48 pages • 1 hour read
Lydia ChukovskayaSofia Petrovna
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Stalin and the Great Terror
Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924 left a power vacuum at the top of Soviet leadership. Joseph Stalin, then the general secretary, outmaneuvered his political opponents to replace Lenin as the head of government. Chief among these rivals was Leon Trotsky, a charismatic Old Bolshevik—one of the largely middle- and upper-class revolutionaries who led the Russian Revolution of 1917. Trotsky was a skilled military commander whom Lenin credited with leading the Red Army to victory against the anti-Bolshevik White Army in the two-year civil war that followed the Revolution of 1917; however, Trotsky’s domineering style of management made him a lot of enemies in the Communist Party, including Stalin, who hated him.
Stalin managed to expel Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1929. In exile in Turkey, Trotsky formed an anti-Stalin coalition with factions within the Soviet Union in 1932. This conspiratorial bloc, known as the Bloc of Oppositions or Trotsky’s Bloc, threatened Stalin, who in fear tightened his grip on power. In the press Stalin accused Trotsky’s Bloc of colluding with Japan and Fascist Germany to overthrow him: These fascist “saboteurs” are the bogeymen that appear throughout Sofia Petrovna (there’s no evidence of such collusion).
Although the Bloc dissolved in 1933, Stalin grew increasingly paranoid about being overthrown. In 1934, the assassination of Stalin’s close friend and Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov terrified Stalin that he was next. Under the pretext of squashing Trotskyist dissent and preventing civil war, Stalin began a widespread purge of supposedly treasonous people. This became known as the Great Purge or the Great Terror and included internationally publicized trials of former party leaders who, brutally tortured into giving false confessions before trial, begged for execution in front of a national and international audience.
This first wave of arrests following Kirov’s assassination is what Sofia is referring to when, hearing a group of doctors has been arrested, she says she’s worried another wave is starting. It is also in this first wave of arrests that Sofia’s childhood friend Mrs. Nezhentseva—a French teacher and former member of the bourgeoisie—is arrested.
The Purge also targeted a diverse list of people accused of anti-Soviet activity, including ethnic minorities, Old Bolsheviks, intellectuals, and kulaks—peasants wealthy enough to own their own farm. Under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov, the secret police (NKVD) used torture, deportation to gulags (forced labor camps), and murder to control the populace with fear. It’s estimated that over one million people were killed during this two-year period from 1936 to 1938. Many relatives of those executed were told by the NKVD that they had been sentenced to 10 years in a gulag without the right to correspondence. Both Kolya and Dr. Kiparisov are given this sentence, suggesting that they were executed.
In 1938 Stalin blamed the Great Purge on Yezhov and executed him, effectively ending the two-year reign of terror.
Authorial Context: Lydia Chukovskaya
Born in 1907, Chukovskaya was raised in St. Petersburg (which was renamed Leningrad following Lenin’s death). Her father was the poet and celebrated children’s writer Korney Chukovsky, whose popularity in Russia was similar to Dr. Seuss’s in the United States. As a result Chukovskaya grew up around famous writers, including the Nobel-nominated poet Anna Akhmatova, with whom she would later become lifelong friends.
Sofia Petrovna was inspired by Chukovskaya’s experience during the Great Purge. In 1937 Chukovskaya’s husband, Matvei Bronstein, was arrested on a false charge and, unknown to her, executed. Chukovskaya spent two years in the interminable lines she describes in Sofia Petrovna trying to learn her husband’s status.
Chukovskaya faced many hurdles in getting Sofia Petrovna published. Though she wrote her novella in 1939, she was forced to hide it until the early 1960s, when with the backlash against Stalin it was approved for publication. Then the political climate changed again and the Communist Party began to feel that, after a decade of overturning Stalin’s legacy and rehabilitating those wrongfully imprisoned in his gulags, it was time to focus on the future. In a volte-face the publishing house reneged on their contract to publish Sofia Petrovna, citing ideological flaws.
Chukovskaya won a suit against the publishing house for the remainder of her fee (though she still couldn’t publish her book). This relatively favorable treatment was likely the result of her father being a national hero. Her father’s status, as well as her growing reputation in the West, also protected Chukovskaya somewhat from the KGB. While an indomitable critic of the repression of the Soviet Union and an outspoken advocate of many dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chukovskaya was too well regarded to be murdered.
