Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda

“It is quite clear that the Socialist economy is not founded on Platon Karatayev,” declared L.D. Trotsky in 1920, attacking a symbolic peasant figure in L.N. Tolstoi’s War and Peace as a remnant of old Russia.1 In this declaration Trotsky articulated a common dream of the Bolsheviks: to cut themselves off from Russia’s past and remake the mind of the Russian people in accordance with their own ideology. After ten years of experimentation, however, the Bolsheviks found that their socialist heroes and other symbols were not attractive enough by themselves to mobilize the ordinary people in war, and those symbols needed to be supplemented with other ones, closer to the people’s hearts from the tsarist era. This u-turn, or retreat, of Soviet politics has long been well known, but recently it has aroused renewed interest as an important topic in the history of national identity in modern Russia. This volume, composed of 12 articles and many historical documents, is a fruit of this renewed interest in the rehabilitation of the tsarist era in Stalin’s Russia, and the attempt of the editors to investigate the complicated and contradictory Stalinist revision of history by organizing collective research from different disciplines attains much success. However contradictory and full of tensions, it is beyond doubt that the revision of the tsarist era in the 1930s was launched from above. Tracing the downfall of Dem’ian Bednyi by the mid-1930s, Alexander Dubrovsky makes clear the gulf between the old, internationalist modes of mocking the Russian epic and the new official modes of rehabilitating traditional Russian culture. The revision of history for propaganda purposes is evident in two studies on the rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible. As Maureen Perrie points out, among M.A. Bulgakov’s banned plays, only Ivan Vasil’evich had not been revived because of its historical theme. David Brandenberger and Kevin Platt underline the practical necessity for the party leaders to rehabilitate Ivan the Terrible because of his mobilizing capacity. That the revision of tsarist history was initiated from above does not mean, of course, that it was just a manipulation by the party to mobilize the people. A