Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (7 page)

‘
Bricolage
’ was the tactic employed by Soviet citizens when they fused material from both official and unofficial sources to create a composite product. Levi-Strauss popularized the term
bricolage
to describe how story tellers draw upon a pre-existing repertoire of images in order to construct a narrative.
^{69
De Certeau has extended the term in his}
description of the creativity of everyday life:
bricoleurs
‘make do’ with the materials before them in order to create an innovative and novel product.
^70
Bricolage
is not a ‘tactic’ that was unique to Soviet society. However, a discussion of
bricolage
in the USSR is particularly important in the light of the current Foucauldian emphasis on the incapacity of Soviet citizens to interact creatively with the language of the state that ruled them.

Osokina’s description of the illegal food trade reflects many of these
characteristics of Soviet
bricolage
. Private speculation supplemented, rather than replaced, the official food supply. Almost all individuals relied on goods obtained via both sources.
^71
Bricolage
differed from

^{67
A number of authors have described how ordinary people used the Purges to obtain}
revenge in this manner: Y. Kang-Bohr, ‘Appeals and Complaints: Popular Reactions to the Party Purges and the Great Terror in the Voronezh Region, 1935–1939’,
Europe-Asia Studies,
57.1 (2005), 135–54; S. Fitzpatrick,
‘
How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces’,
Russian Review,
52.3 (1993), 299–320. See also: J. T. Gross,
Revolution From Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s
Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, 2002), 232–5.

^{68
See Chapters 5 and 4 respectively.}

^{69
C. Le
´
vi-Strauss,}
The Savage Mind
(Chicago, 1968), 15–25.

^{70
De Certeau,}
Practice of Everyday Life
, xv–xvi. See also the work of Harel and Papert on
bricolage
within education: I. Harel and S. Papert, eds.,
Constructionism: Research Reports
and Essays, 1985–1990 (Norwood, 1991), 168–73.

^{71
E. Osokina trans., K. Transchel and G. Bucher,}
Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distri-

bution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–41
(Armonk, NY, 1999).

xxxiv
Being Soviet

performance in that it was largely undertaken in relation to other Soviet
citizens, rather than Soviet power. Performance often had a prescribed end: to obtain certain material or social ends that were dispensed by the government. When post-war Soviet musicians performed their sets in accordance with the dictates of government policy, they were ‘performing’ for the state. When they spiced up their repertoires with risque
^{´
jazz numbers, however, they were also employing}
bricolage
and

humouring their listeners.
^{72
They carefully melded sounds that would}

be acceptable to both audiences to create a composite product.
Bricolage
lacked the strategic nature of ‘performance’: there was no official reward to be obtained. If there was a benefit, it was the admiration and trust of fellow citizens.
Bricolage
also lacked the coherence of performance. Its products were more complex because they relied on a diversity of sources. Nonetheless, it also embedded Soviet citizens within the ‘habi- tat’ of Soviet life, rather than removing them from it. Soviet citizens deployed
bricolage
to supplement the official supply of information, food, and clothing, rather than stepping outside of the mechanisms of Soviet power and living independently of them.

The most important expression of the ‘tactic’ of
bricoalge
discussed in this book will be rumour. Historians rarely take rumours seriously as an object of study: this is the first book length study of rumouring in the USSR since the 1950s.
^{73
However, rumouring was an extremely wide-}
spread practice in the Stalin-era Soviet Union, and also a clear example of
bricolage
in action. When it came to gathering news, as with the process of gathering food, Soviet citizens supplemented information provided by the official press with information from unofficial sources that was obtained by word-of-mouth. This creative
bricolage
brought together material from two contexts in order to create a third product that did not depend exclusively on either source.

^{72
See Chapter 5.}

^{73
A. Inkeles and R. A. Bauer,}
The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society
(Cambridge Mass., 1959) and R. A. Bauer, A. Inkeles, and C. Kluckhohn,
How the
Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological and Social Themes (Cambridge Mass., 1956). For some exceptions, see G. Lefebvre, trans., J. White,
The Great Fear of 1789: Rural
Panic in Revolutionary France (London, 1973); C. Wickham, ‘Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry’,
Past and Present
, 160.1 (1998), 3–24; A. Fox,
Oral and
Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000). In the Russo-Soviet context see:

O. Figes and B. Kolonitskii,
Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and
Symbols of 1917 (London, 1999); S. Smith, ‘Letters from Heaven and Tales of the Forest: “Superstition” against Bolshevism’,
Antropologicheskii Forum
, 3 (2005), 280–306.

Introduction
xxxv

Rosnow and Fine, the leading sociologists of rumour, define a
rumour as ‘information neither substantiated nor refuted’.
^{74
Once its}
contents have been demonstrated to be true or false, then it ceases to be a rumour and becomes either a fact or an error. Until the point of authentication, rumours function as ‘improvised news’ and analysis transmitted by word-of-mouth from one person to another.
^75
Rumours
are distinct from other word-of-mouth media in the emphasis they place on communication rather than entertainment or scandal. Gossip is the transmission of often verified information about a third party for the purpose of passing comment on it. Rumours hypothesize about unver- ified realities.
^{76
The Stalin-era Soviet Union was also inundated with}
tips. Shortages of basic necessities, such as food, as well as luxury goods like cinema tickets, made oral information a vital medium through which Soviet citizens found out about where and when to buy goods. Tips are distinct from rumours because they are exclusively informative: they do not contain an element of explanation. Another element of oral communication, which was particular to the USSR, was the
anekdot
.
^77
Anekdoty
wryly observed the absurdities of Soviet life, puncturing the pomposity of official rhetoric. Unlike rumours, they did not transmit information but passively commented on the lived experience of Soviet citizens. The distinctions between these different categories of speech are not absolute. Nonetheless rumours are a distinctly informational and analytical form of unofficial oral dialogue.

The nature of the Soviet system, with its officially mandated
propaganda machine, lent a particular character to rumours (
slukhi
). Rumours were defined by their origin outside of the official mass media. They could only be authenticated or disproved in that context. This distinction between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ has recently come under attack as an example of applying non-Soviet categories to the USSR.
^{78
However, in this case, the definition of a rumour as ‘unofficial’ was a}

^{74
R. L. Rosnow, and G. A. Fine,}
Rumour and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay

(Oxford, 1976), 4.

^{75
See: T. P. Johnston, ‘Subversive Tales? War Rumours in the Soviet Union}
1945–1947’ in J. Fu¨rst, ed.,
Late Stalinist Russia: Society Between Reconstruction and
Reinvention (London, 2006), 59–78; T. Shibutani,
Improvised News: A Sociological Study
of Rumour (New York, 1966), 62.

^{76
G. W. Allport and L. Postman,}
The Psychology of Rumor
(New York, 1965)
,
165–7.

^{77
For a discussion, see Yurchak,}
Everything Was Forever
, 238–81; S. B. Graham, ‘A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot’ PhD thesis, Pittsburgh University, (2003).

^{78
Holquist, ‘“Information is the Alpha”’, 415–16.}

xxxvi
Being Soviet

peculiarity of the Soviet system itself. By propagating an authoritative
narrative, the Soviet state made all rumour intrinsically non-authoritative, or ‘unofficial’. This is not to suggest that the two rhetorical worlds, the unofficial world of rumour and the official world of the Soviet press, were entirely separate from one another. They intersected with, and even referred directly to, one another. The contents of the official press were clearly, on occasion, intended to suppress ideas and stories that were circulating within the word-of-mouth network.
^{79
The contents of}
the informal rumour matrix were also deeply influenced by the rhetoric and categories of the official press.
^{80
The two arenas were distinct by}
virtue of the source from which the information flowed, rather than the kinds of language and ideas which circulated within them.

Rumouring was an extremely widespread phenomenon in the Stalin-
era Soviet Union. The prominence of rumouring within Soviet life was first pointed to by the researchers of the Harvard Interview Project on the Soviet Social System (HIP) in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Project’s authors conducted 329 interviews and 2,725 questionnaires amongst Soviet e
^{´
migre
´
s in West Germany and the United States.
81
One}
section of the interviews was devoted to ‘Communication’. In the first question, the respondents were asked about sources of information in a general manner. Soviet newspapers were referred to by 85 per cent, whilst both radio and ‘word-of-mouth’ were mentioned by 47 per cent of the respondents.
^{82
When asked, in the next question, which sources}
were most important to them, 36 per cent said newspapers, 28 per cent said ‘word of mouth’, and only 10 per cent said radio.
^{83
When asked}
which source they considered most reliable, 61 per cent cited oral information, and only 13 per cent newspapers.
^{84
The researchers of}

^{79
See Stalin’s comments to King in late May 1943 which were clearly intended, in}
part, to address rumours circulating about the Comintern:
Pravda
, 30.05.1943, p. 1. For the capacity of ‘folk’ images to shape official narratives, see: S. M. Norris,
A War of
Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity 1812–1945 (DeKalb, 2006).