Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e
552
Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e
552Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Originally published in 1988.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691631936 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #894 |
| Pages: | 552 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.30(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Time of Troubles
The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e
By Terence Emmons
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1988 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05520-6
CHAPTER 1
Got'e and His Diary
* * *
Russia in the summer of 1917 was in a state of crisis: a revolution in February, in the midst of the First World War, had overthrown the tsarist regime; a Provisional Government, committed to running the country until a constituent assembly could be called and determined to keep Russia in the war against the Central Powers, maintained a fragile hold on power. By mid-July 1917, the failure of the Russian offensive on the Galician front, which began in the third week of June and turned into a rout by the beginning of July, and the "July Days" demonstrations in Petrograd (July 3–5), which nearly ended in a Bolshevik-led coup d'etat, had clearly revealed to contemporaries that the moderate Provisional Government would not be able to carry on the war against Germany and provide political stability at home. It was a sense of patriotic revulsion over impending national disaster that led Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e, a fortyfouryear old history professor at Moscow University and associate director of the Rumiantsev Museum, to begin keeping a diary on July 8, 1917, the day that Aleksandr Kerenskii replaced Prince Lvov at the head of the Provisional Government and two days after the beginning of the German counteroffensive on the eastern front. It was an occupation he had previously disdained:
The army is an army no more. ... Russia has no future. ... The final fall of Russia as a great and unified power, as a result of internal, not external, causes, not directly due to enemies but to our own flaws and inadequacies, from complete atrophy of a sense of patriotism, motherland, common solidarity, and a sense of union sacrée — this is an episode with few analogies in world history. Living through all this, to my great sorrow, shame, and humiliation, I ... feel myself obliged to record my impressions and in this way to create a very imperfect, very subjective, but nevertheless historical source that may be of use to someone in the future. I do so contrary to all my former views on this account: I specifically did not want to write either reminiscences, or reflections, or a diary, for I have always thought there was quite enough of that rubbish written without me.
And he kept it up through five years of revolution, civil war, family tragedy, hunger, and progressively deteriorating living conditions — writing on a stool in the doorway of the room in communal quarters where he and his family took refuge after their own apartment had been sequestered in 1919, or on the sly at work in the museum, or in the country. Toward the end, the entries become noticeably less frequent, mainly because by this time Got'e was afraid to keep the diary at home, but also because of his exhaustion, which was no doubt mingled with awareness that the new regime, having survived the Civil War, the Polish war, and the internal rebellions of 1921, was there to stay: the great uncertainty about the immediate future of the country that had sustained the chronicle for nearly five years had begun to fade.
As a matter of fact, we do not know for certain whether Got'e ceased keeping a diary altogether on July 23, 1922. What we do know is that he had decided by that time, as he was about to return to Moscow from his summer refuge of Pestovo, that he would not be able to continue the diary in town because of the danger of searches and the intolerable housing situation, and that shortly afterward he turned the diary through that date over to Frank Golder for safekeeping abroad.
Frank Golder (1877–1929) was an American professor of history who was in Soviet Russia collecting materials for the new Hoover Library at Stanford (founded in 1919) and working at the same time as an agent of Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration (ARA). Golder was an omnivorous and insatiable collector of books and manuscripts. Got'e first met Golder on October 23, 1921, and in his penultimate diary entry, on July 16, 1922, Got'e wrote: "We visited Golder. ... A proposal to ship off my materials; I think I will accept it. This may yield a turning point in my plans for the future [at this point Got'e was thinking seriously of emigrating]; in any case, it will save the materials."
And so, soon after his return to Moscow, Got'e turned over the diary and its convoy of correspondence to Golder in order to preserve the record of his impressions for posterity. Golder shipped the diary off to the Hoover Library through channels that had been arranged between ARA and the Soviet government in the spring of 1922. The diary subsequently lay in the Frank Golder papers in the Hoover Library — unidentified except for the words "revolutionary diary of a Moscow revolutionary" [sic] written on its crumbling mailing envelope — until 1982, when it was correctly attributed to Got'e by Edward Kasinec, then curator of Slavic Materials at the University of California-Berkeley, who was searching the Golder archive for materials on the history of Soviet bibliography. The whereabouts, and perhaps even the existence, of the diary appeared to be unknown in the Soviet Union: Got'e's friends knew he was keeping a diary, as did members of his immediate family, but he may never have told anyone what he did with it in 1922, and it is unlikely he reminded anyone of its existence in later years, especially after his arrest in 1930 on charges of counterrevolutionary conspiracy.
The diary that Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e so painstakingly kept for five years and was able to preserve for "someone in the future" thanks to the fortunate meeting with Frank Golder (it would surely have perished had it remained in Got'e's possession) is an extraordinary document that plunges the late-twentieth-century reader directly into the first, critical years of the new Soviet order with a vividness surpassing that of any other source known to this writer.
To be sure, the picture is delimited by the author's geographical location, social milieu, and professional situation: we learn most about the Moscow of the middle-class academic intelligentsia, which was relatively isolated from both the mass movements below and the political regime above. Nevertheless, Got'e was a man who got around. His professional situation involved him with a variety of institutions and social groups, and brought him into fairly close proximity to the corridors of power: he sat on various commissions and convocations in the Kremlin (mostly connected with Narkompros, the Commissariat of Enlightenment); he knew personally quite a few politically significant figures in the new regime, such as Lunacharskii, Pokrovskii, Krupskaia, and Inessa Armand. He traveled extensively within "Sovdepiia": to Petrograd on numerous occasions, to Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Tver', Novgorod, Sergiev Posad and other towns, as well as to the countryside, where he and his family generally managed to spend most of their summers. He walked Moscow, in all directions, looking for food, visiting friends and relations, and going about his business. And to all that he saw, Got'e brought an unusually developed visual sense, a keen eye for detail. He also brought to his diary the terse and elegant style for which he was well known in his professional writing.
At the most obvious, documentary, level, the contents of the diary for the most part belong to three categories: (i) description of major events and of living conditions in the city and in the countryside; (2) information on developments in the principal institutions with which Got'e was associated, the Rumiantsev Museum and Moscow University, and their relations with the new regime after October 1917; and (3) Got'e's assessment (and by extension that of his milieu, the professoriate, on which he regularly reports) of events and the general situation.
It is also, despite its author's intentions, a profoundly personal record. Beneath his stoic demeanor and matter-of-fact style, Got'e was a man of intense feelings, and these are constantly surfacing in the diary (he occasionally apologizes for lapses in his effort to avoid personal matters). In the end, we have the record, perhaps unique in depth and duration, of an individual consciousness living through the Russian Revolution.
Got'e was a man with a family and many friends, toward whom he maintained a touching solicitude and loyalty, even in the most trying times. He visited them regularly or kept in contact, sometimes with great delay, by mail. The Appendix, consisting mostly of letters to Got'e, documents these relations and the diaspora of middle-class Moscow in the Revolution.
The distinction between a diary, "a daily record, especially a personal record of events, experiences, and observations," on the one hand, and memoirs, reminiscences, or autobiography, on the other, must be insisted upon here. The former is a contemporary document and thus part of the historical record — subjective by nature, to be sure, but with its integrity undisturbed by the layers of interpretation and selectivity inevitably imposed by intervening events on even the best memory. The latter are interpretations of the historical record written well after the fact; despite their personal focus and the place assigned to memory in them (often prompted by reference to a diary or contemporary correspondence), they belong to the genre of historical narrative.
Got'e's manuscript is a nearly perfect example of the true diary: unlike many — perhaps most — personal journals that are eventually published, this one was never revised, censored, or embellished at a later time by its author. His entries are never separated from the events and experiences they describe by more than a few days; usually they were recorded the same day. By contrast, N. Sukhanov's famous personal record of the Revolution in Petrograd between February and October 1917 (which is often referred to as a "diary" or "journal" in the history books) is in fact a piece of historical reconstruction, although it evidently followed closely a diary or log kept by the author. And Pitirim Sorokin's "diary" of his experiences in the early years of Soviet power, with pieces of a contemporary record inextricably mixed with ex post facto evaluations, represents a kind of bastard genre between the two.
Like other great upheavals in modern times, the Russian Revolution has engendered a vast quantity of memoir literature, from full-scale personal histories to recollections about discrete events or individuals, with everything in between; their publication has been a minor industry both in the Soviet Union and in emigration. True diaries are extremely rare. When Zinaida Gippius published the fragments of her Petersburg diary for 1919, she wrote in an afterword: "The diary in Sovdepiia — not memoir or reminiscences 'afterward,' but namely 'diary'— is an exceptional thing. I don't think many of them will be found after the liberation. Except perhaps those of commissars."
Only a handful of diaries appear in fact to have been kept in Russia during the Revolution and Civil War, and the number kept inside Soviet Russia after October 1917 is even smaller, despite an epistolary tradition that was still very much alive. Few, at least, have found their way into print, and the available archival guides do not indicate the existence of numerous unpublished diaries from that period either. No published diaries approach even remotely the Got'e diary in richness of detail or number of entries, to mention only two objective characteristics.
The reasons are not far to seek. They are eloquently evoked in Got'e's diary: the extremely difficult living conditions, which, in Moscow at least, more or less precluded spare time or privacy; and the political risk — since after mid-1918, searches of domicile became regular occurences. (In this respect, Got'e's situation was unusual: as director of the Rumiantsev Museum's great library and archive, he had for a time relatively risk-free places to store his diary.) Few members of the writing public with the time and inclination to engage in the peculiar activity of diary keeping were favorably disposed toward the new Bolshevik regime in those early days of its existence; later on, prudence did not counsel preserving evidence of one's attitude toward the new regime in those early days."
The motivations that lay behind Got'e's resolve to "create a historical source" — that is, to chronicle Russia's crisis for posterity — and to sustain it for so long in such trying circumstances are not entirely clear. By the time Got'e began to keep his diary, the genre had long since left its original moorings as a strictly private, usually confessional, enterprise; the second half of the nineteenth century, in Russia as elsewhere in Europe, saw a great florescence of diary writing by men and women who in one way or another were writing for the public. As a result, "it has become no longer possible to define clearly the motivations of diarists."
Toward the end, as he intimates in the remarks about Golder quoted earlier, Got'e apparently entertained the idea that his diary was a kind of capital investment that would help him get started in a life of exile, but that is an idea that could only have come to him after his resolve to emigrate had become strong and the diary had taken on substantial dimensions. For Got'e, his diary may have been above all a means of bringing order into the ongoing chaos of events, and thus of exercising a kind of control over them. It has been remarked, in that respect, that diaries of the chronicle variety are usually the work of outsiders, people who feel themselves cut off by the course of events from power, from participation in political and economic affairs in general. In any case, Gippius was to be disappointed in her anticipation that the "commissars" would produce the diaries of the Russian Revolution: they were too busy making it, or trying to guide its course; Got'e was not.
Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e was born on June 18, 1873 (old style). His father was a bookseller, owner of a large bookstore on the fashionable street of Kuznetskii Most that specialized in fine editions and foreign literature, especially French. The business had been founded by Iurii VIadimirovich's great-grandfather, "Jean Dufayet dit Gautier," son of a French immigrant to Russia. Jean-Marie Dufayer Gautier, son of a magistrate of Saint-Quentin, had come to Russia as a young man in 1764 in response to Catherine the Great's 1763 ukaz inviting foreigners to settle in Russia with various privileges. This great-great-grandfather of Iurii Vladimirovich settled in Moscow in 1768, was inscribed, temporarily, in the Moscow merchantry, and took up the sale of musical instruments. His son, "Ivan Ivanovich," was in time inscribed as a regular member of the Moscow merchantry and established his bookselling enterprise in 1799, having married the daughter of his former employer, the bookseller Fraçois Courtener.'
Iurii Vladimirovich was the first eldest son of the Gautier/Got'e family not to take over the family business, choosing instead to go to university and pursue a scholarly career, and in 1895, the year before his father died, the business was accordingly sold to an employee, Félix Tastevin, who ran it until 1917. The business was thus in continuous existence for 118 years.
Though Iurii Vladimirovich was the first eldest son to leave the family business, members of the Got'e family had long since gone into other endeavors: one of his uncles, Eduard Vladimirovich, was a doctor and professor of medicine; another, Lev Vladimirovich, owned an iron works. Iurii Vladimirovich's younger brother, Vladimir Vladimirovich, was a lawyer and civil servant.
Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e attended Moscow University in the early 1890s (1891–1895), where he matriculated in the historico-philological faculty and took the courses on Russian history of the great Professor V. O. Kliuchevskii and the young Privatdozent P. N. Miliukov, under whose direction he wrote his undergraduate thesis on the defense and colonization of the frontiers in Muscovy (it was completed just before Miliukov was exiled from Moscow for his political activities in January 1895). Got'e also studied ancient history and European history with P. G. Vinogradov (later Sir Paul Vinogradoff) and V. I. Ger'e (Guerrier). He and his later colleague and friend A. N. Savin graduated with highest marks among the historians.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Time of Troubles by Terence Emmons. Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- List of Illustrations, pg. ix
- Acknowledgments, pg. xi
- A Note to the Reader, pg. xiii
- List of Frequently Used Abbreviations, pg. xv
- Chronology of Principal Events Mentioned in the Diary of Iu. V. Got'e, pg. xvii
- Got'e and His Diary, pg. 1
- 1917, pg. 27
- 1918, pg. 95
- 1919, pg. 227
- 1920, pg. 328
- 1921, pg. 397
- 1922, pg. 442
- Appendix, pg. 463
- Index of Personal Names, pg. 497