Q1. Briefly discuss the commonalities between Oceania and Stalinist Russia.
Q2. What were the factors that led some to accept Stalinism (not just obey but believe)?
Q3. What does this reading suggest about why Russia has been unable to transition to Western-style democracy?
Why They Believed in Stalin
By Aileen Kelly
The New York Review of Books, 26 April 2007 <
Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Princeton University Press, 332 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin
by Jochen Hellbeck
HarvardUniversity Press, 436 pp., $29.95
In a work published after he was expelled from the Soviet Union, the dissident writer Alexander Zinoviev depicted a new type of human being: Homo sovieticus, a "fairly disgusting creature" who was the end product of the Soviet regime's efforts to transform the population into embodiments of the values of communism.[1] In recent years the term has acquired a more neutral sense, as material emerging from the archives of the former Soviet Union—confessions, petitions and letters to the authorities, personal files, and diaries—has given scholars new insights into the ways Russians responded to the demand to refashion themselves into model Communists.
…Contrary to the theorists of totalitarianism who dominated Soviet historical research in the 1960s and 1970s, [cultural historians] argue that far from repressing the individual's sense of self, the pressures exerted by the Soviet state's revolutionary agenda worked to reinforce a drive to self-perfection whose roots lay deep in pre-revolutionary Russian culture.
While the two approaches [of social and cultural historians] are mutually illuminating, they can also lead to divergent views on the attitudes of Soviet citizens toward the official ideology and the crimes committed in its name. A comparison of recent books by Fitzpatrick and Hellbeck shows that despite the prodigious increase in documentation on the mentalities and motives of those who implemented or colluded with Stalin's Terror, we are still far from a consensus on the lessons to be drawn from that great historical catastrophe.
One of the most productive and influential of Western Sovietologists, Sheila Fitzpatrick began publishing in the 1970s in the US, where she was among the first to challenge the "totalitarian" school's depiction of the Soviet people as passive consumers of an ideology force-fed to them by their rulers. Her studies of everyday Soviet life revealed a more complex interaction between rulers and ruled, the latter often adroitly manipulating the system for the purposes of their own survival and advancement. She has used newly available archival material on Soviet citizens' communications with the regime to extend her analysis of their responses to its ideological demands. The resulting articles, written over the last decade, form the present book.
Tear Off the Masks concentrates principally on the 1920s and 1930s, when Soviet discourse was dominated by a Manichaean division between allies and enemies of Soviet power, defined in terms of class. Advancement depended on the ability to prove that one was really proletarian; ruin followed from the "unmasking" of citizens' concealed class identity—kulak[1] or bourgeois—on the basis of their words or practices. Fitzpatrick ranges over the multiple and ingenious ways in which Soviet citizens laid claim to a "good" class identity or attempted to discredit the claims of others through letters to the authorities, petitions, appeals, and denunciations, and the autobiographical summaries included in the files kept on every citizen.
Observing that all these forms of self-expression were animated by the effort to "speak Bolshevik" (a phrase borrowed from Kotkin)—to show that one was a genuine Soviet citizen—Fitzpatrick points to the nervousness about self-presentation and performance in Soviet society with its pervasive anxiety about class and political identity. Citizens writing to the authorities cast themselves in roles based on established Soviet stereotypes—worker, activist, patriot, victim of past oppression. She devotes two essays to the most polished and inventive of Soviet performers: the con men who flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, immortalized in Soviet literature in the humorous novels of Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, whose protagonist Ostap Bender speaks Bolshevik with such fluency that he can assume any role in Soviet society at will.
These case studies in stratagems for survival under Stalin add substantially to our knowledge of the functioning of early Soviet society, but offer few insights into the personalities behind the masks. They skirt around a question on which opinion is still divided—whether the Soviet system worked to obliterate the individual's sense of selfhood, creating, in Alexander Zinoviev's words, "behavioral stereotypes without convictions." Fitzpatrick seems to imply this in her concluding essay when she cites the observation of another Soviet dissident, Andrei Sinyavsky, that Ostap Bender's survival skills were those of "a Soviet citizen who has imbibed this system body and soul": the personification of Soviet "new man." …
Fitzpatrick implies strongly that despite its self-imposed limitations her research has removed the ground from beneath the feet of the other kind of historian, maintaining that one encounters a "notable silence" in the Soviet period with regard to individual soul-searching about identity. In the diaries and memoirs of the time, self-presentation took the place of self-exploration, as citizens worried "pragmatically" about how best to conform to the model of the Soviet "new man." In periods of revolutionary turmoil, she suggests, "self-understanding becomes irrelevant, even dangerous."
Fitzpatrick seems to be projecting onto Soviet society a tension between, on the one hand, the claims of the public sphere and, on the other, a liberal conception of selfhood as the pursuit of individual autonomy. Of course there were Soviet citizens who felt such a tension. But the Soviet notion of selfhood had deep roots in a different cultural tradition which did not recognize the same dichotomy of public and private. Lack of historical perspective is a major flaw in Fitzpatrick's book. The "new man" was not, as Fitzpatrick implies, a concept invented by the Soviet regime. It was central to a tradition of introspection and moral self-perfecting that arose in the early nineteenth century as a response to the dilemma of the Russian intelligentsia[2] whose talents were frustrated in their benighted country, and whose longing for personal fulfillment was combined with a strong commitment to social justice. From Enlightenment rationalism, German romantic philosophy, and French utopian socialism many educated Russians absorbed a vision of history as a collective process leading to the fullest self-realization of man through the healing of all painful divisions between individuals and the social whole. Radical critics urged writers to speed up the advance to this goal by creating images of "new men," integrated personalities whose personal fulfillment was achieved through heroic labors for the good of society. We have the testimony of Lenin himself that it was this exemplary type, as embodied in Nikolai Chernyshevsky's enormously influential novel of 1863 What Is to Be Done?, that set him on his revolutionary path.
The romantic dream of self-realization through fusion with an all-powerful collective force was transformed into alleged scientific certainty by the Marxist account of the laws of history; the notion of the new man was harmonized with Marxist Prometheanism by Bolshevik theorists such as Leon Trotsky (who described the Communists of the future as an "improved edition of mankind"), the writer Maxim Gorky, and the Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky, who responded to the need to energize the masses for the building of socialism with a collectivist version of Nietzsche's heroic model of personal authenticity. The doctrine of socialist realism did its part by making the depiction of Communist heroes an imperative for all Soviet writers. A secularized form of belief in the coming of a millennium, Stalinist ideology aimed to transform not only society but the very nature of man. Hence the endless campaigns of purification, personal and public, ranging from self-criticism in the workplace and Party cells to the show trials of the Great Purge. We know now that very many who took part in these campaigns were genuine believers in the messianic ideal. The sacrifices involved in the country's industrial transformation were prompted not only by coercion and fear but also by the efforts of individuals to perfect themselves in line with Party directives based on the Bolsheviks' claim to the sole knowledge of history's path.
In the worst years of Stalinism many maintained their faith in the Party's infallibility by developing a dual consciousness. As Stephen Kotkin explains, for Soviet citizens the discrepancies between lived experience and revolutionary ideology based ultimately on theory seem to have given rise to a dual reality: life could resemble "a split existence: sometimes in one truth, sometimes in the other." Even when theoretical "truth" was contradicted by common sense, it still formed an integral part of everyday existence; without an understanding of it, citizens found it impossible to know what was permitted and what not. But acceptance of the truthfulness of the revolutionary truth also fulfilled another function: "it was also," Kotkin writes, "a way to transcend the pettiness of daily life, to see the whole picture, to relate mundane events to a larger design; it offered something to strive for."[3] True believers could explain away the worst excesses of Stalinism by viewing the present from the perspective of eschatological[2] time. In this form of secular religiosity, history, like Providence, was seen to move in mysterious ways; when the goal was attained it would become clear that policies and actions which now seemed objectionable or senseless all had their place in the overall grand design.
A telling example was the case of Nikolai Bukharin, one of Bolshevism's founding theorists, convicted of treason in a show trial of 1938 and shot, who explained that the combination of shared Bolshevik goals and repugnant Stalinist methods produced in him "a peculiar duality of mind." In conversations with émigré Mensheviks during visits abroad in the 1930s he set out his dilemma: the Party was the whole meaning of his life, and though Stalin was a monster he was a "sort of symbol of the party." Bukharin's faith in the Party's collective infallibility made opposition to Bolshevism from within untenable for him. Resigned to his eventual death at Stalin's hands, he consoled himself with a historicist argument: "One is saved by a faith that development is always going forward ...like a stream that is running to the shore. If one leans out of the stream, one is ejected completely.[4]
Stephen Kotkin observed in 1995 that in the absence of documents from the secret police archives it was difficult to judge how much people consciously thought through the inconsistencies they saw between the Party's version of events and what was actually happening. The declassification of Communist Party records is still far from complete, but Jochen Hellbeck's searches in private collections and his personal inquiries have yielded a rich harvest of Stalin-era diaries which give important new insights into the ways in which Soviet citizens struggled to rationalize the monstrous irrationality of Stalinism as they worked on perfecting their inner selves.
Unlike Fitzpatrick, Hellbeck has found no lack of soul-searching in Soviet diaries—although not directed to individualist purposes. He emphasizes the importance of the traditional ethos of the intelligentsia and its ideal of the new man in shaping Soviet citizens' attitudes toward the regime. Bolshevik ideology was not just a corpus of official truths and directives enforced from above; it was also a ferment of ideas interacting in the individual consciousness with an illiberal notion of selfhood, according to which authentic self-fulfillment was realized through collective acts fulfilling the laws of history:
Stalin-era diarists' desire for a purposeful and significant life reflected a widespread urge to ideologize one's life, to turn it into the expression of a firm, internally consistent, totalizing Weltanschauung.[3]
Soviet communism having become the vehicle for realizing the hopes of the diarists, their diaries reflected an inner dialogue with the Bolshevik project, as they sought to make sense of the unfathomable.
Hellbeck concentrates on four individuals, who represent a spectrum of responses to the 1917 Revolution. Zinaida Denisevskaya, a thirty-year-old provincial schoolteacher and a political gradualist when the Bolsheviks came to power, was initially repelled by the regime's fanaticism, suppression of individuality, and hostility to culture. As the son of a kulak, Stepan Podlubny was forced to conceal his class origins in order to be accepted into Soviet society. Leonid Potemkin was one of the multitude of Soviet citizens from a deprived background whom the Revolution permitted to fulfill their dream of a higher education. As a mining engineer he had a significant part in the industrialization process and rose in the Party administration to become deputy minister of geology in 1965. Alexander Afinogenov joined the Party while still at school, and became a director of the Association of Proletarian Writers, the most militant and doctrinaire Soviet literary organization. His plays won praise from Communist leaders, including Stalin, whom he regarded as his supreme literary mentor, and he rose to the top of the Soviet establishment as a leading exponent of the socialist realist aesthetic.
The four represent what Western historians have commonly seen as two opposing categories: those who enjoyed the status and material rewards of the Soviet establishment and those who survived only by concealing their class origins. But Hellbeck shows that these diaries should make us wary of typecasting the first as careerists and the second as impostors: all four diarists show a similar commitment to a revolutionary agenda of self-cultivation and self-perfection.
Two factors were crucial in Denisevskaya's conversion to Bolshevism: the intelligentsia's social ethic and her own sense of isolation from others, compounded in her case by unsuccessful personal relationships. She expresses envy of the comradeship of Communist activists, and fascination with ritual expressions of collectivism, such as the military parades and workers' marches on revolutionary festivals. In 1931 she takes the symbolic step of joining a demonstration to celebrate Labor Day and exults at her sense of oneness with the collective: no longer just an onlooker, "I was a drop in the sea." Hellbeck notes her lack of any trace of regret at this surrender of her individuality; she describes herself as having been reborn. In identifying with the Soviet project she had discovered her "true" self:
Throughout her life Denisevskaya cultivated her "personality," which she defined by the possession of an integrated, universalist "worldview" and the dedication to working on behalf of history's progression. In the end she came to consider the Soviet regime the sole legitimate carrier of these core intelligentsia values. In her diary the Bolshevik project of creating a new man appears as but a variant of the preoccupation with perfecting the "personality" that defined the Russian intelligentsia as a whole.
Podlubny's diary records the skillful adaptive techniques that enabled him to avoid being marginalized as a class alien and become a brigade leader in the factory school of the Pravda printing plant. But the primary goal of these efforts is his inner transformation into a Soviet new man: his diary serves to chart his progress in rooting out the habits of a "useless person."
Born in 1914, Potemkin was shaped by the Soviet state as one of its new elite. The smoothness of his trajectory to the top suggests a careerist focused on honing his adaptive skills; but his diary is devoted to charting the successes and setbacks of an elaborate program of physical and psychological self-improvement inspired by Gorky's and Lunacharsky's socialist version of the Nietzschean superman. This glorified strength, beauty, daring, and heroic will as the components of collectivist subjectivity—an ideal that Leonid Potemkin, as a political agitator, set down in a manual for Soviet youth. Hellbeck observes that his diary reveals him as one of those who found genuine fulfillment as Soviet citizens.
Afinogenov also was no careerist, despite the substantial material privileges he enjoyed as a leading exponent of socialist realism. He took his role very seriously, comparing Soviet theater to a church which showed people how to live and behave by exposing the vestiges of the past and depicting the seeds of the future in everyday ethics. Stalin's attack on one of his plays for its negative portraits of Communists plunged him into anguished introspection, as he sought to realign himself with the approved version of history. Believing like Chernyshevsky that a writer must embody the standards he preaches, he saw his diary as "gymnastics for the soul," a process of self-cleansing through self-criticism.