THE SOVIET SYSTEM AND THE CULTURE OF STALINISM
BOOK REVIEW by Olga Velikanova (St. Petersburg and Toronto)
Jeffrey Brooks. THANK YOU, COMRADE STALIN! SOVIET PUBLIC CULTURE FROM REVOLUTION TO COLD WAR. Princeton University Press, 2000.
The latest book of Professor Brooks (Johns Hopkins University) is a big success. The copy in Canada's largest library is in the Short Term Loan section. You can only take it out for two hours. The book is of interest to historians and journalists as well as political scientists. It makes its contribution to the scholarly debate about what it was that motivated Soviet people, what they thought, in what they believed, and how they saw the world and their own place in it.
Social psychologists consider that people's social behavior is determined not always directly by the reality of their everyday life and political events, but often by the images that this reality takes in their consciousness. Studying the perceptual system that lay at the source of the social behavior of Soviet people will help us understand how they could tolerate and even support a regime that brought the country such unimaginable suffering -- civil war, discrimination, famine, terror.
The "totalitarian" school of Sovietology explained the regime's stability as the result of fear and deception. Social historians have preferred to place the emphasis on people's pragmatic interests in the cruel struggle for survival. In order to understand how fear and enthusiasm, dissent in the kitchen and fanaticism at the public meeting went hand in hand, more and more researchers have been stressing mass consciousness (to use the Soviet term) or collective perceptions (the term used by anthropologists) or mentality (the good old school of the Annals) or political culture (as in the history of culture) or public opinion (as in sociology). These varied approaches to the puzzle of Homo Sovieticus are supplemented by the fashionable research themes of everyday life, identity, and -- most promising of all -- political mythology.
The author gives hardly any definition of what he means by the leading term in his subtitle: "public culture." But from the content of the book it quickly becomes clear that his main topic is the self-representation of the Soviet authorities -- that is, the official Soviet culture, as it was transmitted by the mass media of the time, and above all by the newspapers Pravda, Izvestiya, Krasnaya zvezda [Red Star, newspaper of the armed forces], and the central newspapers for workers, peasants, and youth. "The government's public conversation with officials and sympathizers" -- thus the author defines the place of the press in the social universe.
The central Soviet newspapers are evidently the most accessible historical source, studied far and wide by both Soviet and Western researchers. Jeffrey Brooks, however, asks this source new questions that have been posed by contemporary Soviet Studies, enriched by archival discoveries and interdisciplinary "incursions." Skilfully formulated questions have been able to extract new knowledge from the dogeared pages of Pravda.
The book examines official culture at a new level of interpretation that transcends the limits of Marxist- Leninist ideology. "The press presented a normative standard for society as a whole and a practical guide to public behavior for all citizens" (p. xviii). That is, it displayed Soviet values and the official picture of the world. Behind the ideological formulas and propaganda cliches of newspaper editorials the author discerns narratives of the system of perceptions of the world -- the search for a new identity, the image of the enemy, the image of the leader, xenophobia, the social hierarchy -- as they were articulated by the Soviet authorities and the Soviet elite.
In order to make clear the absurdity and utopian nature of the official Stalinist images, the distance that separated the official Stalinist representations from commonsense and from cruel reality, Jeffrey Brooks proposes the concept of "performative culture." He draws a parallel between the political theater of Stalinism and primitive ritualistic drama with its repetitive plots, stereotyped characters, and symbolic decoration (p. 66). The cult of Stalin and the embellishment of Soviet reality were classical attributes of drama. The author uses the metaphor of the theater to demonstrate the conventionality of official culture and the symbolic dimension in which it unfolds. The concept of "performative culture," based on the painstaking dissection of newspaper texts, adds a new parameter to the specification of Soviet culture provided by earlier researchers who interpreted it as utopia or as a mythological vision of the world (Heller and Nekrich, Stites) or as theatricality or ritualism in the self-presentation of power (Sinyavsky, Papernyi, Antonov-Ovseyenko and Kotkin).
One of the metanarratives of the official scenario was the authorities' pose of beneficence toward those under their care and the expected response of gratitude: "Thank you, Comrade Stalin!" The ideology of the "gift economy" found expression in the language and metaphors of the official press. The gift economy assumed by official rhetoric represented a sharp break with the economic and social values of the free market that had permeated the pre-revolutionary press. Through the press were articulated "representations of citizens' indebtedness to the leader and the state."
This approach enables the author to interpret anew the cult of the leader. His contribution to the contemporary debate about the paternalistic relations between the authorities and the people (Feher, Siegelbaum, Verdery, Ledeneva, and others) is especially cogent and weighty by virtue of being based in deep study of the sources.
His thorough knowledge of the Russian press of the preceding period gives Jeffrey Brooks a good vantage point from which to observe broad processes in public consciousness. He notes the shift from the appeal to the reader's reason and commonsense characteristic of the press at the beginning of the century to the demand for faith in, respect for, and love of the authorities in the Soviet publications of the 1920s through the 1950s. Indeed, he notes how rational argument is replaced by the excitation of emotion in Pravda itself, comparing pre-revolutionary with post-revolutionary issues of the newspaper.
These observations constitute important arguments in favor of treating Soviet civilization as one based upon a mythological vision of the world. Whatever name we may give that vision -- myth, utopia or theater -- it structured the world of the Soviet person and lent the regime the stability that does not cease to puzzle researchers.
Jeffrey Brooks makes use of a wide range of research methods. Unlike the Europeans, who are more inclined to stick to a single method of investigating their topic, the Americans are not afraid of syncretism and boldly select the method that suits them best at any given moment. The theory of moral economy, structuralist approaches to metaphor, the concept of identity, statistical analysis -- all help the author interpret the official message of the authorities and open up a new vision of the relations between rulers and ruled.
For many researchers and lecturers the statistical analysis of the content, language, and themes of the Soviet press will be of special interest. The author chooses specific themes, and calculates quantitative indicators of their coverage on the pages of one or another newspaper. For example: What place was occupied by surveys of the international situation? What images and assessments were dominant in them? How frequently did this or that term -- "fascism," for instance -- occur? How did the place given to "world revolution," let us say, change over time? How did the set of metaphors used change? And so on.
Someone may object that the importance assigned to a theme depended on where it was published, on the first page of a newspaper or on the fourth, rather than on the number of references or the amount of space taken up. Nonetheless, in dealing with matters as delicate as collective perceptions the historian often has to be guided by his or her impression concerning which opinion or image is dominant, so any attempt at quantification deserves close attention. A more detailed justification of his criteria and methods of statistical analysis could have made his conclusions more convincing, but Jeffrey Brooks remains a historian and omits the boring description of sampling method that a sociologist would have included. With these unimportant provisos, the statistical data presented in the book may be regarded as fully representative. They add a new nuance to the study of perceptions, and I think that many colleagues will be tempted to use them.
The book provides such a broad picture of the themes, images, and plots of the official press that many students and researchers studying Soviet Russia will be able to use it as a reference manual. Cross-references enable the inquisitive reader to navigate the text without difficulty and mine the scattered nuggets of classical and contemporary material, much of it little known.
Jeffrey Brooks writes for the broadest possible audience. He helps American and European students grasp Russian realities by drawing parallels with cultural phenomena in the history of their own continents. Nor does he forget to provide Russian readers with the original Russian form of slogans, ideologems, and idioms that become unrecognizable to the Russian ear in English translation (for instance, "Dayosh!"). This is a very welcome change: it is not so long ago that American Sovietologists wrote primarily for American readers.
The development of anthropology, social psychology, and social history, and their interpenetration, open new perspectives for Soviet Studies. The book under review is a proof of that. By using the most up-to-date methods to study a traditional source, a historian has obtained new knowledge -- a broad picture of how the world looked from within the Kremlin.
NOTE
Olga Velikanova is a fellow at the Republican Humanitarian Institute of Saint-Petersburg State University, and simultaniously a resident fellow at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies of the University of Toronto, participating in the Stalin Era Research and Archive Project. Her review was translated by Stephen D. Shenfield.
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