids get into the best camps? Komsomol 1.  Were you in the Komsomol? 2.  Did you want to join? Did you feel it was necessary? (Feel like it should be done?) 3.  Did you like being in the Komsomol? 4.  Do you have a story you can tell about your time in the Komsomol? 5.  How seriously did you take your Komsomol activities? Party 1.  Were you a Party member? 2.  When did you join the Party? 3.  Why did you join? 4.  What part did the Party play in your life? 5.  How seriously did you take your Party activities? 6.  Did your personal commitment to the Party change over time? Ideology 1.  As a young person, what were your favorite ideological texts? 2.  How was ideology taught at the Academy? –What classes were required? –What officer taught these classes? 3.  What part did ideology play in forming your identity, personally?



Questionnaire for Follow-Up Interviews 199

4.  Did ideology remain an important part of your life? 5.  D  o you now consider yourself a Socialist? Intellectual life 1.  W  hat is your favorite book? –When did you first read it? 2.  W  hat types of books did you like in your youth? –Have your tastes changed over time? 3.  W  hat was the first thing you read from samizdat? –Who gave it to you, and when? –Did you pass along anything in samizdat form? To whom? 4.  D  o you like music? –What types? –What type of music did you like in your youth? 5.  D  id you ever listen to any uncensored (underground) music? –What was the first thing you listened to? –Who gave it to you, and when? –Did you pass along any music like this? To whom? 6.  W  hat would you say is your “philosophy of life”?  ow has your philosophy changed over time? 7.  H Children  e all have stories about our children. Please tell me your favorite story 1.  W from your children’s childhood. 2.  D  id anything scary or particularly difficult ever happen with one of your kids? Please tell me the story. Military Life 1.  How did the army and the Academy support families and children? 2.  How did the army and the Academy support sport for its members? 3.  How did the army and the Academy support research for its members? 4.  T  hinking back, are you glad that you joined the army [or, for women, married a soldier]? 5.  I am sure that you have many stories from your [or, for women, your husband’s] army days. What is your favorite story? Brezhnev’s Visit/Death 1.  W  here you in Kharkov when Brezhnev visited in 1972? [If yes, then:] Please tell me about it.

200

Appendix C

2.  What do you remember about Brezhnev’s death and funeral? 3.  How did you feel, personally, when he died? Perceptions of the Rest of the World 1.  As a young person, what did you think, personally, about America and Americans? 2.  How did that change as you got older? 3.  In the Soviet era, was “the West” a monolithic thing for you, personally, or did you feel differences between, for example, Americans and Britons? French and West Germans? 4.  In the Soviet era, what did you think of the other Warsaw Pact countries (DDR, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania)? 5.  And what about the rest of the world? What can you tell me about your perceptions during the Soviet era? Did you have special interest in any other country (e.g., India, Cuba, Angola, China, etc.)? 6.  Do you think that your opinions about other countries/peoples changed as a result of the collapse of the USSR? 7.  [If “no” to question #5 above, then] What did change your opinions about other countries/peoples? Humor 1.  What is your favorite joke? 2.  What other good jokes do you know? 3.  Do you know any jokes about military life? Summing Up 1.  What do you think were the greatest accomplishments of the Soviet Union? 2.  In your opinion, in what ways did you and your comrades (colleagues) contribute to the success of the USSR? 3.  What is your opinion about the fall of the USSR (how it happened, etc.)? 4.  If the Soviet Union still existed, how would your life be different?

Bibliography

PRIMARY SOURCES Archive Sources Ivan Kozhedub Air Force University Museum—Kharkiv, Ukraine This is a closed military museum, intended only for military personnel, especially the education of cadets. ARTA-VIRTA Archive and Collection This archive and collection was originally housed in the archive at VIRTA. From 2003–10, it remained available to military educators as a museum. The archive consists of large unorganized and uncatalogued boxes of loose papers, folios, and other items, as well as stacks of publications and other materials that do not fit into the boxes. I was allowed to see the contents of ten of these boxes and many of the larger items; there may be more. The holdings include, but are not limited to: Student and Faculty Yearbooks, Orders, Awards, Historical Books and Pamphlets, Textbooks (Military and Educational), Other Educational Materials (e.g., Military Training Materials, Ideological Tracts, Lesson Plans, Study Guides, Lecture Notes, Research Documents, etc.), Scientific and Military Research Journals, Academy Promotional Materials, Commemorative Publications, Floor Plans, Flowcharts, Student Lists, Official Correspondence, Photographs, etc. The museum collection and exhibits specifically regarding VIRTA comprise an entire wing of the museum and includes selected examples of most of the above types of items, as well as uniforms, models, and replicas. Soviet Air Defense Forces Collection The museum collection and exhibits specifically regarding the Soviet Air Defense Forces comprise a smaller wing of the museum and include selected examples of

201

202

Bibliography

most of the above types of items, as well as dioramas (e.g., an air battle in Egypt) and thematic displays (e.g., on the destruction of Gary Power’s U-2 spy plane). Soviet Air Forces Collection The museum collection and exhibits specifically regarding the Soviet Air Forces comprise a larger wing of the museum and include selected examples of most of the above types of items, as well as a wide range of materials about the Soviet space program, especially since many cosmonauts graduated from the Grtisevets Kharkiv (Higher) Military Aviation School in Kharkiv.

Family Archive Sources The family holdings described below are unprocessed and uncatalogued, and vary widely in terms of both type and number of items. Some families allowed me free access to boxes, file drawers, closets, and shelving units; some selected items for me to see. Detailed descriptions of each family collection follow. Babich Family Collection—Kharkiv, Ukraine Awards (e.g., Military, Educational, Communist Party, Sports), Bibliographical Documents (e.g., Passports, Birth Certificates, Employment Histories, Medical Certifications, Military Orders, Internal Ministry Forms, District Utility Bills, Property Ownership Documents, Residency Registrations, City District Bills, etc.), Textbooks (Military and Educational), Other Educational Materials (e.g., Military Training Materials, Ideological Tracts, Lesson Plans, Study Guides, Lecture Notes, Research Documents, etc.), Photographs Bolodian Family Collection—Kharkiv, Ukraine Awards, Bibliographical Documents, Professional Scientific Journals, Commemorative Materials, Other Educational Materials, Photographs Chikatev Family Collection—Kharkiv, Ukraine Awards, Biographical Documents, Correspondence (Official and Personal), Contemporary Journals, Scrapbooks, Class Yearbooks, Commemorative Materials, Textbooks, Other Educational Materials, Photographs Donets Family Collection—Kharkiv, Ukraine Awards, Other Educational Materials, Photographs Garev Family Collection—Canada Awards, Biographical Documents, Correspondence (Official and Personal), Other Educational Materials, Photographs Kotov Family Collection—Kharkiv, Ukraine Awards, Biographical Documents, Textbooks, Other Educational Materials, Photographs Lotov Family Collection—Kharkiv, Ukraine Awards, Biographical Documents, Professional Scientific Journals, Other Educational Materials, Photographs Manukian Family Collection—Kharkiv, Ukraine Biographical Documents, Correspondence (Official and Personal), Photographs



Bibliography 203

Medvedev Family Collection—Kharkiv, Ukraine Awards, Commemorative Materials (e.g., rare books and newspapers), Photographs Ovcharenko Family Collection—Kharkiv, Ukraine Awards, Biographical Documents, Correspondence (Official and Personal), Contemporary Journals, Personal Diaries, Scrapbooks, Notebooks, Commemorative Materials, Textbooks, Other Educational Materials, Photographs Romanenko Family Collection—Kharkiv, Ukraine Awards, Biographical Documents, Correspondence (Official and Personal), Sports Journals, Contemporary Journals, Personal Diaries, Scrapbooks, Notebooks, Textbooks, Other Educational Materials, Commemorative Materials, Photographs Stoliarskii Family Collection—Kharkiv, Ukraine Memoirs, Professional Scientific Journals, Commemorative Materials, Photographs

Rare Published Primary Sources (500 total copies or less; intended for a specific limited audience) Bazhanov, IU.P. Nasha voennaia molodost’: Ot soldata do marshala. Edited by B. M. Zakoriukin, A.IU. Bazhanov, and E. L. Zelenina. Kharkiv: FLP Zaugol’nikov IL, 2008. [Memoir intended for former VIRTA audience, 500 total copies] Kharkivs’kii viis’kovii universitet. “10 rokiv: Kharkivs’kii viis’kovii universitet” (Kharkiv, 2001). [Commemorative magazine intended for internal use at Kharkiv Military University only] ———. “60 rokiv: Kharkivs’kii viis’kovii universitet.” (Kharkiv, 2001). [Commemorative book intended for internal use at Kharkiv Military University only] ———. “80 rokiv: Kharkivs’kii universitet povitrianykh syl imeni Ivana Kozheduba” (Kharkiv, 2001). [Commemorative book intended for internal use at Kharkiv Military University only] Kubareva, V. N., ed. Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova: Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk. Kharkiv: VIRTA, 1980. [History textbook intended for internal use at VIRTA only; 400 total copies] Medvedev, IU.M., ed. “Iubileinoe izdanie: 50 let Akademii imeni L.A. Govorova.” “‘Imeni Govorova’: Razovaia iubileinaia gazeta Voennoi inzhenernoi radiotekhnicheskoi akademii PVO imeni Marshala Sovetskogo Soiuza Govorova L.A.” Kharkov: VIRTA, 1991. [Commemorative newspaper intended for internal use at VIRTA only; 205 total copies] Shifrin, Iakov Solomonovich. Kak my zhili. Kharkiv: IPP Kontrast [Memoir intended for personal connections only; 250 total copies]

Published Primary Sources Bakhvalov, A. N. Shutka sluzhbe ne pomekha: soldatskii iumor. Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo ministerstva oborony SSSR, 1981. Berdiaev, Nikolai. The Origin of Russian Communism. Translated by R. M. French. London: Bles, 1937.

204

Bibliography

Bukovsky, Vladimir. To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter. London: Andre Deutsch, 1978. Danchenko, Colonel A. M. and Colonel I. F. Vydrin. Military Pedagogy: Textbook for Higher Military and Political Schools. Moscow: Ministry of Defense Military Publishing House Order of Red Banner of Labor, 1973. Translated by U.S. Air Force. Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1973. Debrin, II., ed. Okhotnichii turizm: tsentral’nyi sovet vsearmeiskogo voennookhotnich’ego obshchestva. Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo ministerstva oborony SSSR, 1964. Filimonov, A. G., ed. Religiia v sovetskom obshchestve: prichiny sokhraneniia i problemy preodoleniia. Moscow: AON, 1989. Koriakov, Mikhail. I’ll Never Go Back. Translated by Nicholas Wreden. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948. Krupskaia, N. K. “Brachnoe i semeinoe pravo v Sovetskoi respublike” (1920). In Pedagogicheskie sochineniia, vol. 11, 434. Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1963. ———. “Preface” (1933). In Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, The Emancipation of Women; From the Writings of V. I. Lenin. New York: International Publishers, 2011. Kuchma, Leonid. Ukraina—ne Rossiia. Moscow: Vremia, 2003. Kuroedov, B. A. Religiia i tserkov’ v sovetskom obshchestve. Moscow: Progress, 1986. Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich. “Heroism of the Workers in the Rear: ‘Communist Subbotniks’” (1919). In Lenin’s Collected Works 2nd ed. vol. 29. Translated by Andrew Rothstein and Bernard Issacs. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974. ———. “On the Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’” (1922). First published in Kommunist 9 (1956). http://transformations.russian-literature.com/ node/61. ———. “Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women” (1918). In Lenin’s Collected Works 2nd ed. vol. 28. Translated by Andrew Rothstein and Bernard Issacs. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974. ———. “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion.” Proletarii (1909). In Lenin’s Collected Works 2nd ed. vol. 15. Translated by Andrew Rothstein and Bernard Issacs. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973. Lodiaev, N. F. Voennoe troebor’e. Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo ministerstva oborony SSSR, 1978. Marchenko, Anatoly. My Testimony. Translated by Michael Scammell. London: Pall Mall Press, 1969. Marx, Karl. “Private Property and Communism.” In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Mulligan. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959. McDonough, Carolyn Warner Harris and Carol McDonough Gorman. Kharkov Chronicles. Longmont, CO: Temple Printing, 1995. Morozov, Kostiantyn P. Above and Beyond: From Soviet General to Ukrainian State Builder. Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University Press, 2000. Odnoklassniki. “Veterany VS SSSR, Odnoklassniki Page.” Accessed April 10, 2014. http://odnoklassniki ru/veterany.vs.sssr.



Bibliography 205

———. “VIRTA, Odnoklassniki Page.” Accessed April 10, 2014. http://odnoklassniki ru/group/42798281916517. ———. “Voiska PVO strany, Odnoklassniki Page.” Accessed April 10, 2014. http:// odnoklassniki ru/group/42568303837339. Rudnitskii, N. I. (Colonel). “Voenkomaty Khar’kova v predvoennye i voennye gody.” In “Chernyi Sentiabr’, 1941,” by Valerii Vokhmianin. Sloboda (October 15, 2006): 74. Sharansky, Natan. Fear No Evil. Translated by Stefani Hoffman. New York: Random House, 1988. Shifrin, Kysiel’ Solomonovich. Uchenyi, Uchitel’ I Chelovek—Khar’kov. St. Petersburg: Kontrast, 2008. Shirman, Iakov Davidovich (Colonel), interview by D. V. Atamanskii. “Kafedra Teoreticheskikh osnov radiolokatsii—60 let!” (Kharkiv, 2006). Documentary film. Soloviev, Mikhail. Zapiski sovetskogo voennogo korrespondenta. English. My Nine Lives in the Red Army. Published New York, D. McKay Co. [1955]. New York: D. McKay, 1955. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation I–II. Vol. 1. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. ———. Inside the Aquarium: The Making of a Top Soviet Spy. Published New York: Macmillan, c1986. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ———. Inside the Soviet Army. New York: Macmillan, 1982. ———. Inside Soviet Military Intelligence. New York: Macmillan, 1984. Suvorov, Viktor. Spetsnaz: The Inside Story of the Soviet Special Forces. New York: Pocket Books, 1987. ———. The “Liberators”: My Life in the Soviet Army. New York: W.W. Norton, 1983. Tarnapolsky, Yuri. Memoirs of 1984. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993. Timofeev, Nikolai. “Armiia, kotoruiu ia poterial. Zapiski ofitsera.” Red News. December 2004. http://www rednews.ru/article.phtml?y=2004&m=02&d=12&id=3588. Tritten, James J. Observations on a Recent Trip to the Former Soviet Union. Ft. Belvoir: Defense Technical Information Center, 1992. Volkogonov, Dmitri. The Army and Social Progress. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987. Zetkin, Clara. “Reminiscences of Lenin” (1924). In Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich. The Emancipation of Women; From the Writings of V. I. Lenin. New York: International Publishers, 2011.

Music Bakaladin, Vitalii Borisovich, ed. Novorossiiskii saliut. Krasnodar: krasnodarskoe kinzhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1976. “Moi adres—Sovetskii Soiuz” (1972). Music by David Tukhmanov, lyrics by Vladimir Kharitonov. “Moi adres—www.leningrad.spb ru.” “Leningrad.” Piraty XXI veka. St. Petersburg: Gala Records, 2002.

206

Bibliography

Government Sources Armed Forces of the USSR. Obshchevoinskie ustavy vooruzhennykh sil SSSR. Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo ministerstva oborony SSSR, 1983. “Article 209.” In Criminal Code of Ukrainian SSR (1965). http://search.ligazakon.ua /l_doc2 nsf/link1/ed_1965_04_26/an/ 481222/KD0006.html#481222. “Article 227.” In Criminal Code of the Russian SFSR, 91. Moscow: Juridical Literature Press, 1964. Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America. CIA World Factbook, 2010 edition. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/. Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America. Online Archive Collection. “Francis Gary Powers: U-2 Spy Pilot Shot Down by the Soviets.” http://www foia.cia.gov/collection/francis-gary-powers-u-2-spy-pilot-shot-down-soviets. Communist Party of the Soviet Union. “22nd Party Congress (17–31 October 1961): Transcript.” New York: Gospolitizdat, 1962. ———. “The 24th Party Congress (March 30–April 9, 1971): Transcript.” New York: Gospolitizdat, 1971. Council of People’s Commissars. “Dekret o svobode sovesti, tserkovnykh i religioznykh obshchestvakh” (January 2, 1918). http://www.law.edu ru/norm/norm .asp?normID=1119186. ———. Kharkov. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1943. Inturist State Travel Agency. Kharkov. Moscow: Inturist, 1950. ———. Kharkov. Moscow: Inturist, 1960. National Bank of Ukraine. “Bulletins” (2001–2011). http://www.bank.gov.ua/control/ en/publish/article?art_id=57793&cat_id=37350. ———. “Annual Reports” (2001–2011). http://www.bank.gov.ua/control/en/publish/ article?art_id=57793&cat_id=37350. Russian Communist Party. “Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury vos’moi s”ezd RKP/BU” (March 1919). In Protokoly i stenograficheskie otchety s”ezdov i konferentsii Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, 326. Moscow: Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri KPSS, 1959. State Statistics Committee of the USSR. “Peoples of the USSR according to the 1989 Census.” Journal of Soviet Nationalities vol. 1, no. 2. (Summer 1990). Itogi vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1989 goda. Minneapolis, MN: East View Publications, 1996. CD-ROM. United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. “World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers (WMEAT), 1985–1995.” Agency Report, 1996. United States Bureau of the Census. USA/USSR: Facts and Figures. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991. United States Bureau of Verification and Compliance. “World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1998.” Bureau Report, 1998. USSR Academy of Sciences. “Vooruzhennye sily SSSR.” In Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Moscow: RAN, 1990. http://slovari.yandex ru/dict/bse/article/00075/33900.htm. V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. “Historical Background [to University],” Official University Website, http://www.univer.kharkov.ua/en/general/our_univer sity/history.



Bibliography 207

TsIK and Sovnarkom Joint Resolution, USSR. “Ob ustanovlenii edinoi paspotnoi sistemy v SSSR” (1932). In Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

SECONDARY SOURCES Abrams, Lynn. Oral History Theory. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Abrams, Lynn, Cordelia Beattie, Pam Sharpe, and Penny Summerfield. “Statement of Purpose for Gender in History Series.” http://www.manchesteruniversitypress .co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?series=23. Akturk, Sener. “Continuity and Change in the Regimes of Ethnicity in Austria, Germany, the USSR/Russia, and Turkey: Varieties of Ethnic Regimes and Hypotheses for Change.” Nationalities Papers vol. 35, no. 1 (March 2007): 23–49. Akyildiz, Sevket Hylton. The Young Pioneers and the Komsomol of Uzbekistan: Soviet Citizenship and Values. London: Creataspace, 2012. Aldis, Anne C. and Roger N. McDermott, eds. Russian Military Reform, 1992–2002. London: Frank Cass, 2003. Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. Translated by Kieth Gessen. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005. All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center in Moscow (VTsIOM). “Verim li my v Boga?” (March 30, 2010). http://wciom ru/index.php ?id=268&uid=13365. Anderson, Barbara A. and Brian D. Silver. “Growth and Diversity of the Population of the Soviet Union.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science vol. 510, no. 1 (1990): 155–177. Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Arel, Dominique. “Fixing Ethnicity in Identity Documents: The Rise and Fall of Passport Ethnicity in Russia.” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism no. 30 (2003): 125–136. Arel, Dominique and Blair A. Ruble, eds. Rebounding Identities: The Politics of Identity in Russia and Ukraine. Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Atkinson, Dorothy, Alexander Dallin, and Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, eds. Women in Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977. Attwood, Lynn. Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Avidar, Yosef. The Party and the Army in the Soviet Union. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983. Avis, George. The Making of the Soviet Citizen: Character Formation and Civic Training in Soviet Education. London: Croom Helm, 1987. Babakov, A. A. Vooruzhennye sily SSSR posle voiny, 1945–1986: Istoriia stroitel’stva. Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo ministerstva oborony SSSR, 1987.

208

Bibliography

Bahalii, D. I. Istoriia Slobids’koi Ukrainy (1918). Reprinted. Kharkiv: Osnova, 1990. http://dalizovut.narod.ru/bagaley/bagal_so htm. Bahalii, D. I. and D. Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar’kova za 250 let ego sushchestvovaniia (s 1655-go po 1905-yi god), 2 vols. Kharkiv: V. N. Karazin, 1905, 1912. Baker, Mark. “Rampaging Soldatki, Cowering Police, Bazaar Riots and Moral Economy: The Social Impact of the Great War in Kharkiv Province.” CanadianAmerican Slavonic Papers vol. 35, nos. 2–3 (Summer–Fall 2001): 137–155. Baltanov, R. G. Sotsiologicheskie problemy v sisteme nauchno-ateisticheskogo vospitaniia. Kazan’: Kazan’ University Press, 1973. In William C. Fletcher, Soviet Believers: The Religious Sector of the Population. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1981. Barbour, William and Carol Wekesser, eds. The Breakup of the Soviet Union: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1994. Basarsoft, Google, Tele Atlas, ORION-ME, GIS Innovatsia. Map data (2012). Bassin, Mark and Catriona Kelly. Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Batutina Military School commemorative website. http://shilka narod ru/. Bauer, Raymond, Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Klukhohn. How the Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological and Cultural Themes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. Beacháin, Donnacha and Abel Polese. The Colour Revolutions in the Former Soviet Republics: Successes and Failures. New York: Routledge, 2010. Benmayor, Rina and Andor Skotnes, eds. Migration and Identity (International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Bernard, H. Russell and Gery Ryan. Analyzing Qualitative Data: Systematic Approaches. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2010. Bertaux, Daniel and Paul Thompson, eds. Between Generations: Family Models, Myths, and Memories (International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Bertaux, Daniel, Paul Thompson, and Anna Rotkirch, eds. On Living through Soviet Russia. London: Routledge, 2004. Boles, Captain John K. III. “The Interrelation between Personnel and Training in the Soviet Armed Forces.” Garmisch, Germany: U.S. Army Russian Institute, 1981. Bourdeaux, Michael. Gorbachev, Glasnost & the Gospel. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990. ———. The Gospel’s Triumph over Communism. Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1991. Boydston, Jeanne. “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis.” Gender & History vol. 20, no. 3 (November 2008): 558–583. Bremmer, Ian. “The Politics of Ethnicity: Russians in the New Ukraine.” Europe-Asia Studies vol. 46, no. 2 (1994): 261–283. ———. Post-Soviet Politics and Political Integration: Russians in Lviv. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 1994. Bucher, Greta. “Struggling to Survive: Soviet Women in the Postwar Years.” Journal of Women’s History vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 137–159.



Bibliography 209

Buckley, Cynthia J., ed. Migration, Homeland, and Belonging in Eurasia. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008. Buckley, Mary. Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. Burdo, M. and S. B. Filatov, eds. Sovremennaia religioznaia zhizn’ Rossii: Opyt sistematicheskogo opisaniia. Moscow: LOGOS, 2003. Chase, Philip. “Conflict in the Crimea: An Examination of Ethnic Conflict under the Contemporary Model of Sovereignty.” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law vol. 34, no. 1 (1995): 219–254. Chase, William J. “Microhistory and Mass Repression: Politics, Personalities, and Revenge in the Fall of Béla Kun.” Russian Review vol. 67, no. 2 (July 2008): 454–483. Chatterjee, Choi. Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910–1939. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. Ciraulo, Patricia M. Re-structuring Lives: Interviews with Russian Professionals. New York: CreateSpace, 2010. Clements, Barbara Evans, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, eds. Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Clements, Barbara Evans, ed. Russian Masculinities in History and Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Clements, Barbara Evans. Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. ———. Bolshevik Women. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Daughters of Revolution: A History of Women in the USSR. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1994. Cohen, Stephen F. The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin. New York: PublishingWorks, 2010. Collias, K. A. “Striving for Homo Sovieticus: Making Soviet Citizens: Patriotic and Internationalist Education in the Formation of a Soviet State Identity.” In Soviet Nationalities Policies: Ruling Ethnic Groups in the USSR, edited by D. E. Huttenbach. London: Mansell, 1990. Colton, Timothy J. Commissars, Commanders, and Civilian Authority: The Structure of Soviet Military Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Colton, Timothy J. and Thane Gustafson, eds. Soldiers and the Soviet State: Civilmilitary Relations from Brezhnev to Gorbachev. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Confino, Alon. “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method.” American Historical Review vol. 102, no. 5 (December 1997): 1386–1403. ———. Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. ———. “Present Events and the Representation of the Past: Some Current Problems in Russian Historical Writing.” Cahiers du Monde russe vol. 35, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 839–868. ———. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

210

Bibliography

Conquest, Robert. Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Constant, Amelie, ed. The Russian-Ukrainian Political Divide. London: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2007. Costlow, Jane T. and Stephanie Sandler. Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Crutcher, Michael H., ed. The Russian Armed Forces at the Dawn of the Millennium. Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, 2000. David-Fox, Michael, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, eds. The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014. D’iachenko, N. T. Ulitsy i ploshchadi Khar’kova. Kharkiv: Prapor, 1977. Deane, Michael J. Political Control of the Soviet Armed Forces. New York: Crane, Russak, 1977. Deyermond, Ruth. Security and Sovereignty in the Former Soviet Union. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2008. Dick, C. J. The Current State of the Soviet Military. RMA Sandhurst: Soviet Studies Research Center, 1991. Diuk, Nadia and Adrian Karatnycky. Nations Rising: The Fall of the Soviets and the Challenge of Independence. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993. Dobruskin, M. E. Religiia i ateizm na istoricheskom pereput’e: proshloe i sovremennost’. Kharkov: SMIT, 2005. Dobson, R. B. Russians and Ukrainians Differ in their views of NATO and the U.S. Washington, DC: Office of Research and Media Reaction, U.S. Information Agency, 1997. Dodge, Norton T. Women in the Soviet Economy: Their Role in Economic, Scientific, and Technical Development. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966. Duluman, E., B. Lobovik and V. Tancher. Sovremennyi veruiushchii. Moscow: Publishing House for Political Literature, 1970. In William C. Fletcher, Soviet Believers: The Religious Sector of the Population. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1981. Edmondson, Linda Harriet. Gender in Russian History and Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Elkner, Julie. “Dedovshchina and the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers under Gorbachev.” The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies 1 (2004). http:// pipss. revues.org/243. Engel, Barbara Alpern. Women in Russia, 1700–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. London: Pandora, 1989. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Der kurze Sommer der Anarchie (1972). In Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Federation of American Scientists. “Russian Military Spending.” https://www.fas .org/nuke/ guide/russia/agency/mo-budget htm.



Bibliography 211

———. “SA-9 GASKIN; 9K31 Strela-1.” http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/row/sa-9.htm. Figes, Orlando “Private Life in Stalin’s Russia: Family Narratives, Memory and Oral History.” History Workshop Journal no. 65 (2008): 117–137. ———. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. S. V. Filatov and D. E. Furman. “Religiia i politika v massovom soznanii.” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 7 (1992). In William C. Fletcher, Soviet Believers: The Religious Sector of the Population. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1981. Fisher, Alan. The Crimean Tatars. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986. Fishman, Robert M. Democracy’s Voices: Social Ties and the Quality of Public Life in Spain. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Live in Extraordinary Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———. Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Fletcher, William C. Soviet Believers: The Religious Sector of the Population. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1981. Frances, Karen and Margaret McLeod. “A Safety Net: Use of Pseudonyms in Oral Nursing History.” Contemporary Nurse no. 25 (2007): 104–113. Frankel, Max. High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004. Frede, Victoria. Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Fritzsche, Peter and Jochen Hellbeck. “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.” In Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Edited by Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Froese, Paul. “Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an Atheistic Monopoly Failed.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion vol. 43, no. 1 (March 2004): 43–50. Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin Press, 2005. ———. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Gannagé, Charlene. Double Day, Double Burden: Women in the Garment Industry. Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1986. Gheith, Jehanne M. and Katherine R. Jolluck. Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Gijsberts, Mérove, ed. Nationalism and Exclusion of Migrants: Cross-National Comparisons. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Giliarov E. M. and A. V. Kudriashov. “Institut voennoi tainy—Problemy stanovlenia i razvitiia.” Nauchnaia sessiia MIFI no. 14 (2006): 60–63. Ginsburgs, George. “Citizenship Issues in Russian-Ukrainian Relations.” Osteuropa Recht vol. 42, no. 4 (December 1996): 347–369. Goldman, Wendy Z. Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

212

Bibliography

Golos Khar’kova. “Millionnyi khar’kovchanin otmetil 46-letie.” no. 29 (November 2008). Gorenburg, Dmitry. “Soviet Nationalities Policy and Assimilation.” In Rebounding Identities: The Politics of Identity in Russia and Ukraine, 279–302, edited by Dominique Arel and Blair A. Ruble. Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Greenslade, Rush V. “The Many Burdens of Defense in the Soviet Union (CIA confidential working paper, 1970).” CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence Archives vol. 14, no. 2 (released 1994). Guest, G., A. Bunce, and L. Johnson. “How Many Interviews are Enough? An Experiment with Data Saturation and Variability.” Field Methods vol. 18, no. 1 (2006): 59–82. Halfin, Igal. From Darkness to Light, Class Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. ———. Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Halfin, Igal and Jochen Hellbeck. “Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s ‘Magnetic Mountain’ and the State of Soviet Historical Studies.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas no. 44 (1996): 456–463. Harris, Chauncy D. “Ethnic Groups in Cities of the Soviet Union.” Geographical Review vol. 35, no. 3 (July 1945): 466–473. Hellbeck, Jochen. Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Hewryk, Totus D. “Planning of the Capital in Kharkiv.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies vol. 16, nos. 3–4 (December 1992): 325–359. Higham, Robin and Frederick W. Kagan, eds. The Military History of the Soviet Union. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Himka, John-Paul and Andriy Zayarnyuk, eds. Letters from Heaven: Popular Religion in Russia and Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Hine, Darlene Clark and Kathleen Thompson. A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Holyk, Roman. “The Miracle as Sign and Proof: ‘Miraculous Semiotics’ in the Medieval and Early Modern Ukrainian Mentality.” In Letters from Heaven: Popular Religion in Russia and Ukraine, edited by John-Paul Himka and Andriy Zayarnyuk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Hosking, Geoffrey. The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Hrycak, Jaroslaw. “Die Formierung der modernen ukrainischen Nation.” Österreichische Osthefte vol. 42, no. 3–4 (2000): 189–210. Hrytsak, Yaroslav. “On the Relevance and Irrelevance of Nationalism in Contemporary Ukraine.” In A Laboratory of Transnational History: Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography, 25–45. Edited by Georgiy Kasianov and Philipp Terr. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2009.



Bibliography 213

Husband, W. B. “Godless Communists”: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000. Hyman, Anthony. “Russians outside Russia.” World Today vol. 49, no. 11 (November 1993): 205–208. Iarmysh, A. N., ed., Istoriia goroda Khar’kova XX stoletiia. Kharkiv: Folio, 2004. Inkeles, Alex, Raymond Bauer. The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. Inkeles, Alex, Merle Fainsod, Alexander Dallin, Raymond Bauer, Mark Field, and Paul Friedrich. Soviet Interview Project of 1979–85. http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/08694/detail. http://daviscenter fas harvard.edu/research_ portal/emigre.html. Inoue, Koichi and Tomohiko Uyama. Quest for Models of Coexistence: National and Ethnic Dimensions of Changes in the Slavic Eurasian World. Sapporo, Japan: Hokkaido University, 1998. Janmaat, Jan G. “Language Politics in Education and the Response of the Russians in Ukraine.” Nationalities Papers vol. 27, no. 3 (1999): 475–501. Jenks, Andrew L. Russia in a Box: Art and Identity in an Age of Revolution. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. Johnson, Juliet, Marietta Stepaniants, and Benjamin Forest, eds. Religion and Identity in Modern Russia: The Revival of Orthodoxy and Islam. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Johnston, Michael. Civil Society and Corruption: Mobilizing For Reform. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005. Jones, Ellen. Red Army and Society: A Sociology of the Soviet Military. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1985. Kääriäinen, Kimmo. Religion in Russia after the Collapse of Communism: Religious Renaissance or Secular State. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998. Kalashnikov, M. F. ed., Nauchnyi ateizm: Voprosy metodologii i sotsiologii. Perm: Perm State Pedagogical Institute, 1974. In William C. Fletcher, Soviet Believers: The Religious Sector of the Population. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1981. Kalinin, Mikhail Ivanovich. Speech at the opening of the first Suvorov Military School (1946). In “Stranitsy Istorii.” Suvorov Higher Military School Alumni Website. http://www.svu ru/index.sema?a=articles&pid=10. Kappeler, Andreas. Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600–1945. Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2003. ———. Great Russians and Little Russians: Russian-Ukrainian Relations and Perceptions in Historical Perspective. Seattle: University of Washington, 2003. ———. “The Russian Southern and Eastern Frontiers from the 15th to the 18th Centuries.” Ab Imperio no. 2 (June 2003). Kasianov, Georgiy and Philipp Terr, eds. A Laboratory of Transnational History: Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2009. Kelly, Catriona. Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

214

Bibliography

Khar’kovskie izvestiia. “Istoriia: bez belykh pyaten.” nos. 100–101 (August 23, 2008). Kharkiv Holocaust Museum. http://holocaustmuseum kharkov.ua/. Khubova, Daria N. “Imprisoned History: The KGB Archives.” Journal of the International Institute vol. 1, no. 1 (1994). Klepinin, Nicholas. “The War on Religion in Russia.” Slavonic and East European Review vol. 8, no. 24 (March 1930): 514–532. Klüsener, Sebastian. Wikimedia Commons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Charkiw-Ukraine-Map.png. Kobetskii, V. D. Sotsiologicheskoe izuchenie religioznosti i ateizma (Leningrad: Leningrad University Press, 1978). In William C. Fletcher, Soviet Believers: The Religious Sector of the Population. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1981. Kolkowicz, Roman. Soviet Party-Military Relations: Contained Conflict. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1966. ———. The Soviet Military and the Communist Party. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967. Kononenko, Natalie. “Folk Orthodoxy: Popular Religion in Contemporary Ukraine.” In Letters from Heaven: Popular Religion in Russia and Ukraine, edited by JohnPaul Himka and Andriy Zayarnyuk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Kolstø, Pål and Andrei Edemsky. Russians in the Former Soviet Republics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Korostelina, Karina V. “Mapping national identity narratives in Ukraine.” Nationalities Papers vol. 41, no. 2 (2013): 293–315. Kotkin, Stephen. “The State—Is it Us? Memoirs, Archives, and Kremlinologists.” Russian Review vol. 61, no. 1 (2002): 35–51. Kraljic, Matthew A. The Breakup of Communism: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1993. Kravchenko, V. V. “Kharkivs’kyi universytet u pershii polovyni XIX stolittia.” In Kharkivs’kyi natsional’nyi universytet imeni V. N. Karazina za 200 rokiv, 6–124. Kharkiv: Folio, 2004. ———. Khar’kov/Kharkiv: Stolitsa Pogranich’ia. Vil’nius: Evropeiskii Gumanitarhyi Universitet, 2010. ———. “Rehional’na identychnist’ Slobozhanshchyny v istorytchnii perspektyvi XVIII—potchatku XX st.” In Ukrains’ko-rosiis’ke porubizhzha: Formuvannia sotsial’noho ta kul’turnoho prostoru v istorii ta suchasnii politytsi—Zbirnyk materialiv seminaru Kyivs’koho proektu Instytutu Kennana ta filosofs’koho fakul’tetu Kharkivs’koho natsional’noho universytetu imeni V.N. Karazina, 11 kvitnia 2003 roku, 44–48. Kyiv: Stylos, 2003. ———. “Universytet dlia Ukrainy.” Skhid-Zakhid (2005): 120–166. Kravchenko, Volodymyr. “Kharkiv: A Borderland City.” In Cities after the Fall of Communism: Reshaping Cultural Landscapes and European Identity, edited by John Czaplicka, Nida Gelazis, and Blair A. Ruble. Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. ———. Ukraina, Imperiia, Rosiia: Vybrani tsitaty z modernoi istorii ta istoriografii. Kyiv: Krytyka, 2011.



Bibliography 215

Krivosheev, G. F., ed. Rossiia i SSSR v voinakh XX veka: Poteri vooruzhennykh sil, Statisticheskoe issledovannie. Moskow: Olma-Press, 2001. Krylova, Anna. Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Kubareva, V. N., ed. Akademiia imeni L.A. Govorova: Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk. Kharkiv: VIRTA, 1980. Kuehnast, Kathleen and Carol Nechemias, eds. Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism. Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Kuromiya, Hiroaki. Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———. Ukraine: State and Nation Building. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. ———. “Ukrainian Nationalism Again under Attack in Ukraine.” Eurasia Daily Monitor vol. 7, no. 138 (July 19, 2010). http://www.jamestown.org/single/?tx_ttnews [tt_news]=36643. Kuzio, Taras. “Soviet Conspiracy Theories and Political Culture in Ukraine: Understanding Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions.” Communist and PostCommunist Studies no. 44 (2011): 221–232. Lebedeva, V. P. and P. P. Sokol’skii. Skazhi, Drobitskii Iar…: Ocherki. Vospominaniia. Dokumenty. Kharkiv: Prapor, 1991. Ledeneva, Alena V. Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Leibfreid, A., V. Reusov, and A. Tits, eds. Khar’kov: Arkhitektura, pamiatniki, novostroiki: Putevoditel’. Kharkiv: Prapor, 1987. Leinarte, Dalia. Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality: Life Stories of Lithuanian Women, 1945–1970. Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi, 2010. Levi, Giovanni. “On Microhistory.” In New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, 2nd ed. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001. Lewin, Moshe. The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia. New York: Pantheon Books 1985. Lewis, David C. After Atheism: Religion and Ethnicity in Russia and Central Asia. Avon: Curzon, 2000. Leydesdorff, Selma, Luisa Passerini, and Paul Thompson, eds. Gender and Memory (International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Lovell, Stephen. Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710–2000. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Lovell, Stephen, Alena V. Ledeneva, and A. B. Rogachevskii, eds. Bribery and Blat in Russia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Magocsi, Paul Robert. The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism: Galicia as Ukraine’s Piedmont. Toronto, London, and Buffalo, NY: University Press Toronto, 2002. Markus, Vasyl, Roman Senkus, and Ihor Stebelsky. “Kharkiv.” Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (2006). http://www

216

Bibliography

.encyclopediaofukraine.com/next.asp?bottomMenuDisplay=pages\K\H\KhanenkoMykhailo htm&KidNumer=5554. Markwick, Roger D. and Euridice Charon Cardona. Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Marsh, Rosalind J. Women in Russia and Ukraine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Martin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. ———. “The Empire’s New Frontiers: New Russia’s Path from Frontier to Okraina 1774–1920.” Russian History vol. 19, nos. 1–4 (1992): 181–201. Masenko, Larisa. “Why Ukrainian-Language Dubbing Rubs the Authorities the Wrong Way.” The Ukrainian Week International Edition (April 18, 2012). http:// ukrainianweek.com/Columns/50/47729. McFaul, Michael. “Russia and the West: A Dangerous Drift.” Current History: A Journal of Contemporary World Affairs vol. 104, no. 684 (October 2005): 307–312. Mel’nikova, L. A. “Sovershenstvovanie zakonodatel’stva po okhrane gosudarstvennoi tainy.” Sovetskoe gosydarstvo i pravo no. 6 (1989): 123–131. Melvin, Neil. Russians beyond Russia: The Politics of National Identity. London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1995. Messana, Paola. Soviet Communal Living: An Oral History of the Kommunalka. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Michailova, Snejina and Verner Worm, eds. Personal Networking in Russia and China: BLAT and GUANXI. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School, 2002. Miller, W., A. Grodeland, and T. Kosechkina. A Culture of Corruption? Coping with Government in Post-Communist Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001. Minahan, James. The Former Soviet Union’s Diverse Peoples: A Reference Sourcebook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004. Miner, Steven Merritt. Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Morgan, M. G., B. Fischoff, and C. J. Atman. Risk Communication: A Mental Models Approach. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Morikhin, V. E. Traditsii ofitserskogo korpusa russkoi armii. Moscow: Kuchkovo Pole, 2010. Morton, Henry W. and Robert C. Stewart, eds. The Contemporary Soviet City. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1984. Moskovich, Wolf and Leonid Finberg. Jews, Ukrainians and Russians: Essays on Intercultural Relations. Jerusalem; Kiev: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2008. Mould, David H. “Legal Issues.” In Catching Stories: A Practical Guide to Oral History. Edited by Donna M. DeBlasio, Charles F. Ganzert, David H. Mould, Stephen H. Paschen, and Howard L. Sacks. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. Naimark, Norman M. “Cold War Studies and New Archival Materials on Stalin.” Russian Review vol. 61, no. 1 (2002): 1–15. Neugarten, Bernice L. and Karol K. Weinstein. “The Changing American Grandparent.” Journal of Marriage and the Family no. 26 (1964): 199–206.



Bibliography 217

Newsland. “Statistika RPTs: skol’ko veruiushchikh v Rossii” (November 27, 2009). http://www.newsland .ru/news/detail/id/438189/. Nielsen, Niels C. Jr. “Introduction.” In Christianity after Communism: Social, Political, and Cultural Struggle in Russia, edited by Niels C. Nielsen Jr. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994. Odom, William E. Collapse of the Soviet Military. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. ———. “Soviet Military Doctrine.” Foreign Affairs vol. 67, no. 2 (Winter 1988): 114–134. Oral History Association, “Principles and Best Practices” (October, 2009). http:// www.oralhistory.org/do-oralhistory/ principles-and-practices/. Orsi, Robert A. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Panov, A. I. Ofitserskii korpus Rossii: sotsial’no-professional’naia adaptatsiia k grazhdanskoi zhizni. Moscow: Voenizdat, 2000. Paperno, Irina. Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Passerini, Luisa, ed. Memory and Totalitarianism (International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories. Vol. 1). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Petkevich, Tamara. Memoir of a Gulag Actress. Translated by Yasha Klots and Ross Ufberg. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. Pifer Steven. “Ukraine’s Perilous Balancing Act.” Current History: A Journal of Contemporary World Affairs vol. 111, no. 743 (March 2012): 106–111. Pipes, Richard. Russian Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Plokhy, Serhii and Frank E. Sysyn. Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine. Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2003. Poliakov, A. M. Istoriia Rossii: Vooruzhennye sily SSSR (1998). http://apol.interwave ru/Articles/ussr-voors.html. Polian, Pavel. Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR. Translated by Anna Yastrzhembska. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2004. Portelli, Alessandro. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. “General Introduction to the Three-Volume Work.” In History of Soviet Atheism, vol. 1, xi–xv. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. ———. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory and Practice and the Believer. 3 vols. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Potichnyj, Peter J. Ukraine and Russia in their Historical Encounter. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1992. Prince, Howard T. II. The Human Factor in the Soviet Armed Forces: Leadership, Cohesion and Effectiveness. Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, 1990. Raeff, Marc. The Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. Raleigh, Donald J. “Doing Soviet History: The Impact of the Archival Revolution.” Russian Review vol. 61, no. 1 (2002): 16–24.

218

Bibliography

———. Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about Their Lives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. ———. Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Ransel, David L. “Review of Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).” Journal of Modern History vol. 77, no. 4 (December 2005): 1168–1170. Razumkov Centre in Kyiv. “Church-state relations in Ukraine: features and trends” (February 8, 2011). http://www.razumkov.org.ua/eng/expert.php? news_id=2597. Reese, Roger R. Red Commanders: A Social History of the Soviet Army Corps, 1918–1991. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. ———. Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers: A Social History of the Red Army, 1925–1941. University Press of Kansas, 1996. ———. The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought: The Red Army’s Effectiveness in World War II. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. RIA Novosti. “Statistika rosta veruiushchikh v Rossii za poslednie gody” (November 15, 2006). http://www hermogen.ru/kms_community+index+id-2.html. Ritchie, Donald A. Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Round, John, Colin C. Williams, and Peter Rodgers. “Corruption in the Post-Soviet Workplace: The Experiences of Recent Graduates in Contemporary Ukraine.” Work, Employment & Society (2008): 22–149. Rutten, Ellen. Unattainable Bride Russia: Gendering Nation, State, and Intelligentsia in Russian Intellectual Culture. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Rybalka, I. K. Khar’kov v gody revoliutsii i Grazhdanskoi voihy, 1917–1920. Kharkiv: Prapor, 1983. Sagramoso, Domitilla. Russian Imperialism Revisited: Neo-Empire, State Interests and Hegemonic Power. London: Routledge, 2010. Saideman, Stephen M. and R. William Ayres. For Kin or Country: Xenophobia, Nationalism, and War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Sanborn, Joshua A. Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. Sapir, Jacques. The Soviet Military System. Translated by David Macey. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Scott, Harriet Fast and William F. Scott. The Armed Forces of the USSR. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984. ———. The Soviet Control Structure: Capabilities for Wartime Survival. New York: Crane, Russak, 1983. Scott, James. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. In Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine, by Catherine Wanner, 205. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.



Bibliography 219

Shabad, Theodore. “Population Trends of Soviet Cities.” Soviet Geography vol. 26, no. 2 (1985): 109–153. Shattenberg, Suzanne. “Kul’tura korruptsii, ili K istorii rossiiskikh chinovnikov.” Polit.ru. http://www.polit.ru/research/2005/09/21/shattenberg.html. Shelley, Louise. “The Political-Criminal Nexus: Russian-Ukrainian Case Studies.” Trends in Organized Crime vol. 4, no. 3 (1999): 81–107. Shevchenko, Taras. “Constitutional Court Obliges to Dub All Films in Ukrainian.” IRIS, Legal Observations of the European Audiovisual Observatory vol. 3, no. 19–20 (2008). http://merlin.obs. coe.int/iris/2008/3/article29.en.html. Shlapentokh, Vladimir and Munir Sendich. The New Russian Diaspora: Russian Minorities in the Former Soviet Republics. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. Shtromas, Alexander. Political Change and Social Development: The Case of the Soviet Union. Frankfurt-am-Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 1981. Shulman, Elena. Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire: Women and State Formation in the Soviet Far East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Sikes, J. E. Kharkov and Sinai: A Study in Operational Transition. Fort Leavenworth, KS: Army Command and General Staff College, 1988. Simons, Thomas W. Eurasia’s New Frontiers: Young States, Old Societies, Open Futures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Sklokin, Volodymyr and Iryna Rebrova. “Sna istoriia v Ukraini: zapovnennia ʻbilyx pliamʼ ch i metodologich nii perevorot? Retsenziia na chasopis [Ukraina moderna—2007—no. 11].” East-West, a scientific, historical, and cultural journal no. 11–12 (2008): 391–397. Skorobogatov, A. V. Kharkiv u chasy nimets’koi okupatsii, 1941–1943. Kharkiv: Prapor, 2006. Slater, Wendy and Andrew Wilson, eds. The Legacy of the Soviet Union. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ———. The Jewish Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Slezkine, Yuri. “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism.” Slavic Review vol. 53, no. 1 (1994): 414–452. Smith, Graham. The Nationalities Question in the Post-Soviet States. New York: Longman, 1996. Smith, Myron J. Jr. The Soviet Army, 1939–1980: A Guide to Sources in English. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1982. Smith, S. A. “The First Soviet Generation: Children and Religious Belief in Soviet Russia, 1917–41.” In Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, 79–100, edited by Stephen Lovell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Soskovets, L. I. Religioznye organizatsii i veruiushchie v Sovetskom gosudarstve. Tomsk: TML-Press, 2008. Steinberg, Mark D. Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. ———. “Workers on the Cross: Religious Imagination in the Writings of Russian Workers, 1910–1924.” Russian Review vol. 53, no. 2 (April 1994): 213–239.

220

Bibliography

Steinberg, Mark D. and Catherine Wanner, eds. Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008. Steinberg, Mark D. and Catherine Wanner. “Introduction: Reclaiming the Sacred after Communism.” In Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies, edited by Mark D. Steinberg and Christine Wanner. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008. Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ———. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Suny, Ronald Grigor. “Affective Communities: Making Nations in the Russian Empire.” Paper prepared for the Conference Commemorating the 25th Anniversary of Imagined Communities, October 2008, at the University of Chicago. ———. The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. ———. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Suny, Ronald Grigor and Terry Martin, eds. A State of Nations: Empire and Nationmaking in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Sutcliffe, Benjamin M. The Prose of Life: Russian Women Writers from Khrushchev to Putin. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. Szinovacz, Maximiliane, ed. Handbook on Grandparenthood. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. Szpakowski, Ivan. “‘Socialism in One Country’: Promoting National Identity Based on Class Identification.” Janus, The University of Maryland Undergraduate History Journal (Spring 2007): 24–33. Szporluk, Roman, ed., National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eurasia. Armonk, NY, and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. Szporluk, Roman. Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2000. Thompson, Clifford, ed. Russia & Eastern Europe. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1998. Thompson, Terry L. and Richard Sheldon. Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1988. Troiinitskii, N. A. Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi Imperii, 1897. St. Petersburg: Izd. tsentral’nago statisticheskago komiteta Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1899–1905. Tsypkin, Mikhail. “Armiya i voennaya organizatsiya gosudarstva.” Otechestvennye zapiski no. 8 (2003). Tumarkin, Nina. Lenin Lives: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Venturi, Franco. Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia. Translated by Francis Haskell. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1960. Viola, Lynn. “The Cold War in American Soviet Historiography and the End of the Soviet Union.” Russian Review vol. 61, no. 1 (2002): 25–34. Vokhmianin, V. K. and A. I. Podoprigora. Khar’kov, 1941. Kharkiv: Raider, 2009.



Bibliography 221

Vorontsova, L. M., S. V. Filatov, and D. E. Furman. “Religiia i politika v sovremennom massovom soznanii.” In Religiia i politika v postkommunisticheskoi Rossii, 33–98. Moscow: Moskovskii Institut filosofii RAN, 1994. Wade, Rex A. Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984. ———. “The Revolution in the Provinces: Khar’kov and the Varieties of Response to the October Revolution.” Revolutionary Russia vol. 4, no. 1 (June 1991): 132–142. Walicki, Andrzej. A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism. Translated by Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979. ———. Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Walton, John, James F. Brooks, and Christopher R. N. DeCorse. “Introduction.” In Small Worlds: Method, Meaning, & Narrative in Microhistory, edited by James F. Brooks, Christopher R. N. Decorse, and John Walton. New York: SAR Press, 2008. Wanner, Catherine. Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. ———. Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. ———. “Explaining the Appeal of Evangelicalism in Ukraine.” In Rebounding Identities: The Politics of Identity in Russia and Ukraine, 243–272, edited by Dominique Arel and Blair A. Ruble. Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. ———. “Missionaries of Faith and Culture: Evangelical Encounters in Ukraine.” Slavic Review vol. 63, no. 4. (Winter 2004): 732–755. Weiner, Amir, ed. Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Wikipedia Commons, open source use (2007). http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File%3AKharkov_Freedom_Square.jpg. Williams, E. S. The Soviet Military: Political Education, Training and Morale. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Wilson, Andrew. The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2000. ———. Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s: A Minority Faith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Wolfe, Thomas W. Signs of Stress in Soviet Political-Military Relations. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1964. Wood, Elizabeth. The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Yekelchyk, S. “The Making of ‘Proletarian Capital’: Patterns of Stalinist Social Policy in Kiev in the Mid-1930s.” Europe-Asia Studies vol. 50, no. 7 (November 1998): 1229–1244.

222

Bibliography

Yow, Valerie Raleigh. Recording Oral History: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994. Yurchak, Alexei. Everything was Forever, until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Zahra, Tara. The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Zakharova, M. V. 50 let Vooruzhennykh sil SSSR. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1968. Zhuk, Sergei I. Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dnipropetrovsk, 1960–1985. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Zhurnala uspekhi sovremennoi radioelektroniki. “90 letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia.” no. 10 (2009). Zickel, Raymond E., ed. Soviet Union: A Country Study. Washington, DC: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1989. http://www.countrydata.com/frd/cs/ sutoc.html#su0002. Zigon, Jarrett. “Aleksandra Vladimirovna: Moral Narratives of a Russian Orthodox Woman.” In Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies, 85–105, edited by Mark D. Steinberg and Christine Wanner. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008. Zubkova, Elena. Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945– 1957. Translated by Hugh Ragsdale. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Zubok, Vladislav and Constantine Pleshakov. Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Zubok, Vladislav. Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Zurzhenko, Tat’iana. “Strong Woman, Weak State: Family Politics and Nation Building in Post-Soviet Ukraine.” In Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition: Nation Building, Economic Survival, and Civic Activism, 23–43, edited by Kathleen Kuehnast and Carol Nechemias. Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Dissertations and Theses Katyrenchuk, Taras. “Creation of a Higher Military Educational System in Ukraine as a Part of Civil-Military Relations (1992–1998).” PhD Dissertation. U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, 2004. Leleko, Vera Vital’evna. “Mifopoetika sovetskoi massovoi musykal’noi kul’tury (vtoraia polovina 1950kh—nachalo 1980kh godov).” Kandidat nauk Dissertation. St. Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts, 2011.

Index

Abrams, Lynn, 108 Afghanistan, 21, 88 Air Defense Forces (Soviet), 45, 74, 87 Air Forces (Soviet), 45, 85 All-Union Resettlement Committee, 40 Angola, 21 anonymity, 12–14, 124 antiaircraft technology, 16–17, 44–45, 57, 71, 74–75, 93 antisemitism, 21, 41, 78–80, 137. See also Jewish population apparatchiks, 3, 183 agnosticism, 6, 18, 156, 163, 171 architecture, 32, 37, 40, 59 atheism, 23, 155, 180; “Babushka phenomenon” and, 160–62; Jewish respondents and, 171; resurfacing of religious belief and, 165–72, 182; Soviet history and, 156–60, 172–73; VIRTA officers and, 6, 17, 169. See also Christianity; Orthodox Church; religion Babaian, Boris Khachaturovich, 63n55 Babich, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, 70–72 “Babushka phenomenon,” 156, 160– 165, 171, 172 Bahamas, 179 Baltics, 19, 139, 145

Battle of Borodino, 4 Belarus, 60n9, 79, 144 Belov, Viktor Grigor’evich, 100n79, 183 Belyi, Boris Anatol’evich, 64n73, 139 Berlin Wall, 89 Black Sea, 34 Bolodian, Petr Razulevich, 154n67, 162, 171 Bol’shakov, Anatolii Ivanovich, 146–47 Bolsheviks, 36–37, 69, 73, 104, 106, 157–58 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 4 Boydston, Jeanne, 107–8 Brezhnev, Leonid, 2, 101n83 Brown, Harold, 68 bureaucracy and administration, 6, 12, 17, 31, 69, 109, 111; Kharkiv and, 32, 34–35, 37, 59, 185; VIRTA and, 17, 46–47, 57 Butova, Ekaterina Ivanovna, 116 Canada, 21 Canary Islands, 113, 179 Catherine the Great, 35 Caucasus, 35 Central Rada, 36 Chernigov Governorate, 35 Chicago, 36 223

224

Index

Chikatev, Andrei Nikolaevich, 18, 138, 160 Chikatev, Nikolai Petrovich “Kolia,” 4–6, 16–19, 123–24, 160, 169 Chikatev, Viktor Nikolaevich, 18, 144 Chikateva, Liudmila Petrovna, 17–19, 109, 122–24, 156 China, 21, 40 Christianity, 18, 160, 170–71; intergenerational practices and, 156, 160, 163, 172; resurfacing of, 23, 156, 165, 167, 169. See also “Babushka phenomenon”; Orthodox Church: “folk Orthodoxy”; religion citizenship: Communist Party and, 40, 183; Kharkiv and, 3, 36–37, 42, 46; nationality and, 135–37, 139, 144– 45, 148–49, 182; religion and, 156, 158, 164, 168, 173, 182; VIRTA and, 66, 74, 77, 80, 83, 92 Civil Defense Forces, 45 Cohen, Stephen F., 12 Cold War, 1, 7, 44, 68, 179 collectivization, 40 Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, 89 communism: construction of, 138, 141; fall of, 1–2, 6, 23, 88–90, 136, 156; post-communism, 136, 147, 156; religion and, 156, 157–59, 162–63, 166, 170; size of Soviet military and, 68–70, 72; VIRTA officers and, 4, 22, 49, 53, 57, 70, 72, 81, 95, 142, 181; women and, 106, 111. See also Communist Party; Komsomol; Marxism-Leninism; Pioneers Communist Party, 56, 90, 183; Kharkiv and, 22, 37, 46; religion and, 157, 159, 162, 166; Ukrainian, 37; VIRTA and, 19, 53, 70, 56, 70, 72–73; women and, 111, 113, 156; youth and, 16, 19, 49, 166. See also communism; Komsomol; Pioneers Congress of People’s Deputies, 113 conscription, 17, 66, 69, 72, 73, 88, 92, 96, 180, 181

Cossack Hetmanate, 34–35 Crimea, 34–35, 185 Crimean Khanate, 34–35 Criminal Code, 158 cronyism, 104, 128 Cuba, 21 dachas, 17, 19, 123, 124 Davis, Angela, 114 Defender of the Fatherland Day, 17, 87, 185 “defense of the homeland,” 32, 44, 49, 68–69, 72–73, 81, 83, 142 Denikin, Anton, 37 deserters, 34–35 Derzhprom. See Gosprom diaspora, 145, 148, 182 dissidents, 1, 3, 7, 22, 35, 179, 183 doktor nauk degree, 46, 57, 75, 78–79. See also kandidat nauk degree Don Cossacks, 34 Donets Coal Basin (Donbas), 36, 40 Donets, Aleksandr Mikhailovich, 98n39, 131n29, 168–69 Donets, Inna Aleksandrovna, 142–43 Donets, Liudmila Nikolaevna, 101n97, 119–20, 172 Donetsk, 147–48, 185 Dzerzhinskii, Felix, 37 Dzerzhinskii Square, 20, 37, 38, 41, 43, 46–47, 49, 52, 57, 58, 183 Egypt, 21, 71, 179 émigrés, 7. See also migration English language, 77, 106, 144, 146 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 11 Estonia, 145 ethnicity, 11, 17, 23, 135–149; communism and, 69, 136–38; discrimination and, 19, 137; Kharkiv and, 32, 41, 139–40, 145–47; minorities, 2, 19, 137, 143; postSoviet Ukraine and, 90, 135–36, 144–49; VIRTA officers and, 77–78, 90, 93, 96. See also antisemitism;



Index 225

Jewish population; nationality; passports Ezhov, Valerii Nikolaevich, 149n2, 170–71 famine, 40, 163 Fikse, Tat’iana Vladimirovna, 49, 51, 57, 90, 105, 110, 141, 146, 164–65, 172 forced labor, 41–42, 47 Free Ukraine. See Sloboda Ukraine Freedom Square. See Dzerzhinskii Square France, 85 French army, 4 French language, 77 Fuller, William, 83 Garev, Anatolii Vladimirovich, 13, 84–85, 95, 168–69 Gareva, Ol’ga Nicolaevna, 32, 63n60 gender, 11, 22, 103, 106–8, 125, 128, 164, 181–82; discrimination and, 77, 105, 127. See also “New Soviet Military Man”; women German language, 77 Germany, 21, 41, 46, 68, 74, 85. See also Kharkiv: Germans and Gestapo, 41 Gheith, Jehanne M., 8–9 glasnost, 6, 112 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 6, 66, 80, 88–90, 104–5, 111–13, 128, 182 Gor’kii, Maksim, 25n11 Gor’kii Park, 49, 50 Gosprom, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 46 Govorov, Leonid Aleksandrovich, 74 Govorova, See VIRTA Grabov, Leonid Ivanovich, 63n65 Great Britain, 85 Great Depression, 89 Great Patriotic War, 2, 16, 25n11; ethnicity and, 137, 139, 146; Kharkiv and, 32, 40–42; religion and, 158, 171; Soviet army and, 68, 88;

VIRTA and, 32, 44, 46; women and, 105, 107; “Great Russia,” 69, 141–43, 146 Great Terror, 40 Ground Forces, 45 Gubskii, Nikolai Efimovich, 184n4 Gvozd’, Evgenii Vladimirovich, 63n55, 152n31 Holocaust, 19, 171. See also antisemitism Holodomor. See famine hospitals, 44, 118. See also medical care housing, 19, 42, 46, 52–54, 56, 57, 81, 104, 109, 119, 128 Huntington, Samuel, 83 immigration, 40. See also migration intelligentsia, 3, 7, 81, 108, 111, 157, 159, 164 Iran, 21, 71 Iraq, 71 Israel, 21, 71 Ivankiev, Andrei, 6 Ivanov, Evgenii Mikhailovich, 162, 170 Jewish population, 19, 21, 41, 77–80, 137, 139, 140, 171. See also antisemitism; Holocaust Jolluck, Katherine R., 8–9 Kalinin, 16, 75 Kalinin, Mikhail Ivanovich, 74 kandidat nauk degree, 17, 46, 57, 75, 78–79. See also doktor nauk degree Karelia, 77, 153n45 Karelian language, 143 Karelian-Finnish Republic, 143 Kazakhstan, 19, 40, 139, 144 Kaziuta, Ekaterina Mikhailovna, 64n85, 116–122, 128 KGB, 6, 22, 40, 53, 80, 168 Kharkiv: built environment of, 22, 31–32, 37–40, 41–44, 46; Communist Party and, 22, 37,

226

Index

46; education and, 16–17, 44–46; ethnicity and nationality in, 32, 41, 139–40, 144–47; Germans and, 37, 40, 41–42, 47; Great Patriotic War and, 32, 40–42; history of, 33–44; military-administrative nature of, 34–35; religion and, 161, 167; VIRTA academy and the city, 2, 16–17, 34, 44, 49, 57, 59, 180; women and, 105, 110–11 Kharkiv Governorate, 35 Kharkiv Military University of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, 57, 92, 144. See also VIRTA Kharkiv Region, 33, 185 Kharkov. See Kharkiv Khmelnytsky Uprising, 34 Khrushchev, Nikita, 25, 114, 137 Khubova, Daria, 6–7, 12 Kiev, 31, 32, 34, 36, 40, 59, 146, 185–86 kommunalka, 12 Komsomol, 16, 19, 49, 56, 166–67. See also Communist Party Konev, Aleksandr Grigor’evich, 163, 167 Koshelev, Viktor Nikolaevich, 81 Kosheleva, Elena Nikolaevna, 133n80, 147 Kotov, Aleksandr Fedorovich, 99nn61– 62, 131n29 Kotov, Fedor Borisovich, 47, 94, 161 Kotova, Liubov’ Vladimirovna, 143–44 Krupskaia, Nadezhda, 104, 105 Krylova, Anna, 107 Kuchma, Leonid, 136 Kulaks, 40 Kursk, 44 Kyrgyzstan, 143 Latvia, 77, 144, 145, 166 League of Militant Atheists, 158 Lebanon, 71 Leinarte, Dalia, 8, 13 Lenin, Vladimir, 98n40, 104–5, 151n15, 157, 158, 185; statue of, 38, 149, 185

Leningrad, 31, 49, 79–80. See also Petrograd; St. Petersburg Libya, 21 Litaev, Petr Alekseevich, 64n82, 72 Lithuania, 77, 145, 162. See also PolishLithuanian Commonwealth Lotov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich, 141–42 Lviv, 19, 139, 147–48 Manukian, Valentina Viktorovna, 103– 4, 108–117, 120, 121, 126–29, 143, 163, 171, 186 Marx, Karl, 157 Marxism-Leninism, 68–70, 90, 95, 105, 129, 138, 161, 181 medical services, 40, 42, 44, 104, 118, 128 Medvedev, Petr Borisovich, 63n53, 72, 76, 85, 93, 166, 186 Messana, Paola, 8–9, 12 metro (subway), 44, 53, 81, 172, 180. See also transportation microhistory, 3–4, 11 migration, 19, 21, 40 Military Pedagogy: Textbook for Higher Military and Political Schools, 68, 73 Ministry of Defense (Ukraine), 49, 85, 90–91, 93. See also Morozov, Kostiantyn P. Ministry of Defense (USSR), 80 Ministry of Internal Affairs (USSR), 80 Minsk, 34 Moldova, 19, 139 Morozov, Kostiantyn P., 49, 85, 90–92 Moscow, 31, 32, 34, 35, 46, 49, 59, 76–80, 117, 136, 186 Moscow State University, 117 movies, 57, 71, 81, 89, 90, 146, 158, 168 music, 56, 89, 90, 141 nationalism, 23, 135–36; imperial lived experience and, 138–141; post-Soviet identity and, 144–48; Soviet history and, 36, 41, 69–70,



Index 227

136–38; Soviet identity and, 141–44; supranationalism, 23, 93, 135–38, 141–44, 146, 148–49, 182; VIRTA officers and, 91, 93, 95. See also citizenship; ethnicity; passports nationality, 11, 93, 136–39, 141–45, 147–48 NATO, 21, 67, 71 Navy, 45, 66 New Soviet Man, 37, 73, 81 New Soviet Military Man, 16, 22, 65, 72–81, 89, 96 New Soviet Person, 32, 42, 46–47, 66, 106 New Soviet Woman, 106 NKVD, 40, 137 nomads, 34 North Korea, 21 Nosov, Oleg Vladimirovich, 76, 86, 89, 93–94, 110, 141, 170 Nuremberg Trials, 41

Pirogova, Aleksandra Valentinovna, 64n74, 142, 166 Pirogova, Liudmila Aleksandrovna, 131n29 Pletnev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, 27n42, 72 Poland, 19, 68, 139 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 34 Poltava Governorate, 35 Popova, Elena Mikhailovna, 61n10, 116, 171 Portelli, Alessandro, 11 postmodernism, 1, 69 Prospekt Lenina, 52–53, 54, 56–57 Pskov, 16 propaganda, 68, 73; architecture and, 37; ethnicity and, 137, 141–42; German, 79; officer corps and, 6, 66, 95, 181; religion and, 155–59; women and, 106 purges, 40, 171 Pushkin, Alexander, 146

oaths, 83–84, 91–93, 95 Octobrists, 166 Odnoklassniki, 86–87 Odom, William, 90 Olenev, Dmitrii Vital’evich, 161 Onoprienko, Valerii Ivanovich, 40–41, 161 oral history, 6–14, 107, 128, 163 Orthodox Church, 34, 40, 158, 160, 163–65, 167, 172; “folk Orthodoxy,” 156, 164, 169–70 Ovcharenko, Elena Petrovna, 119, 162, 165

radar technology, 4, 16–17, 44–45, 67, 71, 75 radio communications, 45, 75, 94 railroads, 35, 40, 41, 44. See also transportation Raleigh, Donald J., 8–10, 12–14 Reagan, Ronald, 89 Red Army, 37, 41, 88 Reese, Roger, 83–84, 88 refugees, 34 religion, 11, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 96, 139, 180–82; “Babushka phenomenon” and, 156, 160–65, 171, 172; baptism, 159, 161–62, 164–67, 169, 171, 182; content of beliefs, 169–172; persecution and, 40, 167, 179; post-Soviet resurfacing of, 155–56, 160, 165–69; science and, 157, 170; Soviet history of, 157–60. See also atheism; Christianity; Jewish population; Orthodox Church repression, 7, 12, 13, 40, 159, 179–80 resettlement, 40 Riazan’, 17

Pashkov, Vitalii Nikolaevich, 162, 166 passports, 136–37, 139–40, 142, 144–45 patriotism, 90–91, 137, 143 perestroika, 66, 88–89, 104–5, 111–13, 128, 182 Petrov, Oleg Nikolaevich, 94 Petrova, Inna Viktorovna, 152n31 Petrograd, 36. See also Leningrad; St. Petersburg Pioneers, 19, 166–67

228

Index

Riazan Oblast’, 116 Roma, 139 Romanov, Sergei Nikolaevich, 70, 162 Rostov, 35, 41 Rudnev Square, 46, 47 Russia (tsarist), 32, 34, 46, 59, 65, 68–69, 84, 158, 164 Russian Civil War, 25n11, 37, 41, 79, 88, 157 Russian Federation, 2, 18, 32, 34, 92, 144–45, 148 Russian language, 2, 32, 36, 77, 86, 93, 136, 137, 140, 142–44, 146–47 Russian Soviet Socialist Republic (Russian SSR), 16–17, 18, 153n45 Rybalko, Elena Viktorovna, 127, 139, 149, 161 Rybalko, Svetlana Viktorovna, 69n14, 139 Rybalko, Viktor Grigor’evich, 64n73 Sakhalin Island, 19 Scott, James, 12 Sharova, Tonia, 6 Shcherbakov, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 79 Sherbakova, Irina, 12 Shevchenko, Natal’ia Vital’evna, 127, 168 Shevchenko, Vladimir Ivanovich, 127, 154n60 Shevchenko Park, 38, 49 Shirman, Iakov Davidovich, 71, 78–79 Siberia, 170 Sloboda Ukraine, 34–36 Sneshkovoi, Vsevolod Afanas’evich, 27n42, 184n4 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 12, 25n11, 183 “South Russia,” 35–36 Soviet Armed Forces, 66–69, 72. See also Air Defense Forces (Soviet); Air Forces (Soviet); Civil Defense Forces; Ground Forces; Navy; Strategic Rocket Forces; Ukrainian Armed Forces Soviet Bloc, 17, 21, 34 Soviet Constitution, 66, 92

Soviet military: collapse of USSR and, 88–94; education and, 66–67, 69, 72, 84; history of, 65–72; ideology and, 69–72; New Soviet Military Man, 65, 72–81, 89, 95; oaths and, 83–84; size of, 65, 66–69; violence and, 72. See also Soviet Armed Forces; VIRTA Soviet secret police, 37, 40, 41 Soviet Victory Day, 87 St. Petersburg, 34, 35. See also Leningrad; Petrograd Stalin, Josef, 8, 25n11, 79–80, 114, 137, 158, 180, 186 Stoliarskaia, Tat’iana Petrovna, 59n1, 169 Stoliarskii, Leon Abramovich, 24n1, 29n71, 78–80 Strategic Rocket Forces, 45 Struve, Peter, 65 Suez Canal, 71 Suny, Ronald Grigor, 138 Suvorov, Aleksandr Vasil’evich, 73 Suvorov Military Schools, 16, 45, 49, 73–74 Suvorov, Viktor, 49 Tajikistan, 19, 139 Taratorkin, Oleg Petrovich, 76, 171 Tashkent, 108, 117 television, 18, 91, 114 Thatcher, Margaret, 89 Tolstoi, Lev Nikolaevich, 4 transportation, 32, 34, 35, 44, 53, 59. See also metro (subway); railroads; trolleys trolleys, 44, 53, 155 Turgenev, Ivan, 176n54 Turkey, 179 Tver’, 16 Ukrainian Armed Forces, 57, 92, 144 Ukrainian Armed Forces Day, 91 Ukrainian independence, 57, 90–92, 136, 139, 144 Ukrainian language, 93, 136, 142, 146



Index 229

Ukrainian National Republic, 37 Ukrainian People’s Republic, 36 Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR), 23, 34, 36, 66, 78 “Ukrainization,” 36, 37, 40, 90–91, 147 Ul’ianovsk, 116 United States, 3, 8, 17, 21, 46, 67–68, 85, 89, 94, 114 universities, 17, 44–45, 73, 76, 79–80, 161; civilian, 15, 21, 44–45, 57, 66, 147, 183; Moscow State University, 117; Kharkiv Military University of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, 57, 92, 144; V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, 35, 38, 42, 46, 48, 49, 57, 183 Uzbekistan, 40, 108, 143 V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, 35, 38, 42, 46, 48, 49, 57, 183 Vatican, 158 Vienna, 34 Vietnam, 21, 70–71 VIRTA, 2, 4, 11, 14–22; administration and, 17, 46–47, 57; atheism and, 6, 17, 169; built environment of, 32, 44, 46–49; city of Kharkiv and, 2, 16–17, 34, 44, 49, 57, 59, 180; communism and VIRTA officers, 4, 22, 49, 53, 57, 70, 72, 81, 95, 142, 181; Communist Party and, 19, 53, 70, 56, 70, 72–73; creation of, 44–45; decline of, 57, 91–94; ethnicity and, 77–80, 90, 93, 96; Great Patriotic War and, 32, 44, 46; living conditions at, 52–57; nationalism and, 91, 93, 95; sports and, 49, 53–58, 81; women and, 18–19, 21, 52, 77. See also Kharkiv Military University of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Volkogonov, Dmitri, 70, 72 Voskresensk, 109

Walicki, Andrzej, 90 Wanner, Catherine, 12 War and Peace, 4 Warsaw, 34 Warsaw Pact, 21, 71 Weber, Max, 69, 164 Wehrmacht, 40, 41, 47 West Point, 46, 84 Western Sahara, 71 White Army, 37 Wild Steppe, 34 women: careers and, 104–105, 108– 116, 117, 120–21, 126–27, 128, 183; children and, 107, 117–18, 121, 125–26; communism and, 49, 106, 111, 113, 156; education and, 116, 117, 120; Great Patriotic War and, 105, 107; homemaking and, 103, 116–122, 126, 128; lionization of motherhood and, 23, 89, 104, 106, 121, 127; propaganda and, 106; religion and, 161, 163; sexism and, 105, 116, 125–27; socialism and, 104, 105–106; socialist marriage and, 103–104, 122–26; Soviet history of, 105–108; VIRTA and, 18–19, 21, 52, 77. See also “Babushka phenomenon,” Christianity: intergenerational practices and World War II. See Great Patriotic War Yanukovych, Viktor, 148 Yom Kippur War, 71 Yugoslav wars, 71 Yushchenko, Viktor, 146 Zaporizha, 34 Zdorovenko, Oleg Vital’evich, 99n59, 184n1 Zhivets, Valentin Grigor’evich, 96n1 Zhuk, Sergei I., 8–10, 12 Zhukov Military Academy, 16 Zolotarev, Sergei Petrovich, 145, 167

About the Author

Michael T. Westrate is the director of the Graduate School Office of Grants and Fellowships at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also concurrent faculty in history and first-year studies. He has published on the subjects of pedagogy, Soviet dissident history, and the intersections of nationalism and historiography.

231