Dreams of Terror: Dreams from Stalinist Russia As a Historical Source‪.‬

Long recognized as a historical phenomenon, dreams may be of particular interest to historians of terror regimes. (1) In A History of Private Life, Alain Corbin wrote of a dramatic change in dream content after the French Revolution, when political themes invaded dreams (even erotic dreams were politicized). (2) In a methodological essay on historical experience, Reinhart Koselleck introduced dreams recounted by the subjects of Hitler's Third Reich as sources that "testify to a past reality in a manner which perhaps could not be surpassed by any source." (3) And what about dreams from the Stalinist terror? In recent years, personal accounts that purport to provide evidence of the Soviet experience (diaries, memoirs, and other) have been appearing in print in large numbers. Many of them contain dreams; most of the dreams that Soviet people chose to include in their personal accounts have political content. Such publications can be seen as a massive effort on behalf of different people (authors as well as publishers) to open the daily, intimate lives of Soviet citizens-especially in the years of the terror-to the public eye. (4) In this context, political dreams, too, have been presented as historical evidence.