The Suffering of the Nation | CU Experts

Abstract; Chapter 6 challenges the depiction of the Brezhnev era as a time of intellectual “stagnation” by exploring the fierce debates that took place over the nature of the nation and Stalin’s postwar policies toward the peasantry. The chapter begins by analyzing a debate over “urban” and “rural” prose in Armenia, demonstrating that intellectuals continued to associate the village with the nation even after decades of Soviet rule. It then discusses how, in the second half of the 1960s, the Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov, the Russian writer Fedor Abramov, and the Moldovan writer Ion Druță initiated a public conversation on the treatment of the peasantry by Soviet officials after World War II. Analyzing these works and their reception, this chapter shows that village writers continued to criticize Stalin’s agricultural policies even as the state sought to curtail discussion of other Stalinist policies like the 1937 purges and the Gulag. This chapter also discusses the repercussions of Brezhnev’s preferential policies toward Russian Village Prose writers. The case of Druță’s novel, which condemned the state’s response to the 1947 famine in Moldova, demonstrates that the “policy of inclusion” toward Russian Village Prose undermined “policies of exclusion” in the non-Russian republics and encouraged the spread of non-Russian nationalisms in the USSR.

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