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New research by Trinity PhD student Ekaterina Zadirko using the rarely studied diaries of teenage boys in Stalin’s Russia reveals how they navigated the troubled times in which they lived, their attitudes to girls, and their hopes for the future.
In the journal Slavic Review, Zadirko writes about a rare example of a peasant diary by a young person. Ivan Khripunov wrote his diary from 1937, when he was 14, until his ill-fated conscription into the Red Army in 1941.
His diary is one of 25 Zadirko is studying as part of a PhD. Together the diaries preserve the voices of boys from a wide range of families and locations. Sergei Argirovskii, for example, was born into Leningrad’s intelligentsia, his parents were teachers of Russian language and literature. By contrast, Aleksei Smirnov was of peasant origin and worked as a mechanic in a Moscow boiler-house.
Zadirko said:
Scholars tend to disregard most of what’s in these diaries as just teenage concerns. But in 1930s Russia, writing was a key strategy for teenage boys to process their coming of age and find their place in society. Even if their diary remained a private document, writing for these boys felt very high-stakes, even existential.
Ivan Khripunov was the son of a once wealthy peasant who was labelled a ‘kulak’ and exiled as an enemy of the people. Before the Russian Revolution of 1917 wealthier peasants could be important figures in villages, but particularly under Stalin their resistance to the collectivization of agriculture led to their disposition and deportation.
In December 1940, Ivan Khripunov wrote:Ten in the evening. I am sitting alone in the back room. Everyone has already gone to sleep … the ink is bad, it blurs on paper, and the quill scratches the paper like a good plough … Everything hinders my work … But I have to fill in the diary, whatever it takes.
Ivan followed Maxim Gorky’s literary model, recording his hardships as Gorky had described his pre-revolutionary struggles. Ivan wrote about his family surviving the famine of 1932–33, his father’s exile, and his mother and elder sisters suffering from the public humiliation of ‘dekulakization’, the Soviet campaign to eliminate those it labelled kulaks.
‘I don’t think Ivan realised that he was doing something potentially dangerous,’ Zadirko said. ‘By imitating Gorky, Ivan was following established literary conventions, but in doing so, he broke the rules of a Stalinist public autobiography, by discussing taboo subjects. It was not an expression of conscious political dissent but a clash of cultural models.’
Several of the diarists became successful writers and saw their diaries published. Other diaries were printed in small regional journals, but the majority are only now accessible thanks to Prozhito, a crowdfunded digital archive of diaries, memoirs and letters launched in 2015 by scholars at the European University in Saint Petersburg.
The diaries record the daily grind of school, homework and being bored at home. But they also provide fascinating insights into the boys’ attitudes, including to girls.
In September 1941, Ivan Khripunov wrote: Abroad, love is the main goal of life … For us, love is a secondary concern. The most important thing is communal work. We rarely say the word “love.” …I fell in love with a girl, but she didn’t love me back … In my thoughts, I only wanted to look at her and not besmirch my tender being with the dreams about sexual intercourse.’
Some of the diaries end abruptly as their writers entered the Red Army and Second World War.
As he prepared for the military draft in 1941, Ivan wrote, A new life begins. That is why I have written my autobiography … The war makes everyone into adults. I thought I was a boy, but now I am being drafted like an adult.
Less than a year later, he was reported missing. The exact date of his death is unknown.
‘We mustn’t over exoticize Soviet lives,’ Zadirko says.
Soviet ideology shaped people, but they weren’t completely brainwashed. There weren’t just true believers and dissidents. People didn’t simply accept or reject propaganda, or play by its rules to survive.
The diaries show that Soviet people, including teenagers, were many things all at once, trying to assemble their identity and make sense of the world with what they were given.
Read more:
From Russia with love and teenage angst (cam.ac.uk)
Cambridge researcher studies teenage diaries from Stalin-era – BBC News