Rósa Magnúsdóttir Assistant Professor Aarhus University [email protected]
Havighurst Center Annual International Young Researchers Conference: Culture, Practices, and the Memory of the Cold War October 25-27, 2007
Imagining America: Propaganda, Patriotism, and Popular Attitudes in the Postwar Soviet Union
One often encounters in the Western scholarly literature appraisals of Soviet people’s abilities to judge the outside world and see in it an alternative to the life they led within the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. This trend in the historiography on the Soviet Union started in the 1950s with the Harvard Refugee Project and was later reinforced by émigré testimonies, which at the time were the only available accounts of everyday life in the Soviet Union as access to the country, the people, and the archives remained limited. 1 Later, with the onset of perestroika and glasnost, memoirs were published in the Soviet Union that often discussed the utopian vision many Soviet citizens had of the West in general, and of America in particular. 2 With the fall of
This paper is an excerpt from chapter 2 of my dissertation, Keeping Up Appearances: How the Soviet State Failed to Control Popular Attitudes Toward the United States of America, 1945-1959 (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006), entitled “Experiencing the Myth of America, 1943-56.” I am now starting the process of rewriting the dissertation for publication and look forward to the feedback of the participants in the Annual International Young Researchers Conference at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies.
1While it is not possible to go into much historiographical detail, the following works deserve special mention as they directly influenced my approach. Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer based their most influential work on the Harvard Refugee Project; The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). Oleg Anisimov, a Soviet émigré wrote an article based on his personal experiences as seen in “The Attitude of the Soviet People toward the West,” The Russian Review 13, no. 2 (April 1954): 79-90. Another Soviet emigrant, Vladimir Slaphentokh, later published influential books about Soviet society, see, for example, his Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). During Soviet times, American journalists and diplomats also often wrote popular accounts of their experiences behind the Iron Curtain.
the Soviet Union, historians have made critical use of heretofore classified reports on the mood of Soviet citizens, as well as of letters and private diaries. These sources reveal the limits of indoctrination and the extent to which people harbored alternative understandings of Soviet domestic history and the outside world. 3
My work contributes to the third trend in that it draws on the archival record, but it pushes the discussion in a new direction. For one, most previous research focuses on the years of high Stalinism or the 1930s while my study focuses on the postwar years. Second, this article explores a little used source base in order to show that the popular imagination of some Soviet citizens cast the United States of America in a positive light. 4 These documents combine several of the elements found in reports on the popular mood and in personal letters, but they also include biographical information about real people and therefore allow for some analysis as to
2Liudmila Alexeeva’s The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Boston: Little Brown, 1990) is probably the most widely known memoir in the West. Vassily Aksyonov’s In Search of Melancholy Baby , trans. Michael Henry Heim & Antonia W. Bouis (New York: Random House, 1987) is also popular. For a recent example, see Vladimir Voinovich’s Antisovetskii Sovetskii Soiuz: Dokumental’naia fantastagoriia v 4-kh chastiakh (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Materik”, 2002), first published in the US as The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union , trans. Richard Lourie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986). See also Dmitrii Bobyshev’s Ia zdes’ (Chelovekotekst) (Moscow: Vagrius, 2003) which has a chapter on “American things” ( Amerikanskie veshchi ).
3Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) relies on svodki and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) relies on letters. Jochen Hellbeck has published several influential articles where he uses Soviet diaries of the 1930s but he focuses on representations of the self within the Soviet state and not on how his subjects saw the outside world. See, for example, his “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931-1939) Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 3 (1996): 344-73. Davies and Fitzpatrick also focus mainly on inside realities but mention the outside world in passing.
4These sources can be found in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, GARF) in the USSR Procuracy fond (f. R-8131) and the RSFSR Procuracy fond (f. A-461). The files were compiled after a former convict or a relative had appealed for rehabilitation and contain an interesting combination of documents such as decisions about arrest ( postanovleniia na arest ), indictments ( zakliucheniia ) and sentences ( prigovory ) to interrogation transcripts ( doprosy ) and complaints ( zhaloby ) from the convicted and family members. The indictments and sentences excerpt testimonies and list evidence from the original case against the accused anti-Soviet individual or group but the original case files, if they still exist, remain off limits to researchers. Owing to the miscellaneous types of documents and files, these records, as opposed to strictly official records or letters written by citizens, provide a space where the official and private viewpoints collide. These revealing sources give a clear picture of the state’s attempts to control the myths about the Soviet Union and the outside world and how it went after those who challenged those myths. Furthermore, one can often trace the anti-Soviet (here pro- American) comments to either the official anti-American discourse of the Soviet authorities or to alternative sources of information, such as contact with American soldiers on the front during World War II or radio broadcasts. 2
who these people were and where they got their ideas from. The examples analyzed here show that, despite the Cold War, some Soviet citizens favorably compared the United States with the
Soviet Union. The obvious question as to where these favorable views of America came from quickly arises. This article locates two main sources of information that influenced the Soviet people’s perceptions of the outside world. Often, people voiced their criticisms of the Soviet
Union and used Pravda language and vocabulary to do so, but my sources also reveal that sometimes people used alternative sources of information about the West, such as foreign radio broadcasts, to form their opinions about the outside world and inside realities. This article presents the argument that a favorable discourse about the United States of America existed often because of—and partly in spite of—the official anti-American propaganda of the Soviet government.
In analyzing over two hundred personal files of Soviet citizens who had been convicted for anti-Soviet behavior in the late 1940s and 1950s, I have identified five major themes relating to the United States of America and the West. 5 The first theme concerns the superior military strength of the United States, America’s super power status, and leadership abilities on the global level. Within this theme one also finds repeated references to international events of the era:
World War II, the creation of the state of Israel (1948), the Korean War (1950-1953), and the
Soviet invasion of Hungary (1956), to name a few. A second theme spotlights technology, progress, and the difficult living standards of Soviet workers and peasants as compared to their
American counterparts. The third theme evolves around alternative sources of information, mainly the radio broadcasts of the Voice of America and other such channels, and published propaganda journals such as Amerika . A fourth theme relates to Soviet people’s appraisal of
5One could use these sources to look at many other thematic categories, without focusing on perceptions of the West. There is, for example, clear nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary times, and issues of nationalities and borderlands are also prevalent. These sources can therefore enrich many studies of Soviet history but I am only aware of two other young scholars who have used them in their works; Mark Edele and Miriam Dobson. 3
American democracy, the electoral process, freedom of the media, and individual free choice.
Closely connected to the fourth theme is the popular topic of the cult of the leader turned inside out. While maligning Soviet leaders, people praised Harry S. Truman and Dwight D.
Eisenhower and often manipulated Soviet slogans to praise the American adversary. What follows is an examination of how the official anti-American myth, and to some extent alternative sources of information, nourished and helped create an anti-Soviet myth of “Amerika.” 6
The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union: Standards for Behavior and the Alternative Myth
Both the Soviet state and the Communist Party spent much energy on highlighting the shortcomings of American society and rare was the newspaper issue that did not include some indignant story of American imperialism or exploitation of its working class. Soviet propaganda cast the United States as a country of racial prejudice and social inequality. Bourgeois and hollow, its culture was completely devoid of kulturnost’ (culturedness) 7 and overall degrading to
Soviet values. Gone were the years of the 1920s and the 1930s when American industrial technology was openly praised and terms such as Fordism and Taylorism seen as synonymous
6Throughout the paper, “official” is used interchangeably with “public” when referring to the anti- American myth propagated by the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet government. The term myth is used in the sense that it symbolizes the activities of the “collective unconscious.” Furthermore, myths are often manipulated and controlled by agents, such as the state, in order to reach a collective goal. See for example, Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). On the relationship between perception and memory, myth and reality see for example S.E. Poliakov, Mify i real’nost’ sovremennoi psikhologii (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2004). For the importance of myth in Soviet political culture, see A. M. Beda, Sovetskaia politicheskaia kul’tura cherez prizmu MVD: Ot “moskovskogo patriotizma k idee “Bolshogo Otechestva” (1946-1958) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ob’’edineniia Mosgorarkhiv, 2002). Both Catherine Merridale and Nina Tumarkin have worked extensively with myths in the Soviet context. See Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994) and Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (London: Granta Books, 2000). Finally, in this paper, references to America (or “Amerika”) only include the United States of America. The primary sources use either “Amerika,” “Soedinennye Shtaty Ameriki,” or “SShA” in talking about the United States.
7On the concept of kulturnost or “culturedness,” see Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of kul’turnost’ : Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process” in Stalinism: New Directions , ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000): 210-30. Volkov shows how the term was used to describe a set of “complex practices aimed at transforming a number of external and internal features of the individual” (216). 4
with progress and efficiency. 8 The wartime alliance was cast aside as the Cold War grew out of the tense international postwar atmosphere. By 1947, the American wartime ally was reduced to a vague memory and the official party line steadfastly adhered to the anti-Americanism that had become the order of the day. 9
Another important element of official Soviet propaganda was the promise of what can be seen as the most tenacious myth of Soviet times—the socialist utopia. Without the active usage of such myths, argues A.M. Beda, the political culture of the Soviet Union would not have survived as the strategic usage of myths allowed mass-political consciousness to be manipulated to the extent that it was. 10 In the same sense, the hardships people encountered in real life led some Soviet citizens to create an alternative reality, a myth that in many ways countered the
Soviet one. The Soviet popular press of the postwar years, for example, spoke endlessly of sacrifices and reconstruction but never mentioned the famine of 1946-47, the growing number of orphans, or other social catastrophes that many people were facing. 11 Insofar as the coverage of
Soviet domestic topics was so far-removed from everyday realities, why should people trust coverage of international issues or a leading adversary like America any better? America was
8See Alan M. Ball, Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003). 9A quick look at the press gives a clear example of the official propaganda and Jeffrey Brooks’s Thank You Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) provides an excellent overview of the newspaper discourse under Stalin. An investigation of the documents of the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU (found in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii [RGASPI], f. 17, op. 125 and 132) reveals the strategy and planning behind the anti- American propaganda which I detail in my dissertation. See also Vladimir Pechatnov, “Exercise in Frustration: Soviet Foreign Propaganda in the Early Cold War, 1945-47,” Cold War History 1, no. 2 (January 2001): 1-27; and N.I. Nikolaeva, “Obraz SShA v sovetskom obshchestve v poslevoennye gody, 1945-1953,” Amerikanskii ezhegodnik (Moscow: Izd-vo Nauka, 2002): 244-70.
10 Beda, Sovetskaia politicheskaia kul’tura , 198. Vladimir Shlapentokh also contends that the meaning of political behavior can only be evaluated on a mythological level.
11 Elena Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: Politika i povsednevnost’, 1945-1953 (Moscow: Rosspen, 1999). See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Postwar Soviet Society: The ‘Return to Normalcy’, 1945-1953,” in The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union , ed. Susan J. Linz (Rowman and Allanheld: Totowa, New Jersey, 1985): 129-56. For a document collection on social catastrophes of the postwar era, see E. Iu. Zubkova et al., Sovetskaia zhizn’, 1945-1953 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003). 5
present in the official discourse, admittedly as an enemy of the Soviet state, but even that kind of coverage aroused curiosity in some Soviet citizens and did not kill the interest others had in
American society, culture, and values.
Thus, America, as the incarnation of the imperialistic capitalist bloc, remained an important factor in how the Soviet state defined its domestic and international policies and influenced the worldview of the Soviet people. Some, like satirical writer Vladimir Voinovich, would even argue that the official representation of America prompted the alternative view of
America as the Promised Land:
Every day Soviet newspapers, radio and television broadcasts curse the United States of America. They paint a bleak picture of the unemployed, racial discrimination, crime, devaluation, and impoverishment. It is precisely because of such propaganda, however, that an enormous number of Soviet people believe there are no such serious problems in America. They think that money there grows on trees and that one can, without doing anything, live luxuriously, gamble in the casino, and drive around in Cadillacs. 12
In addition, personal experience in the West and with alternative realities had an enormous impact. In 1954, Oleg Anisimov, a Soviet émigré, recounted his experiences with the
Soviet citizens’ outlook on life inside and outside the Soviet Union. He claimed that the Soviet people were disillusioned with their realities now that they had first-hand knowledge that life was better elsewhere. The Second World War had altered people’s worldview: “And they remember Lend-Lease. Personal observations naturally carry more weight for the Soviet man than the broadcasts of Radio Moscow. These observations have made him very critical of the
Soviet economic system.” 13 World War II played an important role in increasing the chances for personal contact. Anisimov described how a defector had told him “that most Soviet soldiers
12 Voinovich, Antisovetskii Sovetskii Soiuz , 37.
13 Anisimov, “Attitude of the Soviet People,” 86. 6
scoffed at Communist propaganda, contending that the ‘hate-America’ campaign had been a complete failure.” 14 He continued:
Most Soviet people with whom I have had opportunity to talk about the United States thought that life was freer, pleasanter, more prosperous, in general ‘better’ in the U.S.A. than in Russia. Most of them held the view that the American government interferes less in the private pursuits of its citizens than does the Soviet government, and that it is more efficient and less oppressive. 15
Such observations, according to Anisimov, caused many Soviet people to critically evaluate their government and what it had to offer:
[I]t is often the case that Soviet people, instead of assuming that the governments of Western countries are as dishonest as their own, try to escape the frustrating experience of Soviet realities by attributing to non-Communist governments all the ideal qualities of a wish-dream government. I have come across many cases illustrating this tendency to idealize the West. 16
The Soviet public harbored many images of America that were created to counter the official anti-American myth. Soviet people were interested in the world around them as well as in their own survival and quality of life—with the dawning of the Cold War and the war of words it ignited, it was justifiable to link external circumstances to private interests. It was not, however, acceptable for Soviet citizens to publicly voice their positive opinion of the United
States and the Soviet authorities had a strict system in place to control the behavior of their people.
The Soviet state had clear expectations for individual behavior as it set out to create the new Soviet man. The state punished deviations from those standards according to the Soviet
14 Ibid., 79-80. Interestingly, in 2002 and again in 2003-2004, I repeatedly heard from ordinary Russians, academics and general observers, that the anti-American propaganda had never fully worked in the Soviet Union and people reminisced quite happily about their encounters with American culture and consumer products (cigarettes, soft drinks, clothes, films, novels, etc.). This is an interesting observation—the America of the Cold War still upheld a mythical perception in the anti-American Russia of the twenty-first century.
15 Ibid., 80.
16 Ibid., 81. 7
Criminal Code, particularly its article 58, which broadly defined anti-Soviet behavior. The legal framework for anti-Soviet persecution was article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code. Article 58 served as the foundation for the political terror that reigned in the Soviet Union; it defined anti-
Soviet behavior and laid out minimal punishment. The article consisted of fourteen clauses that dealt with people considered dangerous to society, i.e. counterrevolutionary or anti-Soviet, but clause ten (58-10) specifically addressed the manifestation and the spread of anti-Soviet agitation:
Propaganda or agitation, containing a call for the overthrow, subversion, or weakening of Soviet authority or for the carrying out of other counterrevolutionary crimes, and likewise the distribution or preparation or keeping of literature of this nature shall be punishable by deprivation of liberty for a term not less than six months. 17
Anti-Soviet behavior thus corresponded with the violation of what sociologist Vladimir
Shlapentokh defines as the “official Soviet standards for behavior.” 18 These standards for behavior of “the ideal Soviet individual” applied to the economic, political, international, and private spheres. The Soviet state, for example, expected the Soviet man to be “patriotic, ready to defend the motherland, politically vigilant, proud of achieving the first socialist society, capable of evaluating social phenomena from a class point of view, able to demonstrate solidarity with those who struggle against imperialism, and quick to defend the ideas of socialism.”
Additionally, a Soviet man was supposed to “reject everything that contradicts the socialist style of life and the persistent struggle for communist ideals.” 19 In other words, agreeing with the
American way of life was not acceptable behavior in the Soviet Union. Those who were caught
17 See for example Hugo S. Cunningham’s English translation, “Article 58, Criminal Code of the RSFSR (1934) ,” retrieved from http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/uk58-e.html (last consulted January 30, 2005). It was the part about “weakening Soviet authority” that was most commonly interpreted loosely by the government.
18 Shlapentokh, Public and Private , 18.
19 Ibid., 19. 8
deviating from the set standards (among them those who had created alternative myths) were prosecuted for anti-Soviet behavior. Thereby, in line with the super patriotism that was the order of the day, an anti-Soviet crime amounted to treason as complete loyalty to the socialist system was demanded of all. 20 If one were anti-Soviet, one had offended the socialist regime, what it stood for, and its present day policies.
In order to keep track of how Soviet the Soviet man was becoming the state employed a complicated network of surveillance. Categories of surveillance, however, were never entirely arbitrary and often calculated to fit the propaganda agenda of the day. 21 Those accused of anti-
Soviet behavior often fit into one of the targeted categories of surveillance—those deemed to be the antipode of the Soviet man at any given point in time were therefore more likely to be kept under surveillance. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that, given the emphasis on anti-
American and anti-Western propaganda in the post World War II period, hundreds of people convicted for anti-Soviet behavior were accused of having expressed their fascination with the
United States of America or the West in general.
Fears of a Renewed War: From World War to Cold War
Although the Soviet government softened the official propaganda against the United States during the war, the Soviet state did not lessen the patriotic expectations of its citizens. In 1943, a female medical doctor who had served in the White Army during the Civil War, a nun of gentry origins, was arrested for anti-Soviet behavior. Her anti-Soviet career was only barely mentioned
20 See for example, Ralph Parker, Moscow Correspondent (London: Frederick Muller Ltd, 1949). Parker, a contemporary observer, described Soviet patriotism as “the most characteristic feature of the contemporary Soviet man” (185).
21 Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of totalitarianism, rightfully pointed this out. See The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951), 402. 9
in the proceedings 22 —her gossiping about the poor performance of the Red Army during the
Second World War was emphasized. In fact, in 1941, this woman had predicted a crushing defeat in the war, the end of Soviet power, and the subsequent escape of the Soviet leadership to
America, which would: “leave the nation at the mercy of fate.” 23
One of the most serious anti-Soviet crimes committed during the war was talk of defeat such as that expressed by this doctor. 24 Not surprisingly, the authorities encountered such unpatriotic views in the borderlands or in formerly occupied areas. Communist Party cells reported to the Central Committee about the mood of people and worried, for example, about
Polish nationalists, who sincerely hoped for the departure of Soviet troops after the war and hoped for the help of England and the United States in attacking the Soviets in order to seize back Polish territories. 25 These kinds of nationalist views lasted long after the war had ended and, as often happens, repressed nations show empathy with the freedom fights of others. Such was the case of a Ukrainian arrested in 1957 at the main train station in Odessa who had made claims about the illegitimacy of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and simultaneously stated his hopes for the arrival of Americans in order to liberate Ukraine. He himself would then assist the Americans in hanging the Communists. 26
22 Clearly this person fit many anti-Soviet categories and would obviously have been a surveillance target. For a recent analysis of the tensions inherent in the operation of Soviet control, see Cynthia Hooper, “Terror From Within: Participation and Coercion in Soviet Power, 1924-1964” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2003). 23 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 14162, l. 1, 1ob. In 1957 when this woman appealed for rehabilitation, her appeal was declined. See ibid., l. 37 (20 April 1957): “Your guilt was confirmed by a number of witnesses and other materials of your file.”
24 See for example GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 12854, ll. 1-4 and the emphasis on “defeatist mood” (porazhencheskoe nastroenie ) or, GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 12917, l. 2, where “nice treatment of German occupants among the village population” is a main crime.
25 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 311, l. 2. (O sostoianii politicheskoi raboty sredi naseleniia zapadnykh oblastei v Belorusskoi SSR, ll. 1-8).
26 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 88433, ll. 1a and 3. It is tempting to speculate that the frequent mention of hanging and lynching in people’s remarks about the United States had its roots in anti-American Soviet propaganda 10
Criticizing Soviet military strength after the war became another major offense, such as maintaining that, without the involvement of the United States the Soviet Union would have lost
World War II. These sorts of claims were probably a byproduct of the persistent rumor of a renewed war that circulated in the Soviet Union after the end of the hostilities. As soon as the
Cold War had started, Stalin’s theory of the inevitability of wars between the capitalist powers took on a life of its own in the Soviet Union. 27 Fears of a new war were expressed at public meetings and Soviet citizens voiced their opinions about the actors and the outcome of this anticipated war. Instead, however, of adhering to the Stalinist paradigm of a competition between Great Britain and the United States of America as they sought to establish themselves on the global stage—the “anti-Soviet citizen” feared war between England and America, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other. Furthermore, almost all of these utterances entailed a Soviet defeat: “There will be war and then we will have an American spring.” 28 The fear of a renewed war is well documented and it seems that many people believed that if there would be a war between the two powers the United States would win: “Germany could not beat the USSR, but if America would try, it would take them one day.” 29
Unfortunately, there seemed to be “profound confusion and uncertainty” 30 about the long- term prospects for durable peace and safety. In a 1947 meeting of the Leningrad oblast
Communist Party Committee, those present anxiously asked if a war between the United States and the Soviet Union was likely. They posed several challenging questions about the nature of
that emphasized the segregation and the racial inequalities in the United States. Stories of the Ku Klux Klan were common in the Soviet press, for example. 27 See for example David J. Dallin, The Real Soviet Russia , trans. Joseph Shaplen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), 101.
28 GARF, f. 8131, op. 36, d. 1052, l. 7.
29 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 44809, l. 11.
30 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 510, l. 17. 11
the peace and the role that America would play on the postwar stage. “How much of a threat to world peace is the United States?” “Is America ready to go to war again?” “Would America use the atomic bomb again?” “In the case of an attack from the former allies, is Soviet strength sufficient?” Clearly weary of war, people also asked questions about the necessity of the imminent superpower struggle: “Why is the Soviet Union competing with the United States and
England? Would it not be better if our leadership surrendered to these countries?” 31
Obviously, the Soviet leadership did not consider yielding to the United States and
England. In line with the state’s anti-American policies, newspaper headlines emphasized the imperialistic aspirations of the United States—intervention in Greece and Turkey, the Truman
Doctrine in general, the nature of the Marshall Plan in Europe, and assistance in Latin America, to name a few. 32 In the early 1950s, the Korean War attracted much attention among those guilty of anti-Soviet behavior. One man claimed that it was “rubbish” that America was conducting a bacteriological war in Korea: “America is a civilized country, if they would have liked to they could have crushed Korea a long time ago, they want to wage war [fairly].” 33 Another international postwar issue that was much debated in the Soviet Union was the state of Israel.
Soviet Jews were often persecuted for their anti-Soviet (i.e. “nationalistic”) behavior, and often their behavior involved applauding Israel’s orientation toward America. 34
In all official discussions of international affairs, propaganda aimed at showing the
American predisposition toward domination and repression, in line with the core characteristics of the capitalist-imperialistic camp, but clearly some people questioned the propaganda and drew
31 Ibid.
32 Nikolaeva, “Obraz SShA,” 246-47.
33 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 38230, l. 7.
34 Ibid., l. 6.
12
their own conclusions about the veracity of the information. The effect of World War II should not be underestimated in this context—the war opened the Soviet Union up to an extent that had not been conceivable during the 1930s and during the war and its immediate aftermath, access to alternative sources of information was easily attained. When the Soviet state closed down again in 1947, it was too late to eliminate altogether the influences of wartime openness and not even the “iron curtain” kept information from seeping into the Soviet Union.
“Americans Tell the Truth About Us”: Technology and the Well-Off Worker
The alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom clearly influenced the outlook of
Soviet people. Some former soldiers regretted returning to the Soviet Union as they soon realized that the Soviet regime did not share their newfound worldview. One war veteran, Oleg
Olegovich*, expressed ill will toward the authorities who confiscated his nice American suit upon reentry into the Soviet Union. Instead of wearing it, he had to celebrate May Day in “a dirty sheepskin coat and torn boots.” Oleg Olegovich regretted not staying behind with the
Americans and moving to America, as there he would have “lived well and received the title of major in the American army.” Yearning for the American way of life and the military power of
America, he cursed the defeated mood of the Soviet people and his war experience changed his outlook on life. He suffered from tuberculosis during the war, was held in captivity from 1942-
45, and returned home an invalid. He claimed that the “Soviet people, who allegedly do not need anything, live much worse than Americans.” 35
*All names in the text are pseudonyms.
35 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 41583, l. 28. 13
“The material life of Soviet workers,” 36 a common cause for complaint, was the flipside of utopian views of the American way of life: “In the USA every unemployed person has a car and lives in many ways better than an engineer in the Soviet Union.” 37 Even members of the
Soviet intelligentsia expressed complaints of this sort, as did this Uzbek—formerly the director of a middle school in Namangan:
In America representatives of the intelligentsia do not walk, they drive in a car. In any case, if they walk anywhere, they attach speedometers to their legs, measuring the length of their walk, and for that they receive pay. Soviet intelligentsia receives little pay and lives badly. Because of the insufficient choice of products in the Soviet Union, children often get sick, and nothing can be done to cure them. 38 The theme of the well-off American worker, blessed with superior working conditions that enabled him to produce higher quality products, was widespread. One man noted how the
“remarkable” work conditions of Americans contrasted sharply to the abusive Soviet labor camp system, Soviet technology, he said, “is built with slave labor.” 39 Another man described the necessity to learn from Americans in the technological sphere. He specifically named Ford and
Studebaker as longer lasting than Soviet cars, stating that Americans were significantly more efficient and produced quality products, while “we have only bad ones.” 40
In 1951, Ivan Ivanovich, war veteran, former locksmith, and of peasant origins ( krest'ian- serednikov ), repeatedly praised American and English production while simultaneously deriding
Soviet manufacturing: “everything is done by Stakhanovite methods—quantity matters more
36 For example, GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 12774, l. 7.
37 GARF, f. 8131, op. 36, d. 1242, l. 4. 38 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 48102, l. 118.
39 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 38230, l. 7.
40 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 39893, l. 5. The presence of cars from the 1930s as a source of alternative information. 14
than quality.” 41 Furthermore, Ivan Ivanovich asked an acquaintance—who later testified against him—to find him a foreign bicycle, but “of good quality.” 42 He told another that “it is all propaganda: goods may be cheaper, but wages are lower.” Ivan Ivanovich also claimed that the
Kremlin exploited the peasants—especially those working on the collective farms and that “the
Americans tell the truth about us.” Moreover, he maintained that “everything they write about
England and America in the papers is a lie.” 43 Similarly, another man claimed “the American broadcasts say that our lives are bad, that workers get paid very little, and are forced to work.
The Americans tell it as it really is.” 44
The Voice of America first broadcast to Russia on February 17, 1947 and over the next decades, it steadily increased its operation, broadcasting overall in nine languages to all parts of the Soviet Union. 45 Soviet authorities started jamming the broadcasts almost immediately (in
1948) but they never fully succeeded in eradicating listenership. In the anti-Soviet case files, the
Voice of America is frequently cited as an alternative source of information. In the late 1940s and 1950s, American and Western broadcasters presenting the alternative image, succeeded in reaching an audience in the Soviet Union but, not surprisingly, listening to such broadcasts amounted to an anti-Soviet crime. 46
41 GARF, f. A-461, op. 1, d. 131, l. 19 (“ ne kachestvenno, a kolichestvenno ”), and l. 29.
42 Ibid., l. 18. 43 Ibid.
44 GARF, f. A-461, op. 1, d. 1307, l. 30. For a similar statement mentioning the Voice of America as a source of information, see GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 40704, l. 6.
45 Ludmilla Alexeyeva, U.S. Broadcasting to the Soviet Union (New York: U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, 1986), 9 and 79. The languages are Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, Azeri, Uzbek, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian. The Baltic countries were assigned to the VOA European division (because the US did not recognize incorporation of the three Baltic republics into the USSR).
46 The Voice of America had a clear impact as people frequently cited the radio station as their source of information about the much better life of American workers than Soviet workers. Ivan Ivanovich’s case is one of many where the Voice of America broadcasts are emphasized. 15
It is clear from the examples given here that alternative sources of information played an important role in promoting these favorable comments about the West. Soviet authorities were uncomfortable and felt anxious about foreign radio broadcasts and the distribution of foreign publications, such as the journal Amerika , among the Soviet public. 47 While it is impossible to quantify how many people listened to radio broadcasts, one can examine how people’s claims regarding America often corresponded with the emphasis of the Voice of America programs.
Walter L. Hixson claims that the “contrasts between light and dark, good and evil, worship of God and atheism, were a staple of VOA broadcasting.”48 The programs maligned totalitarian control over almost every aspect of private and public life: the right to travel abroad, collectivization, wages, long working hours, privileges granted to Communist Party members, limitations on creativity, and denial of freedom of religion to name a few. VOA radio hosts discussed how Western freedom fostered a thriving culture of artists and intellectuals, whereas the Soviet system stifled and often punished those with creative talent. Furthermore, the VOA explained the US electoral process, emphasizing that the people selected their own leaders through free elections. The role of a free press was also discussed but “[m]ost of all, however, programming constantly emphasized the higher standard of living, better health care, abundant consumer goods and leisure activities, and relative ease of everyday life in the West.” 49
Take for example Sergei Sergeevich, an engineer from Leningrad, who accepted the criminal responsibility of having spread over several years the contents of anti-Soviet broadcasts
47 The official Soviet discourse on jamming and the harmfulness of international broadcasts changes very little throughout the period: it is dominated by great anxiety and strategies to hinder the effects of the radio broadcasts. The discourse on the publications of journals is a bit more complicated as the publications were legal. Mainly, the authorities limited people’s access to the journals and, as I show, even imprisoned people for anti-Soviet behavior if they talked about the contents of these legal publications.
48 Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997), 42.
49 Ibid., 40, 42-44. Quote on p. 43. 16
of the Voice of America, BBC, and Radio Free Europe among his friends. He had maligned the
Communist Party and its measures, strongly criticizing Soviet democracy as well as Soviet press and radio. He praised the living standards of working class people in capitalist countries while disapproving of the conditions of workers in the Soviet Union. 50 In a later appeal, this man wrote that he did not deny having listened to and discussed foreign broadcasts but he did not see in that any anti-Soviet agitation. He claimed, indeed, not to have commented in any way on the quality of the radio broadcasts and his comments should therefore not be seen as anti-Soviet. 51
It was, however, enough of a crime to have listened to the broadcasts. The content of the broadcasts corresponded with the state’s definition of anti-Soviet behavior and it is no wonder that the Soviet authorities frequently discussed how to limit and respond to foreign broadcasts.
Without further going into the official response to foreign propaganda, one should keep in mind that all these people were prosecuted for anti-Soviet behavior, which in and of itself shows the reaction of Soviet authorities to positive statements about the United States of America. The
American propaganda succeeded in creating an alternative discourse among some of its Soviet listeners who judged the internal propaganda to be invalid as it was so removed from everyday experiences. In some cases, the alternative reality of the “American way of life” helped people deal with everyday life in the Soviet Union: the American “truth” about the Soviet Union corresponded with these people’s experiences in a way that the official discourse did not.
“The Most Democratic Country in the World”: Soviet Style Democracy and Freedom
In the winter of 1951, in a conversation about the Korean War, Vladimir Vladimirovich responded to a claim about America being the most aggressive country in the world: “America is
50 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 78153, l. 4. 51 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, l. 26. 17
not an aggressive country, quite the opposite; it is the most democratic, strongest country in the world. As to invading smaller countries, that is only what strong and progressive countries do.” 52 In his proceedings, Vladimir Vladimirovich admitted to having said that America was a strong ( krepkaia ) country. He claimed, however, he had “never said, that America was stronger
[krepche ] than the Soviet Union.” 53 It is, of course, likely that people saw both the United States and the Soviet Union as strong, democratic countries. But it is also possible that those who
“maligned Soviet power” in the same instance they praised the democratic nature of the United
States were in some way disillusioned with Soviet style democracy and freedom.
In the final stages of war, Igor Igorevich, a Ukrainian Jew and a professional musician, was arrested for having maligned Soviet power and the non-democratic nature of the Soviet state: “Everyone keeps screaming about democracy, but every fool can see that we do not have authentic democracy, as they do in England and America. Nowhere else is there an NKVD that shuts up its citizens, nowhere else is there such terror—the pre-revolutionary police was angelic in comparison with [the NKVD].” 54 When interrogated, Igor Igorevich recounted the anti-Soviet conversation he had had at a friend’s apartment:
I compared democracy in the Soviet Union with democracy in England and the USA. I said that, in some sense, the democracy that exists in England and USA does not exist in the Soviet Union. In England and USA, there is full freedom of speech; any person can say what he likes, when he likes, and where he likes. This is forbidden in the Soviet Union. That is why I said that we do not have democracy here. Genuine democracy exists in England and the United States. 55 One often encounters in the sources laments about how people in the Soviet Union were shepherded around and did not have any choice in life. When talking about elections, people
52 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 38577, l. 62. 53 Ibid., l. 82.
54 Ibid., d. 14157, l. 1.
55 Ibid., l. 15. He had originally been convicted to 5 years in prison. 18
would frequently praise the element of choice inherent in the process in the United States. It was not just that Americans could choose from multiple candidates, but also that “there they are not forced to go and vote, like we are here. Here it is obligatory, there it is a choice.” 56
Issues of choice and freedom frequently came up in Soviet people’s discussions of
America. The lack of freedom of the media in the Soviet Union and the fact that there was no outlet to criticize the state caused some outrage: 57 “Here it is forbidden to articulate in the press anything that does not correspond with the politics of the party and the government without being persecuted.” 58 One man bluntly noted that Soviet newspapers published only lies, while the whole nation “suffered hungry in prison.” 59 Another man convicted for distributing anti-
Soviet leaflets claimed that he was tired of keeping his thoughts to himself and that he no longer considered himself to be a son of Soviet Russia. 60 There was some sense that in the United
States people lived freely, without worrying about invasive authorities: “people there talk a lot, about anything they want.” 61 Thus, the notion that “people mattered” 62 in the United States paved the way for the idea that they did not matter in the Soviet Union: “We do not live here, we only breathe.” 63
Pleas to America and to president Eisenhower were common in this discourse, as the outcries from a forty-two year old Russian peasant, who “threatened” the leaders of the Party and
56 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 38577, l. 86. 57 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 40557, l. 67, and d. 40557, l. 55.
58 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 91938, l. 21.
59 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 46866, l. 24.
60 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 57224, l. 13.
61 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 47825, l. 30.
62 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 91938, l. 21.
63 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 48282, l. 2. 19
government, Comrade Khrushchev and others show. He offered to “personally kill them all and leave for America.” He had apparently come to Moscow in order to fulfill these actions and had
“fifteen thousand people behind him” who would fulfill his mission if he would fail. He ended by stating that “soon Eisenhower will come and introduce his order to us.” 64 A Gulag inmate apparently also held Eisenhower in high esteem. He claimed that “soon the Americans will take our side and destroy the Communists. Soon Eisenhower will be out father, we will be surrounded from all sides, and then all Communists will be kaput. I will personally hang all the
Communists, and the people will destroy them.” 65
The Soviet people were well versed in propaganda slogans of the regime as parades and celebrations of leaders were embedded in the socialist value system. Imagine the dismay when a
Soviet citizen cried out “Truman is the only one capable of providing us with freedom!” 66 The cult of the leader thus often turned inside out, as, for example, when a group of drunks shouted so that many people heard them:
Long live Capitalism! Down with Communism! Down with Soviet power and down with Communism! Long live Eisenhower! 67
People clearly had ideas of a different world where concepts such as democracy and freedom, although not that different in conceptualization were somehow acted out differently in practice.
In reality, the “anti-Soviet” person noted that options were limited and social democracy restricted.
Conclusions
64 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 82753, l. 7.
65 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 84264, l. 28.
66 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 43336, l. 11.
67 GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 83367, l. 8. 20
What did Soviet socialism mean to people who observed and commented on America in this kind of way? In his study of the Soviet cultural offensive, Frederick C. Barghoorn rightfully warned against exaggerating the meaning of interest in America:
Interest in American comforts and luxuries should not […] be interpreted as indication of a lack of pride and patriotism on the part of Soviet people. They are determined to have these luxuries themselves, and some of them may share the Kremlin’s professed confidence that before many decades have passed the Soviet Union will actually outproduce even the United States, at first in heavy industry and possibly, eventually, in the field of consumers’ goods. 68 The fact that the people whose views are presented here had all been politically prosecuted and sentenced by the state for anti-Soviet behavior complicates this issue. They may often have been targets of persecutions that labeled them anti-Soviet without them having doubted the idea of the Soviet Union. Moreover, they may have been victims of the Soviet state’s notorious suspicion of all things foreign—including random observations about the nature of life in America. Russian historian Vladimir Kozlov has, for example, recently documented incidents of mass unrest in the Soviet Union, arguing that “the spontaneous uprisings of the
1950s and early 1960s against party bosses who had betrayed the ‘cause of communism’ were, no matter how paradoxical it sounds, evidence of the continued ideological stability of the regime and of the still vibrant belief in ‘real communism.’” 69
Getting at the mindset of people is always a difficult task for historians and that task becomes even more problematic when dealing with what Soviet authorities referred to as “Soviet reality.” If, for example, people were being framed for pro-American views and these files therefore are only representative of the mindset of party agitators—someone at the bureaucratic level was creatively and sometimes even correctly imagining an America that was the complete
68 Frederick C. Barghoorn, The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 310.
69 Vladimir A. Kozlov, Mass-Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years , trans. Elaine McClarnand MacKinnon (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 314. 21
antithesis of the official Soviet Party Line. Dismissing the meaning of these opinions as purely the workings of the state caters to ideas about the all-encompassing Soviet state—which diminishes Soviet people to walk-ons in the great play staged by the totalitarian theater in the
Soviet Union. Seen from the authorities’ perspective, even the slightest criticism of “Soviet reality”—i.e. the state—could be viewed as a sign of dangerous behavior. The Soviet people were not a monolithic, inactive population that proved incapable of any independent analysis.
As most groups, they tended to form their opinions based on the information available to them and in addition to state sponsored unifying myths, that play a traditional role in any culture, some
Soviet citizens had experienced the West during the Second World War and many had access to alternative sources of information. People who praised the United States of America were only anti-Soviet because the Soviet state defined them as such: the more tools people had available to forming opinions—the more diverse the Soviet reality became. The American myth represents, in its own right, a counter myth that existed in spite of—and because of—the idea that the Soviet state sought to create of itself and the outside world.
It may seem paradoxical that everyday history (bottom up) is often written with official
(top down) sources. However, Vladimir Shlapentokh has rightfully pointed out that popular images of the Soviet leadership are often to be found in “the behavior of the authorities toward the people.” 70 Official sources sought to create “a reality which must exist in the minds of the people inside and outside the country and which [was] beneficial to the given political regime.” 71
This paper presents an overview of the kinds of views that went against the official representation of reality and were collected and prosecuted by the state. It is impossible to measure the extent of these opinions or to generalize about public opinion or popular sedition in
70 Shlapentokh, Public and Private , 21.
71 Ibid., 15. 22
the Soviet Union based on these sources. It is, however, possible to make the following observation: in creating a national narrative and enforcing unifying myths, the Soviet state interacted with society. The American way of life as an alternative to the Soviet realities is therefore as telling about the Soviet state’s expectations of its citizens as it is about citizen’s desire to fulfill these expectations.
The role of the Soviet state in creating a myth (through agitation and propaganda) was just as important as the state’s reaction (control, surveillance, imprisonment) to people’s positive views about America, the counter-myth, which the state classified as anti-Soviet behavior. The emphasis on America makes it possible to focus on some of the forces at play between state and society as there is ample documentation on how the Communist Party and the Soviet state campaigned against America and American propaganda. America, and all it stood for, was anti-
Soviet. The anti-Soviet persecutions can therefore provide insight into the Soviet system, its people, and how both state and society created strong myths—the official and public myth of a socialist, anti-imperialistic utopia and the anti-Soviet, sometimes private, myth of an anti- socialist America. This private myth of “good” America could not have existed without the myth of the public “bad” America.
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