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

always another, more positive aspect to Soviet diplomatic identity.
     
     
politicheskikh stereotipov v soznanii Rosiiskogo obshchestva pervoi polovini XX Veka (Moscow, 1998); E. Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics and the Problems of Russian Development (Princeton, 1999); I. B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations (London, 1996); A. M. Ball , Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Oxford, 2003); Y. Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, 1994).
38 V. Zubok and C. Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge Mass., 1996), 4; G. Hosking, Russia and the Russians: From Earliest Times to 2001 (London, 2002), 521; D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York, 2000), 8–9; V. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middle Class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976), 84.
39 J. Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley, 1994), 7.
xxviii Being Soviet
At successive disarmament conferences in the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet representatives adopted the guise of peace-loving defenders of interna- tional security. 40 Following the rise of Hitler in 1933, the USSR also postured itself as the leader of a progressive, Europe-wide anti-Hitler coalition that was embodied in the Popular Front. 41 Despite the turn inwards that took place during and after the Purges, Soviet diplomatic identity in 1939 still combined the dual notions of foreign threat with the idea of the USSR as a morally righteous actor on the world stage.
The second aspect of Official Soviet Identity in this period concerned the relationship between Soviet and non-Soviet civilization. The artistic and scientific achievements of the West are a long-standing reference point for Russian and Soviet identity formation. 42 In the nineteenth century the debate over the nature of Western civilization crystallized around the ‘Westernizers’, who sought to ape the West, and the ‘Slavophiles’, who argued that Russia must find a distinctive and spiritually whole road to the future. 43 In the years following the Octo- ber Revolution, Soviet authors were consistent in their condemnation of the economic inequalities of Western capitalist society. 44 Writers such as Gorky excoriated the ruthless nature of the capitalist monopolies and drew attention to the ever-present threat of capitalist economic crisis. 45 Soviet citizens were informed that workers in the West suffered injustice and deprivation on a scale that was inconceivable in the USSR. In the 1930s the famous satirists, Ilf and Petrov, published a popular travel- ogue about their journey to the USA that also stressed the deep-seated inequalities of American life. 46
     
40 I. K. Kobliakov, USSR: For Peace Against Aggression 1933–1941 (Moscow, 1976).
41 Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain , 229–30.
42 G. Belaia, ‘Sick Ideas of a Sick Society: The “West-East” Theme in Soviet and E ´ migre ´ Criticism’, in. A. McMillin, Under Eastern Eyes: The West as Reflected in Recent Russian E ´ migr ´ e Writing (London, 1991), 1. See also: C. Avins, Border Crossings: The West
and Russian Identity in Soviet Literature 1917–1934 (London, 1983), 2.
43 Kingston-Mann In Search of the True West , 112–17; H. Rogger, ‘America in the Russian Mind—or Russian Discoveries of America’, Pacific Historical Review, 47.1 (1978), 27–51.
44 H. Rogger, ‘How the Soviets See Us’, in M. Garrison and A. Gleason eds., Shared
Destiny: Fifty Years of Soviet American Relations (Boston, 1985) , 120.
45 H. Rogger, ‘America Enters the 20th Century: The View from Russia,’ in
I. Qverbach, A. Hillgruber, and G. Schramm, eds., Felder und Vorfelder Russicher Geschichte: Studein zu Ehren von Peter Scheibert (Rambach, 1985), 161–4;
F. C. Barghoorn, The Soviet Image of the United States: A Study in