Of Political Resurrection and ‘Lost Treasures’ in Soviet and Russian Politics

Abstract

Drawing from the central notion in Russian culture of resurrection, and from Hannah Arendt’s concept of political ‘lost treasures’, this article analyses initiatives for democratisation during the Soviet Thaw (1956–1964) and perestroika (1985–1991); and current attempts to recall the legacy of medieval Pskov and Novgorod’s republican institutions. Retrieving memories of civic action matters intellectually and politically because it roots Russian democratisation in alternative national traditions, which, curiously, both Russian democratic activists and Putin supporters dismiss today. The empirical data come from interviews, ethnographic observations, and studies on Russian/Soviet politics and memory.

Are there ‘usable pasts’—some of Hannah Arendt’s ‘lost treasures’—for political reform and democratisation in Soviet and Russian history (Arendt 2006)? This article answers this question affirmatively and offers empirical evidence, which it analyses through the conceptual lens of resurrection, a central notion in Russian culture and history. Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘lost treasure’ provides another, more secular analytical category, which shares important commonalities with political resurrection. The first piece of empirical evidence of usable pasts is vast: it covers almost 40 years of collective and individual self-transformations from 1953 to 1991; the second comes from Russian academic research on the republican traditions of the cities of Pskov and Novgorod during the Middle Ages. In spite of its broad range, the empirical evidence has no pretence to exhaustiveness; plausibility, factuality and relevance to issues of democratisation have guided the author’s choice.

When this non-Russian scholar presented this argument to an audience of Russian pro-democracy activists and scholars, it understandably provoked disbelief (Guisan 2016). Indeed, selective references to the past have helped legitimise the turn of the Putin presidency to authoritarianism at home and imperialism abroad (Kalinin 2011; Dugin 2015; Hill & Gaddy 2015). Russian liberals face a difficult choice between two forms of memory, which Svetlana Boym calls restorative and reflective nostalgia, at the intersection of collective and individual memory. Restorative nostalgia insists upon a singular narrative, which brings about ‘the secular transformation of fatality into continuity’ and ‘meaning’ (Boym 2001, p. 42). It applies to any ‘official’ memory, promoted to unify a people, be it the Russians or another people. To the contrary, reflective nostalgia does not pretend to rebuild the past as a mythical home; it is ‘ironic, inconclusive, and fragmentary. … The past is not made in the image of the present or seen as a foreboding of some present disaster; rather the past opens up a multitude of potentialities, nonteleogical possibilities of historical development’ (Boym 2001, p. 50). In 1998 Boym wondered, in a moment of reflective nostalgia with a group of Moscow intellectuals, why the days of August 1991, when intellectuals, workers, entrepreneurs and soldiers briefly united against a hardliner putsch, ‘so quickly became irrelevant’, a question she left pending (Boym 2001, p. 71).

To contribute to a healthy patriotism based on achievement while acknowledging and atoning for the totalitarian Soviet past when ‘crimes and acts of heroism are embedded in the same historical moment, the same historical process’ is difficult (Wolfe 1997, p. 179). The Russian democrats’ ‘nonchalant dismissal of national history as a source of positive inspiration’ prevented them from offering alternative narratives during the 1990s, when President Boris Yel’tsin celebrated tsarist times as a source of Russian identity and ‘endorsed forgiving’ Soviet-era abuses ‘with a dose of forgetting’ (Smith 2002, pp. 29, 172). The dearth of constructive liberal narratives about the past has persisted in the Putin years, while Stalin’s actions and legacy have undergone an official ‘resurrection’: the Soviet leader’s ruthlessness and purges are now portrayed as a necessary evil during trying times, and his strong leadership, especially during the Great Patriotic War, is celebrated (Whitaker 2012, pp. 6–7; Nuzov 2014, p. 313; Kolesnikov 2016).

The commitment of so many Russian liberals to atone for past evil is praiseworthy, but critical analysis by itself cannot ground constructive political action. This article argues that both relatively recent and much older transformative moments reveal elements of an alternative Russian historical tradition to imperialism without and violent constraint within, which are worth resurrecting through the articulation of fact-based narratives. The years of the Thaw (1956–1964) and of perestroika and glasnost’ (1985–1991) witnessed individual and collective resurrection-like processes. Lavinia Stan cites the Soviet Union as ‘a rare instance of a non-democracy seeking redress’ with processes of transitional justice having already started in 1987 (Stan 2009, pp. 222, 223); the ‘unraveling of legitimizing myths’ was a grassroots as well as an elite-initiated process (Aron 2012, pp. 112–71), which involved thousands of Russians in truth-seeking and truth-telling about their shared history. The earlier Thaw had prepared the ground.

One reason why these relatively recent experiences of individual and collective transformation have been forgotten in Russia, and even forsaken, is that stable political, economic and judicial institutions and an effective state failed to develop out of them, at the cost of much suffering (Boym 2001, p. 58; Kotkin 2001; Tsygankov 2014, pp. 96–9). President Putin has remained in power for 18 years because he brought ‘order’, which the Russian people equate with economic and political stability and prioritise over human rights and civil freedoms (Tsygankov 2014, pp. 137–39; Khrushcheva 2014, pp. 165–66). Therefore today, and this is a paradox, both the Putin regime and its opponents consider the Thaw of the 1950s and the 1980s’ perestroika and glasnost’ as irrelevant to public concerns. However, there is another way to revive a Russian tradition of popular participation, which the article also discusses, and which skirts controversies about the impact of Soviet transformations after Stalin’s death: retrieving evidence from a much older history. This is the path some Russian academics have followed as they research the republican practices of the medieval cities of Novgorod and Pskov.

To probe the existence of usable pasts for democratisation in Soviet and Russian history, this article proceeds in the following manner. The first part discusses the theoretical underpinnings of the argument by defining and justifying the analytical use of the concepts of ‘resurrection’ and ‘lost treasure’. The second part offers empirical evidence of individual and collective resurrection-like transformations during the Thaw and the years of perestroika. The third part discusses scholarly initiatives in the 2010s to retrieve the lost treasure of Russian republicanism. The conclusion revisits the idea of usable pasts under increasingly authoritarian conditions. The empirical data come from primary research (interviews and ethnographic observation) and secondary sources such as memoirs and essays, and academic literature on cultural history, transitional justice and democratisation.

Theorising usable pasts: political resurrection and ‘lost treasures’

‘For heaven’s sake, Mrs Durr, don’t send us any essay on the Russian soul. Everybody has done that. Go to Russia and do a job of reporting’, her editor told the left-wing New York journalist Rheta Durr when she went to Petrograd in 1917 (Barber 2016). Like Durr’s editor, although for different reasons, academic disciplines tend to thrive on sharp distinctions. Studying mindsets is the prerogative of cultural studies rather than political science (Smith 2002, p. 6), and the collective level of analysis must not be confused with the individual level. Yet inner transformations and action in the public sphere and individual and collective initiatives cannot be dissociated from each other that easily. The concepts of resurrection and lost treasure can help bridge the gap between different perspectives, given that current English-language scholarship on Russian democratisation exhibits little interest in memory, self-reflection and transitional justice.

The voluminous literature on the democratisation of Russia focuses on pathologies and needed institutional and policy change (Smyth 2006; Sakwa 2008a, 2008b; Bunce et al. 2010; Remington 2011; Rose et al. 2011; Stoner & McFaul 2013; Van Herpen 2013; Wegren 2013; Hill & Gaddy 2015). Although Russia transitioned successfully from Soviet-style autocracy to a modest form of democracy in the 1990s, it failed to consolidate this democracy, and reverted to a form of autocracy under Putin (Stoner & McFaul 2013, pp. 27–9). Yet democracy and democratisation are ‘essentially contested’ concepts (Lukes 1974, p. 9), best understood as a continuum rather than an end point. Especially in the case of Russia, binary distinctions such as authoritarian/democratic or consolidated/unconsolidated are not particularly helpful for empirical analyses of democratisation (Grugel & Bishop 2014, pp. 1–11, 206–7). Richard Sakwa’s concept of the Russian ‘dual state’, with its ‘typical panoply of democratic institutions’ and ‘parallel system or administrative regime’ that transcends the rules of the constitutional state, carries more explanatory purchase (Sakwa 2011, p. 527).¹ In his extensive study, Russian Politics and Society, Sakwa engages briefly with the question of whether there are ‘elements of usable past in Russian tradition’ that could assist the transition to democracy (Sakwa 2008a, pp. 445, 448). He notes the absence of truth or reconciliation commissions, although a Commission on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Repression was established in 1989 in Russia (Gessen 2017, pp. 145, 493). In 1988 human rights activists founded Memorial, an NGO that has worked hard and successfully toward the documentation and official acknowledgment of the massive human rights violations committed under Stalin, and since. But resistance to full de-Stalinisation is widespread for cultural and generational reasons, and Sakwa concludes that there are few ‘re’s in Russia except the ‘rediscovery’ and ‘recovery’ of native memory and indigenous traditions (Sakwa 2008a, p. 476).

The Western analytical toolkit of democratisation studies and transitional justice has trouble accounting for important transformative phenomena because the Soviet experience departs from the processes regarded as conventional in Western scholarship. There were no lustration processes (Nuzov 2014, pp. 308–10), no trials except that of the Communist Party, and only selected citizens have had access to their files in the late Soviet Union and its successor state, the Russian Federation.² As a result Russia remains ‘conspicuously absent from the debate on transitional justice’ (Nuzov 2014, p. 274). However, much truth-telling and confrontation with the past have occurred through literature, public letter-writing, encounters with friends and the media (Boobbyer 2005; Figes 2007; Aron 2012; Etkind 2013; Ostrovsky 2015). In several cases this has contributed to policy changes, as this article’s factual evidence will show.

As Nicolai N. Petro and Oleg Kharkhordin argue, Western scholars should incorporate cultural history into the study of Russian democratic transitions through multidisciplinary approaches (Petro 1995, pp. 3–8; 2004, p. 104; Kharkhordin 1999, p. 361).³ The concepts of resurrection and lost treasure offer ways to bring in Russian cultural discourses and to theorise the links between personal and collective transformation, and memory and political liberalisation. They serve as helpful heuristic devices, a contribution rather than closure to debates on usable pasts in Russian politics. Resurrection has long been associated with the fitful processes of Russian democratisation, although lack of attention to definition is common in contemporary studies on Russian politics with ‘resurrection’ in the title (Remnick 1998; Waller 2004; Sidorov 2006; Whitaker 2012; Moses 2014), perhaps because scholars never fully analyse the meaning of ‘resurrection’. The next two sections probe this important and somewhat neglected question by providing a religious and a secular definition of resurrection, and discussing Arendt’s concept of lost treasure, which is quite compatible with the secular definition of resurrection. Resurrection and retrieval of lost treasures play different but complementary analytical roles in this essay’s interpretation of Soviet and Russian transformations.

Defining resurrection in religious terms

As one analyses a country deeply shaped by Orthodoxy, it is imperative to take into account resurrection’s Christian meanings. The resurrection of the dead is central to Orthodox theology and liturgical practices (Lossky 1978; Esaulov 2006; Pappas 2006). Salvation does not come by faith alone, such as in Lutheran theology, but through a process of continual physical and spiritual sanctification in the here and now. The resurrected Jesus appears to his disciples three days after his crucifixion not as a spirit, but as a fully living human being, walking, talking and partaking of a meal, and his presence announces the fate of those who obey his word on this earth. The road to resurrection after the last judgment of single persons and nations is clearly marked: to feed the hungry, protect the orphan and the persecuted, welcome the stranger, minister to the sick, visit the imprisoned, and act justly (Pappas 2006, p. 35). After his resurrection Jesus does not require confession of past sins from his followers. Peter, his favourite disciple, who disavowed him three times during his trial, must simply repeat three times that he loves Jesus and will ‘take care of his lambs’.⁴ Confession came to play an important role in the Roman Catholic tradition only in the thirteenth century by offering a system of both external policing of the sinner’s behaviour and personal consolation (Brooks 2000, pp. 89–102). Jesus’ parting words to Peter are not about penance, punishment or consolation, but about acting in more responsible ways toward others.

Such ethical and practical demands pervade Tolstoy’s Resurrection (Tolstoy 1994). The plot, which is based on a true (and somewhat autobiographical) story, describes two kinds of earthly resurrections, distinct but intimately linked: the first is about personal salvation, the second about collective transformation. Prince Nekhlyudov completes his inner journey of resurrection by asking Katyusha, the woman he has wronged, to marry him and by offering some of his land to his tenant farmers. Tolstoy also advocates collective resurrection by offering a sharp critique of the recently reformed Russian jury and court system, and of the Russian religious, economic and political institutions at the end of the nineteenth century. Both Katyusha and the tenant farmers reject Nekhlyudov’s offers and the reader is left with a sense of the impossibility of collective resurrection. Resurrection here means a personal and public turning away from past wrongs through acknowledgment to self and others of the evil committed, tangible attempts to repair the harm done, and institutionalising new beginnings.

As Andrew Wachtel writes, the themes of death, resurrection and suicide (fake and real) pervade not only Tolstoy’s later works, including his play The Living Corpse (Tolstoy 1912), but the writings of other great Russian thinkers: Bulgakov, Dostoevsky, Fedorov, Mayakovsky, Nabokov and Pasternak. What makes for a genuine resurrection is a change of identity that transforms relationships with others. Otherwise the ‘resurrected’ is more like a ‘living corpse’ (Wachtel 1992, pp. 261, 268–70). There is a dark side to the search for moral change, however, which Kharkhordin, like Brooks, warns against in his comparative study of the practices for personal regeneration of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet state (Kharkhordin 1999). How then to distinguish the self-initiated resurrection à la Nekhlyudov from ‘disciplinary’ processes of moral improvement? The first challenges political and social conventions for the sake of more freedom and justice, and the second enforces (or willingly conforms to) prevailing opinions and rules with little regard to their substantive content.

Comparing the secular definition of resurrection with Arendt’s ‘lost treasure’

Probably because of its religious connotations, the term ‘resurrection’ is rarely used in the social sciences, with one recent exception: it was the theme of the Council for European Studies’ (CES) 21st International Conference of Europeanists in 2014. Conference programme committee co-chair Kathleen McNamara explained the call: ‘after six years of financial crisis, we were tired of dealing with mostly negative realities and arguments. We wanted to offer some options for alternative discourses’.⁵ The conference’s call stated:

In the wake of crisis in Europe, bits and pieces of the past are being resurrected as a means of understanding the present and imagining the future. … But resurrections are not simply about nostalgia, and they aren’t just a restoration of the past in unchanged form. [They] necessitate fundamental transformations: inserting old things into new contexts, changing their natures, and assigning them new meanings and value. … What elements of Europe’s past, and present, are amenable to reanimation? How do they work in contemporary debate, and how is their relevance to the present disputed?⁶

The call left the terms ‘resurrection’ and ‘reanimation’ undefined. However, its stress on the political relevance of past practices, symbols and concepts to current dilemmas lent itself to the recovery of politically usable pasts. Arendt’s discussion of ‘lost treasures’ has much affinity with the CES’s secular definition of resurrection, although she writes of ‘retrieval’ of the past rather than resurrection or reanimation, which will stand as a proxy for secular resurrection. Well before cultural studies of memory gained their current pre-eminence, Arendt understood the importance of memory to popular participation and theorised the polis as a form of ‘organized remembrance’ (Arendt 1958, p. 198). She enriched debates on usable pasts by offering historically informed theorising of the content of lost treasures: disinterested political engagement on behalf of the common good (Arendt 1993, 2006). Her On Revolution recalls political lost treasures—‘council politics’—from the eighteenth-century New England town meetings and the Parisian sections during the French Revolution to the soviets of the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions, and the 1956 Hungarian councils. These ephemeral, yet influential, councils, which the most meritorious lead and which federate with one another in large countries, discussed and adjudicated shared interests in a manner devoid of partisanship. Arendt mourned the failure to institutionalise councils and their disappearance from collective memory: they became more like mirages than historical realities, and important consequences ensued. In the United States, amnesia led citizens to confuse free trade with the practice of political freedom, and personal self-gratification with the pursuit of happiness, a particularly sorry state of affairs as they interacted with the Soviet regime during the Cold War (Arendt 2006, pp. 106–31, 209). Arendt’s remedy is to recover the original meaning of crucial concepts, which have become clichés through thoughtless use, by studying the speech and deed of historical figures. This article follows this intellectual strategy in discussing personal and political resurrections in the late Soviet Union.

The CES secular concept of resurrection and Arendt’s ‘lost treasure’ do not mention self-transformation, changes of heart or ‘conscience’; in that respect they differ from the religiously informed notion of resurrection as the self-reflective turning away from evildoing, which is so important in Russian culture. Moreover, Jesus’ message draws its power partly from the fact that the messenger is no longer dead but resurrected; a similar fate awaits his disciples if they prove faithful in implementing his teachings. In spite of these differences, the concepts of resurrection and ‘lost treasure’ share some important features. Both hinge upon ‘natality’, the human capacity for new life and new beginnings. Arendt defines freedom as the capacity to start something new, which all human beings are endowed with through being born. Action as the realisation of freedom is therefore rooted in natality, as each birth represents a new beginning and introduction of novelty in the world: natality is ‘the supreme capacity of man’ (Arendt 1975, p. 479). Thus, the CES interpretation of resurrection and Arendt’s retrieval of lost treasures propose decisive breaks with passivity by emphasising action and courage, quintessential political qualities (Arendt 1958, p. 186). They confront earthly conditions in the name of memory by invoking persons who are no longer present on this earth but have a meaningful message for the living. Neither concept announces a happy ‘end of history’, however. Acts, the biblical account of the lives and accomplishments of the disciples after Jesus’s resurrection, provides vivid stories of their many and often deadly tribulations on this earth.⁷

The religious understanding of resurrection sheds light on inner and public journeys of conversion toward more freedom and justice, and provides an important theoretical standpoint from which to probe the Soviet transformative experiences of the 1950s–1960s and 1980s–1990s. Three kinds of initiatives by public actors constitute the empirical evidence for each of these two periods: those of senior leaders, of civil society movements and of one self-reflective individual. To recall their actions is to retrieve a lost treasure. The academic search for Russian republicanism does not involve processes of atonement but the recollection of forgotten political institutions and practices and their application to current dilemmas; in this case, Arendt’s retrieval of lost treasures and the secular version of resurrection suffice for interpretation. What matters most is that the remembrance of specific historical processes establishes precedents (rather than models) for unexpected openings in closed political and social systems and roots civic practices in an indigenous historical terrain.

Empirical evidence: ‘lost treasures’ of the Thaw (1956–1964)

The Soviet ‘Thaw’, which started in the mid-1950s, can be remembered as a kind of resurrection-like phenomenon on a massive collective scale in Soviet history. It began as an entirely top-down process, as befitted the post-totalitarian state, which was in part prompted by the emotional exhaustion of a Soviet leadership that did not want to continue Stalin’s murderous policies (Ostrovsky 2015, p. 26).⁸ Soon it involved thousands of other actors. The Thaw’s actors were no saints, nor were those of the perestroika and glasnost’ years. Their main merit is that they refused to live like Fedya Protasov, the ‘living corpse’ of Tolstoy’s play (Tolstoy 1912; Wachtel 1992, p. 264), and chose ‘natality’ over fakeness and disengagement.

Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism concluded unexpectedly with a celebration of ‘beginning’ as ‘the supreme capacity of man’. ‘Politically identical with man’s freedom … this beginning is guaranteed by each new birth: it is indeed every man’ (Arendt 1975, p. 479). Few would have predicted that General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, a faithful collaborator of Stalin, would become one such ‘every man’. But his 1956 ‘Secret Speech’ to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, which condemned Stalin’s Great Purge (1935–1940), the cult of personality and the deportation of whole minority populations, broke with totalitarianism. Khrushchev was initially cautious: the speech had to remain secret because the Party should not air its internal differences in public (Taubman 2003, p. 285). Stalin was still ‘popular in many ways’ (Boobbyer 2005, p. 40): there had been such massive outpourings of grief during his funeral in Moscow three years earlier that several people had been crushed to death during the street procession (Ulitskaya 2015, pp. 60–7).

Still, within a few weeks, almost seven million Communist Party and 18 million Komsomol members had had the secret speech read to them in factories, collective farms, offices, universities and high schools (Taubman 2003, p. 283). The Gulag system melted away with amazing speed as almost a million prisoners were released. By 1964, some 800,000 to two million victims had been rehabilitated, their innocence fully recognised, and some reparations paid (Nuzov 2014, p. 287). Cultural historian Alexander Etkind remembers watching on television as a child in 1961 the removal of Stalin’s corpse from the Red Square mausoleum. Observing his father being deeply moved was ‘the first political experience of my life’ (Etkind 2013, pp. 34, 38). In 1962 Khrushchev personally authorised the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s graphic description of life in the Gulag, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn 1963; Remnick 1998, p. 118).

Khrushchev launched other domestic policies that broadened personal freedoms. Hundreds of thousands of new modest private apartments, popularly nicknamed Khrushchevki, replaced communal flats where up to ten families had shared one bathroom and kitchen. This permitted Soviet citizens to escape constant exposure to their neighbours’ surveillance: ‘the impact of the transformation from communal to private living can hardly be overestimated’ (Ostrovsky 2015, p. 29). ‘Fences around the homes and gardens of citizens’, as Arendt noted, help preserve (or establish, in the Soviet case) the public realm (Arendt 1958, p. 72). Thanks to the Soviet Khrushchevki, the family re-emerged as a private sphere, and it became more difficult to mobilise citizens behind one singular idea or project (Zimmerman 2014, pp. 156–57).⁹ In the countryside peasants received internal passports and gained freedom of movement. The 1957 International Youth Festival brought 34,000 foreign visitors to the Soviet Union, exposing Soviet youth for the first time to their peers from other countries (Figes 2014, p. 360).

Khrushchev took new initiatives in foreign policy as well: his government signed a peace treaty with Austria and withdrew Soviet troops from Austrian soil in 1955. His 1956 official visit to the UK and the signing of cultural agreements with Belgium, the UK, France and Norway strengthened exchanges with Western countries (Magnúsdótir 2006). That same year the last German prisoners of war went home, and the Soviet Union returned the Porkkala military base to Finland. A declaration was co-signed with Japan whereby the USSR committed to return two of the four Kuril Islands (Habomai and Shikotan), which it had occupied in 1945, as soon as the two countries signed a peace treaty. As the US opposed the peace treaty, the process stopped. Between 1956 and 1960 the Soviet Union unilaterally cut its conventional military forces by a third (Evangelista 1999, pp. 90–122; Taubman 2003, pp. 380–81).

Khrushchev proved to be a deeply ambiguous and contradictory ‘every man’ (Tsygankov 2014, p. 70). He acted as a ‘beginner’ by helping found new social institutions in the Soviet Union and new international commitments; but he sought ‘a turn to universal values while rejecting them at the same time’ (Boobbyer 2005, p. 62). At the height of his power, he stuck to the ‘disciplinary dream’ in the Soviet Union: to establish a relentless and rational system of preventative surveillance administered by 96 million controllers watching one another ‘so that not even a mosquito could escape notice’ (Kharkhordin 1999, pp. 299, 355–58). After vacillating several times, he ordered the 1956 violent repression of the Hungarian uprising, which Soviet liberalisation processes had encouraged (Taubman 2003, p. 296). Workers’ protests were harshly suppressed in Novocherkassk in 1962, with over 100 wounded or killed (Taubman 2003, pp. 519–22).

By his own account, Khrushchev had been deeply influenced by his mother’s religious faith during his childhood, which may explain his ‘idealism’ (Taubman 2003, pp. 27–8). But the path to full personal resurrection was closed to him. He recalled hearing ‘the voices of comrades who perished’ on the night before he delivered the ‘Secret Speech’ (Taubman 2003, p. 274); however, he turned against Stalin only after ‘he had made his career … saved his own life while helping deprive countless others of theirs and Stalin was safely in his grave’ (Taubman 2003, pp. 27, 28). Within the Party, he failed to rally support for ‘his courageous repentance’ (Etkind 2013, p. 37). Although he agonised over his responsibility in his memoirs, he never admitted complicity for Stalinist crimes or lost faith in the Soviet system; yet, ‘he did feel genuine contrition at its brutality’ (Wedgwood Benn 2004, p. 619). Asked at the end of his life what he most regretted, he responded: ‘most of all the blood. … My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul’ (Taubman 2003, p. 639).

Leonid Brezhnev and like-minded colleagues put an end to the Thaw in 1964 by forcing Khrushchev into peaceful retirement. Totalitarianism never returned; in previous times Khrushchev would have been shot (Zimmerman 2014, p. 130). His transformative deeds vanished from collective memory, as Soviet media, Party histories and official documents almost completely abstained from mentioning him after 1964. The younger Russian generations knew little about the freedom-oriented structural changes he helped initiate within the Soviet Union’s borders and beyond (Wedgwood Benn 2004, p. 615). His great granddaughter learned of his years in power primarily as a history of the Communist Party, with little reference to the name Khrushchev, in her Moscow primary school: by the 1970s he had become like a ‘ghost’, as if he had never existed (Khrushcheva 2014, p. 20).¹⁰ Khrushchev and the Thaw years enjoyed a brief rehabilitation during the Gorbachev years, and then his history-changing reforms faded again from collective memory (Taubman 2003, pp. 647–50).

Resurrection in civil society

Disagreements over the extent of civil society engagement in the Soviet Union of the 1950s and 1960s abound, and the factual evidence is ambiguous. Thus, Kevin Platt argues that most Soviet and Russian citizens have lived in ‘knowing silence’ and ‘disavowal’ about the past since 1956 (Platt 2016, p. 664), whereas Polly Jones challenges the ‘tenacious belief that Soviet public memory consistently falsified and silenced popular memories’. She describes a cautious but highly engaged citizenry from 1956 until the late 1960s, even if the ‘right to remember’ became more contested after 1961 (Jones 2013, pp. 2, 10, 14).¹¹ Given its focus on usable pasts, this article gives pre-eminence to constructive lived experiences of resurrection, that is, the rejection of abusive practices and the choice to act justly.

For Philip Boobbyer, the turning point on the Soviet path to resurrection came much earlier than 1956, during World War II, when greater elements of personal freedom and social solidarity grew out of the need to fight the Germans: ‘the death of Stalin then, did not suddenly bring society to life’ (Boobbyer 2005, p. 57). Scientific research institutes, circles of friends, informal networks that resorted to blat, all created pockets of independent thinking. Some participants were important party functionaries (Boobbyer 2005, pp. 56–8).¹² The Soviet tradition of public letter-writing also contributed to new beginnings (Magnúsdótir 2006, p. 114; Jones 2013). One reason Khrushchev condemned Stalinist crimes in 1956 was because Soviet citizens wrote to him after Stalin’s death in 1953 and asked about the fate of their relatives. Their letters compelled the Soviet leader to confront the full extent of the crimes committed (Taubman 2003; Boobbyer 2005, p. 62).

Selling peaceful coexistence as believable to an audience that had for over a decade considered war with America inevitable was another challenging project. However, the ‘Soviet public embraced the opportunity to recount and remember the times when the United States was an ally in the Great Patriotic War’ (Magnúsdótir 2006, p. 111). Thousands of Soviet citizens, many of them pensioners or war invalids, sent letters wishing Khrushchev well on his 1959 trip to the United States, and a popular book, Face to Face with America, reproduced some of them.¹³ The letters emphasised their authors’ desire for peace. Because of the downing of the U-2 spy plane flying over the Soviet Union in 1960, the planned return visit of President Dwight Eisenhower never took place. Harsh confrontations over the status of Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis followed in 1961 and 1962. The Berlin Wall was built. In spite of this, Khrushchev and US President John F. Kennedy managed to negotiate and sign the 1963 Test Ban Treaty, which barred nuclear tests and atomic explosions in the atmosphere, under water and in space. ‘Despite the failure of peaceful coexistence as such, Soviet–American cultural relations of the post-Stalin period and above all, the changes in the discourse about the United States, had a deep impact on the Soviet people and their perceptions of America’ (Magnúsdótir 2006, p. 130).

A singular journey of resurrection

Stories of individuals in search of resurrection, such as Tolstoy’s Prince Nekhlyudov, illuminate the self-reflective process that leads to changed practices. Orlando Figes’ The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (2007) confronts the reader with multiple narratives from some of the Stalin regime’s 25 million victims and their families: they tell of collective silencing and terror, arbitrary arrests, double lives and betrayals, but also the powerful role of grandparents and friends in keeping the young alive.¹⁴ Figes’ central figure is writer Konstantin Simonov (1915–1979), a Stalinist until the mid-1950s, who wrote eloquently on complicity and atonement. Simonov came from an aristocratic family, which raised him with values of public duty, although it was persecuted for its class origin after the Revolution. Confusing civic service with slavish loyalty to Stalin, the young poet became famous in the 1930s. He fought courageously during World War II, but was dragged into the anti-cosmopolitan campaign of the late 1940s, which targeted Jewish intellectuals, including some of his best friends, and he went so far as to write a propagandistic play whose conclusion was dictated personally by Stalin. He supported the 1956 repression of the Hungarian Revolution, and as the editor of Novyi Mir chose not to publish Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago that same year (Pasternak 1958; Figes 2007, pp. 497–508).

During the Thaw, Simonov embarked upon the Tolstoyan path of resurrection by turning away from wrongdoing and acting anew, without any claim to Orthodox faith. He gave money to writers who had suffered from the Stalinist purges and campaigned for the publication of Mikhail Bulgakov’s subversive novel The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov 1967). In 1968 he publicly opposed the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. His post-Stalinist interpretations of the Great Patriotic War—The Living and the Dead (1959 Russian version; 1975 English version) and People Are Not Born Soldiers (1963, 2004)—celebrated the heroism of ordinary Russian soldiers rather than Stalin’s flawed leadership. His third revisionist account of the war, One Hundred Days of War (Simonov 1999) was banned from publication in 1966 after Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev (Jones 2013, pp. 234–38). The writer had reached out to the public for testimonies before and after publication, and received thousands of letters from veterans, terror victims and their families, and former POWs from all regions of the Soviet Union (Jones 2013, pp. 183–211). Most correspondents revealed a sophisticated understanding of Stalin’s failings as they tried to reconcile their personal sufferings with ‘the bitter truth’ about the war; and the term vosstanovlenie (renewal) appeared in many letters (Jones 2013, p. 194). It is these exchanges that prompted Simonov to audaciously reverse ‘the former historiography of unbroken advances and triumphs by bringing retreats and losses to the forefront’ (Jones 2013, pp. 187, 188) and stimulated the Soviet leadership to grant more reparations. Jones finds the ‘scholarly neglect of Simonov’s post-Stalinist popular reception … surprising’. His glasnost’ publications suggest that ‘the de-Stalinisation of the 1950s and 1960s … merits comparison with the de-Stalinisation (and ultimately de-Leninisation) of the 1980s and early 1990s’ (Jones 2013, pp. 185, 260).

Simonov spent the last two decades of his life agonising, privately and semi-publicly, as ‘he began to purge the inner Stalin from himself’ (Figes 2007, pp. 593–94, 614). His ‘feelings of contrition were sometimes so intense that they bordered on self-loathing’, and he castigated himself at his fiftieth birthday in front of 700 guests, ‘not moved by “repentance” … that is a person’s private business, but simply because, by remembering, one wants to avoid repeating the same mistakes …. From now on, at whatever cost, I will not repeat the moral compromises I made’. As he lay dying in hospital he dictated his memoirs, which were conceived as a conversation with his former selves, and ‘he judged himself harshly’ (Figes 2007, pp. 624–28). Solzhenitsyn and other members of the literary intelligentsia did not trust the genuineness of Simonov’s conversion, and young Russians seem to know little about him, judging from the author’s conversations with Russian students in 2013. Simonov’s books remain, but his actual pursuit of ‘resurrection’ has become another ‘lost treasure’.

The perestroika years as a ‘lost treasure?’. Controversies

Twenty years of stagnation followed Khrushchev’s fall from power. Although totalitarianism did not return, Soviet general secretaries Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko turned the clock back by raising the military budget, limiting freedoms of expression and assembly, imprisoning dissenters and compelling others to emigrate. They recentralised the economy, pursued aggressive foreign policies in Afghanistan and Czechoslovakia, and crushed the Prague Spring in 1968 while high oil prices helped bolster public support for the regime.

Three types of political responses to ‘stagnation’ emerged. The first was the human rights movement, whose most prominent voice was Andrei Sakharov. The second called for a return to Russia’s prerevolutionary heritage; its main spokesperson was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The third called upon the Communist Party to reform itself from within and helped promote Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership (Petro 1995). Although ‘outsiders’ (the dissidents) and ‘insiders’ did not coordinate their initiatives, similar impulses meant that some of their actions dovetailed to open difficult public debates and promote political reforms.

The Thaw’s most noteworthy legacy may be the shestidesyatniki (‘people of the sixties’) who became adults during the 1950s and early 1960s and initiated a second Thaw-like new beginning after Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko died in short order in the early 1980s. Elected general secretary in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was determined to end the stagnation of the 1970s: ‘this attitude would enable him to be decisive and imaginative, though it also laid him open to trying things out without a proper idea of what to expect’ (Service 2015, p. 127). There is relatively little in Gorbachev’s Memoirs (Gorbachev 1997) on what transformed him from party apparatchik to reformer; his accounts are descriptive, analytical and rational. Unlike Khrushchev, Gorbachev did not have blood on his hands. Under his watch the TASS Soviet news agency expressed on 13 April 1990, ‘the Soviet Union’s profound regret’ for the Katyn massacres, ‘one of the most heinous crimes of Stalinism’ (Gorbachev 1997, p. 621). But only in 1991 would President Boris Yel’tsin deliver to the Polish government Soviet archives on the 1940 massacres of 22,000 Polish officers, which Gorbachev had been somewhat reluctant to acknowledge fully (Taubman 2017, pp. 640–41). Yet Gorbachev exonerated more than one million victims of Stalin’s repression through rehabilitation between 1987 and 1989, and later issued a blanket presidential decree rehabilitating all of Stalin’s remaining victims (Nuzov 2014, p. 299).

What distinguished Gorbachev and many of his collaborators was education: they were the first university-educated Soviet leaders, and in some cases, like Gorbachev and his closest adviser Aleksandr Yakovlev, well-travelled. Another distinguishing feature was the quality of relationship among leaders and senior bureaucrats, at times reminiscent of Arendtian council politics. Theoretically, council members join ‘spontaneously’ to debate and act (Arendt 2006, p. 254). In the Soviet bureaucracy of the 1980s, councils certainly did not appear spontaneously but were appointed. However, during Politburo meetings, Gorbachev ‘let others have their say and there was no censoring of opinion’; he encouraged ‘a corporate sense of responsibility’ among his top advisers (Service 2015, pp. 124–25). The policies of glasnost’ (open speech) and perestroika (the restructuring of institutions) were not launched in a vacuum, as the terms had been widely used during the Thaw (Etkind 2013, p. 41). A large number of reformers had been quietly at work in the numerous research institutes connected to the Central Committee where they became acquainted with one another (Burlatsky 1989, pp. 176–77; Figes 2014, pp. 381–82). Some of the perestroika reforms they endorsed, such as the anti-alcohol policy, were a resounding flop, and others, such as allowing kooperativy in the service sector, were the beginning of a liberalised economy. Perestroika ‘remained largely an ideological slogan’ but the ‘commitment to glasnost’ was real and transformative’ (Billington 2004, p. 39).

The most innovative section of Gorbachev’s first Report to the Party Congress in 1986 was on foreign policy and represented a certain set of ideas and opinions that were characteristic of a whole stratum of the Soviet intellectual elite. The report replaced the idea of antagonistic confrontation between two systems with a new concept of competition and struggle, which would accommodate ‘a growing tendency for interdependence among the states forming the world community’; and it gave up the commitment to destroy world imperialism (Grachev 2008, pp. 72–3). When it came to making recommendations to the Soviet negotiators in disarmament talks, 40 or 50 functionaries from the ministries of foreign affairs and defence, the KGB and the Party’s International Department ‘worked in an atmosphere of free and often heated debates searching to reach consensus’ (Grachev 2008, p. 90). Gorbachev’s last official spokesman, Andrei Grachev, argues that the radical transformation of Soviet foreign policy in the late 1980s was above all regarded as the means necessary to achieve Gorbachev’s ‘main objective’—internal democratic reform—and involved many actors inside the Politburo and the Secretariat of the Central Committee (Grachev 2008, pp. 90, 161). Turning the ‘new thinking’ into practical politics led to the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, signalling that Soviet troops would not be used to maintain the status quo in Central and Eastern Europe and paving the way for the peaceful reunification of Germany.

‘We had to change everything radically’, Gorbachev said in his parting speech in December 1991. He could not admit his own ambivalence about letting revelations of the crimes of Stalinism slip too far out of the party’s control,¹⁵ nor celebrate the unexpected demise of the Soviet Union and the failure of half-hearted economic reforms. He paid tribute to what had been achieved: free elections, free press, respect for human rights, a multiparty system, and the end of the Cold War and violent interference in other countries’ internal affairs (Gorbachev 1997, pp. xxxiii–xxxvii).

A new beginning for civil society

Civic engagement involved many others besides the senior officials in a position to reshape policies, and occurred on a much larger scale than during the Thaw years. Critical debates on the Soviet past and needed reforms blossomed. Between 1986 and 1990, subscriptions to Argumenty i fakty, an investigative weekly, went from two million to 33 million copies; and an estimated 100 million watched on television the opening session of the new legislative body, the Congress of People’s Deputies, whose elections had been partially competitive (Figes 2014, pp. 395–97). By 1987 there were 30,000 informal political associations in the Soviet Union, and by early 1989 more than 60,000, which built upon previous opposition attempts to restore civil society (Petro 1995, pp. 127, 147). Like council politics elsewhere, most associations did not last very long. One exception is the organisation Memorial, which in 1988 started to document human rights violations under Stalin and his successors and became an effective advocate for restitution.

It was difficult in the former Soviet context to distinguish victims from victimisers. Most Soviet citizens had been ‘kitchen dissidents’, critical in private and silent in public because they feared the Gulag (Khruscheva 2014, p. 21). Sergei Kovalev, who headed the parliamentarian and the presidential committees on human rights during the Yel’tsin years, opposed any attempt to divide Russian society between the guilty and not guilty, saying: ‘Everyone is to blame’ (Sakwa 2008a, pp. 459–60). Arendt, who felt that only individuals should be held responsible for their actions, critiqued collective guilt, contrary to her mentor and friend Karl Jaspers. Even in the aftermath of totalitarianism, what mattered most to this survivor of Nazism was a new ‘beginning’ (Jaspers 1978; Arendt 1992). When a conservative Communist Party coalition mounted a coup against Gorbachev in 1991, the newly elected president of the Soviet Russian Republic, Boris Yel’tsin, was isolated but not alone in his courageous opposition. As tanks rolled into Moscow on 19 August, with the media silenced, 150 volunteers surrounded the Russian parliament. A Russian-speaking American scholar witnessed the resistance first hand:

Key initial defenders of the Yeltsin White House came directly from a liturgy in the Cathedral of the Assumption within the Kremlin, the opening event of a ‘Congress of Compatriots’ held on the Feast of the Transfiguration. Old women church-goers (long dismissed as playing any but a forlorn and vestigial role in Russia) provided an alternative ‘motherland’ chain of command for the young soldiers surrounding the White House, urging them not to shoot as they awaited ‘fatherland’ commands that never came from their superior officers. Orthodox priests ministered to some in the ring of defenders as they awaited an attack; and after the coup collapsed, everyone used one simple, half-forgotten word to describe it all—chudo, a miracle. (Billington 2004, p. 45)

In the Russian Federation, which emerged from the implosion of the Soviet Union, Russians began to enjoy freedoms that had never existed before. Freedom brought also ‘a new irresponsibility through confiscatory privatisation, official corruption, and widespread criminality’, which political and economic institutions failed to curb (Billington 2004, p. 40). Artemy Magun writes of the elected soviets resurrected by Gorbachev that they knew how to engage with ‘negativity’ and protest. ‘As such, they were truly democratic, but after their victory over the Party and a short period of political creativity, they reverted to the expression of protest and resistance, now against the politics of the Russian president and his government’: the post-communist revolution became ‘almost entirely non-productive’ (Magun 2012, p. 64).¹⁶ This is an assessment which conservative Russians, as the introduction to this article shows, share with Magun, a self-described Marxist. This article has attempted to mitigate the assessment’s excessive harshness by bringing some evidence to the contrary. More on this in the next sections.

Another singular journey of resurrection

As during the Thaw years, resurrection-like processes of conversions in mindsets and individual practices undergirded the concrete changes observable in the public sphere (Smith 2002; Boobbyer 2005; Aron 2012; Ostrovsky 2015). Thus, Aleksandr Yakovlev is considered ‘the spiritual leader’ of perestroika and glasnost’: having been Politburo chief of propaganda and ideology during four of the Brezhnev years (1969–1973), he was ‘in effect responsible for smashing them both’ (Ostrovsky 2015, p. 13). In his youth he had been an ardent Stalinist and found Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ very hard to swallow (Yakovlev 2002, pp. 6–7). He spent one year at Columbia University in 1959 as one of the first Soviet Fulbright scholars, where he attended George Kennan’s lectures. In 1972 he wrote an article attacking Russian nationalists and Stalinists in Literaturnaya gazeta. As a punishment he was dispatched to Canada as Soviet ambassador and spent 11 years ‘in comfortable exile with plenty of time to think’ (Ostrovsky 2015, pp. 45–6). Three experiences shaped Yakovlev’s gradual and ‘tortuous’ rejection of Marxism and Soviet communism: first, witnessing as a 20-year-old soldier, the persecution of returning Soviet prisoners of war; second, Khrushchev’s secret speech; and finally, the 1968 crushing of the Prague Spring. As a party bureaucrat in the 1950s and 1960s he had lived an existence of ‘agonising dissimulation’. Searching for a way to put an end to this inhuman system, he asked to study in the Academy of Social Sciences’ Department of International Relations: ‘all this took the form of hope, not action, but of one thing I was sure even then—this new way must be strictly nonviolent if it was to lead to freedom’ (Yakovlev 2002, p. 8).

For Yakovlev, perestroika was a ‘reformation’ rather than a resurrection and the end of all gnawing doubts (Ostrovsky 2015, p. 16). Initially the point was to reform communism, not end it. Eventually Yakovlev left the Communist Party: ‘I came to hate Lenin and Stalin—these monsters who had cruelly deceived me and crushed my romantic hopes’ (Yakovlev 2001, vol. 1, p. 447; Ostrovsky 2015, p. 17). In the 1990s Yakovlev hoped that the ‘resurrection of religious activity would bring a resurrection of morality and spirituality in its wake’. His expectations faded as he witnessed activists in the Orthodox Church ‘trying to prove that Stalin wanted to fulfil Christ’s commandments on earth’ and communist leaders making oaths of fidelity to Christian commands (Yakovlev 2002, pp. 167–68). What ‘repelled’ Yakovlev particularly were statements by current Communist Party leaders or ‘neo-Bolsheviks’ whose party ‘destroyed thousands of churches and exterminated hundreds of thousands of clergymen …’. Yet such people attempted ‘to pose as upholders of morality and defenders of spiritual values’. Yakovlev expressed amazement that anyone would vote for Communists except out of sheer ignorance, and wondered how Communists avoided dealing with their past and their conscience (Yakovlev 2002, p. 168). He concluded that those who lived through the 1956 and 1985 eras of reformation as he had, ‘will no doubt have to return more than once to that tangled labyrinth of public and personal relationships to analyse what happened, take pride in what was achieved and repent of ours sins and errors’ (Yakovlev 2002, p. 26). Indeed, controversies over the legacies of Stalinism and the post-Stalin reformers have continued unabated in Russia (Dempsey 2015; Gertcyk 2016; Kolesnikov 2017a, 2017b).

There are other ways to reclaim political lost treasures in Russia by going much further back in time. Some Russian scholars have managed to avoid memorial controversies about the Thaw and the Gorbachev years and imagine new democratic procedures by probing the political traditions of two medieval cities preserved from the Mongol invasion. Their efforts are peripheral, yet meaningful; they tap into a long tradition of archaeological digs and school teaching, which deserves much more attention. Hence the next part of this article on Russian republicanism.

Being political: the lost treasure of Republican Novgorod and Pskov

The dissidents and reformers of the 1960–1980s were critiqued for being excessively motivated by moral considerations with too little eye to the need for concrete results and material advantage. The lost treasure examined in this article’s fourth section departs from this tradition. Its retrievers are highly conscious of the need for innovative institutions and policies and show little interest in the Russian soul. Like Arendt they stress the political and its observable manifestations. Former Rector of the European University of St Petersburg (EUSP), Oleg Kharkhordin (2009–2017) founded the Res publica Centre in 2006, to introduce graduate students and colleagues to the republican experience of Italian city-states and the Russian medieval cities of Novgorod and Pskov. He explains that ‘after writing on the worst in Russian history, I decided to write on the best: friendship. My study of Aristotle, the great thinker of friendship in politics and its role in the polis, led me to Cicero’s res publica’.¹⁷

Novgorod, the only Russian city of any importance to escape full subjugation by the Mongols and to exhibit republican features from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, holds considerable power over the national imaginary; it has stimulated scholarly commentary and archaeological excavations spanning more than 75 years (Mitchell & Forbes 1970). ‘Every school kid in Russia learns that the main feature distinguishing the city of Novgorod from its last chief enemy—Muscovy—was veche, a public assembly or gathering that deliberated on the most important concerns of public life’ (Kharkhordin 2005, p. 174). No unified public records of veche decisions remain, but the Novgorod Chronicles, written by monks and churchmen, describe a thriving commercial and turbulent republic, which changed its leadership regularly. The city was built on swampy ground, and its residents started to cooperate around the building and maintenance of the infrastructure: streets, bridges and churches. The task ‘provoked local and political conflicts that simulated local self-government’ (Troianovskii 2009, pp. 51, 94). Kharkhordin, who owes an intellectual debt to Bruno Latour, stresses the importance of ‘public things’ (material structures) in political networks: the churches, the bells and the bridge that linked both parts of Novgorod (Colas & Kharkhordin 2009, pp. 217–69). Clearly the bridge was not just a place for peaceful interaction: those condemned to death were thrown off it. Yet it was the stage for reconciliations and the elections of each new posadnik (mayor-like leader of the city), who obtained everyone’s support.¹⁸ This was in striking contrast with Muscovy where physical and public grounds for meeting and deliberation were missing. The church played a reconciliatory role in some disputes, and balanced the posadnik’s power (Kharkhordin 2005, pp. 175–81). When Novgorod fell under Muscovite rule in 1478, after being a free city for 350 years, longer than Florence, an alternative path for political development was closed in Russia.¹⁹

Pskov, a medieval city not far from Novgorod, is another example of Russian republicanism. Besides chronicles, and judicial and civil charters, a rich treasure trove of over 1,000 birch bark letters reveals that a large proportion of Pskov’s inhabitants were literate and corresponded about many details of their shared life. According to Alexei Vovin, who coordinated the 2012–2014 Res publica seminar while completing a doctoral dissertation on Pskov at EUSP, ‘the development of the city’s political and social institutions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are very similar, if not identical, to the processes of emergence and development of communes in cities of the Latin world in the eleventh and twelfth centuries’ (Vovin 2012, p. 9).²⁰ Max Weber’s five criteria for a city in the ‘full sense of the term’ support this comparison: Pskov had fortifications, a market, a court of justice with some of its own laws, and a degree of autonomy and, consequently, governance by institutions created by city residents (Vovin 2012, p. 1).

Republicanism in contemporary Russia

Vovin, by his own account, has greatly benefitted from the retrieval of Russian republican lost treasures. He began researching medieval Pskov, a topic he knew nothing about, because the project financed his doctoral studies. To his surprise, this turned into a transformative experience. He had volunteered as an election monitor during the Duma and presidential elections of 2011 and 2012, and his research helped him ‘deepen his understanding of his own political engagement, which started several years earlier, and see problems in a new light: life in society depends on people willing to participate disinterestedly’.²¹ He remarks on the difference between the civil society of the early post-Cold War years, when people demonstrated primarily for the sake of private interests, and the 2011 and 2012 protests motivated by demands for justice and human rights. He is confident that internet access, which is widely available in Russia, will make it easier for those willing to participate in the political process to do so, and eventually to even vote on some laws by internet. In Europe this is common. As a historian, he hopes one day to spread the realisation, which has been so ‘important’ for him, that ‘Russian political culture is not so different from Western European political culture, although Republican developments were interrupted in Russia’.²²

Another participant in the Res publica seminar, Lev Shilov, helped organise an experiment in participatory budgeting in the city of Cherepovets. Every year the federal government returns to regions and cities a certain portion of tax revenue. The ‘People’s Budget’, a project that gives city residents the possibility of participating in the distribution of the city budget, was launched in spring 2013 with the support of the Committee of Citizen Initiatives. Its main purpose was to unite the experts, city residents and city officials to establish public access to decision-making. Twenty people willing to participate were selected by drawing lots; their task was to decide how to spend the 15 million rubles allocated to the People’s Budget. After training workshops on the structuring of city budgets and debates on priorities, the 20 citizens agreed that ten million out of the 15 million rubles would be spent on sport fields, and the last five million on improving a square near the monument dedicated to the courageous workers who cleaned up the Chernobyl nuclear power plant site after the 1986 explosion. Unfortunately, because of the limited funds available, the participants had to relinquish their first priority—a meaningful housing project—and chose what they considered their second best options.²³ Kharkhordin, who participated actively in the Cherepovets experiment, looks at the local level for contemporary republican experiments: ‘The nation-state won over classical republicanism. But when you go to municipalities you find that people are alive’.²⁴

Some have critiqued Arendt’s nostalgic interpretation of the ‘lost treasure’ of the American Revolution, which made light of slavery and idealised the political impact of the founding fathers. Should a similar critique be addressed to Kharkhordin and his colleagues for romanticising the republican experiences of Novgorod and Pskov? Thanks to their research, scholars of republicanism continue to give much thought to the future of their country. Kharkhordin wishes for an eventual ‘withering’ of the federal state: as islands of republican life and freedom are created, eventually they could ‘form an archipelago’ and lessen the need for a central state with the monopoly over the means of physical violence (Kharkhordin 2005, pp. 1–40). Vovin would like Russia to become a real federation with genuine power sharing between different levels of government instead of the current unitarian state. Small-scale republican experiments help form new mindsets, but the present system must be ‘broken, not reformed’.²⁵

Conclusion: retrieving lost treasures in twenty-first century Russia

Outsiders who are not subject to daily pressures from an authoritarian regime may have an easier time assessing the part of the glass that is half full, in this case usable pasts supporting democratisation. Some of the more positive English-language assessments of the Soviet transitions from the 1950s to the early 1990s (beside memoirs written by the main actors involved) come from Russian-born scholars living abroad and non-Russian social scientists who draw primarily from Russian-language sources (Gorbachev 1997; Smith 2002; Boobbyer 2005; Figes 2007; Grachev 2008; Aron 2012; Etkind 2013; Jones 2013; Nuzov 2014; Ostrovsky 2015). There are some exceptions. Lyudmila Ulitskaya, who resides in Moscow, published The Big Green Tent: A Novel in 2010 in part to retrieve the lost treasure of Soviet dissidence—speaking truth to power fearlessly—although her novel is hardly a hagiographic portrait (Ulitskaya 2015).²⁶

Since 2000 Russian official memory has cast out Khrushchev as well as Gorbachev and is rehabilitating Stalin. Civil society’s involvement in the non-violent changes that liberalised the Soviet Union seems forgotten. Oleg Barabanov, a Russian political scientist and member of the Russian state-sponsored think tank, the Valdai Club, cited media assessments just before the 2017 centenary of the Bolshevik revolution: ‘Stalin built and Khrushchev ruined’. He added that ‘some inescapable evil fate was leading Gorbachev and his country to perdition and this could not be stopped’ (Barabanov 2016). This refers to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet Russians initially accepted the disintegration of the Soviet Union without much reluctance—the young did so even ‘enthusiastically’: they elected Boris Yel’tsin to preside over the new independent Russian Federation, and ‘any trauma associated with the Soviet collapse became apparent only many years later’ (Pomerantsev 2014, p. 130; Ostrovsky 2015, pp. 141, 144). Gorbachev’s Memoirs had noted with some dismay that ‘people seemed almost to welcome the event [the collapse of the Soviet Union]’ (Gorbachev 1997, p. xxxi).

Manipulation of history and gaps in collective memory are obviously willed by the Russian state. President Putin uses ‘the application of history as a policy tool, a social and political organizing force that can help shape groups identities and foster coalitions’ (Hill & Gaddy 2012, p. 22). Thus, there was little official celebration of the centenary of the Russian Revolution in 2017, whose remembrance could undermine the presidential narrative of historical continuity (Plamper 2017). But Arkady Ostrovsky also attributes amnesia in Russian civil society to intergenerational shifts, and the growing materialism and individualism of the sons and daughters of the Russians who changed the system from within. They mistook their parents’ hard-won freedoms as a licence for private enrichment and look resolutely toward the future; the past has little to teach them (Ostrovsky 2015, pp. 120–40). Regardless of its causes, amnesia is disempowering. British journalist Peter Pomerantsev, whose dissident parents left the Soviet Union in 1978 shortly after his birth, worked nine years for the Russian television channel TNT (2001–2010) and produced documentaries on Russians fighting corruption and injustice. His Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (Pomerantsev 2014) offers a sarcastic portrait of the new Russian bourgeoisie, the corrupt justice system and the state takeover of the media, although a third of the book relates the initiatives of his documentaries’ ‘new Moscow dissenters’. Pomerantsev, whose love of Russia is palpable, does not confront the contradictions of his complex account. Except for a brief reference to the collapse of the Soviet empire, he does not devote a single sentence and apparently not a single thought to the historical processes that guaranteed his own return. The fact that he worked quite freely in Russia for almost a decade, became an eloquent and published critic of the Putin regime, and returns for regular family visits with his young daughter safely by his side, is all too much taken for granted (Pomerantsev 2014, pp. 67, 125, 236–38).

The retrieval of the Russian republican ‘treasure’ and its application to contemporary dilemmas have also come under threat. EUSP, which hosted the Res publica seminar, was founded in 1994 as an independent private university thanks to the political will of St Petersburg’s liberal mayor Anatoly Sobchak, the efforts of Western-oriented researchers within the Russian Academy of Sciences and, to a lesser degree, within the Russian academic community, and the financial support of American foundations. In 2008 the Putin administration, on the pretext of fire hazards in the buildings, shut down EUSP, which had qualified for a major grant from the European Union (EU) to train election monitors. EUSP refused the EU grant and reopened a month later, also thanks to a public campaign (Zhuravlev et al. 2009). Was this not a defeat? Kharkhordin responded that this incident,

tested the limits of the existence of a free community within an authoritarian state. Basically we were told: do not meddle with federal politics and vote-counting, and this is in your charter. However, the Russian authorities could not make sense of our existence. How is it that this place exists? To whom do we report? Nobody. Our research is conducted freely; our students choose their courses, except for some state-required courses during the first year of their masters.²⁷

As Russia's economy started to grow in the 2000s, EUSP registered a university endowment in 2007, the first among St Petersburg universities, and the second in Russia. However, in December 2016, the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Education and Science terminated EUSP’s tenancy of its premises at the Kusheleva-Bezborodko Mansion in central St Petersburg for an alleged violation of state rules. On 23 June 2017, Kharkhordin announced his resignation as Rector of the University. EUSP, which had lost its court case against the government’s decision, suspended new student registration for the academic year 2017–2018 and applied to rent another building close by. As Kharkhordin had acknowledged much earlier, ‘action is fragile’.²⁸ By summer 2018 the situation had changed again, however, in part thanks to the pressure exerted by courageous academic leaders and EUSP reopened its teaching programmes.²⁹

It seems a stretch to ponder the possibilities for new political beginnings under worsening conditions of oppression. Raising similar questions during the Brezhnev years of stagnation, however, would have seemed no less of a stretch. As poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko argued, ‘don’t think that glasnost’ or perestroika dropped from the sky or that it was given to us by the Politburo. It was many years in preparation’ (Yevtushenko 1989, p. 264). If this is true, could there be new reformers quietly waiting in the wings of government, as some did even during the Stalin years and in the decades following? Within President Putin’s inner circle there are hundreds of people at work with divergent ideas and interests (Zygar 2016). The best examples of civil society’s capacity for self-organisation and renewal are found at the local and regional rather than at the federal level, as Kharkhordin argues; and while NGOs are increasingly restricted, especially those dependent on foreign funding, their members demonstrate an impressive ability to keep cherished causes alive through volunteer work and small domestic donations (Daucé 2016). Three dozen interviews with Russian candidates for Fulbright awards in 2013,³⁰ and many conversations in March 2015 and April 2016 in Moscow and St Petersburg, confirmed these facts. ‘Natality’ is not in short supply in Russia.

‘Conscience’ and self-reflection continue to motivate new opponents. Putin’s Kiss, a 2011 Danish documentary film on the youth movement Nashi, which supported Putin’s policies unconditionally until it closed down in 2012, depicts a modest but striking account of resurrection-like conversion. Masha Drokova rose to the ranks of Nashi’s leadership at the young age of 16; she spontaneously kissed Putin when she received a medal from him. However, after she started studying in Moscow, she befriended journalists critical of the government and witnessed the sufferings of journalist Oleg Kashin, who barely survived a violent attack in 2010. By chance the filmmakers caught Masha on camera as she renounced her membership in Nashi and her many privileges, such as her state-provided apartment. Her stand seemed unusually courageous, especially as the documentary made her internationally known,³¹ although it did not particularly impress the graduate students who saw the film at EUSP in 2013. Political scientist Mischa Gabowitsch, a scholar of the ‘new Russian protest culture’, told this author that such stands are nothing extraordinary these days.³²

This article has argued for a revaluation of the legacies of the Thaw and perestroika years and of medieval republicanism to Russian political democratisation, and analysed the factual evidence as several instances of ‘lost treasures’. It has offered individual examples of resurrection-like journeys for each period under examination: Simonov in the 1950s–1960s, Yakovlev in the 1950s–1990s, and Drokova in the 2000s. It has also discussed transformative acts of leadership and civil society’s engagement. Known and unknown reformers laid the foundations for democracy in Russia and other Soviet republics and helped liberate nations from Soviet domination. To dismantle dictatorship without civil war or major violence is a major accomplishment (Figes 2014, p. 405).

There was a ‘brief moment in Russian history when one was not nostalgic for the past and was proud to live in the present’ (Boym 2001, p. 71). By many accounts (Cohen & vanden Heuvel 1989; Evangelista 1999; Grachev 2008; Aron 2012; Greene 2014)³³ participants in the Soviet transformations experienced eudemonia, this special form of ‘public happiness’, which Arendt extolled and that comes from engaging with one’s peers to transform shared life into ‘oases of freedom’. Eudemonia has little to do with private happiness and personal well-being: an actor is never merely a doer ‘but and at the same time a sufferer’ because action engages the ‘other’ and its effects are boundless and unpredictable (Arendt 1958, p. 290). When Arendt reminded her fellow American citizens at the height of the Cold War and the civil rights unrest to remember the best in their political inheritance and act accordingly, she downplayed the worst—slavery and the genocide of American Indians. Yet her argument moved countless people to action, from the US to Central Europe to the Philippines (Schell 2006). Soviet and Russian citizens have experienced much suffering, at their own hands and from outsiders. This article, rather than offer a coda to the necessary and ongoing debates over past tragedies, has discussed a few resurrection-like phenomena in the Soviet and Russian historical and cultural traditions. More could be made of these ‘lost treasures’ to sustain Russian democratisation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Guisan

Catherine Guisan, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, 1414 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 See also Sakwa (2015). Likewise, the political influence of Orthodoxy is too often depicted in terms that overlook the internal tensions within the church between the clergy’s conservatism and ‘lay activism’, which ‘has been central to disseminating ideas about tolerance, religious pluralism and ecumenism, and an inclusive notion of national identity’ (Knox 2005, p. 3).

2 The Russian Constitutional Court ruled in 1992 to uphold President Yel’tsin’s ban on the Communist Party’s upper-level organisational structures, in light of the Party’s historical complicity with Soviet terror. But it annulled the dissolution of primary level organisations in order not to punish ordinary members, who could not be held responsible for leadership action taken without their knowledge or participation (Smith 2002, pp. 26–7). Because the KGB brought all their files to Moscow in 1991, the citizens of the new Commonwealth of Independent (CIS) countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Moldova and Ukraine) lost all possibility of access (Stan 2009, pp. 222–26).

3 American-trained Sovietologists overlooked the presence of competing political cultures within the Soviet Union, which prevented them from anticipating the collapse of the regime in 1991 (Petro 1995, pp. 2–4).

4 Good News Bible: The Bible in Today’s English Version (New York, NY, American Bible Society, 1976, p. 156).

5 Conversation with Kathleen McNamara, Washington, DC, 14 March 2014.

6 Council for European Studies, 2014 call and programme, available at: https://councilforeuropeanstudies.org/conferences/past-conferences/11-meetings-and-conferences/184-2014-conference, accessed 25 October 2013.

7 Good News Bible: The Bible in Today’s English Version (New York, NY, American Bible Society, 1976, pp. 157–200).

8 The term ‘thaw’ comes from Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg’s path-breaking short story The Thaw (1954), which recalls the coming of spring when a woman dares break away from her domineering Stalin-like factory boss husband.

9 The Khrushchevki remain psychologically and politically important six decades later as the fierce and organised resistance to the authorities’ plan to destroy thousands of these buildings in Moscow and expropriate its residents demonstrates in 2017 (Kolesnikov 2017c).

10 See also Nuzov (2014, p. 298).

11 A professor of diplomatic history in a major state institution who was a graduate student in the 1950s told this author that the only time she felt free to speak her mind was in the mid-1950s and in the 1980s (Moscow, 15 October 2013).

12 See also Kulavig (1998, pp. 80–1).

13 Litsom k litsu s Amerikoi. Rasskaz o p ezdke N. S. Khrushcheva v SShA. 15–27 sentyabria 1959 goda (Moscow, Gospolitizdat, 1959) was published in 250,000 copies. English-language version: Face to Face with America: The Story of N. S. Khrushchov's Visit to the U.S.A. September 15–27, 1959 (Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960).

14 According to recent figures, the total number of those executed, displaced or imprisoned during the Stalin years exceeds 50 million (Nuzov 2014, p. 284).

15 Gorbachev failed to dismantle the KGB and implement lustration policies (Nuzov 2014, pp. 299–300).

16 Also, author’s interview with Artemy Magun, Professor of Political Theory and Chair of Department of Political Science, European University of St Petersburg, 9 December 2013.

17 Author’s interview with Oleg Kharkhordin, St Petersburg, 16 December 2013.

18 The posadnik (equivalent to a stadtholder, Burgmeister or podestà in the medieval West) was the mayor of Novgorod and Pskov. Beginning in the twelfth century, they were elected locally.

19 Author’s interview with Oleg Kharkhordin, St Petersburg, 16 December 2013.

20 See also Vovin and Krom (2017).

21 Author’s interview with Alexei Vovin, European University at St Petersburg, 16 December 2013.

22 Author’s interview with Alexei Vovin, European University at St Petersburg, 16 December 2013.

23 For more on this, see ‘First Results of “People’s Budget” were discussed in Cherepovets’, European University, St Petersburg, 30 September 2013, available at: https://eu.spb.ru/en/news/12049-first-results-of-the-people-s-budget-project-were-discussed-in-cherepovets, accessed 2 July 2018.

24 Author’s interview with Oleg Kharkhordin, St Petersburg, 16 December 2013. See also Kharkhordin and Alapuro (2011), for an extended discussion of the role of material things in politics, such as squares or sport fields in today’s Cherepovets or the bridge in Middle Ages Novgorod, in keeping with Latour’s political theory (Kharkhordin 2018).

25 Author’s interviews with Alexei Vovin, European University at St Petersburg, 16 December 2013.

26 See also Jego (2014).

27 Author’s interview with Oleg Kharkhordin, European University at St Petersburg, 16 December 2013.

28 Author’s interview with Oleg Kharkhordin, St Petersburg, 16 December 2013.

29 For two years (2016–2018) EUSP operated without a teaching licence, and its faculty could only conduct research with its graduate students. But when another prestigious private university, the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka) lost its accreditation in June 2018, there was significant push back with rectors of 50 major state universities writing to the government a joint letter asking to change the rules of the watchdog of the Ministry of Education issuing licences, and citing the EUSP and Shaninka cases as obvious mistakes. See ‘Another Independent University Comes Under Fire’, The Moscow Times, 25 June 2018, available at: https://themoscowtimes.com/news/another-independent-university-comes-under-fire-61968, accessed 10 July 2018; and ‘Universitety Khotyat novykh otsenok’, Kommersant”, 2 July 2018, available at: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3674951, accessed 10 July 2018. A month later EUSP regained its teaching license and reopened its nine Masters’ programmes (‘License Restored for European University in St. Petersburg’, The Moscow Times, 10 August 2018, available at: https://themoscowtimes.com/news/license-restored-european-university-st-petersburg-62501, accessed 5 September 2018). For more information on EUSP, see also https://eu.spb.ru/en.

30 The 2013 Fulbright Russian candidates’ proposals reflected a lively civic life across Russia, from initiatives to train citizens to participate in local decisions to new concepts for senior mixed housing, and innovative photojournalism to document all aspects of public life (author’s observations).

31 For more on this, see the official website at: http://putinskissmovie.com/, accessed 10 July 2018, and the Wikipedia page at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putin%27s_Kiss, accessed 18 July 2017. By 2014 Masha Drokova had become a political opponent of the Putin regime and moved to New York although she still visits Russia regularly (Miller 2016).

32 Author’s conversation with Mischa Gabowitsch, Colloquium ‘Civil Society in Russia and the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Institutions, and Moods’, European University at St Petersburg, 8 November 2013.

33 Also author’s conversations with Russian actors, colleagues, students, taxi drivers, diplomatic employees, NGO collaborators, Kaliningrad, Moscow and St Petersburg, September–December 2013, April 2015 and April 2016.