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Propaganda State: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination and Stalinist Terror, 1928-1939 (ms., 2003-)   prospectus Long overlooked in the on-going debate over Soviet social identity has been the party's striking failure to promote a popular sense of Communist idealism. Something of a paradox for a society that was ostensibly organized along Marxist-Leninist lines, this shortcoming is all the more curious in light of the fact that at least during the Stalin period, the party allocated virtually unlimited resources to the cause of ideological indoctrination. Yet despite this massive investment, Stalinist ideologists were repeatedly frustrated in their attempts to popularize the philosophical tenets of Marxism-Leninism--a failure which ultimately affected all other spheres of Soviet social policy and identity politics as well.   Propaganda State explores this heretofore unacknowledged weakness at the core of the Soviet "experiment" by examining the construction of Communist-oriented agitation on high, its dissemination in society, and its mass reception on the popular level. An investigation of the ossification of Soviet ideology and indoctrinational efforts, this project also considers the ramifications of this ideological impotence for the society as a whole, both during and after the Stalin period.   problematica During the past decade, many scholars have focused on the subject of identity politics under Stalin. Some have argued that the rhetoric surrounding industrialization and socialist construction was ubiquitous enough to have a decisive effect on the formation of ordinary Soviet citizens' sense of self. According to one such account, Soviet citizens literally began to "speak Bolshevik" during 1920s and '30s, displaying beliefs that were apparently socialist in content if rather heterogeneous in form.[1]   Other specialists contend that Stalinist rule led to the coalescing of ethnic identities. Although class-consciousness nominally lay at the philosophical foundation of the Soviet experiment, these scholars contend that in practice, Stalin and his entourage actually behaved like "nationalists," actively promoting nation-building throughout the USSR.[2] According to this line of reasoning, early Soviet policies in the 1920s celebrated non-Russian ethnic diversity but then gave way to countervailing populist, russificatory tendencies during the mid-to-late 1930s.[3] In my first book, I explored how this ideological "national Bolshevism" matured during the late 1930s to survive the war and stretch deep into the 1950s.[4]   Aside from these two schools of thought, other scholars have ascribed identity formation under Stalin to a variety of other factors, from the Second World War[5] and the party press[6] to the peculiarly Soviet practices of everyday life.[7] Although the varied nature of these scholars findings may seem confusing and inconsistent at first, upon closer examination, it is often remarkable how compatible they actually are. On a fundamental level, Soviet society turns out to have been strikingly diverse and Soviet social identity extraordinarily multivalent.   But absent throughout many of these studies is attention paid to the party's failure to promote a more explicitly Soviet sense of social identity grounded in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism.[8] Despite the fact that "Workers of the World, Unite!" echoed from every Pravda masthead, and despite the fact that textbooks like The Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) made up a significant proportion of state publishing's total output between 1938 and 1953, the philosophical dimensions of Marxism-Leninism seem to have played a decidedly marginal role in Stalin-era social identity. Aspects of this question have been considered before from oblique angles. A number of studies have been published on leading Stalin-era ideologists[9] and crucial ideological texts.[10] But this is the first major account to synthesize such accounts together with other sorts of original research into a comprehensive investigation of official efforts to inculcate a Marxist-Leninist worldview in Stalinist society under Stalin. The importance of the party’s ultimate failure to promote a sense of identity grounded in materialism and proletarianism is difficult to exaggerate. It was, after all, the failure of political indoctrinational efforts that encouraged the proliferation of other sorts of social identity noted above. Moreover, it was this weakness at the core of the Soviet experiment that repeatedly forced the party to resort to ad-hoc, populist propaganda ploys that inevitably contradicted other aspects of the “official line.” Scholars have long been aware of the party hierarchy’s heretical flirtation with Russian nationalism and the Orthodox church, as well as its encouragement of economic stratification and gender inequality. That said, these practices have often been written-off as examples of Stalinist pragmatism or linked to the exigencies of war. Absent in such accounts is an awareness of the fact that it was the failure of attempts to promote a more ideologically-consistent sense of social identity that forced the party hierarchy to compromise in the first place. Supplying the missing dimension to scholarship concerning Soviet identity politics during the 1930s, Propaganda State combines an archival investigation of the Stalin-era ideological establishment with an interdisciplinary focus on the “official line,” as represented in party study circles, the all-union press, low-brow literature, theater, film, opera and museum exhibition. Propaganda State then complements this examination of the construction and dissemination of ideology with a special investigation into the popular reception of this rhetoric and imagery. Intent on determining how ordinary Soviet citizens reacted to the wax and wane of the official line, this study surveys an array of letters, diaries and memoirs, as well as denunciations, secret police reports and rare interviews conducted during Stalin’s lifetime, in an effort to identify “authentic” voices from the 1930s with which to gauge the popular resonance of ideologically-charged propaganda on the mass level. Propaganda State begins by addressing the ideological nature of Soviet avant garde propaganda during the 1920s, both within traditional contexts (textbooks, poster art) and less conventional forums (art, literature, drama, museum exhibition, etc.). Collapse of Soviet morale during the 1927 War Scare on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the October 1917 revolution hints of the low enthusiasm that the Soviet populace had for such an abstract and inaccessible melange of schematic materialism and anonymous social forces. In the aftermath of this mobilizational fiasco, Propaganda State traces how party historians and ideologists began to modulate their representation of the official line in order to enhance its accessibility and mobilizational power. Party historians focused on the construction of a "usable past" in order to demonstrate the relevance of the Bolshevik experience to Soviet society at large. Propagandists and members of the ideological establishment augmented these efforts by launching an ambitious personality cult that identified Stalin as the living personification of the Soviet "experiment." Neither of these approaches proved easy to refine or implement, however. Indeed, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that party historians and ideologists spend much of the early and mid-1930s attempting to reconcile their long-standing commitment to Marxism-Leninism with new, seemingly "bourgeois" approaches to mass mobilization. Curiously, the first to arrive at an accessible version of the “usable past” were strangers to the party’s ideological establishment, hailing instead from the ranks of journalism and the creative intelligentsia. Their approach, celebrating contemporary individual heroism and the long-taboo patriotic imagery, confounded veterans on the ideological front with its use of conventional, non-Marxist appeals at the same time that it elicited a surprisingly strong response from Soviet society at large. But if this new Soviet Olympus of everyday heroes, iconic individuals and dynamic role models was remarkably successful, it was also remarkably short lived. Coming into its own during the mid-1930s, this populist, patriotic line was immediately blindsided by the most brutal dimensions of the Terror that swept through Soviet society between 1936 and 1938. Its pantheon of contemporary heroes and patriots "unmasked" as enemies of the people, this new version of the Soviet usable past lapsed into disgrace, taking with it an entire generation of textbooks, fictional bestsellers and popular dramas for the stage and silver screen. As its dramatis personae fell victim to the Terror, the new line’s hard-won dynamism and individual heroism lapsed back into discussions of sterile schemata and anonymous social forces.[11] Ultimately, this purge of the usable past explains the ossification of the official line in the notorious 1938 Short Course on the History of the ACP(b). It also clarifies why the party hierarchs rushed to rehabilitate an array of non-Marxist heroes from the annals of the prerevolutionary Russian national past on the eve of the launch of this supposedly seminal text. More generally, it explains why the party failed to inculcate a popular sense of communist idealism in Soviet society and instead reconciled itself to the proliferation of nativist jingoism that inevitably stemmed from its recourse to russocentric imagery, rhetoric and iconography.   significance In its contribution to the discipline’s on-going inquiry into social identity under Stalin, Propaganda State uncovers an ideological failure that took a devastating toll on all subsequent Soviet indoctrinational efforts. Ripe with implications for the social, cultural and intellectual history of the Stalin-years, Propaganda State is relevant to the study of the post-Stalin period as well. First, it helps clarify why N.S. Khrushchev proved unable to foster a supra-national sense of identity revolving around membership in the "Soviet people" [Sovetskii narod] during the post-Stalin "Thaw." Second, it explains why the Brezhnev-era party found it so tempting to rely on the memorialization of the Second World War and the selective use of Russian nationalist appeals in order to bolster its legitimacy. Third, it explains the failure of communist idealists like Andropov and Gorbachev to find common cause with the Soviet population. Fourth, it explains why Communist politicians in post-Soviet Russia resort so frequently to Russian nationalist sloganeering. Detailing the Stalinist party’s failure to promote a sense of Communist idealism during the Stalinist 1930s, Propaganda State speaks to one of the core dysfunctions of the Soviet experiment across the span of the twentieth century.     notes [1] Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995). Somewhat different approaches are reflected in Jochen Hellbeck, "Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: the diary of Stepan Podlubnyi," Jahrbuecher fuer Geschichte Osteuropas 44:4 (1996): 233-73; idem, "Laboratories of the Soviet Self: Diaries of the Stalin Era" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1998); and Anna Krylova, "The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies," Kritika 1:1 (2000): 119-46.   [2] Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993); Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53:2 (1994): 414.   [3] Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Ethnicity and the Soviet State, 1923-1938 (Ithaca, 2001).   [4] David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge MA, 2002).   [5] Amir Weiner, "The Making of a Dominant Myth: the Second World War and the Construction of Political Identities within the Soviet Polity," Russian Review 55:4 (1996): 638-60; idem, Making Sense of War (Princeton, 2000). See also Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994); Elena Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: politika i povsednevnost', 1945-1953 (Moscow, 1999).   [6] Jeffrey Brooks, "Thank You, Comrade Stalin": Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 1999).   [7] Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge MA, 1994); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism--Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999); Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: a Study of Background Practices (Berkeley, 1999); Stalinism as a Way of Life, eds. Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov (New Haven, 2000); etc.   [8] Recent studies that restrict their analysis to ideological developments within the Stalin elite appear to be unaware of the party's failure to popularize its core tenets on the mass level. See Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: a History of Socialism in Russia (New York, 1994); Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: the Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, 1995).   [9] George Enteen, The Soviet Scholar-Bureaucrat: M. N. Pokrovskii and the Society of Marxist Historians (University Park, 1978); idem, "The Writing Party History in the USSR: the Case of E. M. Iaroslavskii," Journal of Contemporary History 21 (1986): 321-39; A. A. Chernobaev, "Professor s pikoi", ili Tri zhizni istorika M. N. Pokrovskogo (Moscow, 1992); S. B. Borisov, Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov: opyt politicheskoi biografii (Shadrinsk, 1998); A. N. Artizov, "Shkola M. N. Pokrovskogo i sovetskaia istoricheskaia nauka (konets 1920-kh--1930-e gody)" (Doctoral diss., VAK, 1998); Iu. Rubtsov, Alter ego Stalina: L. Mekhlis (Moscow, 1999).   [10] N. N. Maslov, "'Kratkii kurs istorii VKP(b)'---entsiklopediia kul'ta lichnosti Stalina," Voprosy istorii KPSS 11 (1988): 51-67; S. V. Sukharev, "Litsedeistvo na poprishche istorii [Beriia--apologet kul'ta lichnosti Stalina]," Voprosy istorii KPSS 3 (1990): 102-18; idem, "Predtecha 'kratkogo kursa' v litsakh i dokumentakh." Voprosy istorii KPSS 8 (1991): 110-20; D. L. Brandenberger, "Sostavlenie i publikatsiia ofitsial'noi biografii vozhdia--katekhizisa stalinizma," Voprosy istorii 12 (1997): 141-50   [11] For initial work on the murder of the usable past, see Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, chap. 2.