61. Gross, “Nature of Soviet Totalitarianism.” Because Poland underwent Nazi and Soviet occupations simultaneously, it would seem the ideal (if that is the word) place to make the case for “totalitarianism” as a concept encompassing both regimes, yet Gross, a proponent of the term, also noted significant differences between the nature and consequences of Nazi and Soviet rule. Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 230–1. After a trip to newly acquired western Ukraine and western Belorussia as a Pravda correspondent, the writer Avdeyenko returned with a new Buick. (On Sept. 9, 1940, he would be taken to task for being a “serial goods pursuer.”) Babichenko, Pisateli i tsenzory, 22–31. The writer Vishnevsky, afforded a visit to the front in Finland, had written in his diary (Jan. 2, 1940), “I am ashamed to the point of horror to see how our people soiled many homes in Finland, how they carried off everything.” Golubev et al., Rossiia i zapad, 226–7 (citing RGALI, f. 1038, op. 1, d. 2076, l. 2).
62. Khabarovsk OGPU materials of the early 1930s (to which I was given access in 1993) contain extremely specific, comprehensive characterizations for the population, right down to dwellings drawn to scale, in the émigré settlements across the border in Manchuria, even as the Soviet authorities could not feed or clothe the population in Khabarovsk region.
63. In the 1940 Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language, the word sovetizirovat’ (to Sovietize) was defined as “To implant Soviet ideology, worldview, and understanding of the practical tasks of Soviet power.” Amar, “Sovietization as a Civilizing Mission in the West,” 31.
64. Beria wrote to Stalin that in the summer of 1940, the police archive in Kishinëv, seized from Romania, had been burned before the NKVD could seize it. Khaustov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov,” 308 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 7, d. 22, l. 301).
65. “The capitalists succeeded for a time in playing on the national distrust of Latvian, Estonian, and Finnish peasants, as well as shopkeepers, toward the Great Russians,” Schcherbakov would admit after the annexations to the Supreme Soviet (Aug. 1, 1940), in connection with the failures in 1918–20 to reconquer these lands. When the transcript was getting ready for publication, he crossed out “national distrust” and inserted a passage about “bourgeois politicians” in cahoots with the “imperialist bourgeoisie,” “deceiving” these peoples. Golubev et al., Rossiia i zapad, 86 (citing RGASPI, f. 88, op. 1, d. 1015, l. 5).
66. Kul’turnaia zhizn’ v SSSR, 1928–1941, 734.
67. The Taras Shevchenko Theater of Ballet and Opera performed Natalka-Poltavka, The Zaporozhets beyond the Danube, and other folk favorites. Literaturnaia gazeta, March 27, 1936; Sovetskaia kul’tura v rekonstruktivnyi period, 517. Pravda, March 24, 1936; Nevezhin, Zastol’ia, 115 (citing RGALI, f. 962, op. 21, d. 1, l. 10); Cherushev, Komendanty Kremlia, 477–8. A Kazakh Ten-Day followed (May 17–26), with 350 participants, including the Kazakh Musical Theater, which performed the first Kazakh opera, a form that was a Soviet implant but, in this case, with a story based on the sixteenth-century oral epic Kyz Zhibek. The sensation proved to be the traditional improviser-troubadours (akyns), who sang tales accompanied by a dombra. Literaturnaia gazeta, May 10 and 15, 1936; Nevezhin, Zastol’ia, 115–6 (citing RGALI, f. 962, op. 21, d. 1, l. 10). See also Ubiria, Soviet Nation-Building, 169–70. Maya Plisteskaya, the ballerina, condescendingly observed that “Soviet Leaders positively loved these showy-imitation Ten-Days,” then admitted that “these parades mobilized creative people to an extreme. Everyone worked to the limits (otherwise, you look up, and you don’t get the little medal, and they don’t summon you to the final banquet). So you forget all the negatives. . . . These Ten-Days gathered the best forces.” Plisetskaia, Chitaia zhizn’ svoiu, 93.
