Sheila Fitzpatrick: Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 288 pp.
Winners and Losers
As the title indicates, Sheila Fitzpatrick focuses primarily on how ordinary people adapted to life after the great upheaval of the October Revolution. First, who were the losers? The new constitution of 1918 provides a helpful checklist: Kulaks, entrepreneurs, people living off unearned income, monks and priests, members of the nobility and the upper classes generally. To this list could be added anyone who owned a large apartment. In the ensuing decades, the housing shortage was to become so acute that it was not unusual for pre-war apartments to shelter more than one family in each room.
Who were the winners? Broadly speaking, the proletarians and peasants, of course, but within these groups there were special beneficiaries. Stakhanovites and Komsomol officials, for example, were rewarded with larger quarters, free furniture and the like. In return, it was expected that they would become examples for others and avail themselves of the books they were given to cultivate their knowledge. And it should be kept in mind that the recipients, while privileged, never actually owned any of the things presented to them – it all remained the property of the state and could in theory be reclaimed at any time.
As Fitzpatrick points out, another thing that the revolution changed was the traditional concept of class. In the USSR, the individual’s relationship to the means of production was less important than access to the goods produced, which was regulated by the state as a matter of entitlement. In other words, ownership meant less than access, which became so valuable because goods were so hard to come by, scarcity being the result of the communists’ own economic policies. Though some years were better than others, in general a shortage of consumer goods was a typical feature of command economies from beginning to end. Even in Moscow, people soon acquired the habit of getting in line first so as to secure a place, and only then asking what everyone was waiting for.
As an aside, I can confirm that such practices obtained even decades later in the DDR. Now and then one would come across a load of fresh peaches or strawberries being sold from the back of a delivery truck that had pulled over to the side of the road. One couldn’t always see the truck itself, but the long line leading to it was a dead giveaway. After spending some time in East Berlin, I too acquired the habit of always carrying a string bag in my pocket in case I happened upon such a line. People would buy items they neither wanted nor needed as long as they were scarce, knowing that they could always barter them for something they did want. In the Soviet Union, such behavior dated back at least to Stalin’s day.
Here’s another element of continuity. Party activists early on developed an effective technique for coping with criticism, especially from so-called class enemies. “An important aspect of the party’s claim to cultural vanguard status was its possession of esoteric knowledge, namely Marxist-Leninist ideology…. To outsiders, the boiled-down Marxism of Soviet political literacy courses might look simplistic, almost catechismic. To insiders, it was a ‘scientific’ worldview that enabled its possessors to rid themselves and others of all kinds of prejudice and superstition – and incidentally master an aggressive debating style characterized by generous use of sarcasm about the motives and putative ‘class essence’ of opponents. Smugness and tautology, along with polemical vigor, were among the most notable characteristics of Soviet Marxism.” (pg. 16)
The “confident, contemptuous tone” favored by Stalin in the 1930s was still being displayed generations later. I once witnessed a demonstration of it in East Berlin’s pedagogical center, the House of the Teacher. As the end of the German Democratic Republic approached in 1989, security types clad in black leather jackets showed up to defend the status quo before a large gathering of reformers. They were indeed aggressive and sarcastic. Never having seen them in action before, I found them intimidating. By that time, though, the teachers and other citizens of the DDR were thoroughly sick of them and simply brushed aside their rhetoric. That was the day I realized that ordinary people had lost their fear, and the system’s hold over them had really and truly been broken.
What Stalin Got Wrong
That things would end this way could not have been anticipated, of course, in the early years of Soviet power. Still, even in the beginning there were signs that not all was going as expected. According to Marx, communism was supposed to be the inevitable outcome of developments within the capitalist system, such that the most highly industrialized state would be the first to turn to communism. This, of course, failed to happen, as the revolution broke out not in Sweden or Germany or Switzerland, as Lenin had expected, but in a relatively backward country. The explanation given for this was that the masses in Russia were driven to the head of the line because they had been more severely exploited than elsewhere.
Crime was also supposed to disappear, since the new social order had removed the injustices and material deprivations that were supposedly the basis for theft. This also failed to occur, even as the generations brought up under the old system gradually died out. What’s more, new categories of crime arose, along with the means of combating them, as large numbers of people took to denouncing their neighbors to the police. In part, this was another consequence of the housing shortage – people simply wanted to increase their cramped living quarters. This provides the background to the following joke: A husband tells his wife, “Just think Masha, how unpleasant. I wrote a denunciation on Galkin and it turns out that Balkin has the bigger room.” (pg. 208) On the whole, of course, denunciation was no laughing matter. Even those who did not actively participate became complicit through their enforced passivity when it occurred all around them.
The fundamental problem that plagued the new system from the beginning was the triumph of dogma over experience and common sense. In the 1920s, for example, new apartment buildings were constructed without kitchens, since it was assumed that everyone would take all their meals at cafeterias. Before long, when reality proved otherwise, rooms meant for living space were converted into kitchenettes. This reduced the space available for other purposes without really solving the problem, since they were not built on anywhere near the required scale. In retrospect, it may be hard to imagine that anyone ever imagined that such a scheme would prove practical. Yet, on the basis of ideology alone, that is how apartment buildings were indeed constructed.
Since the theory of communism could not be wrong (it was, after all, “scientific”), but the system obviously was not working in practice, that left only one explanation: Saboteurs and wreckers must be at work. This led to the fruitless, never-ending search for guilty parties. One technique to unmask them was through criticism from below, which Stalin supported as it had a beneficial side-effect: It proved a weapon he could use against the unpopular bureaucratic class.
Another way was through the process of self-criticism, a kind of public confession that omitted a key element present in the church variant: final absolution. “Soviet political culture had developed no effective mechanism for allowing errant sheep back into the fold.” (pg. 193) Sins against socialism could never be totally expurgated. Expressing repentance for your errors and crimes might be enough to get you back into the party, but the stigma always remained. When the next wave of repressions came, any youthful dalliance with Trotskyism could be dredged up again, often with fatal consequences. (See Update below)
Purges
This is precisely what happened during the Great Purges of the late ’30s, as the revolution began to eat its own children, and those who had been victimizing others became victims themselves. Previously, in the 1920s, you were suspect if you belonged to a certain class, for example if you were a kulak. By the 1930s, such markers began to lose their relevance. People who once had sought to protect themselves by denouncing their own family members for crimes such as “softness on Trotskyism” were themselves liable to be arrested and charged with the crime of having such people as relatives. Gradually it became clear that anyone was subject to arbitrary arrest, even – or especially – members of the party. According to another popular joke (this one not published in the newspaper but overheard by the police), the name of the party boss in Leningrad, Kirov, spelled backwards is “Vorik” – the Russian word for “petty thief.” The implication being, of course, that party leaders were themselves stealing from the populace.
For Stalin, with his background and mindset, the idea that there could somehow not be a vast conspiracy was inconceivable. The evidence was all around, in the obvious failure of the USSR, despite forced industrialization and collectivization, to catch up to, much less overtake capitalist countries. And ordinary Russians, normally so skeptical, in this instance tended to agree. Moreover, they reasoned that if people were arrested, they must surely have done something. Suspicion was a daily companion. It was inconceivable to them that arrests were made simply to fulfill a pre-established quota.
Even those who had been arrested and knew they were innocent assumed that it was all just an aberration, and that their fellow inmates must indeed be guilty. This meant that even behind bars they tended to shun each other, at least initially. Such was the popular faith in Stalin’s infallibility that wives who knew their husbands had done nothing wrong began to have doubts. Children, too.
Once the show trials featuring big party bosses began, they proved popular among the rank and file. To a large degree they became a form of entertainment, with blow-by-blow accounts in the press. The draconian punishments inevitably handed down at the end were not just applauded – the public would have been happy to see them carried out even more ruthlessly, at least when the trials first started. (See Update below)
Some Things Have Not Changed
Fitzpatrick does not make a big point about this, but anyone familiar with life in Russia after Gorbachev will notice certain continuities as well as change. The USSR featured soaring revolutionary rhetoric, for example, combined with heavy-handed paternalistic practices. Though today the uplifting slogans are largely gone, the bureaucracy is still often characterized by rudeness and red tape.
Back in the ’30s, some people coped with unresponsive officialdom by creating what was in essence a “roof” system (to use the current term): Local elites formed self-protecting “families” whose members helped each other out. When a boss was transferred to another town, for instance, he would make sure to take his trusted subordinates along with him. Stalin hated this, but the system was so ingrained that even he could do little to stamp it out. (pg. 32f)
“The poor quality of the few goods available was a subject of constant complaint…. Handles fell off pots, matches refused to strike, and foreign objects were baked into bread made from adulterated flour.” (pg. 44) Though things have improved overall, some of these shortcomings persist even in the Russia of today. Nowadays, at least, when a new tank breaks down during the Victory Day parade or a handle comes off a military vehicle in the president’s hand, it’s news.
Faced with an unresponsive bureaucracy and all-encompassing state power, many people refused to participate in public life to the extent possible and sought refuge in the private sphere. This trend also continues into the present: “The wish to have such dacha-palaces still survives…” (pg. 106) Of course, the dachas of today are much more palatial than those of the 1930s.
Contemporary Russians, like their counterparts from before the war, remain suspicious of banks, pollsters, and most representatives of the state. With some historical justification: “Even agencies like the census bureau and local electoral commissions were drawn in to report on the popular mood.” (pg. 169)
It was their own government that taught Russians to be cynical. When the new Stalin constitution was proposed, with its expansive guarantees of freedom of speech, the press, assembly and so on, no one believed it for a moment. As one person commented, “It’s all lies what they write in the draft of the new constitution, that each citizen can write in the press and speak out. Of course it isn’t so, you try speaking up, tell how many people died of hunger in the USSR and you’ll get 10 years.” (pg. 180) This remark was noted down by a government eavesdropper, who classified it as “hostile,” though a better term might have been “defiant.”
At least one thing has changed for the better, though: In Stalin’s day, “not to believe the party would be blasphemy.” (pg. 215)
Conclusion
Fitzpatrick’s survey is enlivened by colorful stories drawn from the archives, featuring diverse topics such as family squabbles, abortion practices, and the fate of abandoned children. She is particularly informative when it comes to issues involving women, for example the unpaid work they did improving cultural life in remote factory towns that had been created on orders from above.
All in all, while I enjoyed this book, I am looking forward to reading her more recent effort, a memoir of her experiences doing research in cold-war Russia, which promises to be more autobiographical in nature.
Update: For an eyewitness account of how public criticism and self-criticism worked, and its consequences, see Betty Roland: Caviar for Breakfast. For a similar account of early purge trials, see Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander. One who was purged but lived to write about it was Lev Kopelev. His memoirs too are reviewed elsewhere at this site. Also William J. Chase: Enemies Within the Gates?
© Hamilton Beck
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