Everyday Stalinism Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times Soviet Russia in the 1930S Sheila Fitzpatrick

Everyday Stalinism Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times Soviet Russia in the 1930s Sheila Fitzpatrick Sheila Fitzpatrick is an Australian-American historian. She is Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney with her primary speciality being the history of modern Russia. Her recent work has focused on Soviet social and cultural history in the Stalin period, particularly everyday practices and social identity. From the archives of the website The Master and Margarita http://www.masterandmargarita.eu Webmaster Jan Vanhellemont Klein Begijnhof 6 B-3000 Leuven +3216583866 +32475260793 Everyday Stalinism Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times Soviet Russia in the 1930s Sheila Fitzpatrick Copyright © 1999 by Oxford University Press, Inc. First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1999 To My Students Table of Contents Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Milestones Stories A Note on Class 1. “The Party Is Always Right” Revolutionary Warriors Stalin’s Signals Bureaucrats and Bosses A Girl with Character 2. Hard Times Shortages Miseries of Urban Life Shopping as a Survival Skill Contacts and Connections 3. Palaces on Monday Building a New World Heroes The Remaking of Man Mastering Culture 4. The Magic Tablecloth Images of Abundance Privilege Marks of Status Patrons and Clients 5. Insulted and Injured Outcasts Deportation and Exile Renouncing the Past Wearing the Mask 6. Family Problems Absconding Husbands The Abortion Law The Wives’ Movement 7. Conversations and Listeners Listening In Writing to the Government Public Talk Talking Back 8. A Time of Troubles The Year 1937 Scapegoats and “The Usual Suspects” Spreading the Plague Living Through the Great Purges Conclusion Notes Bibliography Contents This book has been a long time in the making - almost twenty years, if one goes back to its first incarnation; ten years in its present form. Over that period, I acquired intellectual debts to so many people that I cannot list them all. Those whom I acknowledge here made a direct contribution in the final stages of the project. Jörg Baberowski, Dietrich Beyrau, Terry Martin, and Yuri Slezkine were kind enough to read the whole manuscript and make detailed comments that were extremely helpful. To Yuri I owe an additional debt for answering all my e-mails about Russian linguistic usage and esoteric aspects of Soviet culture. In the sphere of politics and police matters, J. Arch Getty generously played a similar role. James Andrews, Stephen Bittner, Jonathan Bone, and Joshua Sanborn aided me as research assistants at various times. Michael Danos read the whole manuscript in all its drafts and made useful editorial suggestions as well as helping to shape my thinking about the topic. Thanks are also due to two fine editors at Oxford University Press: Nancy Lane, an old friend, without whose tireless prodding and cajoling over many years the book might never have been written, and Thomas LeBien, whose support and good advice made the final stages of the project easier. It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge my debt to a remarkable cohort of students at the University of Chicago who wrote or are writing Ph.D. dissertations dealing with aspects of the 1930s: Golfo Alexopoulos, Jonathan Bone, Michael David, James Harris, Julie Hessler, Matthew Lenoe, Terry Martin, John McCannon, Matthew Payne, and Kiril Tomoff. I have learnt a great deal from their work and from working with them; and it is in recognition of this exceptionally stimulating and happy collaboration that I dedicate this book to past and present students. I have also benefited from working with other current and former members of the Chicago Russian Studies Workshop, notably Stephen Bittner, Christopher Burton, Julie Gilmour, Nicholas Glossop, Charles Hachten, Steven Harris, Jane Ormrod, Emily Pyle, Steven Richmond, and Joshua Sanborn, as well as my much-valued colleagues, Richard Hellie and Ronald Suny. Acknowledgments Other young scholars whose recent work on the 1930s has been particularly useful to me include Sarah Davies, Jochen Hellbeck, Oleg Khlevniuk, Stephen Kotkin, and Vadim Volkov. I thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, IREX, the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, and the University of Texas at Austin for support at various stages of the project. Equally heartfelt gratitude goes to the University of Chicago for providing the best of all possible environments for scholarship. Explanatory Note To make it easier for the reader, I have used familiar anglicizations of names of well-known figures like Trotsky, Tukhachevsky, Lunacharsky, Gorky, Vyshinsky, Zinoviev, Mikoyan, and Tolstoy. Given names like Natalia, Maria, and Evgenia are rendered without the extra “i” that a strict transliteration requires. For other names I have followed the standard transliteration model set by the Library of Congress, except that in the text I have not used diacritical marks for proper names and place names. Since this is a social history, I saw no reason to burden the reader with a proliferation of undecipherable institutional names and acronyms in the text. Where necessary, elucidation about institutional provenance is given in the footnotes. I have referred throughout to “Ministries” and “Ministers” in place of the “People’s Commissariats” and “People’s Commissars” that are strictly correct for this period. In my text, “province” or “region” stands for the Russian oblast’ and krai, and “district” for raion. Introduction This book is about the everyday life of ordinary people, “little men” as opposed to the great. But the life these ordinary people lived was not, in their own understanding and probably ours, a normal life. For those who live in extraordinary times, normal life becomes a luxury. The upheavals and hardships of the 1930s disrupted normalcy, making it something Soviet citizens strove for but generally failed to achieve. This book is an exploration of the everyday and the extraordinary in Stalin’s Russia and how they interacted. It describes the ways in which Soviet citizens tried to live ordinary lives in the extraordinary circumstances of Stalinism. It presents a portrait of an emerging social species, Homo Sovieticus, for which Stalinism was the native habitat. [1] There are many theories about how to write the history of everyday life. Some understand the “everyday” to mean primarily the sphere of private life, embracing questions of family, home, upbringing of children, leisure, friendship, and sociability. Others look primarily at worklife and the behaviors and attitudes generated at the workplace. Scholars of everyday life under totalitarian regimes often focus on active or passive resistance to the regime, while a number of studies of peasant life focus on “everyday resistance,” meaning the mundane and apparently everyday ways in which people in a dependent position express their resentment at their masters. [2] This book shares with many recent studies of everyday life a focus on practice - that is, the forms of behavior and strategies of survival and advancement that people develop to cope with particular social and political situations. [3] But the book was not written to illustrate any general theory of the everyday. Its subject is extraordinary everydayness. The times were extraordinary because of the revolution of 1917 and the upheavals, no less deracinating and disruptive, that accompanied the regime’s turn to rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture at the end of the 1920s. These were times of massive social dislocation, when millions of people changed their occupations and places of residence. Old hierarchies were overturned, old values and habits discredited. The new values, including condemnation of religion as “superstition,” were puzzling and unacceptable to most of the older generation, although the young often embraced them with fervor. It was declared to be a heroic age of struggle to destroy the old world and create a new world and a new man. The regime, committed to social, cultural, and economic transformation, rammed through radical changes regardless of the human cost, and despised those who wanted to rest from the revolutionary struggle. Savage punishments, worse than anything known under the old regime, were inflicted on “enemies” and sometimes randomly on the population. Large numbers of people found themselves stigmatized as “social aliens” in the new society. All these circumstances were part of the reason Soviet citizens felt they were not living normal lives. But when they made this complaint, they usually had, in addition, something specific in mind. The most extraordinary aspect of Soviet urban life, from the perspective of those living it, was the sudden disappearance of goods from the stores at the beginning of the 1930s and the beginning of an era of chronic shortages. Everything, particularly the basics of food, clothing, shoes, and housing, was in short supply. This had to do with the move from a market economy to one based on centralized state planning at the end of the 1920s. But famine was also a cause of urban food shortages in the early 1930s, and for some time ordinary people, as well as political leaders, hoped that the shortages were temporary. Gradually, however, scarcity began to look less like a temporary phenomenon than something permanent and systemic. Indeed, this was to be a society built on shortages, with all the hardship, discomfort, inconvenience, and waste of citizens’ time associated with them. The Homo Sovieticus emerging in the 1930s was a species whose most highly developed skills involved the hunting and gathering of scarce goods in an urban environment. This is a book about life in urban Russia in the heyday of Stalinism. It is about crowded communal apartments, abandoned wives and husbands who failed to pay child support, shortages of food and clothing, and endless queuing. It is about popular grumbling at these conditions, and how the government reacted to it. It is about the webs of bureaucratic red tape that often turned everyday life into a nightmare, and about the ways that ordinary citizens tried to circumvent them, primarily patronage and the ubiquitous system of personal connections known as blat.

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