—Historias de vida. Parte 1 Life Stories: Part 1

CHAIR

Paola Lo Cascio

MESA 11TABLE 11

—Rozaliia Cherepanova ((Russia)“Power of Memory or Power over Memory? Influence of Official Discourses on Individual Autobiographic Stories.”

—Maija Krumina (Latvia)“Ethnic and Narrative Diversity in the Construction of Life Stories in the town of Kandava.”

—Leva Garda-Rozenberga (Latvia)“Life Story and Self-Awareness. Oral History in Latvia”

—Dace K. Bormane (Latvia)“Biography as Power or Life Story as Language of Art of Life”

—Enrique Arrosagaray (Argentina)“A Patagonic man in the East Europe.”

—Ivaldo Marciano de França Lima (Brazil)“ Zé Gomes y el maracatu indiano: famoso e ilustre en su tiempo, desconocido entre los maracatuzeiros de la actu-alidad.. “

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Power of Memory or Power over Memory? Influence of Official Discourses on Individual Oral Autobiographic Stories Rozaliia Cherepanova (Russia): Abstract:

This article shows possibilities of official discourses to influence on oral autobiographical stories and on "memory language". As the basis for the conclusions the author uses his own collection of oral biographical interviews with representatives of the Soviet provincial intelligentsia. The author emphasizes that in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian official discourses impact on memory was particularly powerful. The author explores the traces of official discourse in oral stories and trying to explain the mechanism of actualization of a discourse, using the theory of narrative psychology and intertextual analysis. The article also discusses the features commemorative texts created among intellectuals.

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In its very beginning oral history had been considered a strong antidote to the ideological influence of power and even a possible means to dismantle “official” historiography1. By now, however, one cannot deny the fact that all the effort exacted by state power to manipulate the course of remembrance on a collective as well as on an individual level has been, at times, quite successful. The statement by Maurice Halbwachs that “before we remember something, we talk about it” and that the recollection itself leads to the reconstruction of the past from our present position2 gives us some insight into the mechanisms how official discourse affects the course of remembrance. In Soviet Russia, where local and corporative “languages” were practically wiped out by “cultural revolution”, “internationalism” and “socialist realism”, the influence of official discourse on memory has been extremely strong. Also, nowhere else, only in Russia official discourse changed so often and so fundamentally over the last one hundred years: first, the orthodox-stately-tsarist rhetoric was replaced by revolutionary language, superseded by “vysokii stil’” (“lofty style”) of the Stalin period with its totalitarian utopia, followed by specific tropes of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev times; the mid 1980s were marked by the emergence of a democratic-unmasking style; finally, in the early years of the second millennium, one could note a recurrence of stately monarchic phrases, solemn-moralizing terms and orthodox-imperial phraseology. The change in discourse did not only reflect a change in leaders but a political and ideological about-face of a radical nature. The goal of my oral history project that I started in 2006, was to trace in which way those discourses were intertwined, in conflict, or transformed in the autobiographical narrative of the respondents, and to what extent those discourses are still valid today. The project was based on 132 biographical interviews, 97 women and 35 men. The oldest among the respondents were born between 1917 and 1941 (33 women, 17 men); The middle aged group of respondents were born between 1941 and 1960 (52 women, 13 men); whereas twelve women and five men were born between 1960 and 1973. On the professional level the group of respondents consisted of medical doctors (7 women, 2 men), school teachers (49 women, 9 men), engineers (6 women, 12 men), teachers at institutions of higher education (12 women, 5 men), writers/journalists (2 men), musicians (5 women), economists (7 women, 1 man), librarians (4 women), lawyers (1 woman, 1 man), actors (2 men), and several of other professions. The respondents came from different national subcultures (Russian, Tartar, Ukrainian, Jewish, German, Bashkirian, Estonian and others) and from different social classes (peasantry, working class, middle class, pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie and nobility). Irrespective of this apparently great variety of social status in Soviet times all those people were part of a single unified social layer, the Soviet intelligentsia; unified not only by definition of Soviet ideologues or historians, but also because all their members fulfilled a similar social role and spoke a similar language. As a social group, professionally engaged in intellectual work, they complied with official discourse by reflecting, creatively arranging and popularizing it “in the masses”, and to a high degree official discourse became their professional language. Most of all I was interested to find out which of the manifold official discourses of Soviet and post Soviet times turned out to be most viable and most adequate to become the language of individual remembrance. It turned out to be the most difficult procedure trying to trace elements of “Stalinist” and “Khrushchevite” discourses in the narratives collected. “Stalinist” discourse could rarely be detected, because in general the respondents made an effort to mask it with Putin style language (with tropes like “establishing order”, “fighting corruption, “fight against national-separatist elites” etc.); Krushchevite elements, however, were almost totally absorbed by the democratic rhetoric of Gorbachev’s perestroika and of Yelcin’s reform era.

                                                            1See for instance: Thompson, Paul, The Voice of The Past. Oral History, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000, p. 18. 2 Maurice Halbwachs, The collective memory, New York: Harper & Row 1980, p. .

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In the narratives of my respondents I could not trace any images, metaphors, or phrasings typical for the official discourse of the mid 1950s up to the beginning of the 1960s. The only “lively” and personal account of this period was given by a female engineer on how she personally remembered the space flight of Gagarin and how all members of her work collective went home earlier and celebrated this event. Yet, the great majority of all other memories came across in a totally clichéd form free from all personal coloring. The respondents expressed their shock about the revelations of the XXnd Party Congress in a wording of supporters of perestroika, they denounced the repressions under Stalin and showed their pride about the “Thaw” and achievements connected with the “Kosmos” using journalistic stereotypes of the last decade. I cannot name even a single nuance that might have left an especially strong impression on me. For the period of the 1980s, followed by the post-Soviet years, the protest movements in the USSSR were a preferred topic. Dissidents and defenders of personal rights were seen as suitable to identify with and to place the responsibility on them for various developments by so called “democrats” and by nostalgic communists alike. In the end, the great number of studies and of media reports attached to “social movements” in the USSR proved out of proportion in relation to their actual dimension. Talking with my respondents more often than not I heard them express their great fascination about the dimension of “dissident and underground activities” and of similar phenomena in the late USSR. Yet, whenever I asked them to give a concrete example of either their own civic involvement or of somebody else’s among their friends or acquaintances, they started to tell me about harmless debates at Party meetings (most of them connected to interpersonal or workplace conflicts), or they referred to the well known protest by Andrey Sakharov in 1968 which at that time had almost immediately fallen into oblivion and was remembered only recently due to renewed reports on this very topic in the media over the last ten or twelve years. Occasionally they complained, they wouldn’t be able to remember anything concrete because of the length of time that had passed since or they admitted: even if nothing like this occurred in our own family, still there were activities of this kind elsewhere. The situation was described in the following manner: “I know that it happened even though personally I don’t remember it” or: “I remember it even though it didn’t happen in my own surroundings”. Those answers definitely need additional analytical studies and field research. Maybe the respondents forgot about certain events because, at that time, they were not considered important enough to be remembered. In other words, at that time the discourse available to the respondents did not provide the necessary verbal framework to adequately explain those events. Or maybe, similar events did not occur as a matter of fact, and we can only speak of memory almost exclusively (imposed) from outside as the result of an intentional ideological effort of the last decade, when the democratic discourse of Perestroika and the years of reform that followed recalled those events that were to be the basis for Perestroika and for civic reforms. By far more distinctive was the official “Brezhnevite” discourse, even though it shows a strong similarity to the present language. The epic rhetoric of the 1970s corresponds perfectly well with the contemporary orthodox-imperial discourse. Some of my respondents, when asked to comment on their situation at the time of the interview, used typical “Brezhnevite” tropes, and considered them fully adequate to describe their present circumstances:

“We have a positive attitude towards politics, we accept all the decisions and resolutions taken by the party and try to fulfill them. We always participate in the elections, we never fail to take part in them” (Alevtina T., born in 1939, librarian)3.

For anyone familiar with Soviet history it is absolutely clear that a phrase like “accept/approve of the resolutions of the party” (without any mention of a particular one because they were all alike) is a direct quotation of official texts of the second half of the 1960s and of the 1970s.

                                                            3 This quotation and all the following are taken from the interviews registered by the author (R.Ch.)

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Some interesting traces of the mutual influence of different discourses (“Brezhnevite” – “Perestroika” – “Putinesque”) can be seen in the account of Peter B., an elderly engineer and construction worker. He is totally bound to the epic style of Soviet editorials in the era of “standstill”. This is what the beginning of his narration sounds like:

“Let me introduce myself: I am the son of a peasant, brought up by working in a factory, called by the party I became a construction worker […] I was born here, in the Ural, at the border between Europe and Asia, at the foot of the Ural mountains. How beautiful – the Ural mountains! However, in my childhood, there was little chance to seriously fall in love with nature” and so on.

Peter then remembers his student years and the obligatory trips in the fall to nearby kolkhoz farms to take part in the grain harvest. Those trips were connected with considerable difficulties concerning living conditions, but, nevertheless, for the young men and women they were a good chance to defy control of pedagogues, educators, the party, public organizations, and to enlarge their field of individual freedom, at least to a certain extent. They offered adventures and an important possibility to establish not only friendship ties but also romantic and/or sexual contacts. You can hear an old man speak with great affection in his voice:

“When we were young we studied, we became friends, lived in communal setups – from one student grant to the next one. We worked hard. It made us very happy to fulfill all the assignments we were given. We enjoyed the trips to the kolhoz and sovkhoz farms, with their senseless activities for the help of the village and to take part in the grain harvest.”

The word “senseless” though does not seem to fit into his idyllic remembrance. Only in the years of perestroika, when a democratic-unmasking rhetoric came into use, the student help for harvesting was called senseless. Naïve Soviet enthusiasm turned into a grim picture of devaluation, and the kolkhoz farms became a place of suffering so that the joy of traveling there was considered amoral and inadequate. Obviously our respondent managed quite well to let the ideological turn of perestroika pass by, he stuck it out, adjusted to it, and after all seemed to be truly happy, when the new Putinesque discourse rehabilitated the Soviet past and made it possible for the older generation not to be ashamed when remembering the experience of their youth. The official language used at the beginning of the second millennium obviously enjoyed great popularity. Many respondents actively stressed the ingrained religiousness in their family, their loyalty to the interests of the state, as well as to national and family values, pride about the military prowess of their ancestors, and they literally quoted verses from the bible (or Koran), etc. We have to admit that the tendency to adopt the dominating discourse is not only a habit acquired over many years by any resident of Russia/the USSR/Russia as a precaution, a habit almost ingrained on a genetic level. But it is also a natural human quest for wanting to “be correct”, to be up to date, able to believe in the future, to belong, and to be part of the community. It is typical how the school teacher Nadezhda F., born in 1940, tells us with unchanging enthusiasm and with the same intonation how, over the last twenty years, she supported all the different official policies , from Gorbachev’s Perestroika, followed by “democracy” in the sense of the “Yabloko”-party , up to Putin’s “patriotism”. And it is also quite interesting that the narrator herself did not see any contradiction in her own position. This is not only a question of being politically immature or of an unsound memory. It is rather bound to the fact that in Russia, over the last two centuries, there has never been a fundamental difference in the changing official discourse. Challenged by the West and reacting to this challenge with concepts of either militant isolationism or of quasi liberal mimicry, Russian/Soviet/Russian power alternately used two different kinds of slogans, rhetorical approaches, metaphors and, accordingly, two different images of the past. The discourses of power were adapted to particular times and conditions, but in principle they always produced quite similar national conservative or liberal western settings so that periodical changes do no

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longer come as a surprise for society and are not considered a “contradiction”. There is a tradition in Russia of more than 200 years that former liberal intellectuals, over the years, turn into true orthodox and conservative men. (We can think of Nikolai Karamzin, Alexandr Pushkin, Sergey Uvarov, Konstantin Aksakov, Michail Katkov, Lev Tikhomirov, just to name a few). Therefore the language of memory of a Russian intellectual is notably a rather complicated palimpsest. And despite the diversity official ideological strategies one and the same traditional “liberal Westernism” and “conservative Slavophilia” are being (re)produced in Russia again and again4. Quite often, when the state performs this kind of transition from “Westernism” (a quasi liberal mimicry of the West) to “Slavophilism” (a strong intransigent opposition to the West), we are reminded of the change in official political rhetoric under Alexander I or under Vladimir Putin. To my opinion, the question which discourse is chosen as language of memory by the one who remembers can only be resolved by taking into account several subjective factors and, most of all, individual psychological constitution. They determine which events of the past one remembers, forgets or endows with importance. Let us not forget that an autobiographical report is first of all a particular type of narrative5, and for Jerome Bruner it exists even exclusively in the form of a narrative6. Bruner who uses the terminology of the Russian formalists distinguishes three aspects in the “telling” of life narratives: fabula, sjuzet, and genre. fabula is the mythic, the transcendent the story is about, sjuzet incorporates or realizes the timeless fabula in concrete circumstances and genre is a set of linguistic devices generating different kinds of story plots7. According to the better known classification of Hayden White (who draws on the literary theory of Northrop Frye) there are only four modes of emplotment to structure historical narrative (including autobiographical narrative): Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, or Satire. The choice of emplotment is linked to the set of events included in the narrative as facts and to certain modalities of poetic language, i.e. to a chosen discourse strategy8. One should not forget that the analysis of narratives in psychology is also based on the idea of intertextuality and on the assumption that a text cannot be separated from context. In biographical accounts of intellectuals intertextual relations appear to be most significant. Following the ideas of Max Weber, Alvin Gouldner, Antonio Gramsci, Bernhard Giesen, Irina Paperno, Alexander Kustaryov, and many others intellectuals in general cannot only be defined as a social group, but also as a community that shares a specific discourse; they are known as “avid readers” –a group that is formed around a definite corpus of texts. The canonical set of texts for the Russian intelligentsia is well known and much has been written about it. To this collection belong, among others, “The Confessions” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Radishchev’s “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow”, Alexander Pushkin as “the singer of freedom” and “friend of the Decembrists”, Alexander Herzen with his “My Past and Thoughts”, Lev Tolstoy with “War and Peace”, Turgenev with his Bazarov, Chernyshevsky with the dreams of Vera Pavlovna, and Chekhov with his Doctor Dymov who lost his life when he saved a sick child. Many of those texts were either directly mentioned or even quoted by my respondents.

“My grandfather, Leonid Mitrofanovich Okerblom, was a country doctor, a very nobel-minded man because he did not treat the people out of private acquisitive motives – there was no need for it –

                                                            4The debate about the adequateness of applying the term „liberal“ to the Westerners, and the term „conservative“ to the Slavophiles, just as the debate about the remarkable persistence of the Western-Slavophile experience in Russia is beyond the scope of this article. 5According to Labov the narrative is understood by the individual as a means to construct and represent his or her own experience with the help of successive clear sentences which reflect the chronological succession of events. See: Labov W., Waletzky J. Narrative Analysis: Oral Representation of Personal Experience. Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Seattle 1966. 6Jerome Bruner, „Life as Narrative“, in: Social Research, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Spring 1987) pp. 11-32; here p.12. 7Ibid., pp. 15-18. 8Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1973, pp. 7-11.

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but exclusively on humanitarian grounds… (…) As a member of the bourgeoisie he was on several occasions taken by Red Guards to be shot, but every time the inhabitants of the town stood up for him so that he was not executed. He died like Chekhov’s doctor Dymov when he got infected by one of his patients” (Valentina F., economist, born in 1940).

In a similar fashion the engineer Peter B., born in 1938 (already mentioned above), gives us several intertextual clues in just one sentence when describing his childhood:

“I was brought up by my grandmother, just as it was with Pushkin – do you remember Arina Rodionovna? Only I called my grandmother very affectionate “babon’ka”, and all the universities of my childhood I was under the guidance of my “babon’ka”.

In this report there are not only references to Pushkin but also to Maxim Gorky’s “My universities” – a story well known to many a Soviet generation where the young boy learnt all his lessons for life from life itself and through his extremely strict grandfather. By speaking very warmly of the “universities of my childhood” and by referring to “Arina Rodionovna”, the nanny of Pushkin - a simple peasant woman who, according to legend, familiarized the poet with traditional Russian culture - our respondent tells us that he is not ashamed of his “low” birth, that growing up among simple folk taught him many things worthwhile, and nevertheless he managed to break free and become part of a “creative” group of society, the community of intellectuals, similar to Maxim Gorky whom he quoted implicitly, through long periods of self-study. In the terminology of Hayden White the scenario of Peter B.’s life would be a classical “Bildungsroman” (a coming-of-age novel). The latter found an ideal expression in the slow-moving production novels of the Brezhnev period. The opposite feeling about one’s own life, i.e. life seen as a tragedy of unfulfilled ambitions and personal mortification, is expressed by another respondent, Alexander A., a lawyer, born in 1946, who chose the democratic-unmasking discourse as an adequate language for his memory. Irrespective of being quite affluent - having a good family, a prestigious professional position, and the material means of livelihood - to which he paid little attention and only when the interviewer insisted, Alexander positions himself in texts about a non-integrated marginal intelligentsia. He emphasizes that he played ostracized jazz, listened to “Voice of America”. His poems and stories (novellas) were always turned down by various editors and were never published. He presents in great detail several episodes of being “persecuted”. His father, who came from a family of wealthy Cossacks, a mining engineer, fought during the Civil War for the Whites and also for the Reds, became an ardent communist and an atheist. He was arrested in 1937, denounced by a friend and was resettled with his whole family. But at the point where our respondent’s story would logically turn to his present successful life, he all of a sudden stops talking. Real success does not fit into his self-perception of a social outcast, a scenario for which he constructed the decorum very beautifully and with great care. Yet, another self-assessment, a different life scenario, demands the choice of another wording, as for instance the story of Maria K., the oldest respondent in my project, born in 1921. She started out as an elementary school teacher in a village, changed very quickly and determined to administrative positions (“putting things straight” - first, in the loss-making section of a kolkhoz farm, then in the loss-generating regional trade office, then in a remote veterinarian clinic, then seeing to the discipline in a city hostel). Her biography – variegated and, at the same time, monotonous (“to impose order”, to put pressure on people and to punish them) ‒ was not only the result of well-known events of the twentieth century that intermingled and mixed people of all walks of life in an erratic way, but also and above all it was due to her remarkable personal qualities, as for instance, her capacity to get by with four hours sleep per day and also to comply with the requirements made at work that, in Soviet times, were often close to sadism and misanthropy. How can one be surprised that Maria’s language of memory was the discourse of the times of Stalin? Maria looked for enemies and vermin and unmasked them. As she tells us, she most often found them among deported Chechens, among people from Western Ukraine, among Jews or among the Ingush. She underlines that she didn’t have a “private life” and regrets that her newborn daughter prevented her

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at that time to leave for the front. Her everyday ascetism, stamina, and resilience make one think of the metaphor used by a Soviet poet talking of ‘people, hard as nails’. In an almost Rabelaisian momentum Maria presents her life as a never ending battle with parasites, loafers, saboteurs, alcoholics, perfidious women, idiots, weaklings, and unfaithful men. As an apotheosis of this comédie humaine appears the unexpected proposition of the respondent, that in her passport there is no date of birth, she was born beyond time, even before the beginning of time:

“I ask my mother: “Mama, when was I born? [. . .] And she sat there for a while, didn’t move: “There was hunger. It was Maslena”9. It was the week of Maslena! Yes, this was it. This is why I have no date of birth in my passport”.

With this strange statement Maria tells us about her experience with time, how she experienced it as a standstill and as bewitched. This standstill obviously occurred a long time ago, expressed in the refusal of Maria’s mother to give away her little daughter to the refugees passing by:

“… our people were already fleeing to China. The rich were crossing our Kustanajskii Region, and they had gramophones, they turned them on, and I started to dance. They said: “Oh, please, give us this child!” Mama said: “How could I give away my own child?” – I have three brothers, my father had five brothers, and I was the only daughter: I was born a real princess. Mama said: “What do you think who I am! No! Never!” And I danced very beautifully”.

By describing herself as a “princess”, the respondent points out that she was born to be happy and gay (born to dance). But in her hard life she saw neither happiness, nor joy, nor love, at least in her interview nothing of this kind was mentioned, not even in connection with the birth of her children. Our respondent interprets her hard life with a husband who did not love her, who was a drunkard and deceived her, as the failed fulfillment of predicted happiness. The episode with the refugees, seen under the succession of events in her biography, is definitely not essential, but it represents this very “piece of evidence” (K. Ginsburg), this “marginal note” (Roland Barthes) that give meaning to her life in a metaphorical and illustrative way. Comparable to the evil fairy that bewitches the princess and lets the time stand still, the evil and envious “refugees” transform the little girl, who was born a “princess”, into a stern, unfeminine, chthonian person. This recalls the words of Hayden White for whom “Satire paints its gray on gray, in the awareness of its own inadequacy as an image of reality”10. Here we can see that the influence of official discourses on individual memory is not only one of direct influence, but a system of complicated transmission and individual experience.

                                                            9Maslena – a popular term for Maslenitsa, a holiday of heathen origin, celebrated in the week before Lenten fast with merry making and an abundance of food. Starting with the First World War and later connected with the traumas of revolution, the overabundance during Maslenitsa, in years before the war, must have even more been considered a utopia of the „Golden age“, Masletnitsa became a metaphor of happiness and a state of carefreeness. Therefore the year 1921, mentioned by our respondent, even when seen against the overall misery and distress, stands out as especially hard with its hunger crisis. One could not even think of any merry making and even less of any abundance of food. The arrival of a newborn child could hardly be considered a happy event, since the chances of the newborn to survive were rather limited. The mother of the respondent cannot remember her daughter‘s date of birth. The only thing she remembers is hunger. This way, something in the sentence – „There was hunger, it was Maslena“ — that, on first sight, seems not related to each other is in fact connected in a very deep and tragic manner. 10Hayden White, Metahistory, op.cit., p.10.

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Ethnic and narrative diversity in the construction of life stories in the town of Kandava. Maija Krumina (Latvia):

Abstract:

Two main goals of this paper is to analyze the structure of life stories from two different ethnic groups (Latvian and Romani), recorded in the town of Kandava; and to examine the narratives about various historical periods (Second World War, Soviet time and post-Soviet period) within these life stories. It was chosen to focus on these two ethnic groups because, firstly, they have different social, historical, and cultural experiences, thereby allowing them to be contrasted and compared; and, secondly, because town of Kandava has historically had many Romani residents. For methodological purposes it is important to interview Latvians and Romani living in the same location, as it is then possible to preserve equivalent contextual, including regional, conditions. The life story approach prescribes that the interviewer proposes the narrative and maintains the biographical perspective in the construction of the narrative, but the interviewee is given full freedom in his or her choice of topics and arrangement of the narrative. Only in such way interview can result in a life story that reflects the narrator’s individual and collective ideas about what life story is comprised of and what historical aspects it should include. The field work experience in Kandava, which is discussed in the first part of the paper, demonstrates that such approach is successful as it allows determining how life stories are influenced, firstly, by an individual’s ethnic and cultural belonging and, secondly, by the collective memory of the respective group, which is then discussed in the bulk of the paper.

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This paper, which aims to analyze how the Latvian and Romani representatives construct their life stories and create narratives about the recent periods of Latvian history, including the Second World War, the Soviet era and the restoration of independence, is part of a larger research project “Ethnic and narrative diversity in the construction of life stories in Latvia”11 . The project is based on the assumption that the form and function of a life story is determined by ethnicity, gender and geographical affiliations. According to this assumption it is planned to compare life story constructing techniques of three ethnic groups living in Latvia (Latvians, Russians and Romani), as well as to explore how individual memory of different age and sex interacts with the collective memory of different ethnic groups. Particular ethnic groups have been chosen because they have different social, historical and cultural experience that allows them to be compared and contrasted with each other. For methodological reasons it is intended to interview representatives of the ethnic groups living in the same place as it is the only way to maintain the same contextual, including regional conditions.

Keeping in mind the main objective of the project, the paper analyzes biographical interviews recorded in the town of Kandava with Romani and Latvian representatives, by researching and comparing the structure and content of their narratives, as well as the narrative performance. Kandava as a research location has been chosen because both objective and subjective reasons. The objective reason is the fact that historically Kandava, among other small towns of Courland region in Latvia, has had relatively large Romani community. In turn, the subjective reason is the fact that Kandava is my home town which in many ways facilitated the finding of the respondents. The paper is based on the first stage of the research which was carried out in the summer of 2013, when I interviewed 12 inhabitants of Kandavas – 6 Romani and 6 Latvians. Among the Romani there were 3 women and 3 men; between Latvians – 4 women and 2 men. The age of respondents ranged in from 38 to 85 years although most of them were between 60 and 70 years old. There were no strict selection principles when addressing the respondents because the most important factor in this case was ethnicity and willingness to participate in the study. Thus, respondents were found both following the so-called snowball principle when one respondent indicated the next one and by turning to the help of acquaintances. The exception was an Latvian woman who was addressed because I red the letter written by her in the local. In the letter she briefly described the destruction of Jewish people in Kandava in the Second World War which she had witnessed and expressed regret that this kind of evidence goes obliterated because her generation is passing away and no one has written down their testimonies. Consequently, this was one of the rare cases when respondent him/herself had expressed a wish to share their memories and had previously reflected on their life experience even without someone’s initiative.

In other cases, respondents were specifically addressed and although all agreed to an interview, some were still not ready to reflect on their biography and experience. It should be noted, however, that all interviews was arranged in advance so people were given time to prepare for it .

In speaking of the interviewing process, it must be noted that those were biographical interviews which meant that I tried to interfere as little as possible, allowing respondents to build a narrative of their own lives and to construct their life story on their own terms. In some cases it worked better, namely, respondents formed their narrative freely and only rarely I had to ask a clarifying question; while in other cases I had to interfere more actively which resulted in that the life story was constructed with supplementary assistance. It should be noted that the latter was particularly appropriate when interviewing Romani. However, while it allows to assume that Romani might not possess so good telling skills and their willingness to reflect on their past may be quite low, in the same time one should not ignore that many Latvians also lack such narrative and reflexive skills. Consequently, at this stage of the research far-reaching conclusions on this issue can not be done yet.

It should be noted that the main attention of this paper will be focused on the interviews with two Romani women, which will be compared both with other Romani and also Latvian biographical narratives.

                                                            11 The Project is funded by Latvian Science Coucil and carried out by the researchers of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Latvia (2013-2016).

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When getting acquainted with the scientific literature related to the Romani history and memory, one is often confronted with the view that the Romanini people is more focused on the present; they lack deep-rooted idea of their origins and their own knowledge of the past can be very confusing and contradictory. In addition, it is stated that historical narratives appear rarely in Romani daily life.12 Recently, some authors, such as Michael Stewart, begin to question or at least to explore in more detail this type of claims. Accordingly, he has concluded that, although many Eastern-European Romani live without such historical insight and memory culture as other inhabitants of particular countries, Romani do not forget important aspects of their history.13 It is interesting that he uses the word “forget” instead of saying “remember” which also suggests that oblivion is more characteristic to the Romani than remembering.

However, when I started to interview Romani representatives I endured some surprise as both in the interview situation and also later when I compared these with the Latvian interviews it became clear that at least particular Romani representatives are quite highly oriented to the past, which is the basis for constructing their life story. When turning to examples, the most prominent among them was Ruth, Romani women who almost could not wait until I switched on the recorder, when she already started to recount past events of the year 1942 when her mother, unlike her grandparents and other relatives, escaped the shooting of Romani organized by the Nazi. Also further throughout our conversation Ruth constantly and in various forms referred to the past, mostly by recounting past narratives told by her mother and father. For example, the slaughter of the Romani in 1942, her father’s work experience before Second World War etc. It should be noted that the details in which she recounted these stories (for example, when describing her grandparents’ room demolished by the Germans, she mentioned that even the rubber tree was destroyed), the use of direct speech, as well as the observation that sometimes in her stories she got mixed in using term “mother” and “grandmother” (e.g. she told a story about her “mother” and only later corrected herself that it was her grandmother) – all this suggest that Ruth’s mother told these stories very often to her children, including Ruth. And obviously she did it in a very emotional way, if they are so strongly embedded in Ruth’s memory and she has completely taken over the mother’s use of language and modes of expression. During the interview Ruth confirms this by saying that her mother liked to tell about the past, even though these memories caused deep suffering. Similarly, Ruth confirmed that she is doing the same, namely, retelling her mother’s stories to her sister’s children (as she has none of her own) thus contributing to the inheritance of the stories to the subsequent generations. It is important that this does not coincide with the above mentioned statements about the small importance of past memories to the Romanini people. However, it should be noted that in Ruth’s case a large part of this past narrative serves a very specific purpose, namely, to reflect the difficult life of the Romani in Latvian. Since it is one of the leading-motives of Ruth’s life story I will dwell on further as well.

But first I must note that Ruth's life story is not the only one which discloses the role of past in the life story narratives of Romanini people because another interviewee Brigita who is in Ruth’s age and Zigurds who is in his forties tells similarly about the experience of their parents and grandparents which also proves that these memories are passed on from generation to generation. This suggests that the historical experience and historical narratives are present and relevant among Romanini people. In addition, this is not limited only to personal experience events that are retold to children and grandchildren, but also to a general understanding of history. In Ruth’s case this, for example, appears in such sentences as – “What was good for Stalin, was as good for Hitler” which is in line with the widespread attitude of people living in Eastern Europe towards the two occupations (Nazi and Soviet). She also very often uses comparisons between past and present, for example, by comparing interwar period with nowadays Latvia. In her words – in interwar period Romani walked around “begging” and today the situation is so bad that they almost have to go back to this practice. Finally, when Ruth was telling about the Romani language she brought up a brief narrative about the origins of the Romani from India thus showing that she cares not only for her family history, but also for the shared history of the Romanini people.

                                                            12 Gay y Blasco, Paloma, 2001. “We don’t know our descent”: how the Gitanos of Jarana manage the past. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Volume 7, Issue 4. pp. 631-647. 13 Stuart, Michael, 2004. Remembering without commemoration: the mnemonics and politics of Holocaust memories among European Romani. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Volume 10, Issue 3. pp.566.

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It should be noted that in this respect the Romani and Latvian life story constructing is not very different as in the identities and life stories of both ethnic groups the common past of the whole nation and kin play an important role.

What, in my view, distinguishes Latvian and Romani life stories, at least in my case-study, is the main aim of telling a life story and also the themes that are emphasized and appear not only when talking about certain life events, but also in overall judgments and evaluations. In the case of my interviews, especially regarding two already mentioned women, Ruth and Brigita, at least one of the leading themes from each of the respondent’s life story emerged from the very beginning of the interview. In Ruth’s case, as already mentioned, it was an extensive narrative about the planned destruction of the Romani during the Nazi occupation, which later allows her to express outrage at the fact that the Jewish people’s suffering is widely remembered, while the suffering of Romani are not even mentioned. This in turn allows her to turn to another significant recognition of her life story, namely, that Romani’s are discriminated in Latvia.

When structuring Ruth’s life story’s main themes, they can be grouped as follows: 1 ) injustices done to Romani during the Nazi occupation; 2) existing prejudices against the Romani in post-Soviet Latvia which Ruth depicts as racism; 3) Romani diligence ; 4) Economical and political decay of contemporary Latvia which she is opposing to the “good Soviet times”. Of course, all of these topics are overlapping and stemming from each other, but the most important thing is that Ruth touched some of these topics in every episode of her life story, and almost every question ends with a return to one of these topics. For example, when answering the question about Romani funeral, Ruth said: “In the past we had a funeral for 3 days, but now it is only 1 day because people have become poorer. We, for example, invited a lot of people to the funeral; now we invite far less because people have no money. And all this stuff came with the free Latvia..” As we can see, Ruth’s narrative very often is formed by regressive scheme, that is, it used to be better and now it is worse. At the same time, this regression scheme does not apply to her overall view of history, as, for example, she thinks that interwar period was as bad as the present day, so that in her opinion the best period for Romanini people was the Soviet period.

It should be noted that the main themes of Brigita’s life story are almost identical to Ruth’ – the difficult life of the Romanini (she begins her narrative with the words: “We had a very hard life” which is followed by a brief story about how her mother survived the shootings), existing prejudices towards the Romanini, diligence of the Romanini which is contrasted to the inability of finding a job in today's Latvia and finally – the good Soviet years.

Since it would be too time consuming to look at all of these key topics in more detail, I will only briefly analyze the theme of Romanini diligence which was a fundamental topic for both respondents. It is essential that in their narratives they are attributing this diligence both to themselves personally (for example, “And so I have worked for all my life! I have not had one effortless day!”), to their families (“We have worked hard for all our lives!”), and, apparently, to all Romanini (“But we have been working; we have not been lazy!”). It should be noted that sometimes it is difficult to distinguish to whom both respondents are referring this term “us” which should be another aspect of further research.

However, the highlighting of the particular topic – diligence in both interviews raises the question of why the two respondents wanted to highlight it. And the answer is likely to be linked with the inter-cultural circumstances of the interviews. That is, the Romanini representatives were interviewed by a Latvian – a representative of the nation which, as stressed by both respondents, draws so much discrimination against Romanini which is party based on the opinion that Romanini do not like to work. As has been noted by several researchers, interviewees often make assumptions about the interviewer's cultural identity, and as a result, modify what they say and how they represent it according to these assumptions14. It is therefore not surprising that such cross- cultural situation respondents are tended to create their own narrative as self-defense. I suggest that in the case of my interview it can be surely assumed that the two

                                                            14 Phoenix, Ann, 2008. Analysing narrative contexts. In M. Andrews, C. Squire and M. Tamboukou (eds), Doing Narrative Research. London: Sage. pp.71-85.

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respondents was guided by their own assumptions about me as an interviewer, but more generally, about me as a Latvian and together with that – about my presumptions of Romanini. Perhaps they also kept in mind the broader social context, namely, the entire Latvian population’s assumptions and stereotypes about the Romanini. Most likely this is why this topic – diligence was emphasized in all the mentioned forms – “I”, “we as a kin” and “we as a ethnic group”.

It should be noted that the fact that my presence had a significant impact on the narrative content is unarguable which is evidenced by the number of episodes. For example, when Ruth was expressing once again a very critical assessment of the Latvian government that does not care about Latvian residents, she directly approached me by saying: “If you write about this stuff, ask him [meaning – Latvian Prime Minister] the question of how it would be – would they be able to survive with 63 Lats [approximately 100 Euros per month]?” In her turn, Brigita was even more direct: “It would be good, ma'am, if you could help us, it would be very good. You could help to find some job for my son. Then you would be a golden woman!” Both of these quotes testify to the assumptions underlying the two women’s agenda, perhaps not really understanding my role and possibilities as a researcher. The most important thing is that these assumptions and expectations inevitably affected the content of the interviews.

Without denying that the interviewer is always having an impact on the life story content, but in the interviews with representatives of Latvian nationality this impact was not so observable. Instead of waiting from me as an interviewer some kind of answer or even help, the aim of Latvian respondents or what they understood as the aim was to provide an account of their life. At the same time, I do not want to make too generalized judgments because also in the case of Romanini such approach was unique to these two women. Consequently, this is just one of the aspects that require further research, expanding the empirical data and performing the analysis further.

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Life Story and Self-Awareness. Oral History in Latvia Leva Garda-Rozenberga (Latvia):

Abstract:

More than 20 years have passed since Latvia regained its independence, but increasingly we hear people wondering who am I? and who are we? Latvian National Oral History (LNOH) researchers see these questions as being part of a broader issue, namely, how do self-understanding and self-awareness interact and how are they reflected in an individual’s narrative about himself/herself? The LNOH contains many stories in which the main focus is placed on events that demonstrate we were all real men, all of us. Not only do soldiers and legionnaires speak in such a manner, but so do regular people (whether a kolkhoz director or a church sexton) when telling about everyday life during wartime, in the inter-war period, and during the Soviet era. Life stories demonstrate that people preserve their self-awareness even in the most difficult circumstances, whether it be in voluntary or forced exile or in a communal apartment in a suburb of Riga. The paper shows the connections between the establishing of LNOH in 1990s and view of the LNOH researchers regarding life stories and self-awareness.

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ABOUT THE LATVIAN NATIONAL ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVE The conditions for developing a collection of life stories and for studying oral history were set in place by the late 1980s in Latvia, when the country experienced the Atmoda (Reawakening). As a result of this movement, people began losing their fear of suffering repressions for speaking openly. The long years of keeping silent had finally come to an end and people began talking about all they had experienced, thereby creating a multi-voiced counteraction to Soviet-era history. In the beginning of 1990, when Prof. Augusts Milts established the oral history study at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Latvia, the floodgates of silence had already broken open and the people of Latvia were overcome by a spontaneous flow of memories that is difficult to describe. These memories were recorded both in written and oral form as well as in published diaries. Looking back at these events from the present day, we can see that this flow of personal experience stories emerged at least in part from a conscious (or maybe unconscious) desire of human beings to bear witness. In other words, many Latvians of the older generation told their stories as testimony to important events in the nation’s history, and these people were in large part motivated by the necessity to create a more authentic and true history of the people and by their awareness of themselves as witnesses to these events (Bela-Krūmiņa 2004, 58).

The National Oral History Archive was created in order to document the experience of Latvia’s history through individual narratives. The most attention was paid to the memories of older people, because that generation had experienced two world wars, the period of independence, and the various occupations and could therefore provide unique testimony that served as points of comparison for the experiences of younger generations. At the same time we can say, – these countless personal history stories – stories that came from the politically repressed, from citizens living in exile, from all those who had been persecuted, rejected, and ignored by the regime – created and strengthened the national identity. Today the Latvian National Oral History Archive (NOH) contains more than 4000 life stories recorded throughout Latvia and in Latvian communities abroad (Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Germany, Australia, and Brazil). The Archive proves that memory stories and diaries, in which people address the contradictions present in their inner and outer worlds, have become a 20th-century phenomenon of the people of Latvia (Milts 2001; Zirnīte 2008, 109). The task of the NOH is to document, generalise, analyse and make available to a wider public the life stories as evidence of social experience. It listens not only to what has happened to an individual person but also to how that person understands, responds, tells and feels the consequences of the event. A second goal of the NOH researchers, which is just as significant as the first, is to preserve life stories as intangible cultural heritage. Life stories are not only testimonies of historical, social and cultural events; they are also a source for language studies (language as a carrier of intangible cultural heritage), research into thought structure and paradigms and inquiries into traditional values and viewpoints. Augusts Milts stressed that “Each person’s life story has a unique value, because it contains rational thoughts as well as particular emotions, irrational life instincts and many nuances that are difficult to grasp. We can learn from each of these people, including the experience that resounds as a warning to not repeat it.” (Milts 2001, 35–36) By continuing the work Milts began, the NOH researchers have developed several research directions: the securing of biographical and oral history research methods in Latvia; studying ethnic, historical and regional identities among Latvia’s population; the interaction of cultures in Latvian communities abroad; the history of everyday life, problematic aspects of Socialism-era history, life stories in folklore and folklore in life stories; and also such topics as the issue of space, name and narrative identity, the ecology of the human and the environment. The creation of the NOH archive is based on qualitative research methodology in oral history and the biographical approach in the social sciences, which considers personal experience as a significant

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resource for the study of social life as well as for the analysis of the relationship between the individual and society. The sources for research – life story interviews – are considered socially constructed texts and a dialogue between the researcher and the participant of the study taking place in a specific social and cultural context. The life story principle envisions that the interviewer initiates the narrative and maintains the biographical perspective in the construction of the narrative, but the narrator has complete freedom regarding the choice of topics and the structure of the narrative. Such an approach to an interview allows the researcher to obtain a life story that reflects the narrator’s ideas about what constitutes a life story and what aspects of the past should be included in such a story. On the whole, life stories are considered to be narrative constructions in which the relationship between life and its reproduction in a narrative is mediated by memory, consciousness, language, the communication setting, the rules of communication, experience with other stories and knowledge about social processes in society. In addition, the theoretical perspective of the research is based on the conclusion that the story is not looked at merely as information about the past, but that the very structure of the story (content, form, means of expression) carries information about the culture and society in which the specific narrator lives. In a person’s story about his or her life, the following issues are all linked: the language in which the story is told, consciousness and memory, personality and psyche, cultural traditions, communication models, the understanding of the world and people. As a whole, the life stories uncover different tendencies in the complicated 20th century, show the ways of inheriting and transforming values in society and present an insight into the dynamics of the identity formation processes. Research problems concern the collective forms of correlation that appear in people’s behavior, attitudes and relationships; the retained practices and the new values and norms. In the foreground of the analysis are the problems of retainability and changeability of identity in the different periods of transformation of culture and mode of life as well as the questions of the social use of memory. The research direction is in step with the general trend in the humanities and social sciences initiated at the beginning of the 1990s with the turn towards the biographical and narrative approach, the ever-growing use of the biographical approach in the research of socially significant problems – it is acknowledged that one cannot understand a society without understanding separate individuals comprising it. LIFE STORY AND SELF-AWARENESS More than 20 years have passed since Latvia regained its independence, but increasingly we hear people wondering who am I? and who are we? Oral history researchers see these questions as being part of a broader issue, namely, how do self-understanding and self-awareness interact and how are they reflected in an individual’s narrative about himself/herself? And yet, life stories are not only stories about the self and others, about the personal and the shared, about experiences and hopes. It is precisely through life stories that we can approach an individual and national self-awareness. Namely, social cohesion can be seen in life stories, and this can be manifested at any level: plot, topics, choice of words, attitude, etc. In addition, in trying to “touch upon” individual self-awareness, we must keep in mind that life stories do not so much tell about historical events and processes as they express an evaluation of the meaning of these events in the past, present and future. On the whole in Latvia, in trying to find an answer to what oral history researchers can offer to the creation of society’s self-understanding and self-awareness and how its presence or lack thereof can influence attitudes about life and the meaning of life on an individual and collective level (be it the family, the inhabitants of one region or the whole nation, whether imagined, construed or actual), researchers examine the theoretical principles of the creation of collective memory and the many different social memories that exist in Latvia and their potential for confrontation or existing peacefully alongside one another. Attention is also paid to individual memories and narrative identity by showing the constructive participation of language and story in the process of self-understanding and the promotion of intercultural dialogue, including within the process of national identity awareness. Studies about national identity and the awareness and understanding of it 20 years after regaining independence is an essential step in studying the view people today have of themselves and of others in close connection with the nation in which they live. The issue of how a researcher should approach an

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individual’s views regarding a feeling of belonging and expressions of national identity in his or her everyday life. Recognising that a sense of national identity cannot be elucidated with direct questions, because a feeling of belonging cannot be easily recognised nor expressed nor formulated, one of the paths of studying national identity self-awareness can be the biographical interview, during which time the narrator tells about what he or she has experienced and reveals his or her worldview and the values he or she has formed over a lifetime. In other words, a biographical interview involves listening to an individual’s narrative about himself/herself and his or her life – a life story, which offers both informational material about a nation’s worldview and cultural history as well as the opportunity to listen to one individual’s experience. This experience and the narrator’s worldview is a significant resource for studying national identity, because national identity is self-defined and structured by an individual’s sense of belonging and values, including language, history and culture – values that unite a person with society, the separate with the common. One of the ways to study national identity and the awareness of it in life stories is to analyse the thematic organisation of a story, because collective history memories, past events and cultural references are used in the present construction of national identity. In the life stories recorded in Latvia, a united heritage of political history and national identity is created by World War II and the deportations of 1949, the creation of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic and also more recent events, such as the Atmoda (Reawakening) period in the 1990s. Due to the limited scope of this article, I shall examine memories of historical and social change in the post-war period and later, in the 1980s and 1990s, when the population was forced to rethink and create its identity (sometimes anew) under new circumstances. In this aspect, those life stories that tell, for example, of resistance to the new authorities become significant. In Katrīna’s (NMV-1550) story, the episode about her husband’s refusal to join the Communist Party is the only segment of the story that can be attributed to the interpretation of the political past. Irony and even sarcasm about the Soviet era can be encountered in several life stories, but there are also stories in which the Soviet reality is reflected as a fact that had to be accepted because that was the situation at the time. For example, Marija (NMV-1586) stresses that she is in essence an idealist, and she reproaches those who very much wanted to join and did join the Party at the time but then denied their memberships once the Atmoda began, maintaining that they were forced to join the Party or could not further their careers without joining it. Ilga (NMV-1894) expresses a similar assessment and story about joining the Party: I do not want to boast about myself, but I approached things really very conscientiously: if it had to be done, I did it. If I had to join the Young Pioneers, I joined. Others say, ‘Oh, I was forced.’ No, no one forced me. I was also a member of the Komsomol, yes. And in the end I was also drawn into the Party, too. She said she did not join the Party the first time around because her husband objected to it. But after her husband’s untimely death, when she was invited to join the Party a second time, she could no longer make excuses, saying she wished to avoid an argument with her husband, and could therefore not refuse the party secretary again: I did not know how to lie, and I no longer had a pretext, nothing. Aldis had passed away. However, Ilga immediately tells the interviewer how she left the Party in 1988: It was 1988 and we were all teachers. We agreed that we all needed to leave the Party; let them throw us out. OK, how can you be thrown out [of the Party]? Well, we’d write a big complaint about how the cheating at the top [levels] was unacceptable, that it amounted to treason, and that it was all top-level Party men. That was not acceptable to us, and therefore we wanted to leave the Party. But we were not [thrown out] according to ‘our own will’, but for...I don’t remember what for, what the justification was. I don’t really remember it all that well. But we got out. And, again, that gave us a bit of gratification. I don’t want to portray myself as black or white – what happened, happened. It must be noted that the inclusion of a certain topic or – the exact opposite – the suppression of a certain topic in a life story is a significant indicator of the narrator’s identity because, in telling about themselves and their experiences, narrators not only construct a story during the interview but also their own identities by describing themselves in the way they sees themselves at the time of the interview and wish the interviewer to perceive themselves. Therefore, unlike a historian who studies events, the oral historian does not examine through a magnifying glass the congruences between historical events and narrated

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events, but instead asks: “How is the described event or situation evaluated, and why are specifically these events or situations important from the viewpoint of the narrator’s own history (identity)?” (Jāgo 2007, 114) From this aspect, the episodes from Katrīna’s, Marija’s and Ilga’s stories about links to the Party show how, having come under the rule of a new political system, an individual’s historical experience, self-confidence and justifications for specific actions can change. CONCLUSIONS In the present day, finding ourselves at the crossroads of the national and global, between cultural and intercultural influences, between the individual’s seeming freedom of choice and moral (imperative) principles, self-awareness has become a topical event of our time. When examining self-awareness in the context of such concepts as memory, history, experience and also culture, it is revealed in subordinated meanings: the awareness of the self as an individual, including the conviction of one’s abilities and one’s worth, and the awareness of the existence of one’s nation and togetherness in society. Self-awareness levels increase when society has found a reason for them to do so, for example, due to the society’s achievements and progress in the present or due to memories on which a vision of the future may be based. The Latvian Oral History Archive contains many stories in which the main focus is placed on events that demonstrate we were all real men, all of us. Not only do soldiers and legionnaires speak in such a manner, but so do regular people (whether a kolkhoz director or a church sexton) when telling about everyday life during wartime, in the inter-war period, and during the Soviet era. Life stories demonstrate that people preserve their self-awareness even in the most difficult circumstances, whether it be in voluntary or forced exile or in a communal apartment in a suburb of Riga. Life stories as sources of self-awareness are an inexhaustible resource for researchers; each story allows the nation’s history to be viewed from a different viewpoint. In telling their memories, people not only reveal to others but also become aware themselves of the meaning, connections and moral guidelines of the events in their lives. An awareness of the self has taken place within the life story, an awareness that is necessary in order for the person to understand his or her individual experience and how it connects to what others have experienced. Researchers achieve the same thing when they delve into the analysis of a single life story or when they look at many interconnected or individual experiences. The life story – from the author to the researcher and back to the community – is a source of self-awareness. Likewise, the genuine reflections of true events provided by life stories ensure a steady foundation for the self-awareness of an individual and society as a whole.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bela-Krūmiņa, Baiba. Dzīvesstāsti kā sociāli vēstījumi. Unpublished doctoral thesis. Rīga: Latvijas

Universitāte, 2004. 188 lpp.

Jāgo, Tīu. Pagātnes un laika interpretācijas pētīšana no pārmantojamās vēstures viedokļa. In Dzīvesstāsti:

vēsture, kultūra, sabiedrība. Ed. by Māra Zirnīte. Rīga: LU Filozofijas un socioloģijas institūts, Latvijas

mutvārdu vēstures pētnieku asociācija „Dzīvesstāsts”, 2007, 112.–129. lpp.

Milts, Augusts. Tautas izziņa mutvārdu vēsturē. In Spogulis. Ed. by Māra Zirnīte. Rīga: LU Filozofijas un

socioloģijas institūts, Latvijas mutvārdu vēstures pētnieku asociācija „Dzīvesstāsts”, 2001, 33.–39. lpp.

Zirnīte, Māra. Nacionālās mutvārdu vēstures pētnieku skola Latvijā. In Augusts Milts: patība un ētika.

Veltījums profesoram 80. dzimšanas dienā. Rīga: RaKa, 2008, 108.–119. lpp.

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Otto César Vargas: “A Patagonic man in the East Europe”. Enrique Arrosagaray (Argentina):

Abstract:

Otto César Vargas is an Argentinian citizen who was born in a small city in the coast of the Río Negro, in the Argentinian Patagonia, in 1929. Twenty years later, he was studying in La Plata, a university and worker town, which is the capital of the Buenos Aires Province. Soon he moved to distant latitudes and lived in Praga, Moscow, Viena, Budapest and Sofía during the 50s. He worked in the World Federation of Democratic Youth, an organization that was run by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. By then, the red flag was turning into pink and later white. By then workers power and the democracy that they had developed was beginning to be defeated. Vargas noticed from the inside how such a powerful, widespread and organized political structure was weaken and later collapsed. Vargas tells us his experience as a young communist from his own revolutionary, critical, Latin American viewpoint. Staying in Cuba from a few months before up to some weeks after the Triumph of the Revolution in 1959 contributed to his strong political training. The clandestine work that he did next to Cuban revolutionaries opened his mind. And meeting Che Guevara in January and February of 1959 injected more passion into his red blood. He also has visited China during that period and it helped him to understand the complexity of the situation. He was a witness to the real fall of Western Europe – and to betrayals, a long time before to the official one. From Buenos Aires, he narrates it in first person. Enrique Arrosagaray Asociación de Historia Oral de Avellaneda/República Argentina

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Con la caída del Muro de Berlín, la historia política y la cultura mundial dominantes definieron que había caído el comunismo. También dijeron que caía el Muro de Stalin o un símbolo del stalinismo. En todos los países del mundo sonó esta misma campana y pocas organizaciones políticas y personas desdijeron este argumento aunque algunos lo han hecho con solidez. Nosotros pretendemos con este trabajo, enfrentar esta afirmación dominante y afirmar que “el muro” había caído mucho antes de que cayera formalmente. Y que en ese momento culminó un acto –importante-, nada más que un acto de un proceso histórico muy complejo: el acto formal que anunció el paso del socialismo al capitalismo en ese sector del mundo. Pero el socialismo ya había sido abandonado hacia mucho. Ponemos nuestro foco de atención en la década de 1950 a 1960 aunque habrá referencias a otros momentos. Partimos de una concepción teórica y de una experiencia práctica. El concepto teórico es que las sociedades posrevolucionarias que en el mundo se plantearon construir el socialismo, lo debían hacer desde organismos de poder conformados por las mayorías de las clases sociales que habían hecho esa revolución, con delegados enviados desde las bases y revocables por sus pares, campesinos, empleados, obreros, desde sus lugares de origen. Es decir, el poder ejercido por las masas organizadas. A esos organismos de dirección se los llamó soviet en la sociedad soviética luego de Octubre de 1917 15. La experiencia práctica –que se transforma en eje de nuestro trabajo- es la de Otto César Vargas. Vargas es un marxista nacido en la Patagonia Argentina, que vivió, trabajó políticamente y viajó por el Este Europeo entre 1951 y finales de 1959. Tres largas entrevistas a él, en un bar de Buenos Aires, son la fuente central para la presente ponencia. Su relato es valioso porque él estuvo ahí trabajando para la Federación Mundial de la Juventud, organismo dirigido, en última instancia, por el Partido Comunista de la Unión Soviética –PCUS-. Y porque Vargas siguió formándose como marxista, estudió la disputa Chino – Soviética16 y sus repercusiones en América Latina y en Argentina; y también conoció de cerca la experiencias de los procesos revolucionario cubano y chino. Y no se conformó con observar y analizar esos procesos sino que tomó partido en su vida revolucionaria práctica. Hasta el día de hoy. Advertimos que queda excluido intencionalmente, cualquier análisis de fondo de la transformación de la estructura económica en los países de Europa del Este, asunto central e inédito pues nunca había ocurrido el paso de una sociedad con el socialismo en construcción, hacia el capitalismo. PATAGONIA Y ANTECEDENTES Otto César Vargas nació en septiembre de 1929 en la localidad de Choele Choel, provincia de Río Negro, a aproximadamente 1.000 kilómetros al sur de Buenos Aires. Según el prestigiado periodista y escritor argentino Rodolfo Walsh17, Choele Choel (ahí también nació él dos años antes) quiere decir corazón de palo, en la lengua de sus pueblos originarios18.

                                                            15 En realidad el nombre de soviet es anterior a la revolución pero representan lo mismo: organismos de obreros y/o de soldados y/o de campesinos para ejercer su poder. 16 En los primeros años de la década del 60, los comités centrales de los partidos comunistas de China y la Unión Soviética polemizaron, en parte públicamente, sobre la línea general del movimiento comunista internacional. 17 Rodolfo Walsh, “Autobiografía”. Hay varias ediciones y citas. 18 Otto Vargas cree que quiere decir ruidos extraños. Por su parte Juan Domingo Perón en su “Toponimia Patagónica de Etimología Araucana”, Imprenta de la Biblioteca Nacional, 1948, pgs 14 y 15, dice: “Choele-Choél (ver Chúle-Chúl)” y luego “corruptela de chel, espantajo, y en gracia a la eufonía repiten chel-chel; en plural los espantajos, fantasmas, etcétera”. Y cuando vamos a Chúlechúl, dice: “Nombre primitivo de Choele-Choel. Según indios viejos era el nombre de un cacique tehuelche muy antiguo que vivió allí”.

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En 1949 se incorporó a las filas de la Federación Juvenil Comunista (FJC), ala juvenil del Partido Comunista Argentino (PCA) y desde ese momento hizo y hace todo lo que puede para la revolución en Argentina. “Nací en Choele Choel 19 y a los siete años nos fuimos a Beltrán20, otro pueblo dentro de la isla, que antes se llamaba Colonia Galesa. Había muchos italianos. Y cuando se desarrolla la Segunda Guerra Mundial, parte de esos tanos eran fascistas, no muchos pero había. Y yo que me había criado en un hogar en donde sobre todo mi padre simpatizaba con los republicanos de España... Las noticias de la guerra mundial se seguían día a día y los chicos, me acuerdo, jugaban tirándose esas bolillitas de los árboles, creo que eran paraísos, a modo de guerra entre italianos y abisinios”. Además de Beltrán, había otros dos pueblos, Pomona y Lamarque. “En Lamarque nació el gran escritor Rodolfo Walsh. Él nació en lo que era El Curundel. El padre de él era mayordomo de El Curundel”. En ese pueblo tan pequeño Vargas no podía desarrollar las ambiciones que le venían surgiendo. “Después de hacer la escuela secundaria en Bahía Blanca, fui a Buenos Aires por primera vez porque quería ingresar en la Escuela Náutica, pero justo ese año pusieron examen de ingreso y me jorobaron. En ese momento vivía en una pensión en el barrio de Parque Lezama. Ahí eran casi todos obreros peronistas; había un obrero del puerto, paraguayo, Duarte se llamaba; cuando se iba a trabajar me dejaba, como sin querer, el Orientación21, ahí a mano para que lo leyera. Y yo me lo leía todo. Del Orientación yo saqué la dirección de la librería del partido, fui y me compré “Materialismo y Empiriocriticismo”, “El origen de la familia, la propiedad privada y el Estado”, un montón de libros. Con un amigo tiramos la moneda a ver que hacíamos, y nos fuimos a La Plata22 a estudiar derecho”. “En La Plata, un día busco un local del PC, voy y me afilio. Nadie me lo propuso ni sugirió, fui y me afilié”. “De esas lecturas había cosas que me incomodaban, hablo de 1949, 1950. Una era lo del culto a la personalidad. Pero cuando en 1951 voy a Berlín, ahí se me pasan esas cosas, quedo entusiasmado completamente”. En la posguerra la figura de Stalin creció debido al triunfo del Ejército Rojo sobre los nazis. Esto, sumado al centralismo excepcional que había en la conducción política en la Unión Soviética. La mayoría de los PC latinoamericanos seguían las directivas del PCUS y por lo tanto, Stalin no solo fue querido y respetado sino que fue adorado desde todas las páginas de la prensa oficial de esos Partidos. Este aspecto a Vargas no le gustaba. “Pero en 1951, en Berlín, se me desdibujó esa duda. Yo volví maravillado”.

Poco después Vargas conoce otra cara de la construcción del socialismo: la República Popular China. El triunfo en 1949 luego de una larga guerra popular revolucionaria, le otorgó a millones, incluso a Vargas, otra mirada de la lucha por el socialismo.

“En 1954 voy a Pekín como delegado de la FJC. Era la época en China en la que se estaba desarrollando una revolución democrático popular”. Luego retomamos pero ahora volvemos a los pasos de Vargas por Europa del Este.

                                                            19 Choele Choel es una localidad de la provincia argentina de Río Negro, a la vera del Río homónimo. En el medio del río, frente a esa localidad, hay una isla larga y delgada a la que se llama Isla de Choele Choel. 20 Luis Beltrán es un pueblo dentro de la Isla de Choele Choel que tiene hoy algo más de 5.000 habitantes. 21 Orientación era el nombre del semanario oficial del Partido Comunista de Argentina por esos años. 22 La ciudad de La Plata es la capital de la Provincia de Buenos Aires y es, además, una ciudad eminentemente estudiantil y obrera. Tiene su propia Universidad, de referencia para la juventud Suramericana; y tiene un cordón urbano tapizado de astilleros, metalúrgicas, frigoríficos y químicas.

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“En octubre de 1956 debería haber ido a Budapest, me designan para ir a trabajar a Budapest, pero por lo que estaba pasando, no viajé”. En la última semana de octubre y la primera semana de noviembre de 1956 hubo un importante levantamiento popular contra la omnipotencia soviética en tierra húngara. Ese levantamiento fue aplastado por una invasión militar contundente desde la Unión Soviética que sujetó a fuego las aspiraciones de importantes sectores del pueblo húngaro. Estos métodos de construcción del socialismo de los soviéticos en otros países eran por lo menos discutibles y de hecho, opresores. Muchos marxistas de la época dudaron; otros defendieron la ocupación y otros comenzaron a pensar en otra cosa. Stalin había fallecido tres años antes. Además, la cúpula política de la URSS y del PCUS ya habían elaborado, presentado y aprobado el “informe secreto” contra Stalin, ocho meses atrás. Por lo tanto, quienes decidieron la invasión eran antiestalinistas. “En 1956 estuve en Sofía, luego del XX Congreso del PCUS”. Este Congreso, el primero luego de la muerte de Stalin, se realizó entre el 14 y 26 de febrero de 1956. Dentro de éste, el día 25, hubo una sesión especial en la que presentaron el denominado “Informe Secreto” sobre Stalin. Lo leyó Nikita Jruschov y lo escucharon más de 1.400 delegados. En él, sintéticamente, se le cargaban a Stalin todos los problemas de la Unión Soviética y la responsabilidad por todos los deportados, encarcelados y asesinados, durante las llamadas purgas políticas. Vargas estuvo en Sofía pocos meses después de ese XX Congreso, con apenas 26 años. “En el Congreso de la Federación al que asistí, había debates, etc, pero finalmente todo lo decidía un grupo muy chico: los delegados de Italia, Francia y de la URSS, pero en última instancia decidía el de la URSS. Y el problema era que los soviéticos, en ese momento, no hablaban, no resolvían nada. No tenían opinión”. Vargas percibía estos hechos pero no entendía qué pasaba. Casi como consecuencia de ese descalabro político y organizativo, Vargas recuerda que “yo llegué ahí por milagro porque en avión había llegado a Hungría y de ahí debía ir en tren pero no sé por qué yo no estaba en las listas, no estaba mi pasaje con la consiguiente inmunidad diplomática, que era la modalidad con la que viajábamos ¡Viajé por toda Checoslovaquia, Hungría y por toda Rumania sin pasaje! Recién cuando entré a Bulgaria, bueno, ahí si me tenían registrado y me toman oficialmente. Aunque esa vez me metieron en el salón de sesiones y nunca vi las calles de Sofía”. De ese largo viaje en tren Vargas recuerda, entre otras, una imágenes que le resultó reñida con la construcción del socialismo: vio en una estación a “varias personas descalzas. Me sonaba muy raro eso de tantas personas descalzas. Pregunté, me decían que era una cuestión de costumbre; y me preguntaron a mí cuánto costaban en mi país mis zapatos; les contesté. Y me preguntaron la equivalencia de ese precio con un sueldo. Ellos se sonrieron y me explicaron cuántos sueldos hacían falta ahí para comprar un par de zapatos como los míos”. Sutil desconcierto para la cabeza de un muchacho que se estaba haciendo marxista y que tenía la oportunidad de conocer con sus propios ojos y oídos, cómo era la construcción de una sociedad sin clases. Él pensaba que estaba pisando tierras y viendo sociedades que cada día eran más rojas. En 1957, ya viviendo en Europa, pudo caminar por Budapest. Allí funcionaba la Casa de las Juventudes, sede de la Federación Mundial de Juventudes. Desde ahí viajaba a otros países, a veces para hacer trabajo político clandestino. En uno de los regresos a Budapest, ya en 1958 “me dicen ¿sabés lo que pasó? Fusilaron a Nagy”. A fines de 1956, dijimos, se produjo un levantamiento popular para que Hungría dejara de estar sometida a la Unión Soviética. Los aires del XX Congreso hicieron suponer que estaba incluida la independencia política. En ese momento Imre Nagy era la figura más importante que representaba a quienes pretendían esa libertad política. Nagy planteó con claridad la salida de Hungría del Pacto de Varsovia. Tras la invasión

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desde el este, Nagy y cientos de opositores a Moscú fueron apresados. Nagy y otros fueron fusilados el 16 de Junio de 1958. “Te aseguro que no entendía nada- afirma Vargas-. Nada de nada. Tenía un amigo ahí, Orlando Gómes, delegado brasilero, quien me dice ”¿No entendés nada? Es fácil, están todos en contra del XX Congreso”. Y era así, los alemanes, los rumanos, todos en contra del XX Congreso. Me enfermé, me enfermé. Fue la primera vez y la única en mi vida, que pedí vacaciones. Me las dieron y me fui un mes a Rumania. No sabía que pocos meses después iba a disentir con el Che, sobre la valoración de las resoluciones del XX Congreso del PCUS, en La Habana. “Todo ese proceso que llevó a que se consolidara Jruschov, provocando la derrota de Molotov, Kaganovich, etc., a mí me pareció buenísimo ¡Cerraron como 20 ministerios! Varios nos cruzamos a un bar, una fonda en donde comíamos habitualmente, pedimos una de esas bebidas muy fuertes ¡y brindamos, contentos! A mí me parecía que ese proceso salía con gran vigor hacia delante”. Trata de hacer una explicación sencilla sobre eso que había que renovar: “Hay que decirlo: era la época en la que el ministerio de confección de ropa tenía que coimear en algún callejón de Moscú a un funcionario, para que del ministerio de botones le mandaran botones, porque si no, no cumplía con los planes ¡Era así!”. “Me llevaron al Kremlin. Nuestra guía era la secretaria de Romanosky. Éste era el secretario de relaciones internacionales del KOMSOMOL23. Ella nos lleva y nos guía por el despacho de Lenin, un lugar muy sencillo, con una cocina en donde cocinaba Krupskaya24... ¡mis ollas son mucho mejores que las de ella! Todo así. Y cuando salíamos yo pesqué que esta guía le decía con ironía a otro: “Igual que Romanosky”. Éste se suma a otro recuerdo casi simultáneo: “Una vuelta, de Moscú a Budapest, viajo con Joseph Biró, un funcionario húngaro; en un momento se abre el saco y veo que llevaba un montón de lapiceras ¿para qué? Yo no entendía pero me sorprendía. Otra vez estábamos viajando en coche, creo que de Viena a Budapest y cuando estábamos llegando, Biró me pide si podía llevarle un paquete, pequeño, a una señora que trabajaba en el Buró de Traducciones. Le dije que sí. Fui, la ubiqué y le di el paquete, lo abrió delante de mí, eran varios pares de medias de seda. ¡Con el tiempo este señor fue Ministro de Finanzas de Hungría! ¡Y hacía contrabando!” Su residencia era en Budapest, en la sede de la Federación Mundial de la Juventud. Y desde ahí “voy a España a hacer trabajo clandestino, en 1958. Voy a Cuba en 1958 cuando todavía estaba Batista, y en 1959 vuelvo cuando triunfa la revolución. También me traslado a Viena unos cuantos meses porque en 1959 hicimos un Festival. Entonces –se reordena- hay dos Festivales, uno en Moscú en 1957 y por eso vivo un tiempo en Moscú, y otro en 1959 en Austria. En ese lustro hice además, dos giras completas por América Latina”. La mención de sus pasos por varios países latinoamericanos, le recuerda: “Sabés que la Casa de las Juventudes, en Budapest, era una casa grande con planta baja, primer piso y altillo. El Departamento Latinoamérica de la Federación funcionaba en el altillo –se sonríe por aquella mirada eurocentrista que valoraba poco a los pueblos sudacas- pero... ¡¡después de la revolución cubana!!”. La mirada desde Europa, incluso de marxistas, valoraba con distancia las luchas revolucionarias en América Latina. No querían reconocer que en realidad no las entendían. Les resultaba más fácil aplicar que integrar. Las experiencias en China y en Cuba fueron distintas a los “manuales”; y fueron contemporáneas a la década que auscultamos. Y la tiñeron. Justo cuando desde Moscú se fortalecía la idea de que los partidos comunistas del mundo tuvieran una única manera de ver la lucha de clases y el

                                                            23 Komsomol era el nombre de la organización juvenil del PCUS. 24 Nadezhda Krupskaya era la esposa de Lenin.

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rol de los marxistas en ella. Fueron experiencias que Vargas vio de cerca y le sirvieron para chequear conceptos políticos e ideológicos. Comenzó a ver que no todos eran comunistas aunque así se definieran. “Una de las cosas que me impresionó mucho en China fue cuando me contaron lo de la toma de Pekín; la revolución cubana se inspiró mucho, sobre todo el Che y Raúl, en el trato que los chinos daban a los prisioneros; Risquet Valdez, que fue ayudante de campo de Raúl, conoció mucho la experiencia china. Los chinos, cuando tomaban prisioneros, averiguaban de qué pueblo era y trataban de acercarle a alguno de ese pueblo. Después lo mandaban de vuelta. Cuando estos prisioneros liberados contaban lo que había pasado, los otros decían entonces, en vez de pelear levanto las manos”. Ellos –los chinos revolucionarios- contaban sobre la toma de Pekín lo siguiente: cuando se disponían a tomar Pekín, querían hacerlo sin tirar un tiro para preservar las riquezas históricas de Pekín. Entonces, cercaron Pekín. Establecido el cerco, bombardean todos los aeropuertos que tenía la ciudad. Entonces le dicen al que comandaba Pekín, ustedes no tienen salida porque si van por acá no pueden salir, tampoco por allá... les proponemos que se entreguen; les garantizamos sus vidas, estudio de sus hijos y una buena residencia para el resto de sus vidas. Nosotros queremos tomar Pekín sin destrozos. Pero el tipo tenía una opción, porque había un pequeño aeropuerto en Pekín, que los de Mao no habían detectado. Pero ¿qué sucedió? La hija del tipo noviaba con un oficial que era un tapado25 de los rojos, entonces ella le cuenta al oficial y el oficial informa a los de Mao y bombardean ese aeropuerto. Al tipo no le quedó más remedio que entregarse. Con el tiempo ese tipo fue Ministro en la China de Mao, en una primera etapa, después se fue. Eso era muy instructivo para la experiencia de cómo diferenciar a los enemigos. Fue muy instructivo para mí”. Vargas fue uno de los oradores en aquellas jornadas en Pekín.

No es habitual que un entrevistado pueda comparar experiencias políticas tan significativas, a partir de su propia experiencia. “Era todo muy diferente a lo de la Unión Soviética. Vos tenés que saber que cuando hacen el XX Congreso –del PCUS-, ellos –el PCCH- no toman inicialmente una posición en contra del XX Congreso. Al contrario, salvaron a la Unión Soviética porque escribieron dos folletos en los que les tiran un lazo a los soviéticos. Los soviéticos no sabían que hacer y los chinos... –no los enfrentaron-. Me acuerdo que nosotros, con jactancia, usábamos mucho las referencias de los chinos en eso de las contradicciones, en las reuniones de la Federación. Esto a los soviéticos les daba bastante bronca, pero lo hacíamos. Por ahí andaban las diferencias en ese momento. Y la efervescencia, claro, la efervescencia”. Acá aparece un aspecto no menor de los procesos políticos que Vargas pudo ver: la efervescencia. Porque para construir una sociedad de nuevo tipo como la socialista, hace falta un gran entusiasmo y una gran convicción de clase y personal, para llevar a cabo las tareas necesarias y sostenerlas en el tiempo. “En ese entonces lo que era visible, era el fervor revolucionario que había en China ¡Fervor revolucionario! A diferencia de lo que se veía en los países del Este Europeo e incluso en la Unión Soviética, en donde no existía ese fervor. Sí lo había visto en Berlín en 1951. Mucho entusiasmo. Y otra cosa: cuando fui a China en el 54, lo hice en avión desde Moscú. En esa época podías viajar con un tipo al lado que iba de camisa, podía parecer un laburante y era un ejecutivo; pero en el 69, cuando iba a viajar a Cuba yo estaba en un hotel en Praga y justo había una reunión de ejecutivos de no sé qué sector de la industria. La delegación checa estaba parando en ese hotel. ¡Era impresionante verlos a los tipos! Empresarios igual que acá ¡Una pinta! Vos tenés que tener en cuenta una cosa muy importante cuando se habla de Stalin: una cosa era el mundo de 1945 a 1950 o 1951 y otra...”. Vargas quiere marcar el peso de las consecuencias de la bestial Segunda Guerra Mundial, en el pensamiento del pueblo soviético: el orgullo por el triunfo y el tremendo dolor por las pérdidas gigantescas. El esfuerzo fue de los soldados, millones; pero también fue una gran guerra de resistencia del pueblo soviético porque el nazismo sitió y atacó ciudades enteras agrediendo a millones de ciudadanos. Millones de muertos por balas, por enfermedades curables y por hambre.

                                                            25 Un tapado, es decir, en este caso un militante comunista que no se mostraba como tal.

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“Claro –agrega Vargas-, estaba muy fresca la guerra. No te olvides nunca que quien derrotó al ejército nazi fue el Ejército Rojo. La bandera que se puso sobre el Reichstag fue la roja. Eso impresionó al mundo, estaba muy fresco lo de la guerra y el papel que había jugado la Unión Soviética y los comunistas. ¡Murieron más de veinte millones de soviéticos en la guerra! La visión que tenías del mundo en ese momento no tenía nada que ver con la visión en el 70 o en el 80. Hablábamos de fervor ¿no? Acá se juntaba el fervor patriota con el fervor comunista”. Le preguntamos si es posible comparar el fervor del pueblo soviético tras el triunfo sobre el nazismo, con el fervor que él pudo ver en La Habana en 1959. “¡No, no! –usa palabras negativas para acrecentar la afirmación-. ¡Había un fervor de locos! Mirá, yo estuve en Cuba en 1958. Entré clandestino, hice trabajo clandestino, por lo tanto era muy amigo de la dirección de la Juventud26 cubana. ¡Había que entrar a la Cuba de Batista! Entré cuando era el aniversario de no sé qué y estaba todo lleno de volantes de una manifestación que se había hecho y la policía había... –reprimido fuertemente-, digo esto porque no hay que creer que fue un foco que estuvo allá... –sólo la lucha en la Sierra-. Ese es uno de los errores, me parece, que tuvo el Che; pero bueno, él lo vio así. Él lo vivió desde allá –desde la sierra-, pero en Cuba había una resistencia muy grande”. Y pone un ejemplo que parece naif pero no lo es: “Había una cervecería que se llamaba La Tropical ¡no confundir con Tropicana27!; éramos tres varones y tres mujeres y uno de los varones, bien a la cubana, dice porque yo soy bien macho... y una de las chicas le dice si tú eres tan macho no estarías acá, estarías en la Sierra Maestra”. Y menciona algunos otros pasos que dio por la Cuba del 58: “...en esa estadía me vi con Alonso, el del ballet, hermano de la famosa Alicia Alonso; nos fuimos en coche para las afueras de la ciudad para conversar más tranquilos. Me vi con el Directorio, con masones. Me vi con Ricardo Alarcón, quien después fue Canciller”. - ¿Con qué impresión volviste de ese viaje? - Se convocaba a una huelga para abril, que fracasó. Pero la resistencia era muy grande. El asunto fue que ellos –la Juventud del PSP- pedieron a la Federación Mundial que yo viajase a hacerle un reportaje a Fidel. En esa época, un viejo amigo que después fue Ministro de Industrias Básicas en Cuba, Joel Domenech, hizo un viaje por el Este de Europa pidiendo ayuda monetaria para mandar gente del PSP a la guerrilla, porque cada guerrillero costaba 150 dólares, armas y equipamiento. Entonces, estábamos festejando el Año Nuevo en Budapest cuando llegó la noticia de que Batista se había rajado; entonces Domench, que ya había planteado que fuese a la Sierra... ¡yo tenía todo listo y viajé! ¡Y ahí conocí ese fervor tremendo! Una idea de ese fervor: en el 60 organizamos el Primer Congreso Latinoamericano de Juventudes. En la reunión inaugural28 habla el Che. Yo, como presidía el Congreso, tuve la suerte de ir al palco, al lado de Fidel. En primera fila estaba el Che, Raúl, y se produjo una situación muy particular porque Fidel estaba hablando y se quedó sin voz y tuvo que hablar Raúl. Ahí Fidel anuncia la expropiación de todos los ingenios azucareros, de la compañía eléctrica y de otras empresas yanquis. El estadio estaba lleno y ante cada anuncio de Fidel la multitud cantaba Fidel, Fidel, que tiene Fidel, que los americanos, no pueden con él ¡Y no callaban! y el tipo no podía seguir hablando. Entonces la orquesta tocaba el himno. Se callaban, y cuando la orquesta frenaba, otra vez Fidel, Fidel, qué tiene Fidel... ¡No sé cuánto duró ese acto! Este fervor ya no lo veías en el Este Europeo”. Dejamos estas referencias al proceso cubano en relación con el proceso soviético, para volver a nuestro hilo.

                                                            26 Se refiere a la organización juvenil del Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) que era el nombre que adquiría en Cuba un partido comunista tradicional, ligado a la Unión Soviética. 27 Tropicana sigue siendo un cabaret lujoso, sobre todo visitado por turistas, en La Habana. Fue creado en 1939. 28 La apertura del Primer Congreso Latinoamericano de Juventudes fue el 28 de Julio de 1960.

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“Éramos muy jóvenes y algunos de aquella camada fueron con el tiempo hombres de peso. Yo tenía un libro del KGB en donde aparecía el nombre de Vdovin, ése que trabajaba con nosotros en la Federación Mundial. Ahí en Operaciones Especiales, de Sudoplatov29. Ahí, además, se narra en detalle el atentado contra Trotsky, su asesinato”. Sigue Vargas cruzando nombres y hechos. “Estaba también Alexander Scheliepin. Él presidió el KGB desde diciembre del 58 hasta noviembre del 61; éste era el jefe del KOMSOMOL, cuando fue el cuarenta aniversario –Octubre de 1957- y nos dieron una cena por ese aniversario. Yo estuve en la delegación, estaba Bernini, presidente de la Federación, estaba Scheliepin y Semichastny30, que era un trajeadito a la inglesa... que después fue jefe del KGB. Ese día, al lado había un armenio... Ahí fue cuando los rusos –la dirigencia del PCUS- se habían opuesto a que hiciéramos un Congreso Latinoamericano de Juventudes. Nosotros aprobamos en la Comisión de América Latina hacer el congreso –que se haría en La Habana-. Entonces ellos, que manejaban el Buró de Impresiones, cuando imprimen la resolución, borran eso. ¡Lo borran! Ahí fue -en esa cena aniversario- que Semichastny pasa la mano así, sobre Bernini, me palmea y me dice ¿así que ustedes aprobaron hacer un Congreso Latinoamericano? ... bueno, marchen tranquilos que nosotros los vamos a apoyar. En ese momento, Scheliepin entró en contradicción con Breshnev, lo fue cagando hasta que lo eliminó porque era su rival. Se decía que Scheliepin le metió un tiro en la panza a Beria, en el Kremlin ¡Ah! ¡Te decía lo del armenio! Ahí había un armenio y Semichastny esa vez me dice en vos baja dicen que los armenios son peores que los judíos. Porque donde los judíos le sacan dos cueros a una vaca, los armenios le sacan cuatro”. Para contraponer el recuerdo de este derrumbe que comenzaba a percibir desde su mirada, se le vuela la cabeza una vez más hacia el Che, porque por ahí comenzaba a respirar algo de oxígeno. “Cuando me vi con el Che –en las primeras semanas de 1959-, se burló del XX Congreso y defendió a Stalin. Y en un libro biográfico que publicó no recuerdo quién sobre el Che, se cuenta que cuando el Che se declara comunista, le escribe una carta a una tía31 en la que le cuenta que delante de un retrato del querido Pepe, juré ser fiel hasta la muerte a los ideales del comunismo. Algo así. Claro, yo venía embalado con lo del XX Congreso, y salió la conversación y él me mira burlonamente y me dice ¿y vos te creés todo eso?. Como diciendo ¡no me vengás con pelotudeces! ¿Qué eran estas cosas que el Che no creía y Vargas sí, en 1959? Eran varias, Vargas intenta resumirlas así: “El XX Congreso tuvo tres ejes. En política exterior, la coexistencia pacífica. Esto implicó un acuerdo entre Jruschov y Eisenhouer; a nosotros nos dio ganas de vomitar. Segundo, la línea general de tránsito al socialismo sería el camino pacífico. En Europa, a partir de la alianza de comunistas y socialdemócratas. Y en Asia, África y América Latina, sobre la base de apoyar a las burguesías nacionales. Este punto chocaba completamente con la revolución cubana. Se abrió una gran discusión entre nosotros. Y el tercero, reemplazar el concepto de dictadura del proletariado por el concepto de gobierno de todo el pueblo, que ya se acuñaba. El Partido Comunista Francés lo incluyó rápidamente en sus Estatutos. Y acá vienen algunas anécdotas que me chocaron mucho en aquel momento: con nosotros trabajaba Vdovin...

- ¿Qué responsabilidad política tenía Vdovin? - ...Vdovin era delegado del KOMSOMOL en la Federación. Resulta que al Festival de Moscú se permitió la ida de turistas, además de los delegados. Tramitaban su viaje en la Embajada soviética en cada país. De la embajada en Argentina había llegado una lista de más de cien personas que querían asistir. Entonces me dice Vdovin, mire, acá ha llegado una lista de turistas de Argentina al Festival y yo quería saber, me dice, si esta lista es de Argentina o de Israel. Porque fíjese los apellidos... ¡me mató! ¡El antisemitismo era

                                                            29 Anatoli Sudoplatov, alias Pavel. Su libro, como recuerda Vargas, se llama “Operaciones espaciales: memorias de un maestro de espías soviéticos”. Sabemos de una edición de Plaza & james, 1994. 30 31 Carta a su tía Beatriz, desde San José de Costa Rica, el 10 de Marzo de 1953. El párrafo dice así: “He jurado ante una estampa del viejo y llorado Stalin no descansar hasta ver aniquilados estos pulpos capitalistas. En Guatemala me perfeccionaré y lograré lo que me falta para ser un revolucionario auténtico”. Stalin había muerto cinco días antes.

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terrible! Otra, estábamos en un pueblito de Hungría que se llama Eger32, un pueblo que tiene muy buen vino, como el tocai 33! Bueno, estábamos cenando y ahí estaba Amado Heller, hermano del banquero Carlos Heller34. Amado Heller había venido como delegado de la juventud comunista argentina – la FJC-, creo. y Vdovin me dice ¿es judío tu compañero? Y le digo ¿qué? Y Vdovin me responde... ¡por lo hipócrita! Me puse a llorar, te juro. Había ahí un africano, Daudá, que se me acerca y me pregunta qué me pasaba y yo le dije nada, nada. ¡No le podía contestar! Si le contestaba a Vdovin lo tenía que mandar a la puta madre que lo parió y eso era imposible. Vdovin era un antisemita visceral. Había un antisemitismo en Rusia, que era visceral... - Y el marxismo que podrían tener en la sangre, no iban desactivando... - ¡No sé si tenían tanto marxismo en la sangre!- lo dice con burla y con amargura-. Una vez, una chica que estaba en la dirección de la juventud comunista ahí en Eger, acompañó a alguien a un boliche, de pronto, un tipo que estaba en el boliche la puteó a la piba, en húngaro, le dijo algo así como ¿así que sos de la juventud comunista? Y por eso la puteó. ¡Es que después de la intervención soviética había una actitud en el pueblo húngaro! ¡Una bronca a los rusos! La otra cosa a tener en cuenta es la política colonialista de la URSS, que criticó el Che en Argel. Guevara hace un discurso profundo y polémico, el 24 de febrero de 1965, en el Segundo Seminario Económico de Solidaridad Afroasiática, en Argelia. - Otra experiencia que me quedó marcada: vos me decías cómo eran los gobiernos. En Budapest vivía un argentino que se llamaba Juan Varga; y también un gran amigo del Che, llamado Fernando Barral, que después fue a Cuba. Era español y amigo del Che, de Alta Gracia. En Budapest lo conocí a él, a su madre...”. Allí estaba cuando Guevara le propone ir a Cuba35. Barral viajó y se instaló en la Isla poco después. Vargas retoma el hilo acerca de cómo se gobernaba en los hechos: “te decía que Juan Varga, dirigente de la juventud comunista del Distrito 1º de Budapest, me hizo participar de algunas reuniones de ellos. Dos experiencias saqué de allí. En una reunión se discute la distribución de viviendas. A la juventud comunista le habían asignado una cantidad y esa dirección decidía a quiénes iban esas viviendas. No es que eso lo decidía el pueblo a través del soviet. No. Ahí decidía la dirección del Partido. Esa cuestión de para el pueblo o del pueblo”.

                                                            32 Eger es una ciudad húngara a poco más de 100 km al noreste de Budapest. 33 Tokaj en húngaro. Tokaji o Tocai, en español. 34 Carlos Heller es, desde hace años, Presidente del Banco Credicoop, creado por el Partido Comunista de Argentina en la década de 1960. Además, fue vicepresidente durante diez años, del Club Atlético Boca Juniors, uno de los dos clubes de fútbol más importantes de Argentina. 35 Esta carta es la que le envió Ernesto Guevara a su amigo Fernando Barral: La Habana, febrero 15 de 1961 “Año de la Educación”Dr. Fernando Barral Papp. J.18 Budapest IV Ujpest, Hungría Querido Fernando: Es verdaderamente una lástima no habernos podido ver aunque fuera unos minutos. Te escribo con la precipitación y la concisión que demandan en mí muchas ocupaciones diversas; espero lo comprendas. Concretamente, aunque no lo dices específicamente en tu última carta y sí en la anterior, como que tienen deseos de venir a trabajar por estas tierras. Desde ya te puedo decir que aquí tienes trabajo para ti y tu mujer. Que el sueldo será decoroso sin permitir mayores lujos y que la experiencia de la Revolución Cubana es algo que me parece muy interesante para personas, que como tú, tienen algún día que empezar de nuevo en la patria de origen. Por supuesto, podrías traer a tu madre y aquí se te conseguirían las comodidades de tipo personal necesarias para tu trabajo. La Universidad se está restructurando y hay campo para trabajar aquí si les interesa. Naturalmente, aquí encontrarás más cosas irracionales que en ese país, pues una revolución lo conmueve todo, lo trastoca todo y poco a poco hay que poner a cada uno en el puesto que mejor pueda desempeñar. Lo único importante es que no se obstaculiza el trabajo de nadie. Para resumir, aquí está tu casa, si quieres venir lo avisas en la forma que mejor creas y me explican los trámites que habría que hacer, si fuera necesario alguno, para traer a tu mujer. Como hemos seguido rumbos tan distintos desde hace muchos años, te comunico a manera de información personal que estoy casado, tengo dos hijas y que tuve algunas noticias de los viejos amigos por mamá, que estuvo a visitarnos hace algunos meses. Recibe el fraterno abrazo de tu amigo, Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara

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Este asunto de “para el pueblo” o “del pueblo” es crucial aunque pueda parecer un juego de palabras. Una cosa es un organismo del pueblo en donde el pueblo debate, decide, ejecuta y controla, y otra muy distinta es que un puñado de personas discutan, decidan, ejecuten y controlen. Aquel concepto inicial que afirma que el socialismo lo construye el pueblo organizado y no algunos en nombre de éste. - Lo otro que aprendí ahí, en el Distrito 1 de Budapest, fue a partir de una pregunta que yo hacía: ¿vos qué querés ser? ¿qué te gustaría ser? Todos me decían más o menos lo mismo: A mí me gustaría ir a Viena, a mí me gustaría ir a tal otro lado... Esa era la ambición de los jóvenes. Cuando volví de Hungría, le dije a algunos amigos, como a Planes36 y otros pocos, les dije mirá, te voy a confesar una cosa: yo, en Hungría, no conocí ningún comunista. No sé si Ianos Kadar, siempre me quedó la duda; estuvo tantos años preso en la época de la represión de Stalin, preso, perseguido... Más allá de esta duda, yo no conocí comunistas Ese era mi resumen de mi visita a Hungría. Una vez más aparece el tema del culto a la personalidad. “En el año 1961 cuando voy al Foro Mundial de la Juventud, en Moscú, se hace un acto en el que estaba Jruschov. En medio de ese ataque al culto a Stalin , Jruschov hablaba y a la tercera frase alguien gritaba ¡¡Nikita Serguei Jruschov!! y todos vivaban a Jruschov; después, tras otras tres frases de Jruschov, alguien otra vez gritaba ¡¡Nikita Serguei Jruschov!! Y otra vez las vivas y gritos de todos. ¡Me quería matar! Quisimos destinar este tramo final para hablar de los órganos de doble poder. Lo abordamos cuando hablamos de la distribución de viviendas en Budapest, pero se lo planteamos de nuevo: - No, no se hablaba; y todavía yo no tenía esas inquietudes. Esas inquietudes se me abrieron con la Revolución Cultural Proletaria. Durante muchos años nosotros vivimos en una desorientación muy grande en este tema, nos causaba... insomnio. Nos producía terribles conflictos internos porque ¿qué pasaba? ¿a qué se debía esto? ¿Será que faltan libertades democráticas?, me preguntaba ¿Eso de que no hay partidos? El XX Congreso por eso nos sedujo, inicialmente. Parecía que buscaba una solución. - Estas cosas que te incomodaban, ¿las veías como resabios a corregir o en avance? - Era evidente que era un cáncer, ya. Era visible que avanzaban. Me asombraban mucho algunas pequeñas cosas..., en 1961 en Moscú, cuando terminó el Foro y salimos de joda con Roberto Carcedo, después trabajó para la inteligencia cubana... Salimos una patota, chicas, chicos, iba una rusita con nosotros y de repente aparece una patotita de muchachos rusos. Nos dicen algo... –no amigable- y entonces la rusita los enfrenta y les dice ¡mushik! ¡mushik! Así se les llama a los campesinos pobres. Se lo decía despreciativamente. -¿Desde los inicios de los 50 a los 60, veías esos avances...? - Yo venía viendo que esas cosas avanzaban, pero no tenía respuesta. Recién tuve respuestas cuando fui en 1972 a China, en plena Revolución Cultural. La época de los dadzebao. Dadzebao eran esos carteles colgantes... Vos entrabas a una fábrica y tenías que ir abriendo camino entre esos carteles con la opinión de quien quisiera escribir. Uno o un grupo, escribía sobre la dirección de la fábrica o sobre la política del Partido. Cuando volví en 1979, ya había muerto Mao37, estaba Hua Kuo Feng como presidente pero ya nadie le daba bola. Yo lo había conocido en la juventud. Ya estaba Hu Yao Ban como secretario del partido, que había sido en mi época el secretario de la Juventud. En 1979 ya no había más dadzebao. Cuando volví dije algo que nadie me creyó, dije el capitalismo ha sido restaurado en China. Me di cuenta que había sido

                                                            36 Pedro Planes fue un compañero de militancia de Vargas durante muchos años. De estrecha relación. También estuvo en Europa del Este algunos meses y compartió con Vargas la convicción de que había que crear un partido marxista nuevo en Argentina, cosa que hicieron, fundando el Partido Comunista Revolucionario del que Vargas es secretario general. Planes falleció a las semanas de aquella parición. 37 Mao Tse-tung muere el 9 de septiembre de 1976 en Pekín.

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derrotada la línea de Mao porque tuve una conversación con el secretario del Partido, Hu Yao Ban. Él me recibe y me dice ¡Tantos años Vargas!, nos conocimos siendo jóvenes, y comienza a hablarme, en forma indirecta, mal de Mao... y me dice ¿cómo están las cosas en Argentina, Vargas? Entonces le dije antes le quiero decir algo sobre lo anterior, para nosotros ni Marx ni Elgels fueron comunistas alemanes, ni Lenin ni Stalin fueron comunistas rusos, ni Mao fue un comunista chino. Para nosotros Mao y todos los otros fueron dirigentes comunistas internacionales. Por eso le quiero dar mi opinión sobre Mao... ¡Para qué! A partir de ese momento –risas- pobre de mí. Terminé..., bueno, me maltrataron en esa gira. Cuando nos fuimos de China, llovía ¡No nos pusieron ni un paraguas hasta llegar al avión! Pero aquella democracia grande la vimos en 1972 ¡El entusiasmo de las masas! ¡Eran decenas de millones! Ahí viene eso de si se gobierna para el pueblo o gobierna el pueblo. - Han pasado muchos años. Vos te recordarás andando por aquellos países siendo un muchacho tan joven y nacido en un pequeño pueblo. Fue un salto muy grande ¿no? Fue el sueño de mi vida. Vos acordate que yo te dije al inicio de estas charlas, que yo quería ir a la Escuela de Náutica, y eso era porque quería conocer el mundo. - Y la política te permitió conocer un poco del mundo... - Un poco, sí. Pero los míos no eran viajes de turismo. Pero así uno aprende más profundamente las cosas. Hubiera sido diferente toda mi vida si yo no hubiera viajado en 1951 a Berlín, tan joven. Y qué bueno haber conocido qué era el socialismo, más allá de los problemas que supe ver muy poco... ¿Estás conforme con tu vida, entonces? ¡Por favor!

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Ze Gomes and Maracatu indian : famous and illustrious in his time, unknown among maracatuzeiros today. Ivaldo Marciano de França Lima (Brazil):

Resumen:

Zé Gomes fue el principal liderazgo del Maracatu Indiano. Sus proezas en cuanto líder del maracatu le rindieron legitimidad tanto entre los que pertenecían a su grupo, como entre los que pertenecían a otros maracatus. En la memoria de los maracatuzeiros de los años 1960 y 1970, el Indiano era recordado como un club carnavalesco de frevo, llevando en consideración sus dimensiones e importancia. Era un gran maracatu en una época en la que las agremiaciones carnavalescas recifenses no reunían más que seiscientas personas. El Indiano también era reconocido por su afinado batuque, así como por disponer de un presidente innovador, que a cada año agregaba personajes diferentes a la manifestación cultural. Zé Gomes, de hecho, conseguía agregar personas en cantidades significativas. Las fiestas que organizaba para conmemorar las hazañas de su maracatu fueron registradas en el libro O Folclore no Carnaval do Recife, de Katarina Real. Zé Gomes y su grupo fueron por diversas veces campeones del concurso carnavalesco de maracatus, y su fama era suficiente para, al lado de la no menos afamada reina Maria Madalena, destronar en los certámenes carnavalescos al mítico y aún hoy en día reconocido Luiz de França, maestro del Leão Coroado. Entre tanto, en la actualidad y al contrario de Luiz de França que era reivindicado por dos maracatus homónimos que disputaban el legado del antiguo Leão Coroado, Zé Gomes ni siquiera tiene su existencia recordada por parte de los maracatuzeiros de la actualidad, además del hecho de que su maracatu, el Indiano, no más existe desde el año de 1998 cuando salió a las calles por la última vez. En ese sentido, este trabajo objetiva discutir el desempeño y las estrategias cotidianas de Zé Gomes, a fin de entender cómo los liderazgos negros de Recife de los años 1960 y 1970 actuaban en busca de legitimidad e inserción. También objetiva analizar los diferentes mecanismos y procesos de constitución de la memoria entre los maracatuzeiros, a fin de reflexionar sobre cómo éstos eran construidos, poniendo en relieve cuestiones de orden teórico-metodológico a respecto de la cultura negra, de los maracatuzeiros y sus maracatus.