Reading Revolution

This chapter analyses the large and hitherto unexplored archives of readers’ letters to Politizdat and to individual authors about the series (Iurii Trifonov, Natan Eidel′man), in order to challenge understandings of how late Soviet literature was read, and to diversify the ‘uses’ of Soviet biography. Reader responses to the series reveal a vibrant multiplicity of late Soviet ‘interpretive communities’ and hermeneutic practices: the traditionally Soviet model of remoulding the self in the image of the hero; both factographic and more sophisticated historical reflection; and critique of the late Soviet public sphere and its constraints on self-expression. The ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ series thus exemplifies the ways in which late Soviet ‘official’ culture could also contribute to pluralization and ‘diverse thinking’ (raznomyslie), which is often identified only with the underground. The historical collaboration and solidarity facilitated by the correspondence between the series’ authors and their readers also suggest the survival of intelligentsia networks and ideas of literary professionalism from the Khrushchev-era thaw.

Telling Revolutionary Lives

This chapter explores the Brezhnev-era ‘biography boom’, when biography was collected, consumed, and critiqued with extraordinary interest, thanks in part to ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ as one of the most prominent and prolific biographical series. This biography boom grew out of the post-Stalinist shift to more private forms of reading and more psychologically sophisticated literature, and was supported by developed socialism’s unprecedented ideological focus on the individual personality (lichnost′) as multi-faceted. The series served as a laboratory of different models of ‘revolutionary’ selfhood, and as a forum for novelistic experimentation with biographical narrative that often exceeded contemporary developments in the genre in the West (as well as in other types of Soviet biography). However, this experimentation endured onerous suspicion and interference. The series’ texts were caught between traditional views of revolutionary identity and more innovative, even subversive, explorations of psychology and ethics. This helps to explain why the series consistently produced a significant quotient of much more conventional biographies, especially of Bolsheviks, complicating its identity for writers, critics, and readers.

Politizdat’s Literary Turn After Stalin

This chapter analyses the effects on political publishing of the party and state authorities’ urgent concerns about the language and form of Soviet propaganda, which emerged very soon after Stalin’s death, lasted throughout the post-Stalin period, and targeted Politizdat as political literature’s main producer. This major drive for more engaging propaganda gave rise, in the 1950s and 1960s, to unprecedented critique of the language of Politizdat’s previous publications, and then to the embrace of biography as the most lively and effective form of propaganda. The creation of the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ series initiated a large-scale, long-term experiment with the biography genre and with literary collaboration to revitalize political literature’s popular appeal: it was intended to produce evocative and emotionally involving portraits of a huge gallery of ‘revolutionaries’. The last part of this chapter traces the early, embattled years of the series between its creation in 1964 and its launch in 1968, the same year as the party’s ideological crackdown connected to the intervention in Czechoslovakia.

Investigating Revolution

‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ was a major forum for experimentation with the Soviet historical novel, and fuelled the craze for historicist writing and thinking throughout late socialism. The series’ aim of revitalizing revolutionary myth chimed with the burgeoning historical and documentary interests of many late Soviet writers: this often persuaded them to join the series, and stimulated an enduring ‘historical turn’ within their careers. In turn, their works contributed to vibrant public debates about historical truth and documentary literature, and also about revolutionary selfhood, ethics, violence, and terror, extending and enriching the debates of the thaw. The second part of the chapter focuses in on the sophisticated, multi-faceted representation of the late nineteenth-century ‘People’s Will’ (Narodnaia volia) movement in the series’ texts, by writers including Iurii Davydov, Iurii Trifonov, and Vladimir Voinovich, which allowed them to pose complex questions about the origins of Bolshevism, as well as reflecting through ‘Aesopian’ poetics on late Soviet ‘stagnation’ and the dissident movement.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ (Plamennye revoliutsionery) series of over 150 biographies and historical novels, published by Politizdat throughout late socialism until the Soviet collapse. It contextualizes the decision to create the series, and to target sophisticated literary and historical writers regardless of their ‘official’ reputations, within the party’s urgent and persistent post-Stalinist demands for more emotionally and intellectually engaging revolutionary propaganda. At the same time, it suggests that this ‘historical turn’ was not just a top-down initiative, by highlighting the passionate interest in historical investigation and reflection shared by many post-Stalinist writers and ordinary Soviet readers. It also introduces key conceptual frameworks to understand the series’ operations within Politizdat, Soviet publishing, and the Soviet (and unofficial) literary worlds: ‘niches’ and ‘oases’ within official institutions; ‘in between’ and ‘grey zone’ literature; and the complex ‘circuit’ of Soviet writing, publishing, and reading.

Perestroika and Post-Soviet Afterlives

This chapter focusses on the dramatic changes that the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ series underwent over the last decade of Soviet power. It first analyses the difficult conditions for the series in the early 1980s, as official suspicion of the series and its ‘niche’ mounted, and as censorship became more oppressive. However, these conditions of the late Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko periods ultimately proved easier and more productive than the Gorbachev era: glasnost and perestroika marked the peak of popular interest in Soviet history nationwide, but also a full-blown crisis for the series. It came under threat in the mid- to late 1980s, as both public and internal criticism singled out ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ for its historical falsifications and declining literary quality; sales and popular interest went into free fall, and the series closed in 1990. The conclusion traces Politizdat’s transformation into a post-Soviet philosophical publishing house, and shows that the series itself has been selectively reimagined, from the late 1990s to the present, as a dissident and liberal project, rather than fully revived in all its diversity.

Authors, Editors, and the Niches of Late Soviet Literature

This chapter traces the formation and evolution of the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ community in the Brezhnev era from three points of view: of writers as they decided whether and how to collaborate with it; editors, as they struggled to recruit writers and develop a distinctive culture for the series; and Politizdat’s managers and their party-state overseers, who were consistently suspicious of this unusual ‘niche’ and often interfered in it. Despite heavy censorship, political interference, and a large dose of conformist writing ‘to order’, the series sustained an ‘oasis’ or ‘niche’ within late Soviet literature, though this term fails to capture the effort involved in maintaining this sense of difference. In employing a very wide range of writers throughout late socialism, it also blurred the boundaries between Soviet and dissident literature, and compels us to reconsider the notion that ‘thaw’ writers, literary experimentation, and historical reflection migrated entirely into unofficial publishing after 1964 or 1968. Instead, such fragile niches kept late socialist literary identities and practices in flux throughout the Brezhnev period.