The Modern Approaches to the Study of «Leningrad Affair» of the late 1940s — early 1950s in the Russian Semi-Scholarly Literature

Abstract

The last major bout of Stalin-era political repression, the 1949–1952 “Leningrad Affair” was a purge that affected not only that city’s local party organization, but an array of other similar regional bodies. This purge resulted in the execution of a number of leading party and state officials; it also ruined many others’ lives, careers and families. Leningrad and its party organization were likewise crippled by the purge and endured the loss of a special status they had enjoyed since 1917. Despite the seriousness of the “Leningrad Affair” and its legacy, this subject was regarded as taboo within the USSR until the late 1980s. As a result, it has taken the society decades to come to terms with this purge and to rehabilitate its victims. Today, the question of what precisely precipitated the “Leningrad Affair” is actively debated not only in academic circles, but in the press and mass culture. Many of the best-known works on the subject are not written by historians, but by journalists, who play on both their audience’s patriotic emotions and the appeal of sensational new “revelations” that are often insufficiently supported by the historical record. The existence of such a semi-scholarly genre of books demonstrates the scale of contemporary societal interest in this dimension of late Stalinism. Unfortunately, the destructive effect of this sort of publication is often underestimated at first glance. Published in large print runs, these books tend to overshadow more scholarly, professional studies and catalyze the formation of erroneous popular beliefs and misconceptions about important historical events. This article offers a dispassionate evaluation of the latest semi-scholarly work on the “Leningrad Affair” (taking as its case studies a number of books by S. S. Mironin, E. A. Prudnikova, S. Kremlev, S. Yu. Rybas and V. D. Kuznechevskii). The authors of this study identify an array of specific mistakes and errors in interpretation in the books under review; they also point to a series of more fundamental errors present throughout this semi-scholarly literature.