Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (9 page)

Performance, reappropriation,
bricolage
, and avoidance embedded Soviet citizens within the habitat of Soviet power. They differed from resistance, which involved stepping outside of the habitat of Soviet power and finding an external pattern of behaviour and speech in order to subvert the government.
^{107
They were everyday strategies of}

^{103
Fitzpatrick,}
Stalin’s Peasants
, 286–95; Viola,
Peasant Rebels
, 48–63; Davies,
Popular
Opinion in Stalin’s Russia, 92–100.

^{104
See: Johnston, ‘Subversive Tales’.}

^{105
Gorlizki and Khlevniuk,}
Cold Peace
, 20–3.

^{106
Fitzpatrick,}
Everyday Stalinism.
See also: Peukert,
Inside Nazi Germany
, 112–17, 167–9.

^{107
J. J. Rossman,}
Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop

Floor
(Cambridge Mass., 2005), 2–7.

Introduction
xli

living within the Stalin-era system. In his description of ‘speaking
Bolshevik’, Kotkin cites de Certeau, Foucault, and Bourdieu as his sources of inspiration.
^{108
My ‘tactics of the habitat’ are less influenced}
by Foucault’s notions of all-embracing discourse and owe rather more to de Certeau’s notion of everyday creativity.

This account of everyday creativity is not a pious attempt to separate
ordinary Soviet citizens from Soviet power and salvage their ‘dignity’.
^{109
Official Soviet Identity played a key role in shaping the landscape within}
which these ‘tactics’ were deployed. Nonetheless there was not simply a view ‘from above’ and a subversive rival view ‘from below’ about the outside world in this period.
^{110
A binary model of ordinary people,}
subsumed by official discourse or rebelling against it, obscures the complexities of life in the Stalin-era USSR. Most Soviet citizens neither lived as automatons nor struggled against Soviet power. They innova- tively negotiated their way through Soviet society, drawing on the ‘tactics of the habitat’ that were a key element of what it meant to be Soviet in this period.

The model of ‘tactics of the habitat’, rather than support or resis-
tance, is particularly appropriate in relation to Official Soviet Identity in the post-1939 era. As Chapter 1 argues, the Soviet occupation of the Polish, Finnish, and Romanian borderlands in 1939–40 meant that Soviet citizens were no longer living in a closed informational system. During the pre-war 1930s Soviet citizens had very few alternative sources of information concerning the outside world. Few individuals travelled into or out of the USSR and the mental horizons of the Soviet population were firmly focused within the confines of the Soviet Union.
¹¹¹

The outbreak of conflict in Europe shattered this informational seal
around the USSR. As one former Soviet citizen explained, ‘For us “abroad” opened itself in 1939, after the occupation of Poland, Latvia etc. Here our attitudes changed drastically. The ones who were there

^108
Kotkin,
Magnetic Moutnain,
22–3, 237.

^{109
L. Engelstein, ‘New Thinking about the Old Empire: Post-Soviet Reflections’,}
Russian Review
, 60. 4 (2001), 489. See also: A. Krylova, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies’,
Kritika,
1.1 (2000), 119–46.

^{110
For this approach, see R. Magnusdottir, ‘Keeping up Appearances: How the}

Soviet State failed to Control Popular Attitudes Towards the United States of America
1945–1959’, PhD Diss. University of North Carolina (2006).

^{111
C. Kelly, ‘“The Little Citizens of a Big Country”: Childhood and International}
Relations in the Soviet Union’,
Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and

Societies: Approaches to Globality,
8 (2002), 20.

xlii
Being Soviet

talked about it . . . ’
^{112
The battles, displacements, and occupations of}
World War II offered millions of Soviet citizens an opportunity to interact personally with the outside world. The German occupation brought foreign soldiers and technology into the villages and homes of the USSR, and the Red Army’s counter-attack across Europe carried large numbers of Soviet citizens beyond their own borders. For the first time, every collective farm had several members with personal experi- ence of life beyond the USSR.
^{113
This contact with the outside world}
continued into the post-war period, with Soviet soldiers stationed in East Germany until the end of the Cold War.

The war also provided large numbers of Soviet citizens with direct
experience of their wartime Allies. Between 1941 and 1945, Arkhangel’sk, Murmansk, and Odessa hosted thousands of Anglo-American sailors and military experts. British and US-made film, music, and literature were also popularized in an unprecedented manner between 1941 and

1945.
^{114
Personal interaction with foreign citizens was sharply curtailed}
during the late-Stalin years, but the launch of radio stations such as the Voice of America and BBC Russian language broadcasting and screen- ing of American-made films such as the
Tarzan
series, offered new avenues for information. The large volume of personalized information about the outside world, and in particular about Britain and America

after 1939, provided Soviet citizens with a rich vein of information
that they could fuse with official sources to create a composite picture of the outside world.

The Official Soviet Identity of the USSR touched on the political
campaigning, music tastes, movie watching, clothing styles, and rumour transmission of ordinary Soviet citizens in the period 1939–53. They engaged with Official Soviet Identity in a manner that traversed the binary poles of support and resistance. Personal responses to jazz music or foreign movies, were subtle and complex, resisting the simple cate- gories of pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet. Most Soviet citizens deployed a whole array of ‘tactical’ behaviour in order to carefully negotiate their relationship with Soviet power. Those ‘tactics of the habitat’, along with

^{112
HIP. B9, 136, 43 (B schedule interview, subject 9, respondent 136, page 43.}
Davis Centre Library, Harvard University).

^{113
For discussions of the impact of this process see: E. Zubkova, trans. H. Ragsdale,}
Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957
(Armonk, NY, 1998), 25–6.

^{114
R. Stites, ed}
., Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia
(Indianapolis, 1995).

Introduction
xliii

the rhetoric of Official Soviet Identity, shaped what it meant to be
Soviet in Stalin’s last years.

MENTALIT E´ AND SOURCES

The manner in which these ‘little tactics of the habitat’ were deployed
provides an opportunity to evaluate how ordinary Soviet citizens im- agined the world around them. This is made possible by the study of ‘successful’ rumours and patterns of behaviour during this period. Successful rumours, dance tastes, or music styles are those that prolif- erated in time and space, rather than being isolated examples. They are collective phenomena. Rumours survive on the basis of ‘natural selec- tion’. Those rumours which are credible to those who transmit them are passed on and become successful; rumours which are not credible do not survive.
^{115
In the same way, the popularity of a particular film or}
haircut demonstrates that it resonated with the collective imagination of the society within which it succeeded. A haircut’s success relied on a shared understanding of the symbolic and stylistic associations of that particular fashion.

Successful patterns of behaviour provide a window into the collective
mentalit
^´
e
of the society within which they proliferated. I employ the term
mentalit
^´
e
as described by Darnton to mean ‘the attitudes, assump- tions and implicit ideologies of specific social groups’.
^{116
These some-}
times unconscious assumptions are revealed in the manner that ordinary citizens deployed the ‘tactics of the habitat’ in relation to Official Soviet

Identity. For example, the successful proliferation of a rumour that the
Allies had demanded the closure of the Comintern in 1943 provides an important insight into the ways in which Soviet citizens imagined the Grand Alliance relationship.
¹¹⁷

^{115
Shibutani,}
Improvised News,
176–82; O. Figes and B. Kolonitskii,
Interpreting the
Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (London, 1999), 25.

^{116
R. Darnton, ‘The History of}
Mentalit
^´
e
s: Recent Writings on Revolution, Crimi-

nality, and Death in France’, in R. Harvey Brown and S. M. Lyman eds.,
Structure, Consciousness, and History
(Cambridge, 1978), 112. See also Darnton’s critique of the historiography of
mentalit
^´
e
: R. Darnton,
The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in
French Cultural History (London, 1984), 258–60. Said talks in similar terms about the ‘saturating hegemonic forms’ that shape the way individuals interpret the world around them: Said,
Orientalism,
6–14.

^{117
See Chapter 2.}

xliv
Being Soviet

This attempt to ‘read’ collective behaviour as a window into a
society’s collective
mentalit
^´
e
closely resembles what the anthropologist Geertz calls ‘thick description’. Geertz suggests that myths and rituals provide insights into the ‘webs of meaning’ of a society: ‘Culture is public because meaning is.’
^{118
The success of a particular rumour or}
style of dress was ‘public’ in the later Stalin years, in the sense that it was collectively understood. This book attempts to recover some elements of the ‘public’ framework of thinking that made that behaviour compre- hensible to contemporaries.

The study of
mentalit
^´
e
can also be compared to the attempt to understand a joke.
^{119
A joke is funny because it makes sense to the}
social group within which it circulates. If we are not familiar with the

symbolic and rhetorical world of the joke then we don’t get it, and don’t
laugh. Whether they approved of them or not, Soviet citizens under- stood the symbolic importance of the rumours, dance styles, political activism, and musical tastes of their contemporaries. The exploration of these collective understandings is necessarily impressionistic and runs the risk of simplifying the complex frameworks through which Soviet citizens imagined the outside world. Nonetheless, a careful reading of this behaviour makes it possible to begin to interpret the ‘interworked systems of construable signs’ that gave life meaning in the USSR.
¹²⁰