Soviet citizens living under the iron grip of Josef Stalin (1879-1953) hid their inner thoughts from family, close friends and neighbors, fearing arrest by the secret police. Despite the risks, some wrote diaries in which they expressed their dreams of becoming model communists, their pride at being part of an idealized new society, and their innermost concerns. Little of this has been explored by historians. 

A chance to visit to a newly opened cache of Soviet diaries in Moscow in 1990 opened historian Jochen Hellbeck to the private worlds of people subjected to totalitarian rule. Over time, he obtained more than 40 documents, often donated by descendants of the authors or culled from recently declassified materials in state archives. 

The result is “Revolution on My Mind” (Harvard University Press, 2006), a book that takes a probing look at the thoughts of people who lived in a time of unprecedented repression, brutality, and political upheaval. What Hellbeck found was a totally new take to life in the totalitarian state, written by people who attempted to shape their ideals to the Stalinist society around them. Some were tormented by doubts or conflicted by arrests of those close to them; others remained devoted to socialist ideals long after Stalin had been discredited. 

“There’s an intense longing to be part of this new world order, to belong to something much larger than they were,” said Hellbeck, assistant professor of history in New Brunswick. “Yet some people were troubled. They could see that all wasn’t well in this new society. Because they lived in a climate of intense suspicion and surveillance, the diary may have been their only outlet for these deeply personal feelings.” 

Hellbeck said he was drawn to the emotional intensity of the writing and the moral quandaries of some diarists. He is working on a documentary based on the diaries and hopes to turn one of the diaries, that of Stepan Podlubny, into a movie screenplay.   

Podlubny, a Ukrainian whose wealthy father was jailed by the communists, moved from a rural area to Moscow and worked to fit in with his socialist friends and neighbors. His attempts to conceal his problematic past worked so well he was approached by the Soviet secret police. The police asked him to act as an informant, ferreting out “wolves in sheep’s clothing” who were outwardly communist but held some inner reservations, or were related to known “enemies of the state,” people like himself.   

Hellbeck was able to interview one living diarist, Leonid Potemkin, who, at 92, remained dedicated to the ideals of communism. He had lived the socialist ideal, rising from an impoverished background to become a noted geologist and Arctic explorer. “The task of building a great new Soviet order became a lifelong labor of love for Potemkin,” Hellbeck writes.

Hellbeck hopes that the book will expand researchers’ understanding of one facet of Stalinism that has proved hard to study – the feelings of people who lived through it. “Historians have long speculated about what people in the Stalinist era actually thought about what was happening around them,” said Hellbeck, who teaches courses on 20th- century Europe, Imperial Russia and autobiography in history. “These diaries are a window into their consciousness.”