Everything is corrected: Corruption, terror, intelligentsia, and the state in Edvard Radzinsky's Conversations with Socrates

In this essay, I will examine two absences within the text of Edvard Radzinsky's Conversations with Socrates: the absence of a proper name for the First Disciple and the lack of any references to male same-sex desire. I argue that these absences are meaningful and interconnected features in the text that, in the context of Russian history, complicate Radzinsky's own cherished position as a gadfly of the state and deface his portrait of Socrates as an analogue for the heroic intelligentsia. Ultimately, I suggest that the absence of same-sex desire functions as a pathology, as a hidden metonym for the historic guilt of the Russian intelligentsia and its role in the excesses of the Soviet regime. Finally, I argue that such erasures are implicated in the geopolitical oppositions and gendered/sexualized national identities that inflected and constituted the Cold War.