Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (10 page)

One potential danger of such an approach is to read too much into,
or misread the meaning of, a particular action. The study of
mentalit
^´
e
also runs the risk of positing homogeneity and unity when there was a diversity of complex views. This danger is alleviated to a significant degree by the study of only those rumours and styles that were peculiarly ‘successful’. In terms of rumours, for example, I only discuss rumours to which I found at least a hundred references in three or more source groups. By studying successful, rather than marginal or occasional behaviour, it is possible to avoid the pitfalls of overinterpreting meaning on a narrow basis.

The examination of
mentalit
^´
e
is not the same as the attempt to chart ‘popular opinion’ in the Stalin era. The study of ‘popular opinion’ in this period has been justifiably criticized in recent years. Much of the criticism has focused around the way in which historians of ‘popular opinion’ have made use of sources. Lomagin’s study of ‘popular

^{118
See, C. Geertz,}
Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
(New York, 2000), 3–30.

^{119
See Darnton for a similar comparison, Darnton,}
Great Cat Massacre,
3–5.

^120
Geertz,
Interpretation of Cultures,
14.

Introduction
xlv

opinion’ in wartime Leningrad, for example, relies heavily on secret
police reports,
svodki
, and state prosecution files to measure the shifting mood in the besieged city. He concludes that the fall in prosecutions for anti-Soviet agitation in the summer of 1942 is evidence that the mood was improving. He does not even consider the possibility that what he is measuring is a decline in punishment and recording of anti-Soviet agitation, rather than the changing sentiments of the civilians them- selves.
¹²¹

The
svodki
that were central to Lomagin, and other authors’, source bases did not simply record public opinion but were also intended to play a role in shaping the consciousness of the Soviet citizenry.
^122
They
almost certainly over-represented negative sentiments about the Soviet government.
Svodki
also routinely laid the blame for the circulation of negative ideas at the feet of sect members, nationalists, foreigners, and counter-revolutionaries.
^{123
Ascribing rumour to these ‘suspect’ groups}
provided a vehicle for describing negative comments circulating in the community whilst attaching them to groups who were expected to harbour dissent, within the logic of the regime.

The suspect nature of these categories is demonstrated by a compari-
son of two
svodki
concerning the reactions of the population of L’vov to the 1945 San Francisco conference. The original report, drafted on 19 May 1945, from L’vov to Kiev stated that, ‘In connection with the spreading of provocative rumours at the Krakov market’, some citizens had refused to receive payments in roubles. They believed that L’vov would soon be under American and British ‘occupation’ and roubles would be worthless.
^{124
A subsequent document, sent to Moscow six}
days later, concerning the mood in Western Ukraine stated that, ‘ ... in connection with the spreading by the agents of Polish reactionaries and Ukrainian German nationalists of various provocative rumours at the

^{121
N. Lomagin, ‘Soldiers at War: German Propaganda and Soviet Army Morale During}
the Battle of Leningrad, 1941–44’,
The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European
Studies, 1306 (1998), 37–9. For similar criticism of Davies’s approach see: Hellbeck and Davies, ‘Letters to the Editor’, 437–40. See also S. Kotkin, ‘Review of S. Davies, ‘Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia’,
Europe-Asia Studies
, 50.4 (1998), 739–42.

^{122
Holquist, ‘“Information is the Alpha”’.}

^{123
Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politihceskoi Istorii, henceforth}
RGASPI f. 17, op. 122, d. 289, l. 60; op. 125, d. 517, ll. 36–7; d. 289, l. 62; Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv v Avtonomnoi Respublike Krym, henceforth GAARK f. 1, op. 1, d. 2550, l. 38, respectively.

^{124
Tsentral’nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromads’kykh Obiednan’ Ukrainy, henceforth}

TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 23, d. 1449, l. 25.

xlvi
Being Soviet

Krakov Market in L’vov’, some citizens had refused to receive payment
in roubles.
^{125
A series of ideologized abuse categories had been added to}
the rumours that were entirely the invention of Litvin, the recipient of the first report and sender of the second report.

Nonetheless,
svodki
can play a role, as part of a constituent picture, in illustrating how ordinary Soviet citizens deployed the ‘tactics of the habitat’ in this period. This book draws on as wide a diversity of Stalin- era source groups as possible. These sources fall into three broad categories. First, the state generated sources, such as the
svodki
,
^{126
information reports generated by agitators at party gatherings,
127
and}
a sample of 250 case files of the State Prosecution Organ of the Soviet Union from 1939–53.
^{128
These sources tend to categorize all behaviour}
within the narrow framework of support or subversion, and the cate- gories they use are often questionable. Nonetheless, to use the example above, it is by no means logical to infer, despite the meaningless nature of the language about ‘Polish reactionaries’, that rumours about an Anglo-American takeover never circulated at the Krakov market at all. The rumours and behaviour contained within the
svodki
and State Prosecution files provide, if nothing else, a window into what was imaginable, to a creative secret police officer under Stalin.

The second category of sources is those created by Soviet citizens
themselves, such as letters sent to political leaders in Moscow;
^129
and
the memoirs and diaries of Soviet citizens living at the time.
^130
These
sources tend to provide a more ‘loyal’ image of the Soviet citizenry. Memoirs, like all sources, have their own particular pitfalls. They were subject to government censorship in the Soviet period, and some Soviet-era texts, such as the wartime diary of V. Vishnevskii, are clearly full of later interpolations.
^{131
The third source category consists of interview type-}
scripts generated by historians. These include the material of HIP,

^{125
TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 23, d. 1449. l. 34.}

^{126
Henceforth Sv.}

^{127
Henceforth Inf. These party-generated sources did not rely on secret police}
material
.

^{128
Henceforth Proc. My thanks to V. A. Kozlov and others at the Gosudarstvennyi}
Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, henceforth GARF, for access to the file database. The identities of prosecuted individuals are protected by only using their initials.

^{129
Henceforth Let. The personal letter caches of: Kalinin, Molotov, Shvernik,}
Malenkov, Chadaev, and Stalin were examined. Copies were taken of nearly 450 letters.

^{130
Henceforth Mem.}

^{131
V. S. Vishnevskii,}
Leningrad: Dnevniki voennyx let. 2 Noiabria 1941 goda – 31
Dekabria 1942 goda (Moscow, 2002).

Introduction
xlvii

and a total of twenty-seven interviews conducted by the author between
November 2003 and September 2008.
^{132
Interviews, like memoirs,}
suffer from the danger of self-censorship: the narrator selectively omits elements from the narrative in order to justify, simplify, or valorize their experiences.
^{133
A ‘semi-structured’ interview style allows the interviewee}
to shape the dialogue but also provides an opportunity to question some
of the details provided.
¹³⁴

None of these individual source groups provides a perfect picture of
the ways in which Soviet citizens imagined the outside world between 1939 and 1953. However, when they are ‘triangulated’ together, they provide a constituent picture of the kinds of behaviour and attitudes that were prevalent in this era.
^{135
Just as hill walkers ‘triangulate’ their}
location by taking bearings from two known points, so this book ‘triangulates’ from a diversity of sources to locate the
mentalit
^´
e
of the later Stalin era. In the pages that follow, individual sources will almost never be cited in isolation, and a system of abbreviations will also be used to make clear what kind of document is being referred to.
¹³⁶

CHRONOLOGY

This book examines how Soviet citizens engaged with Official Soviet
Identity over an intentionally broad stretch of time. One of the weaknesses of current Soviet historiography is its ‘Balkanization’ into certain eras. We have often separate literatures on the Revolution, NEP, ‘Great Break’, 1930s, war, post-war, and Khrushchev periods.
Being Soviet
intentionally spans at least three of those conventional periods of the Stalin years in order to examine how Soviet citizens engaged with a number of different incarna-

^{132
Quotations from the HIP are from the notes made by the interviewers at the time}
not verbatim records of the interviews.

^{133
P. Thompson,}
The Voice of the Past: Oral History
, 3rd edn (Oxford, 2000), 110–45.

^{134
Henceforth Int. See Appendix. On interviewing former Soviet citizens, see:}

C. Merridale,
Ivan’s War
:
The Red Army 1939–1945
(London, 2005), 341–2.

^{135
The term ‘triangulation’ is widely used within the social sciences when data is}
compared from multiple sources or research methods. See C. Trosset and D. Caulkins, ‘Triangulation and Confirmation in the Study of Welsh Concepts of Personhood’,
Journal of Anthropological Research
, 57.1 (2001), 62.

^{136
Where the information contained is purely factual, the abbreviation system is not}

employed.

xlviii
Being Soviet

tions of Official Soviet Identity. Chapter 4 also offers some provisional
observations that extend beyond Stalin’s death.

1939–41: the pre-war years

Chapter 1 deals with the relatively underexamined period 1939–41.
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 that committed the Soviet Union to an alliance with Nazi Germany, marked a rupture in Soviet relations with the outside world. Over the following two years the USSR annexed a series of small states and territories along the Soviet border in Poland, Finland, the Baltic, and Romania. The digestion of these ex-capitalist states dramatically redefined both the diplomatic and civilizational aspects of Official Soviet Identity. The Pact Period, until the German invasion in 1941, was also a moment of transition in terms of how Soviet citizens engaged with the official mass media. Rumours of untold luxury in the newly conquered capitalist territories poured back into the USSR, providing a fresh body of information to contrast with the official press. Despite the fact they are so rarely studied, the last two pre-war years were an important turning point in terms of the relation- ship between Soviet power and Soviet citizens.