'Beyond Totalitarianism - Stalinism and Nazism Compared'

The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany 319To make this New Man fully aware of himself he needed a guiding, helpinghand. Again it was Gorky who in great measure defined the medium which wasto instill the man with full self-consciousness: literature. This was the mediumby which intellectuals had introduced the New Man in the first place a centuryearlier. It was at Gorky’s Moscow residence, in October 1932, that Stalincalled on leading Soviet writers to work as “engineers of human souls.” 42 TheStalinist regime invested in literature more than in any other artistic sphere topromote the features of the New Man; simultaneously literature advanced tothe regime’s artistic medium of choice. Literary works were both to “reflect” theachievements of new Soviet men and women and to provide the biographicalmold according to which readers were to pattern their personal life experience.This emphasis on the heroic biography was what for the writer AlekseiTolstoi distinguished Soviet literature from its counterpart in the decliningbourgeois West. “From this point on, the paths of Russian and European literaturepart. . . . Hero! We need a hero of our time.” 43These literary patterns acquired material power as they were assimilatedinto coercive practices of the Stalinist regime. The construction of the BelomorCanal, linking the Baltic to the White Sea, as well as other constructionprojects built with the expanding Gulag workforce, were propagated as initiativesto “reforge” criminals into useful socialist citizens. A propaganda volumecomposed by thirty writers, who included some of the most venerated literaryfigures of the time, presented stories of individuals bent down by capitalistexploitation whose personalities were straightened out after exposure to formsof collective, purposeful labor. The image that the book presents of Belomoras a harsh yet nurturing place clashes with the evidence of exhaustion, death,and cruel regimentation that characterized the social reality of Belomor in thefirst place and found no entry into the pages of the propaganda volume. Whilethe extent to which the ideology of reforging shaped the subjective horizons ofthe forced laborers themselves is uncertain, several of the artists who helpedproduce the volume tied their involvement in the elaboration of the Stalinistmyth of rebirth to agendas of personal transformation that their participationin this project appeared to assure. 44Increasingly in the course of the 1930s, the New Man was declared tobe a contemporary social reality. The extraordinary exploits of Stakhanovite42 Although the term “engineering of souls” had been coined by experimental writers alreadyin the 1920s, it did bring out the understanding Stalin applied to it, of the fully developedindividual (the writer producing under the direction of the Party) who used technology asa tool of social transformation; see O. Ronen, “‘Inzhenery chelovecheskikh dush’: K istoriiizrecheniia,” Lotmanovskii sbornik 2 (1997): 393–400.43 Quoted by Gutkin, 77.44 This applied, notably, to the writer Mikhail Zoshchenko and the photographer Rodchenko.See Elizabeth A. Papazian, “Reconstructing the (Authentic Proletarian) Reader: MikhailZoshchenko’s Changing Model of Authorship, 1929–1934,” Kritika 4, no. 4 (2003): 816–48;Leah Dickerman, “The Propagandizing of Things,” in Aleksandr Rodchenko, eds. MagdalenaDabrowski et al. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 96; see also Thomas Lahusen,How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1997).