Soviet Modernity Post-Stalin: The State, Emotions, and Subjectivities

Abstract

Soviet Modernity Post-StalinThe State, Emotions, and Subjectivities Anatoly Pinsky (bio) Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd, eds., The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s. 512 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. ISBN-13 978-1442644601. $80.00. Brian LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw. 281 pp. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. ISBN-13 978-0299287443. $29.95 (paper). Lukas Mücke, Die allgemeine Altersrentenversorgung in der UdSSR, 1956–1972 (The Pension System in the USSR, 1956–72). 565 pp. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013. ISBN-13 978-3515106078. €78.00 (paper). History, we are often told, is the study of continuity and change. This truism, it seems to me, is an underestimation of the discipline, but one might argue that the specific questions that are asked of continuity and change do much to define the dynamism of a particular historical subfield. As Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd write in the introduction to their edited volume, The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s, study of the early post-Stalin era has long been “rooted in … the paradigm of ‘continuity and change’ between the Stalin years and their aftermath” (25). Questions in this paradigm began to be asked immediately after Stalin died in 1953 and would continue to be posed in the following decades. Indeed, as Kozlov and Gilburd note, “writing about [what came to be known as] the Thaw has a rich history” [End Page 395] (24). Early analyses of the Thaw—which tended to focus on high politics and reforms, socioeconomic trends, and literature and the arts—did not reach a consensus on the extent to which the period marked a break in the history of the Soviet Union.1 Study of the Thaw has grown even richer over the last 15 years, as some scholars have explored earlier objects of analysis on the basis of new sources and approaches, while others have taken the cultural and subsidiary turns. Questions of continuity and change continue to be posed, only now they often concentrate on mentalities, identities, subjectivities, emotions, and various other cultural topics.2 The subfield of early post-Stalin [End Page 396] studies has become increasingly dynamic, to be sure. Focusing on the social as well as the cultural and making important contributions to the subfield, each of the three books under review poses productive questions about the extent to which the death of Stalin marked a break in the history of the Soviet Union. In the ambitious introduction to The Thaw, Kozlov and Gilburd present a case for change. So, too, does Lukas Mücke in his Die allgemeine Altersrentenversorgung in der UdSSR, 1956–1972. In contrast, Brian LaPierre, in Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia, emphasizes continuity. In this review, I examine these three books’ engagement with the question of continuity and change in part by presenting them as exercises, if implicit, in the history of emotions.3 Indeed, affect is central to interpretations of [End Page 397] the metaphor of a thaw; if some scholars present the metaphor to mean anticipation or optimism, others emphasize uncertainty or anxiety.4 Kozlov and Gilburd write of post-Stalin optimism, LaPierre of anxiety, and Mücke of feelings of gratitude and entitlement. The themes of emotions and continuity versus change overlap to an extent. For example, post-Stalin optimism suggests rupture in terms of affect, whereas anxiety implies continuity in that Soviet citizens continued to feel materially and physically insecure. The different arguments are in part a function of different objects of analysis. Like other scholars who write of optimism and change, Kozlov and Gilburd center their attention on intellectuals; like those who emphasize anxiety and continuity, LaPierre concentrates on the lower classes.5 Mücke, interested in pensioners of various social backgrounds, is more difficult to classify in this regard. A question that emerges is what might unite the different affective experiences of these as well as the various other social types discussed in the contributions to Kozlov and Gilburd’s volume and the growing literature on the 1950s and 1960s. In this connection, scholars of the post-Stalin era...