Johnston, Timothy Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life under Stalin 1939–1953 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 778 Johnston, Timothy. Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life under Stalin 1939–1953. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2011. lii + 240 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £55.00. Since the 1995 publication of Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization, the concept of ‘speaking Bolshevik’ has been influential in Soviet studies. This allowed historians to demonstrate the state’s ability to subordinate people’s minds to ideology, but it also enabled scholars to reveal subjects’ agency in using, (re-)interpreting and manipulating official language to advance personal interests and making individual meanings of life under the Communist dictatorship. Inspired by the idea of ‘speaking Bolshevik’, Timothy Johnston puts at the centre of his analysis questions about how ordinary citizens interacted with ‘Official Soviet Identity’ in imagining and experiencing the outside world between 1939 and 1953. Johnston uses a wide range of primary sources from Russian central and regional archives (Murmansk and Arkhangel´sk) and oral history interviews to demonstrate how an ‘Official Soviet Identity’ was constructed through state-sponsored mass media, films, plays and music. Instead of examining the internal factors of violence, terror and suffering of Stalinist Russia, i.e., rather than focusing on the victim’s perspective, the author shows that the defining feature of Sovietness was the perception of its radical difference from Western ideas, things and people. Sovietness stood in opposition not only to Germany (as the main enemy) but, above all, to Great Britain and the United States. These countries were ‘first antagonists, then uncertain allies, and later clear enemies of the USSR’ (p. xxvii). From this fresh starting point, each chapter offers careful analyses of ‘little tactics of the habitat’ — agents’ strategies for negotiating everyday life through ‘bricolage’, ‘reappropriation’ and ‘avoidance’. By zeroing in on these tactics, Johnson masterfully sheds light on ‘grey zones’ in Soviet citizens’ everyday life (the black market, meeting friends at nightclubs, sexual relationships). These were spheres of contact, conflict and bargaining about what was and was not Soviet. These practices enabled Soviet citizens to get by and get on. He convincingly shows that the question of what could and could not be Soviet did not involve binaries like belief or disbelief, acceptance or resistance but rather, was a matter of negotiations between the individual, the system and the imagined West. The book is very well structured. The first and second chapters examine the period from 1939 to 1945 by showing the increasing militarization of pre-war society and the creation of the USSR’s image as a liberator state offering freedom, opportunity and abundance. The image of the Allies as powers who benefited from the USSR’s leading role in the war persisted throughout the period analysed. Soviet citizens’ deeply rooted mistrust of the Allies, which grew out of Russian national and imperial ambitions, contributed to this negative image. REVIEWS 779 Chapters four and five examine the question of post-war Soviet identity when the Cold War turned the former Allies and the Soviet Union into open enemies. Chapter three, the book’s most innovative part, explores interactions between Soviet citizens and foreign sailors/military experts in Arkhangel´sk and Murmansk. In these port cities the Western world became not only imagined but also lived experiences of everyday encounters. Johnston’s fascinating exploration of Soviet citizens’ everyday contacts with foreigners presents multiple strategies through which Soviet male and female citizens of different generations redefined the boundaries separating Soviet and NonSoviet through their interactions with Allied soldiers. After 1941, Hollywood movies and jazz were rehabilitated, the Soviet public welcomed new magazines (Britanskii Soiuznik and Amerika) and academic/scientific exchanges as sources of information about the West but, in the shadow zone there were exchanges of military hardware, clothing and food that were difficult to control. Being Soviet meant feeling Soviet. Throughout the book the author stresses the tension between shame and pride constantly attached to ‘Official Soviet Identity’: people were deeply ashamed of the country’s low living standards but also proud of belonging to the most peaceful and humane liberator state. This pride was expressed in narratives of military and moral greatness, especially after the siege of Stalingrad...