On 22 September 2016, Barbara Martin defended her PhD dissertation in International History, entitled “Filling the ‘Blank Spots’ of the Dark Pages of our History: Dissident Historians’ Underground Accounts of the Soviet Past (1956–1985)” at the Graduate Institute. Professor Davide Rodogno presided the committee, which included Honorary Professor Andre Liebich, Thesis Director, and Professor Kathleen Smith, from the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East-European Studies (CERES) at Georgetown University. Ms Martin shows how these historians, by publishing extensive research works across the Iron Curtain, based on hundreds of witnesses' accounts, went beyond the limited denunciations by Khrushchev in 1956–1961 and testified to a widespread aspiration to reveal “historical truth” about the past. As she has just been awarded an Early Postdoc.Mobility fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Ms Martin will be able to work on the publication of her dissertation and start a new project on Soviet dissidents’ strategies of political action.

The publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s groundbreaking research The Gulag Archipelago, in 1973, has often been acknowledged as an important landmark in the history of the Cold War. However, much less well-known is the history of the production of this book, as well as the general political and societal context, which gave rise not only to The Gulag Archipelago, but also to similar works by dissident researchers of the Soviet past.

Ms Martin’s thesis concentrates on the trajectories of these “dissident historians” of the post-Stalin era. She defines her subjects as “individuals who engaged in independent research on the past, guided by ethical and/or political convictions, and consciously exposed themselves to state repression”. Because Soviet official historians failed to tackle crucial chapters of the Soviet past, in particular the history of Stalin’s crimes, non-professional researchers undertook what was initially independent research, but was soon regarded by the Soviet authorities as political dissent. After Leonid Brezhnev replaced Nikita Khrushchev at the helm of the Communist Party, the limited policy of “destalinisation” (official condemnation of Stalin’s crimes) launched in 1956 with the “Secret Speech” was discarded, and it became clear that these independent studies could not be published in the Soviet Union. However, with the rise of the Soviet dissident movement and such phenomena as samizdat (underground circulation of typewritten texts) and tamizdat (publication abroad), new avenues of diffusion for these works opened up.

In her study, Ms Martin adopts a double focus: on a broader, macro level, she examines the political and societal trends that triggered the rise of this phenomenon of dissident historiography, in particular the role of the campaign of partial rehabilitation of Stalin in the 1966–1969 period, which led to protests from the anti-Stalinist intelligentsia. On the micro-level, she analyses the individual strategies that led these researchers into dissent and allowed them to overcome the obstacles on their way.

Four individuals are more closely examined: besides Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, she considers the cases of the liberal communist dissident Roy Medvedev, author of a study on the causes and consequences of Stalinism entitled Let History Judge (1971); the professional historian Alexander Nekrich, whose book June 22, 1941 on Stalin’s responsibility in failing to prepare the USSR to the German attack, published in 1965, became the subject of an intense polemics known as the “Nekrich Affair” in 1967; and Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, son of a famous Bolshevik revolutionary, who published a vitriolic biography of Stalin (The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny) in 1980.

The main finding of this research is that dissident historians initially sought to collaborate with the Soviet regime, as it seemed to be reforming in the Khrushchev era. However, this posture of loyalty evolved after 1965, as the political climate deteriorated: anti-Stalinists were then faced with a range of options that can be expressed in the terms of Albert Hirschman’s theory “Exit, voice, loyalty”. Protests (voice) were an option that some attempted to use, but with few results. By the end of the decade, Medvedev and Nekrich had been excluded from the Communist Party and Solzhenitsyn from the Writers’ Union, and the alternative became between a return to loyalty, which now meant compromising one’s ideas, and exit – from the country (exile) or from the official sphere, through samizdat and publication abroad in tamizdat.

Another finding of the thesis is that dissident historians were never isolated researchers. In their work, they relied on the use of oral testimonies from hundreds of witnesses, many of them former gulag prisoners. Moreover, they benefitted from the active help and support of broad networks of sympathisers and helpers, who contributed in various ways to the writing of these works. Finally, through its broad focus, this dissertation also shows some less spectacular but still significant cases of underground historical writing taking place in the shadow of these more famous works. Overall, the picture of late Soviet societal activism conveyed in this research is very far from the usual stereotypes about a “stagnant” Brezhnev-era society and demonstrates the need to go beyond the perception of Soviet dissidents as isolated fighters for freedom in a sea of conformism.

Although this research focuses on a chapter of the past, it touches upon issues that remain of great relevance for today: in many countries of the post-Soviet space, history continues to be instrumentalised to fit political needs, and alternative narratives are marginalised, sometimes repressed. “Memory wars” opposing Russia to its former satellites have been rife in the last decade. In Russia itself, some attempts are made to silence narratives that emphasize the dark pages of the Soviet past, for example through the harassment of the NGO “Memorial,” which concentrates on historical research and education on past and present human-rights violations.

Thanks to her Early Postdoc.Mobility fellowship, Ms Martin will spend six months in Moscow and one year in Bremen, Germany, where she will carry out her new research project on Soviet dissidents’ strategies of political action during the Cold War and Perestroika, taking the example of two famous dissidents: Andrei Sakharov and Roy Medvedev. She will also be working on the publication of her PhD research with the British publishing house I.B. Tauris. Her past publications are accessible here.

Full citation of the thesis: Martin, Barbara. “Filling the ‘Blank Spots’ of the Dark Pages of our History: Dissident Historians’ Underground Accounts of the Soviet Past (1956–1985)”. PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2016.

Photo: Moscow State University. Courtesy of Barbara Martin.