Dreams of Terror: Dreams from Stalinist Russia as a Historical Source

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Long recognized as a historical phenomenon, dreams may be of particular interest to historians of terror regimes. (1) In A History of Private Life, Alain Corbin wrote of a dramatic change in dream content after the French Revolution, when political themes invaded dreams (even erotic dreams were politicized). (2) In a methodological essay on historical experience, Reinhart Koselleck introduced dreams recounted by the subjects of Hitler's Third Reich as sources that "testify to a past reality in a manner which perhaps could not be surpassed by any source." (3) And what about dreams from the Stalinist terror?

In recent years, personal accounts that purport to provide evidence of the Soviet experience (diaries, memoirs, and other) have been appearing in print in large numbers. Many of them contain dreams; most of the dreams that Soviet people chose to include in their personal accounts have political content. Such publications can be seen as a massive effort on behalf of different people (authors as well as publishers) to open the daily, intimate lives of Soviet citizens-especially in the years of the terror-to the public eye. (4) In this context, political dreams, too, have been presented as historical evidence.

In the pages that follow, I provide interpretations of selected dreams that have been drawn from the recently published autobiographical narratives (mainly diaries) that deal with the Stalinist terror. I treat reported dreams as texts-stories about historically specific experiences. A question arises: in what ways can we speak of dreams as "stories"? And why do dreams seem particularly suited to serve as evidence of living under the terror?

First, I explore these issues by reviewing the theories of dreams that inform my analysis. Sigmund Freud, of course, has left a permanent imprint on our understanding of dreams. Like many others, I have borrowed from Freud his insistence that dreams occupy an exceptional place in psychological and cultural analysis and his hermeneutic approach to dreaming, viewed as a symbolic language of the individual psyche, but in other respects my analysis is not Freudian. (5) I have adopted a notion from the contemporary synthetic approach to dreams: that dreams provide explanatory metaphors that comment on a person's existential situation and emotional concerns. (6) For me, the key word is "metaphor." It has been suggested by psychoanalysts, cognitive psychologists, and philosophers alike that dreaming may be a paradigm or even a source for such operations as the use of images to symbolize thoughts, feelings, and situations; the transformation of one image into an expression of another; the creation of narrative by fusing concordance and discordance; and for the questioning of the reality of our lives (for the idea that "life is like a dream"). (7) In a word, dreaming can be seen as an analogy, or even (as one scholar has put it) the "ur-form of all fiction." Yet a dream is also unlike a fiction "in that it is a lived experience as well as a narrative." (8)

For my purposes-for the historical hermeneutics of dreams-the status of dreams as forms of experience and knowledge is of special importance. (9) As Freud notes, a product of our own psychic activity, the "finished dream strikes us as something alien to us." (10) Jurgen Habermas emphasizes the unique epistemological status of dreams as "texts that confront the author himself as alienated and incomprehensible": after waking, the dreamer, who in some ways is still the author of the dream, does not understand his creation. (11) Thus dreaming may be an experience of confronting one's hidden depth: what one knows, feels, or fears without being fully aware; and what defies control. Dreaming includes the splitting of the subject, and thus the ambivalence of knowledge and feeling. There is a disjunction and an encounter between the non-knowing and knowing self, amplified when the dream is recounted.

Of course, there is another view-the age-old belief in the prophetic nature of dreams, which is relevant for many dreamers to this day. (12) A person who does not believe in prophetic visitations takes a dream for a presentiment, if not a prophecy, by way of the belief that the dream, while evoking things past, refers to a potential action of self or other, and thus to a possible reality of what could happen. Some psychologists believe that in this way dreams play a crucial part in imagining and creating the future. (13)

Whether dreams are viewed as emanations of the self or as visitations, the knowledge they communicate is taken to be genuine and authentic, but from Artemidorus to Freud, and beyond, the meaning of the dream has been a product of interpretation. Moreover, the dreamer seldom believes in the possibility of a satisfactory interpretation. In accounts of dreams, we find a note of surprise and bewilderment: is this really me? where do my dreams come from? what do they mean? Relating a dream in a diary, many a writer stumbles in his or her self-knowledge and self-revelation. In the end, there is a unique relationship to the self that resides in watching oneself dream and in telling one's dreams: the ultimate intimacy and the lack of transparency, the disjunction between "my text" and "my meaning-intention." (14)

I would argue that for this, and other, reasons dreams, as stories and as experiences, are specifically suited to express the aporias of living faced by those who live under political terror. Indeed, since repressive regimes mobilize our ability for self-alienation, self-deception, and ambivalence, dreams can be taken as a structural analogy of self-knowledge under terror. Recall that Freud used the word "censorship" to describe "the violence done to the meaning" in dreams. (15) (From Freud's famous letter to Wilhelm Fliess about dream messages: "Have you ever seen a foreign newspaper which has passed the Russian censorship at the frontier? Words, whole clauses, and sentences are blacked out so that what is left becomes unintelligible.") (16) Moreover, because the dream is the main medium of fear, it can be used as a model of feeling in the subjects of terror regimes. (Suffice it to recall that clinical characteristics of nightmares include the perception of danger, the threat of violence, and the feeling of helplessness.) (17)

Thus it is not an accident that in his methodological statement on the value of dreams for history-the strongest we have-Koselleck draws examples from a collection of dreams compiled in Nazi Germany: Charlotte Beradt's Das Dritte Reich des Traumes (The Third Reich of Dreams). (18) Between 1933 and 1939, Beradt, a Communist (and a Jew) who gathered information for German emigre publications, asked people she met to share their dreams. In 1939 she emigrated to the United States. Her collection, which contains anonymous dream stories accompanied by Beradt's brief interpretative commentary (but devoid of information about her subjects), was first published in 1966 in Munich. (Hannah Arendt, who was Beradt's personal friend, served as an expert reader for the publisher.) At that time, Beradt, who no longer believed in communism, was motivated by a desire to demonstrate the impact of totalitarianism on the human psyche and human condition. (19)

In bringing dreams to the domain of history, Koselleck also followed both an impulse to methodological innovation and a moral imperative: the historian's duty to account for "the daily and nightly world of acting and suffering mankind." (20) As far as the methodology is concerned, his argument is twofold: as "stories" told in the context of National Socialism, dreams tell us about the regime. At the same time, these dreams are themselves "components of the terror": in their effect on the subject (the dreamer's knowledge of what is happening and what might happen, the dreamer's sense of fear and guilt), dreams themselves are instruments, or modes, of "performance of the terror." (21) In speaking of dreams as "stories," Koselleck insists that dreams, when written down, can be counted as fictional texts. Moreover, it is precisely their "poetic quality" (Koselleck argues) that allows us to obtain from dreams messages of the type "that cannot be captured through factual reports" or (I would add) through realistic representations. (22) In the end, dreams lead the historian into the "recesses of the apparently private realm of the everyday" penetrated by waves of terror, and thus disclose "levels that are not touched even by diary entries." (23)

In analyzing dreams of the Soviet terror, I follow similar impulses. Yet my goals do not include theorizing general problems of evidence raised by dreams. Wherever possible, I note similarities and differences between the dreams from Hitler's Germany and the dreams from Stalin's Russia. (The available material is too diverse to allow a systematic comparison). I present the dreams in the thick contexts of both the life experiences and personal narratives in which they are embedded, commenting on various ways in which dreams were produced and used by the subjects. (In this, my work is different from Beradt's.) Aspiring to account (albeit in a small measure) for the daily and nightly lives of thinking and feeling people, I go person by person, dream by dream. I interpret what the dream may mean to the person who chose to record it and what it means to us, distant readers. My initial thesis is simple: the dream narratives people record, the ways they interpret them, the questions they ask about their dreams, and the ways in which they incorporate dreams into their personal narratives-creating an encounter between the intended and unintended meaning-reveal how they relate to the self, to the world, and to the very task of representing the self and the world under the conditions of political terror.

People who lived under Stalin themselves attached a special value to their dreams. Nobody expressed this idea with more force than the literary scholar, editor, and writer Lydia Chukovskaya (1907-96). Throughout her life, Chukovskaya was an avid diarist. In the years of the Stalinist terror she mostly recorded dreams: "My entries on the terror, incidentally, are notable in that the only things which are fully reproduced are dreams. Reality was beyond my powers of description; moreover, I did not even attempt to describe it in my diary. It could not have been captured in a diary, and anyway could one even conceive of keeping a real diary in those days?" (24) Chukovskaya's dream diaries have not survived, but other people's dreams of terror have reached us, mostly in publications from recent years.

Andrei Arzhilovsky: The Peasant Raped by Stalin

Andrei Stepanovich Arzhilovsky (1885-1937), a peasant from the Tiumen' region in the Urals (educated only in a primary school in his village), found it conceivable, even essential, to keep detailed records of his daily life in the years of the terror. Throughout his life he was a social activist (and he dreamt of becoming a writer): during the Civil War, under the "White" government of Kolchak he became a member of the civil committee of inquiry; when the "Reds" came in 1919, he was arrested by the Cheka and sentenced to prison for these activities. Released in 1923, he joined the inspection commission of a rural soviet and edited a wall newspaper. In 1929, he was arrested again and sentenced on charges of agitating against collectivization. In the camp, Arzhilovsky contributed satirical writings to a small-print paper published for the purposes of "reforging" (reforming) the prisoners. Released in 1936, he worked at the Tiumen' woodworking factory Red October. Against his better judgment, he wrote social satire for the factory wall newspaper and sent critical essays to the printed press. He also kept a diary. In his diary, Arzhilovsky expressed his distaste for the coercion, poverty, hypocrisy, and injustice of the Soviet regime. Carefully recorded dreams (about 20 in nine months) form a noticeable part of the diary. When, in July 1937, Arzhilovsky was arrested again, the diary was used as evidence of his counterrevolutionary views. Some passages-including dreams-were underlined in red by the NKVD investigator. The last page contains a note in Arzhilovsky's hand: "This diary was confiscated during a search in my home. It contains forty (40) sheets." Signed: "Arzhilovsky" Dated: "29 August 1937" Seven days later, Andrei Arzhilovsky was executed. In the early 1990s, an employee of the NKVD's successor organization, the KGB, gave the diary to a local writer, who published it in the literary journal Ural. (25) What follows is one of the dreams Arzhilovsky recorded soon after his release:

   18 December [1936] You may call it nonsense, but still, dreams too
   are a fact. I want to write down an interesting dream I had.
   Someone told me I could see Stalin. A historical figure, it would
   be interesting to get to see him. And so ... A small room, simple
   and ordinary. Stalin is drunk as a skunk, as they say. There are
   only men in the room, and just two of us peasants, me and one
   other guy with a black beard. Without a word, Vissarionovich knocks
   the guy with the black beard down, covers him with a she et and
   rapes him brutally. "I am next," I think in despair, recalling how
   they carry on in Tiflis, and I am thinking, how can I escape, but
   after his session Stalin seems to come to his senses somewhat, and
   he starts up a conversation. "Why were you so eager to see me
   personally?" "Well, why wouldn't I be? Portraits are just
   portraits, but a living man, and a great one at that, is something
   else altogether," said I. Overall, things worked out fairly well
   for me, they even treated me to some food ... I've had two dreams
   about Stalin: once before my release and now this time. And in
   fact, before the revolution I dreamt about Nicholas II. At the
   time I thought: what is this all about? I had never seen him and
   wasn't really interested in him. But then during the revolution
   and after his execution, I found myself often recalling this
   strange …