Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (6 page)

This model of importation and experimentation followed by rejec-
tion was mirrored to some extent in the fate of Soviet jazz. Jazz was always regarded as a non-domestic product in the pre-war USSR. During the 1920s Soviet musicians gathered sheet music overseas, and

^{47
W. Partlett, ‘Breaching Cultural Worlds with the Village School: Educational}
Visions, Local Initiative, and Rural Experience at S. T. Shatskii’s Kaluga School System, 1919–1932’,
The Slavonic and East European Review
, 82. 4 (2004), 847–85. On Kerzhentsev, who was adamantly anti-Western but inspired by some of the models of public theatre he had seen there, see: R. Russell,
Russian Drama of the Revolutionary
Period (New York, 1988), 29–30.

^{48
J. Brooks, ‘Official Xenophobia and Popular Cosmopolitanism in Early Soviet}

Russia’,
American Historical Review,
97.5 (1992), 1443.

^49
Ball,
Imagining America,
79–81.

^{50
On the concept of ‘Cultural Revolution’, see: M. David-Fox, ‘What is Cultural}
Revolution?’ and S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Cultural Revolution Revisited’,
Russian Review,
58.1 (1999), 181–209.

^51
Ball,
Imagining America
, 104–5.

^{52
P. Kenez,}
Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin

(London, 2001), 114–64.

xxx
Being Soviet

jazz was performed as an example of African-American folk music. It
was legitimate because it was the tunes and rhythms of an oppressed people.
^{53
Nonetheless, jazz always had its critics within the musical}
academy and amongst some Bolshevik ideologues, who regarded its Western provenance as a symptom of bourgeois degeneracy.
^54
Gorky’s
1928
Pravda
article ‘The Music of the Gross’ was a sign of the changing times, and jazz, like foreign film, faded in the face of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ of the late 1920s.
^{55
Unlike foreign cinema, however, jazz}
returned in the mid 1930s, and achieved its greatest extent of pre-war popularity.
^{56
In 1936 Leonid Utesov, the USSR’s leading jazzmaster}
played the lead in the hit film
The Happy Go Lucky Guys
, which also spawned the jazz-influenced hit song,
The March of the Happy Go Lucky
Guys. The same year saw the launch of his State Jazz Orchestra. By the late 1930s Leningrad radio stations were playing whole evenings of jazz from their collections of Whiteman, Hilton, Ellington, and others.
⁵⁷

The official attitude towards foreign science and the global scientific
community evolved in a similar manner in the pre-war years. During the 1920s and early 1930s the Soviet leadership invested a great deal of effort acquiring equipment and expertise from Europe and the US: Fordism and Taylorism were watchwords for excellence.
^{58
The 15th}
Party Congress in 1928 called for the ‘widest use of West European and American scientific and scientific-industrial experience’ and between 1928 and 1932 over 3000 foreign engineers worked on high profile projects in the USSR, such as the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, Dnepr Dam, and the Nizhny Novgorod car factory.
⁵⁹

^{53
See, for example, Iu. Dmitriev’s introduction to Leonid Utesov’s 1959 autobiog-}
raphy
, Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva
, henceforth RGALI

f. R3005, op. 1, d. 82, ll. 17–25. For a discussion of Soviet jazz in the pre-war era, see

E. D. Uvarova, ed.,
Russkaia sovetskaia Estrada 1930–1945: Ocherki istorii
(Moscow, 1977), 271–6.

^54
Uvarova,
Russkaia sovetskaia Estrada
, pp. 276–8; RGALI f. R3005, op. 1, d. 82, l.

187.

^55
Ball,
Imagining America,
102.

^{56
F. Starr,}
Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union 1917–1980
(Oxford, 1983), 107–25; Uvarova,
Russkaia sovetskaia Estrada,
290–301.

^57
Starr,
Red and Hot,
111–14.

^{58
J. Brooks, ‘The Press and its Message: Images of America in the 1920s and 30s’, in}

S. Fitzpatrick, A. Rabinowitch, and R. Stites, eds.,
Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations
in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington, 1991), 239–40; Ball,
Imagining America,
24–5.

^{59
D. Holloway}
, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy

1939–1956
(New Haven, 1994), 15; Rogger, ‘How the Soviets See Us’, 124.

Introduction
xxxi

However, Soviet imports of foreign technology and expertise were
sharply curtailed after 1932. The 17th Party Congress in 1934 declared that domestic, rather than foreign, technology would make the USSR the most advanced nation in Europe, and the official press began to trumpet the achievements of Soviet science and technology.
^{60
As the}
Moscow Daily News
announced in 1935, ‘If foreign was always a synonym for the best in Russia, the situation has changed radically now. The Soviet Union has a powerful industry which is able to produce any machine, any metal or any chemical.’
^{61
The USSR had}
drawn whatever it might need from the West and would now forge ahead on a mixture of reverse engineered copies and domestically designed materials. Scientific links with the outside world were sharply curtailed. Having good connections inside the All Union Society for Cultural Connections (VOKS) had been an essential means of obtain- ing materials from abroad in the 1920s—by the 1930s it was a political liability.
^{62
Domestic achievements in aeronautics and Arctic exploration}
were touted as symbols of the strength of Soviet civilization. Heroic narratives such as the Cheliuskin Expedition, to rescue a group of sailors stranded on a polar ice flow, were celebrated from the capital cities to the GULAG.
^{63
As Avins argues, the key message of Kataev’s}
Time Forward
, one of the most popular novels of the decade, was that, ‘Russia is figuratively becoming its own “West”—developing the industrial capacity and national image that will enable it to surpass the West of modern capitalism.’
^{64
These ideas about Western civilization, in com-}
bination with official narratives about international diplomacy defined what it meant to be Soviet in relation to the outside world before 1939. This book offers a distinctive approach to the second key question within the post-1991 historiography of the USSR: how did ordinary people engage with Soviet power in Stalin’s later years? It seeks to build on and clarify some of the ambiguities within Kotkin’s work on 1930s’ Magnitogorsk. Kotkin’s concept of ‘speaking Bolshevik’ has proved enormously popular. However, his description of what it meant to

^60
Holloway,
Stalin and the Bomb,
15.

^61
Ball,
Imagining America,
157.

^{62
Krementsov,}
Stalinist Science
, 39–43; M. David-Fox, ‘From Illusory “Society” to

Intellectual “Public”: VOKS, International Travel and Party: Intelligentsia Relations in
the Interwar Period’,
Contemporary European History
, 11.1 (2002), 7–32.

^{63
Tatiana Poloz states that ‘Pride in being a Soviet citizen was probably never as all-}
embracing and intense’ as in the 1930s. Figes,
The Whisperers
, 221.

^64
Avins,
Border Crossings,
179.

xxxii
Being Soviet

‘speak Bolshevik’ is unclear on the relative roles of performance and
belief for ordinary citizens. A more potent concept, that has received far less attention, is his idea of the ‘little tactics of the habitat’. Kotkin argues that Soviet power shaped the arena within which ordinary citizens lived, but that they deployed a number of strategic manoeuvres in order to negotiate their way through Stalin-era society. Unfortunate- ly, the only ‘tactic’ he describes is ‘speaking Bolsehvik’. This book argues that the resistance and discursive paradigms explain the behaviour of a small, but significant, number of Soviet citizens. However, the beha- viour of the majority of ordinary people is better understood via a whole range of different ‘tactics of the habitat’ such as ‘reappropriation’,
‘bricolage’
, and ‘avoidance’. Soviet power established the general para- meters of life but these ‘tactics’ enabled Soviet citizens to get by and get on. I also refer to the ‘tactic’ of ‘performance’, rather than ‘speaking Bolshevik’, to remove any ambiguity over the meaning of Kotkin’s term. Soviet citizens ‘performed’ the rhetoric of the state when they publicly mouthed it in order to ensure personal safety or advancement. ‘Reappropriation’ was the process whereby Soviet citizens subtly rewrote the rhetoric contained within Official Soviet Identity and used it in a manner that was not originally intended by the state. A non-Soviet example of reappropriation might be the behaviour of the indigenous peoples of Central America after their conquest by the Spanish in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Spanish
conquista- dores
sought to convert their new subjects to Catholicism, and the indigenous peoples engaged enthusiastically with the rituals and struc- tures of the new religion. However, they also reappropriated the sym- bols and rituals of European Catholicism by imbuing them with their own distinctive meanings derived from their pre-Conquest religious practices.
^{65
Reappropriation in the Soviet context is most obvious in}
connection with government-sponsored political campaigns to collect money, protest against the action of foreign powers, or celebrate Soviet holidays. Evaluating the public behaviour of Soviet citizens is often very difficult: we cannot be sure who is performing the rhetoric and who is speaking sincerely.
^{66
However, it is also clear that meetings, marches,}
and campaigns were often delicately transformed by their participants

^{65
M. de Certeau, trans., S. Rendall,}
The Practice of Everyday Life
(London, 1988), 30–2.

^{66
See Petrone,}
Life Has Become More Joyous
.

Introduction
xxxiii

into an opportunity to socialize, drink, or settle scores with enemies.
^{67
Soviet scientists and musicians were experts at reappropriation, redir-}
ecting official campaigns against Western science in the post-war era in order to harm their rivals and secure their professional advancement. Ordinary citizens also deployed the ‘tactic’ of reappropriation when they transformed official calls to ‘Struggle for Peace’ into an opportuni- ty to publicly express their grief connected to the Great Patriotic War.
^{68
This ‘tactic of the habitat’ was not necessarily deployed consciously, and}
it also embedded individuals within the mechanisms of Soviet power; in order to reappropriate a public campaign, they had to participate in it. However, their behaviour was ‘tactical’ rather than ‘resisting’ or ‘sup- porting’ the Bolshevik state.