Oleg Khlevnyuk biography

Russian authors of foreign leaders succeed better than domestic - work about Soviet leaders are often politicized, not always reliable, and sometimes even based on fake documents. About what this is connected with and how to navigate the reader in the books of the biographical genre was told in the summer reading at the VDNH historian, the author of the book Stalin. The life of one leader »Oleg Klevnyuk.

The purpose of the leader’s biography is propaganda in the Soviet period the biographical genre continued to develop. The leaders of the first plan-Stalin, Lenin-were in the USSR the object of cult and studying exclusively official historiography, that is, not just some specific author, but a whole team. A brief biography ”and the Stalinist biography were officialdom, but if the prospectors from official structures wrote the first, then Stalin himself wrote the second for the most part.

This text is in the archive, with a huge number of corrections, inscribed passages, sometimes very curious: sometimes Stalin entered the lines glorifying himself. He selected illustrations for the publication and treated this very seriously. For example, he rejected his slightly ridiculous photo in Budenovka, apparently the times of the Civil War. After Stalin, other times came, but the Soviet leaders continued to acquire various biographical publications - we can recall at least the biographical Brezhnev books “Malaya Earth”, “virgin lands”, “Renaissance”.

The trilogy was well written and had to arouse warm, positive emotions to the leader, which probably happened. I must say that these books were written very reasonably, they are small, they are easily read, which was an important and thorough propaganda technique. Why did Khrushchev erected a monument to Dzerzhinsky in the Khrushchev period, much changed in the approach to the biography.

Then the framework of freedom, including in relation to the biographical genre, expanded a little. This happened, first of all, for political reasons. On the one hand, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and other leaders, which were at that time in disgrace, were not objects of biographical research, the works of them did not appear, but attention was drawn to other personalities that were considered politically profitable.

Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow. On the right is the building of the Children's World store: RIA Novosti Khrushchev was to contrast the Leninsky period with the dominant democracy and the correct socialism of the Stalinist period, which, as you know, was criticized by Nikita Sergeyevich. Accordingly, it was necessary to elevate the Lenin period, and not only at the expense of Vladimir Ilyich himself, but also those people who surrounded him.

There were not so many of them, most of them died in years, others became opposition, but of those who remained, tried to blind Pantheon. In this sense, the figure of Felix Dzerzhinsky, who turned out to be a very comfortable leader, is very characteristic. He was not the first row, but Lenin's ally. On the other hand, he died very on time in the year, so he did not become a victim of repression.

As a result, Dzerzhinsky during this period began to write, make films. The sequence of events testifies to much: the year - the XX Congress of the Party, the year - open the children's world on Lubyanka, which corrected the former symbolism of this place. In the year, a monument to Dzerzhinsky is erected, around which there are so many disputes today, but then it became a symbol of a change in the role of punitive organs in the Soviet system.

The fact is that of the existing leaders of these bodies, Felix Edmundovich alone remained a revolutionary, Leninist symbol. It is difficult to imagine in the square a monument to Yagoda, Yezhov or Beria. How to choose the right leader for propaganda were other political figures, who also began to lift the shield. This was done in order to show that in the Stalin period, not all were bad leaders, because this topic, of course, was risen.

Therefore, he tried to show that no, we were in place, tried to somehow resist the Stalinist arbitrariness, although this was not so noticeable. Several such characters were invented, one of them was Pavel Postyshev, the secretary of the all -Union Communist Party, Stalin's ally, then became a party secretary in Ukraine. Everywhere he proved himself a rather tough politician, but he suffered, he was shot.

Therefore, under Khrushchev, they blinded the legend that he allegedly entered into conflict with Stalin, opposed repression and so on. In Khrushchev’s speech at the XX Party Congress, a fragment even got a fragment that at the Plenum of the Central Committee in the year of Postyushev expressed doubts about the guilt of one of his arrested employees: “I do not believe it ... I can’t imagine how difficult years can go with the party and then go to the Trotskyists in the year.

It is strange ... ”Khrushchev said in detail that Postyashev suffered to counteract the Stalin course of repression. True, then, when the archives opened and the transcripts of plenums became available, it turned out that the quote was truncated. In fact, Pustyshev continued the phrase as follows: “It is strange.Some kind of worm was all the time. When he had this worm-in a year, in M, it is difficult to say, but, obviously, there was some kind of worm that he did some work so that he would get into the camp of enemies.

” Such politically motivated legends were the basis for writing new biographies. For example, for example, they wrote about the “correct” leader, they even remembered that the New Year holidays and Christmas trees were returned on his initiative in his initiative. Another of the figures of this series is Sergey Kirov. He was a faithful and completely loyal ally of Stalin, but, in the end, became a victim of the terrorist act of the loner Leonid Nikolaev.

Under Khrushchev, they came up with the version that Kirova actually ordered Stalin to kill, because the party leader opposed the leader, headed a certain opposition to him. Such a version actually became the official Khrushchev. Now we know that it is unlikely to correspond to reality, several commissions that worked on this business and searched for evidence of the murder of Kirov as a result of a conspiracy from above, did not find anything.

Nevertheless, Kirov became a hero not involved in Stalin's atrocities, moreover, resisting him. Many biographies were written about him that came out both in the days of Khrushchev and later. It must be said that in the Brezhnev period in this sense, much has changed, biographies began to write less actively. They almost did not write about Gregory Ordzhonikidze, who committed suicide Oleg Klevnyuk adheres to this version.

According to another theory, the Georgian Bolshevik was killed - approx. They rarely remembered Kirov, they tried not to say anything about Stalin. In general, during these years several biographies of “safe” leaders came out: Yakov Sverdlov, who died very early and did not cause any negative emotions in the company, the same Felix Dzerzhinsky, George Chicherin, who departed from power in the middle of the X, Vyacheslav Malyshev, a well -known addict in the tank industry.

Why are foreigners or publicists the biographies of Soviet leaders are written by very curious things in perestroika: the first time the biography was generally stopped publishing. In the same series of ZhZL, almost 10 years, almost no biographies of the Soviet leaders appeared for many years, almost 10 years. Of course, here we can say that it was a certain editorial policy, that they tried not to intervene in this matter, they were afraid of some unnecessary reaction.

Obviously, much depended on historians - they did not offer society and publishers good, high -quality texts. It was not bad for that time, he introduced some new materials into circulation, but these were very chaotic and not very understandable texts, they aroused interest more likely due to the novelty of the problems than their content. Time passed, and only in the year a book about Lenin appeared in ZhZL.

Interestingly, it was written by Robert Payne another year. Of course, in 38 years the book could not help but become obsolete. Over the past decades, the scientific community has accumulated a lot of knowledge on this topic, a huge number of new documents about Lenin have appeared. The appearance of the book by Payne reflected a certain trend: biographies of a number of “controversial” leaders were published in the performance of foreign authors.

The choice was unmistakable from all points of view. Firstly, this is high-quality work. Secondly, the author of the author did not cause a sharp reaction, since the author was a foreigner. You can notice another important trend in the HUR series - biographies of Soviet leaders in it are still mostly written by publicists. There are only a few biographies written by professional historians - this is still the same Taubman or, for example, George Chernyavsky with his book about Trotsky.

They are mainly written by professional historians. Apparently, this is due to the presence of a certain historiographic tradition. Historians of the pre -Soviet period were better prepared to make up for a growing interest in biographies. The biographies of Soviet leaders written by publicists are often quite high quality, nevertheless differ in some features. The historical context is poorly spelled out in them, which obviously reflects the level of training of the author.

A special emphasis is on personal life and spicy details from the life of the leader. In principle, this is important, but it is obvious that the political leader is interesting to us by his activity. The journalistic biographies in this sense are insufficient. An important reason for this weakness of journalistic biographies is poor knowledge of sources, support on dubious materials to the detriment of archives and documentary publications.

For example, publicists prefer memoirs, with their bright characteristics and details. However, memoirs, as you know, have a significant drawback - they are only to some extent reliable. Now it is possible to check memoirs using other sources. For example, many memoirists who worked in Stalin's times always write that Stalin had at a reception in the office. Visits for visits to the Kremlin cabinet of the leader allow you to verify these statements.Often we get a negative result, which should be taken into account when using certain memoirs, but publicists are usually not interested in conducting such an analysis of sources, because this involves the rejection of bright, winning memoirs.

As writers rewrite history since there are not enough sources for biographies, they begin to invent. Fake documents are not so very rare in history. As for Soviet history, they began to be made in the pre -war years, and then the flow of creation of fakes only increased. Our time is also marked by the heyday of fake documents. The ancestor of the latest fakes I would call the writer Vladimir Uspensky, the author of the book “Privy Advisor to the Leader” published in the late x.

She aroused tremendous interest, her circulation amounted to hundreds of thousands of copies. This book was a journalistic work, but, according to Uspensky, he wrote it on the basis of the manuscript of one secret adviser to Stalin, who worked with him for many years. The especially secret documents of this person allegedly fell into the hands of the author and formed the basis of the work.

This example was contagious.

We are faced with a stream of fakes. For example, the writer Vladimir Karpov, author of the famous book “Generalissimo”, became their victim. The most “sensational” discoveries in this book are based on fake documents: the NKVD agreement with the Gestapo, the report of Beria on the results of mass repressions, which indicated that of all the convicted enemies of the people, 90 percent were Jews, and so on.

The methods and circumstances of the manufacture of these fakes, as well as their authors, are practically not known to us, and such fabricated materials are easily refuted by genuine documents. One of the known recent fakes is the “Beria Diaries”. They appeared after a very long propaganda campaign, in which even large -type central newspapers participated.