Book Alert / Revolution On My Mind
Revolution On My Mind -- Writing A Diary Under Stalin by Jochen Hellbeck, Harvard UP '06, $29.95, 436 pages, ISBN #0674021746. Index, note on sources, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.
Some writers approach the writing of serious nonfiction in a deliberate way, taking a subject on which they'd written their dissertation, for example, then obtaining a research fellowship to gain the time to write a full manuscript. And others fall into their subjects quite by chance. Rutgers University historian Jochen Hellbeck is one of those.
In 1990, he had just completed research in Moscow on the fate of Russia's peasants under Stalin and was preparing to leave for America when a street sign titled "People's Archive" caught his eye. He knew that Mikhail Gorbachev's liberal reforms had opened up Soviet records for the world to see, but he was quite unprepared for what he would encounter once he had negotiated the aisles of an old Times Square-type shop selling music tapes and transistor radios. For behind the shop lay a mission: the collecting and preservation of diaries of ordinary citizens, recounting what it was like to live under Stalinism.
The first diary Hellbeck came across told of a man persecuted by the Soviets because his father was a "class enemy." In this, as in later diaries he accessed, Hellbeck found oppressed citizens who, movingly, tried to adapt to Stalinism by trying their best to become model communists. Of the diary of Stepan Filipovich Podlubny, he writes: "The diary revealed a double life fraught with tension and danger; but most remarkably it documented this man's attempts to remake himself -- he seemed to yearn to become the person he impersonated."
Hellbeck draws from dozens of such diaries -- from students to housewives to intellectuals -- to reconstruct life in a lost era. Watching people try, to various degrees, to subordinate their individualism to a collectivist movement aimed at building a socialist society I found to be a vigorous affirmation of the virtues of democracy.
