The Archeology of Bolshevik Knowledge, Or the Birth of Stalinism from the Spirit of Grand Cultural Projects

These days, only historians interested in early Soviet ideological interpretations would peruse the first edition of the Bol´shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Great Soviet Encyclopedia, hereafter BSE) or the Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR (History of the Civil War in the USSR, hereafter IGV). But when they search major research libraries for the BSE's distinctive dark-green volumes with red spines or leaf through the pages of the large crimson volumes of the IGV, they will no longer see these books as mere repositories of Bolshevik texts. After reading Brian Kassof's article, a student of Soviet history is bound to pay attention to "paratext" or the non-textual features of a printed work. It is fascinating to read about how page layouts, headings, and editorial information reflected the changing nature of the encyclopedia project and the growing role of ideology in Soviet cultural production. Likewise, after perusing Elaine MacKinnon's paper, readers will find it difficult to see Soviet history books simply as texts, without imagining the astonishing mixture of belief and survival skills that motivated their authors. Knowing more about the personality of Isaak Izrailevich Mints, his passion for Pushkin and Shakespeare, and the ways that the Civil War formed him as an agitator allows one to see the imprint his generation of scholars left on the IGV project and other historical works of Stalin's time.

Attention to features other than the "facts" and interpretations found in the texts of these monumental Stalinist projects is only one trait uniting the excellent articles by MacKinnon and Kassof. In the pages that follow, I attempt to show that the many parallels between the two articles in fact mean that both authors, in different ways, are analyzing the same fundamental qualities of the emerging Stalinist culture.

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The Bolsheviks' intensely ideological view of the world led to the proliferation of monumental historical and reference works in the USSR. History had to be rewritten to emphasize its inner logic leading to the victory of socialism, but all other fields of knowledge needed reshaping too, so that they could conform to the materialist viewpoint. This familiar and seductively simple scheme of the Bolshevik remaking of learning is, of course, missing two important points. First, Bolshevik theory itself was unstable and constantly changing, especially during the decade immediately after the Revolution, but also during Stalin's tenure at the helm. Second, far from being independent judges standing above the cultural sphere, party ideologues were part of the Soviet "cultural ecosystem," which acted upon them just as they sought to reshape it.¹ These two corrections turn a static picture of Soviet cultural production into a dynamic one in which the line between the state and its cultural agents is no longer solid. They also imply that Bolshevik culture evolved—an evolution brought about by complex interactions in the cultural sphere among ideologues, cultural figures, and their audiences, rather than by the state's simple Diktat.²

Keeping this "dynamic" model of Soviet culture in mind, let us proceed to the first common feature of the articles by MacKinnon and Kassof. Both authors examine the difference between original designs, for the IGV and the BSE, and final products. The change, which occurred halfway through the BSE and early in the IGV project—but in both cases during the mid-to-late 1930s—was obviously related to the advent of Stalinism in culture. But what was the exact nature of this transformation?

To put things in better perspective, it helps to start with the encyclopedia project because it began during the 1920s. Kassof shows that the BSE grew out of an idealistic vision of an ideologically coherent...