Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw by Brian LaPierre (review)

Abstract

SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 924 authorities in officially maintaining the ‘Katyn Lie’ for decades. Revealingly, it was in September 2012 that the American National Archives finally released more classified documents which shed light on decades of suppression of Soviet guilt within the United States government. Two important corrections to the volume should be noted. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has never been Germany’s ‘head of state’ (p. 134). Whilst the June 1943 report by the Warsaw Red Cross team confirming the massacre date as 1940 was published for the first time in Poland in February 1989 (only ‘1989’ is mentioned on page xxiii), it was not the first time there had been public notice of that report. It was read into the evidence of the March 1952 American House of Representatives House Hearing on the Katyn Forest Massacre and published accordingly in Part 3, showing the dates of 13 March and 14 March 1952, pp. 406–10 (see also this reviewer’s account, ‘Katyn: Tragedy Upon Tragedy’, History Today, 60, June 2010, 6, pp. 31–34). London John P. Fox LaPierre, Brian. Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2012. ix + 281 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 (paperback). In this innovative book, a revised version of his dissertation, Brian LaPierre, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi, provides an insightful account of the post-Stalinist state’s campaign against what official discourse termed ‘hooliganism’. LaPierre’s account brings out the nuances implicit in the broad and vaguely-defined legal category of hooliganism, which during this period expanded to cover a wide variety of behaviours perceived as ‘showing disrespect to the values of Soviet society’, ranging from swearing to drinking and rowdyism, and to stabbing; the fact that ‘one of every twenty-five men between the ages of eighteen and forty was either convicted in a court or arrested administratively for hooliganism’ illustrates the mass nature of this phenomenon (p. 4). To tease out the meanings and implications of the government’s actions against hooliganism, the book investigates how political authorities, legal bureaucracy, policing organs and ordinary citizens applied this amorphous category on the level of everyday life. In undertaking his analysis, LaPierre draws extensively on sociological models of criminology, and especially Howard Becker’s labelling theory, which considers deviance a socially constructed concept used to label and stigmatize behaviour that society finds inappropriate, in turn reflecting broader underlying issues of social concern. Using this lens, the author argues against much previous historiography that perceives Soviet hooliganism as resulting REVIEWS 925 primarily from extraordinary social change, mass media construction, or resistance to authorities. Instead, he envisions the hooligan as a child of Soviet normality: ‘Hooliganism was a daily reminder of the constant difficulty of living life in an intolerant society where there was too much alcohol, too much boredom, and where aggressive policing, ambiguous laws, and narrow conduct norms were likely to label the smallest misdeed as a serious violation of vague concepts like social order or socialist morality’ (p. 7). LaPierre specifically underlines the Khrushchev-era concerns over ideological change associated with de-Stalinization, over the growing Cold War competition and over intensifying foreign influence as impelling the anti-hooliganism drive, which the authorities aimed to use to discipline the working class, to enforce prescribed codes of behaviour, and to ‘socially engineer the new Soviet man’ (p. 98). The book argues that ‘instead of being imposed by the centre’, hooliganism was made by police, by judges, by prosecutors and by ordinary Soviet citizens ‘in countless local interpersonal settings where actions met interpretations and where citizens were outfitted with appropriate stigmata’ (p. 9). In effect, the Khrushchev anti-deviance campaign, instead of constraining agency to the top, delegated interpretive and enacting agency downwards to the locales and individuals, giving local law enforcement and Soviet citizens the power to redefinethecategoryofhooliganisminnew,localizedandoccasionallystartling ways that sometimes conformed and sometimes deviated from centrallyprescribed models. As a result, in both the changing perceptions at the centre of how to define and struggle with hooliganism, and variable interpretations of hooliganism and its meanings at the grassroots level, this category...