Read Online Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 by Timothy Johnston - Free Book Online
Authors: Timothy Johnston
Tags: General, History, 20th Century, Europe, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Modern, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Social History
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shared understanding of the symbolic and stylistic associations of that particular fashion.
Successful patterns of behaviour provide a window into the collective mentalit ´ e of the society within which they proliferated. I employ the term mentalit ´ e as described by Darnton to mean ‘the attitudes, assump- tions and implicit ideologies of specific social groups’. 116 These some- times unconscious assumptions are revealed in the manner that ordinary citizens deployed the ‘tactics of the habitat’ in relation to Official Soviet
Identity. For example, the successful proliferation of a rumour that the Allies had demanded the closure of the Comintern in 1943 provides an important insight into the ways in which Soviet citizens imagined the Grand Alliance relationship. 117
115 Shibutani, Improvised News, 176–82; O. Figes and B. Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (London, 1999), 25.
116 R. Darnton, ‘The History of Mentalit ´ e s: Recent Writings on Revolution, Crimi-
nality, and Death in France’, in R. Harvey Brown and S. M. Lyman eds., Structure, Consciousness, and History (Cambridge, 1978), 112. See also Darnton’s critique of the historiography of mentalit ´ e : R. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984), 258–60. Said talks in similar terms about the ‘saturating hegemonic forms’ that shape the way individuals interpret the world around them: Said, Orientalism, 6–14.
117 See Chapter 2.
xliv Being Soviet
This attempt to ‘read’ collective behaviour as a window into a society’s collective mentalit ´ e closely resembles what the anthropologist Geertz calls ‘thick description’. Geertz suggests that myths and rituals provide insights into the ‘webs of meaning’ of a society: ‘Culture is public because meaning is.’ 118 The success of a particular rumour or style of dress was ‘public’ in the later Stalin years, in the sense that it was collectively understood. This book attempts to recover some elements of the ‘public’ framework of thinking that made that behaviour compre- hensible to contemporaries.
The study of mentalit ´ e can also be compared to the attempt to understand a joke. 119 A joke is funny because it makes sense to the social group within which it circulates. If we are not familiar with the
symbolic and rhetorical world of the joke then we don’t get it, and don’t laugh. Whether they approved of them or not, Soviet citizens under- stood the symbolic importance of the rumours, dance styles, political activism, and musical tastes of their contemporaries. The exploration of these collective understandings is necessarily impressionistic and runs the risk of simplifying the complex frameworks through which Soviet citizens imagined the outside world. Nonetheless, a careful reading of this behaviour makes it possible to begin to interpret the ‘interworked systems of construable signs’ that gave life meaning in the USSR. 120
One potential danger of such an approach is to read too much into, or misread the meaning of, a particular action. The study of mentalit ´ e also runs the risk of positing homogeneity and unity when there was a diversity of complex views. This danger is alleviated to a significant degree by the study of only those rumours and styles that were peculiarly ‘successful’. In terms of rumours, for example, I only discuss rumours to which I found at least a hundred references in three or more source groups. By studying successful, rather than marginal or occasional behaviour, it is possible to avoid the pitfalls of overinterpreting meaning on a narrow basis.
The examination of mentalit ´ e is not the same as the attempt to chart ‘popular opinion’ in the Stalin era. The study of ‘popular opinion’ in this period has been justifiably criticized in recent years. Much of the criticism has focused around the way in which historians of ‘popular
Successful patterns of behaviour provide a window into the collective mentalit ´ e of the society within which they proliferated. I employ the term mentalit ´ e as described by Darnton to mean ‘the attitudes, assump- tions and implicit ideologies of specific social groups’. 116 These some- times unconscious assumptions are revealed in the manner that ordinary citizens deployed the ‘tactics of the habitat’ in relation to Official Soviet
Identity. For example, the successful proliferation of a rumour that the Allies had demanded the closure of the Comintern in 1943 provides an important insight into the ways in which Soviet citizens imagined the Grand Alliance relationship. 117
115 Shibutani, Improvised News, 176–82; O. Figes and B. Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (London, 1999), 25.
116 R. Darnton, ‘The History of Mentalit ´ e s: Recent Writings on Revolution, Crimi-
nality, and Death in France’, in R. Harvey Brown and S. M. Lyman eds., Structure, Consciousness, and History (Cambridge, 1978), 112. See also Darnton’s critique of the historiography of mentalit ´ e : R. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984), 258–60. Said talks in similar terms about the ‘saturating hegemonic forms’ that shape the way individuals interpret the world around them: Said, Orientalism, 6–14.
117 See Chapter 2.
xliv Being Soviet
This attempt to ‘read’ collective behaviour as a window into a society’s collective mentalit ´ e closely resembles what the anthropologist Geertz calls ‘thick description’. Geertz suggests that myths and rituals provide insights into the ‘webs of meaning’ of a society: ‘Culture is public because meaning is.’ 118 The success of a particular rumour or style of dress was ‘public’ in the later Stalin years, in the sense that it was collectively understood. This book attempts to recover some elements of the ‘public’ framework of thinking that made that behaviour compre- hensible to contemporaries.
The study of mentalit ´ e can also be compared to the attempt to understand a joke. 119 A joke is funny because it makes sense to the social group within which it circulates. If we are not familiar with the
symbolic and rhetorical world of the joke then we don’t get it, and don’t laugh. Whether they approved of them or not, Soviet citizens under- stood the symbolic importance of the rumours, dance styles, political activism, and musical tastes of their contemporaries. The exploration of these collective understandings is necessarily impressionistic and runs the risk of simplifying the complex frameworks through which Soviet citizens imagined the outside world. Nonetheless, a careful reading of this behaviour makes it possible to begin to interpret the ‘interworked systems of construable signs’ that gave life meaning in the USSR. 120
One potential danger of such an approach is to read too much into, or misread the meaning of, a particular action. The study of mentalit ´ e also runs the risk of positing homogeneity and unity when there was a diversity of complex views. This danger is alleviated to a significant degree by the study of only those rumours and styles that were peculiarly ‘successful’. In terms of rumours, for example, I only discuss rumours to which I found at least a hundred references in three or more source groups. By studying successful, rather than marginal or occasional behaviour, it is possible to avoid the pitfalls of overinterpreting meaning on a narrow basis.
The examination of mentalit ´ e is not the same as the attempt to chart ‘popular opinion’ in the Stalin era. The study of ‘popular opinion’ in this period has been justifiably criticized in recent years. Much of the criticism has focused around the way in which historians of ‘popular
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