Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (59 page)

its contents.
^122
As
Elle
observed, the basketball players’ answers were

‘unpleasant but honest’. Mariia Kotlova admitted that, ‘To speak
openly, there was nothing that I liked in France.’ Ol’ga Medvedeva remarked, ‘What I have seen in France is not to my liking . . . Jazz? It is good enough for Americans but we love our civilization.’ Ol’ga Voit declared, ‘I love classical music and hate jazz ... In Russia there is no shortage of chic things but the quality is much better.’ Valentina Karkhinova complained that, ‘They told me that French women are elegant. It is not true.’ Only Zina Laguna and Liudmilla Zaitseva made positive comments about Parisian style.
^{123
The naive use of language}
which was appropriate for a domestic context, but entirely inappropri- ate for a foreign newspaper, reveals how deeply entrenched these women were within the rhetoric and cultural chauvinism of Official Soviet Identity.

A number of Soviet citizens also took offence at the foreign films that
were screened in the post-war USSR. These isolated comments may well not be representative of the wider population, but they do provide an insight into the pride some individuals took in Soviet movies.
^124
Vasili
Ermolenko commented in his diary in March 1946, ‘I saw the American

^{122
Inf. RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 391, l. 81.
123
Inf. Ibid., ll. 78–80.}

^{124
The fact that the Soviet government did not solicit comment on foreign films, and}
that some of these letters bordered on criticizing the government for being ‘too soft’ adds something to their authenticity as expressions of the views of the individuals concerned.

192
Being Soviet

film
Edison
. It is the first foreign film which I have truly liked. It has no superficial chicness.’
^{125
In 1948}
Pravda
received a large number of objections to the domination of the Soviet screen by foreign films. Comrade Fedotov from Kiev wrote, ‘I am angered to the depths of my soul by the demonstration on our Soviet screens of foreign films

with intriguing names . . . We don’t need old foreign junk.’ Another
writer described
The Rubber Hunter
as ‘made with the dirty hands of the worshippers of the typical productions of Hollywood’.
^{126
A number}
of respondents to HIP also made disparaging comments about jazz

music, which would hardly have endeared them to their interviewers:

Soviet people do not like jazz, they are not used to it.
^{127
The Russians don’t like this bum bum, tam tam.
128}

We do not want to hear some trashy American jazz; we have enough good
music in the Soviet Union.
¹²⁹

Domestically produced classical music also remained hugely popular.
The first performance of a Prokofiev symphony in December 1947 was a major event, with tickets exchanging hands on the black market for weeks beforehand.
¹³⁰

At least some Soviet citizens also took great pride in the achievements
of Soviet science at this time. L. Kishnevskii wrote to Malenkov in 1947 suggesting that the USSR must invest in the future of its camera produc- tion. Failure to do so, he argued, ‘might create a false impression about our incapacity to surpass the technical achievements of the leading foreign firms . . . ’.
^{131
A number of my interview respondents also}
spoke with pride about the USSR’s development of nuclear weapons in this period.
^{132
The successes of Soviet scientists in competition with}
foreign researchers, was a source of satisfaction to many late-Stalinist citizens. The prevalence of these attitudes draws attention to the discur- sive power of the Soviet propaganda machine, which structured the behaviour, speech, and perhaps thought of many Soviet citizens.

^{125
Mem. Ermolenko,}
Voennyi dnevnik starshego serzhanta
(Belgorod, 2000). 245.

^{126
Let. RGASPI f. 17, op. 132, d. 92, l. 63.}

^{127
HIP. A. 1, 9. 78.}

^{128
HIP. A. 3, 25S, 38.}

^{129
HIP. A. 32, 1124, 37.}

^{130
Mem. Werth,}
Russia: The Post-War Years
, 352.

^{131
Let. GARF f. R5446, op. 80, d. 5, ll. 147–5. Once again, whether this is}
evidence of performance or ‘thinking Bolshevik’ is impossible to state.

^{132
Int. Vasilii Ivanovich, Moscow, May 2004.}

Subversive Styles? 1945–53
193

On the other hand, there is strong evidence from the NKVD
svodki
and state prosecution files that at least some individuals subverted the language of Official Soviet Identity in order to create a rhetoric of resistance. A large number of individuals were prosecuted in this period for praising specifically those aspects of American civilization that the Soviet press attacked. The democratic freedoms of the USA, where workers could strike and criticize their government, were fre- quent objects of praise. N.P.S. was prosecuted for saying ‘Look in America there is democracy there you can speak out freely but in the Soviet Union they only talk about democracy, try to speak out and they will straight away arrest you.’ Others, such as E.M.M., got in trouble for praising American living standards in comments such as, ‘the average worker earns 400–500 roubles a month, however, they live worse than the unemployed citizens in America.’
^{133
Others were}
prosecuted for suggesting that ‘There the workers work for one day a week and supply themselves with everything they need.’
^{134
The speed}
with which an American worker could save up to buy a suit and the omnipresence of cars for every worker in the USA were recurrent motifs.
¹³⁵

The NKVD
svodki
and state prosecution files from this period also demonstrate that at least some individuals doubted this idea of Soviet scientific greatness and a few also inverted it and transformed it into a rhetoric of resistance. A.Kh.N. told his fellow dock workers in the autumn of 1950 that the USSR would be defeated in a forthcoming war with the Anglo-Saxon powers ‘because America and England have a strong fleet and aviation’.
^{136
V. V. Nezloa, of Shtepovskii}
raion
Sumsk
oblast
’, explained to his friends that, ‘The war will be an air war and America will win. The result will be decided by atoms and toxins.’
^{137
N.A.A., who claimed to have fought in Korea, was prose-}
cuted in September 1951 for saying that American technological superiority was devastating Soviet troops. He claimed that: ‘We have shot down 2–3 American planes but they have shot down 15–17 of

^{133
Proc. GARF f. R8131a, op. 31a, d. 36308, l. 140; d. 36740, l. 7; d. 36324, l. 73.}

^{134
Sv. TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 23, d. 4557, l. 120.}

^{135
Proc. GARF f. R8131, op. 31a, d. 36287, ll. 11–13; d. 36362, l. 22; Inf. RGASPI}
M. f. 1, op. 6, d. 467, l. 44.

^{136
Proc. Ibid., d. 31773a, l. 15. See also: d. 36324, l. 72.}

^{137
Sv. TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 23, d. 4557, l. 102; d. 4490, l. 5; Inf. RGASPI f. 17, op.}

122, d. 289, l. 75.

194
Being Soviet

ours . . . The pilots are dying like flies.’
^{138
M.O.A. went so far in 1951}
as to say that ‘Our academics can do nothing without the help of overseas, they can’t discover anything.’
^{139
This somewhat dismissive}
view of Soviet technological greatness was embodied in the Khrush- chev-era joke that asked ‘What are the key components of the Soviet space program? Answer: German technology, Czech uranium and Russian dog.’
¹⁴⁰

However, it is very difficult to assess how many of these comments
really were examples of resistance. As argued in the Introduction, these comments, recorded by the state observing organs, were not the unoffi- cial ‘truth’ that Soviet citizens uncritically believed because it inverted the official ‘lie’.
^{141
Instead many of them seem to have originated within}
the everyday practice of
bricolage
, whereby Soviet citizens fused infor- mation gathered from different sources. One of the most important sources in this period, that may well have accounted for the recurrence of ideas about the availability of suits and cars, was the Voice of America (VOA). The VOA was a Russian language radio broadcast that began in February 1947 and was soon joined by its British equivalent from the BBC. Listening to the VOA appears as part of the indictment for a very significant number of people in this period. However, it was rarely enough, in itself, to render individuals guilty. Their response to the broadcasts was more important. Indeed listening to the VOA or BBC seems to have been an extremely widespread practice. P.K.L. even brought his radio into work at the Kharkov Home of Officers and ‘listened to these stations as long as the workers in the artistic unit did not prohibit it’. He defended himself by stating that ‘I don’t deny and did not deny that I listened to the radio transmissions of VOA but that is hardly a crime.’
^{142
These Russian language broadcasts provided an}
alternative source of information about the outside world. Many Soviet citizens drew information from there, as they did from the Embassy

^{138
Proc. GARF f. R8131, op. 31a, d. 36284, l. 69. In reality Soviet aircraft acquitted}
themselves well in Korea: Zubok and Pleshakov,
Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From
Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge Mass., 1996)
,
71.

^{139
Proc. GARF f. R8131, op. 31a, d. 32456, ll. 17–8.}

^140
Lewis,
Hammer And Tickle: A History Of Communism Told Through Communist
Jokes (London, 2008), 165. The dog referred to is Laika, who became the first animal to orbit the Earth in 1957.

^{141
This is the approach taken by Magnusdottir: Magnusdottir, ‘Keeping up Appear-}
ances: How the Soviet State Failed to Control Popular Attitudes Towards the United States of America 1945–1959’, PhD Diss. University of North Carolina (2006).

^{142
Proc. GARF f. R8131, op. 31a, d. 33063, ll. 10, 46.}

Subversive Styles? 1945–53
195

journals whilst they were still available. They then deployed the ‘tactic’
of
bricolage
and fused it with information from other sources to create a composite, and sometimes disturbing from the point of view of the state, vision of the outside world
.
D.M.G. admitted that he had seen a ‘portrait of a well dressed American worker’ in
Amerika
and told his colleagues ‘on this basis, that workers were better dressed there than our engineers’.
^{143
He was prosecuted for anti-Soviet agitation but that}
hardly seems to have been his intention. He was simply doing what many Soviet citizens did, gathering the information available to him about the outside world, engaging in
bricolage
, and passing it on. At least some of those recorded as ‘resistors’ in the
svodki
and procuracy files do not seem to have considered their behaviour in that light.