Johnson's Russia List #6022 15 January 2002 davidjohnson@erols.com A CDI Project www.cdi.org ******** JRL RESEARCH AND ANALYTICAL SUPPLEMENT Issue No. 4 January 2002 Editor: Stephen D. Shenfield shenfield@neaccess.net CONTENTS ======== Introducing the issue POLITICS AND SOCIETY The Movement "In Defense of Childhood" Paganism and neo-paganism ECONOMY The geo-economics of Russian agriculture Heiko Pleines. Taxing the metal business DEMOGRAPHY The demographic cost of the post-Soviet transition Foreign workers in post-Soviet Russia EPIDEMIOLOGY Syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases Cancer in decline? RUSSIA AND THE CIS Russia's non-strategy for relations with Ukraine Does Russia need Azerbaijan? CULTURE Marina Aptekman. Modern Russian History in the Mirror of Criminal Song Stephen Shenfield on Viktoria Tokareva HISTORY: LOOKING BACK AT STALINISM Book review by Olga Velikanova Jeffrey Brooks. Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Book review by Stephen D. Shenfield Sheila Fitzpatrick. Everyday Stalinism RECOMMENDED SOURCES -------------------------------------------------------- INTRODUCING THE ISSUE This is a bumper issue -- partial compensation for the absence of a November issue. There is a stronger than usual emphasis in this issue on demography and epidemiology, and also on culture and history. As a result there is less material than I would have liked on politics and economy -- and nothing on ecology. These disproportions will be corrected in future issues. I suppose it isn't feasible to try to cover everything in every issue! I'd like to draw readers' attention to a couple of new features that I have introduced. First, I have written a piece in appreciation of my favorite Russian writer. I invite readers to contribute similarly brief pieces about their favorite Russian writers (Russian in the sense of Russian-language). Second, some readers have told me that they find the RAS particularly useful as a pointer to sources of which they were previously unaware. So I am putting at the end of each issue a feature on "recommended sources." I would like to express my special appreciation of those colleagues who have contributed pieces to this issue: namely, Heiko Pleines, Marina Aptekman, and Olga Velikanova. I hope that many more colleagues will get round to writing for future issues of the RAS. I am currently preparing an issue on the special theme "Looking Back at the Cold War." I hope to have it ready for distribution early in February. Please contact me if you would like to contribute a piece relating to this theme -- or, of course, on other themes for other future issues. I work on the RAS on my own, so I rely heavily on readers' feedback. I am especially glad to get comments on substantive issues about which I have included material. So please don't be shy: share your thoughts! Stephen D. Shenfield, editor -------------------------------------------------------- POLITICS AND SOCIETY THE MOVEMENT "IN DEFENSE OF CHILDHOOD" SOURCE: Dvizhenie "V zashchitu detstva." My v otvete za budushchee. Materialy vserossiiskoi konferentsii Ispolnit' dolg pered budushchim (8 aprelya 2000 g.) [Movement "In Defense of Childhood." We Are Responsible for the Future. Materials of the All-Russian Conference "To Fulfil Our Duty to the Future" (April 8, 2000). Moscow: "Mysl'" 2000. These proceedings of a conference of the movement "In Defense of Childhood" (MIDC) reflect a certain type of civic activism in Russia today. The MIDC is a movement of teachers and educators, others whose work brings them in contact with children and young people (such as youth workers and pediatricians), and parents concerned to improve conditions for normal development of the young in a harsh, uncaring, and dangerous social environment. Founded in late 1992, the movement now has branches in many towns and cities throughout the country. Much of the grassroots activity described by speakers from local branches of the MIDC could be presented as "non-political" charitable and social work. Activists look after and feed neglected children, investigate conditions in children's homes, spread information about the harmful effects of drugs and alcohol, support youth theaters and youth clubs, and organize summer camps and sports competitions that keep kids off the streets. The MIDC, however, presents its activity within an explicitly communist ideological framework. To create a sports team, notes one speaker, is to create a children's collective. Other speakers share their experience of teaching social studies with a view to instilling in pupils a communist outlook. Great importance is attached to reviving the Pioneers, the Soviet organization for young children, and in some places activists have succeeded in forming new Pioneer groups. The movement's long-term strategy is to build "teachers' and parents' councils" (or "soviets," soviet being the Russian word for council). These are to complement "councils / soviets of workers, peasants, and specialists" in the eventual restoration of Soviet power. Thus the existence of movements like "In Defense of Children" challenges the conventional wisdom of the Western discourse that identifies the growth of "civil society" with the consolidation of democracy. One could perhaps argue that the grassroots nature of the MIDC's activity "objectively" (as Marxists like to say) furthers the democratization of Russian society despite the fact that the movement's ideology calls for the restoration of the Soviet system. The MIDC describes itself as "inter-party." That is, it draws support from several of the smaller left and communist parties. Most supportive is the Russian Party of Communists, the only party whose leader (Anatoly Kryuchkov) spoke at the conference. The dominant theme of the speeches is the contrast between the care that was lavished on children by the Soviet authorities and their neglect at the hands of the "anti-people's regime." Symbolic of the fall from grace is the confiscation for commercial or government use of the "palaces" where children formerly developed their artistic and scientific talents under professional supervision -- and without payment. Besides the direct withdrawal of resources formerly devoted to children, the increased burden on parents (and especially on the many single mothers) struggling to make ends meet makes it impossible for them to pay proper attention to their children. And often "their nerves give way" and they physically assault their children, who may then run away to join the masses of other fugitive and abandoned children. A few speakers do acknowledge that some problems were basically the same in Soviet times as they are now. One example is the encouragement of alcoholic consumption by the state (except under Gorbachev). Another is the widespread corruption and abuses of people in positions of power at the local level. A playwright tells how she took up the cause of teachers who were fired when they protested against the theft of school property by the principal of their school. Her plays were taken off stage, she was harassed by the KGB, and one newspaper editor warned her that if she didn't shut up she would end up in a psychiatric prison. The same abuses continue, as does the persecution of those who protest against them. The social role of those idealistic people who call themselves "communists" converges with that of similar people who call themselves "democrats." Another issue that arose at the conference is the right attitude to be taken toward patriotism. A young man from the Left Youth League shocks the "Soviet patriotism" of his older colleagues when he argues that patriotic slogans now play into the hands of fascist and other anticommunist forces. Communists should therefore adopt a consistent class position, and should not take part in "military-patriotic work" (i.e., pre-draft military training). He admits that he did not get very far in influencing young people before he got fired. This source is not, of course, a reliable indicator of the scale and sources of the problems affecting children in Russia. The information is fragmentary, and there is the problem of political bias. Nonetheless it gives insight into some of the processes going on below the surface. For example, a teacher from Yekaterinburg reveals how pressure is put on parents to make numerous "voluntary" financial contributions to the cost of what is still supposed to be free public education. I intend to include more material about the plight of children in Russia in future issues of the RAS. -------------------------------------------------------- POLITICS AND SOCIETY PAGANISM AND NEO-PAGANISM SOURCE. Viktor Shnirel'man, compiler. Neoyazychestvo na prostorakh Yevrazii [Neo-Paganism on the Expanses of Eurasia]. Moscow: Bibleisko-bogoslovskii institut sv. Apostola Andreia [Biblical-Theological Institute of the Holy Apostle Andrew], 2001. This collection of pieces on "neo-paganism" in various parts of the former Soviet Union is based on papers presented at a conference held by the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow in June 1999. It is the first book devoted solely to the subject. The first three papers deal with neo-pagan movements in Russia, with one focusing specially on St. Petersburg, the main center of Russian neo-paganism. Next come papers on neo-pagans in Belarus, Latvia, and Abkhazia. In his concluding essay, Viktor Shnirelman fills in the gaps by examining neo-pagan movements in Ukraine, Lithuania, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan, as well as the pagan revival among various peoples of the Middle Volga (Mari, Chuvash, Mordva, Tatars), the Far North (Komi), the North Caucasus (Ossets), and Siberia (the Altai Territory). It is clear that two quite distinct phenomena are under consideration. Among the Abkhaz and some of the Volga peoples, traditional pagan beliefs have never been forgotten. Now they can be professed more openly, but there is an underlying continuity that makes the prefix "neo-" superfluous. In all the other cases, we are dealing with efforts by modern urban intellectuals to reconstruct long-forgotten peasant cults, or even to invent cults that never existed except in their own imaginations, in order to give their peoples more "authentic" roots and identity. To the extent that these neo-pagan cults receive political expression, they tend in the direction of fascism. The attitude taken by neo-pagans toward Christianity and Islam, the world religions that displaced their primeval ethnic gods, varies. Many aim to restore the old gods -- whether it be Perun, Svarog, and the other members of the ancient Slavic pantheon or Tengri, sun-god of the Turkic peoples before they adopted Islam -- in all their pristine glory. Others strive to construct a synthesis of pagan and Christian elements, such as the doctrine of the Ancient-Russian Ingling Church of Orthodox Old Believers, founded in 1992 in Omsk by the occultist "Father" Alexander Khinevich. -------------------------------------------------------- ECONOMY THE GEO-ECONOMICS OF RUSSIAN AGRICULTURE SOURCE. Grigory Ioffe and Tatyana Nefedova. The Russian Food System's Transformation at Close Range: A Case Study of Two Oblast's. Washington, D.C.: The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, August 2001. Grigory Ioffe (Radford University) and Tatyana Nefedova (Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences) are leading experts on the economic geography of Russian agriculture. Here they present in-depth analyses of agriculture in Moscow Province and Ryazan Province, and draw wide-ranging conclusions about the spatial polarization of Russia's territory. (1) The contrast between "center" and "periphery" exists at two levels -- between the national center (Moscow) and provinces distant from that center, and also between the center of any given province and its own periphery. In their own case study, the authors find that farms in Moscow Province are more productive than farms in equivalent locations in Ryazan Provinces, while farms closer to the central city of either province do better than farms near the borders of that province. These differentials were already well marked during the late Soviet period, when centrally located farms (in both senses) received disproportionately great investment in equipment and infrastructure, as well as suffering less from the drift of skilled labor to the cities. The post-Soviet transition has greatly widened the differentials. Near-city farms cater to an easily accessible market for fresh produce, while outlying farms, no longer supported by state subsidies, go to rack and ruin. The result is an archipelago in which "islands of vibrant socio-economic life" are surrounded by "a sea of stagnation and decay." The authors cite an observer (Boris Rodoman) who divides Russia into three segments: capital cities and their immediate environs; "the provinces" -- all remaining land within 2 kilometers of railroads, highways, and paved streets with year-round traffic; and "the boondocks" -- all other places, encompassing about two-thirds of the country. (1) See also their books "Continuity and Change in Rural Russia" (Westview Press, 1997) and "The Environs of Russian Cities" (Edwin Mellon Press, 2000), and articles in Europe-Asia Studies (1998, No. 8) and Post-Soviet Geography and Economics (2000, No. 4). -------------------------------------------------------- ECONOMY Heiko Pleines. TAXING THE METAL BUSINESS SOURCE. Stephen Fortescue. Taxation in the Russian Mining and Metals Sector (Tax Burden and Tax Behavior of Branches of the Russian Economy. Part I). Working Paper of the Research Center for Eastern European Studies (Bremen) No. 27, July 2001. Price $4 + postage. To order send e-mail to publikationsreferat@osteuropa.uni-bremen.de] (Synopsis contributed by Heiko Pleines of the Research Center for Eastern European Studies, Bremen) The new tax code is Russia's first major project of economic reform to be introduced under President Putin. Its declared aims are to simplify taxation and reduce the tax burden on enterprises. The liberal reformers hope that as a result tax evasion will be reduced and the state's income from taxes increased. At the same time, the tax police have been used by Putin to put pressure on influential businessmen ("oligarchs"). In one of a series of studies of Russia's tax reform, Stephen Fortescue analyses its impact on the Russian mining and metals (M&M) sector. The first part of the paper deals with the tax burden on the M&M sector and the main changes resulting from the present tax reform, above all cuts in profit tax and in employers' social security payments. The author shows that the M&M sector pays a disproportionately high level of tax compared to other sectors of the economy, primarily as a consequence of high tax liabilities on assets. Professor Fortescue concludes: "The stated aim of the reform is to encourage a higher level of tax compliance through the introduction of a more reasonable tax system. One doubts very much whether the carrot offered is enough to convert high-level tax evaders into model taxpayers, particularly when there are no signs of a more effective stick being deployed. While the single social tax might reduce the level of tax-avoiding employment and remuneration practices, those are relatively marginal issues within the M&M sector. The cuts in profits tax are unlikely to have any effect on the incentives to reduce the levels of declared profits." Accordingly capital flight from the sector is expected to remain at a high level. The second part of the paper analyses the influence of the M&M sector on economic policy, taking the tax reform as a case study. Until fairly recently the M&M sector lacked powerful oligarchs, and had to lobby through sectoral trade and business associations. In the Russian context this has proven rather unsuccessful, which might explain the relatively high tax burden on the sector. The author also considers the implications of the tax reform for the general relationship between oligarchs and the state: "There is nothing in the new tax code or any other sphere of government activity to suggest that Putin's much-vaunted anti-oligarch "stick" is to be used against transfer pricing and capital flight. While one notes the Duma's recent acceptance on first reading of a government-sponsored bill on money laundering, it is overwhelmed in symbolic and practical terms by Putin's distressingly selective anti-oligarch campaign, the total lack of action with regard to inadequate corporate governance, the apparent immunity of shadowy offshore trading companies, and the continuing high levels of capital flight. These are not things that can be dealt with by a tax system alone, but the current tax changes appear to have minimal regard for them anyway. It might be going too far to see tax reform as a victory for the resource-based oligarchs, but it is even harder to see it as a contribution to their taming." -------------------------------------------------------- DEMOGRAPHY THE DEMOGRAPHIC COST OF THE POST-SOVIET TRANSITION SOURCE. Steven Rosefielde, Premature Deaths: Russia's Radical Economic Transition in Soviet Perspective, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 53, No. 8, December 2001, pp. 1159-1176. Since 1917, Russia has passed through three periods of radical change in the political and economic system -- the civil war (1918-21), the first decade of Stalin's rule (1929-38), and the post-Soviet transition of the 1990s. Each of these periods has been marked by a sharp fall in living standards and a "population deficit" -- that is, a shortfall in population compared with what would have been expected on the basis of trends in the preceding "normal" period. The population deficit is made up of two components: premature deaths and a deficit in births. Professor Rosefielde (University of North Carolina) seeks to put the post-Soviet transition in historical perspective by comparing its demographic impact with that of the two earlier upheavals. He calculates the population deficit under Yeltsin by comparing actual population with the forecast presented to the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress in 1993 by W. Wade Kingkade, a demographer at the US Bureau of the Census. Thus Russia's actual population at the end of 1998 was 146.7 million. Kingkade predicted that it would be 150.7 million. However, Kingkade underestimated population gain from migration. As he is interested only in births and deaths, the author uses the prediction that Kingkade would have made had he known the true migration figures -- 152.8 million. This gives a population deficit for 1990-98 of 6.1 million, which is attributed to 3.4 million premature deaths and a deficit of 2.7 million births. Of course, a later cut-off date would give somewhat higher figures. The population deficits for the earlier periods of radical change under Lenin and Stalin were greater by a factor of about 3 -- 19.7 million for 1918-23 and 19.6 million for 1929-38. Professor Rosefielde evidently does not consider the difference great enough to invalidate the political parallel he draws between Yeltsin on the one hand and Lenin and Stalin on the other. -------------------------------------------------------- DEMOGRAPHY FOREIGN WORKERS IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA SOURCE. Rossiia-2000. Sotsial'no-demograficheskaia situatsiia [Russia-2000: The Socio-Demographic Situation]. Moscow: Izd-vo Instituta sotsial'no- ekonomicheskikh problem narodonaseleniia [Publishing House of the Institute of Socio-Economic Problems of Population], 2001, pp. 118-130. In 2000, officially registered foreign workers in Russia numbered 146,000 or 0.4 per cent of the total workforce. In addition, there are an unknown number of foreign workers in Russia illegally. Why should foreigners be working in Russia at all when so many Russians are unemployed? In part, it is a continuation of patterns established in the Soviet period, such as the employment of Ukrainians in the oil and gas fields of the Tyumen region (West Siberia). In part, it is due to the low mobility and adaptability of the Russian workforce. There are certain unskilled jobs that few Russians are willing to take, at least for the wages on offer. That is why in January 2000 Russian labor exchanges had as many as 600,000 vacancies on their books. But many people from countries where conditions are even worse than in Russia are prepared to take these jobs. According to official figures, about half of foreign workers are from the "near abroad" (other countries of the former Soviet Union) and about half from the "far abroad." As these figures do not include illegal workers, most of whom are believed to be from other post-Soviet states, the real proportion who come from the near abroad must be well over half. The single largest exporter of labor to Russia is Ukraine, accounting for 30 per cent of legal workers and an even higher share of illegal workers. (A Ukrainian building worker can earn at least 7 times more in Moscow than he can at home, a Ukrainian driver at least 3 times more.) A further 15 per cent of legal workers are from Moldova, the Southern Caucasus, Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. The main areas of origin outside the former USSR are China, North Korea, Vietnam, and also Turkey and the Balkans. Over a third of legal foreign workers go to the Moscow region, where they work mainly in construction and transportation. The other two main reception areas are Western Siberia and the Far East. Workers from a given country tend to go to the same parts of Russia. Thus Vietnamese go to the Maritime Territory (Far East), Moscow, and Astrakhan Province; Bulgarians go to the Urals and the Tyumen region; and so on. This is largely the result of recruitment of workers in groups through contracts between foreign governments and Russian construction, agricultural, and forestry enterprises. In the early 1990s the number of legal foreign workers increased, peaking in 1996 at 292,000 -- that is, double the 2000 level though still under 1 per cent of the total workforce. Numbers declined in the late 1990s, as cash-strapped Russian enterprises that had employed foreign workers no longer found it profitable to do so. For example, the coal mines of Rostov Province no longer needed workers from neighboring Ukraine when coal output fell. However, part of the decline in legal labor migration is thought to reflect a redirection of the flow of foreign labor into illegal channels. -------------------------------------------------------- EPIDEMIOLOGY SYPHILIS AND OTHER SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES SOURCE. Papers by I. V. Zhuravleva (pp. 67-83) and L. S. Shilova (pp. 111-143) in Zdorov'e i zdravookhranenie v usloviiakh rynochnoi ekonomiki [Health and Health-Care Under Conditions of Market Economy]. Moscow: Izd-vo Instituta sotsiologii RAN [Publishing House of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences], 2000. The public attention paid to AIDS tends to overshadow the rapid spread of other more "traditional" sexually transmitted diseases (STD), the most serious of which, syphilis, is no less fatal than AIDS unless treated properly and in time. Sterility caused by STD is also the hidden factor behind the collapse of Russia's birth rate. Soviet medicine established quite effective control over STD. It is estimated that up to 90 per cent of cases received treatment. A 1949 decree set the goal of eliminating STD, which had spread under wartime conditions, within two years. Coercive means were used. Individuals refusing treatment could be imprisoned and treated against their will, while patients who refused to identify their sexual contacts were fined. Physicians were likewise subject to (non-criminal) penalties for failing to track down at least 60 per cent of their patients' sexual contacts. These penalties were dropped in the new criminal code of 1996, leading to a decline in the proportion of contacts traced. In 1995 over 1.7 million people in Russia were registered as having STD, although the real figure is thought to exceed 5 million. The number of NEW cases of syphilis registered annually -- the best indicator of the rate at which an epidemic is spreading -- rose from 8,000 in 1990 to 388,000 in 1996 and 450,000 in 1997, a 57-fold increase over 7 years. In the last few years the official figures have leveled off and started to decline. However, experts do not believe that this reflects reality. The trouble is that the official figures are based on records generated by the system of state registration of diseases inherited from Soviet times. The recent rapid expansion of commercial medical services offering anonymous treatment without registration removes an increasing proportion of cases from the statistics. Moreover, even where registration does still occur it tends to be at a later stage of the disease, as people delay seeking treatment for economic reasons -- in particular, out of fear of losing their job if their employer finds out that they are syphilitic. This shift also biases the figures downward. The younger the age group, the faster the spread of syphilis within it. Thus between 1992 and 1998 the prevalence of syphilis increased by 5.5 times among adults, but by 17 times among children under 15. Between 1990 and 1996 newly registered cases of children with syphilis increased by 78 times, from 0.11 to 8.61 per 100,000. That is, child syphilis remains rare, but is no longer extremely so. Unlike the figures for adult syphilis, those for child syphilis have continued their upward trend in the last few years, presumably because the economic motives for concealment do not apply to children. A child is often infected with syphilis as a result of rape or from living with syphilitic parents. It appears that in the late Soviet period congenital syphilis did not exist at all. Even in 1991 no case of a child born with syphilis was registered in Moscow. Any pregnant woman who had syphilis was detected early, and the embryo was aborted. In 1997, 34 cases of congenital syphilis were registered in Moscow. A similar trend has been found in other regions. Many women now slip through the net and do not get examined during pregnancy -- or else are examined but get infected afterward. Besides age, exposure to syphilis and other STD depends on sex and place of residence. For example, among 15-17 year olds in the period 1993-98 girls were 3-4 times more likely to get syphilis than boys. Over twice as many new cases per 100,000 population are registered in urban as in rural areas (although this may overstate the difference, as the proportion of cases that are registered may be lower in rural areas). The situation is especially bad in Siberia and the Far East, the North Caucasus, and big cities. Syphilis is less widespread in the small towns of provincial European Russia. The spread of STD is closely linked to prostitution and drug addiction, which are also closely linked to one another, as the cost of drugs is often covered by prostitution. (The combination of prostitution and drug addiction also plays a major role in the spread of AIDS, which passes from one person to another through shared needles as well as sex.) Promiscuity combined with ignorance is no doubt the main culprit. A comparative survey of young people in Moscow, Estonia, and Finland conducted in 1995-96 found that only 31 per cent of the Muscovite respondents were able to identify gonorrhea, and a mere 11 per cent chlamydia, as sexually transmitted diseases, as against over 80 per cent of the Finnish respondents who correctly identified both diseases. (1) A survey of Russian schoolgirls infected with STD gave the following results. 51 per cent had learned what they knew about STD from friends and only 3.5 per cent from school, while 40 per cent learned of STD only when they themselves were infected. 38 per cent had already had STD more than once. Asked whether any of their sexual partners had used condoms, 54 per cent answered no and just 5 per cent yes. 40 per cent had had only one sexual partner, while 10 per cent had had at least 10 partners and 15 per cent could not remember how many partners they had had. About a third of respondents regarded frequent change of partner as "normal," and 7 per cent considered it good for the health. (2) (1) About 1,000 respondents were interviewed in each country. The survey was organized by Dr. Mussalo- Rauhamaa of the University of Helsinki. (2) Results published in 1998. The source (Shilova) gives no information on how or when the survey was conducted. -------------------------------------------------------- EPIDEMIOLOGY CANCER IN DECLINE? SOURCE. V. M. Shkolnikov, M. McKee, J. Vallin, E. Aksel, D. Leon, L. Chenet and F. Mesle, Cancer Mortality in Russia and Ukraine: Validity, Competing Risks and Cohort Effects, International Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 28, 1999, pp. 19-29. Full PDF version available online at http://ije.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/28/1/19.pdf The death rate in Russia and Ukraine has increased dramatically since the late 1980s, but that does not mean that mortality from ALL causes has risen to an equal extent. In contrast to the sharp rise in deaths from such causes as cardiovascular disease, accidents and violence, mortality from cancer has actually fallen slightly. In this paper, a team of researchers from the Center of Demography and Human Ecology of the Institute for Economic Forecasting in Moscow explore four factors that might account for this decline in cancer deaths. Their analysis of patterns and trends in the data leads them to conclude that all four factors may have contributed to the observed result, but with important variations by age group and sex. First of all, the decline may to some extent be a statistical illusion, due to change in the way data are collected rather than to any real change in the incidence of cancer. Indeed, the official figures for cancer among the elderly are implausibly low, especially for rural areas, probably because many cases remain undiagnosed in areas where medical provision is poor. The ways in which cause of death is recorded on death certificates, and then coded for statistical purposes, have also shifted over time. For instance, is the immediate cause of death given or the underlying cause? Often cancer is the underlying cause, but the immediate cause is something else (e.g., a heart attack following a fall). Secondly, there is the problem of birth-cohort effects arising from the turnover of generations whose cancer risks differ for reasons having nothing to do with recent changes in the social environment. These effects can explain some reduction in the cancer rate among men after early middle age and among women at all ages. The third factor is the "competition" between mortality from cancer and mortality from other causes. Those who die early from heart disease or accident are thereby deprived of the chance of dying from cancer later on. This effect was found to explain some reduction in cancer deaths among middle-aged men. Finally, might the decline in cancer mortality have something to do with improvement in health care? The authors are not sure, but tentatively suggest that improvements in treatment may have brought about a reduction in deaths from childhood leukemia. -------------------------------------------------------- RUSSIA AND THE CIS RUSSIA'S NON-STRATEGY FOR RELATIONS WITH UKRAINE SOURCE. Tor Bukkvoll, Off the Cuff Politics: Explaining Russia's Lack of a Ukraine Strategy, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 53, No. 8, December 2001, pp. 1141-1157. Tor Bukkvoll (Norwegian Defence Research Establishment) seeks to explain Russia's failure over the last decade to develop "a coordinated political strategy for the conduct of relations" with Ukraine. His explanation has three strands: 1. Russia's political establishment has not truly come to terms with the existence of an independent Ukraine. Ukraine's independence from Russia is still widely regarded as an anomalous and temporary phenomenon. It may be felt that having an explicit policy on Ukraine means admitting that Ukraine is there to stay. 2. Russia has realized that her resources for influencing Ukraine are limited. The author demonstrates this by considering three ways in which Russia might influence Ukraine: a. By exploiting Ukraine's dependence on Russia for oil and gas This method has been used to extract concessions on several occasions. An example was the 1993 Massandra summit, when President Kravchuk agreed to give up the Black Sea Fleet in order to keep the gas flowing -- until domestic political pressure forced him to back out. However, Russia's ability to exploit this factor is constrained by the fact that the major part of its oil and gas exports to the West pass through Ukraine. (The situation will change to some extent when the alternative route through Belarus is in operation.) Squabbles within the Russian elite also prevent consistent and purposive exploitation of Ukraine's oil and gas dependence. b. By using informal political and business networks Close connections have developed over the past 3-4 years between some Russian and Ukrainian businessmen, especially in the energy and metallurgical sectors. Some of these businessmen also have close ties with their political establishments. President Kuchma's political adviser Oleksandr Volkov is a good example. Russia does not seem to have made use of these networks to bring political influence to bear on Ukraine. It is not clear that Russian businessmen would be willing to jeopardize their economic interests by cooperating in such an effort. c. By manipulating the Russian minority in Ukraine Russia has not supported or promoted ethnic separatism in Crimea or Eastern Ukraine as a means of exerting pressure on Kiev, fearing that to do so would create uncontrollable instability and upheaval. In any case, the predominant Russian aspiration has been to reunite with the whole of Ukraine, not to revise borders. 3. The institutional structure of Russia's relations with CIS countries militates against the making of coherent foreign policy. Russia's foreign ministry, created as it was out of the Soviet foreign ministry, remains poorly equipped to handle relations with countries that used to be part of the USSR. In 1994 a special Ministry for Cooperation with CIS Countries was formed, but it was given few resources and little policy-making authority and was finally disbanded in May 2000. No body in Moscow concerns itself with maintaining relations with Ukraine on a day-to-day or even a month-to-month basis. Russian foreign (like domestic) policy emerges from the personal interaction of important players rather than from any formal bureaucratic process. "Yeltsin's style was to take advice from the persons he trusted most at the time, regardless of their formal position." Most such advisers most of the time had little interest in Ukraine. Hardly any were well informed about Ukrainian affairs. In 1997 a journalist discovered that even officials and Duma deputies involved in foreign policy did not know who was Ukraine's current prime minister. The personal "chemistry" between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents has always been a major factor in Russian-Ukrainian relations. Kravchuk never had good rapport with Yeltsin, and neither did Kuchma for the first two years after his election in 1994. But in 1996 Yeltsin and Kuchma "found one another," facilitating resolution of the longstanding dispute over the Black Sea Fleet and the signing of the Friendship and Cooperation Treaty (May 1997). At the end of 1997, a Strategic Group on Russian-Ukrainian Cooperation was set up, and it was agreed that the officials on both sides who were its members would remain in frequent telephone contact. Continuing laments about lack of communication suggest that this arrangement was not very effective. Consistent policymaking on relations with CIS countries is obstructed by infighting among Russian officials, who often do not share key documents or tell one another what they are doing (as was the case when the 1997 Russia-Belarus Union treaty was under negotiation). Another problem is that Ukrainian issues are exploited for domestic political purposes, as when Luzhkov took a provocative public stance on Crimea to demonstrate his patriotism. What difference does Putin's advent make to Russia's policy on Ukraine? The author argues that Putin is more inclined than Yeltsin to use the stick -- in particular, the oil and gas weapon -- and less inclined to hold out carrots. (Russia cut off oil supplies to Ukraine in the winter of 1999-2000: it is not clear to what purpose.) Putin's attitude toward Ukrainian sovereignty is indicated by the fact that on his first visit to Ukraine he asked Kuchma to remove foreign minister Boris Tarasyuk, whom he regarded as too pro-Western. Kuchma has tried to establish a close personal relationship with Putin. It does not appear that he has succeeded. This may not matter too much, because Putin prefers a less informal style of negotiation than did Yeltsin. The appointment in May 2001 of such a "heavyweight" figure as former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin as Russian ambassador to Kiev also suggests that Putin does not feel the need to exert close personal control over policy regarding Ukraine. -------------------------------------------------------- RUSSIA AND THE CIS DOES RUSSIA NEED AZERBAIJAN? SOURCE: Azerbaidzhan i Rossiia: obshchestva i gosudarstva [Azerbaijan and Russia: Societies and States]. Moscow: Letnii sad, 2001, pp. 3-10. This is the fourth in the excellent series of books on relations between Russia and neighboring societies issued by the Sakharov Museum and Public Center and edited and compiled by Dmitry Furman (Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences). The first three dealt with Russia and Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, and Russia and Chechnya (see RAS No. 1, item 5.) What follows is a synopsis of Furman's introduction to the volume. -- Editor Russians know little about Azerbaijan. Their attention was drawn to the country in 1988 by the shock of the pogrom against Armenians in Sumgait, which shattered the Soviet myth of "the friendship of peoples" but reconfirmed older myths regarding the special cruelty of Turks and Moslems. These prejudices were exacerbated by the pro-Armenian bias of Russian press coverage of the Karabagh conflict. In fact, the Popular Front that overthrew Soviet rule in Azerbaijan was guided by an ideology that was not only nationalist but also Western-oriented, secular, liberal, and democratic. Even the succeeding regime of President Heidar Aliev officially adheres to a similar ideology in a more gradualist form. This is not to claim that the Aliev regime lives up to liberal ideals in practice, or to deny its traditionally "oriental" traits -- nepotism, clannishness, lack of civic awareness, habitual disregard for law. But in the ideological sphere liberalism has no serious rivals: communist and Islamist parties exist, but are marginal to Azerbaijani politics. There is a good chance that the parties associated with the Popular Front will return to power and Azerbaijan resume its progress toward democracy. Azerbaijan's Western orientation can be traced back to the independent republic of 1918-20 and beyond -- to the emergence in the second half of the 19th century of an Azerbaijani intelligentsia devoted to European culture. This European culture reached Azerbaijan through Russia, and encompassed Russian culture. True, Azerbaijani intellectuals denounced Russian imperialism, but they did so in a language learned from Russia. The cultural ties between Russia and Azerbaijan grew even stronger during the Soviet period. Many Azerbaijanis now live and work in Moscow and other Russian cities. It would be natural for Azerbaijan to seek to realize the "colossal potential" of close relations with Russia, even as it expands its connections with the West. The two are not mutually exclusive. What should Russia do to bring about such an outcome? It is not so much a matter of what Russia should do. It is more a matter of what Russia should NOT do. It should not meddle in Azerbaijani affairs with a view to installing a pro-Russian government. It should not demand military bases on Azerbaijani territory. In general, it should not do anything likely to revive anti-Russian feelings and provoke a hostile reaction. Russia needs Azerbaijan. Not for its "strategic position" as a buffer zone in a supposedly eternal geopolitical contest. And not only for its oil. What Russia needs, above all, is an Azerbaijan progressing along the path of peaceful, democratic, and successful development. Such an Azerbaijan will serve as an example to inspire the evolution of Russia's other Moslem neighbors in a similar direction, thereby averting the looming danger of a civilizational clash between Russia and the world of Islam. -------------------------------------------------------- CULTURE MODERN RUSSIAN HISTORY IN THE MIRROR OF CRIMINAL SONG By Marina Aptekman (Dept. of History, Brown University) In Soviet times, city folklore and criminal song ("street songs") never received serious critical attention. This situation has changed in recent years. City folklore is coming to occupy a large place in official culture. Russian publishing houses are bringing out anthologies of street and criminal songs, while such projects as Eduard Uspensky's radio series "Ships Came to our Harbor" and Mark Rosovsky's "Songs of Our Communal Apartment" have resulted in a number of CDs, TV programs, and concerts. The only American scholar who has studied these genres is R. A. Rothstein (see references below). Official Soviet culture banned street songs and banished them from mind. But they were always a cherished presence in the Russian popular mind. The reason for their popularity lay in the fact that they gave a voice to the "little person," whose perspective on events they expressed. The average Russian thinks about criminal song as a uniform genre, making no distinction between such famous songs of the 1920s as "Murka," labor camp songs of the 1930s such as "Kolyma," and the early songs of the post-Stalin singer Vladimir Vysotsky. However, the songs of each period were different. The origin of the earliest Soviet criminal songs can be traced to the "city romance" of the first decade of the 20th century and its popularization in the cabaret culture of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and (from the early 1920s) Kiev and Odessa. Their emergence owed much to the domination of economic life during the New Economic Policy (NEP) by newly rich profiteers, many of whom had criminal connections. They reflected the breakup of the old society, its structure and rules -- not only by detailed description of criminal activity, but also through unexpected development of traditional plots of city romance. A good example is the song about Yenta, the rabbi's daughter. The situation portrayed is typical for city romance. A Jewish girl falls in love with the director of a new factory, a Russian and a Bolshevik, and runs away with him, leaving her father a short note: "Goodbye, I've left. Citizen Ivanova." But the typical tragic ending is replaced by a finale that is most unexpected and in tune with the general "emancipation" of the new society. The rabbi shaves off his beard, leaves for Odessa, becomes a successful businessman dealing in foreign currency and jewels, and dances Argentine tango every evening. Such mocking twists to traditional plots occur in many songs of the 1920s, placing them close to parody. The songs of this period express a cynical attitude toward the new regime. Relations between the criminal world and the Soviet authorities are always negative, and the person who wants to become a part of the new society is considered a traitor and has to be punished. Soviet functionaries are disdainfully portrayed as poor and dirty. In the most famous Soviet criminal song "Murka," the female character who betrays her fellow criminals and takes a job in the police station because she falls in love with a police officer is condemned to an impoverished life with no good clothes ("without a single pair of stockings"). The heroine is killed for her direct contact with the police. It is important to note that the 1920s were the only years in Soviet history when the criminal song was still permitted as part of official popular music culture, being sung not only in restaurants but also in concert halls by such famous singers as Leonid Utesov. In the 1930s a new genre was added to criminal song -- the labor camp song. Camp songs had not been part of the pseudo-criminal cabaret culture, nor were most of them composed by criminals. Long before the first written works about the Gulag appeared, songs like "Kolyma" and "People with Enormous Terms Are Going North" bemoaned the fate of innocent people destroyed in Stalin's purges. Many songs combined criminal and non-criminal elements, being a product of an environment in which criminal and innocent non-criminal prisoners were held together. The majority of camp songs, like the songs of an earlier era, were by unknown authors. Many circulated in a number of versions. Often one version was more criminal, another more political, as was the case with the song "The Express Train Vorkuta-Leningrad." The next period in the development of the criminal song was that of the post-Stalin Thaw. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, when many people returned from the camps, the anonymous camp song suddenly acquired a very broad audience. The famous bard Alexander Gorodnitsky recounts in his memoirs how he got to know these songs for the first time during his summer student practice in the mines near Vorkuta: "I kept asking who was the author of these songs. The reply usually was: 'The music is a folk melody. The authors of the lyrics will be released soon.'" In the general intelligentsia mind, the criminal song that openly and honestly spoke about the horrors of Stalin's camps and rebelled against official Soviet norms became a symbol of freedom. Such an attitude changed the original meaning of criminal song. The classical criminal songs of the NEP period expressed rebellion not specifically against the Soviet system but against any state system, since in any country a criminal is always in opposition to the state. However, the Thaw intelligentsia interpreted these songs in symbolic terms, transforming their heroes into dissidents rebelling against the norms of Soviet totalitarian society. Criminal folklore, coming from below, confronted the Soviet pseudo-folklore created from above and imposed by force. This attitude of the intelligentsia led, as many bards themselves believe, to the birth of "bard song," which at first was greatly influenced by criminal song. The 1960s witnessed many imitations of criminal song by authors who had nothing do with the criminal world but were actors, poets, or engineers. The best-known of these "bards" was Vladimir Vysotsky. The symbolic interpretation of criminal song is clearly seen in his lyrics. In one of his pseudo-criminal songs, a person asks a cab driver to take him to the famous Taganka prison, only to discover that it has been demolished. He than asks to be taken to the Butyrka prison, and learns that it has been demolished as well. He then declares: "Wait a moment, first let's have a smoke. Or better let's drink to the hope that one day there will be no prisons and no camps in Russia at all!" At this time the history of criminal song entered a new stage. Previously it had been an anonymous genre. Authorship had been of no importance. Songs were frequently rewritten, new couplets or rhymes were added, and new versions might have very little in common with the original. In the 1960s, the era of pseudo-criminal song, the author was quite present and often sang his songs himself, as did Gorodnitsky and Vysotsky. However, by the 1970s the Thaw had given way to Brezhnev's "era of stagnation." Criminal songs became if not officially forbidden then definitely unwelcome in official cultural circles. Some authors, such as Yuz Aleshkovsky, the author of the famous song "Comrade Stalin, you are a Great Scientist," emigrated. Others, like Gorodnitsky, shifted to officially approved genres. Yet others, including Vysotsky himself, simply grew out of their criminal-song phase. But the songs themselves remained very popular. No longer performed by their authors, they returned to their former position as anonymous products of the common people. Sometimes they were attributed to a different author. For example, Aleshkovsky's songs were for a long time attributed to Vysotsky. Some songs were even attributed to a real criminal, who was considered long dead. Gorodnitsky recalls how on a research trip to the Russian North he was shown the grave of an anonymous criminal who allegedly wrote his own famous pseudo-camp song "Do Not Swear from Cruel Anguish." When Gorodnitsky tried to explain that the song was actually his, he narrowly escaped a beating. From then on, he did not try to contest such false attributions. With the end of the Soviet era came a radical change in the position of criminal song. From an underground phenomenon it suddenly turned into one of the most influential trends in official popular musical culture. I believe that the underlying reason is the similarity between the situation in Russia in the early 1990s and the situation during the NEP. In the early 1990s, as in the 1920s, the economic and political system was -- as in some areas it still remains -- largely controlled by wealthy criminal or near-criminal figures. If criminal song is so popular in Russia today, it has nothing to do with the symbolism of freedom or other dissident underground motifs. First, let's recall the Russian saying that "the one who pays is the one who orders the music." The people with a criminal past, who now have a very stable and powerful presence in Russia, pay to promote the songs they enjoy. Second, the interest in criminal imagery is part of the general interest in the world of criminals, which also reflects current social conditions. Detective and crime novels and films were among the most popular forms of entertainment in Russia in the 1990s. Moreover, many of these books and films, such as "Bandits' Petersburg" and "The Brother," do not show that a criminal gets caught in the end. Quite the contrary. They either romanticize the image of the criminal or demonstrate how the police have been totally corrupted by the criminal world. This romanticization of the criminal world can be seen not only in numerous recordings of old criminal songs, but also in the enormous popularity of new groups -- like "Lesopoval" (Tree-Felling) and "Leningrad" -- that make extensive use of pseudo-criminal lyrics and old criminal tunes. One "Leningrad" song says: "Maybe at this moment we are both looking at the same bird, but I am in prison and you are free." The sympathies of the singers are clearly on the criminal's side. Another "Leningrad" song is about a little boy who works as a thief at a railroad station and is beaten to death by police officers: On byl parnishkoi malykh let Rabotal vorom na vokzale V odin prekrasnyi letnii den' Ego menty s polichnym poviazali Oni lomaiut emu ruki I kirzachami biiut boka A on krichit Kharkaia kroviu: "Ne nado, diaden'ka!" He was just a young lad Working as a thief at the railroad station One splendid summer day The cops caught him red-handed They break his arms And kick him in the sides with their boots And he cries out As he coughs out blood: "Don't do it, granddad!" The story of the development of criminal song in Russia suggests that over the last 80 years Russia has now come full circle and returned to the era of the NEP. It seems to me that criminal song helps us better understand both Russian cultural life and Russian political history. REFERENCES R. A. Rothstein. "Popular Song in the NEP Era" in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Alexander Rabinovich, eds. Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture. Bloomington IL, 1991. R. A. Rothstein. "How it Was Sung in Odessa," Slavic Review, No. 4, 2001, pp. 781-802. EDITOR'S AFTERTHOUGHT Another sphere in which the criminalization of Russian culture can be observed is that of children's games. Some of the games on sale were described in a lecture by child psychologist Vera Abramenkova: 'One game is called Cain. On the lid is a deformed face with the words: "I am a traitor. I killed my brother. I enjoyed it..." etc. Another is called Sadist. On the box the "hero" says: "I am a sadist. I love to kill. It fills me with delight. I kill and drink the blood." Another game is called Disemboweler. A sort of monster or puppet. It comes with a little knife and several small boxes. The instructions tell the child: Take the knife, stab him in the belly, pull out his heart, and put it in the box marked "heart." And so on for the liver and other organs. Gradually the child extracts all the monster's innards... One young mum left her baby with his 8-year-old brother while she went shopping. On her return the baby was in such a state that he barely survived. [SOURCE. My v otvete za budushchee [We Are Responsible for the Future]. Moscow: "Mysl'", 2000.] -------------------------------------------------------- CULTURE Stephen Shenfield. VIKTORIA TOKAREVA JRL recently reproduced an interview with the much respected literary critic Alla Latynina that appeared in The Moscow Times (12/21/01) under the heading "Hunting for Russia's Next Dostoevsky." The next Dostoevsky, it seems, is nowhere in sight, and even possible candidates for the title of great writer are few and far between. As for my favorite contemporary Russian writer, Viktoria Tokareva, she didn't even get a mention. And I've noticed a note of condescension in the response of any Russian with pretensions to being a "cultured" person if I happen to mention my enthusiasm for her. Why this snobbishness? Perhaps because Tokareva always writes in straightforward colloquial Russian -- a great help to the foreigner struggling to learn the language. Perhaps because her theme is always the everyday life of ordinary people, with none of the "deep" philosophizing of a Dostoevsky or of the surrealistic fantasy that fills the work of Viktor Pelevin (one of the handful of writers whose merits Latynina recognizes). Perhaps simply because she is pigeonholed as a writer of romantic fiction, a genre with very low social status everywhere, read as it is mainly by women -- of lower status even than detective fiction, to which Latynina does devote attention. I've been reading Tokareva for close on 20 years now, but she's been around for much longer than that. Born in Leningrad, she graduated as a pianist from the Leningrad College of Music -- which explains why many of her stories are about musicians -- and then went to Moscow to study scriptwriting at the State Institute of Cinematography. Her first short story ("Day Without Fibs") appeared in 1964. She is known for her films and TV plays as well as her short stories and novellas, though the latter no less than the former display her talent for vivid dialogue. While Tokareva never philosophizes at length, her work is rich in perceptive and striking insights into both individual psychology and changing social conditions. She does not push her views about current developments down her reader's throat, but she is nonetheless an extremely socially aware writer. "My theme," she says in a letter to the reader, "is nostalgia [toska] for the ideal... It might seem that love does not depend on the political system, but it turns out that everything is embedded in society, and love is no exception." (1) Occasionally she even has something interesting to say about high politics or international relations, though she approaches even such subjects from a worm's eye view -- for instance, from the perspective of the terrified soldier who is summoned at dead of night to staff HQ to type the Soviet declaration of war on Japan. What is especially appealing in Tokareva is the feeling that she conveys as narrator for her characters. She enjoys poking fun at them, but always with gentle irony, never harsh sarcasm. The reader feels the warmth of her sympathy for all her characters -- male and female, cynics as well as naïve idealists -- even as they drive one another to distraction. Tokareva straddles the late Soviet and the post-Soviet eras. But hers is a consistent voice: a strong continuity of style and attitude bridges the divide. In some inessential respects one period of her work differs from another. Glasnost allowed her to tackle previously sensitive themes. Among other things, it allowed her to write about sex. But there was also something in her early work that she lost in the 1990s. One feature that I particularly appreciated, her use of metaphor drawn from the physical sciences, disappeared -- presumably out of deference to those readers unable to understand it. Her best work, in my opinion, was published at the end of the 1980s in the journal Novyi mir -- after the lifting of censorship but before the onset of commercialization. It is a great pity that none of the work of Viktoria Tokareva has been published in English translation. (1) Mozhno i nel'zia (Moscow: EKSMO-Press, 1998), p. 7. -------------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------------- THE SOVIET SYSTEM AND THE CULTURE OF STALINISM BOOK REVIEW by Stephen D. Shenfield Sheila Fitzpatrick. EVERYDAY STALINISM. ORDINARY LIFE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES: SOVIET RUSSIA IN THE 1930s. Oxford University Press, 1999. What was it like to live in Stalinist Russia? This extraordinarily rich and detailed account of everyday urban life in the USSR in the 1930s goes a long way toward providing an answer. (Another book by the same author gives a parallel account of rural life. (1)) Sheila Fitzpatrick discusses -- inter alia -- housing conditions and access to consumer goods ("shopping as a survival skill"), social privilege and discrimination (for instance, against "former people" -- those who belonged to privileged social groups before the revolution), relations between the political leadership and the cultural elite, the position of servants, popular entertainment, marriage and family problems, and the upbringing of the "new man," including the inculcation of standards of personal hygiene. There is also a chapter (Ch. 7) devoted to the channels of communication between rulers and ruled, including secret police surveillance, the press, citizens' letters of complaint to the authorities, and even suicide. Fitzpatrick's book is in this respect a valuable complement to the book by Brooks reviewed above, helping to place his purely press-based analysis in a broader context. The picture of life under Stalin that gradually emerges consists of two sharply contrasting psychic worlds superimposed upon one another -- the grim world of privation, fear, and repression, and the bright world of hope, opportunity, and excitement. But one cannot say that only the first of these worlds was "real" and the second mythical. For instance, new technologies did excite the imagination of millions of Soviet people, as demonstrated by the craze for aviation and parachute- jumping, while Arctic exploration satisfied the craving for vicarious adventure (as would the exploration of outer space for the post-Stalin generation). The two worlds were in some cases opposite sides of the same medal. The opportunity for educational and social advancement that the 1930s opened up to so many was only in part the consequence of industrial expansion. In large part the new and young people owed their rapid promotion to the repression of their predecessors. (2) A similar point may be made about the combination of forced industrial development and the underdevelopment of the general urban environment. We tend to think of Stalinism as a system in which everything of any importance was closely planned, organized, and controlled by centralized power structures. In certain spheres Stalinism was indeed like that -- but by no means in all. In some ways Stalinism meant utter chaos. The construction of new factories was carefully planned from above, but the massive flow of migrants from the countryside -- refugees from collectivization and famine -- that provided the new factories with their unskilled labor force was a spontaneous process. So was the haphazard growth around the new factories of the zones of dirt roads and barracks where the migrant laborers lived. And crime got so far out of control that in some places workers had to sleep inside the factories. The image of Stalinism as a system of total thought control -- or at least of total control over the public expression of thought -- is likewise misleading. The expression of divergent points of view on certain topics and within certain parameters was permitted and even encouraged. Thus the author gives a fascinating account of the debate arranged in the press to sound out public responses to the draft law of May 1936 that dealt with abortion, divorce, child support, and rewards for mothers of many children (pp. 152-156). The boundaries of permitted discussion were continually shifting, before and after Stalin as well as under his rule. Now the limits were narrower, now somewhat wider -- but it was always a matter of policing the limits rather than of trying to impose absolute uniformity. While this book is not explicitly about theory, it contains many ideas and observations relevant to a theory of Stalinism or of the Soviet system. In any case, no theory can be adequate that fails to come to grips with the multifaceted and paradoxical reality surveyed by the author. REFERENCES (1) Sheila Fitzpatrick. Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization. New York, 1994. (2) For an eloquent expression of the ecstatic feelings of the new people see Alexander Zinoviev's "Nashei yunosti polyot" [Flight of Our Youth]. -------------------------------------------------------- RECOMMENDED SOURCES The best source on Russian developments at the regional level is the Russian Regional Report of the East-West Institute. To subscribe send an e-mail to regions@iews.org listing your name and institutional affiliation, with "subscribe" as the e-mail subject. A PDF version is available online at: http://www.iews.org/rrrabout.nsf/pages/rrr+page A very useful source on Russian environmental affairs is Red Files: Russian Environmental Digest, a weekly collection distributed by e-mail and edited by Elena Vassilieva of the Transboundary Environmental Information Agency [>, www.teia.org]. Subscribe by writing to majordomo@teia.org with "subscribe redfiles" in message body. An excellent source of expertise on Russian and post-Soviet military affairs is the Post-Soviet Armies Newsletter (PSAN) at http://www.psan.org/ edited by Elisabeth Sieca-Kozlowski. INSIGHT, a new online-only PSAN publication providing concise insight and analysis, appears on the PSAN site on the 15th of each month. For Russian-language books in the social sciences from the former USSR at reasonable prices, I recommend the firm MIPP International, based in Minsk. For further information see their website http://www.mipp.msk.ru/books *******