Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 Read Online Free PDF Page A

newspaper of the Red Army), and those after the war to Krokodil (a satirical journal). Official Soviet Identity was also communicated through plays, films, and other popular media, as well as lectures and speeches that were commissioned by the Agitprop section of the Central Committee. The Soviet mass media did not always sing in one harmonious voice. However, on the topic of Soviet identity it tended to have a very closely defined and coherent picture. The outside world mattered profoundly in this period and Soviet newsmen, artists, and musicians were extremely adept at conforming to the official line that emanated from the centre. What emerges from this body of sources is the official version of Soviet identity between 1939 and 1953. It was not necessarily opposed to vernacular or popular identities: the two could and did shape one another. Nonetheless it was official in the sense that it was the version of Soviet identity that was being promoted by the Stalin-era government. 36
This book evaluates that rhetoric of Sovietness through the critical tools provided by the literature concerning identity. The historiography of identity has flourished in recent years, drawing on insights from anthropology and sociology. 37 However, the Soviet vision of the
     
34 For a discussion of worker identities in the pre-war USSR see: Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain , 492–500; L. H. Siegelbaum and R. G. Suny, eds., Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca, 1994).
35 Colley, Britons , 6.
36 For the value of this distinction in the 19th century see: A. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd edn (London, 1991), 83–101; J. M. MacKenzie , Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984), 4–7.
37 L. E. Said, Orientalism (London, 1985); E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism
since 1780 (Cambridge, 1990); Anderson, Imagined Communities . For a brief list of those who have examined ‘identity’ in a Russo-Soviet context, see Iu. S. Borisov, A. V. Golubev,

 
M. Kudoiukina, and V. A. Nevozhin, eds., Rossiia i Zapad: Formirovanie vneshne-
Introduction xxvii
outside world has largely been assessed in terms of the respective roles of Marxist-Leninism, Russian nationalism, or realpolitik within foreign policy thinking. This approach has spawned a series of compound and sometimes confusing terms such as: ‘the revolutionary imperial para- digm’; ‘multiethnic imperialism and socialist messianism’; ‘the hostile isolationist tendency’; or ‘a commingling Soviet Socialism and Russian nationalism’. 38 This book takes a different approach, focusing on the roles of status, hierarchy, and patronage within Official Soviet Identity. Marxism and nationalism mattered in the later Stalin years but a more anthropological approach offers a fresh perspective on the Soviet experience.
Soviet identity was constructed in relation to a number of different states in this era. Chapter 1 evaluates the place of Germany, the Western powers, and the newly acquired borderlands within the Soviet imagina- tion. From Chapter 2 (1941) onwards the focus is on the place of Britain, America, and later China within official rhetoric. Between 1939 and 1953 Britain and America were first antagonists, then uncer- tain allies, and later clear enemies of the USSR. As a result they provided some of the most complex and interesting arenas for the articulation of Official Soviet Identity. As case studies, they offer a valuable starting point for any broader discussion of what it meant to be Soviet in this era.
Official Soviet Identity was expressed in two different spheres in this period. The first of these, the diplomatic identity of the USSR, concerned the political and military posture of the USSR within the international community. Foreign relations were always at the heart of the Bolshevik political imagination. 39 In 1917 the USSR became a socialist enclave surrounded by capitalist predators. However, there was