As an editor for Yale University Press in 1992, Jonathan Brent flew to Moscow to discuss the possibility of publishing key documents from newly opened Soviet-era archives.  He returned throughout the 90’s and into the new millennium, gaining access to stunning papers–including records of the interrogation of Isaac Babel and Stalin’s own scribbles–and meeting some characters torn right out of the pages of Gogol.  Now the editorial director of the press, Mr. Brent has written a new book about the process, Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas & Co., $26.00).  In addition to presenting some of the more intriguing things researchers discovered in various archives, the book is also a beautiful and thoughtful discussion of the transition from desperate post-Soviet poverty to the New Russia of Putin and Vogue magazine.  Mr. Brent will be talking about the book with his own editor and publisher James Atlas in our store today, February 4, but he was kind enough to answer a few questions about the book beforehand.

McNally Jackson: First, your book covers quite a lot of material, both personal and historical, and because of this seems to defy easy description.  How would you characterize it?  As travel writing?  Memoir?  History?

Jonathan Brent: I don’t quite know how to characterize my book, either.  It is certainly memoiristic as well as historiographic.  I am convinced that the only way truly to understand the connection between concrete action and historical process is through the lives of individuals.  Consequently, I tried to structure the book in such a way that whatever abstract conclusions I came to–whether about Stalinism or Putin–came out of actual lived experience–whether that of Mariana, Vladimir Naumov, or Nataliya Tomilina. Heisenberg has taught us that there are no "objective" facts in atomic physics–that the observer adds something to every observation–and therefore I felt it necessary to reveal something of my own, personal involvement and background.  How else could I answer the question, "How did this project come about?"  And without this project (Annals of Communism), how could we have learned about Yezhov’s now famous last words, or Stalin’s famous 1937 toast, etc.?

McNJ: In describing your first trip to Moscow in 1992 you have some striking passages about the relative shabbiness and fragility of everyday objects in a Russian home.  Rykhlyi is the word you use, and it  reminds you of a period of postwar deprivation in your childhood in Wisconsin.  Do you see similarities between your nostalgia in that moment and the current widespread Russian nostalgia for the Soviet era, or is theirs more strictly political?

JB: My feelings about the rykhli nature of the world I found myself in became complicated once I realized that this weakness and frailness proved stronger than Stalin’s Terror.  It was something he couldn’t ever abide and tried desperately to eradicate.  He hated weakness in people and things.  But there I was in this bed that might collapse if I snored too strongly, in a cab powered by levers on the steering wheel because the driver had no legs, in restaurants that had no menus, in bathtubs without water…and at the same time at the nexus of the most powerful historical forces of the 20th Century–and perhaps beyond.  It posed for me a great paradox that was both very concrete–how to flush a toilet?–and theoretical–what is the nature of power? And that paradox, I believe, is at the heart of my book.

McNJ: Some of the more enticing archives, including those of the FSB, have begun to restrict access more heavily again in this decade.  Do you think this is due to a "fear of analogies" at higher levels, as you mention in your introduction, or a more general return to a mentality of secrecy, S.D. Ignatiev’s konspiratsiya, within these establishments?

JB: There are several reasons for the greater restrictiveness which began, by the way, in the Yeltsin period and the effects of which are only now being felt. About a week after YUP published The Secret World of American Communism in 1995, the FSB came to the archive and demanded to know how YUP got the documents we published.  The director explained that while access to the documents was restricted in FSB the copies of those documents in his archive were not restricted.  They were immediately reclassified.  Today, nobody could have access to what we published in 1995.  Why?  This had to do with "sources and methods"–that is, the documents we published revealed much more than the FSB would have wanted about how they operate, and although the FSB is NOT the KGB the institutional life of those organizations is continuous and "sources and methods" have remained largely unaffected by the demise of the Soviet Union.

Access to top Presidential archives was ALWAYS restricted.  In fact, I have had more success in recent years in obtaining this material than I did in the early 1990s because I have come to know well the very few number of archivists and historians who work in the Presidential archives and have been granted access. Therefore, my book Stalin’s Last Crime makes considerable use of such materials because my co-author, Vladimir Naumov, had access.  The forthcoming book on the Terror of the 1930s will have much new material from this source for a similar reason.

Materials in Stalin’s Personal Archive to which YUP does not at present have access are classified largely because they deal with espionage or very sensitive international matters.  Here there may be reason to think that a "fear of analogies" is at work, but until I can see what these materials are it’s hard to make the case.  Easier is to argue that the espionage material will reveal "sources and methods" and that the international material might cause difficulties is PRESENT regimes–perhaps in Poland, Ukraine or other East European states–possibly with the U.S.

The return to konspiratsiya is happening in different ways, largely through making the government’s behavior inaccessible to public scrutiny, shutting down the opposition and the liberal press, killing journalists, muzzling academics.

McNJ: How have Yale’s archival publications been received within Russia?  Is  there wider interest, or are they perceived as ephemera, of interest  only to specialists in Soviet history?

JB: Some of the publications have been well-received, such as the volumes on the Romanovs, the Gulag, the peasantry, and the volumes of letters between Stalin and Kaganovich, Dimitrov, and Molotov.  Other volumes have not been well-received, such as The Unknown Lenin, that was thought to be unbalanced and Spain Betrayed that was also thought to be so unbalanced that it wasn’t published in Russia at all.  By unbalanced, they mean that the documents exposing the duplicity, cruelty, cynicism or fraud of the Soviet government or its leaders needed to be balanced with documents showing the good side.  It’s a little like balancing 1+1=2 with 1+1=3.  Many in Russia don’t see it that way which is why studying the persistence of the Stalin cult is important in understanding present day attitudes and dispositions toward historical truth.

There is wide interest in publications such as those on the Terror or the Gulag, but most of the others are seen as largely scholarly and of little value in relation to present concerns.  Just as most American kids don’t know anything about the Vietnam War, let alone WWI, most Russian kids, born in the 90s, know nothing about Stalin or the Soviet Union.  For them it’s a kind of uneasy kitsch.