Read Online Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 by Timothy Johnston - Free Book Online Page B
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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1939–53. 128 These sources tend to categorize all behaviour within the narrow framework of support or subversion, and the cate- gories they use are often questionable. Nonetheless, to use the example above, it is by no means logical to infer, despite the meaningless nature of the language about ‘Polish reactionaries’, that rumours about an Anglo-American takeover never circulated at the Krakov market at all. The rumours and behaviour contained within the svodki and State Prosecution files provide, if nothing else, a window into what was imaginable, to a creative secret police officer under Stalin.
The second category of sources is those created by Soviet citizens themselves, such as letters sent to political leaders in Moscow; 129 and the memoirs and diaries of Soviet citizens living at the time. 130 These sources tend to provide a more ‘loyal’ image of the Soviet citizenry. Memoirs, like all sources, have their own particular pitfalls. They were subject to government censorship in the Soviet period, and some Soviet-era texts, such as the wartime diary of V. Vishnevskii, are clearly full of later interpolations. 131 The third source category consists of interview type- scripts generated by historians. These include the material of HIP,
125 TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 23, d. 1449. l. 34.
126 Henceforth Sv.
127 Henceforth Inf. These party-generated sources did not rely on secret police material .
128 Henceforth Proc. My thanks to V. A. Kozlov and others at the Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, henceforth GARF, for access to the file database. The identities of prosecuted individuals are protected by only using their initials.
129 Henceforth Let. The personal letter caches of: Kalinin, Molotov, Shvernik, Malenkov, Chadaev, and Stalin were examined. Copies were taken of nearly 450 letters.
130 Henceforth Mem.
131 V. S. Vishnevskii, Leningrad: Dnevniki voennyx let. 2 Noiabria 1941 goda – 31 Dekabria 1942 goda (Moscow, 2002).
Introduction xlvii
and a total of twenty-seven interviews conducted by the author between November 2003 and September 2008. 132 Interviews, like memoirs, suffer from the danger of self-censorship: the narrator selectively omits elements from the narrative in order to justify, simplify, or valorize their experiences. 133 A ‘semi-structured’ interview style allows the interviewee to shape the dialogue but also provides an opportunity to question some of the details provided. 134
None of these individual source groups provides a perfect picture of the ways in which Soviet citizens imagined the outside world between 1939 and 1953. However, when they are ‘triangulated’ together, they provide a constituent picture of the kinds of behaviour and attitudes that were prevalent in this era. 135 Just as hill walkers ‘triangulate’ their location by taking bearings from two known points, so this book ‘triangulates’ from a diversity of sources to locate the mentalit ´ e of the later Stalin era. In the pages that follow, individual sources will almost never be cited in isolation, and a system of abbreviations will also be used to make clear what kind of document is being referred to. 136
CHRONOLOGY
This book examines how Soviet citizens engaged with Official Soviet Identity over an intentionally broad stretch of time. One of the weaknesses of current Soviet historiography is its ‘Balkanization’ into certain eras. We have often separate literatures on the Revolution, NEP, ‘Great Break’, 1930s, war, post-war, and Khrushchev periods. Being Soviet intentionally spans at least three of those conventional periods of the Stalin years in order to examine how Soviet citizens engaged with a number of different incarna-
132 Quotations from the HIP are from the notes made by the interviewers at the time not verbatim records of the interviews.
133 P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History , 3rd edn (Oxford, 2000), 110–45.
134 Henceforth Int. See Appendix. On
The second category of sources is those created by Soviet citizens themselves, such as letters sent to political leaders in Moscow; 129 and the memoirs and diaries of Soviet citizens living at the time. 130 These sources tend to provide a more ‘loyal’ image of the Soviet citizenry. Memoirs, like all sources, have their own particular pitfalls. They were subject to government censorship in the Soviet period, and some Soviet-era texts, such as the wartime diary of V. Vishnevskii, are clearly full of later interpolations. 131 The third source category consists of interview type- scripts generated by historians. These include the material of HIP,
125 TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 23, d. 1449. l. 34.
126 Henceforth Sv.
127 Henceforth Inf. These party-generated sources did not rely on secret police material .
128 Henceforth Proc. My thanks to V. A. Kozlov and others at the Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, henceforth GARF, for access to the file database. The identities of prosecuted individuals are protected by only using their initials.
129 Henceforth Let. The personal letter caches of: Kalinin, Molotov, Shvernik, Malenkov, Chadaev, and Stalin were examined. Copies were taken of nearly 450 letters.
130 Henceforth Mem.
131 V. S. Vishnevskii, Leningrad: Dnevniki voennyx let. 2 Noiabria 1941 goda – 31 Dekabria 1942 goda (Moscow, 2002).
Introduction xlvii
and a total of twenty-seven interviews conducted by the author between November 2003 and September 2008. 132 Interviews, like memoirs, suffer from the danger of self-censorship: the narrator selectively omits elements from the narrative in order to justify, simplify, or valorize their experiences. 133 A ‘semi-structured’ interview style allows the interviewee to shape the dialogue but also provides an opportunity to question some of the details provided. 134
None of these individual source groups provides a perfect picture of the ways in which Soviet citizens imagined the outside world between 1939 and 1953. However, when they are ‘triangulated’ together, they provide a constituent picture of the kinds of behaviour and attitudes that were prevalent in this era. 135 Just as hill walkers ‘triangulate’ their location by taking bearings from two known points, so this book ‘triangulates’ from a diversity of sources to locate the mentalit ´ e of the later Stalin era. In the pages that follow, individual sources will almost never be cited in isolation, and a system of abbreviations will also be used to make clear what kind of document is being referred to. 136
CHRONOLOGY
This book examines how Soviet citizens engaged with Official Soviet Identity over an intentionally broad stretch of time. One of the weaknesses of current Soviet historiography is its ‘Balkanization’ into certain eras. We have often separate literatures on the Revolution, NEP, ‘Great Break’, 1930s, war, post-war, and Khrushchev periods. Being Soviet intentionally spans at least three of those conventional periods of the Stalin years in order to examine how Soviet citizens engaged with a number of different incarna-
132 Quotations from the HIP are from the notes made by the interviewers at the time not verbatim records of the interviews.
133 P. Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History , 3rd edn (Oxford, 2000), 110–45.
134 Henceforth Int. See Appendix. On
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