‘The history of the Soviet Union in the 1930s is notorious for the Great Terror when millions of Soviet citizens were arrested and executed,’ Polly wrote in blog post for the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information in September 2018. ‘I chose to research the arrest and interrogations of writers in the USSR during this time to trace the dynamics of the relationship between the political police and those they arrested for political crimes.’
It was a huge challenge, comments James Harris, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Leeds and one of Polly’s two supervisors. ‘The main body of original primary research here comes from the security service archives of Ukraine and Georgia which are (were), by dint of contemporary geopolitics, open. But the files are not complete and the texts – everything from the transcripts of interrogations, field reports and denunciations —demand much more careful interpretation and openness to multiple meanings .. than those of us working on the history of Party and state structures in the 1930s.’
Polly’s work, he says, ‘brings an important contribution to the cultural history of the 1930s where an unsubtle, traditional Cold War-type image of the political control of literature has persisted’. With this thesis, the candidate makes a clear and compelling case that the security service was just as – if not more — messy, confused, and uncertain than the Party apparatus. The case study of novelists in the 1930s shows how the security service was not in sole control of what the regime called ‘cultural production’.
More form james and getty.
The final version of Polly’s PhD, How Soviet Security treated novelists in the 1930s: PhD thesis 2019, was approved in 2020 with a few light corrections by her second supervisor, Professor Mike Goodman, Professor of at Kings College, London. The full version is available via the contacts page. Here you can find the five chapters abridged with trepidation by myself Jane Feinmann to offer what must be said to be my version of an accessibility.
Here are the chapters you’ll find below:
The presentation of the ambiguous meaning and uncertain application of censorship in this work is exceptionally strong. T
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, oy, yet the archives reveal an organisation that was in constant flux during this decade – not, perhaps, what we might expect.’ Polly summed up POLLY
,Poly wrote in a blog post for As she explained in a she chose to focus on writers ‘because I a
Polly Corrigan Memorial Blog 