Catherine Merridale_The Collective Mind: Trauma and Shell-Shock in Twentieth-Century Russia

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The Collective Mind: Trauma and Shell-Shock in Twentieth-Century Russia Author(s): Catherine Merridale Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, No. 1, Special Issue: Shell-Shock (Jan., 2000),

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Journal of Contemporary History Copyright ? 2000 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol 35(1), 39-55. [0022-0094(200001)35:1 ;39-55;0 1 184]

Catherine Merridale

The Collective Mind: Trauma and Shell-shock in Twentieth-century Russia1

The reconsideration of shell-shock has been one of many reflections prompted by the eightieth anniversary of the 1918 armistice. In addition to numerous conferences, there have been new books in the past few years and even a Channel Four television series on the topic. The discussion has ranged beyond the history of psychiatry. One shared assumption has been that the way a society treats soldiers will reflect its humanity by measuring the value that it places upon compassion. The case is extreme and paradoxical. Protection is demanded for the people who are paid not just to kill but also to die. A generation which has missed the two great wars understandably also reflects upon a test which it has not had to face. And underlying all these considerations is the disturbing question of how any of us, the privileged civilians of a mainly peaceful and affluent society, would have measured up to the trauma of battle.

Because the discussion among British and other west European scholars has been largely self-analytical, it has focused mainly on the Western Front. Participants agree that shell-shock, under different names, affected Germans, French and British alike. But can we generalize from this and suggest that it is a universal response to modern war? The idea that any human being might have 'cracked' under the pressure of artillery fire disposes of the suspicion that there was anything effete or cowardly about the victims, and this is certainly progress. But does the assumption of universality stand up to scrutiny? Did shell-shock also affect the Russians, for example, whose losses were so much greater? In this article, I shall discuss the issue of trauma and its treatment in the Soviet Union. I shall argue that the Russian case is important because of what it suggests about the variety of possible social responses to individual neurosis. The tsarist government, at least in its more enlightened moments, followed western Europe's lead. But Soviet Russia took a distinctive line on individual pain, trauma and bereavement. The Soviet experience of war was narrated with a particular emphasis upon survival and endurance. The deeper question is whether the pervasive Stalinist ideology reached beyond the public

1 The material on which this article is based forms part of a larger project, and I would like to acknowledge the generous and continuing support of the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, and the Common Security Forum, King's College, Cambridge. I am grateful to Jay Winter for inviting me to think and talk about the subject of shell-shock at the meeting in Peronne, and to the other participants there for their comments. I am also indebted, though they bear no responsibility for this article, to Ian Collins, Margaret Mitchell, Andrei Popov, Arieh Shalev, Aleksei Smirnov, Elena Stroganova and Derek Summerfield.



Journal of Contemporary History Vol 35 No I

sphere and affected the responses of individuals exposed to violence, pain and death.

The material for this article is taken from my wider study of death and memory in twentieth-century Russia.2 The issue of trauma has been central to this work. What it finds is that culture plays a major part in the identification and treatment of sufferers, and even in the individual's willingness to be identi- fied as a victim. This is not the same as arguing that human beings are not equally susceptible to pain. The idea that 'they' do not feel pain in the same way that 'we' do has been the basis for too many atrocities in history. The dis- tinction comes at the next stage. Just as individuals cope with pain in a variety of ways, so it seems that societies in turn sanction and encourage culture- specific and widely differing collective responses.3 The story in Russia is particularly interesting because the political and social context changed. West European ideas which had briefly been fashionable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were abandoned by the Soviet government at the end of the 1920s. An alternative paradigm of the individual and the mind, whose origins were historically Russian as well as ideologically Stalinist, was widely adopted. It is still predominant in Russia today. Post-communist Russian society, and especially its responses to violence and alienation, cannot be understood without considering it.

Russia's first experience of shell-shock came during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8. But it was the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 which brought the issue to the attention of the psychiatric profession as a whole.4 The majority, and almost all non-specialist medical professionals, regarded new evidence about battle trauma as an indication of malingering, personal weakness, or moral turpitude. Every combatant state included military doctors who adhered to this view, but the Russian variant was already distinctive, and suggested some of the ways in which future thinking might develop. In particular, some psychiatrists, including the future Stalinist A.B. Zalkind, drew special attention to the 'egocentrism' of shell-shock sufferers, to their lack of social

responsibility, and to their selfish personal weaknesses.5 More traditional thinkers also explained the susceptibility of some individuals in terms of

supposedly self-inflicted and morally dubious illnesses such as syphilis and alcoholism. Modern warfare, to these judges of the sick, was a test of man- hood - albeit the harshest ever seen. The sight of otherwise healthy soldiers

falling prey to tremors, mutism, debilitating nightmares and paralysis fed the

2 To be published in the UK by Granta in 2000. 3 For an excellent discussion of this, see Derek Summerfield, 'The Social Experience of War and Some Issues for the Humanitarian Field' in Patrick J. Bracken and Celia Petty (eds), Rethinking the Trauma of War (London 1998), 9-37. 4 The Russian specialist S.A. Preobrazhenskii ascribed the first diagnosis of shell-shock to German and French observers of the bombardment of Paris in 1870. The first Russians to write on the subject were A.I. Ozeretskovskii and S.A. Sukhanov, both of whom based their work on the

Russo-Japanese war. S.A. Preobrazhenskii, Materialy o voprosu o dushevnykh zabolevaniyakh voinov i lits prichastnykh k voennym deistviyam (Petrograd 1917), Introduction. 5 Psikhiatricheskaya gazeta, 1916, no. 5, 76.

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Merridale: Trauma and Shell-shock in Twentieth-century Russia

panic of those who feared that Holy Russia was going down to defeat at the front as well as collapsing from within. For Russian traditionalists, the only way for a soldier to fight was 'with the cross of Christ before his eyes'. Such men were always ready to die, and if they had to bury fallen comrades, they would not weep.6 In Russia as elsewhere, the reality of shell-shock was re- sented partly because it menaced a cherished national myth about heroism.

While the conservatives muttered into their cigars, however, the most enlightened (and widely-travelled) Russian psychiatrists were already dis- cussing papers and cases which pointed in a different direction. At this stage, the most innovative writing on the subject in Russian drew heavily on the findings of psychiatrists working in Germany and France. Most specialists believed the new neurosis to be related to basic physical problems, including mechani- cal damage to the brain or nervous system. Very few had begun to suspect that there might be a purely psychological cause, independent of physical wounds. The most thoughtful, however, were already agreeing that the problem affected even (and perhaps especially) the most conscientious soldiers, that it struck all social classes, and that its sufferers needed rest, quiet and dedicated treatment.7 From 1905, people had begun to suggest that part of the reason for the new phenomenon might lie in the peculiar horror of technological warfare. 'The cavalry are not affected', wrote one specialist. 'It seems that this disorder is most common among the artillery.'8 The symptoms he observed included hallucinations - 'some believe they are still swatting Germans like flies'. One soldier could repeat nothing but the words, 'Oh Lord, save the Tsar and Russia'. Others apparently heard and saw nothing at all. As early as 1905, too, it was clear that the new mental illness might continue to cause problems well into peacetime. Sufferers risked bearing their psychological scars for life.9 In the decade after the Russo-Japanese war, a debate and exchange of findings between Russian and west European psychiatrists greatly added to the stock of case histories and hypotheses available to Russian specialists. These professional links endured into the war years, and by 1916, Russian psychiatrists were publicly calling for the establishment of special hospitals for the treatment of traumatized patients 'such as they have in Britain, France and Italy'.10

The Revolution of February 1917 interrupted the public airing of this debate for several months. Like many other periodicals, the professional journal, Psikhiatricheskaya gazeta, ceased publication in 1917. By 1923, the number of professionals calling for special facilities had been depleted by war, hunger, cold, disease and emigration, but a dozen or more of the pre- revolutionary psychiatric elite remained in post. Notable among these were S.A. Preobrazhenskii, who specialized in the treatment of combatants (includ-

6 Olonetskaya nedelya, 1914, no. 42, 6. 7 Among the best accounts from the time are those by S.A. Preobrazhenskii, op. cit., and N.A.

Yurman, Psikhiatricheskaya gazeta, 1915, no. 9, 139-43. 8 V.K. Khoroshko, writing in Psikhiatricheskaya gazeta, 1916, no. 1, 3. 9 Peterburgskii listok, 1905, no. 10364.

10 Psikhiatricheskaya gazeta, 1916, no. 19, 378.

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ing medical and other civilian personnel exposed to the horrors of the front), A.V. Livanov, who also had a background in military psychiatry, and V.I. Frumkin, who would work closely with him in the years to come. As peace and a fragile stability returned to the Soviet state in the early 1920s, these specialists renewed their demand that facilities be provided for the men and women traumatized by war. The numbers involved were staggering. One expert is reported to have told Lenin that half the Soviet population was suffering from trauma in some form.1' An All-Russian Committee for the Support of Wounded War Veterans (Vserokompom) was established in 1919, but its resources were limited, and it had no institution at its disposal in which to treat psychiatric patients. Instead, patients suffering from nervous disorders would be housed in ordinary hospitals, to the despair of local health authori- ties.12 Doctors complained that their behaviour was disruptive, 'scandalous', and 'disordered'.13 They were reported to be 'undisciplined', 'forgetful' and 'evasive', and, as one report remarked, 'they do not take responsibility for their own behaviour . . . and can create a very unpleasant atmosphere for others'.14

It is well known that such unsympathetic, censorious views would ultimately prevail when it came to the treatment of psychiatric casualties in Soviet Russia. Many ended up in exile, hidden from general view, living out their shortened lives in colonies in the far north and east. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that such harshness was the only option discussed at the time. In 1923, an experimental institution was established with the aim of pro- viding specialized neurological treatment. It was the fruit of years of agitation on the part of its founders. The principles it upheld were among the most advanced, in therapeutic terms, in the world. The idea was to provide a relax- ing and attractive setting for long-term patients, which is why the institution was based in Yalta, in the Crimea. The treatment on offer was intended to address psychiatric disorders - among which the specialists included schizo-

phrenia, hysteria and shell-shock (voennaya kontuziya) - directly. However, Preobrazhenskii argued that other intervention might also be needed, as many trauma patients also suffered from problems such as tuberculosis and mal- nutrition. His hope, which the other founders shared, was that this experimental hospital would be the first in a network of special institutions for the rehabilitation of such casualties. Its pioneering and military mission was enshrined in its name, Red Star.

Why did Red Star fail? The simplest answer is that there were no resources to keep it going. Annual reports by its director chillingly referred to the lack of food, footwear and other basic necessities, at the hospital.15 But beyond the

11 The doctor about whom this was told was Petr Gannushkin, and the story came via a group of medical veterans interviewed by the author in Moscow in 1997. 12 State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), 4537/1/831, 74-5. 13 GARF, 4347/1/94, 101. 14 GARF, 4347/1/94, 70. 15 GARF 4347/1/831, 7.

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resources problem was a wider lack of understanding or sympathy for the project. Red Star's patients were not the most attractive of individuals. Many were alcoholics, some were addicted to morphine. More than a quarter also suffered from syphilis.16 Hard-pressed officials outside the hospital saw little point in spending money and time on the care of such people. Exile seemed an ideal way out. Failing that, insisted a member of the Moscow Soviet, the best way to deal with these people was 'to stand over them with a loaded Mauser in your hand'.'7 As a sanatorium for trauma patients, Red Star was quietly closed after less than three years in operation.

Iron of a more general kind had entered the souls of many Communist Party leaders by this time. To be fair, their practical options were limited. The Soviet Union had become a society where extreme conditions were routine. Virtually no one was spared. The revolutionary regime, still shackled by economic hardship and still desperate for trained personnel of any kind, could hardly have addressed so large a problem with much effect. The evidence of widespread neurosis, if not shell-shock, was overwhelming.18 It was not confined to war veterans, or even to the survivors of catastrophes such as displacement, famine and cholera. Rank and file communists, especially the young, were vulnerable to a particular kind of despair. They measured their contribution to the revolution against its vaunted ideals and found themselves wanting. The resulting malaise, which was sometimes diagnosed as neurasthenia, had become the most common cause of illness among the party mass by 1927. The suicide rate among young communists soared.19 Though social reformers and criminolo- gists were sympathetic, the Party's own elite took a more astringent view. Individuals who dwelt on their own problems were once again described as egocentric. In December 1925, E.M. Yaroslavskii, the Communist Party's ideological spokesman, told a meeting in Leningrad that communist suicides were guilty of a lack of faith in 'the power and strength of the Party', that they were 'weak-willed, weak of character'. Such judgments filtered down to the potential victims themselves, many of whose suicide notes included apologies to the Party for their failure to meet its demanding standards.20

By the end of the Revolution's first decade, then, official support for the people who had suffered psychologically in its early years had evaporated. This is not to say that members of the elite were uninterested in neurosis, especially where they were affected themselves. Many of Lenin's closest aides had shared a life of exile in Europe, and for them, European ideas - including

16 GARF 4347/1/854, 3 17 GARF 4347/1/831, 75 18 The psychiatrist, Aleksei Smirnov, who has worked with veterans of the war in Afghanistan, is among those who believe the 'prison mentality' in contemporary Russia to be a symptom of long-term post-traumatic stress. 19 Aleksandr Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriya psikhoanaliza v Rossii (Sankt-Peterburg 1993), 222. See also Izvestiya, 26 April 1925, and M.N. Gernet, Prestupnost' i samoubiistvo vo vremya voiny i posle nee (Moscow 1927), 11. 20 N.B. Lebina, 'Tenevye storony zhizni sovetskogo goroda 20-30 gg.', Voprosy istorii, 1994, no. 2, 30-42.

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debates about the mind - continued to hold a special magic. Trotsky's close friend, Adol'f Ioffe, enjoyed the best attentions of Kremlin doctors for his neurotic and other ailments until his suicide in 1927.21 Many other members of the Party's inner circle travelled abroad for consultations, or took extended leave in Black Sea resorts and mountain spas. They also experimented with the talking cure. 'In the 1920s', recalled one witness, 'it was not just not dangerous to be involved in psychoanalysis. It was prestigious.'22 The 'International Solidarity' children's home, whose aims included the treatment of disturbed babies, counted among its inmates in 1921 the six-month-old Vasilii Stalin, son of the famous Iosif Vissarionovich.23 Freud's ideas had begun to circulate in Russia before 1914. But they remained acceptable, and even fashionable, for the first decade after the Revolution. To some Bolsheviks, indeed, Freudian analysis offered the possibility in the longer term of perfecting human beings at an individual level as a preparation for their membership of the future utopia.

Stalin's revolution from above was set to change all this by 1932. The first signs of the new thinking were already clear on the eve of the 'great turn', in 1928. Psychoanalysis would be dismissed because it was slow, expensive and potentially subversive. Quicker results were demanded, without the need for unscripted private conversations between analyst and patient. The emphasis shifted from analysis to re-education. Hypnosis, which had always been more respectable in Russia than in Britain, became the therapy of choice. It was

quick, it was cheap, it did not involve the discussion of sexuality which an increasingly prurient society found so disturbing, and it put the practitioner firmly in control of any professional encounter.24 At the same time, the

engineers of human souls turned their attention from the individual to the mass. Psychiatrist A.B. Zalkind summed up the new approach. In 1928 he announced that

... in the USSR as nowhere else, enormous attention is drawn to the study of human personality. The toiling mass, the mass human personality, growing swiftly and creatively, expanding the boundaries of their aspirations, have come to power, to culture, to construc- tion.

The plan for the future was clear. 'These masses', he continued, 'ignored by bourgeois science, must be studied anew both in the sense of identifying their

genuine characteristics and in the sense of identifying methods of educational influence on them.'25 Any individual who fell short of the collective criteria, or who rejected socially-sanctioned norms, would eventually come to be regarded as deviant.

21 Etkind, op. cit., 281. 22 N.N. Traugott, cited in Etkind, op. cit., 253. 23 Etkind, op. cit., 243. 24 Information supplied by Prof. V.A. Ababkov, Bekhterev Institute, St Petersburg, 21 October 1997. 25 Cited in David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford 1989), 250.

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The Stalinist emphasis on the collective as opposed to the individual had several types of origin. Theoretically, it owed a good deal to the thinking of propagandists such as Yaroslavskii, Maksim Gor'kii, and the innovative Proletkult movement. Partiinost', the dedication to wider political goals which all true communists were supposed to share, went deeper than mere political loyalty and offered satisfaction beyond a sense of duty done. Though Lenin rejected the spiritual language of the Party's more mystical wing, substantial numbers of his senior aides experimented with ideas whose origins included religious as well as psychological doctrine. New ideas about the behaviour of crowds were also particularly influential in the 1920s. Psychologists had been among the most influential of specialists in this new field. Naum Kotik, for example, had argued that collective mentalities were created by unseen N-rays, whose power he intended to measure and calibrate on an analogy with X-rays. The liberal Vladimir Bekhterev also influenced a generation of successors with his work on transference, which, like Kotik's, had a particular appeal to Russian audiences. Thinking of this kind was not uncontentious in the Soviet ideological context. Notions about the collective consciousness, the animal energy of crowds, or about their psychic unity, smacked of superstition, and the fact that transference could not be measured reduced it to the realms of unscientific speculation.26 Nonetheless, even the most humdrum Stalinist propaganda would later draw on the idea of the collective, as opposed to the individual, spirit.

Beyond these contemporary and specific influences, however, there were more general historical reasons for collectivism's success in Soviet Russia. Many of these are difficult to quantify. The assessment of their precise role in Soviet culture awaits a future research project. But among the more obvious influences upon Soviet collectivism, Orthodox belief, social patterns, and economic constraints must all be considered. Notions of the self placed little value upon the lone individual. Russian writers preferred to identify the individual through his or her social and spiritual relations and contribution to the wider community.2 Orthodoxy traditionally emphasized the spiritual bond between believers which it called sobornost', a reflection of the unity which made the Trinity not three but one. Peasant culture, as well as the land-holding eco- nomy, historically favoured larger social groups, collectives of a kind, over private yeoman farms, a fact which hampered the reforms proposed by Stolypin after 1906. Accordingly, the individualism, with its attendant notions of privacy and personal responsibility, which marked Protestant north- western Europe, had scarcely touched Russia before 1914. These and other explanations are fashionable now among so-called 'culturologists' in Russia,

26 For a discussion of these issues, see Mikhail Agursky, 'An Occult Source of Socialist Realism: Gorky and Theories of Thought Transference' in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.), The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca 1997), 247-72. 27 See Derek Offord, "'Lichnost": Notions of Individual Identity' in Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (eds), Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolutions, 1881-1940 (Oxford 1998), 13-25.

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but whatever their merits, there is no doubt that Soviet culture had roots which went deeper than revolutionary Marxism.

Social and economic reality for ordinary people was also a collective matter throughout the Stalinist period. Most city-dwellers lived in communal apart- ments, sharing service spaces such as kitchens and bathrooms with several other families. Family groups themselves often shared the same room, and it was not uncommon for more than one family, and several generations, to occupy a single large room, divided, if they were lucky, by curtains. Under these conditions, the concept of private emotion was likely to remain alien. Grief and pain, like joy, childbirth and domestic violence, were shared because they were public, at least within the bounds of the collective. At work, too, the collective, the brigade, was the most common organizational form. From home to school and then to the factory or the fields, Soviet citizens were far less isolated than their counterparts in Britain or America. The sanctions against all forms of deviance, including morbid introspection, began within the family and were reinforced in every area of daily life.

It seems reasonable to allow that it is against this background, as well as in the context of deliberate policy, that the disappearance of individual trauma as an issue in public debate must be understood. But the other influence on emotional openness was more violent. Millions of Soviet citizens suffered unspeak- able hardship and loss in the 1930s. Because much of this was state-directed and officially denied, there was no forum at all - in many instances not even the family - in which it could be discussed. Time after time, respondents told me that the only way to cope with famine, arrest, hunger and bereavement was 'to get on with our lives'. Famine survivors also describe how hunger led to a numbing indifference to their surroundings, their future, and ultimately to their own emotions.28 Anna Larina, the young wife of Nikolai Bukharin, described a similar 'greying' of her world as she awaited the news of his execution from her prison cell. 'I could not believe', she wrote later, 'that somewhere life went on in this world, and human happiness and earthly pleasures.'29 'The torpor common to us all' was how Anna Akhmatova described the mood of the late 1930s. Torpor, however, like depression, can

easily be rendered silent. Private pain went underground. The official slogans of the time left no room for pity. 'You cannot make an omelette without

breaking eggs', people muttered, or 'when you cut wood, the chips fly'. It became dangerous, in a world of informers and guilt by association, to weep for supposed enemies of the people. All eyes were to be fixed upon the future,

28 Several dozen examples might be cited from interviews conducted by the author in 1997 and

1998, including those with survivors of the Leningrad blockade and the famines of 1933 and 1946. A total of 75 individual and group interviews were held, involving nearly 200 respondents. The respondents included survivors of the Civil War, the 1933 famine, collectivization and the

purges, the Great Patriotic War, the Holocaust, the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and the disaster at Chernobyl. In addition, medical and psychiatric personnel were interviewed, as well as social and aid workers, priests and professional carers. 29 Anna Larina, 'Nezabyvaemoe', Znamya, 1988, no. 10, 145.

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on the building of socialism, and on the collective goals embodied in the person of Comrade Stalin. As we shall see, in psychological terms at least, the war, which at least permitted certain kinds of mourning, may have come as something of a relief to those who had suffered during the decades of repression.

Did the Stalinist policy of stoicism, whose contours we shall examine in a moment, affect the mentalities and actions of Soviet citizens after 1930? Is there any evidence that it was ultimately possible to create a new Soviet person? In December 1997, I collected a group of Russian specialists together to discuss this issue in Moscow. Gathered around the table were sociologists and demographers, specialists in psychology, aid workers fresh from the Caucasus, and even a bishop of the Orthodox Church. Their view, most forcibly expressed, was that Russians indeed regarded trauma in a special way, that they were tougher than their counterparts from the capitalist west, and that their strength derived from their faith in collective, as opposed to individual, salvation. We argued for several hours about the idea of individual susceptibility, but in the teeth of my own initial prejudice I had already come to accept a part of the basic claim - that millions of Soviet Russians survived a century of fratricide, war, genocide and famine without giving way to despair or debilitating neurosis. Making sense of this, however, remains a complicated matter.

Three explanations were suggested by my respondents. Some argued that Russians were genuinely immune to the neuroses of the 'soft' west. Others suggested that they repressed their psychological pain along with their political opinions and their material suffering. But the most popular view was that Russians possess a superior cultural framework for coping with extreme circumstances. My own research refutes the first of these explanations. The evidence of individual trauma may often be concealed, but it is abundant. None- theless, the prevalence of the view is in itself an influence upon behaviour, and certainly a barrier to the discussion of individual traumatic symptoms. The other two suggestions certainly merit a wider exploration in the light of interview and archival evidence about the Soviet era.

Evidence that Soviet citizens assumed themselves to be above the weaknesses and neuroses of the western allies is easy to collect. Almost every Great Patriotic War veteran I interviewed, men and women, officers or not, intro- duced and insisted on the idea. Among other cultures, only the Finns were accorded a grudging recognition for their comparable toughness. A similar view was expressed by surviving representatives of the doctors, nurses and auxiliary staff who attended the wounded at the front. 'We were fighting fascism', people explained, 'it was a fight for survival.' True, witnesses still remember the individual who went mad under the pressure, who shot a score of his comrades and then turned the gun on himself, who ran screaming into the enemy's fire, who was found naked and frozen a day after his strange desertion. But such people are regarded as rare exceptions.

People who spent their war behind the lines take a similar view. Only the

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most intrusive questioning can now elicit stories of the panic and distress which affected almost everyone in the darkest years of the war. The evidence for it has been overlooked for decades by Soviet historians anxious to tell a different, more heroic, story. Survivors who gather to remember still reiterate the official tale, comforting each other with stories of endurance and com- radeship. No one denies that their suffering, on a physical level, was unparal- leled. But the idea that they have sustained any psychological damage is entirely alien. 'I did have nightmares', a woman assured me. 'But what is this post-dramatic (sic) stress?' One of the reasons I was interviewing her was that she had been working as a psychologist immediately after the war. She assured me that she had continued to consult psychological journals and to meet professional colleagues ever since. 'Trauma?' a group of doctors echoed. 'We would have been happy if there had been enough to eat.'

It must be admitted that the people I interviewed, more than half a century after the event, shared a self-selected characteristic. 'It helped that we were young', conceded an ex-nurse. 'I would not want to do it now.' But many of them described how their parents (and particularly their mothers) had been even more resilient. 'Mother survived the famine of 1921', was a common remark, 'so she knew how to cope in 1942.' The myth, and it is almost univer- sally believed, is that almost all Russians, whatever their age, got through the war without suffering mental trauma. Archival evidence, however, confirms that this was not the case. The victims may have disappeared from memory, but they were numerous. At the time, some of the more perceptive of health

professionals were concerned that the cause of their nervous or somatic symptoms should not be overlooked. As a group of doctors wrote in 1948: 'The

pathology of high blood-pressure called Leningrad hypertension arises from two factors: a prolonged and intensive nervous-psychological trauma and

dietary deficiencies. ... Of these, the nervous-psychological factor is of the first importance.' The same report also noted the primacy of fear as a cause of

hypertension, and it observed that the most transparently neurotic symptoms - such as those formerly associated with shell-shock - were more common

among survivors of bombardment and artillery fire than among those who had

merely starved.30 The idea of unbreakable mental resilience, then, is as much a myth in Russia

as it is anywhere else. But the story of the Leningraders' war neurosis has vanished from memory. Even professional psychiatrists have forgotten that some Soviet survivors bore scars that went deeper than the flesh. One of the most respected professionals in St Petersburg, for example, a woman in her late forties, assured me that there was no evidence of post-traumatic stress after the blockade. Her elderly colleague, now retired, corrected her. 'There was', she said, 'but no one ever talks about it now. There were even suicides.

30 Gosudartvennyi Arkhiv Goroda Sankt-Peterburga (GAGSPb), 9156/4/321,14-15, report on the neurological origins of hypertension among blockade survivors, principal signatory Prof. I. Ia. Razdol'skii.

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Memdale: Trauma and Shell-shock in Twentieth-century Russia

And there were a lot of other problems.'31 The older woman acknowledged that very little could be done to help. But there were other reasons for the disappearance of individual trauma as an issue in postwar Russia.

The Soviet myth of heroism was born as soon as the war broke out. Although official propaganda played its part, the desire to survive and over- come was naturally strong and needed little encouragement. Coping, indeed, provided people with a sense of purpose and even pride. After a decade where suffering had to be endured in silence, the state-sanctioned struggle against Hitler gave people a new dignity. Because aspects of it were openly shared, this horror was easier to bear than the forbidden pain of the famine and the great purge. Numerous survivors have described the moment when an individual act of courage or even survival awoke a sense of personal worth. Young men dis- covered the importance of their physical strength, initiative and courage.32 Among the most common ingredients of postwar elation, apart from the sense of victory for its own sake, was an expectation that the citizenship which people had earned would soon bear fruit in the form of wider democracy and more generous economic provision.33 It was this kind of sentiment that Ol'ga Berggol'ts, one of the most popular poets of the Leningrad blockade, famously described when she wrote:

In filth, in gloom, in hunger, in sorrow, When death trailed us like a shadow, We used to be so happy Inhaled such a tempestuous freedom That our grandchildren would have envied us.

Readers familiar with British myths such as the Dunkirk spirit or 'mucking in together' during the Blitz may wonder whether the Soviet war mentality was so very different. The Soviet war effort, as an example of collective solidarity, is not unique. Most combatant nations, and certainly Great Britain, saw fewer reports of individual trauma in the second world war than they had in the first. The Soviet survivors' statements that they were fighting for their neighbours, for Russia, or for their town or district all have parallels in other parts of Europe. Many go one step further, in fact, and deny altogether that they 'really' fought, in the famous phrase, 'for the motherland, for Stalin'. 'I think I was fighting for my city', a veteran mused. 'I don't think the motherland really featured.' As for Stalin, his name was invoked less, in some quarters at least, as the crisis intensified. Soldiers sang songs of hatred for Hitler, not love for Stalin.34 Many turned to God, for 'it is one thing to flirt with death, and an-

31 Interview with Valentina Karlovna Myager and Nina Pavlovna Vyanchakova, 20 October 1997. 32 This was one of the abiding impressions described by historian, Mikhail Gefter, himself a veteran of this generation. See E. Iu. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, 1945-1964 (Moscow 1993), 19. 33 Zubkova, op. cit., 36. 34 See L.N. Pushkarev, 'Iz nablyudenii nad tvorchestvom frontovikov', Etnograficheskie obozrenie, 1995, no. 4, 25-35.

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other to die in fact'. The son of a political activist remembered his father's blockade diary from 1942. Page after page read simply, 'God save us, God help us.'35

But in the public-private world of the Soviet collective, Stalin could never be far away. This, surely, is the crucial issue. For whatever parallels there were between Soviet and west European combatants, military or civilian, there can be no denying that the Soviet people were not free. Twenty years of increasingly authoritarian rule, a decade at least of consistent repression, and years of pervasive propaganda had not failed to change them. Even in the midst of the war, waverers and spreaders of panic were liable to be shot on the spot. The snipers who carried out this task show little regret even now, affirming in their old age the certainty that ideological unity was paramount.36 Then as previously and for decades after, the state's aspirations were undeniably totalitarian. But did the system work? Was there an extra element in Soviet sacrifice, the product of a generation of Stalinism? Did it influence the history of individual trauma? The answer which survivors give is that there was. Their testimony suggests that it has had profound implications, not only for the Great Patriotic War, but more generally also for the subsequent history of individual pain and victimhood.

The crucial ingredient which was missing from Soviet esprit de corps was choice. It may, of course, be argued that powerful social sanctions operated in the democratic systems, denying to all but the most determined their option to object, opt out or even grumble about the personal costs of winning the war. But the same kinds of sanction existed in Russia, too. The crucial difference was that in Soviet Russia the option to speak out in the teeth of social oppro- brium did not exist. Dissidents were liable to be arrested. Thousands - the numbers are not easy to count - faced death, a bullet in the neck or the long cold ride to Kolyma. The years which followed the peace did not see a relaxa- tion. Under the circumstances, there was nothing to be gained, in Soviet Russia, from cynicism (of a kind which later became fashionable in western

Europe) or even from the cultivation of a personal tale of victimhood. After a few years of numb silence, the only acceptable account of one's war was the one which could be shared in the singing of patriotic songs, the exchange of endurance stories and the solemn commemoration of the heroic dead.

Victimhood was not an attractive option in medical terms, either. At the front, the only treatment for psychological trauma available to the small band of military psychiatrists was overwhelming chemical intervention. Tran- quilisers were the drug of choice, and their purpose was to return the soldier to active service within days. The maximum time allowed for treatment, said one textbook, was three weeks.37 This was the kind of heroic medicine which suit- ed the Stalinist regime. But it was also the only realistic option in practical

35 Anonymous respondent interviewed in St Petersburg, 22 October 1997. 36 Interview in Moscow, 1997; respondent anonymous. 37 The treatment was described in textbooks for military psychiatrists such as Voennaya psik- hiatriya (Leningrad 1974).

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terms. As it was, there were very few reports of shell-shock among Soviet troops in this war. Among civilians, too, the extent of psychiatric illness arising from artillery fire, bombardment, loss, bereavement and starvation was never publicized. Even the patients were reluctant to draw attention to themselves. The records of psychiatric hospitals in the Leningrad region from 1945 onwards suggest some of the reasons why.38 There was no money, for a start, the hospitals were run-down and cold, and there were very few staff to support in-patients. More worryingly, there were almost no male staff to restrain those whose illness made them violent or aggressive. In-patients fled whenever they could.39 Patients with head injuries refused surgical or other intervention.40 Most of the out-patients who turned up with stories of war or blockade neurosis were also suffering from more immediate problems, princi- pally vitamin deficiencies and anxiety arising from practical difficulties such as homelessness. The best the medical services could do with the resources they had was to prescribe food supplements, talk to the municipal housing authori- ties, and hope that the patients would find their own way. Most seem to have done so. Any whiff of madness or debility, after all, was also likely to damage a person's economic and social prospects irreparably. Referrals for hypertension, anxiety and stress dropped dramatically after 1946. Even the amputees came less often. There were almost no drugs to give them anyway.

More troubling evidence of the coercive suppression of trauma came from a group of people who had been injured as children by landmines, unexploded grenades or stray bullets. Some were blind, others suffered amputation or the loss of movement in their remaining limbs. All would have been shocked by the experience at the time. In many cases, physical injury was compounded by grief - the loss of parents or the destruction of a home. But none of them mentioned psychological trauma when we talked about their lives one after- noon in the Ukrainian city of Kiev.41 For them, mutilation was only the beginning of a life-long struggle to be allowed to remain visible, to lead a reasonably normal life in full view of their fellow-citizens, to go to university. Many were stigmatized because they could not fulfil their military service obligations. The suggestion was encouraged that they might have injured themselves deliber- ately in order to avoid serving in the army. Neighbours shunned them. Far from receiving pensions, bursaries, or special encouragement, in other words, these innocent casualties of war, most of whom were under twelve years old when they were injured, were virtually ostracized. The same fate befell most genuine psychiatric casualties of the war. They disappeared into institutions where the regime of treatment, to say nothing of the general living conditions,

38 Contained in Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Goroda Sankt-Peterburga (GAGSPb), fond 9156 opis 4. The information which follows relates to the years 1942-8. 39 GAGSPb, 9156/4/491, 1. The same report notes an increased incidence of 'accidents', but whether this was a euphemism for suicide is unclear. 40 GAGSPb, 9156/4/1516, 104 and elsewhere. 41 Interview, June 1998.

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was unlikely to encourage recovery.42 The myth was nurtured that Russians did not give way to pain.

A combination of official propaganda, loosely personified in the muscular

figures of socialist realist art, and age-old collectivism, then, shored up a myth of endurance and stoicism which did not allow for victimhood or personal weakness in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War. The veterans who had not died of wounds or been exiled or institutionalized maintained a collective

solidarity which relied on selected memories, shared songs and carefully- edited personal anecdotes. Anyone who has listened to these will know that

they can be heroic and also maudlin, and the narrator may well begin to weep, but that their relationship to emotions such as doubt, loneliness, cowardice, greed or even boredom is remote indeed. 'We never cried', people will insist as the tears now flow, 'we were fighting Hitler, and there was no time to think about pain.' 'I decided to prevent myself from being a coward', one woman recalled, 'by dipping my Young Communist League membership card in the blood of a wounded man and pinning it to my breast pocket.'43 Another claimed, in the 1980s, that it was the Party which 'saved my life and prevented me from starving to death'.44 This mentality pervades the culture of remem- brance even now. Seven years after communism, the images which Brezhnev worked so hard to keep alive remain important to millions of survivors, including the children of veterans. 'Young people do not understand patrio- tism', they often say. 'We pity them sometimes. We had such a wonderful time

together when we were young.' The war also smothers other smouldering resentments. When it was mentioned, previously emotional or angry people, some of whom might have been talking, up to this point, about the injustices their family had endured in the 1930s, would adopt a calmer tone, lower their

voices, and pause. A former prison camp inmate, whose forced labour had

recently been recognized as a contribution to victory, wept as she handed me her plastic medal. It is one of her proudest possessions.

The point about this collective and censored tale of the war is that it worked. As a way of coming to terms with a loss far greater than anything witnessed in the west, it was effective for the generation which sustained it. In some parts of the former Soviet Union, one in four people was killed during the Great Patriotic War. There were twenty million fewer men than women in

1945, meaning that large parts of the country, and especially the villages, were inhabited only by women, old men and infants. The postwar years saw renewed famine, high mortality and more political repression. And yet so

many survivors talk of a golden age. 'Agitation for happiness' was the title of a recent exhibition of official socialist realist art, and a good many of those who visited it wrote comments in the official record which testified to the

policy's effectiveness in their lives.

42 Interview with Valery Mikhailovskii, psychologist, Zelenograd centre for the rehabilitation of victims of trauma, 21 February 1997. 43 Svetlana Alexiyevich, War's Unwomanly Face (Moscow 1988) 107. 44 Ibid., 33.

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We should not be surprised by this. The trendiest western cognitive psy- chotherapy only offers a de-ideologized version of the same idea: give the patients a sense of purpose, encourage them to adopt a positive outlook, steer them away from a morbid focus upon their personal darkness. A handbook distributed by the British Broadcasting Corporation in conjunction with a programme entitled 'How to be Happy' urges converts to smile at themselves in the bathroom mirror for two minutes every morning.45 Soviet citizens tran- scended the dirt, poverty, pain and deprivation of their real lives by smiling into a distorting mirror whose reflection promised victory, moral superiority and social justice. The ultimate catalyst for clearing non-clinical depression, according to Professor Michael Argyle, one of the psychiatrists who partici- pated in the BBC's programme, is Scottish country dancing, 'a very powerful package', in his words, which encourages its practitioners to take exercise in a co-operative and collective way.46 During the Great Patriotic War, the Com- munist Party's Agitation and Propaganda Department issued free harmonicas to the troops on much the same basis.47

As far as shell-shock was concerned, in its modern form of post-traumatic stress, the mirror cracked during Brezhnev's war in Afghanistan. Like the USA's conflict in Vietnam, this was a war which the rest of society, the bulk of the Soviet people, preferred to ignore. The young men who fought it, many of whom were inspired by the heroic stories of their fathers' generation, came home to find that their sacrifice had earned them little approval. On the contrary, many were shunned by people who were beginning to view the Afghan war as a mistake committed by an increasingly unpopular government. But the war did not fade away for many of those who had fought it. Afghan veterans had seen fear, injury and death on a scale and in a setting which marked them for life. It was only a matter of time, in the more liberal atmosphere of the 1980s, before some would reach out to their American counterparts. Joint meetings were arranged, and selected Soviet Afghantsy were even offered pro- grammes of treatment in California and elsewhere.48 The money for this came largely from the USA, and it was the USA which funded most of the conferences to which Afghan veterans travelled, thereby enjoying their first taste of capitalism and their first experience of fully-funded western psychotherapeutic (including alternative psychotherapeutic) care.49 For many of them the combination of travel, attention, talk and treatment seems to have helped. They were largely responsible for introducing a new expression into the Russian language: post-travmaticheskii stress. They use it, and so do foreign

45 Brian Edwards and Wendy Sturgess, How to be Happy, BBC Education, 1996, 12. 46 Ibid., 20. 47 Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Contemporary History (RTsKhIDNI), 89/11/1, 9. 48 Interview with a group of Afghan veterans, Zelenograd, 10 February 1997. 49 The group of veterans I met were especially keen on the approach used by Dr Benjamin Colodzin of the Olympia Center, California. See B. Colodzin, How to Survive Trauma (New York 1992).

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disaster-relief teams. A handful of professional psychiatrists has studied and thought about it. Practically no one else knows what it means.

Psychiatrists from Europe and the USA caught their first real glimpse of the Soviet psychiatric world in the wake of the Armenian earthquake of 1983. Characteristically, Medecins Sans Frontieres sent doctors within hours of the disaster, defying the obstructive silences of the bureaucrats with whom they had to deal. One of their co-ordinators remembered her surprise. When it came to physical injury, Soviet medical provision was more than adequate. But the discussion of the psychological consequences of disaster which she witnessed left her wondering what kinds of aid could ever work.50 Since then, there have been a few international attempts to establish western-style counselling in Soviet and post-Soviet disaster areas, but their impact has been limited. Among the latest generation of Russian psychiatrists, too, there are some who have followed the Afghan veterans' lead and immersed themselves in the literature of PTSD and DSM-IV. Aleksei Smirnov, who works with Afghan veterans in St Petersburg, has written a persuasive doctoral thesis which catalogues the prevalence of traumatic symptoms among Afghantsy and their families.51 As he says, many of them remain incapable of adjusting to peace. Some withdraw into depression or alcoholism, others satisfy their hunger for emergency by offering their services to street gangs, protection racketeers and mafia bosses. His own attempts to address the problem are limited by resources. But the deeper issue is the application of what is funda- mentally an American psychiatric diagnosis to Russia, and neither money nor time is really the answer to the problem.

There are several issues tangled into the complex known, in other societies, as 'survivor syndrome'. One is the approach to be taken with acute psychiatric patients, the people whose bodies have become imprisoned in an endless rehearsal of nightmare. Another is the wider attitude a society may take towards the kinds of trauma which maim without disabling. The Soviet approach to the first was crude, and it remains uncertain. The Stalinist collective was intolerant of invalidity, and repelled by psychiatric damage. We do not know how many of the casualties which this century has produced have died without care or justice. It is one of the many unexplored obscenities of the Stalinist catastrophe. It casts a shadow forwards, too, for a continuing intoler- ance hampers the attempts of the specialists and volunteers who work with trauma patients today. But when it comes to the larger issue, which is that an entire society has, for practical purposes, been traumatized repeatedly for decades, the Russian collective tradition, and even its totalitarian stepchild, has provided an answer of sorts. It may not look attractive from the outside, and there have been times when the price which the people paid for it was very high. But the notion of collective solidarity, the idea of common effort, and the overwhelming generosity towards members of one's family or wider circle

50 Discussion in Cambridge, MA 1995. 51 I am grateful to Dr Smirnov for allowing me to read this thesis in draft.

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which characterized Soviet culture at its best are among the things most fre-

quently mourned by Russians as they contemplate the incursions of capitalism. Veterans of war, repression and disaster in the former Soviet Union are

sceptical of individual therapy, self-analysis and talk. Most have survived until now by suppressing their memories and focussing on work and family. Anyone who forces them to confront the hidden past risks wakening images which still have the power to injure. The last thing most Soviet survivors want, especially as their whole lives have been built around concealment, is to be encouraged to explore their personal histories. 'Even now', a former sniper confided, 'we still have nightmares .... I wake up and find it hard to believe that I am still alive. And I don't want to recall it.'52 Among the respondents who talked to me, several admitted that the conversation would leave them sleepless and distressed. Others refused to see me, explaining their unhelpful decision (they always blamed themselves) on the reaction they had suffered after talking to other European interviewers. And yet, almost everyone I met, including several who acknowledge that the pain in their lives has damaged their mental and physical health, was neither incapacitated nor diminished by their choice of lifelong silence. On the contrary, the majority were fulfilled and powerful individuals. Many, indeed, were inspiring, of a presence too large, in some cases, for the tiny flats into which their lives are squeezed.

Citizens of the democratic and affluent west may question the ethical basis of this survivors' culture. Although it grew from deep popular roots, Stalin- ism's collectivist and stoical approach to mental trauma was basically coercive. But a tradition whose origins were dubious is not necessarily bankrupt. A people accustomed to silence, or at least to a certain kind of tact, does not necessarily need to be coerced again, this time into the disclosures characteristic of a society where victimhood is acceptable and even faintly chic. 'We have our own ways of dealing with trauma', the bishop insisted at my conference. 'Perhaps you should be considering whether yours would be as effective if your people had shared our history.'

Catherine Merridale is Senior Lecturer in European History at the University of Bristol.

She is the author of Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin (Macmillan 1990) and of numerous articles on Stalinist politics, and

on death, mourning, trauma and memory in Soviet Russia. She is currently working on a book on death and memory in modern

Russia.

52 Alexiyevich, op. cit., 21.

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Catherine Merridale_The Collective Mind: Trauma and Shell-Shock in Twentieth-Century Russia

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