***** STALINISM AS A WAY OF LIFE: A Narrative in Documents
Co-Edited by Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov Translation by Steven Shabad and Thomas Hoisington
2000 Slavic Studies 496 pp. 6 illus., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 Cloth ISBN 0-300-08480-3 $35.00
"Maybe some people are shy about writing, but I will write the real truth. . . . Is it really possible that people at the newspaper haven't heard this. . . that we don't want to be on the kolkhoz [collective farm], we work and work, and there's nothing to eat. Really, how can we live?"--a farmer's letter, 1936, from Stalinism as a Way of Life
What was life like for ordinary Russian citizens in the 1930s? How did they feel about socialism and the acts committed in its name? This unique book provides English-speaking readers with the responses of those who experienced firsthand the events of the middle-Stalinist period. The book contains 157 documents--mostly letters to authorities from Soviet citizens, but also reports compiled by the secret police and Communist Party functionaries, internal government and party memoranda, and correspondence among party officials. Selected from recently opened Soviet archives, these previously unknown documents illuminate in new ways both the complex social roots of Stalinism and the texture of daily life during a highly traumatic decade of Soviet history.
Accompanied by introductory and linking commentary, the documents are organized around such themes as the impact of terror on the citizenry, the childhood experience, the countryside after collectivization, and the role of cadres that were directed to "decide everything." In their own words, peasants and workers, intellectuals and the uneducated, adults and children, men and women, Russians and people from other national groups tell their stories. Their writings reveal how individual lives influenced--and were affected by--the larger events of Soviet history....
Lewis Siegelbaum is professor and chairman of the Department of History at Michigan State University. Andrei Sokolov is main researcher and department head of the Institute of Russian History at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Reviews... "This is a first-rate edition of and commentary on significant documents from the Stalinist 1930's. Stalinism as a Way of Life offers a deep look into society, providing a rounded, complex picture of the U.S.S.R. in a turbulent decade." -- Ronald Grigor Suny, Department of Political Science, The University of Chicago
Annals of Communism series Yale University Press
<http://www.yale.edu/yup/books/084803.htm> *****
Lewis Siegelbaum: <http://www.history.msu.edu/cv/siegelbaum.html>
***** Aileen Kelly, "In the Promised Land," _The New York Review of Books_ 29 November 2001: <http://www.yale.edu/annals/Reviews/review_texts/Kelly_on_Siegelbaum_NYRB_11.29.01.htm>
"Great massacres may be commanded by tyrants, but they are imposed by peoples," H.R. Trevor-Roper wrote on the European witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Afterwards, when the mood has changed, or when the social pressure, thanks to the blood-letting, no longer exists, the anonymous people slinks away, leaving public responsibility to the preachers, the theorists, and the rulers who demanded, justified, and ordered the act.
This passage is cited by J. Arch Getty in The Road to Terror, a selection of documents on internal purges among the Soviet Party elite in the 1930s. The opening up of former Soviet Party and police archives has allowed scholars to narrow the range of estimates of the number of victims of Stalin's Terror. In its two worst years (1937-1938) 1.5 million people were arrested on political grounds, hundreds of thousands were shot, and the population of the labor camps increased by half a million. The overall number of deaths caused by repression in the Thirties (including the casualties of the collectivization of agriculture) has been calculated as between 1.5 and 2 million, although some estimates are considerably higher.[1] Add to that countless ruined lives, the use of torture to extract confessions, the brutality of the huge system of work camps, and a national trauma that lasted for decades.
Enormous though Stalin's guilt was, the mass slaughter and the widespread repression of the Soviet 1930s cannot be explained away by the paranoia of a power-crazed despot. We now know that the Soviet party-state was not (as the "totalitarian" school of analysts once believed) a monolithic system ruling omnipotently over a passive, victimized society. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stephen Kotkin, and others have demonstrated from previously inaccessible archives that Stalinism was not just a political system but a set of values and a way of life which many Soviet citizens actively embraced or passively assented to from a wide variety of motives. As Getty observes, at every step of the road to terror
there were constituencies both within and outside the elite that supported repression of various groups, sometimes with greater vehemence than Stalin did.... Repression was as much a matter of consensus as of one man's dementia, and this is somehow even more troubling....
This is not to say that Soviet citizens were stoically indifferent to their daily tribulations, or that they managed to ignore the increasing disparity between the regime's achievements and its propaganda claims as the First Five-Year Plan consistently failed to meet its wildly unrealistic targets. Indeed, the misery and bewilderment that this caused is a dominant theme in the letters, petitions, complaints, reports, confessions, and denunciations from peasants, workers, intellectuals, and Party officials assembled by Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov in Stalinism as a Way of Life. The impact of the documents in this collection (the successor to The Road to Terror in Yale University Press's admirable series Annals of Communism) is strengthened by the fact that some of their writers were barely literate.
The industrialization project was celebrated as a triumph of rational planning. A very different picture is painted by workers on construction sites where chaos and confusion reigned, exacerbated by the constant raising of targets on orders from Moscow. There were frequent protests to Pravda about lack of basic food and shelter, and unsanitary conditions which led to outbreaks of disease of epidemic proportions. One worker complains that although his brigade fulfilled the plan by more than 190 percent, their families were starving; rations were reserved for the workers alone. Their co-op contained "nothing but empty shelves and bottles of perfume," while at the markets profiteers sold goods at vastly inflated prices.
Another worker protests: "Lice have eaten us to death, and soap is given only to railroad workers." Pravda was inundated with peasant accounts of thieving and mismanagement by collective farm chairmen, and other kinds of persecution suffered by farm workers: "We live in a free country, but there are so many prisoners and for what. If your crops get diseased it's ten years, if your horse wears out its withers it's ten years, if you didn't give somebody a cigarette it's ten years, and so on."
Others wrote harrowing accounts of the fate of dispossessed kulaks ("rich" peasants), who had been sent by the hundreds of thousands to forced exile in distant provinces with no food or shelter; even secret police officials complained of mismanagement on this score. The cult of the plan remained a foundation of Stalinism; but plans changed with unpredictable frequency, each new turn bringing the downfall of officials who had been diligently implementing the previous Party line.
Moreover, no interpretation of any plan at any given time could be regarded as wholly reliable. The chairman of a rural council wrote to Politburo member M.I. Kalinin of his fear of being tried for misappropriation of funds as a result of attempting to fulfill contradictory orders from the regional and central Party finance departments: "You work like you're on the edge of a straight razor."
Many complaints and protests show a keen awareness that the system had created a new privileged class-a rampant bureaucracy with privileged access to scarce goods and apartments; and many refer to the shadow economy, whereby citizens coped with endemic shortages through illegal trading in state goods and the cultivation of influential contacts.
However, while Soviet citizens were not slow to complain about the miseries and injustices of daily life, and to denounce inefficiency and corruption on the part of their coworkers or immediate superiors, they tended to present these as abuses by local officials of a system whose inherent rationality they did not question. One complainant concludes that all the abuses he lists can easily be prevented: "All you have to do is have the right person put pressure in the right place." Or, as another affirms: "If our dear leader Comrade Stalin knew what is going on in the countryside, he would never forgive it."...
...Lewis Siegelbaum's analysis of letters from ordinary citizens shows that very many did not question the policy of repression itself, ascribing "excesses" in this respect only to particular individuals: a common suspicion was that "enemies of the people" had wormed their way into the NKVD and, by arresting loyal Communists, were attempting to undermine Soviet power. Substantial numbers of the Party elite seem to have seen the Terror as a necessary defensive operation. Those who (we may assume) did not, such as the veteran Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, were forced to use the official rhetoric. In a letter to Stalin which he hoped would save him from execution after his trial in 1938, he protests his innocence of the charges against him, but writes that "there is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge...[which] encompasses 1) the guilty; 2) persons under suspicion; and 3) persons potentially under suspicion."[5]
Memoirs of the period, however, suggest that expressions of belief in the rationality of the purges were commonly more than just a stratagem for survival. Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls the exasperated retort of the poet Anna Akhmatova, when one of their acquaintances began speculating on the reasons for a particular arrest: "What do you mean, what for? It's time you understood that people are arrested for nothing!"...
<http://www.yale.edu/annals/Reviews/review_texts/Kelly_on_Siegelbaum_NYRB_11.29.01.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
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