Revolution Rekindled

Polly Jones tells the story of the long-running ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ series of biographies published by Politizdat, the most ideologically correct and connected of Soviet publishers. Jones recognises that much, if not most, of the series’ output, 156 biographies of Soviet, Russian and international revolutionaries published between 1968 and 1990, could be classified as hack work. What interests her is the series’ most experimental and popular works. Aimed at attracting discerning readers and reigniting their revolutionary enthusiasm, the series became famous for its emotionally engaging and sometimes politically ambiguous, ‘even subversive’ (p. 8) biographies. Challenging the stereotypical image of late Soviet culture as ritualised, formulaic and unremittingly dull, Jones charts the fluid boundaries between official Soviet culture and the unofficial culture to which it was ostensibly opposed. Given the status of the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ series as ‘official’ culture, Jones begins by explaining how the post-Stalin shift in the party’s approach to political propaganda pushed staid and risk-averse Politizdat to launch one of the most innovative publishing ventures of the late Soviet period. She traces the origins of the series, which the party’s Central Committee approved in 1964, to a 1953 resolution of that same body. Party leaders criticised the publisher’s failure to produce political literature that people wanted to buy and read. In the decade of criticism and self-criticism that followed, editors at Politizdat hit on the idea of enlisting literary authors to produce psychologically nuanced biographies with mass appeal. By the time the first volumes of the series appeared in 1968, some party stalwarts worried that literary biographies would compromise the press’s high ideological standards. Such anxieties, Jones argues, constrained ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’, but the competing fear that the ‘masses’ were not reading political literature allowed the series’ authors to produce linguistically and morally complex biographies, even as the thaw gave way to the so-called stagnation of the Brezhnev era

Art · Art history · Biography · Literature · Classics · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Soviet and Russian History