Talk with Alexander Nakhimovsky: Russian Peasants’ Memories of War, Occupation, and the Holocaust

Join Pushkin House for an evening with Alexander Nakhimovsky who will speak about the language of the Soviet peasantry and what it reveals of their world view.

Around the turn of the 20th century, there were about 100,000,000 Russian peasants. By contrast, scholars, engineers, school teachers, lawyers, doctors, and everybody else in intellectual professions – and these include Tolstoy, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky, Mendeleev, Sikorsky, Malevich, Lenin, and others of similar prominence — amounted to less than three million.

This vast decrease in the peasant population was brought about by WWI, the Civil War, the famine of 1921-22, collectivization and de-kulakization, labour camps, the famine of 1932-33, the famine of 1946-47, and – above all – by the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. There were also tens of millions of peasants who migrated to the cities.

All through the Soviet period up to the 1980s, the peasantry was one of the most censored topics in scholarly and political discourse. Only in the 1990s were the constraints lifted. Scores of researchers – linguists, ethnographers, historians, and sociologists — at once started looking for, and recording, peasants who remembered pre-kolkhoz life and language.

At this point, a great number of autobiographical narratives have been transcribed and published. The central historical experience within these narratives is collectivization and de-kulakization, which was also the central interest of the interviewers. Relatively few narratives touch on occupation and the Holocaust. Nevertheless, those that do open an important window on a part of Soviet history that has been mostly avoided.

Vasily Grossman in his novel Life and Fate created powerful images of the Holocaust in Ukraine but only hinted at Ukrainian and Russian collaboration. Russian peasants’ narratives, with their masterful simple realism, add depth and nuance to the story.

Alexander Nakhimovsky grew up in Leningrad, USSR. After wasting a few years, including a stint in the Soviet Army from which he was honourably discharged with the rank of sergeant, he received an MA in mathematics from Leningrad University (1972). He emigrated to the US in 1975 and received a PhD in linguistics from Cornell University in 1982, with a graduate minor in Computer Science. He taught Linguistics and Russian 1979-85, co-authored three Russian language textbooks and published a number of articles on general and Slavic linguistics.

He is the author, co-author, or editor of a number of books and articles on computer technologies and Slavic linguistics. His most recent publications are on the history of the Russian language in the 20th century. He has a forthcoming book on the language and history of the Russian peasantry.

In English.