Writing the Nation After Stalin: Literature and the Collapse of the Soviet Union

In 1967, the Russian writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, "Looking back, even a fool would have been able to predict it today: The Soviet regime could certainly have been breached only by literature." In Writing the Nation After Stalin, Erin Hutchinson tells the story of a multiethnic cohort of young Soviet writers from villages who set out to remedy a social injustice—the oppression of the peasantry under Stalin—and ended up challenging the Soviet state. Their literary works, published within the official system, praised national values and traditional village culture and helped fuel a resurgence of ethno-nationalism in the USSR. In the late 1980s, several village writers became leaders in the nationalist movements that helped trigger the break-up of the Soviet Union.

In a communist country that prided itself on being "the most well-read in the world," literature was always political. But how was it possible to publish literary works that challenged Marxist-Leninist ideology amid authoritarianism? Writing the Nation After Stalin traces the lives of a generation of writers as they abandoned the violence and poverty of the Stalin-era village in search of literary fame. Drawing on fresh archival material from Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, and Moldova, Hutchinson reveals how these rural migrants navigated the complicated world of Soviet cultural politics and pushed for change despite harsh censorship.

This book tells a new story about the reemergence of nationalism in the USSR after Stalin's death through an array of sources in four languages, including archival documents, diaries, memoirs, letters, novels, and KGB reports. As Hutchinson shows, nationalism spread through central Soviet institutions originally designed to suppress it. Ideas that developed in one Soviet republic quickly gained popularity in others. Although the development of nationalism in the USSR was surprisingly internationalist, it nevertheless put these national groups on a collision course in the late 1980s. Writing the Nation After Stalin is a reminder that we are still living in the world that Soviet literature helped create.