The Meaning of Consciousness in the Early Soviet Union: Thoughts, Feelings, Bodies

The Meaning of Consciousness in the Early Soviet UnionThoughts, Feelings, Bodies Anatoly Pinsky (bio) Igal Khal´fin (Igal Halfin). Avtobiografiia bol´shevizma: Mezhdu spaseniem i padeniem (The Autobiography of Bolshevism: Between Salvation and the Fall). 848 pp. , illus. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2023. ISBN-13 978-5444818824. In 2009, in an article in Kritika, the Russian historian Oleg Budnitskii remarked: "Of course, a poem can hardly serve as an historical source. "1 For other historians, trained primarily in the West, all historical sources are in a sense themselves poems or, rather, characterized by their own poetics. One Western-trained historian who has paid a great deal of attention to the poetics of his sources, and particularly to the plot structures of autobiographical narratives, is the Israel-based Igal Halfin. In five books, an edited volume, and various articles, published between the 1990s and the early 2010s, and devoted above all to the early Soviet years and the Stalinist 1930s, Halfin made clear the intellectual rewards of a close examination of narrative. 2 He thus emerged as a pioneer of the linguistic turn in the End Page 418 anglophone historiography on the Soviet Union and is perhaps best known for his argument that, in their life narratives, Communists as well as aspiring Communists told stories of intellectual development, or a journey, as he put it, "from darkness to light. " Avtobiografiia bol´shevizma is Halfin's first Russian-language book and brings his analysis of language to Russian readers. Stunningly, the lengthy tome is only the first of three books, with each of the remaining two to be twice as long as this first monograph. 3 Halfin presents this opening volume, devoted to the era of the New Economic Policy (NEP), as an extension of his previous work (8–9) ; but the text, in fact, is primarily his own translation of large portions of three of his earlier books—Terror in My Soul, Intimate Enemies, and Red Autobiographies—and a small part of a fourth—From Darkness to Light. Consequently, the reader does not find an engagement in the volume with past criticism of his English-language books or with several newer historiographies. In this review, I thus use the publication of Avtobiografiia bol´shevizma as an occasion both to reflect in detail on Halfin's earlier arguments, at times in dialogue with his previous reviewers, and to build on these arguments by following more recent lines of analysis. 4 Above all, however, I wish to read Halfin's own sources and language against the grain of his study and to suggest an alternative interpretation. In his book, as in his English-language monographs, Halfin has located a narrative of intellectual development in Bolshevik autobiographies. In contrast, I contend that this narrative was in fact part of a larger story. The story of intellectual growth in the early Soviet Union, I argue, was inextricably tied up with the emotional and physiological development of the individual. 5 Indeed, End Page 419 consciousness, that key communist category, should be understood as constituted not only by reason but also by emotion and the body, with the boundaries between the rational, emotional, and bodily often blurry and in flux. Permitting this interpretation is the richness of Halfin's own analysis as well as the breadth of his materials. This essay should thus be read as a dialogue with the author of the book under consideration, to whom this reviewer owes a great intellectual debt. _______ For Igal Halfin, as his past readers will remember, the communist experiment was primarily about opening oneself up and, together with the authorities, using reason to examine what lay within. The overall goal of the project was to transform one's "core, " "interiority, " or "essence, " that deep kernel of the self that, according to the Bolsheviks, above all defined the individual (17). This exercise in self-examination produced an enormous amount of first-person writing. Communists and aspiring Communists penned official autobiographies, petitions, and declarations (priznaniia), as well as more personal texts such as diaries. For Halfin, all these genres are encompassed by the term "autobiography" found in his book's title. The category "autobiography" also includes the long lists. . .