The memoirs of the political leaders of the USSR and the GDR of the 1960s – 1980s. A long and difficult path to the reader

Abstract

The article deals with the memoirs of the political elite of the USSR and the GDR in the 1960s – 1980s. The memoir literature of that period was under a strict ideological control, having a dualistic nature at its core. On the one hand, the control was expressed in a series of prohibitive measures that really led to the restriction of the publication of any memoirs in general and the political ones in particular. On the other hand, it was during those years that two large-scale image campaigns were held, in which the party and the state promoted their ideology through the artificial creation of the memoirs of the highest representatives of the political elite. It concerned the memoirs of the general secretaries: of the Central Committee of the CPSU – Leonid Brezhnev (USSR), and of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany – Erich Honecker (GDR). Of particular interest is the fact that the memoirs of Brezhnev and Honecker were written by a team of professional “ghostwriters” – and not by the nominal authors whose names were on the book covers. The article describes the chronology of the clash of state ideology and memoir prose, and also analyzes the causes and consequences of that clash. For the first time, the article uses the documents from the former Archives of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which makes the article especially interesting.