“Disinfecting Politically Defective Book”. The Publication of Revolutionary Memoirs by the Society of Pre-revolutionary Political Convicts

Abstract

The article analyzes the practice of publishing the works of non-Bolshevik authors in the publishing house of the Society of Pre-revolutionary Political Convicts in the 1920s - early 1930s with editors’ prefaces and footnotes.The author classifies those prefaces and footnotes and analyzes their aims, contents evolution, and connection with the issues in the history of the revolutionary movement, relevant to that period. The author concludes that firstly the editor’s prefaces aimed at criticizing erroneous non-Marxist opinions of memoirists. “Incorrect”interpretations were presented as characteristic for a certain epoch or milieu and giving value to the published material as a historical source. At the second stage(the early 1930s) the volume of editors’ interventions increases, and their character changes. The article shows, that these changes were not so much due to the growth of ideological control, but to the activity of the editor-in-chief of the publishing house I.A. Teodorovich. He used the idea of increasing the role of Bolshevik editors to promulgate his concept of populism history. The author considers this issue in the context of political and literary activity of I.A. Teodorovich.