1 the Soviet Culture of Victory1 Mark Edele [email protected] 10059 Words
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The Soviet Culture of Victory1 Mark Edele [email protected] 10,059 words (incl. notes); 15 October 2018 1 Research and writing of this essay was supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT140101100). Part of one section below was first published in a review of Maria Galmarini Kabbala's book in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 45 (2018): 109-128. 1 This essay explores the Soviet Union after World War II, a prime example of how victory “locks in” a political system.2 Thus, in a mirror image of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s argument of how “cultures of defeat” encourage social and political innovation, 3 the Soviet “culture of victory” reaffirmed a dictatorial system of government and a command economy based on collectivized agriculture and centrally planned industry.4 I argue that the Soviet culture of victory was, first of all, a culture of celebrating the victory of the Soviet system. The Soviet case, then, is an example for how victory in war can have negative consequences for the further development of societies.5 A dysfunctional system of government and a political economy of scarcity were immunized from necessary change for decades to come.6 At the same time, however, the war also engendered subtle changes to this system, putting into doubt the causal links between defeat and innovation, or victory and conservatism implied in Schivelbusch's scheme.7 Some transformations gathered pace subterraneously at first, but would come into their own decades later. 8 Many of them were linked, directly or indirectly, with the war, and took place in the context of the Soviet culture of victory and often in reference to the victorious war. They included a complex system of veteran privileges,9 a growing welfare state,10 a more routinized administration,11 a turn from terror to more predictable repression,12 and an economy where individual and family farming played a major role in the provisioning not only of the rural, but also of the urban population.13 2 W. Brian Arthur. "Competing technologies, increasing returns, and lock-in by historical events," The Economic Journal 99 (March 1989), 116-31. 3 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Die Kultur der Niederlage. Der amerikanische Süden 1865, Frankreich 1871, Deutschland 1918 (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003). 4 Mark Edele, Stalinist Society 1928-1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 8, especially 210. 5 Shimon Tzabar, The White Flag Principle. How to Lose a War (and Why) (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002). 6 Janos Kornai, The Economics of Shortage. 2 vols. (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1980). For overviews of the economic history of the Soviet Union see Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR 1917- 1991. new and final ed. (London: Penguin, 1992); and, more recently, Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy. An Economic History of the USSR from 1945 (London: Longman, 2003). 7 Stephen Lovell, The Shadow of War. Russia and the USSR 1941 to the Present (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 8 Mark Edele, "The Impact of War and the Costs of Superpower Status," in: The Oxford Handbook of Modern Russian History (online) Oxford University Press http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199236701.001.0001/oxfordhb- 9780199236701-e-028 (Retrieved 19 Mar. 2018). 9 Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War. A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941-1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 10 Bernice Q. Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1968). 11 Yoram Gorlizki, "Stalin's Cabinet; the Politburo and Decision Making in the Post-War Years," Europe-Asia Studies 53, no. 2 (2001): 291-313; id. and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace. Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 12 David R. Shearer, Policing Stalin's Socialism. Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). 13 Stephen Lovell, Summerfolk. A History of the Dacha, 1719-2000 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003); Alena Ledeneva, Russia's Economy of Favours. Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 2 Some of these changes were simple evolutions of the system which took place more or less spontaneously. Many others required decisions by policy makers all the way to the top leadership. Thus, this essay narrates the shifts in Soviet policy as initiated from above. This focus on the state is not a result of the approach taken – I am by training and inclination a social and cultural historian. It is a reflection of the realities of power in the Soviet Union, a dictatorship well into the Gorbachev years. Pressure for change might build within the state apparatus or within groups in wider society, but ultimately, the leadership could and did resist calls for reform. Those in power at times chose to accommodate certain pressures "from below." Ordinary citizens certainly had "agency:" they tried to run their lives as well as they could; they had their own dreams and hopes for the future. But ultimately, they could only appeal to the decision makers not force their hand. Social and cultural historians must accept this reality, lest they lapse into wishful thinking.14 Locking in the Stalinist Economy By 1945, the Soviet system had had evolved significantly from the totalitarianism which had entered the war. In the regions of the country which had remained in Soviet hands throughout the war, villagers had quietly privatized more of the collectively held lands than they were legally entitled to.15 Even worse, from the official standpoint was that in some areas which had been under German occupation after 1941, the collectives had been dissolved.16 And in much of the newly annexed territories (the Baltics and parts of western Ukraine), collectivization had never been implemented in the first place. 17 As a result, private ownership and private production of agriculture had increased compared to 1939. In the cities, meanwhile, many had gained access to garden plots to feed their families, removing one major incentive to stay in the village: the ability to grow your own food in an economy of extreme scarcity.18 The black market had encroached on the prerogatives of the state-run economy, reaching a high-point of its development.19 The political system had evolved as well. At the top, Stalin's entourage had re-gained agency while running the war effort,20 and in the hinterland, local officials had also tasted the power which came with a more 14 See also Mark Edele, The Soviet Union. A Short History (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2019). 15 O. M Verbitskaia, Rossiiskoe krest'ianstvo: ot Stalina k Khrushchevu (Moscow: Nauka, 1992), 69; Donald Filtzer, “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in der Nachkriegszeit,” in Handbuch der Geschichte Russlands. Vol. 5: 1945-1991. Vom Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs bis zum Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion. 1. Halbband, ed. Stefan Plaggenborg (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 2002), 78-130, here: 91; Jean Lévesque, "'Into the Grey Zone': Sham Peasants and the Limits of the Kolkhoz Order in the Post-War Russian Village, 1945-1953," in: Late Stalinist Russia. Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention, ed. Juliane Fürst (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 103-19. 16 Johannes Due Enstad, Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation. Fragile Loyalties in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) 49, 113-30. 17 Alexander Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 41, 142-43. 18 Edele, Stalinist Society, 57-58; 207-8. 19 Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade. Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917-1953 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), chapter 6; Jeffrey Jones, "'People without a definite occupation.' The illegal economy and 'speculators' in Rostov-on-the-Don, 1943-1948," in: Provincial Landscapes. Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917-1953, ed. Donald J. Raleigh (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 236-54. 20 Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin's Team. The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2015), chapter 6. 3 decentralized system.21 The intelligentsia had been on a somewhat shorter leash, experiencing the war as a period of freedom.22 The ferment was intellectual as well as social. The top leadership considered transferring resources from the military and the heavy industry it depended upon to consumer goods. They also considered dialling back the dictatorship in order to allow the growth of "socialist democracy." If implemented, such plans would have amounted to a major deconstruction of the Stalinist warfare state in order to reward the population for victory.23 Further down the hierarchy even more radical ideas were circulating. State officials began to think it might be a good idea to legalize the black market, in order to tax it,24 the intelligentsia hoped for a liberalization of cultural production,25 and at the bottom of the hierarchy, rumours of the impending dissolution of the kolkhoz system swept both the demobilizing army and the countryside most of the soldiers initially returned to.26 Many of these soldiers had seen life outside the Soviet Union during the war and brought back stories of easy living and at times reports about political freedom existing elsewhere, "abroad" (za granitsei literally: "on the other side of the border").27 Such hopes were bound for bitter disappointment.28 The attempted stimulation of consumer goods industry was stifled by the emerging cold war. While after the famine of 1946-47 the Soviet economy exited the catastrophic phase of its development,29 consumption levels were 21 On the Janus-faced process of centralization and decentralization of the Soviet system during the war see John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941-1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London and New York: Longman, 1991), chapter 11.