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National
Bolshevism:
Stalinist
Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National
Identity, 1931-1956
Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2002
National
Bolshevism is an investigation of the paradoxical emergence of
a popular sense of Russian national identity during the Stalin epoch.
Controversial in the sense that Soviet social identity is generally
believed to have stemmed from class consciousness, this book argues
that Stalin-era ideology was actually more Russian nationalist than
it was proletarian internationalist. Detailing the production, projection
and popular reception of this propaganda between 1931 and 1956, National
Bolshevism identifies Stalinist ideological dynamics that continue
to affect Russian society to the present day.
It has
been known for a long time that the Stalinist party leadership occasionally
appropriated imagery and symbols from the ancien regime. Resolving
the long-standing debate over the nature and significance of this
flirtation with the Russian national past (particularly the co-option
of tsarist heroes, myths and iconography), National Bolshevism
argues that such actions during the mid-to-late 1930s amounted to
no less than an ideological about-face. Profoundly pragmatic and unabashedly
populist, this ideological shift had a transformative effect on Russo-Soviet
society that has remained unacknowledged among scholars until now.
Frustrated
with the failure of propaganda campaigns during the late 1920s, Stalin
and his entourage began to look for new ways to bolster the legitimacy
of Bolshevik rule during the early 1930s. Their search was complicated
by the need to mobilize popular support within a society that had
proven to be too poorly-educated to be inspired by unadulterated Marxist-Leninism.
Distancing themselves from fifteen years of idealistic, utopian sloganeering,
Stalin and his colleagues gradually refashioned themselves as etatists
and began to selectively rehabilitate famous personalities and familiar
symbols from the Russian national past. By 1937, party ideology had
assumed a valence that I refer to as Stalinist russocentrism.
Having
detailed this ideological volte-face within the party hierarchy,
National Bolshevism traces the trajectory of the new official
line into the 1950s in analysis organized both chronologically and
thematically. Foregrounded is an original methodological approach
that disaggregates Stalinist russocentrism into three distinct dimensions
concerned with the production, projection and reception of ideology.
In this vein, a broad survey of the party line's "production" is followed
by analysis which tracks its "projection" into the Soviet public sphere
through education and mass culture (e.g. the press, literature, film,
theater, opera and museum exhibition). This research, in turn, is
complemented by treatment of the popular "reception" of Stalinist
russocentrism on the mass level, something that I accomplish through
the use of a broad swath of letters, diaries, secret police reports
and other material that can provide glimpses of public opinion under
Stalin.
Appraising
official russocentrism as the most successful ideological initiative
of the Stalin era, National Bolshevism argues that it also
precipitated the formation of a mass sense of Russian national identity,
something which not only survived the death of Stalin in 1953, but
remains in circulation to the present day. Inchoate and internally
inconsistent before the revolution, modern Russian national identity
turns out to be a strikingly recent development, having been systematized,
rationalized and transformed into a mass phenomenon only midway through
the twentieth century. The origin and persistence of this sense of
Russian national identity explains why so many of the rallying calls
favored by modern Russian politicians like V. V. Putin and G. A. Ziuganov
display a clear Stalinist pedigree. These factors also account for
why such sloganeering continues to find resonance among Russian-speakers
in the former Soviet space today, almost two generations after Stalin's
death. More than just a study of Stalinist propaganda between 1931
and 1956, National Bolshevism is an innovative treatment of
the formation of modern Russian national identity over the course
of the twentieth century.
Situated
at the intersection of an array of contemporary debates, National
Bolshevism is designed for those interested in Stalinism, Soviet
ideology, mass culture, the popular press, education and the history
of everyday life, as well as those engaged in burgeoning new academic
fields associated with the theory and practice of national identity
formation. Moreover, National Bolshevism's chronological breadth,
spanning some twenty-five years between 1931 and 1956, assures the
book the attention of audiences concerned with the interwar period,
the Second World War, and the first Cold War decade.
But
aside from these thematic points of reference, National Bolshevism's
methodological approach should also be of considerable interest. Addressing
not only the production and projection of propaganda, but its popular
reception as well, this study eschews many of the shortcomings that
have limited more traditional work on ideology and popular mobilization
in recent years.
Such
an emphasis on popular reception and public opinion also distinguishes
National Bolshevism from more conventional treatments of nation-building,
both within the Russo-Soviet spectrum and throughout much of the rest
of the literature on the subject. Most scholarship, after all, neglects
the role that common people play in the process by focusing exclusively
on either theory or national elites. National Bolshevism, however,
uses the innovative work of prominent theorists (Anderson, Gellner,
Hroch, Brubaker, Bakhtin, de Certeau, etc.) as a lens through which
to evaluate an empirical inquiry into identity formation on the mass
level. As such, this book's findings are notable for their precision,
degree of nuance and subtle contextualization within the historical
dynamics of the Stalin era.
The
first book of its kind to address the production, projection and reception
of russocentric ideology under Stalin, National Bolshevism
fits neatly into a broad convoy of recent publications by prominent
authors and university presses. A natural complement to theoretical
work on Eastern European identity formation by Suny, Slezkine, Hosking,
Dunlop, Brubaker, Laitin and Kaiser,[1] it supersedes dated
accounts by Agursky, Barghoorn, Besancon and others.[2] National
Bolshevism's analysis of the Stalin period dovetails with another
book that I regard as essentially an epilogue to my study -- Yitzhak
Brudny's new monograph on Russian nationalism between the late 1950s
and the collapse of the USSR.[3]
On the
subject of Stalinist mass culture, National Bolshevism engages
with many of the major publications in the field, especially those
by Brooks, Clark, Lahusen and Dobrenko.[4] National Bolshevism
sharpens the analysis of Stalinist cinema found in the works of Kenez
and Taylor, and opens a whole new discussion on Orientalism in the
Stalin-era public sphere.[5]
Finally,
in the debate over Stalinist social mentalite, National
Bolshevism spars with one of the most influential books of the
past decade by Stephen Kotkin.[6] Complementing recent monographs
by Fitzpatrick, Hoffmann and Davies,[7] National Bolshevism
extends and qualifies aspects of their work by looking beyond the
mid-1930s into the 1940s and 1950s. An original study, my analysis
of Stalinist russocentrism is nevertheless grounded squarely within
the mainstream of scholarly literature on the Soviet experience.
National
Bolshevism opens with a survey of the historiographical controversy
surrounding the Stalinist party's flirtation with Russian historical
myths, heroes and iconography. It then segues into an extensive discussion
of contemporary theoretical work on national identity formation and
its applicability to the Russian context during the pre-revolutionary
period.
Chapter
one begins with an examination of Russian-speaking society at the
turn of the century, a time when in many European countries, one could
observe the acceleration of societal dynamics that typically contribute
to mass mobilization and national identity formation (e.g. the spread
of literacy and print culture). Chapter one argues, however, that
although universal education and mass culture were already facts of
everyday life in countries like France during this era, a variety
of factors prevented Russian-speaking society from enjoying the benefits
of such basic societal institutions before the early 1930s.
Chapters
two through six address issues of identity formation in Soviet society
during the decade preceding the Second World War by examining the
party hierarchy's evolving strategy for societal mobilization and
the inculcation of a popular sense of patriotism. Individual chapters
analyze each of the dimensions of this process: the production of
ideology within the party hierarchy; its projection through public
education and state-sponsored mass culture; and its reception within
the society at large. Such an approach foregrounds the complexities
involved in the formulation of a sense of group identity without neglecting
the difficulties of transmitting it to the popular level or the peculiarities
of its mass reception.
Insofar
as identity formation is a long-term process requiring commitment
and consistency, chapters seven through ten trace this dynamic through
the war years, while chapters eleven through fourteen follow it into
the mid-1950s. In each period, individual chapters address ideological
production, projection and reception, detailing a tightly-controlled
process in which mass agitation in the public schools was reinforced
by broad attention given to the same themes throughout the society's
mass culture forums (e.g. literature, the press, film, etc.). Long
misunderstood, the deployment of Russian national heroes, myths and
iconography was a pragmatic move to augment the arcane aspects of
Marxist-Leninism with populist rhetoric designed to bolster Soviet
state legitimacy and promote a society-wide sense of allegiance to
the USSR. Ironic in the sense that the resultant social mentalité
turned out to be qualitatively more "Russian" than "Soviet," this
unintended consequence of the campaign is something which continues
to reverberate throughout the former Soviet space to the present day.
National
Bolshevism's analysis of Stalin-era ideology draws to a close
with a wide-ranging discussion of the implications of Stalinist russocentrism
for the post-1953 time period. Taking advantage of Yitzhak Brudny's
study of Russian nationalism between the Khrushchev and Gorbachev
periods, I identify dynamics that link Stalin-era russocentrism with
aspects of present-day Russian national identity and argue that a
thorough understanding of the latter requires acknowledgment of its
origins between 1931 and 1956. In essence, National Bolshevism
proposes that in order to grasp what is at stake in places like Chechnya
today -- particularly the imperial nostalgia, defensiveness and chauvinism
displayed by the Russian political elite -- it is necessary to approach
the subject of Russian national identity as an unfortunate but remarkably
tangible legacy of the Stalin years. Viewed in this sense as a syndrome
of one of the most brutal, authoritarian regimes of the twentieth
century, modern Russian national identity ceases to be the "riddle
wrapped in a mystery inside of an enigma" that Churchill termed it
some six decades ago. Instead, when properly contexualized, the formation
of modern Russian national identity provides a host of intriguing
new perspectives on the past, present and future of this post-Soviet
society.
[1]
Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution
and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993); Yuri Slezkine,
Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca,
1994); Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917
(Cambridge MA, 1997); Russian Nationalism Past and Present,
edited by G. Hosking and R. Service (New York, 1998); John B. Dunlop,
The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (Princeton, 1984);
Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National
Question in the New Europe (Cambridge UK, 1996); David D. Laitin,
Identities in Formation: the Russian-Speaking Populations in the
Near Abroad (Ithaca, 1998); Robert J. Kaiser, The Geography
of Nationalism in the USSR (Princeton, 1994).
[2]
Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR
(Bolder, 1987); Frederick C. Barghoorn, Soviet Russian Nationalism
(New York, 1956); Alain Besancon, "Nationalism and Bolshevism in the
USSR," in The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future,
edited by Robert Conquest (Stanford, 1986); etc.
[3]
Yitzhak Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the
Soviet State (Cambridge MA, 1998).
[4]
Jeffrey Brooks, "Thank You, Comrade Stalin": Soviet Public Culture
from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 1999); Katerina Clark,
The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1980); Thomas
Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist
Realism in Stalin's Russia (Ithaca, 1997); Evgenii Dobrenko, The
Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception
of Soviet Literature, translated by Jesse M. Savage (Stanford,
1997).
[5]
Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917-1953 (Cambridge,
1992); Richard Taylor, "Ideology and Popular Culture in Soviet Cinema,"
in The Red Screen: Politics, Society and Art in Soviet Cinema,
edited by Ann Lawton (London, 1992), 42-65.
[6]
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
(Berkeley, 1995).
[7]
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism -- Ordinary Life in Extraordinary
Times (New York, 1999); David Hoffman, Peasant Metropolis:
Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941 (Ithaca, 1994); Sarah Davies,
Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent,
1933-1941 (Cambridge UK, 1997).