Making Sense of the ´Good´ Soviet Communist Dictatorship Through Stalin´s Terror, Khrushchev´s Reforms and Brezhnev´s Period of Stagnation
 
Project number: P14-0387:1
 
Tomas Sniegon, PhD in History, Associate Professor in European Studies, University of Lund
 
The project deals with an analysis of the testimony of Vladimir Semichastny, who worked as the chairman of the KGB during the period 1961-1967. It is based on an extensive empirical material, first of all on about 130 hours of my taped interviews with him between the years 1993-1999. Another important source are documents from various archives that were not available during the 1990s but that can be studied today. These sources provide the readers with new knowledge about Vladimir Semichastny´s period in power as well as about the Soviet communist system in general and about Semichastny´s way to construct an individual  narrative about his own life, a narrative that – from the point of view of theory – quite complicated and contradictory.

I knew quite well how I wanted to work with the source material already before I submitted the project application. However, I kept developing the theoretical framework and improving my access to the archives during the entire project period. The most important archives studied were the RGANI and RGASPI in Russia, the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University in the US, the so-called Mitrokhin archive at Cambridge University in the UK and the former KGB archive in Kyiv in Ukraine.  

The project was conducted in three stages. The first goal was to present its contents and goals at the international level and discuss them with relevant distinguished researchers. This allowed me to create a quite extensive contact net that has helped me a lot during the process of studying and writing. For example, I got a chance to present the project at the Stanford University in the USA where I got a visiting fellowship during 2015. Moreover, I had a number of other fruitful discussions during a number of other presentations at other universities, such as the Humboldt University in Berlin, the Lomonosov State University in Moscow, the Peking University in Beijing and, naturally, at my own university in Lund in Sweden. I also used other opportunities and presented the project (or its selected parts) at a number of international conferences, such as the conference series “The History of Stalinism) in Russia, the BASEES (British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies) conference in Cambridge in the UK, the ICCEES (International Council for Central and East European Studies) world congress in Tokyo in Japan or at the Sweden-South Africa University Forum in Pretoria. At the same time, I was focusing on study of all relevant literature available. During the second stage, I was focusing on studies of documents in the already mentioned archives (and other archives, such as the archive of the former Czechoslovak secret police in Prague, Czech Republic) and on evaluations of the knowledge provided by these documents. At the same time, I wrote several articles for scholarly journals and discussed their conclusions at several conferences first of all (but not only) in Russia. At the relatively early stage of the project, I was offered a book contract by one of the best University publishers, the Yale University Press in the USA. The book is going to be published within the Yale-Stanford Series on Authoritarian Regimes. The third stage contains writing the final manuscript. It is still ongoing and the final manuscript is going to be finished during 2019.

The most important results of the project – presented in articles (some of them still under publishing) and especially in the book – are going to increase the knowledge about how the Soviet political elites – especially the leaders of Soviet security – were thinking during two important decades of the Cold War between the late 1950s and early 1970s which meant the periods of de-Stalinisation, led by Nikita Khrushchev, and early “stagnation” under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev. They are also going to contribute to the research concerning the so-called “ideology of chekism” in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, which means those aspects that concerns the relationship between the security forces and the top politics in the country and their influence of both the domestic and international affairs. Which similarities and differences are there between the “ideology of chekism” and the traditional political ideologies? What does it mean if a “professional” chekist – the leader of the State security apparatus – comes to the top politics and what happens if a politician – “non-professional chekist” is appointed the leader of the Security service? Last, but not least, the project also contributes to increased knowledge about the life of “ordinary people” in the Soviet Union during the 1960s, as well as the knowledge about activities of the Soviet cultural elites of that time. It was, for example, just during the Semichastny´s time at the KGB-headquarter Lubyanka when the first cultural works about the life during the Gulag period were published in the Soviet Union, including the famous novel “One day in Ivan Denisovich´s Life”, written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
The articles written during the project concern two main areas. First, they deal with the memory of the Gulag in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia when Semichastny reminisced about his life. Here I want to mention especially two articles, the first one with the title “Dying in the Soviet Gulag for Future Glory of Mother Russia? Making ´Patriotic´Sense of the Gulag in Present-Day Russia” and the second, written with the Austalian historian Julie Fedor, with the title “The Butovskii Shooting Range: History of an Unfinished Museum”. Second, there are three texts that analyze the development in the Soviet union during the 1950s and 1960s, all published in Russian. Their titles are: “From domestic emigrants to dissidents: Soviet non-conform cultural elites in the second half of the 1950s and the early 1960s”, “Komsomol-functionaries hungry for power? The conflict between different political generations in the mid-1960s” and “The Iron-Felix as an ideal chekist of the Cold War. The cult of a ´kind´ Cheka during the period of the battle against the cult of personality”.
Together with these articles that have already been published or accepted for publishing, I have also written several other texts that are currently being reviewed. I have also written two book reviews, one about the diaries of Leonid Brezhnev that were recently published in Russia and one about a new book concerning the unsuccessful history of the attempts to introduce a collective leadership in the Soviet Union.  
 
The grant from The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences has meant an enormous help for my work and I am very grateful for it. The grant has also helped me to get a higher scholarly competence and develop new ideas for my future research.