Sheila Fitzpatrick: <http://history.uchicago.edu/faculty/fitzpatrick.html>
***** Everyday Stalinism
Sheila Fitzpatrick. Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s.. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. x + 227 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $27.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-19-505000-2; $13.95 (paper), ISBN 0-19-505001-0
Reviewed by Nellie H. Ohr, Independent Scholar. Published by H-Russia (March, 2000)
The Care and Feeding of Homo sovieticus
This is one of several recent additions to Sheila Fitzpatrick's oeuvre on the social and cultural history of the Soviet Union in its dramatic early decades. A counterpart to Fitzpatrick's recent book on collectivized peasants, this work is devoted to urban residents in the Russian republic in the 1930s. Fitzpatrick finds it unnecessary to divide the group into subspecies along class lines because class definitions had become so distorted in the Stalinist lexicon, and the population so mobile, that "relations between classes were comparatively unimportant in Stalinist society. What mattered was the relationship to the state -- in particular, the state as an allocator of goods in an economy of chronic scarcity" (pp. 11-12). Focusing on a common urban experience, this book provides few scenes from the factory floor but many from the street, the food-store and the kitchen table.
Fitzpatrick seeks to prove a refreshingly simple assertion: that Soviet urban residents in the Stalinist 1930s sought to live "normal," ordinary lives in extraordinary times, amidst chronic shortages, social upheaval and political terror. Going further, she attempts to paint a portrait of the emerging species Homo sovieticus. A major contribution of the book is to detail various strategies by which Soviet urbanites attempted to live "normal lives." This included strategies not only for physical survival but also for emotional and psychological survival. Fitzpatrick attempts to get inside people's heads and to understand how they perceived and made sense of what was happening....
In Chapter Two, for example, she describes food shortages and other miseries of urban living and the subterfuges, personal connections and other skills necessary for "hunting and gathering" food and other necessities. The following two chapters, "Palaces on Monday" and "The Magic Tablecloth" contrast this with a more positive social phenomenon, the unprecedented upward mobility of the era, and with the bracing cultural images of a brave new world under construction. In a similar alternation of social and political with cultural issues, Chapter Six details family problems such as absconding husbands and political measures such as the 1936 law restricting abortions, then retells her previously published research on the cultural pretensions of managers' wives.
...How did Soviet citizens reconcile their current material hardships, for example, with what they read in the newspapers? Did they accept official declarations that current privations were mere hiccups on the road to abundance? Fitzpatrick argues that whether they believed is less important than the fact that utopian promises were part of the population's experience; "a Soviet citizen might believe or disbelieve in a radiant future, but could not be ignorant that one was promised" (p. 67)....
Her conclusion sums up the survival strategies detailed above, as well as their psychological effects, and attempts a description of the newly evolving Homo sovieticus. Fatalistic and passive, citizens still had strategies of self-protection. Indeed, to assure authority figures that they were powerless was in itself a tactic for gaining indulgence. (As Fitzpatrick astutely points out, even the subjects of the Harvard Project interviews used this strategy toward the well-intentioned American interviewers, who themselves were authority figures). These supposedly powerless Soviet citizens were also risk-takers, trying to strike it lucky. Many played the potentially dangerous game of denouncing their bosses, for example. Managers too had to take risks all the time simply in order to carry out their jobs. As Fitzpatrick points out, this gambling mentality was the antithesis of the official mentality stressing rational planning. Outwardly obedient, Homo sovieticus retained a degree of skepticism. "Homo sovieticus was a string-puller, an operator, a time-server, a freeloader, a mouther of slogans, and much more. But above all, he was a survivor" (p. 227).
The relationship between this species and the regime thus ranged between passive acceptance and cautious hostility. Some, such as young people, supported the regime actively. Workers probably felt a "residual feeling of connection with the Soviet cause" and thus gave passive support to the regime. Trying to explain this grudging acceptance, Fitzpatrick points out that Stalin's regime had positioned itself as the only alternative associated with national sentiment and patriotism, with progress, and with a paternalistic welfare state.
Casting about for a metaphor to describe this relationship, Fitzpatrick considers and finds inadequate the images of a prison, a conscript army or a closed institution such as a strict boarding school. The final image on which she settles is original and thought-provoking. The Stalin regime was like a soup kitchen or welfare agency. Citizens expected it to provide for them and placated it with a "range of supplicatory and dependent behaviors" (p. 227). To extend the metaphor, one might say that it was like the stereotype of the Salvation Army. One had to sing a hymn to Stalin or give a testimonial about one's conversion before receiving one's dinner....
This is not a groundbreaking work in terms of startlingly new research or new analytical concepts. Readers wanting a deeper knowledge of citizens' struggle for food, for example, might consult the work of Elena Osokina; for more on popular complicity in the Great Terror, Robert Thurston's controversial Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia would serve; for an in-depth case study of citizens living in a Soviet city, one might read Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain. For an analysis of Soviet jargon or consumerism in a broader time-span, one could turn to Jeffrey Brooks' Thank You, Comrade Stalin or to parts of Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd's collection Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution. However, what makes Everyday Stalinism unique is a distinctly Fitzpatrickian analysis, both social and cultural, incorporating themes she has highlighted in the past, such as upward mobility and "culturedness."...
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Posted: 13 March 2000
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