Notes on the Benediktov Interview

Stalin-era Stalinism and post-Stalin Stalinism (1)

PART 1

A few months ago, I read the fourth edition, published in April 2023, of On Stalin and Khrushchev: An Interview with Benediktov (Stalin ve Hruşçov Hakkında: Benediktov ile Söyleşi), brought out by Yazılama Yayınevi, the publishing house of the Stalinist Communist Party of Turkey (TKP). [*]

The book is based on an extended series of interviews conducted in the early 1980s by “Soviet journalist V. Litov” with Ivan Aleksandrovich Benediktov (1902-1983), who for many years held senior positions in the Soviet party and state apparatus. (The reason for putting Litov’s name and profession in quotation marks will become clear below.)

Benediktov was no ordinary bureaucrat of the Stalin and Khrushchev eras. From the late 1930s onwards, he occupied top positions in Soviet agricultural administration; before and during the war he served as People’s Commissar for Agriculture, and in the post-war years as Minister of Agriculture. (In the USSR, the Council of People’s Commissars and the People’s Commissariats were renamed the Council of Ministers and the Ministries, respectively, on 15 March 1946.) Later, Benediktov served as ambassador to India and Yugoslavia, and for many years was also a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was therefore a figure closely familiar not only with the general political atmosphere of the Stalin and Khrushchev periods, but also with the inner workings of agricultural policies, the party, the state apparatus intertwined with it, and the ruling cadres.

In my online research, I found no record of this interview having been published in Russian, or in any other language, as a stand-alone book in the form in which it appeared in Turkish. The bibliographic details and notes in the Turkish translation provide information about the two Russian texts on which the book is based; however, they contain no indication that these two texts were ever brought together in the same form and published as a book in Russia.

It appears that the translator, Candan Badem, took the interview text published in 1989 in the journal Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard) [**] and an additional section published in the newspaper Duel on 3 June 2003 [***], which had not appeared in the earlier version, translated them from Russian into Turkish, and shaped them into book form. In this respect, the Turkish edition seems less a translation of an existing Russian book than a compilation made by bringing together two separate Russian publications.

As far as we can see, the book and the two texts on which it is based are scarcely known outside Russia and Turkey. Among the many works we have read on the subject, we found references to this book, or to the interview texts on which it is based, in only a few studies: Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism - Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, William Taubman’s Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, and Grover Furr’s Khrushchev Lied [translated into Turkish as Hruşçov’un Yalanları (Khrushchev’s Lies)]. In all three of these books, however, only the interview entitled “O Staline i Khrushcheve” (On Stalin and Khrushchev), published in Molodaya Gvardiya, is cited.

There are also some ambiguities concerning the person who conducted the interview.

In the Turkish edition, the interviewer is identified as V. Litov. In the 1989 Russian text, Litov is introduced as “a member of the Union of Journalists of the USSR” and “a person holding an academic title equivalent to a doctorate in economics.” [****] By contrast, the supplementary section later published in the newspaper Duel in 2003 bears the signature of V. N. Dobrov. Moreover, some Russian sources suggest that the name Litov was a pseudonym used by Dobrov. Indeed, a doctoral thesis completed at the University of Toronto, when referring to the Benediktov interview, also states that Litov was the pseudonym of V. N. Dobrov. [*****] While this information provides strong grounds for assuming that Litov and Dobrov were one and the same person, the fact that Litov was presented in the original 1989 Russian version as a journalist and economist in his own right makes it advisable to retain a certain degree of caution. At this stage, what we can say on the basis of the available evidence is that the names V. Litov and V. N. Dobrov are intertwined in the publication history of the text.

In addition to all this, it should also be noted that there are certain objections regarding the authenticity of the interview. In Russian sources, there is a claim that Benediktov’s brother and nephew regarded the text published in Molodaya Gvardiya as false or fabricated. [******] At least at this stage, we are unable to determine whether there is any truth to this claim. We therefore simply note it here.

Ivan Aleksandrovich Benediktov

Our purpose in this article is not to provide a general and comprehensive assessment of these lengthy interviews with Benediktov. What we shall focus on here are Benediktov’s observations on how, during the Stalin era, the dictator managed and directed his privileged bureaucratic caste, and on the economic effects of this “administrative” approach, which relied on keeping these bureaucrats under constant pressure. In doing so, we believe it will become easier to grasp why Stalin’s “administrative” method could not be sustained in the same way after his death - that is, to understand some of the differences between Stalin-era Stalinism and the Stalinism of the post-Stalin period.

[*] V. Litov, Stalin ve Hruşçov Hakkında: Benediktov ile Söyleşi [On Stalin and Khrushchev: An Interview with Benediktov], translated from Russian by Candan Badem, Yazılama Yayınevi, 4th edition, April 2023, Istanbul.

[**] Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard) was the monthly literary, artistic and socio-political journal of the Central Committee of the Soviet Komsomol. It was founded in 1922. As noted in the translator’s footnote to the section entitled “V. Litov’s Introduction”, the journal was “one of the few publications that remained on a ‘conservative’ line during the Perestroika period”. (p. 13)

[***] Duel was a weekly political newspaper published in Russia from February 1996 to May 2009; its editor-in-chief was Yuriy Mukhin, and in the sources consulted its political orientation is described as Stalinist, “patriotic”, and anti-Zionist. The supplementary section of the Benediktov interview, which had not been published in 1989, appeared under V. N. Dobrov’s name, under the title “Melkoburjuaznye kadry reshili vsyo” (“The petty-bourgeois cadres decided everything”), in issue no. 22 of Duel, dated 3 June 2003.

[****] In the introduction to the Russian text republished on the RKS M(b) website, it is stated that the interview was based on several meetings held in 1980-1981; at the end of the text there appears the note: “V. Litov, member of the Union of Journalists of the USSR, Candidate of Economic Sciences.” The same attribution also appears in the digitised text of issue no. 4 of Molodaya Gvardiya from 1989.

[*****] Auri C. Berg, Reform in the Time of Stalin: Nikita Khrushchev and the Fate of the Russian Peasantry, doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 2012. In a footnote referring to the interview with Benediktov, it is stated that Litov was “the pseudonym of V. N. Dobrov” (p. 174).

[******] For this claim, see the source note in the Russian study Khrushchevskaya ottepel’ i obshchestvennye nastroeniya v SSSR v 1953-1964 gg. (The Khrushchev Thaw and Public Attitudes in the USSR, 1953-1964). The note states that “Benediktov’s brother and nephew considered this publication to be false”, referring to the article “Interv’yu, kotorogo ne bylo” (The Interview That Never Was), published in issue no. 37 of Ogonyok magazine in 1989.

To be continued