People look at photos on the "We have won!" memorial panel in Stavropol, Russia May 5, 2015. The panel shows the famous Soviet picture "Flag above the Reichstag" made from 4,222 portraits of defenders of their Motherland during the World War II from Stavropol, local media reported. REUTERS/Eduard Korniyenko
What is popular
opinion? One approach would assume that it corresponds to some some kind of
general will, in other words, something unitary. That’s the way people thought
about it in the French Revolution. By contrast, orthodox Marxists in the Soviet
Union and elsewhere dismissed the idea that there was a single “people” (narod), hence a single popular opinion;
instead, there was necessarily an array of class
opinions (bourgeois, proletarian, kulak, poor peasant, etc). However, the
apparent breadth of the array often concealed a binary: proletarian/bourgeois,
good/bad[1];
and so it was with opinion[2]
- meaning essentially opinion about the government - where the binary was
“positive” (pro-Soviet, “proletarian”) and “negative” (anti-Soviet,
“bourgeois”).
Historiographically,
popular opinion became an overt concern of scholars only comparatively
recently. This is because Western historians did not have access to any real
data, and Soviet historians, who had limited access, generally did not write
about it because it was too sensitive a topic.[3]
For scholars writing in the 1950s and ‘60s, the only way to get opinion data
was to generate it themselves by questioning émigrés about their opinions in
retrospect, which is what was done (with great effect) by the postwar Harvard
Interview Project, whose subjects were refugees from the Soviet Union in
Germany and New York in the early 1950s.[4]
Many scholars at this time undoubtedly assumed that there was no public opinion
in the Soviet Union because under a totalitarian regime, there could be no
public. Thus, the pioneering 1950 study by Alex Inkeles treats “public opinion”
as an artefact of propaganda, with only a cursory bow to the findings of his own
Harvard project data that, in light of the deviant opinions of his refugee
interviewees, propaganda was perhaps not as efficient at forming public opinion
as might be supposed.[5]
Yet, even within the framework of thought that denied the possibility of real popular
opinion, Western observers were always on the lookout for negative, dissident
attitudes: like the Soviet secret police, they hoped to discover the rare
Winston Smiths who had managed to liberate themselves from Newspeak.[6]
The first attempt to approach the topic
of popular opinion was made in the 1970s by “revisionists,” critics of the
totalitarian model approach, many of whom were social historians with an
instinctive “bottom up” approach, in contrast to the “top down” approach of the
political scientists who dominated Sovietology in the 1950s and ‘50s. The
revisionists framed the issue as an investigation of “social support” for the
regime. As social support presumably generated positive opinions, this was an
implicit reversal of the more familiar interest (on the part of the NKVD/KGB as
well as of Western scholars during the Cold War) in negative opinion; and the
revisionists’ apparent privileging of the positive provoked a lot of criticism.
Nevertheless, the revisionists’ working premises were those that came naturally
to social historians: first, that all societies have a history (even if the
totalitarian model, with its atomized and passive population suggested the
contrary), and second, that political regimes generally satisfy some social interests
and rarely survive by force alone.
The focus of revisionist scholarship was
on the interwar period, and the main objects of investigation in the 1970s were
workers, peasants, and young people who were upward mobile from the peasantry
and urban working class, often via formal affirmative action programs. With the
classified sections of Soviet archives closed, and assuming that public
statements could not be taken at face value, no direct evidence of
support/popular opinion was available, so it was a matter of inference from
behavior and the scholar’s own assessment of interest and cost/benefit.
Revisionist labor historians found substantial working-class support for the
Bolsheviks in 1917 and a few years thereafter, but their claims about such
support for the 1920s were modest and for the 1930s virtually non-existent.[7]
This was a tribute to the scholars’ respect for data, as at least some of them
had probably originally hoped to find evidence of lasting working-class support
for the Bolsheviks’ “proletarian dictatorship.” With regard to peasants,
revisionist scholars, including the Marxists among them, tended to be very
sceptical about Bolshevik claims that the regime was supported by the “poor
peasantry” and opposed by “kulaks” (prosperous peasants), concluding that this
kind of class division of the peasantry was artificial and the categories
largely meaningless.[8]
Collectivization was seen as a regime policy that the peasantry as a whole
strongly disliked,[9]
and almost the only discussion of social support in this connection was a
pioneering study of urban workers’ (not
peasants’) support via volunteer participation in the collectivization drive.[10]
The argument that
large-scale upward mobility into a new Soviet elite generated social support
from the beneficiaries (known to contemporaries as vydvizhentsy, literally, promoted people)[11]
was accepted within the revisionist group rather grudgingly, as the Marxist
labor historians tended to be uneasy with the idea that workers might put
individual opportunity ahead of class consciousness. Outside the revisionist
group, a different objection was raised, namely that to speak of “upward
mobility” and “affirmative action” in a Soviet context was to misuse concepts
which properly related to democratic societies and implicitly to justify the
Soviet regime.
Urban youth was considered by
revisionists to be a likely source of social support for the Soviet regime, but
for some reason almost no serious work was done on it. As for the educated
elites, social support was identified as coming from the young militants of
Cultural Revolution (the so-called “Communist intelligentsia”) at the end of
the 1920s,[12]
as well as from upwardly-mobile, Soviet-trained engineers,[13]
but revisionist scholarship rarely challenged the then reigning assumption that
the “old Russian intelligentsia” had always kept the Bolsheviks at arms’
length, resisting attempts to coopt them, and staunchly defending freedom of
thought and professional autonomy.[14]
This reticence was in line with the spirit of literary scholarship of the
1970s, which with the notable exception of Katerina Clark’s work[15]
still considered “orthodox” Soviet literature to be out of bounds, assuming
that interesting artistic works produced during the Soviet period would
necessarily be implicitly or explicitly anti-Soviet.
For a long time, we had virtually no
evidentiary basis on which to talk about popular opinion, except for the
Harvard Project. Memoirs were few and
far between, and moreover subject to heavy censorship.[16]
Neither published statements of endorsement of the regime and its policies nor
official allegations about anti-regime opinion in such venues as show trials
could be taken at face value. The revisionists could only deduce opinion from
actions: those who volunteered for collectivization were assumed to share the
Soviet values that underlay the program; those who benefited from proletarian
affirmative action programs were assumed to be grateful.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991, formerly secret archives opened, disclosing various possible types of
evidence: for the interwar period, surveys (svodki)
of “the mood of the population” made by the secret police;[17]
citizens’ letters to authority (including some statements of opinion on public
matters along with petitions, complaints, and denunciations), which were often
summarized for their “popular opinion” input and sent upwards to the party
leaders;[18]
formal public discussions (narodnye
obsuzhdeniia) on issues of the day, such as abortion and the new
Constitution, as well as police reports on what people were saying informally
outside the formal meetings, and similar reports on informal comments overheard
during soviet elections and censuses.. Untypically, the 1937 population census,
later suppressed, included a kind of “popular opinion” question: “Are you a
(religious) believer?” Given that religious belief was unacceptable for a
Communist or “conscious” Soviet citizen, this was a tricky question indeed, but
57% answered it affirmatively.[19]
The first reaction of social historians
was to greet the svodki with joy as
an equivalent of the Stimmungsberichte
in Nazi Germany, the closest thing we were likely to get to a Gallup poll in
Soviet circumstances, though some objected to using police reports as a basis
for assessing opinion.[20]
Svodki, along with citizens’ letters,
were the main source base for the major archive-based study of popular opinion, Sarah Davies’s Popular
Opinion in Stalin’s Russia.[21]
The initial assumption was that when the secret police presented a report on
the mood of the (general) population, that was literally what they meant. More
recently, Terry Martin’s (not yet published) work on information circulation in
the Soviet Union, based on extensive work on svodki, has called that into question, raising the possibility that
the “opinion” on which local secret-police officers reported was often that of
persons under suspicion (na uchete)
rather than a broader sampling of the general population. Martin also concludes
that by the end of the 1920s the political leaders had mainly lost interest in
the information from svodki, being
less interested in opinion in general than in warnings about where active
unrest was likely to flare up.[22]
As already noted, svodki tended to focus on negative opinion, and this was true of
the whole category of “secret” archival material that opened up at the
beginning of the 1990s because of the close connection between since the
secrecy classification and negativity. Information on repression, strikes,
revolts, and all kinds of actions associated with resistance became available
on a large scale for the first time. This generated a substantial literature on
resistance, mainly focused on peasants and influenced theoretically by James C.
Scott’s work.[23]
It was social historians who were primarily drawn to resistance studies, with
the result that revisionists now found themselves pursuing “negative” opinion
with the same energy they had earlier pursued “positive.” But the “positive”
had not dropped out of the historiography. Paradoxically, however, it became
the purview of a group of young scholars, many of them cultural historians, who
self-consciously opposed themselves to the older generation of revisionists as
well as to the “grandfather” generation of totalitarians, and earned the name
of “post-revisionists.”
So far, all the approaches to popular
opinion discussed (including that of the Soviet secret police) analyzed opinion
(“mood”) in terms of different social and class groups as well as by
geographical location and ethnicity: the usual categories were workers
(proletariat), peasants/kolkhozniki (broken down in the 1920s into “poor,”
“middle,” and “prosperous” [kulak] peasants), white-collar,[24]
intelligentsia, and youth. These approaches shared the sociological premise
that collective (class, group) mentalities exist, and that analysis of opinion
in terms of class or group is generally more meaningful than analysis of
national populations as a whole. The problem with this is that thinking is done
by individuals, not groups or classes, whose existence as coherent entities in
the real world – as distinct from the mind of the analyst – may always be
disputed. In the mid 1990s, Stephen Kotkin introduced a new approach to the
subject when he focused on public discourse (not differentiated by class or
group), implicitly treating popular opinion as a unitary thing.[25]
From Kotkin’s perspective, the Soviet Union in the 1930s was full of people
trying to “learn Bolshevik” together – that is, learn and simultaneously create
the codes of “Stalinist civilization.” Stripped of class consciousness - or
rather, stripping themselves of their former habits of thinking as peasants,
Bashkirs, Old Believers, or inhabitants of the village of M in N province –
Kotkin’s subjects, newly-arrived residents of the industrial city of
Magnitogorsk, built from nothing in the middle of the steppe in the 1930s, were
in the process of fashioning themselves as Soviet citizens. Though the rich
empirical data came from Magnitogorsk, a place without tradition where everyone
came from somewhere else, Kotkin‘s reading of “Stalinism as a civilization”
(that is, as a cultural system) was clearly intended to apply Soviet society as
a whole.
The template of “Stalinism as a
civilization” has since been adapted by younger scholars such as Jochen
Hellbeck and Igal Halfin to focus specifically on “Stalinist subjectivity,”
which amounts to a Foucauldian version of Weltanschauung.[26]
They understand ideology not as something imposed from above on a society but as something produced by the society; and what they are trying
to show is how the process of production works in specific individuals (not groups). This means that
first-person documents (diaries, memoirs, autobiographical statements of
various kinds) are often the major source base: Hellbeck’s first work, for
example, analyzed the diary of Stefan Podlubnyi, a kulak’s son living in Moscow
in the 1930s and trying (as his diary describes) to squeeze the kulak elements
from his soul and turn himself into a true Soviet person.[27]
While post-revisionist scholarship uses different terminology, there is a sense
in which it, too, addresses the revisionists’ “social support” issue, for those
Soviet citizens who are earnestly thinking themselves into a positive
relationship with “the Soviet project” (what an earlier generation of scholars
would have called the Soviet regime and its goals) can surely be understood as
providing support for the regime. The approach differs from the revisionists’,
however, in the scope of its claims: on the one hand, smaller (focussing on the
individual, not the group or class), on the other, more global (not limited to
a particular group or class).
If the global claims may be doubted
(“speaking Bolshevik” was probably not a major preoccupation on the kolkhoz or
for the 57% of self-declared believers in the
population), they are very plausible for at least two overlapping groups
of the population: urban youth and victims of social stigmatization.
(Hellbeck’s Stepan Podlubnyi belonged to both of them.) Young people in towns
provided much of the enthusiasm and adventurous spirit that (despite and along
with terror) marked the 1930s. It was they who responded to calls to volunteer
for various causes like collectivization and pioneering the Far East, and who,
judging by memoir and other evidence, were inclined to think of the Soviet
project as their own. Victims of stigmatization are, on the face of it, a much
less likely group of Soviet supporters; indeed it is misleading to call them a
group in this context, since any sense of commonality they may have possessed
had to be suppressed in the service of becoming Soviet. Nevertheless, there is
evidence that some of the most passionate, sometimes almost hysterical, support
for the Soviet cause came from people whose families had been dekulakized or
who had experienced other forms of discrimination. Such people were often
young, embracing Soviet values even as they were renouncing or separated from
their stigmatized parents. Golfo Alexopoulos’s study of petitions from
disenfranchised persons shows how eloquently those who were victims of
discrimination could write about their attachment to Soviet values. Of course,
eloquence is no proof of sincerity, and the disenfranchised had good practical
reasons for wanting to recover their civil rights. But we find a similar
combination of identification with Soviet values and experience of class
discrimination not only in contemporary sources like the Podlubnyi diary but
also in interviews with elderly women conducted in the 1990s, after the fall of
the Soviet Union. It appears that in many individuals the experience of
discrimination produced a particularly intense and anxious form of Soviet
patriotism, expressive of a longing to belong to the community on the part of
those knew what it meant to be outcast.[28]
Other lines of scholarly enquiry have
illuminated particular branches and aspects of “popular opinion” in the Stalin
period. Literary scholarship has been
transformed over the past twenty years by the acceptance of “Soviet literature”
as an object of study and a new focus on “socialist realism” as something more
than a means of political control of writers.[29]
The new British-based field of Russian cultural studies rejects a simple
“top-down” approach to Soviet culture and contests the assumption that
dissident literary texts are the only ones that matter.[30]
In the field of history of science (flourishing since 1991, largely through the
contributions of a lively cohort of young Russian scholars), the old
preoccupation with issues of autonomy and freedom of thought has given way to
an almost ethnographic interest in the scientific world and the way it
interacted with the political one. Instead of dealing with an alien “Soviet
regime” as antagonists or outsiders, the scientists are assumed to be part of
it.[31]Analyses
like Jochen Hellbeck’s of the diary of the writer Alexander Afinogenov[32]
have shown how passionately many intellectuals embraced the regime in the
1930s, and the same point is made with regard to Jewish intellectuals (a
substantial presence in the Soviet Russian intelligentsia) in Yuri Slezkine’s
work.[33]
Scholars have become much more
interested in ethnic and national questions since the collapse of the Soviet
regime, and their researches have revealed a spectrum of attitudes among particular
ethnic/national groups at different times. Some of this scholarship addresses
the question about nationalities (meaning non-Russians) that was the focal
point of nationalities scholarship during the Cold War, namely resistance to
Moscow and attempts to evade its domination and protect the national tradition.
But it has become increasingly clear to scholars that Soviet Moscow was in its
own way a protector and even creator of nations.[34]
Terry Martin has written about affirmative action policies on behalf of
“backward” national minorities (the national counterpart to the class-based
affirmative action mentioned above).[35]
Yuri Slezkine has shown the importance of Jewish support for and identification
with the Revolution and Soviet regime in the interwar period.[36] David Brandenberger has investigated the
policy shift of the mid 1930s toward increasing tolerance (encouragement) of
Russian national sentiment, characterizing it as “an ideological `big Deal’ of sorts,” meaning
a regime concession to a popular demand made in implicit exchange for loyalty.[37]
Any summary of the major advances in our
knowledge of popular opinion on the Stalin period over the past decade, and its
changes over time, must be highly subjective. For me, the most striking single
contribution has been Slezkine’s on Jewish support for the Soviet project – a
topic that was previously more or less taboo for scholars because of Nazi
propagandists’ obsession with “Jewish Bolshevism” in Germany – which shows the
quasi-official anti-semitism of the late Stalin period to be a real breakpoint
for Soviet Jews, especially Jewish intellectuals, not (as suggested by earlier
scholarship) simply more of the same old history of persecution. Another
significant advance has been the gradual dismantling of the (self-)image of the
Soviet Russian intelligentsia as a group of heroic dissidents throughout the
Stalin period and the concomitant recognition that the intelligentsia was in
fact an elite and comparatively privileged group. As intelligentsia opinion comes
to seem more positive, however, peasant opinion is increasingly confirmed as
highly negative throughout the Stalin period, as well it might have been, given
the circumstances of collectivization and the subsequent brutally high rate of
agricultural procurements and taxation. Even the Second World War, in general
clearly a rallying point for patriotic popular opinion,[38]
left peasants largely unaffected – except perhaps for those who managed to use
military service as a way of avoiding return to the kolkhoz.
The urban population seems in general to
have been better disposed than the rural towards the Soviet regime, despite the
abrupt fall in living standards at the end of the 1920s; and my reading of the
attitudes expressed in Leningrad workers’ letters to authority in the 1930s is
that a residual identification with the Revolution and Soviet regime remained,
at least in the Leningrad working class.[39]
But Sarah Davies is surely right in emphasizing the outrage of workers at the
1938 and 1940 labor laws, which may well have been a real turning-point in
labor attitudes.[40]
Certainly Filtzer’s study of labor in the postwar period suggests that very
little worker identification with the regime survived, at least for the younger
generation inducted into manual labor in the 1940s, among the depressed and
often alienated blue-collar workers of the early 1950s.[41]
In a comparative perspective, the
Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union was surely much less popular among its own
broad population than the Nazi one in Germany.[42]
This may partly be because Nazi terror was much more predictable in its
objects: if you did not fall into one of the stigmatized categories, you had no
particular reason for fear. But I suspect that an even more important reason
was that living standards improved under the Nazis, whereas under the Stalinist
regime they dropped sharply at the end of the 1920s and did not recover until
the 1950s. There was no attitudinal equivalent in the Nazi period to the solid
alienation of Soviet peasants (still more than half the total population in the
prewar period) as a result of the unpopular and in many ways disastrous
experiment of collectivization. In assessing popular opinion, one also has to
take account of the fact that those who found themselves outside the Soviet
Union at the end of the Second World War generally didn’t want to return, and
that this seems to have applied across the board, regardless of class,
nationality, or life experience in the Soviet Union.[43]
Concluding complications
The account of popular attitudes I have
given so far assumes that, whatever the limitations of our knowledge in
practice, the question of whether Soviet citizens supported or opposed the
Soviet regime could in principle be answered. In other words, if we had total
access to the relevant data, we could make definite identifications of
individual attitudes, place them on a continuum from negative to positive, and
on this basis make statements about the degree of satisfaction of the
population as a whole and of its component parts (groups, classes). But there are difficulties with this
assumption that must be addressed.
The first question is whether, in
substituting “popular opinion” for the term we would use discussing opinion in
a Western society, namely “public opinion,” we have not carried out some
sleight of hand to evade the problem that one cannot have public opinion
without a public, that is, something capable of being a “carrier” of opinion.[44]
According to most definitions, totalitarian societies do not have a
public (or, to change the terminology, a civil society). When totalitarian
regimes close down the cafes and coffee houses in which opinion is formed,[45]
suppress voluntary organizations not directly controlled by the state, restrict
professional autonomy, censor publication, and punish people for anti-regime
talk, they eliminate civil society and public opinion (the argument goes),
leaving only a artificial “popular opinion” that is a reflection of regime
propaganda.
Demonstrably,
however, people in the Soviet Union had opinions that were not reflections of
regime propaganda. These opinions, moreover, were not conceived and guarded in
solitude. They were part of everyday sociability – exchanged with friends and
strangers at work, in trains, at markets, in the kitchens of communal
apartments and dormitories, or standing in queues. They even displayed another
characteristic of a Habermasian public sphere, namely conscious separation from
the sphere of the state.[46]
The jokes that were ubiquitous in Soviet society expressed a collective
subaltern mood or opinion, often framed for humorous effect as a dialectical
inversion of a familiar official cliché, and were diligently gathered by the
secret police for exactly this reason.[47]
The police also monitored the venues of everyday sociability, using informers
as, in effect, their poll-takers. It
seems, therefore, that our problem of slippage between “popular” and “public”
opinion is not consequential after all: we have found a public, though not one
of Western “bourgeois” type, and this public has its opinion, even if that
opinion is elaborated and exchanged not in a coffeehouse but over a bottle of vodka split three ways between strangers in a
stairwell.
The second problem is the assumption
that individuals have a single, static opinion (or, in secret police’s
terminology, “mood”) rather than a shifting range or repertoire of opinions
(moods), some of them mutually contradictory. This would be a questionable
assumption in any context, but particularly the Soviet one, in which many
observers have identified duality as a key component of popular thinking. There are a number of
different versions of the duality argument. One is the duality of present and
future – the claim that the lineaments of the (better) future can be discerned
through the (imperfect) present – which is central to socialist realism.
Scholars are increasingly treating socialist realism not just as “official
Soviet dogma” but as a popular habit of thought as well.[48]
This means that a Soviet citizen thinking in this way might be perfectly aware
of the imperfections of the present without questioning the premise that Soviet
society was in the process of “building socialism”; in other words, his opinion
about Soviet society might be negative (with regard to the present) and
positive (with regard to the future) at the same time. Russian-speaking
foreigners will recognize remnants of this way of thought surviving into in the
late Soviet period in the popular habit of giving almost any question about
Soviet society a double answer: first “in principle” and then ”in practice” (as
in “V printsipe, this is where you
buy tape-recorders; v praktike, none
are on sale”).
Another kind of duality popular with
Western scholars in the post-Stalin period, – as well as in dissident circles
of the Soviet intelligentsia - was that between public and private utterance.
In this framework, Soviet citizens were seen as invariably saying one thing in
public and the other in private, the first opinion being positive about the
Soviet regime, the second negative; and it was usually taken for granted that
only the second opinion was sincere.[49]
This has recently been disputed with regard to the late Soviet period by a
young Russian-born anthropologist, Alexei Yurchak, who argues that the existence
of an “official” Soviet language, whose use on public occasions was obligatory
and which was widely mocked in private by the younger generation, did not mean
that the mockers’ attitude to Soviet values was necessarily hostile or
dismissive.[50]
It has also been disputed for the Stalin period by Stephen Kotkin (who
considers the question of “true” belief to be unknowable, but understands
Soviet citizens to be involved in a collective project of mastering “Soviet”
ways of thinking[51])
and historians of “Stalinist subjectivity” like Jochen Hellbeck. Yet, even
accepting the validity of these arguments, we are still left with a consensus
that Stalinist citizens knew two ways of thinking, only one of which was
“Soviet.”[52]
Harvard project interviewers saw duality
from yet another angle: they were interviewing a population of postwar refugees
who, by definition, had rejected the Soviet Union but still praised many of its
features. The leaders of the Harvard Project concluded that Soviet citizens
generally liked the system, especially its welfare features but disliked “the
regime,” that is, the men who ran it.[53]
Why, liking the system, they still wouldn’t go back, was implicitly answered by
the observation that they had a strong sense of the punitive aspects of the
regime and would expect to be punished.[54]
Two of the Project’s psychologists, Eugenia Hanfmann and Helen Beier, reflected
further on this phenomenon in their in-depth analysis of six Russian refugees.
Although the group included three who
had join[55]ed
the Vlasov Army during the war to fight the Soviet Army under German
protection, and might therefore be presumed to be particularly hostile to the
Soviet regime, they found that all but one member reported past attachment to
Soviet values and, even more surprisingly, none seemed strongly hostile to the
Soviet Union, even when being interviewed as refugees by Americans in 1950
(that is, during the Cold War), and two were definitely sympathetic.[56] To be sure, the refugees spoke of events in
their Soviet pasts (arrests, purges, failure of Soviet authorities provide
support in time of need) that had disillusioned them. But most responded as if
their opinion of the Soviet Union, as well as their decisions to leave the
country, were largely the product of the
circumstances of the moment, particularly the fact that, as former POWs in most
cases, they were bound to be under constant suspicion if they went back. One
interviewee seemed to speak for the majority of the group when he said that he
“would not have hesitated to return to the Soviet Union if he could have been
certain of his safety.”[57] To their perplexed interviewers, it seemed
that they were simultaneously pro- and anti-Soviet.
Whether one accepts any or all of these
theories of the duality of Soviet opinion, it is reasonable to register a note
of caution about any absolute statements we may be tempted to make about
popular opinion in the Stalin period. Different opinions, which may seem
mutually contradictory, can coexist over long periods in the one individual,
let alone in a social group.[58]
This is particularly true when a binary convention prevails (as it has done
among Western Sovietologists, as well as in the Soviet secret police and
probably the Soviet population as well) of treating opinion (mood) as a binary
toggle switch which is either in the “anti-Soviet” or “pro-Soviet” position,
but cannot be in between. If we substitute “generally tending toward” for any
absolute statement about individual or group opinion, we will be on safer
ground. But even that does not do justice to the peculiar ambiguities of
popular opinion in the world’s “first socialist society” – or at least the
first to have made negation a structuring principle of subaltern discourse and
turned the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic into a popular art form.
==============
Sheila Fitzpatrick is primarily a historian of modern Russia, especially the Stalin period, but has recently added a transnational dimension with her research on displaced persons (DPs) after the Second World War. She received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002 and the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2012. She is past President of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (formerly AAASS) and a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
[1] This is a basic
argument in Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light. Class, Consciousness and
Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000), esp. 12-16.
[2] Called “mood” (nastroenie) in Soviet bureaucratic
language.
[3] A rare exception
was the 1938 survey of attitudes of young peasants, published in the 1970s
along with a more recent survey as Sotsial’nyi oblik kolkhoznoi molodezhi po
materialam sotsiologicheskikh obsledovanii 1938 i 1969 gg., (ed.) V. E.
Poletaev et al. (Moscow, 1976).
[4] The two general
volumes generated by the Harvard Interview Project were Raymond A. Bauer, Alex
Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhohn, How the Soviet System Works (Cambridge,
Mass., 1956) and Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer, The Soviet Citizen. Daily
Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). Other specialized studies by Project members
are listed as appendices in both general volumes.
[5] Alex Inkeles, Public
Opinion in Soviet Russia: A Study in Mass Persuasion (Cambridge, Mass., 1950). Inkeles was aware
of the phenomenon of citizens’ letters of complaint, (Alex Inkeles and Kent
Geiger, 'Critical Letters to the Editors of the Soviet Press: Areas and Modes
of Complaint,' American Sociological Review 17 (1952), and 'Critical
Letters to the Editors of the Soviet Press: Social Characteristics and
Interrelations of Critics and the Criticized,' ASR 18 (1953), as was
Fainsod (Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), ch. 2 ('The
Right of Petition – Letters to the Press and Party Headquarters'), but neither
scholar conceptualized them as having anything to do with popular opinion. .
[6] See George Orwell’s
distopian novel 1984 (London, 1950), which contains an appendix
elaborating his idea of 'Newspeak', a revised version of the English language
'whose purpose was not only to provide a medium of expression for the
world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English
socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.'
[7] On workers’ support
for the Bolsheviks in 1917, see Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917
Revolution (Princeton, 1981) and S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the
Factories, 1917-1918 (Cambridge, 1983). For a revisionist position on the
early post-Soviet years, see William G. Rosenberg, 'Workers’ Control on the
Railroads and Some Suggestions concerning Social Aspects of Labor Politics in
the Russian Revolution', Journal of Modern History 49:2 (1977),
1181-1219, and idem., 'Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power after October', Slavic
Review 44:2 (summer 1985), 213-38 and “Reply,” loc. cit., 251-56. The
latter article was strongly criticized by Vladimir Brovkin, who argued that
that workers were not eternally frozen into a posture of support for Soviet
power, regardless of their attitudes in 1917
(Slavic Review 44:2, 244-50; see also his book The Mensheviks
after October. Socialist Opposition and the rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship
(Ithaca, 1987)). There was comparatively little revisionist work on workers in
the 1920s until William J. Chase, Workers, Society and the Soviet State.
Labor and Life in Moscow 1918-1929 (Urbana and Chicago, 1987). As for the Stalin period, the model for an
approach emphasizing Bolshevik mistreatment of workers and betrayal of the
promises of the 'proletarian revolution' was set by the Menshevik Solomon M.
Schwarz in his Labor in the Soviet Union (New York, 1951) and confirmed
with a more abundant research base by Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and
Stalinist Industrialization (Armonk, NY., 1986).
[8] Moshe Lewin, Russian
Peasants and Soviet Power. A Study of Collectivization, trans. by Irene
Nove (London, 1968), esp. 41-80. Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class. Political
Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society. Russia, 1910-1925 (Oxford,
1972).
[9] Lewin, Russian
Peasants, parts 2 and 3.
[10]
Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland. Workers in the Vanguard of
Soviet Collectivization (New York and Oxford, 1987). As a belated
postscript to the 1970s discussions of (absent) peasant support for collectivization,
I wrote an article in the 1990s proposing that, while there were supporters of the Soviet regime in
the villages in the 1920s - many of them young Red Army veterans from the Civil
War - such people tended to leave the villages quickly once employment
opportunities opened up in the towns (which happened on an unprecedented scale
as a result of the industrialization drive, coincident in time with
collectivization). The article has so far appeared only in Russian ('Vopros sotsial’noi podderzhki kollektivizatsii'
[The question of social support for collectivization], in Otechestvennaia
istoriia XX Veka, ekonomicheskaia, politicheskaia i sotsialnaia zhizn’. V
pamiati V.Z. Drobizheva,
(ed.) Efim Pivovar (Moscow, 2004)), but should be published shortly in Russian
History.
[11] Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education
and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, 1979).
[12] Sheila Fitzpatrick,
(ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington, 1978).
[13] See Fitzpatrick, Education
and Social Mobility and idem, 'Stalin and the Making of a New Elite'
(1978), reprinted in Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front. Power and Culture in
Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992).
[14] For example, Loren
Graham, a scholar sympathetic to revisionism when it emerged in the early
1970s, made the 'revisionist' point that the Soviet government was a big
supporter of science, with a policy towards the Academy of Science that was
'not entirely one of coercion for the sake of political control', but still
framed the early relationship of the Academy and the new regime in terms of the
autonomy battle: see Loren R. Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the
Communist Party 1927-1932 (Princeton, 1967), esp. pp. viii, 200, 208-9.
Graham’s pupil Kendall Bailes, studying the engineering profession, wrote cautiously of a 'fragile' working
relationship between the technical intelligentsia and the regime, in which 'the
forces of mutual attraction proved stronger than the forces of mutual repulsion.' Noting that
'the technostructure … grew in size, status, and material privileges'
and 'elements of [it].. had influence and some power', he nevertheless shied away from any
suggestion of partnership or overt recognition of what revisionists called 'social
support' for the regime on the engineers’ part. See Kendall E. Bailes, Technology
and Society under Lenin and Stalin. Origins of the Soviet Technical
Intelligentsia, 1917-1941 (Princeton, 1978), esp. 410, 413, 422.
[15] Katerina Clark, The
Soviet Novel. History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981).
[16] On problems of the
memoir in the Soviet period, see Hiroaki Kuromiya, 'Soviet Memoirs as a
Historical Source', in A Researcher’s Guide to Sources on Soviet Social
History in the 1930s, (ed.) Sheila Fitzpatrick and Lynne Viola (Armonk, NY:
M.E.sharpe, 1990), 233-54.
[17] The bulk of the svodki remain inaccessible in the
still-closed KGB archives, but some rich deposits have been found, e.g. in the
Leningrad party archive, and in Ukrainian archives.
[18] For a typology of
this source, see Fitzpatrick, 'Supplicants and Citizens' (1996), reprinted in
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in
Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton and Oxford, 2005), 155-81.
[19] For peasants’
comments and calculations on this question., see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s
Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization
(New York, 1994), 204-6, 294-5,
[20] For this criticism,
see Jochen Hellbeck, 'Speaking Out:
Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia', Kritika 1:1
(2000), esp. 76-9.
[21] Sarah Davies, Popular
Opinion in Stalin’s Russia. Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1933-1941
(Cambridge, 1997). Svodki are also a major source for Fitzpatrick, Everyday
Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s
(New York, 1999), whose chapter 7 ('Conversations and Listeners') surveys the
main types of newly-available 'popular
opinion' data on the 1930s.
[22] Based on a reading
of draft chapters from Terry Martin’s book-in-progress, Policing
Soviet Politics: an Informational Interpretation of Stalinism, 1921-1954.
[23] James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the
Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976) and
idem, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New
Haven, 1985). Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin:
Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York, 1996) and
idem, (ed.), Contending with Stalinism. Soviet Power and Popular Resistance
in the 1930s (Ithaca, 2002); Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants; Jeffrey
J. Rossman, Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop
Floor (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). Resistance is also an important
theme in Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia.
[24] Sluzhashchie or state employees was a Soviet statistical category
separate from the workers, despite the fact that a strict Marxist analysis
should have treated them as a white-collar branch of the proletariat.
[25] Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic
Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995).
[26] The programmatic
statement is I. Halfin and J. Hellbeck, 'Rethinking the Stalinist Subject:
Stephen Kotkin’s “Magnetic Mountain” and the State of Soviet Historical
Studies', Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44 (1996). Relevant works are Igal Halfin, Terror in
my Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003) and
Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind. Writing a Diary under Stalin
(Cambridge, Mass., 2006).. The Russian scholar Oleg Kharkhordin, also
influenced by Foucault, is working separately on similar lines in his book The
Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley,
1999).
[27] Hellbeck edited
Podlubnyi’s diary for German publication as Tagebuch aus Moskau 1931-1939
(Munich, 1996) with a long introduction which is published separately as
'Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931-9', in
Sheila Fitzpatrick, (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (London,
2000), 77-116. Hellbeck’s recent book, Revolution
on my Mind, offers a detailed analysis of four diaries, including
Podlubnyi’s.
[28] See Golfo
Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts. Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State,
1926-1936 (Ithaca, 2003); Barbara A. Engel and Anastasia
Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, A Revolution of Their Own. Voices of Women in Soviet
History (Boulder, 1997);
Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, ch. 6.
[29] See, e.g., Thomas
Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book. Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in
Stalin’s Russia (Ithaca, 1997); Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State
Reader. Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature
(Stanford, 1997) and idem, The Making of the State Writer. Social and
Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture (Stanford, 2001)
[30] Russian Cultural
Studies. An Introduction, (ed.) Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (Oxford,
1998),
[31] See, e.g. Nikolai
Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, 1997; Alexei Kojevnikov,
'Games of Stalinist Democracy: Ideological Discussions in Soviet Sciences
1947-52', in Sheila Fitzpatrick, (ed.),
Stalinism. New Directions (London, 2000), 142-75.
[32] Hellbeck, Revolution
on My Mind, 285-345.
[33] Yuri Slezkine, The
Jewish Century (Princeton and Oxford, 2004), esp. 222-42. After showing the
size of that presence in various professions, Slezkine concludes that 'there is
no doubt that the Jews had a much high proportion of elite members than any
other ethnic group in the USSR. In absolute terms, they were second to the
Russians, but if one divides the elite into groups whose members came from the
same region, shared a similar social and cultural background, and recognized
each other as having a common past and related parents, it seems certain that
Jews would have constituted the largest single component of the new Soviet
elite, especially (or rather, most visibly, its cultural contingent)…' (236).
[34] For this argument,
see Yuri Slezkine, 'The Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, or How a
Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism' in Fitzpatrick, (ed.), Stalinism,
and Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in
the Soviet Union, 1929-1939 (Ithaca, 2001).
[35] Martin, Affirmative
Action Empire, esp. 17-18 and 125-81.
[36] Slezkine, Jewish
Century, esp. 216-54.
[37] David Brandenberger,
'Soviet Social Mentalité and Russocentrism on the Eve of War, 1936-1941', Jahrbücher
für Geschichte Osteuropas 48:3 (2000), 406. His book National
Bolshevism. Stalinist Mass Culture and the formation of Modern Russian National
Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002) also deals with the issue of
Russian nationalism, but more in a context of mobilization (i.e. top down) than
of popular sentiment (bottom up).
[38] See Amir Weiner, Making
Sense of War. The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution
(Princeton, 2001).
[39] This is my
interpretation of the letters’ frequent complaints about elite privilege, which
appear to me to be asserting a special relationship to the revolution, hence a
special claim on the regime’s attention, as well as invoking the spectre of
betrayal and deception. Davies, however, focuses only on the theme of betrayal
and deception (Popular Opinion,
43-48 and 133-38)
[40] Davies, Popular
Opinion, 43-48.
[41] Donald Filtzer, Soviet
Workers and Late Stalinism. Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System
after World War II (Cambridge, 2002).
[42]
Alf Lüdtke and I have written a joint essay on the Nazi-Soviet everyday
comparison , 'Energizing the Everyday: On the Breaking and Making of Social
Bonds in Nazism and Stalinism', which explores these themes. See Beyond
Totalitarianism: Nazism and Stalinism Compared, (eds.) Sheila Fitzpatrick
and Michael Geyer (Cambridge, 2009).
[43] The ambiguities of
refugees’ attitudes to the Soviet Union discovered by the postwar Harvard
Interview Project are discussed below,
13-14.
[44] Jürgen Habermas, The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. an Enquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.,
1989), 2.
[45] This actually
happened in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s, though as a probably
unintentional by-product of the abolition of urban private enterprise.
[46] See Sarah Davies,
'”Us”’ against “Them”: Social Identity in Soviet Russia, 1934-41', in
Fitzpatrick, (ed.), Stalinism,
47-70.
[47] On Soviet jokes, see W. Chamberlain,
'The “Anecdote”: Unrationed Soviet Humour,' Russian Review 16/3 (1957),
27-37, and Robert Thurston, 'Social Dimensions of Stalinist Rule: Humor and
Terror in the USSR, 1935-1941,' The Journal of Social History 24:3
(1991), 541-62. for a comparative
dimension, see F.K.M.Hillenbrand, Underground Humour in Nazi Germany,
1933-1945 (London, 1995).
[48] See, for example,
the special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 94:3 (1995) (ed.) Thomas
Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko: 'Socialist Realism Without Shores' and Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'Becoming
Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste', in
Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front. Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia
(Ithaca, 1994), 238-56 Another duality from the sphere of cultural studies is
Vladimir Paperny’s 'Kul’turna 1 /Kul’tura 2'
in his book Kul’tura dva (Moscow, 1996), translated by John Hill and
Roann Barris as Architecture in the Age of Stalin. Culture Two (Cambridge,
2002).
[49] A pioneering study
by an émigré sociologist was Vladimir Shlapentokh’s Public and Private Life
of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York,
1989).
[50] Alexei Yurchak, Everything
was Forever, Until it Was No More. The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton,
2006). For his critique of western assumptions about 'binary socialism',
see 4-8.
[51] Kotkin, Magnetic
Mountain, esp. 228-29.
[52] This image is
reinforced by memoirs like those of Lev
Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer, trans. Gary Kern (New York,
1980); Raisa Orlova, Memoirs, trans.
Samuel Cioran (New York, 1983). The drama of these autobiographies lies largely
in the coexistence of these two opinions and the trauma of the switch between
them. This is a one-time event in the memoirs, but there is no reason to
exclude the possibility that many Soviet citizens who never made a permanent
dissident choice were capable of switching back and forth according to their
immediate circumstances and company.
[53] Bauer et al., How
the Soviet System Works, 133-37.
[54] Ibid., 116: 'The
mass of the Soviet population appears to suffer rather uniformly from the fear
of punitive action by the regime…'
[56] Eugenia Hanfmann and Helen Beier, Six
Russian Men – Lives in Turmoil (North Quincy, Mass., 1976). The lone
interviewee who expressed no past
attachment was Nikolai, a deserter from the Soviet occupation army in Germany
in 1948, who also, however, expressed no strong anti-Soviet feelings.
[57] Alexei, the most
homesick and pro-Soviet of the respondents, 'would not have hesitated to return
to the Soviet Union if he could have been certain of his safety' (Hanfmann and
Beier, Six Russian Men, 63).
[58] In Kotkin’s useful
formulation (Magnetic Mountain, 228)
'elements of “belief” and “disbelief” appear to have coexisted within everyone…
Even in the case of the category of “true believers” it is necessary to think
in terms of a shifting compromise, of rigidity and the search for slack, of
daily negotiation and compromise within certain well-defined but not inviolate
limits…'
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