Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (56 page)

The third, less commonly argued, position suggests that the post-war
ideological campaigns should be understood in relation to the global situation.
^{70
This viewpoint provides a valuable additional perspective}
on the shifting official attitude to foreign science and culture. The campaigns redefined the relationship between Soviet and capitalist civilization and they evolved in tandem with Official Soviet Identity in diplomatic terms. The Central Committee’s closed letter about the

K.R. Affair circulated the day before the vital June 1947 gathering of
Council of Foreign Ministers and Lysenko’s victory over his geneticist rivals took place against the backdrop of the Berlin Blockade in mid

1948.
^{71
The attack on formalist music also took place at the very point}
when the battle lines were hardening during the Czech coup. In the same way, the January to April 1949 assault on cosmopolitanism closely mapped the discussions in the West over the construction of NATO.

The anti-Jewish undertones of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign
also reflected this global context. Soviet Jewry provided, to some extent, a crude metaphor for global capitalism: their supposed domination of Soviet trade made them a domestic archetype of the external enemy. These post-war ideological campaigns solidified the new Official Soviet Identity in cultural terms as the Grand Alliance collapsed. They reasserted the self-sufficient healthiness of the Soviet project as a whole and the alien nature of capitalism, in particular capitalist

^{68
Zubkova, trans. H. Ragsdale,}
Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappoint-
ments, 1945–1957 (Armonk, NY, 1998), 88–98, 117–29; J. Fu¨rst, ‘Introduction’—
Late Stalinist Russia: Society Between Reconstruction and Reinvention
(London, 2006)’, 8–9; Gorlizki and Khlevniuk,
Cold Peace,
41–3; Krementsov,
Stalinist Science
(Princeton, 1997), 177–81.

^{69
Van Ree,}
The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century

Revolutionary Patriotism
(London, 2002), 201–6; Barghoorn,
The Soviet Image of the
United States: A Study in Distortion (New York, 1950), 265; Ball,
Imagining America:
Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Oxford, 2003), 182.

^70
McCagg,
Stalin Embattled 1943–48
(Michigan, 1978), 16–17; H. Swayze,
The Political Control of Literature in the USSR
(Cambridge Mass., 1962), 26–7.

^{71
Gorlizki and Khlevniuk,}
Cold Peace
, 158–9, 289–90.

180
Being Soviet

America. However, they have often been interpreted more narrowly as
‘national’ campaigns whose primary function was to revive the glory of the Russian past. The late 1940s were certainly characterized by the vocal celebration of a pantheon of Tsarist high achievers such as Mendeleev, Chaikovskii, and Pushkin.
^{72
However, their revival did not}
herald an uncritical celebration of the Russian past. As Vavilov, the Head of the Academy of Sciences, explained the Tsarist state had often struggled against true science and its legacy was ambiguous. The Russian past was also responsible for the Weissmanist hangovers that still bedevilled Soviet science. Only now, under Soviet power, had science truly flourished as it should.
^{73
Furthermore, the ‘Russian heri-}
tage’ that was imported into post-war Soviet identity was heavily shaped by contemporary Soviet requirements. Tsarist Russia’s scientific achievements, were hardly celebrated as the foundation of nineteenth- century Russian identity. The fathers of Russian science and culture were co-opted to serve the Soviet present, rather than to celebrate the Russian past.
^{74
The non-Russian republics were also allowed to cele-}
brate their own local artistic and scientific heroes. Russia’s achievements were disproportionately discussed because the Russians had brought industrialization and modernization to the wider USSR. But it was the ‘monumental productions’ of Socialist Realist art and Soviet science that were celebrated above all.
^{75
Pride in Russian achievements served}
the wider process of bolstering Soviet patriotism, rather than competing with it.

The post-war ideological campaigns were above all about loyalty. The
concern about external loyalties was vividly demonstrated in the various local discussions concerning the K.R. Affair. In Tblisi, speakers denounced the pro-Turkish leanings of certain individuals.
^{76
In the}
Karelo-Finnish Region it was connections with Finland, in Moldavia discussants complained of pro-Romanian sentiments and in Central Asia pan-Islamism was the prime target.
^{77
America and the West were}
not the only potential spheres of loyalty that Soviet citizens might become attached to. Each region of the USSR contextualized the

^72
Ogon¨ek
, 02.1947: 7, p. 16; 11.1947: 47, p. 25; 02.1949: 7, pp. 20–3.

^73
Ogon¨ek
, 10.1948: 43, p. 9.

^{74
Krementsov,}
Stalinist Science,
223–4.

^75
Pravda
, 21.07.48, p. 3. See also: 24.03.48, p. 2; 20.04.48, p. 3.

^{76
RGASPI M-f. 1, op. 6, d. 468, ll. 25–30.}

^{77
Ibid. ll. 98–105, 114–16, 155–66; d. 469, l. 71; f. 17, op. 122, d. 283, l. 40.}

Subversive Styles? 1945–53
181

campaigns into a language of loyalty, patriotism, and Sovietness that
was meaningful to local conditions.

The focus on science and technology also reflected the specific
circumstances of the Cold War rivalry. American success in technology, music, and film shaped Official Soviet Identity of the early Cold War. Genetics and jazz music were at the centre of the rhetorical battleground because the USA enjoyed undisputed world leadership in those areas. Physics might also have been a prominent target for rooting out Weissmanism but for its military importance to the bomb project.
^{78
America’s strengths played a role in defining what it meant to be Soviet}
in Stalin’s last years.

JAZZ, STYLE, AND SCIENCE: INTERACTING WITH POST-WAR SOVIET IDENTITY AS A

CIVILIZATION

The intelligentsia and the post-war ideological campaigns

The Soviet intelligentsia was an important target audience for the post-
war ideological campaigns. However, it is extremely difficult to study the manner in which they engaged with this new version of Official Soviet Identity. Beyond the large volume of reports generated by the

K.R. discussions, there are few detailed case studies of their actions, such
as those provided by the presence of Anglo-American sailors in wartime Arkhangel’sk. Their behaviour was reported less frequently than rumours about diplomatic events, making it more difficult to draw conclusions about how widespread particular ‘tactics’ of engagement were. Despite the relatively limited nature of the sources, however, it is still possible to triangulate the evidence for certain kinds of behaviour and draw some provisional conclusions about the ‘tactics of the habitat’ employed by the Soviet artistic and scientific elites in relation to this new version of Official Soviet Identity.

Soviet scientists had reacted with great enthusiasm to the wartime
opportunities for closer contact with the outside world, and leading academics continued to bombard party leaders with requests to import foreign technology or travel for research after the war. The cancer

^{78
Krementsov,}
Stalinist Science,
182–3, 282–3.

182
Being Soviet

researcher, A. Lukin, appealed a number of times to Molotov in late
1946 for funding to study ‘the great volume of foreign experience’ in his area of work.
^{79
Others suggested that it was essential to mimic and}
import foreign expertise in centrifuging, electron microscopy, analytical chemistry, waste disposal, or simply to restock laboratories damaged during wartime.
^{80
In January 1947 a group of leading researchers wrote}
to the government suggesting the foundation of an Institute of Scientific Information to disseminate material published overseas.
^{81
At the heart of}
these letters was a working assumption that the West, and in particular America, would be a source of technological inspiration for years to come. The voices and attitudes of Soviet scientists are not easy to find beyond this extensive body of letter writing. However, their enthusiasm for contact with the outside world is also evident, to some degree, from some of the accusations levelled during the discussion of the K.R. Affair. The rhetoric of such events is often formulaic and the denunciations may have reflected personal animosities. Nonetheless it is clear that some of the academics accused were genuine enthusiasts of global scientific interaction. Discussants at a Moscow higher education insti- tute commented that a recent trip to the USA to study ship production had generated an unhealthy degree of enthusiasm amongst senior colleagues. Other speakers complained that dissertation writers were frequently advised to improve their work by adding more references to foreign literature.
^{82
Comrade Boleerne, of the Polytechnical Institute in}
Kiev, had allegedly stated that ‘it was not important where a discovery was made, here or overseas, it was important that it was made’.
^83
The
complaints of Comrade Ratner at the Leningrad Institute Poligrafmash were typical of many others when he noted that, ‘amongst us there are people who simply talk nonsense that in America everything is better’.
^{84
The evidence suggests that those respondents to HIP who later spoke of}
the frustrations of pre-war scientific isolation were not simply flattering

their foreign interviewers.
⁸⁵

^{79
Let. GARF f. R5446, op. 82, d. 181, ll. 202, 198–4.}

^{80
Let. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 362, ll. 9–12; f. 82, op. 2, d. 1472, l. 36; GARF f.}

R5446, op. 82, d. 181, ll. 97, 187; op. 85, d. 1, l. 190.

^{81
Let. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 544, ll. 1–4.}

^{82
Inf. RGASPI f. 17, op. 122, d. 260, l. 46; d. 206, l. 128; d. 273, l. 46.}

^{83
Inf. TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 23, d. 4537, l. 25.}

^{84
Inf. RGASPI f. 17, op. 122, d. 260, l. 7. See also: d. 206, ll. 105, 108; d. 271, l. 34;}

d. 283, l. 22.

^{85
HIP. B11, 426, 37; 139, 19.}

Subversive Styles? 1945–53
183

When they wrote letters to Soviet leaders requesting research ma-
terials and goods from abroad, Soviet scientists demonstrated a finely honed ability to perform official rhetoric. The struggles within the scientific community over the legitimacy of foreign science in the 1930s had ensured that those who enjoyed senior research positions were astute navigators of the rhetoric of the current moment, as well as excellent scientists.
^{86
During the early post-war months they}
phrased their requests for access to capitalist science in terms of the danger of falling behind foreign scientific advances. Whether Professor Levin, a Stalin Prize winning engineer, who warned in October 1945 that, ‘we have fallen far behind the leading foreign states in all areas of radio technology during the war’, was simply performing official rhetoric or truly ‘thinking Bolshevik’, he employed the language of the current moment to secure both his, and the nation’s interests.
^{87
Jazz musicians like Utesov and Renskii also performed officially}
legitimated, swinging tunes with great enthusiasm. When their re- search or musical interests coincided with official rhetoric, Soviet scientists and artists became enthusiastic performers of the language of Official Soviet Identity.