Symbols and Legitimacy in Soviet Politics

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Symbols and Legitimacy in Soviet Politics

Symbols and Legitimacy in Soviet Politics analyses the way in which Soviet symbolism and ritual changed from the regime’s birth in 1917 to its fall in 1991. Graeme Gill focuses on the symbolism in party policy and leaders’ speeches, artwork and political posters, and urban redevelopment, and on ritual in the political system. He shows how this symbolism and ritual were worked into a dominant metanarrative which underpinned Soviet political development. Gill also shows how, in each of these spheres, the images changed both over the life of the regime and during particular stages: the Leninist era metanarrative differed from that of the Stalin period, which differed from that of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods, which was, in turn, changed significantly under Gorbachev. In charting this development, the book lays bare the dynamics of the Soviet regime and a major reason for its fall. graeme gill is Professor of Government and Public Administration at the University of Sydney and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. A long-time scholar of Soviet and Russian politics, his work covers all aspects of the politics of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, as well as democratisation and the history of the state. His books include The Collapse of a Single-Party System (Cambridge, 1994), The Politics of Transition (with Stephen White and Darrell Slider, Cambridge, 1993) and The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge, 1990).

Symbols and Legitimacy in Soviet Politics Graeme Gill Department of Government and International Relations The University of Sydney

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107004542 © Graeme Gill 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Gill, Graeme J. Symbols and legitimacy in Soviet politics / Graeme Gill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-107-00454-2 (hbk.) 1. Soviet Union – Politics and government. 2. Soviet Union – Civilization. 3. Social change – Soviet Union – History. 4. Symbolism in politics – Soviet Union – History. 5. Political customs and rites – Soviet Union – History. 6. Narration (Rhetoric) – Political aspects – Soviet Union – History. 7. Legitimacy of governments – Soviet Union – History. 8. Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza – History. 9. Political culture – Soviet Union – History. 10. Popular culture – Soviet Union – History. I. Title. DK268.4.G55 2011 947.084–dc22 2010036186 ISBN 978-1-107-00454-2 Hardback

Contents

Acknowledgements

page vi

1

Ideology, metanarrative and myth

1

2

Formation of the metanarrative, 1917–1929

26

3

The Stalinist culture, 1929–1953

89

4

An everyday vision, 1953–1985

164

5

The vision implodes, 1985–1991

213

6

Impact of the metanarrative

264

Notes Bibliography Index

283 337 352

v

Acknowledgements

No book is ever the product of just one person. Everyone must build on the shoulders of others, and this book is no exception. To the many scholars who have laboured assiduously over the years to expand our knowledge and understanding of the Soviet system upon whom my work rests, too numerous to name here, my grateful thanks. Three people gave invaluable research assistance on this project: John Brookfield, Erin Kelly and James Young were all diligent workers without whom the project would not have been finished in either the time or the form in which it was. Librarians and archivists have also been central to this work, and I thank those who staff the following institutions: Fisher Library at the University of Sydney, the British Library, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Russian National Library in Moscow, and the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History. The Australian Research Council generously funded this work and thereby made it possible. And finally, Heather gave the sort of love and support without which this book could never have been completed, and to her my debts are endless. A word on the notes: in many cases, reference has been made to a single political poster, decision or speech. Except for direct citations, these are illustrative; many other instances of these could be cited to reinforce the point, but they have been omitted for considerations of space.

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When the Soviet regime came to power in 1917, its revolutionary nature was soon recognised, both inside the country and out. This was reflected most clearly in the fundamental transformation the regime sought in all of the major sectors of public life – political, social, economic and cultural. In all of these sectors, traditional structures, patterns and processes were thoroughly reworked, and although some continuities remained from the tsarist through to the Soviet period, the magnitude of the changes that flowed from 1917 clearly marked the regime off as revolutionary in nature. Indeed, this was its avowed purpose: the revolutionary transformation of tsarist society. Of the four sectors that were transformed, the most important for the current study was the cultural. Any truly revolutionary change will involve the substantial reworking of the cultural sphere. This sort of cultural revolution is what marked the three great revolutions of modern times, the French of 1789, the Russian of 1917, and the Chinese of 1949. A cultural revolution represents the reworking of the whole public sphere of life. The norms whereby public life is structured and the values which underpin these new patterns of action are transformed as those which formerly had dominated in the public sphere are replaced by new principles representing the brave new world that the revolution represents. The new structures of power that these norms represent become embedded in the patterns of action and the webs of relationships that develop in the society,1 and they are reinforced by the daily interactions which are structured by these norms and which give concrete realisation to their essence. It is this restructuring of the bases of social life through the reworking of the public sphere that is the truly revolutionary process in social change. This is the means whereby new patterns of social life are created and societies are transformed. And it is a process in which societies themselves are intimately involved. The new values and patterns of action are not simply mandated from above, even though central direction may be crucial in the process of the emergence of new sets of social relations, but are reworked and shaped through constant iteration by members of the society going about their 1

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daily business. In the Soviet case, this process has been discussed in terms of the creation of a new civilisation. This so-called ‘Stalinist civilisation’2 has been seen as emanating from the dramatic social changes imposed upon Soviet society from the end of the 1920s with the introduction of rapid industrialisation and forced-pace agricultural collectivisation, although both were contingent on the change of regime in 1917. In this view,3 the regime sought ‘discursive domination’, principally through the involvement of the population in a process of ‘participatory totalitarianism’. In this process, there was no distinction between active believers and passive victims of the ideology, which, rather than being external to the people, so permeated the language and organisation of the society that it was inescapable.4 The regime sought to change not just people’s behaviour, but their whole way of thinking. Publicly justified in terms of building the communist future and creating an alternative and superior modernity to that prevailing in the capitalist West, Stalinism was presented as a new form of civilisation. This notion of civilisation may be seen in terms of three levels: ideology, metanarrative and myth. Central to the regime’s revolutionary quality was its ideocratic nature. This means that a central part in the regime’s life was played by a formal, codified ideology. Known for most of its life as Marxism-Leninism, this ideology was based principally upon the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and was codified in reproductions of those writings and in the large number of exegetical texts produced during the life of the regime for the propounding of that ideology. There has been much debate about the role of ideology in Soviet society – as a guide to decision-making, a form of legitimation, a form of power, or a rationalisation for control – but few deny that it was an important feature of Soviet rule. An ideology is a coherent body of values, assumptions, principles and arguments which contains a view about the way in which historical development takes place, and includes both an assessment of the deficiencies of the past (and possibly the present) plus some guidance about what needs to be done in order to reach a more desirable state of affairs. Ideology thus involves both a philosophy of history and usually some sense of teleology, an assumption that history is working towards a certain goal or in a certain direction. In this sense the ideology is an action programme, a doctrine which both elucidates the way history unfolds and thereby provides guidance about how people should act. The ideology is complex and ontological, explaining in philosophical terms the nature of society and its location in the sweep of historical development. It constitutes the basic philosophical foundation for the regime, the intellectual basis upon which it rests and the means for the development of a sense of legitimation


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around existing social forms, including the political authority structure. In the USSR it provided a basic rationalisation for the Soviet project plus direction on how that project could be realised. As such it was the intellectual bedrock upon which Soviet public discussion proceeded. However, the complexity and philosophical nature of the ideology mean that, while it underpins the dominant conceptions of social reality in society, in its full-blown form it is not particularly suited to the daily tasks of communication between government and governed. Questions of, for example, the dialectic or of the materialist basis of history do not normally have a place in the discussion of policy alternatives. But the discussion of policy and the interaction between regime and society must be structured in terms consistent with the ideology. This means that there emerges a metanarrative, a body of discourse which presents a simplified form of the ideology and which is the vehicle of communication between the regime and those who live under it; it is the principal form of cultural mediation between regime and people. The focus of the metanarrative is the symbolic construction of the society and the projection of a conception of society that explains both current reality and future trajectory. The metanarrative focuses on the nature of the society and where it is going, stripping the ideology down to its essentials and largely simply assuming the philosophical underpinnings of the ideology upon which the regime rests. The metanarrative normalises and stabilises the meanings of some concepts while marginalising and excluding others. It is the meanings contained in the discourse of the metanarrative that give substance to the regime’s rituals. Thus the metanarrative defines the community and what it stands for. As such, the metanarrative is both narrower than the ideology but also for the people much more connected with their lives. While the focus of the metanarrative is the symbolic construction of society, that metanarrative is constituted by myth. The notion of myth was for some time thought to be associated only with ‘primitive’ societies which operated on the basis of non-rational assumptions about magic and the actions of gods. And it is certainly true that a lot of work on myth has been undertaken by anthropologists. But myth can also function as a potent force in highly developed industrial societies. In anthropological terms, the essence of myth is that it provides a narrative structure and a coherence to the history of the community; it is a shared narrative that gives meaning.5 For Malinowski, myth is a ‘narrative resurrection of a primeval reality’.6 What myth presents is a symbolic reconstruction of the community’s formation. This reconstruction may be based on real events, like the representations created in the US of the events of the war of independence, or on phenomena which have no existence independent of the myth itself, like the theories of the ancient Greeks about the role of the gods in

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the creation and functioning of human society. Myth is therefore foundational for the community in the sense that it provides the basic rationale for the community, a sense of its meaning and purpose as well as how it came about. What is important is less the empirical basis of the myth than that the myth is accepted and believed in. Clearly these two things may be linked, but it is the belief that is all-important. To cite Murray Edelman, myth is ‘a belief held in common by a large group of people that gives events and actions a particular meaning; it is typically socially cued rather than empirically based’.7 Myth is therefore socially constructed and is a means of both defining and explaining reality for those who believe in it. While this definition of reality will differ from community to community, because the mythical underpinnings themselves will differ, anthropologists have argued that myths throughout the world have had three themes of particular importance:8 the existence of an evil conspiracy against the community, the presence of a saviour who can release the community from this threat, and the coming of a golden age. The nature of the conspiracy, the saviour and the golden age will differ from community to community and myth to myth, but clearly these three elements are linked. They provide major structuring devices for the community’s myths, with other components of those myths locking in with these themes. It is these themes which provide the main sustenance for the community’s myths. This notion of myth is very useful because of the way it emphasises the role myth plays in constructing a community’s perception of its identity, rationale and purpose. While retaining this perception of the role myth plays, this study will conceive of myth in somewhat narrower terms than has been the case in many anthropological studies. Rather than a single foundation myth which explains the community’s origins, there are a whole series of myths which, individually, explain particular aspects of the way in which a community has developed, and together constitute an explanation of the community’s foundation, growth and development. Myths inscribe understanding on events and define appropriate behaviour in terms of that understanding. Myths are thus the basic building blocks of the metanarrative, providing the structures of which that metanarrative overwhelmingly consists. In the Soviet case, six myths emerged concerning: the foundation of the regime, focusing principally on the October Revolution; the building of socialism, involving the broad course of development, how it was to come about and the forces contributing to it, and the nature of society both now and in the future; the nature of leadership, principally in terms of the qualifications to lead society to the communist future; internal opposition to the course the party was pursuing;


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external opposition to the party’s course; victory in the war. While analytically distinct, these myths were in practice interlinking and interwoven. Central to the functioning of all three levels of discourse – ideology, metanarrative and myth – were symbols. Symbols are important principally because of what they represent. They constitute representations of more complex ideas, a means of simplifying (either visually or linguistically) an idea which can then exist in the public arena as a representation of that more complex reality. In this sense, symbols are a form of language, expressing, often in vivid form, principles, assumptions, conceptions and ideas which are quite complex and politically significant. This was especially so in an ideocratic society like the Soviet Union where the metanarrative was a reflection of the underlying ideology, and where the terms used in the metanarrative gained their particular meaning from the ideology. For example, the image projected of the proletarian in early political posters was of a brawny individual in work clothes, holding tools and usually gazing fixedly into the future, but associated with this was the ideological meaning of the proletariat as the midwife of the future. As means of giving meaning to and simplifying complex ideas or concepts, symbol could be a potent means both of generating and projecting a new cultural message. This was particularly the case where the culture was revolutionary in nature and sought to distinguish itself from that which had gone before, and therefore where significant sections of the target audiences could be assumed to lack the politico-ideological education or sophistication to appreciate not just the nuances of what was being presented, but sometimes even the main themes of the message. Image and allegory can embed an idea in people’s consciousness far more easily and more effectively than hours of political education, and although only through the latter could full understanding come about, the forms projected through symbols could remain a potent force for ideological commitment and consciousness. In this sense, symbolism can be seen as a kind of shorthand means of expressing the programme of change, a means of both keeping that programme at the forefront of people’s consciousness and advancing it by embedding it as the normal intellectual context within which reality is perceived. As Murray Edelman wrote in an early study of symbolic politics, man (sic) ‘reconstructs his past, perceives his present condition, and anticipates his future through symbols that abstract, screen, condense, distort, displace, and even create what the senses bring to his attention.’9 Symbols are a means of understanding the world, and it was principally through the evocation of symbols that myth and thereby metanarrative were expressed.

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The role played by symbols in the metanarrative means that they are also important for defining group identity both internally for the group and externally in relation to other groups. The key here is the response to the symbols. People who respond positively to the same symbols gain a sense of belonging and membership, of being part of the same community which is bound together by the symbols and what they represent. Adherence to a common symbolic system provides a basis whereby people with little in common can feel as though they share a common identity. Alternatively, those who do not share such an attachment to that symbolic system lack a feeling of identification with that group. The metanarrative and the myths of which it consists are thus expressed through symbols related to one another in various meaningful ways, and it is this which a new revolutionary regime seeks to embed in the society over which it rules. The metanarrative is the backbone of the reconstruction of culture that revolutionary regimes seek to bring about. In the Soviet case, there were four major types of symbols central to the metanarrative. (1) Language. This was the most important vehicle of symbolic representation of all because it was the principal form whereby ideas and concepts were projected into the political arena and more widely in the public realm, and it was the explicit representation of the ideology. In both its aural and written forms, language was the main medium of communication and therefore the principal means for the introduction of new ideas and concepts by a political leadership which sought to drive change throughout society. Furthermore, and especially at the elite level, this was the principal medium through which ideas and concepts were worked out in the course of debate and argument within leading political circles. Here symbols were shaped and honed while their meaning was debated, often explicitly but more often implicitly in debates over policy. During such debates, symbols were used as shorthand for the more substantial conceptual concerns that comprised the Bolshevik world outlook. Terms like socialism, communism, proletariat, peasantry and bourgeoisie were not simply common nouns, but emotive concepts carrying a wide range of differences of nuance and meaning, and it was often these differences that were at the heart of elite disagreement, ostensibly over policy but as well over these symbols and their meaning, at different times during the Soviet period. Symbols projected through language were therefore major elements in elite politics, including in the assertion of authority in political debate. When the Bolsheviks came to power, their vision of the future, and therefore of the ultimate ends for which they had seized power, remained inchoate and relatively unformed. While in exile and opposition, little time had been spent on working out either a clearly defined conception of


7

what the future socialist society might look like or the necessary political forms and problems that might confront them the day after they had acceded to power. Most of the energies of the leading figures in the Bolshevik movement had been spent on questions of political strategy and tactics, on the issue of the struggle for power rather than the forms it would take once it had been achieved. This does not mean that, in power, they started from a blank sheet of paper. Their conception, both of the tasks that confronted them and the broader situation in which they were located, was shaped by the intellectual legacy they brought with them, the ideology which underpinned the party’s world view. Embedded within this world view was a panoply of concepts and images which were reflected in the terminology that was used in the course of party debate. Many of the terms had meanings specific to Marxism, thereby in effect transforming normal everyday terms into a more technical language; class is a good example of this, with Marxists using the term very differently from those not espousing the doctrine. Furthermore the meaning attached to such terms, through their embeddedness in Marxist theories of social change, implied a range of assumptions about political reality and change which were simply absent from a non-Marxist approach. To take class again as an example: for the Marxist this was a driver of social change with the conflict between classes central to and inherent in that process of change, while for the non-Marxist there was no such necessary association between class, conflict and historical progression. As a result, much of the terminology used by the Bolsheviks evoked images that stemmed from and were specific to the Marxist frame of analysis; it was, in effect, a shorthand means of conveying often complex assumptions and understandings through the use of signifier terms that all of those who were ideologically literate could understand. In this sense, Bolshevik discourse was conducted largely through symbols. This language of discourse stemmed from the history of the socialist movement broadly conceived, but more especially from the history of the party following its foundation in 1898. This pre-revolutionary period was characterised by two linked processes which contributed to the generation of this symbolic language, continuing leadership conflict and the drive to attract and maintain a committed membership. Both of these processes encouraged the manipulation of the theory guiding revolutionary practice and its presentation through particular signifiers as a means of both attacking one’s opponents and consolidating one’s support. They were also instrumental in consolidating the meanings and implications of various terms used by the protagonists. As a result, when the Bolsheviks came to power, they brought with them a symbolic language already formed but one which needed both elaboration and specification to make it suitable

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for the new conditions of ruling Russia. The principal form this elaboration and specification took was argument and debate over policy, a process which of necessity reshaped and refined the symbolic world of Bolshevik thought. In their quest to transform society, the Bolsheviks had a major impact on the Russian language. This involved the introduction of new words and concepts, the transformation of the meaning of old words, and the generation of a mode of discourse and a patois that was alien to the language prior to the twentieth century. In part linguistic development was inevitable; industrial development and the associated changes in society were bound to lead to linguistic changes. But what was important here was the Bolshevik political project which sought to shape that social development in certain ways. The result, linguistically, was a language that became redolent of Bolshevik conceptions and values; for example, the use of the term comrade (tovarishch) as a form of address implied a whole different set of social relationships to the terms it replaced, like Mister, Mrs and Sir (gospodin, gospozha and barin).10 And by ensuring that this language became the dominant form of discourse in the society, at least in its public arenas, the regime ensured that the populace was encapsulated within the logic of its concepts, values and symbols.11 Language was a key means of propagating Soviet power. The symbolism of language was especially important for the officials who staffed the regime’s institutions at lower levels because it was the main medium whereby they received their instructions from above. This could occur at official meetings, where leading figures gave speeches designed in part to provide guidance to those on lower administrative levels; party congresses and conferences were important instances of this, but similar gatherings were held at regular intervals at lower levels of the politico-administrative structure. Also important for lower-level officials was their reliance upon the written word for guidance. Especially during the early decades of Soviet rule, the vast distances and poor communications infrastructure increased their reliance on the written word as the main form of the transmission of guidance from above.12 As well as internal party documents – decisions, instructions, advice, exhortations – the official press was important as the bearer of the metanarrative, and in particular official decisions of the party-state and the speeches of political leaders.13 Language was clearly crucial to the officials’ fulfilment of their duties, and was therefore a potent source of symbolic representation and projection. Outside the regime’s institutions too, among the mass of the population, language was an important form of symbolism. Initially an important role was played here by the agitprop worker and the propaganda work


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undertaken by party members and officials. Popular harangues and exhortations, attempts at education and persuasion, were constant parts of the public responsibilities of officials and party members, especially during the early years of the regime’s life. The communal reading of newspapers, where a literate person read aloud from the newspaper to a group of probably illiterate listeners, was also common. But as functional literacy spread and the media and communications network expanded, reliance upon the written word, including importantly in the form of slogans, for this group increased. The question that this creates is what language actually constituted the Soviet metanarrative. Not everything that was said in the public sphere can usefully be seen as part of the metanarrative. As a symbolic presentation of the community’s origins, purpose, current state and future, the metanarrative was an authoritative statement about the essence of the community. As such, all members of the community were likely to have views relating to this and therefore in theory could contribute to the development of that metanarrative. While there was some involvement in the shaping of that metanarrative by lower-level officials and by the population at large (see below), the main role in doing this was played by the political elite. This situation applies in most societies, but what made it especially the case in the Soviet Union were three things: the systematic suppression of opposing political forces, the absence of channels of the media independent of the regime, and the pressures for unanimity within the regime itself. But even given the primacy of the political elite in this process, ambiguity remains about what constitutes the metanarrative and what does not. This is clearly a matter of judgement, but one which is probably easier to make in hindsight than it would have been at the time. The chief sources of the metanarrative were essentially twofold: the major statements and speeches of leading political figures, and authoritative decisions made by leading political bodies, including most importantly the regime’s programmatic documents.14 It is from among these that the linguistic aspect of the metanarrative can be constructed, and it is on this basis that much of the subsequent analysis rests.15 (2) Visual arts. The representation of meaning through artwork has a long and well-acknowledged historical pedigree. Art has been a major means of representation of the vast array of emotions and feelings experienced in human life. In all societies, art has played this role, sometimes at the service of political authorities and at other times more spontaneously reflecting the perceptions, prejudices and values of the individual artists. Given the individualistic, decentralised nature of much artistic work, it is very difficult for political authorities to control what is actually produced in the studio. They can have some influence over this, through such things

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as encouragement of the production of certain types of art through the provision of incentives (such as retainers or commissions) or the application of penalties, and the laying down of guidelines about the form and content of art (e.g. socialist realism; see below). They can have a more significant, even determining, influence over what sort of artwork is publicly shown through control over access to sites of display, such as galleries. In pre-Soviet Russia, a major role in shaping the artistic landscape was played by the Church. The production of religious art, especially icons, was a major component of Russian artistic endeavour, while religious themes and imagery were also frequently present in art that was not specifically religious in intent. Secular art also had a long tradition in Russia, with, as elsewhere, portrait painting and landscapes featuring prominently in that tradition. But in the early part of the twentieth century the ferment that was shaking the art world took a particularly potent form in Russia. Modernism was reshaping art, with Russian artists in the vanguard of this change. The artistic experimentation of the avant-garde within Russia was accelerated and amplified by the revolution, with many painters rejoicing in the increased freedom and stimulation this seemed to promise; many turned to the themes of revolution and the building of the new society. So when the Bolsheviks came to power there was a vigorous art world in existence which, like much of the rest of society, was divided among those who supported and those who opposed the revolution, those excited by the prospects the revolution seemed to open up and those afraid for the future, and those who simply did not care about politics and wished it would go away. The new leadership was anxious to use visual forms of representation as a means of projecting their message because of the high levels of illiteracy that were present in society prior to the expansion of education in the 1930s. Furthermore, the disruption to printing brought on by the revolution and civil war posed a barrier to the production of printed materials in large runs, thereby adding to the value of those sorts of productions like posters that could address a large audience simply through their placement on a wall. Within this context, visual propaganda was crucial to the Bolsheviks’ need to project over society a new metanarrative that would accustom the populace to the new rulers and what they stood for. The revolution not only brought to power a new group of rulers in the country, but a new set of categories whereby the world was to be explained and understood, and a new take on historical events and the course history was taking. Visual propaganda was a potentially potent means of projecting this message, but only if the forms in which this message was expressed were broadly consistent. It took some time for such consistency to develop. It was not until the early 1930s, with the unification of the


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creative art organisations and the announcement of socialist realism in 1934, that the political authorities were able to impose a line on artistic activity and thereby bring order to the chaotic and individualistic production process that characterised the earlier art scene. Accordingly, up until the early 1930s, art in the Soviet Union continued to display significant variation in the projection of symbols and meaning. While there was emerging an art which sought to present symbols that accorded with the regime’s priorities, there remained considerably more freedom of expression within that artistic strand than was to become evident in succeeding decades (although it actually never completely disappeared), and there remained a world of artistic work that was only loosely connected, if at all, to regime priorities. Accordingly, while art was an important vehicle of symbolic representation, it became a close reflection of official priorities only from the early 1930s. This was less true of the other major sphere of visual art, the poster. The principal use of posters before the revolution had been for commercial advertising, although they had also been used by the government to promote the war effort. The great advantage of posters compared with traditional painting was that they were quick to create and could be produced in large numbers relatively easily and cheaply through the printing process. Posters were a particularly effective form of projecting a message; they were generally lucid and simple in form, striking images conveyed a clarity of message and often a pleasing artistic image, while the possibility of large print runs and the flexibility of display – they could be plastered on walls or vehicles, carried in processions, reproduced as cards and leaflets and in books and magazines – made posters a potent ideological weapon. Accordingly, they were set to this purpose from early in the life of the Bolshevik regime; they were the classic form of mass propaganda. Furthermore, by combining figurative representation with text, the range of images that posters could project both exceeded that of more traditional art forms and made them potentially of interest to a wider range of people; they could speak to the literate and illiterate, both functionally and politically. While individual poster artists retained a degree of artistic freedom, from the outset official organisations guided the production of posters through commissions and through monopolisation of the means of printing and reproduction. As a result, posters were more clearly a reflection of regime priorities from early in the regime’s life than were traditional art forms. The first political posters appeared on the streets in August 1918,16 and over the following three years some 3,100 different posters were produced by about 450 organisations and institutions.17 They appeared on public display in the streets, at workplaces, in means of transport and anywhere

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that people went. Initially there was no effective central direction about the form and content of political posters, but over time standardised images and themes became established. This process became more firmly based with the 1931 decision to centralise all poster production under the Art Department of the State Publishing House directly supervised by the Central Committee (CC). Henceforth the themes, texts and images were dictated to artists whose work was then regulated by the censors.18 As a result of these moves, the images, or symbols, presented in posters and more broadly in artwork became more standardised. Throughout the Soviet period there were significant changes in the style of representation, the individual images and the juxtaposition of images found in political posters. While up until the early 1930s differences in these sorts of things were often a function of the preference of the particular poster artists involved (although even here the differences became less marked over the decade and a half), after the early 1930s they reflected changes in policy about the visualisation the posters should provide. Such visualisation in both posters and more traditional artwork was an important component of the metanarrative. (3) Physical environment. Spatial configuration is an important element in power relations. Space, how it is constructed, what is used to decorate it, and how it is used, are all important in establishing authority and projecting power and in moulding people’s outlooks and values. The city, and especially a capital city, is a significant site for this; many people live in the city and, because of its bounded location, it is particularly vulnerable to the impact of government planning. The streetscapes, the buildings, the spatial location and design of open areas, the public decoration, the design and disposition of housing, and the nature of the transport system, all combine to create an urban environment within which people must conduct their lives. This is the material infrastructure of people’s lives, and it is a significant shaper of how those lives are constructed. People are not only not indifferent to what surrounds them, but actually use those surroundings as a means of both locating themselves in physical space and identifying themselves in ideational space. Given that the metanarrative was about the definition of such ideational space, the physical environment and changes to it were an important aspect of the metanarrative’s message. Two examples will illustrate this process of location/identification. Location in physical space comes about because of the way in which individuals conceive of where they live and, when they travel, where they are going. They gain their bearings from the urban infrastructure. When asked where they come from, they are likely to reply in geographical or locational terms, specifying a particular area or institution, and when


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describing where they are going, they are likely to describe this in terms of the areas passed through, the features that are passed, or the roads travelled. In this way, physical location is rooted in the physical infrastructure. Similarly, ideational identification is often defined in infrastructural terms. By ideational identification is meant how a person conceives of themselves. There are many aspects of this because people conceive of themselves in many different ways: gender, age, occupation, past experience are simply some of the aspects of such ideational identification. But also important can be where a person is in terms of physical location. People often identify themselves in terms of the urban infrastructure; for example, as Muscovites, or as coming from one of the regions of Moscow. In this way they are identifying themselves in terms of their urban physical location. In both cases, physical and ideational location, the infrastructure that is central to creating these conceptions of self has been created. Both the material (regions, buildings, streets, squares) and the non-material (names by which the material factors are known) elements of the urban infrastructure are created, they are not natural. Furthermore they can be changed, through either the creation of new material constructions or the generation of new names. The power to bring about such change is therefore a power to help shape individuals’ conceptions of themselves. This is the ultimate power, shaping a person’s understanding of who and what they are. For this reason, the way in which a city is reshaped by a new regime, the new symbolic markers that it introduces into the urban landscape, is an important exercise of power, and one which is heavily invested in symbolic significance. Transformation of the physical environment was an important aspect of the intent of the Bolsheviks to transform society as a whole. This was very powerful symbolically. Two aspects need to be distinguished, although in practice they are closely linked: the transformation of the urban environment, and the transformation of nature. Both were linked with industrialisation, but it was the Bolshevik project that gave particular shape and form to the changes that industrialisation wrought. And of course there were also changes that were not a direct result of industrial development. The transformation of the urban environment had two parts: the transformation of existing towns, and the creation of new towns. In symbolic terms, the national capital was the key case of urban transformation, as well as the one in which the central elite took most interest. There was a dual process of transformation in Moscow: its reshaping as a result of the peasant influx to work in the factories that was the result of the drive for industrialisation beginning in 1927, and urban renovation resulting from the desire to improve the living conditions of the workers and to create a socialist metropolis. The former propelled housing construction and the

14


development of services, the latter urban planning, new types of urban buildings (including residential) and spaces, monumental architecture and urban sculpture. The attempt to create a socialist metropolis turned Moscow into a gigantic site for the presentation of the regime’s symbols. The other cities of the Soviet Union also became sites for such symbolic representation and display, but they were not as important as the capital in this regard. The creation of new towns was for the most part directly linked to industrialisation. As industrial development took off, decisions were made about the creation of new towns to service such development. The most famous of these was probably Magnitogorsk, but this was only one of many. Often growing up in the wilderness, and developing on the basis of a formal urban plan, these new towns were symbols of the Soviet advance, of the regime’s success. In this sense, urban development constituted the material counterpart of language: these were the material and ideological worlds in which people lived, and they were structured substantially by regime symbols and their representation. The transformation of nature was implicit in the Bolshevik project right from the outset. This project assumed industrial development as the path to the communist future, and industrial development in a society like Russia was in 1917 of necessity involved large-scale transformation of the natural environment. Soviet history was full of so-called ‘hero projects’, major projects of development involving the creation of new sites of production: major industrial combines, hydroelectric energy projects, systems of communication and transport, were all instances of the sorts of development invested with heavy symbolic significance. Similar transformation in the agricultural arena, through collectivisation and the construction of the kolkhoz system, was also symbolically highly important. Like urban transformation, this gained its symbolic potency in part from the contrast with the past, but also in the way in which it created a new material environment for rural life. But more generally what was symbolically significant about the transformation of nature was the claim that it was being tamed and put to work in the service of the regime’s political end, the achievement of communism. Nature was being tamed and transformed, not for its own sake, but for the regime’s greater cause. Urban transformation seemed an important symbolic affirmation of the correctness of the course the regime was following, material proof of the claims of the metanarrative. Furthermore, unlike in the other spheres, success here seemed more tangible: urban development could be seen with the people’s own eyes, industrial and agricultural development could be charted on the basis of production figures, while overcoming the limits of nature was clear in the construction of new dams and the heroic exploits of Stakhanovites, polar flyers and other popular heroes. Not


15

only did these developments seem to confirm the veracity of the path upon which the regime was embarked, but they also seemed to lead to material changes in people’s lives. The sense that they were building a new world was difficult to escape when the material conditions in which they lived were changing so significantly. The potency of the symbolism projected in this way was high. (4) Ritual. Ritual can be defined as ‘any symbolic behavior that is socially standardized, repetitive, and meaningful’.19 Rituals are formalised collective performances, usually combining movement and both visual and verbal discourse. They normally follow standardised sequences, and occur at certain places and times that may themselves have symbolic significance; anniversaries are common times for ritual, defining time in particular significant ways, while locations are often endowed with a sense of sacrality (and therefore have a contrived character) that lends weight to the particular ritual performed there. Participation in ritual can give individuals a sense of continuity, belonging, and an affirmation that all is regular and in accord. It can act as a reaffirmation of the community, emphasising unity, membership and the absence of dissent and of doubt. It can provide a simplified model of reality and a pattern of interaction which underpins much of the social structure;20 in the words of one scholar, ‘rites create political reality’.21 As such, ritual is a means of integration of individuals into the community through shared experience. But ritual is also a means of reaffirming and reshaping myth and its symbols. It can be, through collective involvement, a means of investing new meaning into aspects of the metanarrative, of reshaping key themes and events in a myth. In this way, ritual can be a mechanism for the continual affirmation and updating of the myth through the actions of the believers. Simply by being carried out, the actions affirm the values that are held to underpin them. Such rituals may be new patterns of action designed specifically to embody the chosen values, or they may be existing patterns onto which new structures of meaning have been projected. The patterns may exist purely to give voice to the values, or they may have other practical functions to which the embodiment of the values is supplementary. Whatever form it takes, ritual involves the vesting of value and meaning in action. All structures of power and authority are aware of the role ritual plays, particularly in sacralising power, and all seek to utilise it for these ends. Three sites of ritual were important for the Bolsheviks. (a) Everyday life. This involved the creation of new rituals to mark important aspects of everyday life. The most important such aspects were the stages of life usually marked by religious ritual and festival – birth, marriage and death. The creation of new, non-religious ceremonies linked to the regime’s ultimate aim of the building of

16


communism were important here. But so too was the creation of expectations about how Soviet citizens should act, the formation of perceptions about how it was fit and proper for the builders of socialism to conduct themselves. Being a Soviet citizen, a builder of socialism/communism, involved acting in certain broadly prescribed ways; in this sense, all public behaviour was ritualised, even if it did not always gain expression through its own specific ritual. (b) Regime feast days. The regime sought to mark its feast days by public festivity and spectacle. A regular programme of feast days was set in train from the time of the regime’s birth. In addition, from time to time there were other occasions which were accorded symbolic significance and were the reason for public festivities and celebrations, or on some occasions sadness and the generation of memory, the funerals of leaders being the best instance of this latter sort of occasion. Such feast days were marked by public performances and activities which were themselves highly symbolic in meaning and significance. They were also the occasion for the projection of many symbols as the regime sought to use them to reinforce and project its message. Ritual activity was the chief official component of feast-day activities. (c) Institutional culture. This refers to the structuring of modes of activity within political life. The principal form this took was the building of political institutions which functioned through political actors playing out their roles in particular ways. Not all sorts of activity were acceptable within the political sphere, and over time rules of conduct were fashioned which structured the way these institutions operated. The way speakers acted in political fora and what they said, the role played by session chairmen, the nature of dissent and how it could be expressed, were typical of the sorts of issues covered by the growth of the institutional culture of the regime. The key to this institutional culture was political activists acting only in certain ways and not in others, acting in a ritually prescribed fashion. An important element of this was the image of the political leader, the way he did and should act, and the attitude to be adopted toward him by others. The way the image of the political leader was projected was a major element in the regime’s institutional culture. All three sites of ritual were important features of the developing Soviet metanarrative. Crucial in the development and sustenance of the metanarrative is how all of these symbols are defined and who defines them. How they are defined is reflected in the content of the myths. Who defines them is central because, if myth is about the definition of a sense of reality, whoever can define that will wield substantial political power. Many have pointed to


17

the ability to name as a fundamental form of political power.22 The ability to name things and people involves the capacity to put people into particular categories which can in turn define their relationship to the myth and, thereby, to the community. It can also shape people’s own understanding of themselves and their neighbours. In this sense, naming and categorisation can create political reality because they establish the basic categories whereby the community defines itself and its parts. The capacity to name is, in principle, open to all; individuals can impose names on things and thereby for their own purposes create the reality within which they operate. However in practice, this capacity is not shared equally. Those who are in charge of the main structures of the society, especially those concerned with the principal instruments of communication, possess much greater capacity in this regard than does the rank-and-file populace. They are better able to shape the myth and its symbols than ordinary people because they are able to project what they shape across the society as a whole, and if they can monopolise the means of communication, they can diminish the power of alternative formulations and thereby consolidate their own conceptions. One approach is to see this in terms of a crude Marxist notion of false consciousness, of the use of propaganda and education to impose values upon a passive population. Such a view sees this process as essentially a top-down one, in which the political authorities use their control over the means of mass communication and of the cultural arms of society and state to impose a set of values at odds with the interests of large parts of the population. The emphasis in this crude approach is upon conscious manipulation by the political rulers, assistance by segments of the intelligentsia, and a passive acceptance by the population. Even when the argument is more subtle, as in the notion of hegemony popularised by Gramsci,23 the direction of change generally came overwhelmingly from the top down. Hegemony exists when there has been the successful adoption of values, outlooks and perceptions which sustain both the regime and the status quo. While avoiding the crude approach outlined here, we must nevertheless acknowledge that the key role in driving the development and growth of this culture is played by those exercising central political power. Discursive power manifested through the embedding of ideology in social and political processes may not be solely due to the political elite, but these people have primary responsibility for the ideology and the values it encompasses. As James C. Scott has argued,24 in attempting to establish their control over society, states seek to impose a standardisation and uniformity on that society which both obscures local difference and directs local activity into new, state-approved channels. As examples, he cites25 urban redevelopment, the creation of surnames, the reworking of language and the

18


redesign of transport routes. These are seen as exemplars of the sort of action states undertake to establish legibility and simplification, and thereby facilitate easier control. The replacement of crowded slums by wide boulevards and open public spaces, the identifying marker constituted by a surname, the replacement of local dialects and languages by a standardised national language shaped by the state, and the replacement of the traditional byways of travel by a more regularised system of roads, all facilitated increased state control. All states are involved to some degree in this process of imposing their own sense of ‘order’ on messy reality in an attempt to promote regularity and control.26 This imperative is even stronger when a state, like the Soviet one, seeks to bring about transformatory change upon society and, through the destruction of competing independent sources of information and discussion, creates a situation in which state voices and the metanarrative they espouse are little challenged. However, even though new ruling elites may play a large part in shaping the development of a new metanarrative, they do not do this alone. The achievement of a dominant position on the part of a new metanarrative involves some process of adjustment to the values rooted in popular society. Two aspects of this are relevant. First, the role of values. The dominance of rulers’ values will be facilitated if there is a point of contact between those values and the value structure of the population. The dominance of elite values is less a matter of driving out or destroying popular values than it is of co-opting and incorporating at least parts of those values. Taking up traditional popular symbols and giving them new life and new meaning, attaching a new signification to existing cultural phenomena, and the reinterpretation of established concepts and figures in a new light are all mechanisms whereby elite values are able to embed themselves in a traditional value structure and take it over. But the reverse process can also operate, with the values, figures and symbols of an elite culture being interpreted in terms of or even shaped by traditional culture. The elite culture can thereby become ‘domesticated’ by the traditional value structure, with its chief elements given meaning and power through their association with that more popular value structure. In most cases, both processes occur, the effect being a partial merging of elite and mass cultures. This is facilitated by the fact that, except in cases of external conquest, when a new elite comes to power in its own country, its value structure will itself have been shaped in part by the established values that were dominant in the society. The existing values and the culture of which they are part can act as what Lotman and Uspenskij call a ‘generative mechanism’ or ‘cultural memory’ which can shape the course of cultural development.27 The influence of the Russian revolutionary tradition on Leninism is an instance of this well attested in the scholarly literature.28


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The second aspect is the role of people. An important part in the dissemination of an elite culture is played by people outside the top political elite. Important here are the people who, be they employees/ functionaries of the regime and therefore work directly for it or fellowtravellers who give it their support, take up the elite’s ideas, elaborate on them and popularise them. The functionaries of the regime found at all levels of the political structure were crucial in this process. Located on the boundary between regime and society, they were significant mediators of what passed between these two spheres. Their job was to implement central policy, to project the elite’s message to the population, and to keep the centre informed about developments at the local level. As such, they were key transmitters of values both ways, into society at large and into the elite. Their official position, and the political and bureaucratic constraints that went with it, could significantly colour how they played their roles, but the importance of those roles should not be underestimated. Also important were the supporters, or fellow-travellers, of the regime. Often subjected to even less political education or training than the functionaries, the party’s supporters were an important element in translating and projecting its message. In the regime’s early years, such supporters were particularly prominent among artists and other sections of the creative intelligentsia. The intelligentsia have often played this role. Neither well integrated into society as a whole nor part of the elite, they could use their position between the two to mediate elite values and translate them into a broader, often more populist, argot, and clearly in the Soviet Union many of them played this role. The most prominent was Maxim Gorky, but a similar role was played by numerous others throughout the society as a whole. They could be an important extension of the regime’s reach. But even the mass of the population who were not recruited into the ranks of the regime’s active supporters were not merely passive receivers of a message sent from on high and mediated through mid-level functionaries and supporters. They too could help shape the message in both negative and positive ways.29 They could be important in a negative sense in that by deciding what to accept and what not to accept of the message the regime sought to project, they could help to shape the future contours of that message. Popular resistance and concern to avoid it could play a part in how the regime’s message unrolled. More positively, as the site of the traditional value structure, the population could be the site of innovation and change in the regime’s message. The way that every individual interacted with the ‘official’ culture could change that culture, at least for that individual and for those around him/her. The important thing to recognise about all of these groups is that, being located within society rather than the elite, they were a major means for

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bringing about the partial merging of elite and mass cultures. This also means that they were intrinsically part of the process of shaping the value structure, including the metanarrative, that came to dominate the society. This was not something that was solely generated from above, by the elite, but was the product of the interaction of the different elements of the socio-political structure. With the dominant culture and its expression, the metanarrative, the product of the interaction of millions of people individually, in groups and in organised structures, that culture was itself something that was fluid and which could appear in slightly different forms in different parts of society. The metanarrative, myths and symbols could thus change over both space and time. The importance of some myths and symbols could fluctuate. Some could disappear, others emerge, and yet others experience substantial transformation. And the meaning of particular symbols could undergo often significant change. This process is natural; any myth or symbol that remained unchanged would be likely to stultify and lose its appeal. One source of change was the regime itself, and as the chief driving force behind the generation of the new culture, it is not surprising that this was the primary source of change. The principal symbols derived from within the regime. It was here, in the ideological perceptions and understandings of contemporary reality that the major cultural elements and themes had their source. And as those ideological perceptions and understandings changed, so major cultural elements also changed. The regime’s message was not static but was a dynamic and developing stream which was changed, sometimes subtly and sometimes in both an abrupt and major fashion, when the political elite (or its dominant faction) deemed it necessary. Put simply, when policy changed, the symbols and their meaning may also have had to change. This could be a conscious process, the result of a decision to recalibrate the message to make it better fit a new understanding of the situation. But change in the cultural message could also be more unconscious, not the result of a decision to rework an image in propaganda, but the consequence of changes in the way elites perceived and discussed questions. Changes in the way elites discussed particular issues, the changing connotations of words and phrases, could have a significant effect on the content of the message disseminated across the country. But this was more a consequence of other changes than the result of a conscious decision to alter the regime’s popular message. And of course even within the elite there was not always unanimity of views, and this could also reverberate through the message that the centre projected. Another means whereby change could come about is related to the nature of the coverage of the message emanating from the regime’s centre.


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Especially early in the regime’s life, the infrastructure through which it could project its message was patchy in its coverage and uncertain in its reliability.30 Limitations of the telegraph network, the paucity of surfaced roads, the design of the rail system, and the high levels of illiteracy (both functional and political) meant that significant parts of the country were in only intermittent contact with the centre. While this problem was less acute in the cities and towns than the countryside, even here there were few direct, effective avenues between the regime’s centre and the populace. Such contact, and therefore the projection of the centre’s message, was mediated primarily through local functionaries. While many of these people may have been highly capable and ideologically aware, many were not, as the successive waves of criticism of lower-level performance that swept through the party over the life of the Soviet system demonstrate. Cadre incompetence and ineptitude and bureaucratic interest meant that officials did not always speak with one voice.31 The result was that, to the extent that these people were not the exact ciphers of the centre, the message in different regions could differ subtly depending upon the local officials. Even when functional literacy became universal and political literacy more sophisticated, and therefore people could read for themselves what the centre was saying, there could still be tension between what the centre meant and how it was interpreted at lower levels. The subtle differences that could exist across different parts of the country were a source of dynamism within the metanarrative. Through a kind of reflex mechanism, the tensions between the contours of the metanarrative in different regions could play back into the metanarrative as a whole and, by small steps, bring about change in it. A major means whereby this could occur was through the geographical mobility of people. Many have noted the impact of the movement of millions of peasants into the cities in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Perhaps just as important in terms of cultural change was the movement of cadres. The massive promotion of cadres during the first five year plan had a major effect on the party’s internal life and culture. Such personnel movement could be a potent factor in driving change in the regime’s culture, as those promoted brought with them the values, perceptions and prejudices they had possessed in lower-level positions. As the regime’s system of political training of cadres and education generally became more routinised, the divergence in views and attitudes should have been reduced. However, the frequent campaigns against deficiencies in lower-level performance suggest that even when such a system of training and education was at its peak, significant differences in outlook could remain among the regime’s functionaries. This alone could ensure continuing ambiguity in the official culture and its metanarrative.

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In this regard, it is important to recognise that symbols can be multivocal, in the sense that they can have a variety of meanings attached to them so that different people will understand them and respond to them in different ways.32 This makes difficult assessments of levels of commitment to and belief in the symbols, both individually and collectively. For example, we can never be sure that involvement in ritual stems from real commitment and belief or is a result of social pressure and mobilisation. While in open democratic societies some approach to answering this question can be made through social science research methodologies, in many societies, including the Soviet Union, such methodologies have not been available. At one level, that of sustenance of the metanarrative, this might be a less severe constraint than might be thought: important to the maintenance of myth and ritual was regular involvement in it and use of its forms. Acceptance and use of the symbols were essential to their survival. However if such acceptance and use were purely formal, without being underpinned by real commitment, the mythic narrative could be reduced to a hollow shell. The language of the narrative, the mythic discourse, could be turned by people into what Scott calls a ‘hidden transcript’.33 Through the mobilisation of the official discourse, the manipulation of its images and use of multiple meanings, people could subvert the official message and surreptitiously express dissent from it. If there was a clear discrepancy between what that official message claimed and individual experiences, this could constitute an ironic comment on the official discourse. In any of these eventualities, the metanarrative could become hollow and commitment weak. The multivocality of symbols is in part related to the existence of three potential audiences for the regime’s metanarrative. First, the central political elite. This includes all of those who held office in the central legislative and executive organs of the party, state and immediately associated organisations, the military, trade unions and Komsomol. It does not include that range of organisations that in the West would mainly take the form of NGOs but which were for most of the Soviet period under the direct control of the party-state, like creative unions and the formally voluntary mobilisational groups like DOSAAF or the citizens’ militia. The central political elite are the central decision-makers and administrators of the Soviet regime, those who were responsible for national affairs. Some were involved in debating the major issues of the day, while others had a more background role, perhaps supportive of some of the major discussants, perhaps seeking to be objective and to provide professional administrative service. Unlike the other two groups, the central political elite was more conscious of its corporate identity and more likely to interact personally on a regular basis. Personal face-to-face


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relations on a regular basis were a feature of life for many in this group, and although the individual circles of such relations were much narrower than the elite as a whole, their overlapping nature held the elite together. Furthermore, it was in this group that levels of functional and political literacy were most extensive, and therefore that language as a mode of symbolic representation was most developed. Second, the subordinate political class. This comprises all of those who held official political office in the Soviet politico-administrative structure below the central political elite. It includes responsible officials in the party, members of party committees below central level, officials in the structure of the state and in the mobilisational organs referred to above; these are mainly career officials. This vast mass of officialdom was united by its tenure of office and by its location, which made it subject to pressures from both above and below. Circles of personal relations existed here too. Such horizontal ties were defined overwhelmingly in geographical or territorial terms, while vertical ties were part of the extensive patronage networks which dominated the Soviet structure. While there was some overlap between such circles, it was probably less extensive than in the central political elite. This group was the principal reservoir for recruitment for the central political elite, as well as being a potential force for mobilisation into elite disputes. For members of official administrative structures, like the central elite, language was a major form of cultural transmission since it was through language, especially in its written form (and especially through decisions and instructions), that such culture was transmitted through those structures. But the rituals that developed within those institutional structures were also important devices for structuring the metanarrative and its reception. Third, and by far the largest, is the general population. These are the vast mass of the people who did not hold career politico-administrative office. Many may have been party members, or belonged to one or more of the myriad of organisations that structured Soviet life, but they did not make their careers through holding responsible office in the party-state structure. While many of them may at times have held a minor post, they were not career officials. It is among this group that levels of functional literacy were lowest, especially in the earliest decades of the regime’s life, and political literacy was least developed. This does not mean that they lacked all political sophistication and knowledge; rather this was not central to their work and day-to-day existence as it was for the other two groups. Although the boundaries between these are not always clear, with considerable ambiguity at the edges in practice, in principle they can be clearly distinguished. This is because none of the audiences lived a self-contained existence, isolated from their counterparts. At the edges, there could be

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social interaction between members of different audiences, while there was certainly continuing work-related interaction, and this could be on quite a significant scale. There could also be movement between the audiences, especially as individuals moved into and up the formal politicoadministrative structure. This process of promotion could also lead in some instances to a contradictory social position through membership of more than one audience. An example of this is provided by the party’s CC. Membership of this body included officials whose primary base of work was in the regions or localities rather than the central organs in Moscow. Thus while they were part of the central political elite by virtue of their CC membership, they were also part of the subordinate political class. The effects of this contradictory location, principally in terms of being subject to imperatives and pressures from both above and below, have been much remarked on in scholarly work, and it is important to be aware of this factor in the discussion of cultural development. The understanding of these symbols by the different audiences was central to the attitudes of these groups to the regime, including why the regime should be obeyed. This means that the representation of the symbols embedded in the myths of the metanarrative was crucial for the course of regime legitimation. The legitimation of a regime is never dependent upon a single mode of legitimation exclusively, and during its life, the Soviet regime sought legitimation through a number of different modes. The most important of these were:34 1. Ideocratic legitimation.35 This comes about when the populace shares the values of the regime. It reflects commitment to and belief in the ideology which underpins the regime and, in the Soviet case, was reflected in the metanarrative. 2. Teleological, or goal-rational legitimation.36 Legitimacy stemmed from the performance of tasks which contributed towards the achievement of specified goals. In this case, the claim for legitimacy rested on progress towards the achievement of communism. The linkage of this type of legitimation to the end goal makes it particularly important for those working in the bureaucratic apparatus, since it was their task to facilitate achievement of that goal. 3. Charismatic legitimation.37 Here legitimacy was based on the perception of the possession of extraordinary, superhuman powers and qualities. Authority stemmed from such qualities, but what was important was the belief that these existed rather than that they actually did. 4. Nationalist legitimation.38 This came about through direct association of the regime with nationalist sentiment and symbols. This could be closely linked with appeals for legitimacy on traditional grounds, on the argument that the regime represents the traditional roots from


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which the community sprang and the values with which it had always been associated. 5. Performance legitimation.39 In this conception, legitimacy stems from the satisfaction of the needs, wants and aspirations of the citizens. In the Soviet case, the teleological goal of communism and how that came to be defined meant that performance legitimation became closely linked with goal-rational legitimation. 6. Democratic legitimation,40 or the sense that authority flowed from the granting to the government of a mandate by the mass of the populace. 7. Legal-rational legitimation.41 This meant that the exercise of authority flowed by virtue of the legality of the procedures used and the position occupied by the authority itself. Observance of established procedures, rules and regulations was the basis of this notion of legitimacy. All seven modes of legitimation were used by the regime at different times in its life in varying combinations. The capacity of these to constitute a stable basis for the regime’s quest for legitimacy was shaped fundamentally by changes in the symbolic representations contained in the metanarrative. Therefore the way that that metanarrative changed over time had a direct impact on the viability and shape of the regime’s legitimation programme, and ultimately on the viability of the regime itself. Symbols and ritual have thus clearly been crucial during all phases of the Soviet regime’s life, structuring meaning and actually creating a sense of reality for Soviet citizens. That symbolism was not unchanging throughout the more than seven decades of the Soviet regime. In each of the four spheres of symbolic representation identified above – language, visual arts, physical environment and ritual – significant changes and adaptations have occurred over the years. Sometimes this was purely the result of institutional development and inertia, of minor improvement and institutional accretion, but on many occasions it reflected more important developments within the political sphere. Furthermore such symbolic development was not of equal significance for all segments of the Soviet populace; it differed by audience.

2


When the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917, the metanarrative for the new regime remained unformed. Many of the elements for the creation of it were present, but they were not yet moulded into a coherent and consistent message. This was principally because of the environment from which the Bolsheviks emerged. The history of the pre-1917 revolutionary movement was one of continual bitter internecine feuding, of conflict and contestation embracing all aspects of the revolutionary process. The conflict was not only between the Bolsheviks and other groups of revolutionaries like the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, but also within Bolshevik ranks. And while a key weapon in such conflict was organisational manipulation, also central was the clash of ideas. Minor points of political theory and praxis were a continuing focus of vigorous debate. One consequence of this factious nature of the party is that there was no single, coherent and consistent line upon which all agreed. The transformation of this ideological cacophony into a metanarrative was achieved through elite conflict in the dozen years following the seizure of power. The creation of a metanarrative was not the primary aim of Russia’s new rulers. This was to stabilise and consolidate their power, a task which involved, inter alia, establishing effective lines of communication between themselves and two primary groups: regime officials and the ordinary populace. This task was not just one of a technical nature, of ensuring access to things like radios, newspapers and agitators on the part of the populace and of regularising procedures within the emerging bureaucratic structures for the officials. It was also a question of ensuring that the messages coming down from the political elite were understood by those beneath them. This was a question of language, of ensuring that there were common meanings and understandings, of making sure that when the elite spoke it was not just heard but understood. This was not a simple task. For a start, the mass of the population remained, at best, not supporters of the new regime. This was clear to the Bolsheviks from the outset, not only because of their experience of trying to generate support 26


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during 1917, but also because they received only 24 per cent of the vote in the Constituent Assembly elections in November of that year. This does not mean that all of those who did not vote for the Bolsheviks were their ardent opponents. Many in the countryside would simply have supported those Socialist Revolutionaries they had traditionally supported and may have known little about the Bolsheviks. Many would have been ambivalent about the new rulers. Content to live their own lives and willing to reach a modus vivendi with whoever was running the country, these people may have started out without strong feelings one way or the other about the Bolsheviks. This view is likely to have changed with the onset of War Communism. In any event, it is clear that a substantial part of the population to which the Bolsheviks sought to address their appeal would have had little sympathy for the new rulers or their emergent metanarrative. This sort of situation is likely to have been exacerbated by the other main problem: the low levels of political literacy possessed by significant parts of the population.1 Although levels of political literacy, which the Bolsheviks conceived of in terms of ‘class consciousness’, were higher in the cities than in the countryside, the overwhelmingly rural nature of the population distribution meant that levels of political understanding were low. The differences between political groups and what they stood for remained problematic for people in many parts of the country. This problem was exacerbated by the Marxist argot used by the Bolsheviks. For many people, talk of things like communism, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie and class struggle was new and unusual. The terms used did not mean much to them and they did not fit in with the cognitive framework within which they were used to working. This was exacerbated by the tendency to create acronyms and neologisms, a practice which caused widespread bemusement among both the populace at large and often officials as well.2 In this sense, low levels of political literacy could be manifested in a lack of understanding of what was being said. The problem of political literacy was also present among many regime officials. The concern about the infiltration of alien class forces into the Soviet apparatus expressed throughout the 1920s was in part recognition of this problem of low political literacy, even if it was often defined in terms of oppositionist motives rather than lack of understanding. This remained a major problem, in part because of the continuing inflow of poorly educated people into the party and government structures during the 1920s; party membership, for example, grew from 390,000 in 1918 to 1,677,910 in 1930.3 The regime put significant efforts into trying to overcome the low levels of political literacy in an effort that continued throughout Soviet history. These low levels increased the importance of symbols and images in the discourse between elite and non-elite. Both

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visually – through things like artwork, posters, statues, architecture – and rhetorically, much of the interchange between elites and these other two constituencies took place through symbols and images. Complex phenomena were reduced to a kind of shorthand in which nuance, light and shade, and often the whole complex structure of an argument were implied by the use of a single term, concept or image. An example which became common from 1921 and is discussed below is that of ‘smychka’. This word, meaning an alliance or union, carried a vast range of assumptions about the Soviet place in the world, the internal structure of class forces, the relationship with the regime’s transcendent goal of communism, and what was necessary for regime survival. The operation of such symbols structured the political debate and made it more readily understandable, in a fashion, to those not centrally engaged. It enabled them to make some sense out of what was being said within the elite and therefore to follow political developments. While this was important for the ordinary populace, it was absolutely crucial for regime officials. They needed knowledge of what was transpiring at elite levels, and the interpretation of symbols helped them to gain it. Such knowledge was essential for their ability to carry out central policy and for career advancement. But it was also important for the elite that lower-level officials embraced the discourse. The commitment of such officials was crucial if the new rulers were to be able to stabilise and consolidate their rule. Furthermore, given that they saw themselves as engaged on a new, unprecedented enterprise – the creation of socialism – the political elite was intent that this should be realised and supported by their officials. This was not only linked to regime stabilisation, but underpinned the expectations about the creation of a new society. Creation of the image of the new society was therefore crucial to the political elite from the outset. One of the Bolsheviks’ first tasks on coming to power was the creation of the new state and its clear differentiation from its predecessor. The new state had to be given its own symbolic identity. In April 1918 the first official symbol of the regime, a breast badge for the Red Army, was adopted.4 This showed a crossed hammer and plough inside a red star. In July 1918, a new national coat of arms was adopted (see below). In early 1918 a red flag with RSFSR on the canton had been introduced,5 but in mid-1918 this was replaced by a red flag adorned with the hammer and sickle surmounted by a red star. The Internationale was adopted as the anthem at the same time, although the revolutionary song ‘You Fell Victim’ was also often played; from mid-1918 both were broadcast across the city twice daily from the Spassky Tower in the Kremlin.6 A clear break from the past was also signalled in some of the nomenclature of the new


29

state: the use of ‘people’s commissar’ instead of ‘minister’ and ‘soviet’ with all of its revolutionary resonance as the name of the legislature were key markers in this regard. But also important was the conception of what type the new state was to be. This was a question which became a battleground for the elite. It was also central to the emergent myth of building socialism, which was at the heart of the evolution of the regime’s new metanarrative. The image of the socialist state The conception of the new state was directly related to the primary symbol for the Bolsheviks – communism. It was this that represented their aspirations and that justified the revolution and the regime’s subsequent efforts at social engineering. It was a common element in the regime’s rhetoric, and was central to the name adopted by the party in 1918 (when it changed from the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Bolsheviks) to the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)), although it never appeared in the formal name of the country. As the presumed teleological end point of the regime, the mythic golden age for which they were working and which stemmed directly from the Marxist paradigm, the symbol of communism was fundamental because it was against this that all policy proposals and developments were to be measured. The original Soviet conception of communism came from the earlier writings of Marx and in particular Lenin. Marx had never been very explicit about what a communist society would look like, his fullest discussion of it appearing in a political tract rather than as part of his scientific analysis of capitalism and its trajectory,7 although the picture presented in the Manifesto was consistent with the thrust of the analysis in his other work. Similarly, Lenin did not articulate a fully developed picture of the communist future, but in a work that was begun before he realised the prospect of revolution was imminent (although written in August–September 1917, it was originally conceived and much of the work done for it in late 1916 and January–February 1917, and was seen by him, at least initially, more as a contribution to theory than a blueprint for the future), he did set out his ideas about the communist future.8 It was this document in particular which informed the early Soviet conception of communism. This conception envisaged a staged development to communism. The basis for this lay in a distinction drawn by Marx9 between a ‘first phase of communist society’ characterised by ‘the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it has emerged’, and a ‘more advanced phase of communist society’ when the effects of capitalist society will have been superseded. Lenin adopted this bi-partite schema, using the term ‘socialism’ for the lower stage, although he said that the word ‘communism’ was also applicable

30


here as long as it was realised that this was not ‘full communism’.10 In Lenin’s first stage, society retained many of the remnants of capitalism, including for a time the bourgeois state, although without the bourgeoisie. The withering away of the state was a major marker of the transition to the higher stage of communism, but Lenin saw this as being of protracted duration.11 During this lengthy period of transition between capitalism and full communism the state would continue to play an important role in society. This view was generally accepted throughout the party, with the result that the ultimate goal of communism remained a transcendent and longer-term ideal rather than something that could be realised immediately. This raised the issue of how the contemporary situation related to this ultimate goal. After some hesitation, the regime began to refer to itself as ‘socialist’, a designation resonant of Lenin’s lower stage of communism. The initial pronouncements of the new government, on the formation of the government of people’s commissars, on peace and on land,12 did not refer to socialism, but rooted the new government created by the revolution in the structure of the soviets and referred to its class nature as being ‘workers and peasants’. The government was declared to be ‘provisional’ pending the convening of the Constituent Assembly. However with the closure of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 and the collapse of the coalition with the Left SRs in March 1918, socialism came rhetorically more to the fore. By February 1918, Lenin made public reference to the ‘Socialist fatherland’, the ‘Socialist republic of soviets’, and the ‘Socialist government’,13 a characterisation of the state which was was confirmed in the Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic of July 1918. The Constitution14 acknowledged the class nature of the state. This was a dictatorship of the urban and rural proletariat and the poorest peasantry designed to crush the bourgeoisie, abolish exploitation and establish socialism. As a ‘free socialist society of all the toilers of Russia’ with power belonging to the entire working population based in the soviets, the new Republic contrasted sharply with the capitalist world characterised by exploitation and oppression. In the new state, which was seen as a free union of nations, there was to be ‘real freedom’ of conscience, opinion, assembly, association and access to knowledge. Work was the duty of all citizens: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat.’ The class nature of the state whose task it was to construct socialism, and the bifurcation of the world into two camps, socialist and capitalist, were important components of this vision. The Constitution also formalised a coat of arms with significant symbolic components: the unity of workers and peasants was reflected in the crossed sickle and hammer, the agricultural basis of the state was clear in the wreaths of ears of grain, and the new beginning was


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marked by the rays of the sun. Two inscriptions were also important: the name of the country (RSFSR), and ‘Proletarians of all countries unite’. The 1924 state Constitution15 added to this picture the image of the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a federal state,16 thereby symbolically endowing some of the national groups from the former tsarist ‘prison house of peoples’ with the status and accoutrements of state sovereignty. In the socialist republic, unlike the hostile capitalist world, this was a free and equal union in which the conditions had been created for the elimination of national oppression. As the party declared, the proletariat had found in the Soviet structure the key to resolution of the national question, and this key must be used to get rid of Great Russian chauvinism and other remnants of the past.17 This early view of the state was enhanced in the party Programme of 1919.18 The Programme concentrated not on the ultimate communist society, but on the current tasks facing the party. It declared that the October Revolution had realised a new type of state, the dictatorship of the proletariat19 which, assisted by the poorest peasantry or semiproletariat, began to lay the foundations of communist society. The class character of the state would remain ‘until the division of society into classes has been abolished and all government authority disappears’. In the meantime, the state would concentrate on ‘the suppression of the resistance of the exploiters’. Accordingly, both the judiciary and the military would have a proletarian class character,20 and the education system would engender communist principles and extend proletarian influence to the semi- and non-proletarian sections of the toiling masses. Expropriation of the bourgeoisie would enable the full realisation of rights, while the government apparatus would be brought into closer contact with the masses; eventually there would be the complete ‘abolition of state authority’. Private property would be turned into the ‘common property of all toilers’, and in order to ensure that the economic dislocation inherited from capitalism was overcome, a general state plan would be implemented. While the masses should take part in the management of production, there needed to be a general mobilisation of labour power, something that would require ‘new socialist discipline’; old specialists, even if imbued with ‘bourgeois ideas and habits’, must be utilised.21 The distinction between town and village would be eliminated through communist construction and the growth of organisational links between the proletariat and ‘semiproletarian groups’ in the village; the party had also to ‘gradually and systematically’ attract the middle peasantry to the work of socialist construction.22 The banking system would become an instrument of the workers and its traditional functions would be transformed into merely book-keeping; money would be eliminated, although not until the

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communist production and distribution of goods had been organised. The state was to manage the economic system. The imagery of the state as reflected in these official documents was also projected in visual form through political posters. Some of this symbolic sense of the new state is captured in a poster from October 1918 which reflects many of the themes that were to become prominent in poster art. This is a poster by Aleksandr Apsit entitled ‘Year of proletarian dictatorship’23 for the first anniversary of the revolution. A worker and a peasant (both male) frame this poster. The worker is a blacksmith with big boots, blacksmith’s apron, rifle on his back, holding a mallet. The peasant is wearing bast boots and a typical peasant shirt, and in one hand holds a scythe and in the other a staff with a red banner on it. Both wear red ribbons on their shirts. The peasant is looking at the worker, who is gazing at the side of the poster and looking in front of the peasant. They are standing at a monumental gateway, which has two red ribbons hanging down the sides. In front of them are symbols of the tsarist regime – a crown lying on its side, a cloak with the double-headed eagle symbol, broken chains and a shield upon which the worker is resting a foot. Through the monumental gateway can be seen the image of a bright future: in the background an industrial city with smokestacks belching smoke into the air, and in the foreground men, women and children marching in the fields, many carrying red banners. Behind the city is the sun, with its rays streaming up into the air, a symbol of emancipation compared with the oppression (symbolised by the broken chains) of the past. Near the top of the poster, on the crossbeam of the monumental gateway, is the slogan ‘Proletarians of all countries unite!’. The symbolism of this poster is clear, but also multi-faceted. The central message is that the worker and peasant have, through their efforts, toppled the tsarist regime which enchained the people, and opened the way to a bright future. But in doing so, it was the worker who took the lead; he has his foot on the tsarist paraphernalia, he has the more potent weapon in the rifle, and the peasant is looking to him as though seeking guidance while he, the worker, gazes into the future. The socialist nature of the enterprise is reflected in the red ribbons and banners (although red was also a holy colour in the symbolism of icons, a fortuitous conjunction which enabled the socialist colour to inherit the sacral quality of the religious red), and in the industrial nature of the town, with the association of worker and peasant in the main part of the poster and of town and field in the background suggesting the continuing alliance of working class and peasantry. The use of the blacksmith as a symbol for the worker was to remain a major theme until 1930, perhaps reflecting the fact that the blacksmith worked in the forge at the heart of the factory, and that his task was to turn hot metal into something new, just as the working class was doing through


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revolution.24 But this image was not without potential ambiguity; blacksmiths were also found in the villages, where they provided for the metal needs of the peasants, so the use of this image as a means of representing the worker may also have suggested the continuing links with the village. Symbolically, the worker was the bedrock of the new state,25 and accordingly remained a prominent figure in posters of the civil war years, usually represented by a single figure acting as the archetype of the class as a whole rather than a collective group of workers. The blacksmith image noted above was a common form of representation of the worker throughout this period. Sometimes he was shown as in the Apsit poster, in a dignified stance holding a mallet, exuding poise, skill and confidence.26 But sometimes he was shown in action, usually striking an anvil with his mallet in an act of production and creativity.27 As Bonnell said, this type of image depicted the proletariat as ‘powerful, aggressive and capable of great acts of prowess’.28 Reflecting the diversity of occupations in the proletariat, some posters depicted a worker other than a blacksmith, such as the famous ‘To work is necessary – your rifle to hand’ poster showing a worker using a handsaw while his rifle stands beside him, bayonet into the earth.29 The worker images were overwhelmingly male, and when a working woman appeared, she was often in the form of a blacksmith, either helping a male blacksmith at the forge or possessing the paraphernalia of a blacksmith, such as the apron and hammer.30 Whenever they were shown together, the male was the dominant figure. The worker was far more prominent in the poster art of this period than the peasant, although at times representations of the latter alone did occur. Posters from 1920, for example, used the image of the peasant (or a hand holding a sickle) to promote increased production, literacy, the need for increased numbers of livestock and the defence of freedom.31 Such representations were overwhelmingly male.32 More often the peasant was shown with the worker, jointly defending the revolution against the Whites,33 saving the country from ruin and hunger,34 or marching gloriously into the future.35 A key theme here was the alliance between workers and peasants, with Apsit’s 1920 poster ‘Long live the union of workers and peasants’ representative of this.36 The other figure which was prominent during the civil war years was the Red Army soldier. The most famous of these representations is Moor’s ‘Have you signed up to be a volunteer?’ poster which shows a Red Armyman standing in front of a factory, looking straight out at the observer with a steady gaze, right hand pointing and mouth open asking the question.37 However, most representations of soldiers show them in action, either rallying to fend off opposition troops or laying waste to the opposition forces.38 All of these figures, worker, peasant and soldier, were shown in heroic form, with a

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stern and unyielding visage and an unshakeable commitment to serve the cause. Where there were other figures in the poster, the worker/peasant/ soldier image was usually much larger and dominating. As well as the representation of the working class by the image of a worker, a number of allegorical techniques also developed, including the strong arm (often red) for the proletariat, a red bayonet for the Red Army, and a red locomotive to represent the forces of history moving forward.39 Many of the posters of the civil war period were exhortatory in nature, appealing for people to contribute their efforts to the defence of the revolution against the Whites and foreign forces. The image conveyed was of the revolution under severe attack, and the imagery used was sometimes redolent of classical mythology.40 The new Russian Republic was represented as a walled town or fortress, while the opposition appeared in the form of a dragon or sometimes a many-headed hydra (with the heads of White generals).41 The proletarian defender of the revolution was sometimes represented as a St George slaying the dragon of imperialism,42 but this image did not become a standard feature of the regime’s message because it was clearly at odds with its anti-religious orientation. Evoking some of the sense of St George but translating it into a Russian historical theme was the 1919 poster by Boris Zvorykin: ‘The struggle of the red knight with the dark force’.43 This shows a blacksmith on horseback carrying a round shield with a hammer and sickle on it and wielding a mallet attacking two other figures on horseback, each with a protective headdress and a shield, one with a club and the other a curved sword. The blacksmith and his horse are red. Defence of the revolution could also be shown abstractly, with the most famous example of this being El Lissitsky’s ‘Beat the Whites with a red wedge’.44 However, most posters exhorted people by showing them either working hard at their particular calling to defeat the enemy,45 or being mobilised as soldiers, usually in defence of a city. Although these posters are exhortatory, seeking to stimulate and make use of the enthusiasm of the people, they are rarely explicit about what that is to be directed in defence of. Certainly, they refer to the need to defend the gains of October, but those gains are rarely outlined; communism or socialism are barely mentioned, and the party is virtually invisible. Many posters carry the name of the new country, although this is often in small letters in the margin rather than as part of the central visual design of the poster itself, some refer to the particular thing with which the poster is concerned (eg. mobilisation to defend the Urals or Petrograd), and some refer to things like ‘workers’ and peasants’ soviet power’.46 But generally there is little explicit statement about what they were fighting for, and no explicit appeal to ideology, perhaps reflecting acknowledgement that posters were directed mainly at those with limited knowledge of the ideology.


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In contrast, the posters are often quite explicit about the nature of the enemy, giving a visual form to the myths of external and internal opposition. External enemies were either generic – capitalism, imperialism – or specific – the countries from which the interventionist forces came. Capitalism, or simply capital, soon came to be symbolised by a corpulent middle-aged to older man, often wearing a top hat and suit with a fob watch stretched across his stomach, and sometimes smoking a big cigar.47 The interventionist force countries also usually were represented by capitalists drawn as just described, although their top hats often had national flags on them.48 Internal enemies were more differentiated. They included the tsar and his entourage, capitalists or ‘burzhui ’, priests, kulaks or rich peasants, White Guard generals, landowners and former political opponents. Standardised images of many of these were quick to develop. The capitalist/burzhui was portrayed much as his foreign capitalist counterpart described above. The priest was usually drawn in black, portly and shown with a leer on his face.49 The kulaks were generally shown as fat, sometimes shifty and stupid, and often dressed similarly to the capitalist, thus posing a sharp contrast with the heroic image of the peasant who had thrown in his lot with the workers and the new regime.50 The White Guard generals, who often had their names on their uniforms to help with identification, were shown as thin, avaricious and leering, and sometimes seemed to have an almost fanatical air about them.51 The political opposition was generally shown as a front for the capitalists or old regime forces.52 These enemies often appeared with human skulls or the bodies of slain workers and peasants, with moneybags or, in the case of priests, crucifixes, and they frequently had maniacal, even rabid, looks on their faces. Whereas the workers, peasants and Red Armymen were always young and fit with a firm gaze, the enemy was usually old, often fat, and shifty. As well as these sorts of satirical caricatures, it was also common to portray these opponents in allegorical form. As well as the dragon and the hydra, they were also presented as eagles,53 spiders,54 snarling dogs,55 birds56 and anthropomorphic imaginary monsters.57 All of these forms operated to dehumanise the opposition and render it into an abstract form. These posters were early visual beginnings of the myths of internal and external opposition that constituted part of the metanarrative. Thus during the civil war period, Soviet poster art reinforced in the metanarrative the sense of being under attack and the consequent need for a rallying of all efforts to beat off those attacks. But while the identity of the enemy was clearly projected in many of the posters, the object for which they were fighting remained significantly understated. Such posters were generally designed to have immediate and short-term impact. Many of them were rushed off the presses in response to a proximate event

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that was thought to require an immediate response, such as the approach of opposition forces to a particular city. They were for the most part simple and direct. But importantly what they did was to project in visual form the metanarrative in a way that those who might not fully grasp the written message could appreciate: the strong, upright workers and peasants defending themselves against a range of sly, avaricious enemies. Posters were a vivid means of getting this message across and given that they tapped into aspects of the traditional world views of workers and peasants – perceptions about being exploited by employers and capitalists, religious conceptions of right and wrong – are likely to have struck a positive response.58 Symbolism and political conflict The conception of the socialist state and its social basis in the working class reflected in both the early programmatic documents and posters was linked to the question of the path to communism and an intrinsic part of the myth of building socialism. This was also at the heart of policy debate throughout the period and the subject of vigorous disagreement within the elite. It was through such policy debate that the symbolism of the Soviet regime was worked out and, in a reflexive fashion, as that symbolism developed, it constituted both a battleground of elite conflict and the terms through which that conflict was expressed. Elite disagreement turned principally on issues of the connection between the Russian revolution and international revolution and the nature of the peasantry and the implications this had for proletarian dictatorship, with a whole series of other issues spinning off from these. The beginning point for this debate was the symbolic discourse inherited from the pre-revolutionary period, but over the course of successive bouts of elite conflict leading up to 1929, that discourse and the associated imagery was substantially expanded and made more complex. This conflict effectively amounted to a debate about the shape of the myth of building socialism. The first issue to come up, and one which remained dominant in the myth of external opposition for the life of the Soviet regime, was that of the relationship with the Western world. Initially this question was cast in terms of the relationship between the Russian revolution and international revolution, but in a practical sense it was manifested in Western hostility toward the Soviet state. Throughout this period all sides to the debate acknowledged the importance of the hostile international environment, something they could hardly ignore given foreign intervention in the civil war and the continuing hostility of major powers into the 1930s. The Soviet Union (as it became in 1924) was the citadel of socialism


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surrounded by the hostile capitalist world, a world that only waited for the chance to strangle the new country and its challenge to the international status quo. This view of the socialist state surrounded by enemies directly raised the question of whether socialism could be built in a single country, or whether its building required socialist revolution in the most advanced centres of capitalism. For the Bolsheviks at this time, including Lenin, world revolution was essential for the successful achievement of socialism, but differences developed over whether this necessitated an attempt to foment early revolution in the West through the projection of revolutionary war into that region, or whether stabilisation at home was essential the better to foster revolution at a later date. In 1917 Lenin had publicly still placed his faith in international revolution,59 but by early 1918 he and most of his colleagues had adopted the latter position.60 In February 1918, Lenin had used a formulation that prefigured the conception of the Soviet state throughout most of its life: ‘The socialist fatherland is in danger’61 and had to be saved. He argued that the Russian revolution had to be preserved in order to facilitate international revolution, with the success of the former ultimately dependent on the latter.62 In contrast, the Left Communists favoured immediate revolutionary war, in the form of continuing resistance to the Germans and the mounting of a propaganda campaign to raise revolutionary forces in the West. The Left Communists agreed that the success of the Russian revolution depended on international revolution, but they were worried that short-term compromise in the name of buying time would prejudice that outcome.63 The revolutionary war position was undercut by the events surrounding the Brest-Litovsk peace in 1918, by the failed German revolution of 1918–19, and by the failure of the invasion of Poland in 1920. But important, too, were the diverse images of the Soviet situation which these positions represented. Although both acknowledged the ultimate importance of international revolution, Lenin’s position gave the impression that even in the absence of immediate international revolution something positive could be achieved in Russia, while the Left Communist position seemed to deny this possibility. Given these very different images, it is little wonder that the Leninist position won majority support both within the political elite and among officials; the image of the possibility of success was psychologically more acceptable than its reverse. This bifurcation of images remained current in the intra-party debate throughout much of the 1920s. NEP was justified by Lenin in terms of the need for an agreement with the peasantry to save the socialist revolution in Russia until the outbreak of international revolution.64 It was initially seen in terms of a breathing space, but one in which the Bolsheviks could make positive steps toward the achievement of socialism. The conception

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was still one of Russia dependent upon international revolution, but able to take significant steps itself. However, this image shifted with the adoption by the right wing of the Bolshevik elite of the view that NEP could itself be a viable path to socialism. Implicit in some of Lenin’s last writings, this view was taken up by Bukharin among others who saw continuing compromise with the peasant as the means for creating a situation in which industrialisation could be promoted and socialism ultimately established. This view was given a catchy name by Stalin, ‘socialism in one country’,65 and although there developed doctrinal ambiguity about whether the full and final victory of socialism could be achieved in the Soviet Union without international revolution, or whether international revolution was a necessary precondition for the full and final achievement of Soviet socialism, the image that this created was a powerful one: the building of socialism in the USSR did not have to wait for the proletariat of the capitalist countries to overthrow their rulers but could be pursued immediately. There was no suggestion that this would be easy; indeed, quite the reverse. But the image was undeniably positive, especially when compared with the view of successive opposition groups (the Trotskyists, the Left Opposition and the United Opposition) that socialism in Russia was impossible without international revolution. That much of the political elite and the subordinate political class should find this image attractive was not surprising; by suggesting that socialism could be built in the USSR within the context of international hostility, it gave meaning to their lives and sacrifices. This duality also enabled successive opposition groups to be charged with a lack of confidence in the Russian revolution. There were also significant differences in outlook on domestic policy, including the issue of governance within the party and regime more generally (the myth of leadership), and these were clearly linked in the minds of the protagonists with the conception of Russian society that was to lead to the teleological aim of communism. The imagery of the debate on domestic policy was rooted in ideological perceptions about the transition to socialism. Initially the revolutionary vision dominated the policy outlook. Although the earliest opposition grouping in the party, the Left Communists, lost their impetus with the signature of the Brest-Litovsk peace agreement in March 1918, for much of the rest of that year their prescriptions regarding the internal organisation of society, and especially the economy, constituted a major critique of prevailing policy. They took a maximalist, even ideologically fundamentalist, position in favour of the direct implementation of socialist measures: large-scale nationalisation of productive resources, workers’ control of the economy and the extension of democracy widely within both party and state.66 This group withered into insignificance by the end of 1918, but a maximalist critique


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re-emerged in 1919–20 in the form of the so-called Military Opposition, the Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition. The Military Opposition (especially active in 1919) concentrated solely on military affairs, opposing both the use of tsarist officers and the enforcement of the traditional military hierarchical structure and discipline; they championed the cause of elected officers, committees and political commissars against professional military men. The Democratic Centralists, whose name came from the traditional formula, democratic centralism, which was formally the repository of party democracy, criticised what they saw as antidemocratic practices in the party as well as the centralised and militarised nature of War Communism, especially the labour mobilisation proposals of people like Trotsky.67 The Workers’ Opposition68 took up what was essentially an anarcho-syndicalist position, advocating expanded workers’ control in management and production, wide democracy in party and state, and decentralisation. These opposition groups embraced the more romantic vision of the working class, emphasising proletarian culture and consciousness as the means which could enable that class to play the key role in managing production. The leadership around Lenin took a more traditional approach to management, seeing the working class as currently lacking the consciousness to play such a role and emphasising instead ‘one-man management’. Central to this conflict was the policy that had been in place since mid-1918, ‘War Communism’. While there is debate about whether War Communism constituted a series of ad hoc measures in response to the wartime conditions or a sustained attempt to put an ideological plan into practice, its implementation was seen by many as embodying a revolutionary approach to the construction of socialism and was therefore strongly welcomed, at least initially, by some on the left of the party. The principal measures of War Communism – extension of state ownership over productive resources, armed requisition of grain, labour mobilisation, the central management of economic activity, the rationing of goods primarily on class lines and the abolition of commodity and money relations – involved an expansion of the state’s role in the economic sphere. It also contributed significantly to the economic crisis that existed by 1921. But in the symbolic sphere it did one very important thing: it established the equation of socialism with etatism, a conjunction reflected in the 1919 Programme. War Communism was also the first instance of the Bolshevik attempt to build socialism through the mobilisation of enthusiasm and commitment, in this case principally among officials, who were in turn meant to mobilise the population at large. This was the beginning of a ‘campaignist’ approach relying on the mobilisation of popular effort for the achievement of political ends.

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The common theme of these opposition groups was criticism of centralist tendencies within the party and state, and the way that these were undermining the democratic traditions of the party. During the prerevolutionary period, much had been made rhetorically of democracy in internal party affairs, although in practice this was clearly a flawed principle; the practice of open discussion and balloting for leadership positions was more often ignored than it was enacted, and there was no real accountability of the leadership to the rank-and-file. Nevertheless it was a solidly entrenched myth that such principles had applied in prerevolutionary party life, and certainly in the regime’s early years a vigorous tradition of party debate had been developing. But in the view of the opposition, this was being eroded by the increasingly centralist measures taken by the party leadership. This was seen by many in terms of ‘bureaucratism’. The conception of communism contained in the 1919 Programme, and before that State and Revolution, involved the dissolution of the distance between state and society through the replacement of a separate bureaucratic administrative machine by the direct involvement of the people; with methods of administration so simplified by capitalism, those tasks could be performed by any literate person. However, in the interim, before communism was achieved, the state would remain as the instrument for the suppression of the proletariat’s enemies and for the construction of socialism. But within an environment in which the petty bourgeois peasants and their values were so powerful (see below), the state’s capacity to play out this role was, in the view of many, under serious threat. The fear of the infection effect of petty bourgeois values on the regime and its social base applied in particular to the state, and the form in which this was sometimes expressed was concern about ‘bureaucracy’, about the way in which decision-making (and those who made the decisions) were artificially separated from the masses and their control.69 From early in the regime’s life, party speakers, including Lenin, criticised the growing bureaucratism of political institutions and argued that the fight against it was being hampered by low cultural levels.70 Many party members pointed to the role of former tsarist bureaucrats, to the way workers who took up positions became divorced from the masses, to the propensity of higher-level organs to fill lower-level positions by appointment and to the monopolisation of decision-making by executive organs as both sources of and evidence for the growing bureaucratisation of Soviet institutions.71 The frequent calls for the promotion of workers to leading positions was seen as one means of combating this danger, since it was peasants and former members of the bourgeoisie who were perceived to have brought this sort of decay into the party.72 So, too, was continuing emphasis on the need for higher levels to be accountable to


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lower levels, and for the former to involve themselves in the ordinary work undertaken by the rank-and-file; participation in subbotniks, the first of which was on 10 May 1919, was symbolically important here.73 Associated with this were complaints about privilege and the way in which officials at higher levels of the political structure were able to enjoy the sorts of privileges and advantages that were not available to ordinary workers.74 Such rewards were associated with abuses of power, with the ability of those in high positions to ‘get away with things’ and to use their positions for personal ends.75 Complaints about bureaucratism and its manifestation through appointment from above were the common fare of successive opposition groups at this time. The complaints about bureaucratism and privilege were essentially criticisms of the way governance within the regime was developing and, more specifically, the way the democratic elements in the communist vision were being crowded out by developments emphasising a more hierarchical structure. Infection by petty bourgeois values threatened to change the class nature of the regime and thereby distort the shift to communism. Concerns about the changing nature of the regime were strengthened by the decisions of the Tenth Congress of the party. It was at this congress that Lenin argued that the discussion over the last year had been a ‘luxury’, and that now there was a need for cohesion and harmony and no trace of factionalism; it was time to ‘put the lid’ on opposition.76 Although the discussion of issues until a decision had been made remained an essential principle of party life, this was not to take place along factional lines, on pain of expulsion from the party.77 The long-standing notion of democracy, expressed in the formula democratic centralism, was thereby given an extra, more restrained, dimension and was one very much at odds with the conception of democracy espoused by internal party groups at this time. This image of a party powerfully united without factional divisions or squabbling, an image that was to attain iconic status in the metanarrative, was justified less on the basis of the intrinsic value of such a situation than on the weakness of the working class and the strength of petty bourgeois forces. This created a clear need for the dictatorship of the proletariat which, as Lunacharsky candidly noted at the Tenth Congress, meant the dictatorship of the party.78 Outside the party this meant a society from which opposition forces were banned,79 and the political institutions linking regime and society were dominated by the proletariat and its party.80 This involved an effective reworking of the traditional principle of rule by the proletariat in the direction of rule for the proletariat by the party, a shift that was obscured by the propagation of the image of the party and class as organically united.

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At the root of the debate about governance were the myths of internal and external opposition which saw the party as a nucleus of the proletariat isolated within a hostile internal environment of peasants and an external environment of hostile capitalist states. Central to this image was the assumption that classes were the bearers of their own values and interests, and that those of the peasantry (possibly with the exception of the poor peasants) were opposed to those of the proletariat. This sort of essentialist approach associating class membership (at times class origin) with particular values explains the widespread concern within the party about the role of so-called ‘class alien elements’. These were people from non-proletarian backgrounds, usually seen as bourgeois or petty bourgeois, who occupied positions within the political or economic structure and whose interests and outlook were alien to those of the proletariat. The danger these people posed was, at one level, in what they actually did. Although at this time there was little expressed concern about their activities being directed consciously at sabotaging the proletarian project, there was considerable concern about how their quest for self-enrichment could undercut the regime’s aims. At another level, concern related to the way their values were believed to be able to infect those who did not share them, particularly members of the proletariat whose class consciousness was not fully developed. And as everyone acknowledged, this meant the overwhelming bulk of the proletariat at this time. This is why, throughout this period, there was constant emphasis on the role of class enemies, the bourgeoisie, symbolised most particularly by the so-called ‘bourgeois specialists’ in both the economy and the military, but also by capitalist entrepreneurs and the petty bourgeoisie represented mainly by the peasants. Concern about their presence and their possible effect was constant throughout this period and underpinned the course of party debate. Within that debate, the notion of class was less a strictly sociological category than a moral category. Society was divided between ‘us’ and ‘them’, with the difference expressed in class terms. The notion of class war, along with the militarisation of language – talk of struggles and fronts, conquest, victory and defeat, the party as an army with its members soldiers of the revolution, the country was the fortress of revolution and slackers were traitors – endowed the symbolism of the War Communism period with a distinct martial air and a sense of the regime being under sustained attack. What successive opposition groups had done, despite the differences in their programmes, was to appeal to the liberationist and democratic elements of Marxism to criticise the prevailing trends of centralisation and control in the political system. By arguing for an expanded role in the system on the part of the working class, they were appealing to the iconic social class in the Marxist paradigm, and conjuring up images resonant


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of those from Lenin’s State and Revolution about workers running the state. They were thus projecting the symbolism of the capacity of the conscious working class to govern their own affairs, an image at the heart of Marxism, and of democracy as a critique of the growing bureaucratisation and centralisation of the system, a process which was leading to the isolation of the working class from power and its domination by bureaucrats. The mobilisation of ideological symbols in this way was quite effective in building support for these groups among sections of the party and the working class, but in the situation of danger which confronted the party at this time, the leadership’s appeals to the pragmatism of needing to establish and maintain central control (supported by organisational measures) carried the day. All of these opposition groups were therefore opposed to what they saw as the increasing bureaucratic centralisation of the regime, with the corresponding erosion of the power and position of the proletariat. The opposition position stemmed directly from the fundamental assumptions about both the nature of the regime and the historical process, and therefore from the core of the regime’s evolving metanarrative. Unless there had been acceptance of a teleological conception of historical development in which the different stages were dominated by different classes and their ideologies, and that classes were the bearers of particular values and cultures, there would have been little basis upon which to complain about the effect of petty bourgeois peasant values, the role of bourgeois specialists and the erosion of proletarian values. A crude power politics argument was possible without such a theoretical framework (‘the peasants oppose us, the workers support us’), but it is difficult to see the sorts of arguments mounted being accepted in the absence of the teleological theoretical framework, especially given the ambiguous nature of the evidence about mass support for the new regime. This means that the criticisms mounted against the party leadership effectively amounted to a charge of betrayal of the fundamental beliefs which underpinned the Bolshevik experiment, and those criticisms were couched in the language of the symbolic programme that was associated with that experiment; while opposition groups appealed to notions of democracy and accountability and the capacity of the workers, the leadership emphasised democracy as a means of unity and discipline, and the dangers posed by the combination of class enemies and undeveloped class consciousness. In this sense, both the basis upon which the discourse of discordant party life rested and that discourse itself stemmed from the structure of the party’s values and how they were reflected in the emergent metanarrative. The promotion of industrialisation was one of the fundamental tenets of the regime. In part this reflected the view that it was through

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industrialisation that the proletariat was strengthened and therefore both the regime and its aim, socialism, were consolidated. But there was also a more philosophical view which saw socialism in terms of modernity and modernity in terms of industrial society, with all of the material benefits that that brought. In this view, progress was seen in terms of the taming or conquest of nature, of the bringing of the vast untamed territory of the Soviet Union into the growing industrial network that Soviet development was envisaged as embodying. The major symbolic expression of this was the campaign beginning in 1920 for electrification of the country. With Lenin’s aphorism ‘Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country’81 at its core, this campaign tied the Soviet project to notions of modernity, promised substantial benefits to the ordinary people (the symbolism of the light going on and pushing back the darkness was a powerful one), and represented the integration of a unified industrial network. It was an important image embodying progress and development, and linking these to the socialist future. This image remained powerful throughout the NEP period. The NEP introduced in 1921 constituted a step back from the revolutionary measures of War Communism, involving the denationalisation of small-scale industry and agriculture with the so-called ‘commanding heights’ remaining in the state’s hands, the replacement of requisition by commodity exchange and the operation of the market, the re-introduction of money and taxation, and the primacy of market principles in economic affairs. It also raised again the question of the appropriate path to the communist future. Initially Lenin justified NEP as a ‘temporary retreat’82 in the face of economic dislocation, saying that in the absence of socialist revolution in several advanced countries, only agreement with the peasants could save the situation. This was to be a period in which large-scale industrialisation and electrification of the country plus the mechanisation of agriculture would transform small-scale agriculture and the peasantry and create the basis for socialism.83 However, by 1923 he saw NEP as a possible path to socialism. Lenin now argued84 that on the basis of collaboration between workers and peasants, an alignment that was the result of socialist revolution in a backward peasant country, the expected historical pattern would not apply and movement could be begun in the direction of socialism. This conception of NEP, one subsequently taken up enthusiastically by Bukharin and what was later to be the Right Opposition,85 saw a mixed economy with a substantial private enterprise component as a path to socialism. Lenin’s support for NEP and the widespread acceptance of his view within party ranks suggested a very different conception of socialism to that of War Communism, and an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary path to its achievement.


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Crucial for the success of this strategy was continued emphasis on the strengthening of worker support for the party and the need to strengthen the proletarian weight within party ranks.86 The aim of increased proletarian entry into the party was shared by both leadership and successive opposition groups during the 1920s, being seen by the former as a particularly important means of combating opposition87 and by the latter as an antidote to the subversion of the party’s proletarian consciousness. Lenin’s death was used as the occasion for the recruitment of large numbers of workers from the shop floor,88 while the success of this so-called ‘Lenin levy’ was seen as reflecting the growth of working-class support for the party; indeed, Stalin even declared that now the party had become ‘the elected organ of the working class’.89 It was to be through the expansion of its proletarian nucleus that the quality of the party and its organisations would be improved.90 That is why there was continuing emphasis on the need to promote the best workers and those leading peasants closest to Soviet power in the main structures of the regime.91 Underpinning the NEP was a particular conception of the social basis of society: the so-called ‘smychka’, or union, between city and countryside reflected in the alliance between the workers and poor peasants. In the established ideological canon and the emergent metanarrative, the peasantry was a backward and counter-revolutionary social class. It was opposed to socialism and would always seek to ensure the continued dominance of its own system of petty bourgeois values rather than those of the proletariat. The interests of proletariat and peasantry were deemed to be opposed. Nevertheless, from October 1917, the social basis of the new regime had been seen in terms of a union between these two classes. The very name of the initial legislative organs, soviets of workers’ and peasants’ deputies, symbolised this perceived unity, and even while War Communism effectively constituted a war on grain producers, the myth of unity between the proletariat and at least sections of the peasantry was maintained. When the NEP was introduced, there was more substance for this claim of a partnership between town and country because commercial relations once again developed between the two, but it was hardly the sort of relation envisaged in the notion of smychka and in practice it was less the poor peasants than the other grades which provided most of the food for the cities. In reality, rather than this being a political alliance, it was an economic arrangement. There were two conceptions of this question, the tactical and what may be called the essential, and they tended to be emphasised by different groups within the party. The tactical aspect was reflected in the early official formulations and in most of the positions taken by Lenin, and involved the assumption that the proletarian dictatorship had to rest on an alliance between the proletariat and what was variously called the

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‘rural proletariat and poorest peasantry’ or the ‘poorest peasantry or semiproletariat’. Regardless of the precise language, the intent was clear: with the peasantry divided into three categories – poor, middle and rich/ kulaks – regime stability and even survival depended upon a solid alliance between the proletariat and the poor peasantry. By 1919, this alliance was also to embrace the middle peasantry. It was assumed that these sections of the peasantry shared sufficient common interests with the proletariat, in contrast to the kulaks whose class interests were allied to those of the bourgeoisie, to underpin a firm alliance that would constitute a solid base upon which the regime could stand. For Lenin, at the end of 1919, this had a concrete manifestation in terms of the peasantry ‘lending’ their grain to the proletariat since the latter had nothing to exchange in return; the very survival of the proletariat was seen as dependent upon this alliance.92 At its base, there was a broad concern within the party about the possibility of the peasants holding the regime to ransom by withholding grain supplies from the cities. Those who emphasised the essential aspects of this question, and the opposition groups in the 1920s were particularly vocal about this, did not deny the tactical significance of such an alliance, at least initially. However they were concerned because, in their view, in the context of an immature Russian proletariat (reflecting the fact that the revolution had occurred in a less developed rather than highly industrialised country), an alliance in which the proletariat was so clearly outnumbered by the peasantry threatened to lead to the ‘declassing’ of the proletariat and its regime. The worry was not just that the peasants would oppose the regime and its aims, although there was substantial basis for such a fear – peasant opposition during the civil war (and in particular the Tambov rising of 1920–1) and the drying up of the grain flows into the cities were graphic instances of this – but that the very proletarian nature of the regime was under threat. There was a continuing fear both within the leadership and among opposition groups that petty bourgeois influence would seep into the party and its ranks from the peasantry and thereby drain the revolutionary and proletarian consciousness out of the regime, replacing it with petty bourgeois values;93 alien, careerist elements, especially from within the peasantry, were a clear and constant danger.94 This fear is most clearly reflected in the discriminatory provisions governing party entry in the party Rules of this period, especially the attempt to increase the weight of the proletariat in the party by making their entry easier than that of other groups.95 It was also frequently expressed by speakers at party meetings, and was also evident in the theoretical division of the peasantry into various strata and the way in which it was assumed that the poor peasantry provided support for the proletariat and their regime; rather than being opposed by the


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entirety of the rural populace, the workers’ state had a firm ally among the poorest ranks of the peasantry. But there was seen to be no real possibility of rapprochement with other peasant ranks. In particular, the kulaks were seen as being utterly opposed to the new regime and its aims, an opposition which necessitated class war in the countryside at the time of agricultural collectivisation. The fear was the infection effect that petty bourgeois values could have on the class and regime, a fear reflected in concerns about the quality and nature of new recruits to the party.96 The development of opposition within the party was also attributed to the effect of this petty bourgeois environment.97 The groupism, meaning the development of personal cliques at various levels of the party and state,98 which came under frequent leadership criticism, was attributed to the strength of this environment. The symbol of the peasantry in the metanarrative was therefore ambiguous, both the guarantee of regime survival and a threat to its existence. Both opposition groups and the party leadership thus shared elements of the essential and tactical conceptions of this question of the proletarianpeasant alliance; both recognised its danger and its tactical importance. As a resolution of the Tenth Conference in May 1921 declared, what was necessary was ‘Correct relations between the proletariat and peasantry and the creation of a fully stable form of economic union between both of these classes for the period of the transition from capitalism to socialism’;99 the union between these classes was the basis of Soviet power.100 Of course, the only real solution to this was transformation of the peasantry through complete economic restructuring in the form of industrialisation; as the Eleventh Conference declared, ‘the struggle between the communists and the private economy has been transferred onto the economic ground’.101 Successive opposition groups until the late 1920s attacked the leadership on the basis of what they perceived to be that leadership’s pro-peasant policies; they did not disagree in principle with a smychka, but they criticised the way regime policy favoured the peasants in this alliance. The basis of Trotsky’s criticism throughout the decade was that bureaucratism and the lack of democracy in the party was a function, in part, of petty bourgeois influence. The Left Opposition headed by Zinoviev and Kamenev were more confident of the capacities of the proletariat than Trotsky and strongly criticised the pro-kulak deviation of the leadership and its underestimation or neglect of the working class. The United Opposition strongly pushed for democracy and a proletarian line, for the strengthening of the poor peasants and restriction of the kulaks, and warned about the infection that flowed from non-proletarian elements in the apparatus. All groups focused on the negative impact the peasant class enemy could have and how this needed to be combated. The partial exception to this was the Right Opposition at the end of the 1920s who were more sceptical about the

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capacities of the proletariat and less concerned about the influence of the peasants, while still accepting that the nature of the peasantry posed some dangers. Thus throughout the 1920s successive opposition groups presented their opposition in terms of the major symbol within which policy was cast, the smychka. It mattered little that the views of all sides in the debates were based on images of the peasant that were overdrawn and not particularly accurate. Crucial to their differences were their respective evaluations of the proletarian–peasant relationship within that alliance. Central to this was the question of industrialisation. The development of heavy industry and the industrialisation of the country was a continuing theme throughout the 1920s, gaining greater strength the longer the decade continued. This was the means of moving the country firmly in the direction of communism and was at the heart of the myth of building socialism. But this myth was given added force by the myth of internal opposition. The need for industrial development was significantly enhanced by the perceived growing strength of the kulaks under NEP.102 While much of the running on this question had initially been made by opposition speakers, who used it as an explanation for the development of bureaucratism in the party and the fact of its becoming isolated from its social base,103 even the spokesmen of the majority on the CC recognised the danger in the countryside.104 As early as July 1921 the CC called for a purge (chistka) of the party, condemning the way in which peasant, bourgeois and semi-bourgeois elements (including the former members of other parties, especially the Mensheviks) had entered the party, and calling for the careful verification of the performance of party members.105 At the Eleventh Congress speakers openly argued that NEP posed a direct danger to the integrity and cohesion of the working class, that the party was becoming isolated, and that the strengthening of petty bourgeois sentiment in the party was a major danger.106 By the Twelfth Congress, Zinoviev was arguing that although the declassing of the proletariat so evident earlier was ceasing and that increasingly the workers were supporting the party, the fate of the revolution depended on policy toward the peasants and the strengthening of the worker-peasant alliance.107 However speakers still emphasised the danger posed by NEP and by ‘bourgeois’ or ‘petty bourgeois elements’.108 In the CC Report he delivered to the Thirteenth Congress, Zinoviev warned about the dangers of the growth of a new bourgeoisie in both the countryside and the city and declared that it was impossible to give a clear answer to the ‘kto-kogo’ question.109 NEP was creating stratification within the peasantry and increasing kulak power, such that this group was able to take over many Soviet organs in the countryside,110 where class struggle was taking an increasingly sharp form.111 Accordingly, the party should put increased emphasis on building up


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support among the poor in the countryside,112 an aim of the ‘face to the countryside’ campaign launched in autumn 1924. At the Fourteenth Congress, Stalin acknowledged that there was ‘some revival of capitalism’ occurring and that the agents of this in the countryside, the kulaks, were mustering their forces. But this danger should not be exaggerated, as the opposition was doing; rather steps should be taken to isolate the kulaks and win over the middle peasants.113 This was the essence of the struggle between capitalist and socialist elements in the economy,114 a struggle which the Left Opposition believed was not being won because excessive concessions to the peasants were leading to a strengthening of the kulaks; the opposition around Zinoviev and Kamenev was much more insistent about the danger posed by capitalist elements in NEP than were those around the Stalin leadership,115 and they were insistent that NEP was a strategic retreat rather than a path to socialism, which could be achieved only through international revolution.116 According to the Congress resolution on the CC Report, the worker-peasant alliance under proletarian leadership had been consolidated.117 It also declared that it was important to struggle with the lack of belief in the building of socialism in the country, an outlook manifested in the opposition’s propensity to view state enterprises as instances of state capitalism,118 and a position consistent with the position enunciated by Stalin in 1924 that regardless of the fate of the international revolution, Russia could build socialism fully in one country. This was to become a key plank in the party’s understanding of its tasks in the USSR. The danger that stemmed from external hostility was matched by an immediate threat from within the country itself stemming from the nature of its populace. By late 1926, with the myth of struggle between socialist and capitalist elements in the countryside and in the city gathering strength, the basic premise for the success of socialist construction was said to be the strengthening of the economic hegemony of large socialist industry in the country and its socialist transforming role with regard to the peasant economy, the growth in number and activity of the proletariat, and the strengthening of the union of the working class with the ‘basic mass of the peasantry’.119 It was this decision, which discussed ‘the restructuring of the economy on a new technical base and the tempo of industrialisation’, that foreshadowed the massive changes to come. The transformation of agriculture through the creation of what were to be the iconic symbols of socialist agriculture, the state and collective farms, also now gained some prominence as socialist construction became the watchword.120 Particularly important in this was the continuing perception of differentiation in the countryside and the strengthening of the kulaks and the decline of the poor peasantry as some became proletarianised and others entered the ranks of the middle peasants,

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which were thereby becoming stronger. But alongside this was the growth of socialism in the countryside, in the form of the development of cooperatives and the planned regulatory role of state organs in the peasant economy.121 This picture of the countryside was evident also at the Fifteenth Congress of the party in December 1927, where Stalin emphasised that not enough was being done to restrict the activity of capitalists in industry and trade, and that the new bourgeoisie was becoming increasingly dissatisfied by the expansion of socialist elements in the economy.122 The struggle between socialist and capitalist elements was proceeding in the countryside. Nevertheless, according to Molotov, NEP and the union with the peasants remained the ‘rails to socialism’, while for Kalinin, the peasants would move to socialism through the cooperatives under the leadership of socialist industry.123 The Congress made much of the strengthening of the socialist aspects of the economy and pressed for the further growth of this through the beefing up of socialist industrialisation and the economic displacement of private capitalist economic elements, and the development of state and collective farms; the call for ‘the unification and transformation of petty individual peasant farms into large collectives’ as the ‘main task’ was the first official call for the collectivisation of agriculture.124 It was argued that this working-class offensive would be opposed by the private capitalist strata of city and village along with bureaucratic elements in the soviet and economic apparatus, but this was being overcome by strengthening the proletarian dictatorship and the increased activity, initiative and culture of the proletarian masses. But this struggle had to be intensified on the ideological and cultural front.125 The offensive, especially through the nationalisation of heavy industry and other planned heights of the economy, opened the way for the planned guidance of the economy to replace the anarchy of the capitalist commodity market. Seen in terms of class struggle, this period ‘is characterised by the growing class power of the proletariat and the consolidation of its alliance with the mass of poor and middle peasants, with the relative decline but possibly still an absolute growth in the private capitalist elements in city and countryside.’ The image remained one of the proletariat proceeding in alliance with the basic mass of the peasantry, development through the cooperatives,126 and the continuing strength of capitalism in the countryside. Indeed, even when collectivisation was increasing in tempo, the party still talked about ‘new forms of smychka’, and therefore a continuing association with the poor and middle peasants.127 Thus it was through the discussion of economic policy in the context of class relations that the myth of building socialism was worked out. Late in the 1920s the regime’s symbolic discourse became dominated even more powerfully by the myth of internal opposition, especially after


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the beginning of collectivisation.128 Important here was the imagery of a rupture of relations between ‘the socialist city and the petty peasant countryside’.129 This problem, plus the threatening international situation, demanded an increased tempo in the socialist transformation of industry and agriculture.130 But there was a sharpening of opposition to this course among bourgeois-capitalist ranks (kulaks, nepmen, bourgeois intelligentsia, counter-revolutionary wreckers) and some wavering by the proletariat’s allies in the petty bourgeois masses. In this context there needed to be both an increased attraction of workers into the party and the soviets and a raising of the cultural level of the worker and peasant masses. These were necessary in order to combat bureaucratism and opportunist vacillation among some ranks of the party, and to press on with the socialist transformation of the country.131 The healthy working-class, intra-party democracy and self-criticism were essential to overcoming bureaucratic elements in the apparatus and to eliminate those like the Right Opposition whose support for continuing concessions to the peasants was weakening the proletariat in the increasingly sharp struggle against capitalism in the countryside.132 With this strengthening of class struggle in the country, bureaucratic distortions were an expression of the pressure being exerted on the proletariat by kulaks, urban bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intelligentsia.133 While the party’s factory cells were the most healthy, generally party ranks had been penetrated by ‘petty bourgeois elements, by carriers of rot in everyday life, people who are bringing corruption to the party ranks by the example of their personal and public life, people who hold the public opinion of the workers and toiling peasants in contempt, self-seeking and careerist elements’, and these needed to be purged.134 In the face of this, working-class mobilisation was needed.135 But such mobilisation had to be directed and focused, something to be achieved through labour discipline136 and the increased cultural level of the workers.137 Residual bourgeois influences and the danger of bourgeois infection were also seen to stem from the regime’s use of the so-called ‘bourgeois specialists’, particularly prior to the end of the 1920s.138 The concern here was once again a material one, that people with bourgeois origins would sabotage the building of socialism because it contradicted their class interests. This was realised in its most explicit form with the Shakhty and Industrial Party trials of 1928 and 1930, but it had been a continuing theme throughout the decade. The interpretation of the Shakhty affair is particularly enlightening.139 It was said to have led to the opening up of a ‘counter-revolutionary wrecking organisation’ and illustrated new forms and methods of struggle by the bourgeois counter-revolution against the proletarian state and socialist industrialisation. This organisation was established by former mine owners and a group of former

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specialists, and was linked to former Russian and foreign owners and a foreign military secret service, and was associated with preparations for intervention and war with the USSR. This image thus explicitly linked former owners, bourgeois specialists and capitalist powers in an opposition force against the proletarian state. In a context of international ‘capitalist encirclement’, the fact that part of Soviet industry (as well as significant parts of the military) was being run by people whose class origins and loyalties were seen to be suspect increased both the sense of vulnerability and the mixed nature of the imagery that the regime projected. The new proletarian state not only rested on social foundations that were suspect as a result of the nature of the peasantry, but was also vulnerable because of its reliance upon bourgeois experts for much of the management of the economy. The myth of internal enemies posing a threat to the integrity of the regime was reinforced by the continuing strength of the myth of external opposition in the form of the hostile international environment. While arguing that the Soviet Union and bourgeois states were now engaged in ‘peaceful struggle’, threats and attacks on the USSR were still being launched.140 In 1922 the CC was warning about the link between international capitalist reaction and Russian anti-Soviet parties,141 but by 1923 the dangers of capitalist encirclement were apparently being moderated by the positive effects that capitalist concessions could have on the building of socialism; one speaker at the Twelfth Congress even argued for the attraction of foreign capital, suggesting that the debts thus incurred would be wiped out by world revolution.142 However, this positive view of concessions did not displace the basic assumptions about the external threat posed by the capitalist states.143 Many believed that there was a link between such concessions and bourgeois activity in Russia.144 More acceptable as a source of international support for the building of socialism in the USSR was the perceived growth of the working-class movement in the bourgeois states and, despite the contemporary stabilisation,145 the approaching crisis of capitalism; while acknowledging that earlier expectations about international revolution had been too optimistic, by the middle of the 1920s the image of approaching international revolution was becoming prominent.146 This was not just a result of the workers’ movement in the West, but also of the growing revolutionary movement in the East, in the colonies and dependent countries. The Soviet situation was also seen to be eased by the increased diplomatic recognition that the regime achieved at this time.147 The importance of external assistance was clear in Stalin’s summing up at the Fourteenth Congress when he declared that although the Soviet proletariat could overcome domestic contradictions through their own efforts, in the last analysis overcoming the contradictions between the


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capitalist and socialist worlds required the assistance of a victorious proletarian revolution in a series of countries.148 At the same time the Congress declared that there had been a ‘strengthening and widening’ of the ‘breathing space’, which has turned into a period of ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the USSR and the capitalist states, even while the contradictions between the two were growing.149 By mid-1927,150 with capitalism becoming stronger both economically and politically, there was said to be increased tension in relations between the Soviet Union and England along with imperialist intervention in China, increasing the danger of counter-revolutionary war against the USSR; the war scare of this year was a prominent theme in the press in the middle of the year.151 But there were also some more positive developments: the successes of revolutionary socialist construction in the USSR, the unrolling of national revolution in China, deep discontent among colonial peoples, and the shift to the left among the proletarian masses of Europe. But the situation remained dangerous.152 Paradoxically, beside the image of a hostile Western world, there was also a view of America that was positive. Along with the criticism of the degradation and exploitation of the workers in the West, including the US, there was a strong theme of the positive value of American technology, efficiency and organisation. The ability to get things done efficiently, through both improved technology and better work practices, was lauded as something to be replicated in the USSR. For Stalin in 1924, the essence of Leninism in party and state work was ‘the combination of Russian revolutionary sweep and American efficiency’.153 Thus while the hostility of the West and the degradation of its working class remained powerful elements in regime symbolism, some of the advantages of Western work practices were seen as highly desirable within the Soviet context; the US was a symbol of modernity. The hostile international environment and the quest for modernity were linked to the emergence in the middle of the decade of a new symbol that had a potent message, aviation. The aeroplane appeared as an iconic image conjuring up two different sorts of message.154 The first was of modernity, technology and industrial development. The aeroplane appeared as the representative of modern technology and the product of an advanced society, its development evoking a sense of both the current advanced level of technological development and the promise of the bright future. The allegory of the aeroplane rising inexorably was clearly drawn in such a way as to symbolise the country’s ascent to socialism. But the aeroplane was not just the symbol of technological modernity; it was representative of the perceived means for the transformation of current reality. An image was projected of the aeroplane as a potent tool for the transformation of Russian, especially peasant, society. It was the symbol both of the new

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world and how that world would be realised. The second sort of message was related to defence, and was an expression of the view that the USSR had a developed aeronautical industry which meant that it was not deficient in terms of the capacity to defend itself from the capitalist states. Technical competence and military superiority were the twin attributes of society signified in the treatment of aviation. A number of techniques were used to project these sorts of images. ‘Agit flights’, where aeroplanes were flown to different parts of the country in order to conduct agitation campaigns, were held throughout the 1920s. An important form of these was the high-profile prestige flights, like the Moscow–Peking flight of June–July 1925, the failed Moscow–Paris flight of July 1926, and in 1927 flights from Moscow to Tokyo (and return), Tbilisi, Wrangel island, Tashkent, Kabul, a tour of western Europe, and the socalled ‘star flights’ where aeroplanes left from different directions to fly to Moscow. All of these were given extensive publicity, and all emphasised (indeed, exaggerated) the technical prowess that underpinned them; a major focus was on the technology, which was a product of industrialism, and the machines. Aeroplanes were also used as part of the attack on religion, purportedly showing that there was nothing above the clouds where believers thought heaven to be, and to promote Soviet defence readiness through the construction of a positive image of the role of airmen in the civil war. Within this context of widespread opposition, both inside and outside the country, increasingly the demand was for unity within the party and subordination of difference to the collective interest and view. This debate about the presence of opposition within the party helped to shape the myth of leadership. In the first few years of the regime’s existence, paradoxically when it was seemingly under most threat during the civil war, opposition had been accepted as a normal part of party life. The successive opposition groups were seen as having a legitimate place in the party. They may have been misguided and their views vigorously criticised, but their right to express those views was not denied.155 This changed at the Tenth Congress when the demand for unity and subordination to the central leadership became overpowering. This was to remain a continuing theme throughout the decade. At the Thirteenth Congress, Stalin argued that opposition within the party was merely the mouthpiece of the new bourgeoisie,156 while for Kuibyshev it was an ulcer;157 rather than being a manifestation of freedom and democracy within the party, increasingly the leadership was presenting oppositional activity as a representation of class difference and division, a weakening of the strength of the party and its defences against ‘petty bourgeois influence’.158 No longer was opposition seen as acting in good faith, but as a manifestation of the class conflict in society more broadly. From this time, leading speakers began


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to construct a genealogy of opposition, linking each successive opposition group in the 1920s with its predecessors. Associated with the demand for unity and the end of opposition was the continual invocation of notions of ‘intra-party democracy’.159 This was deemed to mean freedom of discussion of all the most important matters of party life and the election of all officers, but there was to be no freedom of fractional groupings.160 Nor was there to be any absolute freedom of discussion: ‘abstract’ principles of democracy were to be subordinated to the ‘good of the revolution’.161 Indeed, if Lenin’s words at the Tenth Congress that it was time to ‘put the lid’ on opposition were generalised (although here he does seem to have been referring explicitly to the discussion preceding the Tenth Congress162), as they were by the leadership group, the right of open discussion was also denied; as Stalin later declared, the party should not become a ‘debating society’.163 This demand for unity gained new strength from Lenin’s death and the sacralisation of the leader and his image that followed. Now what was required was unity around Lenin and his ideas, as the CC portrayed itself as ‘defending the foundations of Leninism’; unity based on Leninism was seen as the precondition for the success of the revolution.164 Opposition, meaning those who broke the unity so important for the party, were guilty of opposing Leninism and the path the party was following to communism.165 It was within this general context that the notion became prominent that the CC was following a particular, Leninist, line while the opposition could be cast as deviations from that line.166 Henceforth the metaphors ‘line’ and ‘path’ were frequently invoked to refer to the policy pursued by the leadership in accord with Lenin’s wishes, sometimes in contrast to the views of the opposition.167 It was at this time too that the notion of ‘Trotskyism’ as the complete antithesis of Leninism became prominent as a term of both analysis and abuse by the leadership.168 This imagery was important because it implied the steadfast directedness of the leadership compared with the opposition which was seeking to drag the party off at a tangent. At the Fourteenth Congress a continuing line of emphasis was the way that opposition had to subordinate itself to the majority, to ‘acknowledge your mistakes and bow your head before the will of the party’.169 Failure to do so endangered the proletarian dictatorship.170 However at the same Congress the Leningrad-based opposition headed by Zinoviev contested the notion of opposition that it claimed the leadership was using. While acknowledging the need for unity, they saw this in terms of obedience to decisions of the party, but with the minority having the right to both express and vote for its point of view before that decision was made.171 However the view of the majority around Stalin was clear in the conception of the tasks that were necessary for strengthening

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intra-party democracy: the increased activity of the party masses in the discussion and resolution of major problems of party policy; the consistent application of the principle of the election of leading party organs, with the advancement of new forces to leading party work, the expansion of the party aktiv, and the formation of new party cadres; an increase in the qualifications of the party aktiv, especially its knowledge of theory; and the dissemination of the foundations of Leninist doctrine.172 For the leadership, the link between unity and the fate of socialism was clear. After affirming the importance of intra-party democracy along with the further strengthening of the party’s iron discipline, unconditional unity and the proletarian monolithic nature of its ranks, a July 1926 party resolution declared: ‘Only as the united party and only as the single vozhd and leader of the proletarian dictatorship can the Communist party ensure the victory of the proletarian revolution.’173 The key shorthand charge for the infringement of this was ‘fractionalism’, a term that was generally used to refer to the activities of both organised and individual oppositionists. At the Fifteenth Conference in October–November 1926, with the slowdown in the agricultural economy becoming apparent leading to both increased suspicion about peasant opposition/sabotage and demands for higher levels of industrialisation, the leadership used the conference resolution to explicitly pull together a series of elements of the regime’s symbolism to attack the so-called ‘new opposition’ (the United Opposition).174 Arguing that 1917 was a socialist revolution constituting the basis for the subsequent development of world revolution as well as the opening of the transitional period from capitalism to socialism in the USSR (the dictatorship of the proletariat), the resolution declared that the proletariat ‘can and will successfully build full socialist society’ in the USSR, given correct policy regarding the peasantry and sufficient power to guard the USSR from imperialist intervention. In contrast, Trotskyism believes that the revolution is not ‘in essence’ socialist but only a signal and point of departure for socialist revolution in the West, and that if revolution in the West does not come soon, proletarian power in Russia will collapse or degenerate under the weight of unavoidable clashes between proletariat and peasantry. While the party believes that the victory of socialism is possible in a few or even one capitalist country and that that proletariat must encourage and assist international revolution, Trotskyism believes that revolutionary Russia cannot stand its ground against conservative Europe. Citing Lenin (‘On Cooperation’), the party is said to believe that in the USSR there is ‘everything necessary and sufficient’ for the construction of a full socialist society, while Trotskyism believes that ‘a genuine advance in the socialist economy in Russia will become possible only after the victory of the proletariat in the most important countries in Europe’.175 The party believes


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that a stable relationship with the peasantry can be achieved in this first period; Trotskyism disputes this and believes that clashes are inevitable. These views of Trotsky and his supporters, which amount to a social democratic deviation, are incompatible with the views of the party and with Leninism. In contrast to the opposition, the party stands for: (in the context of temporary capitalist stabilisation) the need for communist parties to turn proletarian attacks against the capitalist rulers and avoid the pitfalls of reformism; the search to industrialise with support generated by the gradual improvement of the material status of the peasantry, thereby strengthening the union between the working class and the peasantry; continued unity of the party apparatus and the party masses on the basis of criticism of errors and renewal; and the strengthening of the disciplining and unity of the party by means of intra-party democracy. Against this view the United Opposition argued that under the guise of the alliance of poor and middle peasants, the power of the kulaks was growing. In the face of this, and the associated weakness of the Russian proletariat, the bureaucratisation of the regime was proceeding, reflected most clearly in the way the central party leadership was acting unilaterally without the support of the party at large. This general situation was exacerbated by the way in which that leadership was following the ‘petty bourgeois theory of “socialism in one country” which has nothing in common with Marxism or Leninism’.176 The danger was the corruption of the proletarian nature of the state as the leadership bent before petty bourgeois influence and deviated from the Leninist line. The intra-party opposition was seen as an agent of the bourgeoisie, but this was in an objective sense. As Ordzhonikidze, in giving the report on the work of the commission on the opposition, said to the Fifteenth Congress in relation to the United Opposition, the leadership was not saying that the opposition had links with counter-revolutionaries, but through their actions they gave nourishment to such counter-revolutionaries.177 In the Congress resolution, it was declared that the opposition had broken ideologically with Leninism, had become a form of Menshevism, and had been objectively transformed into the instrument of a third force against the proletarian dictatorship.178 Opposition represented class division, so opposition to the will of the proletariat as expressed by the party leadership could only be bourgeois in nature. In April 1929,179 the right deviation (Right Opposition) was said to have its roots in petty bourgeois elements surrounding the working class while within the party it rested on ‘the least stable elements in the non-proletarian sector of the party that are most subject to petty bourgeois influence and to the danger of degeneration, and the most backward strata of workers who have not undergone a prolonged schooling in the factory and are linked with the rural and urban petty

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bourgeoisie.’ That opposition was accused of an ‘openly opportunist surrender of the Leninist positions under pressure of the class enemy’.180 Thus under the pressure of continuing conflict within the elite, the image of opposition in the metanarrative changed from erring and misguided comrades to contributors to counter-revolution, from opponents to enemies; they were no longer part of the proletarian elect community.181 Throughout, the link between a class and the values it espoused was central because it was such values displacing those of the proletariat that was so dangerous. Stalin was particularly vociferous in asserting the importance of socialist/proletarian values.182 Invocations to criticism and self-criticism had been evident in party discourse since the beginning of leadership conflict.183 This was generally seen as an important element of intra-party democracy and as a means of combating negative phenomena in the party. But towards the end of the 1920s, and particularly from mid-1928, the focus on criticism and self-criticism was sharpened.184 At this time,185 self-criticism was directly linked to the struggle with bureaucratism within a context of activity by both external and internal enemies. Creative self-criticism from below along with intra-party democracy more generally (seen in terms of the election and removal of officers, which was associated with mass control) was central to overcoming bureaucratic suppression, abuses by officials, and the presence in the party of kulak and capitalist elements. Deficiencies in the party were thus attributed directly to alien class influences that had entered the party during its massive expansion of membership in the 1920s. So intra-party democracy, which was the subject of a campaign beginning in late 1928 in which criticism and self-criticism were prominent, was a crucial means for the party to struggle with various negative phenomena within its ranks. But as was made clear in April 1929,186 this was democracy that did not include the right to defend anti-Leninist political lines, deviations and fractional groupings. Rather it was to promote Leninist unity and rally the party behind the general line. Central to this was ideological education, seen principally in terms of Leninism and Marxism-Leninism.187 Discipline and unity were sources of both strength and creativity for the party and became, in the leadership’s view, the primary values. Paradoxically, the opposition accepted this position, differing from the leadership only on the basis upon which that unity should rest and how it could be achieved. Linked with this the party purge was seen as a positive, cleansing or purifying force, a sign of the party’s strength and its ability to flush out alien elements.188 The shift in imagery evident in policy debate over the 1920s was also reflected in the content of political posters. During NEP there was some change in the way in which the principal social categories and their


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relationship were presented compared with the initial period. The smychka was a feature of many posters, and in contrast to the civil war period, the worker was not always shown as a blacksmith.189 Some posters focusing on the smychka also emphasise the party or Lenin; one put out by the Leningrad Society for the Smychka between City and Countryside shows a well-dressed person from the city (it is not clear whether he is a worker) handing to a peasant and his child a copy of a pamphlet by Lenin,190 while a particularly unusual one, because it has a peasant woman as the principal figure, shows her holding copies of the ‘Behests of Lenin’ (Zavety Lenina), the history of the Russian Communist Party, and a journal called Rabotnitsa i krest’ianka.191 In the depiction of these class representatives, many posters during the NEP period adopted a satirical rather than an allegorical approach, seeking to project an understanding of the class attributes of these groups through their representatives.192 The worker was always young, strong and steadfast, the peasant powerful but tending to look to the worker for leadership. While representations of the worker as a blacksmith still occurred,193 a more generic representation came to be adopted. By 1927 the revolutionary worker had been transformed into the Bolshevik worker, often reflected in the juxtaposition of the worker with a red banner, an image of Lenin, or a quotation from Lenin.194 And as during the civil war, it was still the worker who was the primary figure in the images of this time; where there was a peasant, he was clearly subordinate to the member of the proletariat. During this period as well, female workers appeared without males, thereby projecting an independent role for them in the construction of socialism;195 in one case, a female worker (a cook) was urged to begin to direct the state, echoing Lenin’s famous dictum.196 Particularly during the second half of the 1920s, the female worker appeared in heroic guise, with firmly set, determined facial features and a scarf on her head.197 Like her male counterpart, she ceased appearing as a blacksmith, instead becoming a general representational form of the class. However, there were also many posters advertising commercial goods which featured women as consumers,198 thereby fusing the promise of a plentiful future with a more traditional conception of the female role. In NEP posters there was much less of a focus on enemies than there had been during the civil war period, although this focus became more evident in the late 1920s.199 With the shift of policy in the direction of rapid industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation in 1927, the list of opponents was dramatically enlarged. Prior to this date, posters had noted the continuing opposition of internal enemies, like the old privileged classes (burzhui and nobility) and the clergy, nepmen and kulaks, as well as the continuing opposition of international capital. But often the depiction of such enemies occurred not on a poster in which the

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main focus was on opposition, but on something else; for example, the introduction of a new currency in 1924 was seen as a way of strengthening the economy against such enemies as kulaks and the burzhui,200 while elections were a direct blow against the burzhui.201 Thus although opposition remained an element in the visual propaganda of the main part of the NEP period, it was not particularly prominent until towards the end of that period. In 1920, there had been the beginning of a shift to posters that emphasised reconstruction on the domestic front and international revolution rather than simply the defeat of existing opposition, and this became even more marked with the NEP. Many of the posters were also less immediate and hortatory, stimulated not by the need to mobilise people to meet an impending danger but by the desire to persuade them of the benefits of whatever was the subject of the particular poster. A clear instance of this was the way in which posters advertising commercial products became common; from children’s dummies to watches,202 cigarettes to beer,203 from GUM Department Store to Mossel’prom Trade Association,204 commodities and retail outlets were advertised in a way that not only emphasised the abundance of goods that were theoretically available, but suggested that the availability of these was normal.205 The depiction in posters of advertisements for films was another aspect of this.206 Rather than civil war and a continually looming threat, the message was one of normality and of a system operating in a normal way. This focus on the normal functioning of the system and its everyday concerns is also reflected in the way that posters were devoted to particular themes. One prominent theme was literacy and the encouragement of reading among all citizens,207 particularly women.208 While the focus on literacy had a clear political payoff in terms of exposing broader sections of the population to the regime’s message through the written word,209 it also projected an image of the development of a modern society. Similarly a focus on children and their needs projected an image of concern about contemporary problems (especially mistreatment and homelessness210) as well as about the future society;211 these, the children of Il’ich,212 were the adults of the future. While some posters did see the future in ideological terms,213 many posters of this period were content to project it through such more prosaic forms. Consistent with this, the party appeared in many posters. An educational function was clearly envisaged in the set of posters produced in 1926 which charted the history of the party,214 but the more standard setting was to associate the party with the working class215 or with the progression to socialism.216 The latter became more prominent later in the decade, with socialism being associated with the existence of plenty.217 Again echoing


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Lenin, in some posters socialism was associated with electrification,218 while in others it was with cooperatives.219 The course of the debate over domestic policy, and especially the question of governance within the regime, was thus encapsulated within a symbolic discourse of the metanarrative expressed in the evolving interlinked myths of the building of socialism, of internal opposition, and of external opposition. It stemmed from assumptions about the basic nature and historical role of the Soviet state expressed in the regime’s evolving metanarrative. Soviet public discourse was thus existential in essence, linked directly with the question of why the regime was in existence, and in form was conducted through the projection of symbolic images. The main categories of that discourse – like proletariat, peasant, kulak, socialism, democracy, Leninism, bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, smychka, unity, deviation – were all symbols evoking a range of meanings and understandings, both positive and negative, and it was through these symbols that conflict within the elite was conducted. The symbolic shaping of space The transformation of society central to the regime’s metanarrative had to address the urban environment. This is not unusual. Many schemes for a utopian future have had a conception of the city at their focus. Augustine’s City of God and Campanella’s La citta del sole are but two of the more prominent of these. However, within the Marxist tradition, despite their role as the location of the chosen class, the proletariat, cities did not figure in a major independent fashion in views about the communist future. Certainly Marxists argued that there was a need to eliminate the differences in living standards and conditions of those who lived in the cities and those in the countryside,220 and this implied an extension of many of the conditions of life in urban areas into the rural surrounds, but the city was not identified as the organisational form within which communist society would be realised. Accordingly, when the Bolsheviks came to power, they had no plans for urban development; not only had the speed with which they ascended to power left them little time to give much thought to this, their ideological heritage did not present this as a major priority. However this does not mean that the new regime was not anxious to place its stamp on the city. Upon taking power, the Bolsheviks found themselves in an urban environment redolent of the past. The new capital, Moscow, was seen as the product of ‘barbarous Russian capitalism’;221 it was also the traditional centre of tsarist power. As such, it was an alien, even hostile, environment for the new rulers of Russia, but one which they sought to

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transform to make it more in tune with the tasks upon which they had embarked. Certainly Lenin was aware of the need to make the city their own. In a letter to Lunacharsky, he said: ‘You remember Campanella in his City of the Sun speaks of frescoes on the walls of his fantastic socialist city, frescoes that were to serve as graphic lessons in natural history, science . . . I think that this is by no means naïve and with certain modifications could be assimilated by us and realised right now . . . I would name what I have in mind monumental propaganda.’222 He saw this in terms of ‘the most permanent radical principles and slogans of Marxism’ inscribed on cement blocks, and bas-reliefs and statues, including of leading predecessors of socialism. However, early attempts to grapple with this problem were piecemeal. Attention initially turned to monumental propaganda and the removal of the insignia and symbols of the former regime. Following a Sovnarkom decree of 12 April 1918,223 tsarist regalia was prised off buildings throughout the country and many of the statues of tsars and their officials were toppled; when they could not be removed or destroyed easily, they were covered in red drapes, especially on festive days.224 In Moscow, this included the statues of Alexander II in the Kremlin, of Alexander III near the Christ the Saviour Cathedral and of the hero of the RussoTurkish War of 1877, General Skobelev, in the square in front of the building occupied by the Moscow Soviet, the former Governor-General’s residence on Tverskaia.225 The placement of many of these in museums depoliticised them and effectively neutralised their symbolic power by transforming them into objects of curiosity. But this was not just about removing the monuments of the past; it also involved the creation of monuments to the new regime. In July 1918 a list of sixty-eight revolutionary forebears was adopted to be honoured through the creation of monuments to their memory along some of the most important routes in Moscow.226 The first of these (of Lasalle) was unveiled in October 1918, but by the time the programme was called to a halt in 1922, the poor quality of most of the twenty-five that had been erected meant that they had no long-term significance and their contemporary impact was hardly positive.227 The main product of this attempt to create a link with revolutionary forebears was the monument to leading revolutionary thinkers in Aleksandrovsky Sad, which listed nineteen thinkers.228 Originally designed as a plinth for the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty, this was changed in 1918 to give expression to the revolution’s perceived intellectual forebears. Also important was the erection on the first anniversary of the revolution of the ‘Liberty Obelisk’, which filled the spot recently vacated by the Skobelev statue. The obelisk was a strange mixture of symbols: it had the text of the RSFSR Constitution and a winged female


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in classical form, but it was to remain where it was placed only until 1941. Buildings were also decorated with frescoes and paintings, posters and appeals, while the surfaces on all means of transport – cars, trains, trams, ships – were decorated with revolutionary pictures.229 At this time too, steps were taken to change the major sources of orientation and guidance within the city: street names. A Special Commission on Renaming Moscow’s Streets was created in 1920, but the process of changing street names had begun in 1918. Many streets and squares with names redolent of the tsarist era gained new names that evoked the revolutionary heritage – examples include streets or squares named after Herzen, Kropotkin and Marx (respectively Bol’shaia Nikitskaia ulitsa, Prechistenka ulitsa and Staraia Basmannaia ulitsa) or ideological symbols like Commune Square, Revolution Square and Soviet Square (respectively Yekaterinskaia pl., Voskresenskaia pl. and Skobelevskaia pl.). In 1919 some streets, squares and a district in Moscow (Simonovka became Leninskaia sloboda) were named after Lenin. Street renamings averaged fourteen a year in 1918–21 and there were 202 in 1922.230 There was also some renaming of towns outside Moscow, especially to get rid of tsarist connotations, with political names becoming the norm by the early 1920s;231 the most prominent instance was that of Petrograd becoming Leningrad on Lenin’s death in 1924, but this was just one of numerous instances (see below). The first major attempt to create a symbolic centre for the new regime occurred in 1924, following Lenin’s death. From 1917 martyrs of the revolution had been buried beneath the Kremlin wall on Red Square. A special ceremony had been held to inaugurate this process on 10 November 1917; twelve months later a bas-relief to those who had died was unveiled on the Kremlin wall.232 The importance of this area was expanded massively when it was decided in January 1924 that the newly dead Lenin should be interred in a mausoleum on this site. This transformed this part of the square from being, in effect, simply a hallowed revolutionary graveyard, into that plus a monument to Soviet power. This was the public resting place of the founder of the regime, and his tomb was to constitute a viewing platform from which his successors could oversee the celebrations of the regime’s successes. Accordingly, a wooden mausoleum designed by Aleksei Shchusev was hurriedly erected to take Lenin’s body, but this was a small, crude structure which was superseded by a new and grander mausoleum (again designed by Shchusev) in spring 1924. Although constructed of wood, this was a more imposing building. However, this second mausoleum was still insufficiently grand, and following a public design competition in which all entries were rejected, Shchusev was given the commission to create a more permanent structure. The new mausoleum, completed in 1930, was made of granite, porphyry

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and labradorite, and was pink, black and grey in colour. It was more bulky than its predecessor, and, although it did not dominate Red Square, it clearly became a major focus of that space.233 This was enhanced in 1930–1 when its role as the focus of regime celebration and commemoration was facilitated by the removal of tram tracks from Red Square, cobblestones able to take the weight of heavy vehicles were laid, reviewing stands were erected each side of the mausoleum, and the Minin/Pozharsky statue was moved closer to St Basil’s to create less disruption to parades. Initially, there was little attempt to envisage the city as a whole, perhaps in part because of the ideological concentration on the elimination of the division between the urban and rural. Certainly a plan for the development of the city, designed principally by a team led by the classical architect Ivan Zholtovsky, was formally adopted by the presidium of the Moscow Soviet in February 1919,234 but it was a document without vision and remained a dead letter. A plan for ‘New Moscow’ emerged in the early 1920s, driven architecturally by Shchusev, politically by Kamenev, and influenced by the ‘garden city’ notion developed by Ebenezer Howard in the West. This envisaged a radical reorganisation of functions within the city into specialised zones, albeit with the retention of much of the basic structure of the centre of the city (minus many of the smaller roads), but this too had little practical effect.235 It was superseded in 1925 by yet another proposal, this time driven by a commission chaired by Sergei Shestakov. The plan, for ‘greater Moscow’, envisaged a single unit embracing the city and surrounding countryside divided into five concentric rings including significant areas of green belt plus satellite garden cities.236 But this too remained unfulfilled. At the end of the decade, as part of the so-called ‘cultural revolution’ and stimulated by the prospect of many new cities resulting from industrialisation, and therefore of the opportunity to plan their rational development from the very beginning, a variety of planning proposals were advanced for the ‘socialist city’. Reflecting the views of the diversity of architectural schools of thought that had been contending in Russia over the past decade, the proposals were very varied in the form, shape and components of the city they envisaged.237 Many were animated by the ‘garden city’ notion, seeing the future development of Moscow as involving the decentralisation of the city and the promotion of a more rural lifestyle for the people. But like their predecessors, they remained purely on the drawing board. However, what this did reflect was the acknowledgement that a plan for the city as a whole was required. This was not to come to fruition until 1935. In the interim, development did not stop. There was still the demolition of older buildings or those with objectionable associations, and proposals for the construction of brand new symbols of the new future.


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There was no consistent approach to older buildings and monuments during the initial decade and a half of the Soviet period. There was recognition within the Soviet leadership, mainly on the part of Commissar of the Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky supported by Lenin, of the need to preserve some historic monuments and masterpieces of the past while removing all monuments to ‘the tsars and their lackeys’.238 Early in 1918 the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies declared that while the old masters had gone, they had left behind a vast heritage which now belonged to the people. The Committee continued: ‘Citizens, take care of this inheritance, take care of the paintings, statues, buildings – it is the embodiment of your spiritual strength and that of your forefathers. Art is something wonderful, that talented people were able to achieve even under the yoke of despotism, that bears witness to the beauty and strength of the human soul. Citizens, do not even touch one stone, protect the monuments, the old buildings, articles, documents – all this is your history, your pride. Remember, all this is the soil from which will grow your new, people’s art.’239 This approach was reflected in the work of a number of agencies designed to restore and conserve buildings considered of historical note240 and was given visual form in a poster calling on citizens to protect monuments of art.241 However this sort of attitude did not sit easily with the widespread view that the October Revolution was carried out in order to construct a new and better world, and that this necessarily involved a rejection of the past and all it stood for. In terms of the actual cityscape, this meant the destruction of large numbers of old buildings and the preservation of many others, with this dual process taking place without any overall coordination. The first phase of the destruction of buildings in Moscow occurred spontaneously. The widespread fuel shortages that were a feature of War Communism led in 1919–20 to the significant destruction of wooden buildings in Moscow as people used them for fuel.242 But this was a process driven by need, not by ideology or the desire to create a vacant block of land upon which a new building with ideological connotations could be constructed. Ideological factors, including hostility to religion, were a much more important influence in the destruction of major Moscow buildings in the 1920s. Among the major buildings to be demolished at this time were the Church of the Blessed Virgin on Bol’shaia Lubianka (1924; two other churches also were destroyed in 1924), the Church of Archdeacon Evpl on Miasnitskaia (late 1925), the Red Gates (June 1927), the Church of St Paraskeva on Okhotnyi Riad (June 1928), Sretensky Monastery near the Lubianka (July 1928), and the Church of Konstantin and Elena in the Kremlin (June 1928). Church buildings were often the source of building

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supplies as they were stripped not only of their valuables, but their very structures as well.243 At the same time a building programme developed in Moscow, although it was not guided by a comprehensive conception of the city’s development or what that might mean. There was not even agreement on the style of building that should be erected. The 1920s was a time of considerable ferment in Soviet architectural circles. The revolution had given a significant stimulus to artistic endeavour and its cause had been taken up by many avant-garde artists, building on the extraordinary ferment of innovation that had occurred in the first two decades of the twentieth century in Russia. Similarly in architectural circles, architects excited by the ideals of the revolution and by the potential opportunities for town planning that seemed to be posed by the new regime’s nationalisation of urban land debated about the most appropriate forms buildings should take to reflect the new, post-revolutionary, conditions. The principal axis of conflict during much of the 1920s was between those who remained wedded to neo-classical forms, drawing their inspiration from the classical and renaissance worlds, and a newer school called the constructivists.244 The latter was much influenced by the machine age, and often combined plain flat surfaces with cylinders to evoke machinelike images, and believed that the function a building was to serve should be reflected in its architectural design. Classic examplars of constructivist architecture built in Moscow at this time include the Zuev Club (1927–9), Rusakov Club (1927–9), Burevestnik Factory Club (1927–9), Narkomfin apartment house (1928–30) and the Narkomzem building (1928–33).245 Many other significant buildings also went up at this time, some having constructivist influences without being wholly constructivist in style, while others remained more influenced by neo-classical considerations. Among them were the Lenin Institute for the Study of Marxism-Leninism on Sovetskaia Square (1925–7), the Central Telegraph Office on Tverskaia (1925–7), the Izvestiia building on Pushkin Square (1927), and Government House (‘the house on the embankment’, 1928–31). None of these buildings was considered to be a ‘landmark building’, but they were all representative of the new era. Also important in this regard was construction associated with the provision of housing. In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, this issue was not as pressing as it was to become because large numbers of people fled the cities and the hunger that existed in them. However, as the economy improved with NEP, and especially as industry again picked up with the consequent increase in demand for workers’ housing, this need became more pressing. Initially the authorities had encouraged collective living through the transformation of formerly private homes


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into ‘workers’ communes’ (from about 1919 ‘house communes’). This was in part ideologically driven,246 but it also reflected the availability of large apartments formerly owned by those now considered to be class enemies. The large apartments were now divided up and multiple families of workers were moved in, with a family to a room and shared facilities: common kitchens, dining areas, toilet and washing facilities and creches. This sort of situation was not very popular and, on the ground, led to many tensions and conflicts. Both political leaders and architects were aware that if living was to be organised collectively247 there was a need to design housing stock specifically to serve that purpose. The design of such accommodation was a major issue of debate among architects at this time. The constructivists were significant in this debate, seeing housing in terms of ‘social condensers’,248 or forms which would not only foreshadow the architecture and town planning of the future, but would also through use of space influence people to adopt new social mores and thereby transform their lives. In Kopp’s words, social condensers were ‘to turn the self-centred individual of capitalist society into a whole man, the informed militant in socialist society in which the interests of each merged with the interests of all.’249 Some attempts were made to build communal living accommodation, which involved the construction of individual sleeping quarters, with communal facilities like laundries, kitchens and dining halls.250 More common than fully communal houses were the so-called ‘houses of a transitional type’, like the Narkomfin apartment house. These were meant to encourage collective living without imposing it, principally by providing rudimentary shared cooking facilities close to the individual accommodation areas; the so-called F type units had a single living area with bathroom and kitchen that could be removed when communal catering was introduced.251 Fully communal accommodation was not popular, despite its strong ideological heritage; this was seen as the way of liberating women from the drudgery of housework. Accordingly much more of the transitional type housing was built, and was seen as reflecting the trend towards a fully communist lifestyle. As such, the building of housing was an important symbol of the regime’s aim of achieving communism. The drive for collective living fuelled the construction of collective facilities. From the outset, the regime recognised the need to create facilities to provide not just the material needs of the people (dining halls, kitchens, laundries) but facilities to both foster and structure their civic activities. Clubs were one such form of this. At the XII Congress, the party declared that clubs must be ‘real centres of mass propaganda and the development of the creativity of the working class’.252 Such clubs, which could be linked to communal housing, productive enterprises, trade

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unions or the local councils, ideally had large halls for meetings and performances, lecture theatres, study areas, library, reading room, facilities for special interest groups (such as theatrical groups), restaurant, gymnasium and sporting facilities. Many were built in the late 1920s to early 1930s, and some were architecturally striking (eg. the Zuev Club). Mass kitchens, which provided food to be consumed elsewhere, and communal dining rooms were also established; by 1930, Moscow had more than ten mass kitchens.253 However, the early attempts to create a socialist city had by the end of the 1920s made little progress; the replacement of tsarist symbols with Soviet ones, the tentative shift in the direction of communal housing, the destruction of some buildings and erection of others were all that the regime had to show for its efforts. While it may have lost some of its tsarist sheen, Moscow was not yet a symbol of the bright socialist future. Indeed, for many ordinary people, forced to endure communal living without adequate facilities, their view of this aspect of the regime’s plans is likely to have been overwhelmingly negative. The symbolic shaping of action Also important in the attempt to create a new society was public ritual. The advantage that ritual had over art was that, although many artists experimented with ways of making their art interactional with the observer, ritual was by its nature intrinsically more open to popular involvement than artistic products. The essence of ritual was the acting out of various parts which, in the context of the whole, came together to embody a wider meaning, but it was an acting out which, in principle, could involve the crowd. Onlookers did not have to remain outside the ritual, but could be drawn into it to play their part. In this way they could be invested with a sense of belonging and ownership, with a feeling of being part not just of that particular ritual but of the broader reality which that ritual was meant to represent. Furthermore they did not need a highly developed level of either functional or political literacy to become involved in this way; indeed, it was through such involvement that their levels of political literacy could be increased. Recognising both the problem and the role that ritual could play in addressing it, the Bolsheviks moved from early in their rule to use ritual as a means of reaching out to the populace and of embedding their values and framework of analysis in the society at large. The initial steps in this regard were not highly orchestrated or choreographed by the political authorities. In the early years of the Soviet regime, there was a strong surge of support and enthusiasm for rituals within the creative sections of the population. Among artists, poets, writers, designers, architects and cultural figures more generally, there was a significant


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outburst of support for the revolutionary cause. This created a vibrant culture of innovation and experimentation which lasted until the end of the 1920s as intellectuals, stimulated by the revolution and what it promised, engaged in all sorts of experiments in their fields of endeavour. This was a period of extraordinarily exciting development in all cultural spheres, including art, literature, theatre and urban design. Often stimulated by utopian visions254 and the view of the radiant future opened up by the revolution, these people produced a creative golden age. Up until the end of the 1920s, they worked broadly outside direct party control. Certainly censorship was introduced soon after the Bolshevik accession to power, but this remained somewhat idiosyncratic and arbitrary, and it was not the case that artists were handed down specific and detailed instructions about what to produce. Often their work was a result simply of their response to the main messages and themes of the metanarrative, thus reflecting the initiative of the artist rather than direction from above. Even in those cases when cultural figures took up commissions from the authorities to produce particular pieces of work, during these early years there remained significantly greater room for individual interpretation on the part of the artist than was to be present in later years. In this sense, then, the form taken by the early rituals was shaped as much if not more by their artistic directors than their political sponsors. Taking their lead from the political message of the regime, these people chose what to emphasise and how to present it, in the process shaping the popular perception in particular of the revolution (thereby contributing to the emergent myth of the regime’s foundation) and what it meant.255 When the new regime turned to the mounting of ritual and public festival, artists were eager to participate. This was not only because of the enthusiasm for the revolution and what it portended, but because this promised to provide those artists with a mass canvas for their work that had earlier been unavailable to them. This was, for them, an unprecedented professional opportunity and challenge. Public rituals and festivals, especially on the regime’s feast days, were a symbolic way of the new regime taking control of the city centre and investing it with its own symbolic meaning. By mobilising the populace into street marches and demonstrations, by transforming their essence from protest (which had been their main purpose prior to the revolution) into celebration, and by redirecting such activities into new routes to be taken through the city, the authorities not only asserted symbolic control over the city, but invested parts of it with a new, revolutionary, symbolic significance; for example, in St Petersburg the inclusion of Smolny and the Field of Mars in the route to be taken by the marchers invested these areas of the city with increased symbolic importance while simultaneously

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draining some of that symbolism from the sites that had been central to the tsarist regime, like Palace Square. Lenin was intent on establishing this sort of symbolic ownership of the city. His plan for monumental architecture was part of this idea of creating a city that would give voice to socialist values and thereby cease to be the locus of old regime power and symbolism and instead become the manifestation of the new. Important too was ritual, and from 1918 what were to be two of the regime’s main feast days, May Day and the anniversary of the Revolution, were major features on the regime’s symbolic calendar. The first of these was May Day. The Sovnarkom decree of 12 April 1918 reflecting Lenin’s call for monumental architecture256 also called for the decoration of the city in honour of the May Day celebration. Although a Festival Commission was established to organise the celebration,257 there was no overall coordination about how different parts of the city were to be decorated; each artist decided how best to decorate that section of the city (eg. a building or square) that they were allotted. Accordingly there was no overarching citywide unity to the decoration. Buildings, squares, bridges, roads and lampposts were decorated with brightly coloured banners (many were red) and flags, fake triumphal arches and tribunes were erected, panels depicting revolutionary events were hung from prominent positions, and many tsaristera statues were covered up.258 The centrepiece of the celebration was a march. In the centre of Moscow (such marches occurred in many of the cities of Russia259 and elsewhere in Moscow as well) it was focused on Red Square and Skobelev Square. The march, which was not highly regimented, seems to have been mainly civilian in composition, although there were military units involved; marchers carried banners invoking the revolution, the new workers’ state and May Day, there were vehicles representing various workers’ collectives, and there were representatives of the peasants and of various nationalities (dressed in their national costumes). The march went past a rostrum erected beneath the Kremlin wall. On the rostrum were members of the Central Executive Committee and the Moscow Soviet. The march also passed the graves of revolutionary heroes beneath the Kremlin wall, saluting the dead through the lowering of banners and the playing of solemn music by the bands that accompanied the march.260 This event had a sense of spontaneity, genuine joy and enthusiasm. Rather than a prescribed plan, it looked like a socialist variant of the traditional festivals that had characterised pre-revolutionary Russian towns; the lack of regimentation of the march, the home-made character of many of the banners and decorations and the enthusiasm of many participants marked this as an event with significant impetus from below. This first celebration of May Day was the beginning of the process of transforming this traditional day of protest into one of celebration of Soviet history and achievement.


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The celebration of the first anniversary of the Revolution on 7 November 1918261 was characterised by ‘greater planning and control’ than May Day had been.262 It was also important in that it projected Moscow as the symbolic heart of the revolution, thereby displacing St Petersburg where the more important political events of 1917 had occurred and which had not been overshadowed in the May Day celebrations, and because for the first time Lenin became a focus of the celebration.263 The original plan for festivities envisaged a programme with two components: revolutionary agitation in the form of lectures, reports, meetings, discussions, pageants and music, to be followed by a public parade from different districts of the city converging on Red Square. Again, the city264 was bedecked with posters, flags, banners, slogans, paintings, busts and statues; buildings were specially painted, trees decorated, and special lighting employed during the night; placards with the new symbols of the Soviet regime, the hammer and sickle, were prominent in a way that they had not been in May. Lenin played a prominent part in the celebrations. Not only was he on the viewing rostrum, but he unveiled a statue of Marx and Engels in Revolution Square near the Bol’shoi Theatre and a memorial plaque to those who fell in the Revolution, and he delivered a total of six speeches on 6–7 November.265 Furthermore he was publicly treated with significant deference by other leading figures. At the unveiling of the plaque, what Stites called the ‘revolutionary funeral hymn’266 ‘You Fell Victim’ was played. During the evening, fireworks lit the sky, at nine o’clock the Kremlin bells chimed the Internationale, effigies of opponents were burnt, and orchestral bands and groups of performers were ferried around the streets on trucks so they could give impromptu performances. On the day of the parade, columns of marchers filed through Red Square. They carried bright posters, mocked-up effigies of workers of various sorts, and allegorical symbols of freedom. There were representatives of peasants, public organisations, students, workers, and Red Armymen and sailors.267 The celebrations in Moscow firmly established it as the symbolic centre of the country, displacing the former capital from this role, while the occasion helped to generate the myth of October that was to become the bedrock of the regime’s foundation myth and legitimation programme. After 1918, the decoration of the city on festive occasions became more modest while the celebrations were brought under increasing bureaucratic control. But by 1920 the scale of public performance had increased markedly through the mounting of highly choreographed, large-scale participant theatre where the line between actors and audience was blurred. The most elaborate and largest of these public spectacles took place in Petrograd. The first, on 12 March 1919, was held indoors at the Steel Hall of the People’s House where the Red Army Theatrical-Dramaturgical

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Studio staged a performance of ‘The Fall of the Autocracy’, a portrayal of the events of the February revolution.268 The first outdoor spectacle was to celebrate May Day 1919, and was another performance by the Red Army Studio entitled ‘The Third International’, although this was less successful than ‘The Fall of the Autocracy’.269 For May Day 1920, some 2,000 people, mainly army conscripts, participated in a play entitled ‘The Mystery of Liberated Labour’, mounted on the Stock Exchange steps in Petrograd. This was followed by ‘The Blockade of Russia’ held on 17 June 1920 and ‘Towards a World Commune’ on 19 July 1920, during the II Congress of the Third International; the latter had some 4,000 participants coming from workers’ clubs, theatre schools, Young Communists and Red Army soldiers and sailors.270 However, the most spectacular such presentation was ‘Storming the Winter Palace’ held on the 1920 anniversary of the revolution. The main part of the action, which involved some 10,000 participants, took place mainly on two specially constructed stages, one for the Reds and one for the supporters of the Provisional Government, joined by a walkway over which at the appropriate moment the Reds stormed.271 The message projected through these spectaculars was that October was the apex of revolutionary development and that Russia was the beating heart of socialism. But these spectaculars were more than simply an assertion of ideological rectitude; they were also vivid recountings of history, the projection onto the audience of a particular interpretation of the history of the Russian Revolution and, through the involvement of that audience in the performance, the association of people with this view. This was a means of incorporating the people into the regime’s emerging foundation myth. However, although similar spectaculars were held outside Petrograd, the number of people they could involve in this way was actually quite small.272 In terms of ritual, the regime placed much greater weight upon its feast days and the celebrations of them. In the 1920s, the marches and public demonstrations became more structured and controlled from above. From 1921, the leadership of parades tended to be taken by the military,273 while, especially after 1924 and Lenin’s death, marchers began to carry representations (mainly in the form of pictures or paintings) of party leaders. The May Day 1924 parade saw the marchers carrying banners inscribed with quotations from Lenin while soldiers, tanks and guns led the parade and aeroplanes flew overhead. A big banner stretched out from the Kremlin wall bearing the ‘slogan’: ‘Our banner is Lenin. Our weapon in Leninism. Our task is world revolution.’274 The marches remained multi-constituent, in the sense that workers, military men, peasants, students, intelligentsia, men, women and children mixed during the march, creating a symbol of both equality and unity. They often marched with floats275 principally representing themes of


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production or of opposition to enemies. The initial May Day and October Revolution parades had had a martial emphasis, reflecting the civil war situation, while the May Day parade had also emphasised the international dimension, reflecting its origins in the international labour movement. However from about 1922 the emphasis changed to the building of the new society, to construction and labour enthusiasm. During the 1920s too the range of targets of attack or ridicule widened. Initially this had been mainly limited to opponents of the regime – Kerensky, White Guard generals, foreign and domestic political leaders – who were often shown as being destroyed, but in the 1920s while such images of opponents remained it also became common for the depiction of representatives of social deficiency, such as shirkers from work, hooligans and drunks.276 And in 1922 a new, permanent, stone rostrum was constructed beneath the Kremlin walls from where the leadership could watch the march, replacing the temporary structures that formerly were erected at the time of each demonstration.277 From1924, they could watch from the top of Lenin’s newly constructed mausoleum. Underpinning all of this popular ritual was an emphasis on the creation of a new man, intolerant of the false manners, niceties and morals of bourgeois life and characterised by the sorts of qualities identified in the visual images noted above – resoluteness, commitment, decency, fairness, respect and solidarity. Comradeship was what summed up the new conception of Soviet man, a conception in which the old hierarchy was to be replaced by one of equality, cooperation and mutual concern. This was linked with the debates about the need to create a new workers’ culture, and how this was to be done. Some, like the adherents of Proletkult, sought the creation of a new proletarian culture completely separate from the bourgeois culture of the past. Some favoured the destruction of all aspects of former bourgeois culture, including the destruction of artwork and the burning of books. However, this position was not universally shared even within the movement, and Lenin vigorously opposed such iconoclasm. His position, and that which prevailed, was that the new workers’ culture should be built on the best of the old. Significant too in structuring the lives of the people was the regime’s introduction of changes in the rituals of their private lives. Symbolically significant was the reform of the calendar, with the decision being taken on 4 January 1918 to adopt the Gregorian calendar in use in the West; as a result, 1 February became 14 February. One aspect of this was its antireligious overtone by making the Orthodox Church, which favoured the maintenance of the old-style Julian calendar, appear two weeks behind the modern world. The decree which altered the calendar also removed some Church holidays278 and designated Sundays and Soviet feast days as rest

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days while on 5 February 1918 (23 January) Sovnarkom adopted a list of revolutionary holidays. By 1930 the regime had introduced a number of new holidays: Bloody Sunday commemoration (9 January), Lenin’s death (22 January), Red Army Day (23 February), Women’s Day (8 March), Overthrow of the Autocracy (12 March), Day of the Paris Commune (18 March), anniversary of 1912 Lena massacre (14 April), May Day (1 May), Day of the USSR (6 July), anniversary of October Revolution (7 November), anniversary of 1905 Revolution (19 December).279 In October 1923 a range of public festivals that were meant to replace religious holidays was announced, many of which had as their rationale recognition of aspects of the labour ethic, e.g. Electric Day, and the Day of Industry, while all religious holidays were dropped from the official calendar at the end of the 1920s. The regime also encouraged alternative ways of marking the main stages of life – birth, marriage and death. ‘Octobering’ (Oktiabrina) was the ceremony marking birth, with the name recalling the way the October Revolution had given birth to a new society. René Fulop-Miller280 gave a description of such a ceremony.This was held in the communist party office with the party secretary presiding. The works council of the enterprise where the father was employed provided the ‘godparents’. The hall was festively decorated in red, and a choir of workers sang the Internationale. At the sound of a bell, a curtain rose to show the parents and infants (a number were usually done at the same time) seated at a table with a red cover. The speaker explained the meaning of the ceremony to those present, and then offered the parents a number of revolutionary names from which to choose for their baby.281 The fathers rose, chose a name, and solemnly promised to raise their children in the spirit of revolutionary Russia. Minutes were taken and signed, with a copy given to each couple, followed by festive speeches and general congratulations. The approximate wording of the ‘baptismal’ certificate was as follows: ‘We the undersigned herewith attest that a new citizen has been received into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, [Name]. By giving you your name in honour of [meaning of name], we greet you as a future worker and founder of the communist social order. May the ideals of communism henceforth form the content of your life as long as you live! May you be one of those who will bring the great cause of the proletariat to its goal! You shall march under the red flag! Long live the new revolutionary citizenness.’ However such rituals were not popular and declined later in the 1920s.282 The wedding ceremony was secularised, being held in workers’ clubs or state buildings, and requiring little more than signing a certificate, although authorities did later introduce dances and a banquet as a means of celebration.283 More important were the funerals, because these had as their primary stimulant the revolutionary funerals of dead leaders. The


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biggest of these was Lenin in January 1924 (see below), but elements of this had been worked out in the earlier funerals of figures like Volodarsky284 and Uritsky: the lying in state for people to pay their respects, a huge cortege and catafalque drawn on a carriage by a single horse, massed people and army, and overflying aeroplanes were the model. For ordinary workers, a simpler secular service was promoted, with music, red flags, a procession of workers’ unions, and sometimes the closing of the factory/ies in the deceased’s honour.285 As the regime’s metanarrative took form during the 1920s, driven by elite conflict but embracing in its development a range of changes to society and the way it functioned, it was only natural that this would also shape the development of life within the major institution of the system, the party. The development of ritualised patterns of behaviour in the party both reflected and interacted with the main themes that had been developing in the metanarrative and, like much of the linguistic symbolism of the metanarrative, were worked out in the process of elite conflict. The prominence within the regime’s evolving metanarrative of the myth of internal opposition was a major driving force in the development of ritual within the party. The chief site of politically significant ritual was the party congress. This was the body that formally defined and legitimated the party leaders and the political line through the process of affirmation by representatives of the rank-and-file. It projected an image of membership solidarity and, through the process of election of delegates from lower levels, constituted a symbolic representation of the party as a whole. This added to its formal status as the supreme body in the party with both the right and the responsibility to make binding decisions on key matters of concern. It was the vehicle through which party rank-and-file sovereignty was to be realised. Although the congress was never the real repository of political power, until 1924 it was a forum in which vigorous discussion of policy issues could occur. The congress always began with the report of the CC,286 given by one of the party leaders, in 1918–22 Lenin, 1923–4 Zinoviev, and from 1925 Stalin. This covered the main issues of the day, and was followed by a series of speeches by other speakers (with rank and party seniority important in the levels of authority that such speakers enjoyed) addressing some of the issues raised in that speech; in this early period, oppositionists were even able to present ‘counter-theses’ to the CC report. In the congresses over the initial fiveyear period, major pressing issues were raised and discussed in the congress, with important opposition groupings able to voice both their criticisms of the leadership’s policies and their alternative policy suggestions: at the VII Congress the issue was Brest-Litovsk, at the VIII Congress the Military Opposition attacked increased centralisation and control in

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the military, at the IX Congress the Workers’ Opposition and Democratic Centralists criticised the increasingly centralist regime inside the party, at the X Congress the role of trade unions and centralism in the party were debated, and at the XI Congress there were arguments over the so-called Declaration of the 22. The ability of these groups to spell out their differences and defend their views reflected the belief current at this time that discussion was the means of resolving differences and bringing about unanimity, and therefore different views were natural and normal. Although all of these disputes were resolved in the leadership’s favour, all were the subject of vigorous and wide-ranging discussion, and it could be argued that the final decision could at least be informed by the debate. The inability of the leadership to take the rank-and-file for granted in the early years was shown at the XI Congress when the plenary session overruled a decision by the Congress Presidium not to open debate on the CCC Report.287 However, consistent with the developing view in the metanarrative about the dangers of opposition, this situation was not to last. As early as the X Congress in 1921, a semi-official slate of candidates for election to the CC was used as the basis for the election of that body, thereby compromising the presumed sovereignty of the delegates and increasing the symbolic as opposed to the practical importance of the electoral process. Although such a slate may not have been used at the following congress, it returned for the XII Congress in 1923, gained mandatory standing, and henceforth remained in effect as the means for the congress to choose the CC until the fall of the USSR. Furthermore, from the XIV Congress in 1925, the sending to the congress of rank-andfile delegates supporting oppositionist positions was prevented,288 and although leading figures from among the Bolshevik elite who opposed the course taken by the bulk of the leadership were sometimes able to make their point, there was no substantial putting of an oppositionist point of view. Furthermore, when such people were able to speak, they were subjected to disruption from the floor. At the XIII Conference in January 1924 opposition speakers were subjected to heckling, while by the XIV Congress the jeering and shouting down of such speakers had become the rule.289 At this congress, the principle which had been present before became a matter of major emphasis: the congress was the binding organ of the party, deciding what was in line with Lenin’s teaching. In Tomsky’s words, ‘for Leninists, truth is the party, and the congress determines the will of the party’.290 Even the opposition accepted this view of the tasks of the congress.291 By the end of this period the congress was well on the way to becoming a monolithic assembly characterised by unanimous votes and behaviour that was highly ritualised. From an assembly in which there was genuine debate and obedient majority votes were not


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scripted beforehand while Lenin was alive, the congress was transformed into a meeting at which the members were more a cheer squad for the leadership than independent-minded delegates seeking to resolve issues through discussion and votes. Symbolic of this was the way that the practice of allowing major opposition figures to be members of the congress Presidium was discontinued at the XIV Congress;292 henceforth only supporters of the leadership were members of this body. The congress had become more important as a symbol of party unity than as a decision-making organ. The CC, whose real authority rested on the collective revolutionary spirit it was believed to embody, followed a similar trend of development to the congress, with opposition becoming increasingly isolated as the dominant majority supporting the leadership group increased in strength and representation. While the opposition was better able to voice its opinions here, principally because of the personal standing of leading opposition figures, as the decade wore on their ability to influence party policy diminished. Even up to the end of the decade there were vigorous exchanges of views within the CC,293 but the growing isolation of the opposition was transforming this body from a debating chamber to a Greek chorus. From 1925 the right of the CC to edit the speeches and publications of its members was being asserted.294 This change accompanied the shift of the CC from being an organ to which party notables were elected on the basis of their personal standing to one populated by representatives of bureaucratic constituencies.295 These developments reflected a broader trend within the party and the metanarrative, the rejection of opposition and the imposition of an ethos of unity, discipline and commitment. In the first four years of Soviet rule, paradoxically when the regime was under most severe challenge in the civil war, opposition was considered legitimate, with a general understanding (although often breached in practice) that such activity should be contained within the bounds of the party.296 However that position changed with the decision of the X Congress which effectively outlawed organised fractional activity.297 This was associated with an emphasis on increased unity and discipline, and a change in the understanding of what the organisational principle of the party, democratic centralism, meant. Previously this had been understood to mean that party members were free to voice their opinions on an issue until the party leadership had made a decision on that issue, at which time party members should cease to oppose and support the decision. This implied a form almost of freedom of conscience, and at least that party members could maintain their own views as long as they did not seek to propagate them. This principle was openly rejected at the XV Congress in December 1927; what was

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demanded was complete ideological disarmament through the renunciation of heterodox opinions.298 This was realised in practice through the process of public recantation that successive oppositionist groups were forced to enact.299 The 1928 campaign for criticism and self-criticism embedded this practice (which had cultural antecedents in practices of the Russian Orthodox Church) in party lore.300 This ritual of public recantation was to become even more important in the 1930s. Furthermore, opposition became punishable not only by expulsion from leading party bodies, but from the party itself. The rejection of the right even to hold heterodox opinions promoted the process already under way of the sacralisation of the party. As the vessel of proletarian consciousness, and therefore the guide to the historical future, it was self-evident that the party was always right. As Trotsky said as early as 1924: ‘Comrades, none of us wishes to be nor can be right against our party. In the last analysis the party is always right, because the party is the single historical instrument that the proletariat possesses for the fulfilment of its basic tasks . . . I know that it is impossible to be right against the party. It is possible to be right only with the party and through the party, because history has created no other means for the realisation of what is right.’301 Or as Piatakov is reported to have said in 1928, ‘A real Bolshevik dissolves his personality in the party collective and so can reject any of his own approaches or decisions.’302 This sacralisation of the party, the promotion of it to be the all-knowing guide to Soviet development, was an attempt to confer a form of charismatic authority on it. It was also a central element in the evolving myth of the nature of leadership in the metanarrative. This perception of the party as all-knowing and of opposition as being unacceptable was associated with significant developments in the way in which intra-party political discourse was shaped. From pre-revolutionary times, the Bolshevik political tradition had been characterised by themes of, inter alia, democracy, discussion and criticism. However, over the course of the 1920s, these concepts were subordinated to other themes from that tradition, in particular unity and discipline. Democracy, discussion and criticism were to be allowed only insofar as they strengthened party unity and discipline, and increasingly it became apparent that it was the party leadership that decided what served party unity and what did not. Thus not only was the party given a sort of charismatic authority within the Soviet system, but its leadership was elevated in similar fashion within its bounds. Formally, the party’s leadership was described as collective, and this principle was frequently asserted by the leadership in its arguments with the opposition. As early as 1927, collectivism in leadership was being


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presented as the way of overcoming the cult of personality, in this instance being engaged in by oppositionist figures.303 Throughout the 1920s there was no single position of party leader; the General Secretary was an administrative figure, while the leadership was collective, embodied in the Politburo. Even though Lenin was the leading figure in elite circles, he was not the leader. Lenin was personally unassuming, with little public sense of distance between him and ordinary party members. He often sat among the rank-and-file in party meetings, sometimes squatting in front of the podium when other speakers were speaking rather than sitting on stage behind the speaker as was to become the custom after his death. The image of leadership that he projected was one of the ordinary man;304 extravagant in neither dress nor speaking style (and therefore a stark contrast to Trotsky who often wore a military uniform and could be an electrifying speaker), Lenin was the direct opposite of what is normally expected of a charismatic leader. And it is clear from the difficulties he sometimes had in persuading his colleagues to go along with his wishes (even if ultimately he did triumph) that he did not exercise charismatic authority among upper party echelons. It may be that his authority was greater among rank-and-file party members,305 especially after the assassination attempt on him in 1918,306 but his dominance did not destroy the image of collective leadership. He exercised his power within the collective rather than outside or over it. However, with his death the basis for a change in this relationship between individual leader and collective was laid. This actually began before he died with speakers at the XII Congress in April 1923, which he could not attend because of his illness, declaring that people came to the party congress in order to listen to Lenin and gain clear direction for the future from him; Kamenev even referred to the ‘tactical genius of Vladimir Il’ich’.307 His ‘teaching’ was presented as the key to the future,308 a ‘powerful searchlight’ lighting the way forward. The congress sent ‘fervent love’ to Lenin, ‘our vozhd, genius of proletarian thought, and revolutionary action’.309 Greetings from regional groups of delegates referred to Lenin as ‘vozhd’, although other leaders including Zinoviev, Trotsky and Kamenev were also referred to in this way.310 By the XIII Congress in May 1924, just after his death, this sort of thing had become de rigueur. The congress proceedings were studded with hortatory declarations affirming continued devotion to Lenin and his ideas; for example, ‘Our banner will be Lenin, our programme will be Leninism . . . Under the banner of Lenin, with the teaching of Lenin, in our hands, we will go along that path which he showed us’; and ‘the party now unites under the banner of Lenin, unites around Leninism’.311 Unity based on Leninism was what was required, while factory workers’ greetings declared ‘Long live

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Leninism!’ Lenin was constantly referred to in support of arguments which individual speakers were making. This sort of treatment elevated Lenin into the position of ultimate authority on all matters to do with party policy and the future; loyalty to the party and its cause were synonymous with loyalty to Lenin and his teachings. It also transformed him into a potent political symbol. A definite religious overtone was given to the emerging cult of Lenin at his funeral.312 Brought to Moscow from Gorky where he had died, his glass-lidded coffin was borne through solemn crowds to the Hall of Columns in the House of the Unions where it was to lie in state. The hall was decorated with red and black banners, palm leaves and wreathes. The body was attended by an ever-changing honour guard, while masses of ordinary people queued for hours to file past the catafalque. Mourning meetings were held in places of work throughout the country, thereby mobilising millions of people into ritualised political activity, many possibly for the first time. On the eve of the funeral, the official mourning meeting was held. It was addressed by the major political leaders, including Lenin’s widow Krupskaia and Stalin, and a number of supposedly ordinary citizens. On the morning of the funeral, 27 January, a changing guard of political leaders and worker representatives symbolically bore the coffin from the Hall of Columns into Red Square, followed by Lenin’s family and the political leadership. The Square was filled with chosen delegations from all parts of the country. The coffin was placed on a purpose-built wooden rostrum and the funeral oration delivered by Grigory Evdokimov, reputedly the person among the top leadership with the loudest voice, followed by the playing of the Internationale. For six hours, columns of mourners, with banners and flags lowered, filed past the coffin. At 4 p.m. the banners of the CC and the Comintern were taken from where they had been resting on the coffin, and it was lowered into the vault by Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Molotov, Bukharin, Tomsky, Rudzutak and the formal head of the funeral commission, Dzerzhinsky. Sirens and whistles now sounded throughout the country for three minutes. Everything was still. At 4.06 a new message was broadcast across the land: ‘Lenin has died, but Leninism lives!’ In Stalin’s funeral oration, he not only used the language typical of religious belief, but he also incorporated a rhythm into his speech resonant of Orthodox ritual. He declared, in part: ‘Leaving us, comrade Lenin enjoined us to hold high and keep pure the great calling of member of the party. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, that we will with honour fulfil this thy behest . . . Leaving us, comrade Lenin enjoined us to keep the unity of our party as the apple of our eye. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, that we will with honour also fulfil this thy behest . . . Leaving us, comrade


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Lenin enjoined us to keep and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, that we will not spare our strength also to fulfil with honour this thy behest . . .’313 The day of his death, 21 January, was declared a day of national mourning, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad,314 monuments were to be erected in his memory in Moscow, Kharkov, Tiflis, Minsk, Tashkent and Leningrad, a collected edition of his works was to be brought out, a fund for orphaned children was to be created in his name, and his embalmed body was to be placed in a specially built mausoleum on Red Square.315 At the opening of the XIII Congress, young pioneers marched to the Mausoleum to swear fidelity to Lenin and his cause,316 and were formally accorded the title ‘Leninists’. A ‘Lenin enrolment’ of workers into the party was announced at the XIII Conference in January 1924317 with a second tranche a year later. The Lenin enrolment was projected as a major means of proletarianising, and therefore strengthening, the party, and its association with Lenin’s name added to its symbolic overtones. Lenin’s position as a political symbol was now consolidated at the heart of the regime, with the authorities exercising strict control over how his image was presented; the dissemination of all works in the media (except photographs) was to be controlled by the Committee for the Immortalisation of Lenin’s Memory, while the Lenin Institute (formally created in 1923 and opened in 1924) was to collect and care for his writings.318 The message that dominated after Lenin’s death was that although the person Lenin may have died, he lived on through his example and his teachings to provide leadership to the people. The slogan coined by Mayakovsky, ‘Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!’, reflects this. The body of the dead leader became a major focus of the emergent cult. The embalmed body was placed in the newly erected mausoleum on Red Square near where the martyrs of the revolution had been buried; the mausoleum was opened on 1 August 1924. The body lay in a glasstopped, red-lined sarcophagus, with its lower part covered in black and purple satin. The period immediately after his death saw an outpouring of biographies, reminiscences, posters, photographs and citations, all designed to give life to the continuing symbol of the revolution and the Soviet state. But the cult of his memory was not just a creation from above. The wish to venerate his memory was rooted in the intensity of outpouring of grief on his death as well as in the machinations of the political elite (see below). The actions of individual, ordinary people – the teacher encouraging her pupils to write a poem about Lenin, the manufacturer trying to increase sales by adorning his product with Lenin’s image, the artist seeking recognition through the creation of works depicting Lenin, party members invoking Lenin’s name and memory

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and the growth of personal names with a direct association with Lenin319 – all contributed to the growth and development of the Lenin cult, and before the standardisation of the cult in 1926,320 their contribution helped to shape it in ways outside central control. The growing cult of Lenin was also reflected in the visual realm. Lenin was portrayed in mass-produced photographs from 1918,321 with a 1919 portrait by Isaak Brodsky winning first prize in a competition for works on the October Revolution,322 and on posters well before his death,323 with perhaps the most famous early one in 1920, a caricature which showed him sweeping the globe free of capitalists, priests and kings.324 His head appeared on a commemorative medal in 1919325 and his picture (along with Marx’s) was hung from the Kremlin wall behind where the leaders stood for the 1919 May Day parade.326 Lenin was a common feature in posters later in the 1920s, especially after his death. Soon after his death, a poster appeared with a red Lenin pointing to the future against a background of factories and red soldiers, symbolising his role as the guide to communism.327 Often he was shown with images depicting economic development; in one, he was associated with the slogan he originally coined, ‘Communism is Soviet power plus electrification’,328 while on others he just appeared with an image of economic progress.329 He was also associated with the party’s history,330 and with affirmations like ‘we are marching along Lenin’s path’.331 On occasions his words were simply cited.332 Paintings also depicted meetings with pictures of Lenin on the walls.333 Although other leaders did appear on posters during the 1920s,334 none seem to have been as common as Lenin. By late 1926 images of Lenin abounded in Moscow: there were busts and pictures in the Lenin Corners that had been created in many establishments,335 bronze statues or reliefs were in the more important workers’ clubs, busts of a grander nature in offices and photographs in rooms, and numerous pieces of artwork were hung in galleries;336 according to one visitor, in late 1927 ‘there are so many busts and statues of [Lenin] that they seem to constitute an addition to the population’.337 Images of him proliferated on everyday goods like plates, cups, vases and boxes of all sorts. Memorial meetings were held each year on the anniversary of his death, his written works and works about him were readily available in all parts of the country, and entrants to the Young Pioneers pledged fealty to him. This was all part of the transformation of the dead leader into a symbol of regime progress and legitimacy. But in all of this, the image that was projected was not of a superman, but of a normal, unpretentious, even ascetic man whose leadership stemmed from his personal qualities, including his ability unerringly to give infallible guidance. For the rest of the 1920s, the image of Lenin and Leninism was a symbol in intra-party conflict. Each successive opposition group as well


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as the party leadership they were opposing sought to appropriate Lenin to their side and to claim that their views were Leninist. Different leaders sought to codify what Leninism meant, in ways which suited their side in the particular bout of leadership conflict occurring at the time,338 and to recruit Lenin and his writings to their side in the political debate. The image of Lenin was crucial, because he represented ideological correctness. This claim was read backwards into party history. As elite actors conflicted, history became a weapon in that conflict. Both sides trawled party history to find instances when their opponents had differed from or criticised Lenin. A central element in this was the depiction of the October Revolution, especially in light of the widely known differences that had existed between Lenin and Trotsky and the opposition by Zinoviev and Kamenev to the decision to seize power. While the codification of October had begun virtually as soon as the Bolsheviks had gained power – the production of memoirs and historical works, the public spectacles noted above and the branding of the opposition were all instrumental in this – it was the battle over Lenin’s image and the role of individual Bolshevik leaders in October that gave this a major stimulus. It was thus the combination of elite conflict and the death of Lenin that was the major formative factor in defining the myth of regime foundation at this time. It was through the projection of Leninism in this way, as the one true guide to the future, that the conception of opposition was defined. If Leninism was the line, any deviation from that line meant a deviation from the one true course to communism. Although the notion of a deviation had existed while Lenin lived, once Leninism had been ensconced as the single touchstone of orthodoxy, the idea of deviations became much more widespread and seemingly real. For example, at the XIII Congress the CC was said to have defended ‘the foundations of Leninism against petty bourgeois deviations’, and at the XIV Congress against deviations from Leninism, the vulgarisation of Leninism, and Trotskyism.339 Nevertheless, identifying a deviation was not easy; it did not necessarily have a defined programme or an organisational structure, but was unformed, the beginning of an error which required correction before it led to serious consequences.340 Even more vacuous was the notion of a conciliatory tendency toward a deviation, first noted in late 1928.341 This seemed to mean sympathy for a deviation. This sort of imagery of opposition was closely linked to the growth in the emphasis on opposition in the late 1920s noted above, and was sustained by the combination of the view that an opposition could objectively represent the class interests of hostile class forces with the entrenchment of Leninism as the one true line. The transformation of Lenin and Leninism into symbols was thus the reverse side of the growth of the profile of opposition within the metanarrative.

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But the symbolism of Lenin and Leninism was not used only to belabour the opposition. By the end of the decade, these symbols were securely harnessed to the political programme of the dominant group around Stalin. Henceforth the balance in the treatment of Lenin was shifted away from his person and activities, from his role in the revolution and the party, and more onto the way in which the construction of socialism and the achievements of the first five year plan were the realisation of his legacy. While attention was still given to his person and personal achievements, primary emphasis shifted on to his role as the programmatic guide and legitimator of current policy. At this time too the elevation of other leaders began to occur. Regions and towns were named after party leaders: for example, Stalin (Uzovka), Zinovievsk (Elizavetgrad), Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg), Stalingrad (Tsaritsyn), Molotov (Perm), Frunze (Bishkek) and Trotsky (Gatchina). So too were things like factories, farms, ships and aeroplanes. Increasingly, leaders’ appearances were marked by popular acclaim. At the XIII Congress Zinoviev was greeted by ‘prolonged applause’ when he rose to speak, while Stalin was greeted with ‘prolonged applause, turning into an ovation’.342 At the XIV Congress Stalin was met with ‘Stormy, prolonged applause, turning into an ovation. All stand’, while the end of his concluding remarks was greeted with ‘Stormy applause, that was prolonged without slackening. Ovation. All rise. The Internationale.’343 The contrast with Zinoviev at this congress, where he was applauded only by his own Leningrad delegation,344 was stark. At the XV Congress, when Stalin rose to present the Report of the CC, he was greeted with ‘Stormy, prolonged applause; ovation of the whole hall, cries of “hooray”’, while at the end of his speech he received ‘Stormy, prolonged applause. All rise and give an ovation to com. Stalin. They sing the Internationale.’345 At the XIV Congress in response to Kamenev’s attack on Stalin’s leadership, there was reported to be enormous commotion and noise in the hall culminating in the call ‘Long live comrade Stalin’ followed by ‘Stormy, prolonged applause, cries of “hooray”’.346 At this time too, Voroshilov referred to Stalin as the ‘chief member’ of the Politburo because of the leading role he played in formulating and resolving questions.347 At the XV Congress, messages of greetings to the congress rarely referred to individuals (as opposed to the party) except for the ‘vozhd’ Lenin, but a couple of greetings did exclaim ‘Long live com. Stalin who is implementing the line of Leninism!’, ‘Long live the general secretary of the CC of the party, com. Stalin!’348 When Stalin was mentioned in the list of members of the Congress Presidium, his name was greeted with ‘stormy applause, cries of “hooray”; all standing greet com. Stalin’, while most of the others received only ‘applause’.349 The emergent primacy of a single leader seemed to be


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given some doctrinal standing at the XV Congress when Andreev argued that ‘the authority of a leader in our party can be retained only insofar as the leader goes along with the party, insofar as the leader correctly leads the party along the basic paths . . . of Leninism.’350 Personal primacy was thereby linked with being a ‘Leninist’, following ‘Leninism’, adherence to the ideas of the dead leader. The 1920s was thus a period in which there was continual conflict at the apex of the Soviet state. This conflict was conducted overwhelmingly in terms of policy differences, although personal considerations were also always present. But what is important is that the discourse of these differences was very much one of the manipulation of the symbols that were emerging as the central elements of the regime’s evolving metanarrative. Differences over the nature of the relationship with the peasantry, the need for the industrialisation of the country, the dangers of the bourgeois spetsy, the threat posed by capitalist encirclement, and the overriding need for unity were not differences of principle but of practice. Broadly all sides agreed on these issues at base: there was a need for some compromise with the peasants despite the dangers this involved, industrialisation was necessary, the spetsy were a threat, capitalist encirclement was a significant danger, and unity was needed. But there was disagreement over the scale of the danger, what to do about it and when, and these disagreements were expressed principally in terms of the symbolism and imagery through which the party conceived of its tasks and its situation, the symbols which comprised its emergent metanarrative. The metanarrative was thus the context within which political debate and difference existed, and its myths and symbols were the instruments used by various groups within the party to press their views. As such, they were fundamental to the course of politics during this period. The imagery that pervaded the course of policy debate in the first decade and a half of Soviet rule was stark. It was based on the sacralisation of the revolution and the regime it brought into being. The newly formed socialist state was projected as the hope for the future growth of communism in a hostile capitalist world. But despite the exaggerated hopes of some surrounding War Communism, that communist utopia was still some way off and, in the meantime, its shoots had to be protected and everything done to facilitate its growth. At this time, leading party members were working with two basic scenarios for this: that communism could be achieved only with the outbreak of international revolution elsewhere, and that it was possible to build it within Russia in the absence of such revolution. Both views envisaged the Soviet Union as the citadel of socialism surrounded by a hostile capitalist world which, given the

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chance, would strangle the infant regime whenever it could. This image of a citadel under siege from without was paralleled by a view of it as also being threatened from within. The emphasis upon the importance of the smychka between proletariat and peasantry reflects this view that the basis of the regime was to be the working class, but that in Russia the weakness of that class and the relative strength of the peasantry made such a class alliance essential. The problem was that the peasantry were deemed to be hostile to the socialist aspirations their working-class brothers were believed to bear, the bearers of bourgeois values which were antithetical to the socialist cause. This class hostility, and the consequent feeling of vulnerability because of its strength, was important in generating the sense of the need for absolute unity within party ranks, and of the dangers that oppositionist activity constituted in terms of the petty bourgeois infection of proletarian values. This complex mosaic of imagery, reflected in political speeches and documents and in various other venues of symbolic expression, constituted the main outlines of the metanarrative within which policy debate unrolled. But it was also the means whereby that debate proceeded. Each image (e.g. the revolution, socialist citadel, hostile peasant) when uttered called into play a part of the mosaic and the set of assumptions that were connected with it and which thereby were becoming codified in myth. The result was a discourse within which political actors at all levels had to play out their roles, a culture which defined Soviet politics and bound its participants to a set of cultural assumptions which were to develop even further in the following decades. Thus during this initial period, the five myths that came to constitute the metanarrative were shaped by the combination of the need to stabilise party control and the dynamics of elite conflict. The myth of regime foundation emerged through the codification of a narrative of the October Revolution, and although this began as soon as the Bolsheviks had seized power, a major stimulus to and shaper of it was the perceived need to define the role of Lenin and other leaders in this founding event. The myth of the building of socialism was developed through the debate over the relationship between classes in Soviet society and the appropriate economic policy to pursue. This interacted with the emergent myths of domestic and international opposition, both of which were intertwined with the discussion of classes in Soviet society. Also linked to this was the myth of the nature of leadership, reflected initially in the sacralisation of the party and its peculiar qualifications for leadership, but following Lenin’s death in the role that his thought and adherence to it played in the qualifications for leadership. These myths, expressed through symbolic representation of many of the fundamental tenets of the ideology, had by the end of the 1920s become consolidated, and


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thereby entrenched the metanarrative in a hegemonic position in the society. All public discussion had to be cast in terms of the metanarrative; this was the only mode of discourse accorded any authority in the Soviet public sphere. It is clear that the political elite understood the symbolic discourse the metanarrative constituted and accepted it as the appropriate means of participating in elite political councils. It is not clear that the same level of understanding was shared by officials at lower levels of the state and party apparatus. By the end of the decade, many will have attained a level of political literacy sufficient to appreciate the nuances of the debate, but official efforts at political education notwithstanding, for many the shades of light and dark in the political discourse would all have been grey. But as argued above, it was the essence of the symbolism of the discourse that such exact understanding might not have been necessary. By casting the debate in clearly dichotomous terms and by using a recognisable range of symbols to denote the positive – proletariat, socialist, Leninist – the Soviet metanarrative seemed to give a clear indication of where officials should direct their support and their efforts. But in the practical context of the elite conflict of the 1920s, such terms did not always constitute a clear indication for lower-level officials about which faction of the elite to support since all sides to the debate claimed adherence to these symbols. Other factors were central here, including job prospects (in the form of Stalin’s power over appointment and dismissal) and policy positions, and in terms of the latter, from the time of Lenin’s death Stalin and his supporters consistently espoused policies which were likely to be popular at lower levels because they assumed socialism could be achieved in Russia. The image of ‘socialism in one country’ was a powerful one. But this assumption and the popularity of it among officials made sense only within terms of the metanarrative of the regime. Thus it was acceptance of that discourse that lay at the heart of the support that many officials gave to Stalin during this period. But if the images and symbols helped lower-level officials get a handle on the course of conflict at the apex of the system, for the political elite those images and symbols may actually have done a disservice. By structuring the debate in terms of abstract symbols, the emergent metanarrative placed the leaders at one remove from the concrete reality of what they were discussing. Complex social situations were rendered into simplified forms by their projection through regime symbols, with the result that the human dimension of social questions was often obscured. Policy-making may thus have been extracted even more from its social context than it is in practice in all political systems. The level of popular understanding of the discourse remains an open question. Certainly over time the regime put extensive efforts into the

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political education of the populace, and given the growth in size of the party and the flow of people into new Soviet structures, it is likely that such efforts had some reward. Certainly in public, over this period the regime’s language became the principal mode of discourse. Not only did officials use it when addressing the population, but members of the population also used it when addressing officials. But this does not mean either that everyone had taken this on as the normal mode of everyday (as opposed to official) address, or that everyone supported the regime. The depth of opposition that was to be demonstrated during collectivisation was not purely a response to that policy; its roots lay in broader scepticism about the Bolsheviks and their aims. As Scott has shown,351 people use strategies of resistance which involve participating in regime activities but in such a way as to give those activities, at least for themselves, a different meaning from that intended by the regime. But while such activity remains limited, it does not challenge the overall symbolic framework head-on. It may, as would become evident much later in the 1980s, obscure the extent to which that framework has become hollowed out, but in the short term it does not seem to challenge the framework itself. Thus popular participation in the regime’s symbolic discourse and its ritual activities helped to shape and consolidate the metanarrative which was comprised of those myths and symbols, even if that participation was ritualised and for many devoid of commitment and belief. This was to become even more important when the regime embarked on an even larger scale process of popular mobilisation than it had set in train in the regime’s early years.

3


By the time of the acceleration of pressures for industrialisation and collectivisation, the regime’s metanarrative had taken broad shape. The image of an embattled regime surrounded by international and domestic enemies but led by Lenin’s party which was guiding society along the path towards socialism had become established. The central myths of this metanarrative would be strengthened and elaborated in the coming period, but at the same time those myths would undergo significant change so that by 1953 the metanarrative would be substantially reformed. During the first half of the 1930s, the myth of the building of socialism remained closely intertwined with those of domestic and external opposition. Since the launching of the first five year plan in December 1927, the principal theme of the Soviet metanarrative had been the building of socialism through industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation. The chief stimulus driving these processes forward was shown as the mass enthusiasm and commitment of the workers and peasants. Rather than relying on the slow operation of the market system as in NEP, this ‘revolution from above’ relied on the mobilisation of popular energy and commitment, on the belief that problems could be overcome by the concerted application of the human will, represented by the dedicated efforts of a mobilised populace. While certain large-scale projects – the Turksib Railway and Dneprostroi (both of which were actually begun in autumn 1926), the Volga-Don Canal, Magnitostroi and the Stalin White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal (Belomor) were early examples – were flagged as major symbolic markers of the building of a new socialist society, it was the focus on popular mobilisation, on the single-minded drive of committed workers, which was depicted as the prime driving force of this transformation of the old world. Stalin’s aphorism ‘There are no fortresses that bolsheviks cannot take’1 neatly captured the sense of this. Rather than being constrained to work within the limits imposed by the market-based NEP, now the new world could be built through the concerted efforts of Soviet workers and peasants, an image likely to have wide 89

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appeal. The emphasis was on ‘Bolshevik tempo’, the speed and dimensions of change, the heroism of effort and achievement as all sinews were stretched to build socialism. The five year plan was the symbol of this drive and the overwhelming enthusiasm and commitment of Soviet workers the basis on which it rested. The major projects were all widely celebrated in the Soviet Union, often both at the announcement of them and especially at their conclusion. For example, the Turksib project was rushed to formal completion before May Day 1930, with the announcement of the joining of the lines from north and south on 26 April, although the line did not really become operational until the end of the year. Called ‘the First-Born of the FiveYear Plan’, its opening was welcomed by congratulatory telegrams from the Soviet leadership, the award of the Order of the Red Banner (the state’s highest civilian award) to all of the workforce collectively as well as some individuals, the award to many individual workers of rewards like money or holidays as well as special ‘Turksib medals’, a parade and celebratory meeting with speeches from dignitaries, and the unveiling of a statue of Lenin.2 A film3 was also made about the project in 1929. The press lionised the successful completion of the project, presenting it as a significant blow in the battle for the achievement of socialism. From the outset of collectivisation and industrialisation, entry into a new stage of society’s development had been foreshadowed. The November 1929 CC plenum declared that recent successful advances in collectivisation represented ‘a new historical stage in the building of socialism’, made possible by a ‘decisive breakthrough’ in the attitude of the poor and middle peasant towards the kolkhozy, a breakthrough ‘that is a direct result of the correct policy of the working class and party in the countryside, the strengthening of the leading role of the working class in its alliance with the poor and middle peasants, of the powerful growth of socialist industry and the strengthening of the productive forms of the smychka.’4 The stormy growth of collectivisation and socialist construction meant that this marked the transition from the period of restoration to one of reconstruction and the development of socialist construction.5 The building of socialism was at the heart of the production ethos, the tendency to talk at length about economic production and its tasks, which dominated Soviet discourse at this time. A prominent part of this was talk about exceeding the five year plan targets, completing the five year plan, and surpassing the capitalist countries.6 In the initial years of the decade, fulfilment of the five year plan in four years was the catchcry.7 The production ethos, reflected in the efforts of millions of workers and linked with successive economic plans, was the central focus of the metanarrative. The notion of the plan, and its part in both building socialism and


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demonstrating superiority over Western capitalism, became almost a talisman. Central to the successes achieved in socialist construction was said to be enthusiastic popular support based on the continuation of the alliance between the working class and the poor and middle peasants – the smychka.8 However, socialist industrialisation was leading to changes in class relations. Along with the numerical growth of the working class was a strengthening of its leading role with respect to the poor and middle peasantry. The economic union between the working class and the basic mass of the peasantry had acquired for the most part a production character. The task set by Lenin of turning ‘NEP Russia’ into ‘socialist Russia’ was being accomplished, but the growth of socialist construction and the intensification of attacks on capitalist elements had led to an intensification of class struggle in the countryside on the part of kulak-capitalist elements. According to the emergent myth, the party broke the sabotage and resistance of the kulaks by basing itself on the growing activity of the landless and poor peasants and a strengthening of the union with the middle peasants. This class alliance continued to be led by the working class, whose enthusiastic support was demonstrated through socialist competition and the shock work movement, with the latter significant for the enlistment of workers into the management of production.9 The decisive turn of the middle peasants to socialism was seen to be vividly expressed in the kolkhoz movement, which was bringing about a new balance of class forces in the countryside. The kulaks were the last stronghold of capitalist exploitation in the country.10 The turn away from NEP and the introduction of large-scale industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation was reflected in political posters and their emphasis on positive effort and mass mobilisation;11 the expenditure of huge efforts was required to achieve the desired socio-economic goals. The working class was central to this process, their experience being no less important than that of the leaders.12 All sorts of workers were needed – miners,13 transport workers,14 factory workers,15 specialists,16 and even the inexperienced17 and collective farmers18 had an important role to play in industrial development. The whole process of industrialisation was associated with the name and teachings of Lenin,19 while one of the chief principles was seen to be the mechanisation of production.20 Important for achieving results, especially the five year plan in four years, was shock work,21 while encouragement was also given to storming22 and to the application of ‘Bolshevik tempos’ of work;23 the Stakhanovite movement, and the model of the Soviet worker that this provided, was central here. But posters made it clear that central to the whole industrialisation drive was not just the energy and effort of the working class, but

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adherence to plans and technical requirements;24 one poster from 1931 nicely sums this up, implying that the achievement of the five year plan in four years was a result of the industrial financial plan plus workers’ enthusiasm.25 The combination of science with the creative energy of the working class was the key to success.26 But the centrality of the working class remained paramount; they were often depicted as the source of inventiveness and innovation in the production process,27 and workers remained the archetypal ‘new man’, although they were not the only source from which this new conception stemmed. The image of these ‘new men’ was meant to convey not the physical characteristics of these people, but their inner essence: their strength, energy, fortitude, commitment, dedication and intelligence were what these symbols projected.28 Youth and vigour, commitment to the cause and enjoyment in their success were the hallmarks of this new hero of Soviet development. All of these qualities were clearly reflected in the famous statue by Vera Mukhina, ‘Rabochii i kolkhoznitsa’ (1936/7), originally made for the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition and later placed at the entrance of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (see below).29 The Mukhina statue is considered a classic of socialist realist art. The term ‘socialist realism’ first appeared in May 193230 but gained its official formulation at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934. At this congress, Andrei Zhdanov defined the socialist realist method as the depiction of life ‘not scholastically, not in a dead fashion, not simply as “objective fact” but . . . in its revolutionary development. At the same time the faithfulness and the historical concreteness of the artistic depiction must be combined with the task of the ideological refashioning and education of labouring people in the spirit of socialism.’31 This was the doctrine designed to guide all work in the cultural sphere, a task seen as particularly important given the designation of those active culturally as ‘engineers of the human soul’.32 According to Pravda, socialist realism was the ‘basic method of Soviet artistic literature and literary criticism’, and ‘demands truthfulness from the artist and a historically concrete portrayal of reality in its revolutionary development. Under these conditions, truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic portrayal ought to be combined with the task of the ideological remaking and education of working people in the spirit of socialism.’33 The effect of this approach was to collapse the future into the present, representing Soviet society in large part in the form that was envisaged in the future but rooted in the present. While this was clearly a fabrication of existing reality, it reinforced the principle that the communist future was immanent in the socialist present; the successes of the future were imprinted in the present. Rather than presenting its subject in any sort of objective or abstract


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‘realistic’ sense, socialist revolutionary art was to express its essence: rather than what it was at that time it was to reflect what it was becoming. This is what was meant by the depiction of life in its ‘revolutionary development’; the future was immanent in the present. Art was thus meant to play its part in transforming society. This was achieved through five main strategies of representation:34 1. Portrayal of the present as part of progress toward future socialist society. This was achieved not only through the depiction of reality in an idealised form, but through various allegorical techniques including the portrayal of people marching (often with hair streaming back) towards a point outside the picture, people gazing into the distance, the manipulation of perspective, and the depiction of diagonally dynamic structures which imply movement upwards and forwards. 2. The strategic use of the colour red, which not only had ideological significance because of its historical association with socialism, but lexical allusions through the common root of the words beautiful and red – krasivyi/krasnyi – and religious allusions through its association with sacredness in icon painting. The politics of socialism was turned into the aesthetic of the bright and beautiful future. 3. Depiction of ‘Soviet man’ as an idealised physical image in which those physical characteristics noted above were signifiers of their inner essence and social identity. Standardised, heroic bodies also carried or were clothed in signifiers of their production class – hammer, pickaxe, sickle, headscarf, workers’ cap. 4. The use of pseudo-religious allegory in the presentation of both people and objects. Figures were shown with their faces illuminated by light, and leaders as being adored by the people and as exuding quiet strength, confidence and authority. The presentation of Soviet leaders, particularly Stalin and Lenin, in this way was a major theme of socialist realist art. Similarly, objects like factories, locomotives, tractors and cars were symbols of the bright future towards which the society was marching. 5. Through various artistic techniques, pieces of art sought to draw the viewers into the painting and thereby make them part of the scene and its message. Such techniques included portraying an audience watching the focus of the picture, a group portrayed facing the viewer and thereby inviting him/her to join them, depiction of a figure walking into the background to draw the viewer in, depicting a display in a shop window inviting the viewer to reach out and touch the items, and showing activity at the forefront of the picture which is meant to involve the viewer. Through such mechanisms, viewers were meant to feel part of building the new society.

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Socialist realist art, characterised by these techniques, was meant to guide all forms of artistic production from 1934. The emergence of socialist realism is a good example of the way in which the metanarrative that was articulated by elites was shaped by the values and conceptions of sub-groups within Russian society, in this case writers. While at the general level, the socialist realist view that literature had a role to play in social engineering was consistent with the view in literary circles that literature should have a social purpose, more important in defining the actual contours of socialist realist writing was some of the literature already in existence. The earliest officially recognised models of socialist realist literature were actually written in the 1920s and early 1930s (Gorky’s Mother even dated from 1906), before its official announcement, while the socialist realist hero drew heavily upon the positive models presented in pre-revolutionary literature.35 These models were taken up, elaborated and reworked by writers in the official union, by official censors and by journal editors who, in doing so, gave body and shape to the official doctrine. This cross-fertilisation between literary culture (broadly interpreted) and the official view, the reflexive development of the metanarrative, created socialist realism and its central idea, the representation of the future within the present. The presentation of the future rather than the present is clear in the representation of agricultural collectivisation. One poster from 1930 depicts two happy peasants, the man driving a tractor and the woman standing beside him, calling upon others to join them in the kolkhoz.36 Others showed the working of the collective farms, with the tractor the new symbol of both the peasant (cf. the scythe for the male or sickle for the female previously) and the bright future of collective agriculture;37 shock work was sometimes an important element in such presentations.38 The success of collectivisation was suggested by pictures showing bountiful harvests, often being collected by smiling peasants, sheaves of wheat, and plump and well-fed farm animals,39 especially from the time of the Congress of Victors, when there was a change in the portrayal of the collective farmers; the emphasis shifted from struggle, confrontation and hard work, to satisfaction, serenity and joyfulness in the abundance that had been created.40 By the early 1930s, the USSR was already being presented as the country of the most powerful socialist agriculture in the world.41 Many posters also sought to mobilise people into the various campaigns on the farm, principally sowing and harvesting.42 Progress in agriculture often required ‘Bolshevik’ efforts43 and was guided by the ‘Bolshevik plan’.44 The efforts of the workers and peasants were part of the country’s attempt to achieve the targets set by the five year plan,45 with much fanfare


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given to the achievement of the first five year plan targets in three or four years.46 Individual targets, like the building of new factories,47 the production of large quantities of cast iron,48 or the building of the Moscow Metro,49 were given significant prominence. So too was the completion of major projects, such as Dneprostroi,50 the first line of the Moscow Metro,51 and the Moscow–Volga Ship Canal.52 And when the achievements of Soviet production were put on display in the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in 1939, this too was celebrated in posters.53 From the time of the first five year plan, figures and graphs began to appear in posters.54 During NEP there had been some references to the way in which economic development was building toward the future communism,55 but this became more common both at the time of the great transformation56 and later in the decade. One particularly noteworthy poster from 1939 shows a locomotive with a banner on its side containing the heads of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, going on an upward gradient from a stop marked socialism to one marked communism.57 The USSR was depicted as the socialist homeland for the international proletariat,58 the site of the achievement of the better communist future for all. Male members of the working class and peasantry were shown as primarily responsible for the massive achievements claimed in the metanarrative. However in a strengthening of the trend that had begun to emerge during NEP, women were presented as major symbols in the regime’s iconography, from 1930 often appearing without a male companion59 and without children. Depicted as strong, energetic, committed and beautiful,60 they were shown as being major contributors to production in both factory and farm.61 While sometimes they were shown as working in traditional female roles, such as in the kitchen, albeit of a communal dining room,62 cleaning,63 doing field work on the farm,64 and child-minding,65 they were also often depicted in non-traditional roles: driving a tractor,66 driving a train,67 working in a factory,68 and flying an aeroplane;69 the painting by Serafima Riangina entitled ‘Vse vyshe i vyshe’ (1934)70 showing a male and a female worker climbing a power pylon is indicative of this image of Soviet women. They were also shown as having a role in national defence.71 Their full partnership in production reflected the true equality for women that had been achieved in the USSR;72 they were truly the ‘daughters of the socialist motherland’.73 However, from the middle of the 1930s women were also shown in a more feminine form, with an emphasis on motherhood, than had been the case earlier. This is linked to the symbolism of the better life, discussed below. Youth were also shown as contributing to socialist construction. They were shown as working in the countryside, including driving and repairing

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tractors,74 in factories,75 and on the Metro,76 but there were also many posters which simply lauded the Komsomol.77 From the middle of the decade, children were generally shown as beautiful, innocent, and as the harbingers of the future; they were the symbol of rebirth, a meaning which also added lustre to the image of the woman as mother. Also important in the middle of the decade were heroes. While reference was made on many posters to Stakhanovites,78 there was also attention given to those who performed feats which brought lustre to the Soviet image, such as the Cheliushkin polar flyers,79 and those who flew to the US (see below).80 In the posters of this period, the positive symbols – male and female workers and farmers, and children – were all shown in a similar fashion. All were depicted as firm and solid, undeviatingly loyal to the cause, steady of gaze and firm of muscle. Workers tended to be clean-shaven and farmers bearded; both had powerful physiques. The women too were often shown as being powerfully built, especially when depicted doing some physical activity. These figures were designed to represent the best qualities of their classes: dedication, honesty, openness, commitment and capacity to work for the cause. But reflective of the downgrading of class connected with the 1936 Constitution, posters also showed other segments of society (like soldiers) more prominently than workers which had not been the case before. The positive nature of these representations of regimesupporting social groups was in stark contrast to the symbols presented in the myth of opposition. Posters identified a number of different sorts of opposition during this period. From the outset, there was a focus on the class opposition to socialism by the kulaks.81 These were sometimes shown as fat with a waistcoat and gold watch, and sometimes dressed as a poor peasant but with something which reveals their true nature, like a sly look on the face or an abacus.82 Sometimes kulaks were linked with other sorts of enemies, such as nepmen and wreckers,83 or priests.84 Priests were portrayed as having malign influence, symbolised by the reference to them as ‘black crows’.85 White Guardists were depicted in posters early in this period,86 but this may have been a general term for all of the ‘former people’, those who were seen as having held privileged positions under the old regime. The range of enemies widened considerably at the end of the 1920s to include the Industrial Party, Right Opportunists, Trotskyists, sceptics about the first five year plan, spies, kulaks, priests, thieves, drunkards, bureaucrats, shirkers, wreckers, capitalists, former White Guardists and international capital.87 International capitalism was shown as being hostile, sometimes through the direct invoking of the likelihood of imperialist war88 or through the portrayal of major financial institutions,89 but more usually through the depiction of a fat capitalist with bow tie and bowler


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hat.90 Early in the period, the external capitalist enemy, portrayed as would-be interventionist forces, was linked with internal enemies in the form of the Industrial Party, which was shown as involved in wrecking, spying and preparing the way for intervention.91 Vigilance was clearly needed when confronted by such enemies, but an important blow against them was always improved production performance;92 it was through socialist offensive that the class enemy would be defeated.93 The battle during this period was not only against physical enemies, but also against a range of social ills or deficiencies. These included alcoholism,94 theft,95 sleeping at work,96 reduced labour discipline,97 and hooliganism.98 All of these sorts of activities were shown as having a direct impact upon economic performance, and therefore as aiding the enemy. There was also concern about the welfare of children.99 Thus while symbolically the smychka underpinned the revolution from above, this correlation of forces continued to confront bitter opposition which was portrayed in posters in the form of personalised symbols. A similar process was occurring in the linguistic strand of the metanarrative. The whole process of revolution from above was conceived in terms of class struggle and class war, a clear break from the class conciliationism of NEP, and explained in terms of Stalin’s conception introduced in 1929 that the closer socialism approached, the more intense the class struggle became as opposing class forces redoubled their oppositionist efforts.100 The main enemies at the outset were kulaks, nepmen and bureaucrats. With collectivisation and industrialisation, military metaphors and the symbolism of battle became even more extensive. The country was ‘at war’, they were ‘scaling the heights’ and ‘advancing on all fronts’. The ‘grain front’ became a major site of the struggle, as the acceleration of the rates of socialist construction constituted an attack upon capitalist elements along the entire front.101 The battle for grain was directed against the results of ‘the growth and intensification of the opposition of capitalist elements: the kulak in the countryside, the nepman in the city, and the wrecker in production.’102 This battle was, from December 1929, to involve the liquidation of the kulaks as a class.103 The fierce resistance of ‘kulaks, bourgeois intelligentsia and bureaucratic elements in the state apparatus (wrecking, sabotage etc.)’104 to the socialist construction of industry and agriculture was behind the struggle. These images seemed to be given currency by the Shakhty trial in May–June 1928 and the trials of the Industrial Party in November 1930, the Mensheviks in March 1931, and the Metro-Vickers engineers in April 1933. But by 1933 the picture had shifted somewhat. A resolution105 referred to continuing anti-Soviet elements in the villages who were resisting collectivisation. They were described as ‘kulaks, who have been economically destroyed but not yet

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completely lost their influence, former white officers, former priests and their sons, former managers for landlords and sugar factory owners, former village police and other anti-Soviet elements from the bourgeois nationalist intelligentsia, including SRs and Petliurists’ who have settled in the villages. The implication was that, as ‘former’ people, they had been basically defeated but remained a residual danger, thereby giving continuing currency to the myth of internal opposition. This battle for socialist construction against the opposition of class enemies was linked to the international situation, with the myths of internal and external opposition intertwining. In the late 1920s, the image of a conspiracy between international capital and the domestic bourgeoisie was widely expressed. Despite the fact that the Soviet Union’s increasing economic strength was said to be giving pause to direct Western aggression,106 the USSR remained surrounded by hostile capitalist powers107 who sought to destroy Soviet power. The Shakhty, Industrial Party, Menshevik and Metro-Vickers trials explicitly linked these external enemies with internal enemies. The link between the external and the internal opposition was usually seen in terms of the physical penetration of Soviet institutions by representatives of these hostile classes, for example kulak entry into the kolkhozy.108 Generally, increased reliance on the workers, and in particular the mobilisation of workers into the apparatus,109 was seen as the best means of combating class enemies within. The whole process of vydvizhenstvo, or the widespread social mobility of people from working-class ranks, was important here; this was about creating new cadres of technical and specialist workers to staff growing socialist industry, a development that was the counterpart of the proclaimed need to master new technology.110 Similarly, election of the soviets associated with proletarian democratism and ensuring that healthy elements came to dominate these bodies was seen as a defence against such enemies.111 By 1933, despite the claimed economic destruction of the kulaks, there were still said to be opponents who sought to exploit the lack of consciousness among kolkhoz members.112 They wormed their way into the kolkhozy as accountants, managers, storekeepers, brigade leaders, and even leading people in the kolkhoz administrations, and sought to organise wrecking, spoil equipment, disorganise sowing, plunder kolkhoz property, undermine labour discipline, steal the seed grain, organise secret granaries, sabotage compulsory grain deliveries, and sometimes even dissolve the kolkhoz. They sought to restore the power of the landlords and the kulaks over the peasants and that of the factory owners over the workers. Increased vigilance was needed, but village party and Komsomol organisations frequently lacked this, sometimes even themselves falling under


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the influence of wrecking elements. This applied especially to the sovkhozy, ‘where often directors of sovkhozy under the influence of antiSoviet elements undergo bourgeois rebirth, sabotage the tasks of Soviet power, engage in outright deception of the party and government and try to dispose of state sovkhoz production as if it were their personal property.’ The danger posed by anti-socialist values was evident in the activities of opposition within the party. This constituted not only a practical challenge to the party’s rule, but a symbolic one to its charismatically claimed right to rule as expressed in the regime’s leadership myth. The resolution of the November 1929 CC plenum113 directly associated the opposition of the kulak in the countryside, nepman in the city and the wrecker in industry with the ‘right deviationists (the group of com. Bukharin)’ in the party whose position was an expression of pressure from the petty bourgeois element, of panic before the sharpening class struggle, and of capitulation before the difficulties of socialist construction . . . The sharpening of the class struggle and the stubborn opposition of capitalist elements to advancing socialism in a situation of capitalist encirclement of our country are strengthening the pressure of petty bourgeois elements on the least stable elements of the party, giving rise to an ideology of capitulation in the face of difficulties, to desertion, and to attempts to reach agreement with the kulak-capitalist elements of city and countryside.

The desire to avoid class struggle was seen to be at the root of the right deviationists’ rejection of the party’s, and Lenin’s, policy for achieving socialism, and showed the ‘anti-leninist, anti-bolshevik essence’ of the Bukharin group. The resolution also pointed to the continuing danger of ‘left opportunist, counter-revolutionary trotskyist ideology’.114 Such opposition would only strengthen the position of the enemies of the proletarian dictatorship. ‘The capitulationist stand of the right opportunists on reducing the tempos of industrialisation is dictated, in essence, by the interest of kulak-capitalist groups, and leads to the restoration of capitalism . . . [it is] treason to the interests of the working class.’115 This sharpening class struggle was linked with the activisation of anti-Soviet elements in the state apparatus. This necessitated the cleansing of that apparatus and struggle with bureaucratism on the basis of the further development of self-criticism, the wide attraction of worker-vydvizhentsy, the development of cadres for all the organs of proletarian dictatorship, and the development of new forms of the mass attraction of workers into state administration. This course was seen to have had some success. There had been quantitative and qualitative growth of the party, significant improvement in its social composition, a strengthening of the presence of production workers, an increase in the ideological level of party cadres and wide party masses, and an improved quality of party work;

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the further strengthening of intra-party democracy, the successful unrolling of proletarian self-criticism in all spheres of the party, and the successful action of the cleansing of the party from alien, corrupt and hangeron elements had all taken place. But the ideological-political level of parts of the party was still deficient and needed to be met by self-criticism.116 This was an important way of raising the level of Bolshevik education of party cadres and party masses, strengthening the party line, overcoming opportunism and strengthening intra-party democracy. Crucial also was a drive for the elimination of illiteracy, release of the masses from the influence of religion, and improvement of the press.117 The need for cultural revolution was one of the paradoxes of this period: the success of the construction of socialism was said to be due to the strength of commitment of the population to socialist values, yet a cultural revolution was deemed necessary to ensure the absolute dominance of those values. According to the metanarrative and the myth of leadership, crucial to the party’s ability to exercise the leading role was the iron unity and discipline of its ranks. A XVI Congress resolution118 referred to the socialist advance on a broad front being met by intensified resistance on the part of the class enemy. In the face of this, the CCC and Rabkrin had protected the ‘Leninist unity of party ranks’, led a resolute struggle for implementation of the ‘general party line’, defended it ‘against all attempts to distort it both from the side of the “left” deviationists and right opportunists and conciliators’, and had blocked any attempt at factional work. Party ranks had been purged of socially and ideologically alien elements, hangers-on, corrupted and bureaucratised elements, and elements impeding the development of the socialist advance. The party purge, conducted in conditions of widespread self-criticism, with the active participation of the mass of workers, farm labourers and the poor and middle ranks of the countryside, was said to have led to the strengthening of the ranks of the party, improved its fighting capacity, and facilitated the enlisting in it of hundreds of thousands of production workers. The key to success was reliance on the activism of these working masses. However, there had also been bureaucratic distortions in the soviet apparatus which had been combated through self-criticism and enlistment of the working masses into the management of the state. This struggle was aimed at implementing the task set by Lenin, of adapting the state apparatus to best serve the masses and to maintain and strengthen the union of the working masses and the peasantry on the basis of the industrialisation of the country and the socialist reorganisation of agriculture. But there was said to be a continued need to ensure the health of the state and economic apparatus because of the influence of class enemies (kulaks and nepmen) on the weaker links in the apparatus of the proletarian


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dictatorship. Following a year of the purge of the soviet apparatus, that purge needed to be expanded on the basis of self-criticism and broad mass participation to the entire managerial apparatus. Some party cells and members had failed to lead the struggle against distortions in the class line: they lagged behind and failed to bring these phenomena to the party’s attention. Wrecking, which was a manifestation of the class struggle, was facilitated by the fact that many party members did not show the requisite vigilance and were under the influence of wreckers in their practical work. Worker supervision from below was an important weapon in the struggle against bureaucratism and an important step in realising Lenin’s idea of workers performing state duties. Bureaucratism’s most pernicious aspects were irresponsibility, a functionary’s self-satisfaction and the failure honestly and exactly to carry out party and government directives. The symbol of ‘bureaucratism’ was well established in party lore, being a stock criticism during the 1920s, and it continued to be summoned up in the metanarrative during the early 1930s. Proletarian democracy and selfcriticism were, from the late 1920s, seen as an antidote to this, with the same assumptions underlying this as underpinned the revolution from above: the injection of worker enthusiasm and commitment, both through the promotion of workers to responsible positions and the operation of criticism and self-criticism, was the means of dealing with class enemies. The holding of, and wide publicity about, the show trials of bourgeois experts – Shakhty, Industrial Party saboteurs, Menshevik saboteurs, and Metro-Vickers engineers (wreckers and saboteurs) – highlighted the danger of alien class elements within the ranks of the apparatus; enemies, spies, saboteurs, foreign agents and wreckers seemed to be in all parts of the country. Such show trials were excellent vehicles for demonstrating both class conspiracies and the infection effect that alien values could have.119 Bureaucratism was therefore not merely routine and red tape, but a manifestation of bourgeois influence on Soviet organisations.120 The bourgeois psychology possessed by many officials of bourgeois origin was a major potential source of moral dissolution and needed to be extirpated. This sort of psychology meant that anti-socialist attitudes could lead to wrecking, even if the officials concerned were not conscious of it. By 1933 a further bout of party cleansing was deemed necessary, and in April 1933 a party purge was announced.121 The announcement noted that in the recent influx of party members, inadequate verification had enabled alien elements to penetrate the party and use this for careerist and self-seeking purposes. There were also in the party comrades who, although honest, because of the unsatisfactory nature of Marxist-Leninist education, were either insufficiently stable (they did not understand the spirit and demands of party discipline) or politically almost illiterate

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(they did not know the Programme, Rules and fundamental decisions of the party) and therefore could not carry out party policy adequately. The purge was to ensure ‘iron proletarian discipline’ and to get rid of hangerson and other unstable and unreliable elements. It would elevate the ideological level of party members and strengthen the party politically and organisationally. It had to involve self-criticism and the non-party masses. Those to be purged were described as: class alien and hostile elements, double-dealers who professed to adhere to the party’s goals but in fact undermined them, open and secret violators of party and state discipline who failed to implement party and state decisions and cast doubt on them by talking about their lack of realism and impracticality, degenerates who did not struggle against the party’s enemies (kulak elements, grabbers, loafers, thieves, and despoilers of public property), careerists, self-seekers and bureaucratised elements, and moral degenerates. The purge was an ‘expression of Bolshevik self-criticism’, with party members widely encouraged to participate in this through the ritualised public denunciation of enemies. But as the myths of internal and external opposition came together to paint a picture of the regime and its programmes as being under severe challenge due to the strength of opposition, the main message of the metanarrative was that success was nevertheless being achieved, and central to this was party leadership. The CC was said122 to have followed the correct Leninist policy which had led to the strengthening of the international might of the USSR, successes in the socialist industrialisation of the country, the strengthening of fraternal cooperation between the peoples of the USSR on the basis of the Leninist nationality policy, the fulfilment and over-fulfilment of the first two years of the five year plan, and the decisive turn to socialism by the middle peasants enabling the party to switch from the slogan of limiting and supplanting the kulaks to that of the liquidation of them as a class. However, some oblast and local organisations were accused of grossly violating CC directives and comrade Stalin’s article ‘God velikogo pereloma’, action hostile to Leninism and the Leninist policy toward the middle peasant. The correctness of official policy remained a central pillar of the metanarrative, with ‘line’ and ‘path’ metaphors remaining prominent. Both implied a direct and invariable route into the future which the party led by Stalin was following. This was sometimes shown graphically in the form of a locomotive (‘the locomotive of history’) or a tram racing along the rails, often scattering opposition in the process.123 The victorious completion of the first five year plan in four years (or, as a resolution noted,124 in four years and three months) contrasted Soviet success with the crisis in the capitalist world, including the growth


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of unemployment, poverty and hunger. By 1934 the metanarrative claimed125 that the heroic struggle of the working class in the first five year plan had laid the foundations of the socialist economy. The last capitalist class, the kulaks, was routed, and the basic mass of the peasantry (the kolkhozniks) had become a firm support for Soviet power in the village. Soviet adherence to the socialist path had been consolidated. The second five year plan would see the final liquidation of capitalist elements and classes in general, the full destruction of the causes of class differences and exploitation and the overcoming of the vestiges of capitalism in the economy and people’s consciousness, and the transformation of the working population into the conscious and active builders of non-class socialist society. The party’s policy had been successful despite the opposition of class enemies and the attacks on the party by agents of the class enemies.126 From about this time too there was a blurring of the description of the target of repression, with more emphasis given to the notion of ‘socially harmful elements’.127 At the December 1935 plenum,128 it was declared that the victorious completion of the first and second five year plans had ensured the advance of the economy’s technical basis to a new and higher stage. In the struggle against class enemies and their agents in the party and working class, the economy had been reorganised on the basis of socialist economics. The development of the economy in combination with the elimination of the kulaks – the last of the capitalist classes – and of the remnants of the exploiting classes, along with the end of exploitation in the USSR, the transformation of labour into a matter of honour, glory, valour and heroics, the basic improvement in the material situation of workers and the growth in their political consciousness and activism had led to the growth of the Stakhanovite movement. This was a result of ‘the victory of socialism in our country’. The plenum also noted129 that the party purge had led to the unmasking of alien persons who had made their way into the party, and it had improved the party’s functioning. By conducting the purge themselves, party bodies were able to bring to light their own shortcomings and take steps to remedy them. However there was still a need for increased ‘Bolshevik alertness and discipline’ among party members because the purge had showed the correctness of the party’s view that as successes grew, the class enemy resorted to increasingly refined methods of struggle. Thus during the first half of the 1930s, the metanarrative focused on the role of popular mobilisation in the creation of the new world of socialism. However this was seen as having been achieved only in the face of mounting opposition on the part, principally, of internal enemies. The proliferation of symbols of opposition, including within the structures of the

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regime itself, meant that the successes achieved in socio-economic transformation were confronted in the narrative by the dangers posed by the opposition. The metanarrative was clearly designed to assist the mobilisation of both officials and populace into the struggle for societal transformation. It had positive elements: join the constructive efforts of the people leading to success (the myth of building socialism); negative elements: there is opposition around, do not assist it; cautionary elements: look what happens to opposition (the myths of opposition). But the problem was that the way opposition was presented did not always make it easy for individuals to distinguish between acceptable activity and that which might result in being labelled an oppositionist. A clear indication of this was Stalin’s ‘Dizzy with success’ article130 which criticised officials for what was a too enthusiastic implementation of the official line. What this meant was that an honest attempt to implement the general line or specific directives was no guarantee against being caught up in the web of opposition being constructed through the symbolism of the regime’s evolving myth. However at this time honest but deficient performance was only one target of official concern; there was also real opposition. It is clear that levels of opposition to collectivisation in the villages was high, but there was also resistance to party policies among other sections of the population. Most of this activity was of the classic subaltern variety identified by Scott:131 passive resistance, sabotage, go-slows, pilfering, re-definition of official policies and instructions, manipulation of regime instruments (e.g. denunciations), and creation of informal networks of assistance, dissimulation and false compliance. Such tactics were used both by officials and members of the populace at large to express opposition.132 By acting in these ways, by going through the motions of obeying instructions from above, ordinary people and lower-level officials were contributing to the shaping of the regime’s symbolic metanarrative. By formally acting in the way demanded, they were confirming the ritualised patterns of action demanded by that discourse, but by actually opposing it, they were also giving substance to the claims about internal opposition. They also reinforced the metanarrative by the way in which they used the language and the categories of the regime’s discourse publicly when they discussed current issues and interacted with the state. In their interactions with the state and its representatives, people had to use the ideological definitions and categories created by the state (e.g. party member, worker, farmer) to articulate their own identities, to interrogate and respond to the state, and to structure all of their dealings with higher authorities. Only by adopting the language of the state could they formally interact with it.133 In these ways in the first half of the 1930s, lower-level officials and the


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populace were partners in the creation of the myths that constituted the regime’s metanarrative. Socialism achieved The 1936 state Constitution134 marked a distinct change in the image of communism and the Soviet march towards it presented in the metanarrative. Now it was declared that, as a result of the victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the USSR was ‘a socialist state of workers and peasants’; socialism had been achieved rather than simply being built.135 Rather than the antagonistic classes that had been seen as being present in the earlier formulations, now there were two classes – the working class136 and the collective farm peasantry – and one stratum – the intelligentsia. These were all new social formations and their friendly relations, along with the friendship between nationalities, constituted what came to be called ‘the moral-political unity of Soviet society’. The socialist system of economy had replaced the capitalist economy, with land and natural resources belonging to the whole people, although beside the socialist economy there was also limited provision for some small-scale private undertakings of peasants and handicraftsmen. The state economic plan would continue to determine and direct economic life in the USSR, but rather than overcoming the legacies of the past, its task was to increase social wealth, raise the material and cultural level of the toilers, and strengthen national independence and defence capability. The fundamental principle was to be ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his work’, while work was a duty: ‘he who does not work, neither shall he eat’. The Constitution also outlined a series of individual rights for all citizens (in contrast to earlier when proscribed groups had their rights limited), although these were to prevail only as long as they did not infringe the more general interests of the toilers as a whole. The communist party was the ‘vanguard of the toilers’, which united ‘the ranks of the working class and other strata of the toilers’;137 all power belonged to the ‘toiling people of town and country’. The basic thinking behind the Constitution was found in Stalin’s address in November 1936 on the draft constitution.138 Arguing that ‘the complete victory of the socialist system in all spheres of the national economy is now a fact’,139 Stalin said that classes were now nonantagonistic, exploitation had been eliminated and socialist ownership of the instruments and means of production had been established as the foundation of society. Stalin, however, gave no attention to the question of the transition to the higher stage; instead, throughout the Stalinist period, society was said to be involved in the gradual transition to communism

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through the laying down of the essential preconditions for that. He declared the victory of Leninist nationality policy and that the Soviet Union was a multinational state with the flowering of national cultures (‘national in form, socialist in content’) and an absence of national antagonism. The claimed achievement of socialism changed the substance of the myth of building socialism; no longer was it about building towards a socialist structure, now it was about building on the socialist basis that already existed. This change also led to a new conception of the nature of opposition in the myth of internal opposition. The formulations found in the Constitution implied that, with the achievement of socialism and the formation of an ‘entirely new’ working class, collective farmers and intelligentsia,140 antagonistic class contradictions in the society had been eliminated. Class origins were no longer to be markers against people, as Stalin himself declared that people were not to be held responsible for their parents’ class identity.141 This view put the formal seal on the successful completion of agricultural collectivisation and the consequent elimination of hostile kulak elements among the peasantry. This conception of the elimination of antagonistic classes led to a reconceptualisation of the nature of the society. With socialism achieved and antagonistic classes eliminated, a new social formation appeared, the Soviet people. This had a number of ramifications for the regime’s metanarrative. While classes still existed within the Soviet people, their lack of antagonism was reflected in the disappearance of terms relating to stratification among the peasantry – poor peasants, middle peasants, kulaks – and their replacement by a new entity, the kolkhoz peasantry/collective farmers. Sometimes they were referred to jointly with the urban workers as ‘toilers’, but because the state was officially designated in the 1936 Constitution a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, their symbolic status remained secondary to that of urban workers. However, this was subsumed by the emergence of the notion of Soviet citizen, a conception which not only signified a completely different status to that implied by a class designation, but also reinforced the state as a central component of the individual’s self-description. What this did was to resolve the tension implicit in regime symbolism of the 1920s between the questions of the achievement of socialism and international revolution. The citizen of the socialist state, where both classes and national differences had ceased to be important, was the concrete representation of the correctness of the doctrine of socialism in one country. This was also the basis for the promotion of the Soviet state and for the national emphasis which began to occur in regime symbolism in the second half of the 1930s. But paradoxically this view of the resolution of class contradictions did not lead to a view of a society in which there were no threats to the


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proletarian cause. The external threat remained, and was even heightened by the rise of fascism in central Europe and the coming to power of Hitler in Germany in 1933 in particular. At the same time, a perception of a continuing threat from within Soviet society was projected in the metanarrative. The origins of this perceived threat are to be found in some of the images from the late 1920s, and in particular the concerns about bourgeois specialists. The way this notion of bourgeois specialists was interpreted was in terms not only of the individual specialists themselves, but of the residue of bourgeois class consciousness in the society that they represented. Bourgeois class consciousness could remain as a residual force in society after the dominance of the bourgeoisie had been eliminated. Its elimination was possible only through a combination of structural change eliminating the institutional forms which nourished such consciousness (principally private property) and the implementation of a wide-scale programme of education to impart new socialist values to the population at large. Thus despite the massive scale of social mobility in the first half of the 1930s and the expansion of Soviet education from the 1920s, both processes creating a new Soviet managerial and intelligentsia class, according to the metanarrative residual bourgeois values remained in society to threaten the proletarian advance. The dimensions of this threat, paradoxically, seemed to be expanded by the very process of socialist transformation that was meant to abolish it: with property now effectively state-owned, crime was transformed into opposition and even treason to the socialist order. The evidence for the continued perceived danger was shown in the waves of campaigns that washed through the second half of the1930s. While the description of the objects of these campaigns varied, the general message was consistent throughout this period: the achievements of the proletariat were continually under threat from the residual presence in society of elements possessing alien class values. From wreckers and saboteurs to ‘enemies of the people’, these hostile groups posed a potent threat to the march toward communism. Moreover social origins were not seen to be a factor in defining enemies of the people, who could come from impeccably proletarian ranks as well as elsewhere. Rationalised in terms of Stalin’s view that the closer socialism approached, the more vigorous would be the opposition of such hostile class forces,142 this view of society was one in which the claimed achievement of socialism did not eliminate the danger from internal opposition. Moreover the nature of this opposition from within proletarian and party ranks generated a level and intensity of abuse in the metanarrative not seen before, with the labelling of them as traitors and deserters, reptiles, beasts, scoundrels and vermin,143 characterisations which both degraded and

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dehumanised them. Important here was the association of moral degeneration with political treason.144 Evidence for this was adduced from the Kirov assassination of December 1934, which was blamed on ideological and political enemies within, represented principally by Zinoviev, Kamenev and their supporters. Two main types of charges145 were laid against the so-called ‘Leningrad Centre’: that they had hatched a conspiracy to kill Kirov, and that they were the bearers of the rightist ideas of the class enemy. It was both their actions and the values that they carried that were the danger. The charges against Zinoviev and Kamenev were broadened in mid-1936. Acting in a bloc with ‘trotskyites’, they were accused146 of committing ‘contemptible counter-revolutionary White Guard terrorist activity’. The document then sought to build up evidence of this terrorist activity against party and government leaders, and concluded ‘that the trotskyite-zinovievite counter-revolutionary centre and its leaders, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, finally slid down into the swamp of White Guardism, joined forces with the most desperate and embittered enemies of Soviet power, and turned into the organizing force of the remnants of the classes which had been smashed in the USSR and which in desperation are resorting to terror.’ They had also become the leading detachment of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie outside the USSR, voicing its will and aspiration. The chief message of the first show trial, of the ‘Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre’ (August 1936) was that there was no distinction between ‘spies, provocateurs, saboteurs, whiteguardists, kulaks etc’ and ‘Trotskyites’ and ‘Zinovievites’. This reaffirmed the potency of both action and belief as sources of opposition. In the second show trial in January 1937, of the ‘Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre’, the link between internal and external enemies was made explicit. The main avowed target of the trial was bourgeois wreckers in the economic apparatus who were acting on behalf of the internal enemies who, in alliance with foreigners, sought to dismember the USSR. ‘Wrecking’ became a major category of oppositional activity, something which seemed to be given substance by the way in which both poor performance and accidents were attributed to such activity. The 1935 campaign for the verification of party documents and the 1936 campaign for the exchange of party cards were important here. The verification was directed at ‘enemies with party cards in their pockets’, masked enemies, those who had penetrated the party but were opposed to its aims and ideals,147 while the exchange was meant to target ‘passive’ members, or those who were not active in the party’s work.148 These campaigns were paralleled by a campaign calling for increased democracy and self-criticism within the party. Part of a broader, society-wide campaign for democracy associated with the public discussion and


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introduction of the new Constitution, the call for criticism and selfcriticism and secret ballot elections inside the party149 was designed in part to mobilise rank-and-file members against responsible officials who were not performing satisfactorily. More broadly, the campaign in society culminating in the December 1937 Supreme Soviet elections strengthened notions of equality, justice, participation, democracy and even civil rights (including freedom of religious worship, although this was linked with the right of anti-religious propaganda) in the Soviet metanarrative.150 Visually, democracy was evoked through representations of people joyfully voting or going to vote151 and being involved in discussion of the new Constitution.152 The campaign for democracy lasted throughout much of the worst of the terror, providing a vivid illustration of the perceived connection between a regime under threat from enemies within and democracy, or the commitment of the rank-and-file, as the means of dealing with this; the moral dissolution of the enemy was contrasted with the moral health of the Soviet people. But even though the party was trying to purge itself of ‘trotskyite-rightist agents of fascism’, of ‘double-dealers, spies and wreckers’, there was still much to do. The slow or formalistic processing of appeals against expulsion and the incorrect expulsion of some communists showed that in party ranks there remained ‘unrevealed and unmasked, certain careerist communists who are striving to become prominent and to be promoted by recommending expulsions from the party, through the repression of party members, who are striving to insure themselves against charges of inadequate vigilance through the indiscriminate repression of party members.’153 There had been cases of disguised enemies of the people, wreckers and doubledealers who sought to have honest and dedicated communists expelled from the party as a means of diverting the blow from themselves and maintaining their own positions within the party. There was a need to eliminate every disguised enemy in the party, while Bolshevik vigilance was needed to unmask the enemy. As the terror unfolded, the definition of opposition had become both wider and more vague. It now could include not only those who had taken oppositionist action or supported opposition forces, or those ‘wreckers’, ‘lickspittles’ and ‘toadies’ who were opposed to Soviet development, but those who had at some time in their lives found themselves in regions controlled by the opponents of the Bolsheviks (the Whites in the civil war or abroad at any time), those who had relatives living abroad or corresponded with people abroad, who had relatives who belonged to one of the earlier categories of opposition (e.g. kulaks, bourgeois), and those who were related to or knew someone who had been arrested. Unmasking this enemy was therefore not only very complex, but given the potential scope

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of that opposition, highly important. This course of action was shown as being widely supported by the populace, reflected in popular demonstrations condemning the accused,154 open denunciation of oppositionists in meetings, and the publication in the press of letters of denunciation from ordinary people. This sort of picture reinforced the sense of a chosen community excluding the oppositionists, which increasingly during the 1930s was signified by the use of the prepositions ‘we’ and ‘our’.155 The myth of internal opposition, boosted by the publication of the Short Course history of the party which depicted Stalin as the only leader loyal to Lenin throughout the struggles against successive waves of internal traitors,156 was reflected in the third show trial in March 1938, of the ‘Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’, although this trial seems to signal the end of the search for enemies inside the party.157 Reflective of this was the apparent softening of the meaning of vigilance in March 1938; formerly this had related to seeking out class enemies, but now it was to refer to ‘cultural work, literate leadership’ and ‘the struggle against lack of cleanliness’.158 An essential element of the image of opposition presented by the metanarrative in the second half of the 1930s was therefore its hidden nature, the existence of opponents operating within the regime’s own structures who went about their business covertly but nonetheless effectively. The focus was on conspiracy, and it was this which enabled the authorities to create links between things like industrial accidents, which were attributed to wrecking activity, and the presence of a network of opponents spread throughout Soviet society. Conspiracy, the covert association of opposition to harm the Soviet regime, was the core of the conception of opposition at this time. But that conspiracy was not restricted to internal enemies; the internal opposition was linked in the metanarrative with external opponents in two ways. First, the attention given to spies and agents of foreign powers operating within the Soviet Union.159 The populace was frequently urged to remain vigilant against such enemy agents who may have penetrated Soviet society. Second, the heightened focus upon fascism and the danger it represented to the Soviet Union. Since Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, there had been a strong theme within the metanarrative of the reactionary and hostile nature of fascism. Seen as the archetype of capitalism, fascism was presented as a serious manifestation of the long-established capitalist hostility to the USSR. As Germany continued to re-arm and as its aspirations clearly became more expansive territorially, the sense of danger was heightened. This was clearly reflected in poster art. Fascism was often shown in the form of a monster160 or a scrawny hand holding a weapon.161 This marked a variation in the mode of representation of capitalist opposition, with the fat capitalist evident early


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in the decade sometimes being replaced by a thin man in a top hat with scrawny hands and looking something like Uncle Sam.162 This did not abate until the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939. Prior to that date, and therefore throughout the terror, this strong sense of foreign danger reinforced the focus on conspiracy, thereby intertwining the myths of domestic and external opposition. At the XVIII Congress of the party in March 1939,163 it was declared that the successful completion of the second five year plan had solved the basic historical task of that plan: ‘all exploiting classes have been finally liquidated and the causes of the exploitation of man by man and the division of society into exploiters and exploited have been completely destroyed . . . In our country, “the first phase of communism – socialism – has been basically achieved” (Stalin). The victory of socialism has been legislatively secured in the new Constitution of the USSR.’ The boundaries between the workers, collective farmers, and the intelligentsia were disappearing. The victory of socialism in the USSR ensured the inner moral and political unity of the people under the leadership of the communist party and the Soviet authorities. This unity was able not only to finish with the remnants of hostile classes with their alien influences and to deliver a rebuff to hostile incursions from outside, but was the best guarantee of the victory of communism in the USSR. Fulfilment of the five year plan assumed the struggle against hostile class influences in the economy, in cultural construction, and in all political life. For this purpose it was necessary above all to organise the struggle to protect and strengthen socialist, state and kolkhoz property against thieves and plunderers of state and kolkhoz goods, against all and sundry accomplices of the class enemy, and particularly against traitors to the people in the person of trotskyite-bukharinite and bourgeois-nationalist spies, saboteurs and wreckers who made common cause with foreign intelligence services and became agents of fascist secret services. Their treacherous work caused serious harm in a number of branches of the USSR’s economy. The routing of these bands of spies and wreckers cleared the path for further and even mightier successes of the socialist economy in our country.

With the third five year plan, the USSR had entered a new phase, that of ‘completing the construction of classless socialist society and of the gradual transition from socialism to communism’. Important here was the instilling of communist ideals in the working people and the overcoming of the remnants of capitalism in their consciousness. Difficulties remained; in conditions of hostile capitalist encirclement, the Soviet Union still had not overtaken the capitalist countries economically. The continuing hostility from outside meant that the state could not yet wither away but needed to remain strong in order to defend socialism.

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Within this context of the continued presence of disguised enemies within the apparatus, the regime began to project an image of both the strength of popular commitment to socialist values and the potency of those values. A major means of doing this was through the creation of individual heroes who could act as models for the populace and for subaltern political actors.164 Stalin was explicit about this, explaining in 1935 that new heroes were emerging who broke with conservative attitudes and fetishes, and gave the lead to the ordinary labouring person who could work well and become a hero of labour and be covered in glory.165 Personifying the traits and qualities usually seen in the proletariat – modesty, dedication, diligence, steadfastness, uprightness and loyalty – these heroes were presented as models for the new society. Building on the practice evident since the early years of the regime of publicising the activities of exemplary workers, these models initially stemmed overwhelmingly from production. Evoking the tradition of shock work, and the identification of shock workers as people whose extraordinary efforts applied to particular situations produced outstanding results, a range of models emerged in both agricultural and industrial production. But it was in the latter field, with the emergence of Stakhanovism, that this became most regularised. This built on the practice of socialist competition and shock work, which was a way of seeking to stimulate production through moral (and material) incentives. It had begun in the civil war period but gained particular attention at the end of the 1920s and in the early 1930s with the spread of ‘shock brigades’ in industrial centres. This development also stimulated socialist competition, a practice whereby particular production units challenged counterparts elsewhere to a competition over production levels. The result of these developments was increasing public prominence for leading workers and a shift of focus from the collective to the individual within the overall campaign of heightened productivity. In the context of both the drive for socialist construction and vydvizhenstvo, this was a means of refashioning the image of the proletarian worker, washing away the peasant residue in the struggle for socialist achievement. From this crucible came Stakhanovism. The first Stakhanovite was the eponymous Aleksei Stakhanov, who on the night of 30–31 August 1935 was said to have exceeded his work norm for the production of coal by fourteen times. He became the model for a whole movement and the subject of a nation-wide effort to emulate him in the workplace. Later in 1935, record-breaking workers appeared in a wide range of branches of industry, transport and agriculture. The projection of Stakhanov and the creation of a movement around him sought to provide not only a model for workers to emulate in their work lives, but a more general model of behaviour.166 Stakhanovites, and especially Stakhanov


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himself, were portrayed as devoted to Stalin, who was their father figure giving wise guidance and manifesting solicitous care.167 They were part of the ‘Stalin army’, struggling to achieve increased output to contribute to the development of socialism. They were also representatives of the new Soviet man, smoothing out the contradiction between mental and manual labour,168 and illustrating the capacity to conquer nature. They were model workers, conscientious, dedicated and highly productive, possessing both ‘culture’ and technical knowledge, and loving their job. ‘Outstanding Stakhanovites’ were awarded either the Red Banner of Labour or the Order of Lenin169 and spent much of their time doing agitational work broadly among the populace. Stakhanovites also provided a model of the ideal socialist citizen: clean and neat, well-dressed, alert and prepared, interested in learning and culture, dedicated to their families, and involving themselves in public activity. When they were presented outside their work environments, they were usually shown in an urban setting, living in comfortable apartments with a range of consumer goods, interested in sport and the theatre, engaged in cultural pursuits such as going to concerts or reading books, and characterised by sobriety. Not all heroes had such a production focus.170 By the late 1930s a leading place in the pantheon of Soviet heroes was occupied by Soviet aviators. These figures, sometimes known as ‘Stalin’s falcons’, were the archetype of the new Soviet man. They were the people responsible for the ‘hero flights’ and world records, of which sixty-two were claimed during this period. There was some tension between individualism and collectivism in the image of the aviators. Most flights comprised a team of three – pilot, co-pilot and navigator – who by working together achieved heroic deeds. They seemed to be the essence of the success of the collective. But beside such an emphasis on teamwork, some pilots were projected as individual heroes. The chief of these was Valery Chkalov, a pilot of working-class origin who flew over the North Pole to the US as well as flying across the USSR, who gained widespread fame within Soviet society. The image projected of Chkalov was one of bravery, fearlessness, determination, perseverence, cool-headedness, modesty, technical proficiency and dedication. A good family man, determined to pass on his skills and experience to coming generations, Chkalov was referred to as a son of Stalin and the epitome of the Soviet flyer.171 He was the living embodiment of Stalin’s call to fly ‘farther, faster and higher’, the representative of both growing Soviet power and of the new socialist society. It is striking in relation to this association with socialism that Chkalov’s 1936 flight across the USSR was completed just before the trial of the ‘TrotskyiteZinovievite terrorists’, enabling a direct contrast to be drawn between

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the dedication and heroism of the aviators and the duplicity of the defendants.172 Flying in their ‘steel birds’, the aviators were the modern representatives of traditional Russian mythological heroes,173 through their efforts subjugating nature, as good Bolsheviks were meant to do. Their status was very high; those engaged in the Cheliushkin expedition (see below) were the first to be made Heroes of the Soviet Union (16 April 1934), and when Chkalov died in 1938 he was given an official lying in state, among his pallbearers were Stalin, Voroshilov and Molotov, and he was buried beneath the Kremlin wall. The figure of the Soviet aviator intersected with that of the Soviet polar explorer.174 Throughout the 1930s the deeds of the explorers/aviators in the Arctic region were the subject of major publicity campaigns. The chief of these were: in 1932 the first voyage by a ship, the Sibiriakov, through the northeast passage in a single season; the 1934 Cheliushkin rescue when 104 people stranded on the ice by the sinking of the Cheliushkin (which was trying to replicate the voyage of the Sibiriakov) were rescued by seven pilots; the July 1936 flight by Valery Chkalov, Georgy Baidukov and Aleksandr Beliakov across the USSR without stopping; the May 1937 landing at the North Pole and the establishment there of the first base, which was staffed (by Ivan Papanin, Ernst Krenkel, Pyotr Shirshov and Yevgeny Federov) for eight months; the June 1937 flight by Chkalov, Baidukov and Beliakov following the so-called ‘Stalin route’ (which was also written on their aeroplane) over the North Pole to Vancouver and Washington, which set a new world distance record; the July 1937 flight by Mikhail Gromov, Andrei Yumashev and Sergei Danilin following the so-called ‘Stalin Airway’ (which was also emblazoned on their aircraft) over the North Pole to San Jacinto, California, setting a new world distance record. Building on the traditional romance of the Arctic in Russian folklore and reflecting the emphasis of the early 1930s on subjugating nature and transforming the world to build the new socialist future, the campaigns surrounding these figures and their exploits built them up into mythical heroes. Military metaphors – the Arctic front, the army of polar explorers, struggle, attack, assault and conquest – were used to describe their exploits, while their successes were presented as the living proof of the superiority of socialism. The projection of their efforts and the focus on the Arctic also presented a picture of the social and geographical boundaries of the country, a picture that emphasised its vastness, the importance of its periphery, and its subjection to Soviet man.175 But they were also


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feted individually as heroes. Their return to Moscow generally followed a choreographed pattern: after stopping off for receptions in various towns en route, they proceeded through a ticker-tape parade down Gorky Street and onto Red Square where they were often greeted by Stalin, followed by a state reception in the Kremlin attended by other hero figures and leading politicians, including Stalin. They received state awards: Hero of the Soviet Union, Red Banner, Red Star or Order of Lenin. Their images were ubiquitous in the main vehicles of public culture: the print media, films, books (including fiction), posters, currency, town and street names and stamps.176 Their qualities – dedication, determination, bravery, loyalty, commitment and modesty – were praised, as they appeared as the archetype of the new, the product of socialism. They were loved and guided by Stalin. Public prominence was also given to scientists. People like the psychologist I. P. Pavlov, the physicist K. E. Tsiolkovsky, plant physiologist A. K. Timiriazev, biochemist A. N. Bakh, geologist A. P. Karpinsky, horticulturalists I. V. Michurin and V. R. Williams, and the geneticist Trofim Lysenko were all lauded and given high honours in the 1930s for their scientific work. And all attributed their successes to Stalin. This celebration of scientists also fed into the theme of advanced Soviet technology. This emphasis on individual heroes, which was a significant shift from the earlier collectivist emphasis, was linked to the long-held view about the importance of adherence to socialist values.177 This applied not only to the workers but also to officials, as the battle against enemies within showed. It was given formal and public affirmation with Stalin’s epigram ‘cadres decide everything’.178 The central message of this aphorism was that the consciousness, motivation and commitment of individuals was crucial, although in this comment Stalin was associating those qualities with the capacity of officials to master the technical tasks that confronted them. This was especially the case, in the official view, given the large-scale production of new Soviet managers and specialists as a result of vydvizhenstvo and the emphasis on one-man management from early 1929. Training as well as belief and commitment were essential. An important stage in stimulating this was the publication in late 1938 of the new Short Course history of the party. This was immediately seen as ‘a very important instrument for mastering bolshevism, a weapon in marxist-leninist theory for party members’.179 The sort of commitment required was reflected in the adage ‘Nothing is impossible for a Bolshevik’; there were no objective limits to the human will, which, spurred by consciousness and commitment (and guided by the great Stalin), meant that Bolsheviks could achieve superhuman feats. But there was also a reverse side of this belief in the power of the human

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will: opponents could be highly damaging to the Soviet cause. This was reflected in the fantastic nature of the charges thrown against oppositionist figures during the 1930s. This emphasis on the importance of individual commitment and values, on the primacy of the will, did not sit easily with the collectivist ethos so dominant in the metanarrative. But it did accord with the emerging image of Stalin. The apex of this focus on individuals was the cult of Stalin, which burst into public prominence in the week of Stalin’s fiftieth birthday on 21 December 1929.180 The clearest indication of this is comparison of the issues of the party newspaper Pravda for the weeks beginning 11, 18 and 25 December, with the issues in the first and last week not characterised by excessive laudation of Stalin, but in the middle week all issues dripped with lavish praise of the leader. Messages to him from all parts of the country were accompanied by articles, many written by leaders like Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze and Yenukidze, lauding his work and his qualities. The issue of 21 December was devoted almost entirely to praise of Stalin, and contained six pictures of the great leader, almost as many as had appeared over the preceding five years. Henceforth the cult of Stalin grew to become the dominating symbol within Soviet public life, really taking off in 1933–4 and following a fluctuating but rising trajectory in terms both of saturation of society and extravagance of claims during the 1930s.181 The dominance of a single leader was given theoretical justification at the same time,182 and it was at this time that Stalin became generally recognised as the ‘vozhd’ (analogue of Führer or duce) rather than ‘rukovoditel’.183 One theme of the cult was to associate Stalin with the continuing cult of Lenin.184 Stalin was depicted as ‘the true, best pupil of Lenin’, a ‘staunch and consistent leninist’ and his single most reliable aide who never deviated from Lenin and his positions.185 He was the steadfast supporter of Lenin, the person who always struggled for the realisation of his ideas and the single most devoted associate of Lenin. When Lenin died, Stalin became the ‘true continuer’ of Lenin’s cause, the leader whose devotion to the ideas of the dead Lenin was the strongest guarantee of the realisation of socialism. As Lenin’s ‘firmest and truest pupil’, the ‘best champion of the ideas of Lenin’, and the ‘great leninist’,186 Stalin was Lenin’s closest comrade. Indeed, there was also a hint of a more psychic relationship: in late 1931, Stalin was referred to as the ‘incarnation of the power and genius of the great teacher’.187 This was expressed more succinctly in the phrase that later became a standard epithet: ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today’.188 But this was an association which, when expressed in such terms, was one in which Lenin was superior to Stalin, with Stalin’s task being to execute Lenin’s trust and complete what he had begun.189 As the


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cult developed after 1932, this theme of Leninist primacy was challenged by one in which Stalin appeared as the leading figure; by 1934 veneration of Lenin was cast in terms principally190 of reverence for Stalin, with the latter clearly the pre-eminent figure. The principal means whereby this was suggested were through references to Stalin’s further development/ improvement of Lenin’s ideas, and historical revision. A clear example of the former was Khrushchev’s statement at the XVIII Congress in 1939 that Stalin’s ideas ‘are a great contribution to the treasure store of Marxism-Leninism and mark a higher stage in the development of Leninism’.191 The process of historical revision occurred through the actual rewriting of the historical account, with the Short Course history being the most egregious instance of this. The revision of the party’s history contained in this volume removed all party leaders as major figures except for Lenin and Stalin, and gave Stalin the leading role in both party development and the prosecution of the Revolution;192 the Short Course was in this way a major factor in reshaping the myth of October. This position of Stalin as the principal figure in party history was repeated in all of the treatments of party history published at this time. Another way in which Stalin’s position and importance was elevated over that of Lenin was through many of the epithets for Stalin which came to characterise the cult. Examples include: the ‘greatest strategist of the proletarian revolution’, the ‘best machinist of the world proletarian revolution’, the ‘architect of communism’, ‘creator of the new life’, the ‘powerful heart of our land’, and the ‘greatest man, the leader and teacher, our genius’.193 These sorts of epithets elevated Stalin into such a position of prominence that in comparison Lenin seemed almost an epigone. Similarly, visually Stalin was shown as the much more substantial figure, with Lenin often depicted as a smaller, paler figure, often in terms of a picture, bust, statue or name on a banner.194 In 1933 an American correspondent counted the number of portraits and busts he saw on a walk around Moscow on 7 November. The top three were Stalin 103, Lenin 58 and Kaganovich 56.195 Like Lenin, Stalin was shown as a major theorist. The statements about Stalin’s ‘further development’ of Lenin’s writings and the assertions that they were expressions of Marxism-Leninism were ways of affirming a doctrinal link between the two leaders, while Stalin’s correction or elucidation of Lenin showed both his mastery of the canon and greater importance than the dead leader, and fed into the image of him as a great teacher. However, most references to Stalin’s writings or speeches mentioned neither Lenin nor Marxism-Leninism, instead simply asserting the truth196 and importance of those writings or declaring that they were providing leadership. Typical of the sorts of statements from this time was the injunction: ‘Each kolkhoznik, each worker, must more and more pay

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the greatest attention to the words of comrade Stalin.’197 His words, as embodied in the new Constitution, constituted ‘the guiding star for the proletariat, the workers and oppressed of all the world’, and formed ‘the immutable law of all our country’.198 From 1932 quotations from Stalin appeared in May Day slogans, some of his aphorisms were the focus of posters, and some, like ‘Cadres decide everything’, took on the status of self-evident truths embedded in the popular culture. From 1933 his words were cited as authoritative more frequently than those of Lenin.199 But it was through their status as instructions, offering guidance to the people, that Stalin’s writings and speeches were seen to be most important because they were the means through which the supreme leader exercised leadership. Stalin was the supreme leader. He was ‘our vozhd, our great Stalin’,200 the ‘genius leader’, the ‘true rudder of the socialist revolution’, ‘the helmsman’, ‘the great master strategist and tactician of class struggle’, and the ‘great leader of communism’.201 All of the successes of the Soviet Union, from the 1917 revolution to the construction of socialism, were attributed to his leadership. It was due to his guidance that hero projects like the Moscow–Volga Canal202 were completed. He was truly keeping ‘the locomotive of history on the socialist rails’,203 while ‘Due to the genius of Stalin, in the epoch of Stalin, socialism has been victorious.’204 His leadership was crucial to everything: ‘Comrade Stalin directs all aspects of life in our country. He is the initiator and organiser of all our victories, all the great undertakings in the construction of a new life.’205 He was the teacher and guide of Soviet heroes, unerringly guiding and assisting the pilots on their record-breaking flights and the miners as they dug unbelievable quantities of coal; Stalin helped the hero fliers overcome their difficulties as they appealed to him as to a god.206 He gave them inspiration, confidence and guidance while at the same time being personally concerned for their welfare and safety.207 But the successes attributed to Stalin were not only to do with abstractions like state-building and the achievement of socialism. He cared for the Soviet people and their lives; as Beria asserted in 1939, ‘all of our many millions of people . . . know well that their happy, cultured and rich life is owed to Stalin.’208 Stalin’s overall responsibility for life in the USSR, and therefore his god-like persona, is reflected in the references to him as the ultimate source of life: ‘Stalin is our Golden Sun’, ‘Stalin is the sun of a new life, enlightening the whole world’, and ‘now there is excitement as the May first sun shows himself, comrade Stalin’.209 Stalin’s leadership was an important theme in socialist realist art of the 1930s. He was often depicted looking into the future with his gaze firmly fixed on an endpoint invisible to the viewer, as in Aleksandr Gerasimov’s


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‘I. V. Stalin i K. E. Voroshilov v Kremle’ (1938),210 delivering a speech in which he unerringly laid down the guidelines for the future, as in Gerasimov’s ‘Rech’ I. V. Stalina na XVI parts’ezde VKP(b)’ (1933),211 or simply standing alone in his office, as in Isaak Brodsky’s ‘Portret I. V. Stalina’ (1937).212 Stalin is the dominant figure in virtually all of the paintings in which he appears, usually in a plain military-style uniform,213 with his calm demeanour and internal strength projecting an authority which is almost tangible. When shown with others his leading position is generally not in doubt; when shown alone, he dominates the canvas. His leadership and concern for the people was shown as generating popular love and devotion in return. Especially from 1933, he appeared as a warm, paternalistic figure whose genius and wisdom was dedicated to looking after his people, and who in return was ardently loved by them. For example: ‘with hope and delight the proletariat of all the world repeat (your name) – Stalin’, ‘with a feeling of ardent, sincere love parents and children repeat your name’, ‘Each of us carries in his heart a fervent flame of boundless love for You – our friend, father, leader and teacher.’214 Or as the inhabitants of Dagestan declared in 1935: ‘If the songs of our bards can delight your hearing, take them. If the sculptures and pictures of our artists can make your eyes happy – accept them. If our lives are demanded by you for the defence of the motherland – take them. One thought inspires us: that if only a small line were to reach your ears. Whenever we think that you – Stalin – read these lines, strength fills our muscles, heads are raised, and eyes burn strongly.’215 This was a common theme in the artistic realm. The look of rapt adoration on the faces of the women he meets in Vasily Efanov’s ‘Nezabyvaemaia vstrecha’ (1936–7) and Grigory Schegal’s ‘Vozhd’, Uchitel’ i Drug’ (1937)216 are representative of the sort of image of ardent popular love and adoration for Stalin possessed by the people. Stalin’s position as the great leader was also reflected in reports about popular responses to his appearance. One example of this from early in this period comes from the XVI Congress of the party in 1930: Congress was standing for prolonged applause to greet comrade Stalin. After response to questions comrade Stalin gave an exhaustive estimate of the speeches at the congress of comrades Ulyanov, Tomsky and Rykov. Comrade Stalin’s speech was repeatedly interrupted by applause. At the end of the speech the congress gave comrade Stalin a stormy ovation. Delegates rose and the hall resounded with the powerful sound of the Internationale.217

At the XVI All-Union Congress of Soviets in 1935: At 6.15 comrade Stalin appears. The delegates to the congress, as one, rise and give a stormy and prolonged ovation. From the different sides of the hall float cries: ‘Long live the great Stalin!’ ‘Long live our leader!’ New bursts of applause and

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greetings. Comrade Kalinin announces that the congress is open and reminds that the ‘initiator, inspirer and organiser’ of all the gigantic work of the Soviet Union is comrade Stalin. Again stormy applause turning into a prolonged ovation. The whole hall rises and hails Stalin. Cries of ‘Long live Stalin! Hooray!’ Comrade Filatov proposes to choose the presidium of twenty-six men. The first member of the presidium – Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Again cries of ‘Hooray!’ fill the hall and for a long time there are peals of applause. The congress, standing, hails its beloved leader with enthusiastic calls.218

The sentiments of love, devotion and respect reflected in such descriptions also took a more personal form. For example, according to a young writer speaking in February 1935: Whenever I have been in his presence, I have felt his strength, his charm, his greatness. I have wanted to sing, to cry out, to shout with delight and happiness. And now here I stand at the same rostrum at which the great Stalin stood a year ago. In what country, in what part of the earthly globe, could such a thing be possible?219

Or another, on leaving Stalin, reported: ‘On the stairs I began to run, just like a youth; and joy and pride were in me, that he saw how I managed, and he was pleased.’220 The Stalin cult intersected with the cultic representation of the other heroes of Soviet society. Pilots and explorers, record-breaking miners and milkmaids, were all inevitably guided by the wise Stalin who was solicitous for their health and welfare. He was their inspiration as well as their father and teacher. In the words of Chkalov shortly before he died, ‘In laudatory speeches, songs, and verses the Soviet people call Stalin a lodestar and a sun. But most of all, he is the embodiment of one word, the most tender and human word of all – father.’221 Stalin’s special concern for these heroes was reflected in the photographs taken of him with them, and reports of meetings he held with them before they went expressing his concern for their safety. Their individual exploits were always conceived in terms of the benefit to the collective, but the overriding meaning and legitimation came from the figure of Stalin. He was at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of heroes222 but he was clearly special. The visual image of Stalin was complex and multi-faceted. On the one hand, it showed him, especially towards the end of the decade, as almost imperial, standing alone and exuding power and authority, as the leader with qualities no one else possessed. On the other, he was shown as in touch with his people, close to them, and solicitous for their needs from a position of close empathy with them. Stalin was the distant leader and the close father, the dominant figure yet with his feet firmly among the people,223 the classic location of the charismatic leader. He was the supreme leader whose vision and wisdom unerringly guided the society into the socialist future.


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He was responsible for all of the victories achieved along the way. His power and position, his insight and wisdom, clearly set him apart from both his colleagues and the populace at large. He was the central figure in the metanarrative, especially in light of concerns over the party reflected in its penetration by enemies, as projected in the myth of internal opposition. In the face of this, and in a fundamental transformation of the myth of leadership, the only true guarantee of socialism was Stalin. Yet beside this elevated role, he was also shown as being at one with his people. He understood their needs, was solicitous for their concerns and worked hard to provide them with the good life. While he was distant, he was also intimate: the superman and the father.224 All were beholden to Stalin. The familial metaphor,225 reflected most strongly in the notion of Stalin as the father, cast the Soviet people as Stalin’s children.226 The heroes were ‘brothers’ and Stalin’s sons. In the second half of the 1930s pictures often appeared in the press of Stalin with children, usually associated with the theme that Stalin was responsible for their happy life (see below). They were often shown gazing adoringly at him, but they were also often depicted as being at ease, such that his manner made them feel comfortable. Such meetings also often involved flowers, either being presented to Stalin or as part of the backdrop, a symbol of life and joy. The slogan that gained wide exposure in the late 1930s, ‘Thank you, comrade Stalin, for a happy childhood!’ is reflective of this. Stalin’s image dominated society.227 A visitor to Moscow in 1937 provides a graphic description of this. Stalin-worship, the immoderate cult which the population makes of Stalin, is one of the first things that strikes a foreigner visiting the Soviet Union. All over the country in suitable and unsuitable places, one comes across gigantic busts and portraits of Stalin. Any speeches which one may have the opportunity of hearing, not only political, but also lectures on any artistic and scientific subject, are interlarded with glorifications of Stalin, and frequently the idolisation of the man assumes unattractive forms. Here are some of them. The busts which one finds in the various rooms of the Architectural Exhibition which I have already praised are not entirely meaningless, since Stalin himself is one of the fathers of the project for the complete reconstruction of Moscow. But it is quite impossible to see what the gigantic ugly bust of Stalin is doing in the Moscow Rembrandt Exhibition, which is otherwise most tastefully arranged. And I was taken aback when, at a lecture on ‘The Technique of Soviet Drama’, I heard the otherwise very intelligent and restrained speaker suddenly burst into a tremendous song of praise on the merits of Stalin.228

By 1937 there were sixteen places bearing his name.229 The projection of Stalin in this way transformed the myth of leadership by vesting charismatic authority squarely in the vozhd.

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As Stalin came to dominate the metanarrative, the way society was presented through the myth of building socialism also changed. From 1933 the portrayal of non-Russians increased in the media as the multinational Soviet family became a significant theme, although this was always tinged with a strong emphasis on the way in which the Russians were the leading group, the ‘big brothers’ of the others.230 It was this sense of all nationalities coming together into a single entity, symbolised by the epigram ‘the friendship of the peoples of the USSR’, that constituted the notion of Soviet patriotism and that could be represented in the symbol of the Rodina. If Stalin was the father of the peoples, Rodina was the mother. This figure of the Rodina, inevitably shown in the guise of a statuesque woman, the mother of the people, became a prominent feature of the second half of the 1930s.231 The Rodina also symbolised the unity of the community, a multinational community in which national differences did not disappear but ethnic particularities were subsumed within an overriding Soviet identity and loyalty to the Soviet Motherland and to Comrade Stalin.232 The appearance of the notion of Rodina was accompanied by a reworking of the history of the Russian Empire to create a heroic myth of Russian statism. Positive figures emerged, like state-making tsars Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, the cultural genius of people like Pushkin, Glinka, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky. Through films (such as ‘Peter I’, ‘Aleksandr Nevsky’ and ‘Minin and Pozharsky’) and other media, traditional national heroes were once again promoted, principally in terms of their building up of the Russian state and Russian culture/ civilisation. This harking back to the glories of the tsarist period through the revival of a heroic narrative of Russian history was part of the merging of the myth of Russian statehood, Soviet patriotism and socialism that was taking place at this time through the figures of the Rodina and Stalin. Given ideological justification by Stalin in February 1931,233 the merging of ‘Soviet patriotism’ and the ‘socialist Motherland’ provided a clear justification for the strength of the state and the celebration of it, while the myth of Russian statehood gave it historical substance. There was tension between this theme of Rodina/Soviet patriotism based on the myth of the heroic Russian past and the emphasis up until 1936 on the Marxist categories of class. Not only did the new themes run counter to the earlier prevailing interpretation of tsarist Russia as overwhelmingly negative, but the image of the Russian people as the bearer of progress cut directly across the conception of the proletariat as the vanguard force of history. The basis for the bringing together of these different conceptions began to be laid in the 1920s with the doctrine of socialism in one country and was consummated with the claimed


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achievement of socialism within the territorial bounds of the Soviet Union in 1936. Through the claimed elimination of antagonistic classes, the assertion of the continuing leadership role of the working class, and the definition of socialist society in Soviet terms, there was some bringing together of class and nation into one overarching symbol. But this did not resolve the question of the newly progressive historical role of the Russian people. The closest the metanarrative came to dealing with this issue was through the Stalin cult and the projection of him as one in a line of great historical Russian leaders. In this sense as the representation of the working class, of socialism, and of the Russians, Stalin appeared as the symbol through which these contradictions were resolved. The celebration of the Russian past was also evident in the development during the 1930s of a traditional genre of representation, folklore. Through the revival of traditional cultural forms like the tale (skazka), rhyme (chastushka), epic (bylina), extended poem (starina) and funeral lament (plach), and of traditional figures like the warrior (bogatyr), heroes were shown as overcoming overwhelming odds and emerging victorious. Many of these forms were used to laud Stalin and to portray him in the guise of these traditional cultic folk heroes.234 The first folkloric treatment of Stalin in the central press occurred in December 1935 when a poem by A. V. Morozova entitled ‘About the Miracle Staircase’ recounted a ride on the Metro and thanked wise Stalin and his disciple Kaganovich for building it and caring for the people.235 This genre was used throughout the remainder of this period to laud aspects of contemporary Soviet socialist realist reality, with Stalin the key figure. A significant part of the revival of national themes, particularly towards the end of the 1930s, was that of the military and national defence. While the power and capacity of the Soviet military was a continuing theme, there was also strong emphasis upon the close unity that existed between the Soviet armed forces and the people; the strength of the former was seen to come from its close link with the latter.236 This link was reflected through such things as membership of Osoaviakhim,237 presentation of defence of the country as everybody’s affair rather than just the military’s,238 citizens’ involvement in production for defence needs,239 and defence of the borders.240 The Red Army was also seen as the ‘school of citizenship’.241 Many posters celebrated the ordinary soldier, lauding him as a brave and indefatigable warrior, but one who was intrinsically part of the greater Soviet community.242 The military was also often presented as marching (or flying) under the gaze of the political leaders, especially Stalin and Voroshilov. Sometimes this seems to have been designed to emphasise the military,243 but on other occasions the military seems to represent the country as a whole.244 Many posters simply

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glorified the military as a fighting machine245 and as the defender of the country of soviets246 and the achievements of October.247 It was also the army of liberation, as two posters from 1939 make clear.248 An important strand of the military focus was on aeroplanes and the air force, which supplemented the prominence of aviation in popular culture at this time. Posters showed the ‘proud falcons of our motherland’,249 planes flying in formation over troops below,250 and even engaged in aerial combat.251 This built on the established focus on aviation in the regime’s symbolism. ‘Life has become more joyous’252 Stalin’s aphorism encapsulated a central focus of the myth of building socialism, and thereby of the metanarrative, in the second half of the 1930s, the projection of an image of a prosperous society with the people living well. With socialist realism conceiving of the future as immanent in the present, the depiction of prosperity and happiness was seen as neither just descriptive of contemporary reality nor projecting the future, but the tying of these two together. The image of a prosperous society was projected through depictions of scenes in which well-dressed happy people lived their lives in pleasant and congenial surroundings characterised by a standard of living that far exceeded that which they were actually experiencing; their living and work locations, the array of consumer goods available, their clothing and their leisure pursuits all suggested a material standard of living significantly higher than they were currently enjoying.253 From this time, material well-being was shown as being central to life under socialism, in stark contrast to both the West and tsarist Russia.254 A prominent theme, particularly early in the 1930s, was the importance and value of communal facilities (clubs, dining rooms, recreation facilities like theatres and parks), including how they released women from the ‘slavery’ of work in the kitchen.255 The freedom and equality of women was a significant part of the image that was presented in the 1930s.256 A striking representation of this is to be found in Yury Pimenov’s 1937 painting ‘Novaia Moskva’.257 This is a view from the back seat of a car being driven by a woman down Okhotnyi Riad from Teatral’naia towards the new building for the Council of Labour and Defence (now the State Duma building) with the new Moskva Hotel on the left. The allegory is clear: a young woman driving a modern car into the transformed centre of the socialist capital. Public catering and communal dining rooms were also an important theme at this time,258 as was the provision of school and day-care facilities259 and recreation facilities, especially the new Central Park of Culture and Rest.260 Recreation facilities encouraged a healthy


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lifestyle, something that was also pressed by a concern in posters for promoting physicultural and sporting activity and was justified in part in terms of helping people to contribute more effectively to collective endeavours.261 The fruits of Soviet production were also noted, sometimes with the implication that these were to be used for socially useful purposes; for example, the photographic equipment that should be used ‘in the service of socialist construction’.262 Sometimes the symbol of the new life was much more prosaic, as in the 1934 poster citing Stalin’s words that each kolkhoznik would have his own cow.263 The new, ‘cultured’, style of life was presented as being related to hard work in the construction of socialism.264 In one famous poster,265 peasants are said to now be able to enjoy a human lifestyle if they work honestly, with the illustration showing a smiling man, woman and child, with in the foreground a record playing on a record player, in the background a number of books including volumes by Lenin, Stalin and Gorky, and in the middle an electric light-bulb. The poster thus combines happy people with literacy, electricity, honest work and socialism. Babies and children were shown as enjoying a happy childhood ‘under the Soviet star’,266 while the depiction of happy children with their smiling mothers was also a common image; in a poster from 1937 a happy woman and child (who is holding a model of an aeroplane) are being used to urge people to vote for the ‘socialist motherland’ and a ‘happy life’.267 People were shown as being valued on the basis only of their personal qualities and contribution, not their position, nationality or gender, a situation said to be in sharp contrast with that which prevailed before 1917.268 National questions had been resolved through the Leninist national policy.269 The contrast between Soviet times and those of the tsar was presented as being stark, with those prior to 1917 suffering under oppression and poverty while Soviet citizens relaxed and enjoyed a full and fruitful life.270 From the middle of the decade, posters made much of Stalin’s comment that ‘life has become better, comrades; life has become more joyous’,271 showing happy people along with Stalin’s words; in one such poster from 1936, below three smiling citizens looking at a newspaper, there is also a caricature of Hitler who is sad because the people are happy.272 An important symbol of the advanced society being created (like the tractor in the countryside) was the aeroplane and flying. In the middle of the decade this was often in the form of a celebration of the Soviet Union’s heroes of the air who had flown on record-breaking flights to the Arctic or the US,273 but generally the advance of the country was suggested by planes in flight,274 often in great numbers; one particularly striking poster shows many red planes flying above a large march in Red Square.275 The aeroplane symbolised the quest to transcend the limits of time and space, to construct a new

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world which would burst the limits of the old and emerge as the model of socialist modernity. The aeroplane was directly and unambiguously linked with progress towards the socialist future.276 The Arctic flyers seemed to personify Stalin’s aphorism that ‘there are no fortressses that bolsheviks cannot take’.277 The new and happy life was also reflected in advertising posters. Posters appeared advertising mundane personal items like cigarettes278 and alcohol,279 but there was also attention to luxury items and the sorts of goods which denoted a higher standard of living. Examples include shoe polish,280 crab meat,281 cosmetics,282 confectionery,283 toothpaste,284 and even a fur mantle.285 Films remained popular subjects of posters at this time.286 While many of these things would not really be considered luxury items, nor were they the sorts of things that were likely to be seen to be appropriate to advertise to the poor. They assumed a certain level of disposable income which went with the view that the new world being created would be one where material scarcity would be absent. The new and happy life was associated with the ‘new Soviet man’, an individual whose qualities and characteristics were appropriate to the new age of socialist plenty and happiness. Campaigns had been conducted since the early 1920s emphasising improvements in personal behaviour, but these were expanded significantly in the 1930s. Such campaigns focused on things like hygiene, good work practices, sobriety, abstinence from gambling, literacy, physical culture and productive leisure, the use of ‘cultured’ language, modesty, anti-religiosity and family values. Opposition to sexual licence, pro-natalism, and motherhood campaigns promoted cultural norms designed to produce a person who was ‘kul’turnyi’, or cultured.287 In physical terms, the ‘new Soviet man’ was characterised by masculine good looks, a determined stature and gaze and an apparent athleticism, while the ‘new Soviet woman’ was both feminine and physically robust, ‘broad-shouldered, broad-hipped, big-boned’.288 All possessed a self-confidence, a maturity of judgement and a powerful sense of self. But it was a sense of self which was achieved through membership of the collective. Thus as in the cults of the heroes, individual qualities were embedded in the collective. This focus in the myth of building socialism upon the happy and prosperous lifestyle was the aspect of the metanarrative which, in the 1930s, one would have expected to have been most likely to have been met with popular scepticism and disbelief on the part of significant parts of the population. For most people, living conditions remained poor while the uncertainties created by the terror must have meant for many the antithesis of the happy life projected in the myth. Clearly, many people were aware of the gap between image and reality, and scholars have


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pointed this out,289 but it is not clear what the consequence of this was. Many are likely to have accepted the socialist realist position that the images portrayed the future rather than the present, a view consistent with the aspirations, hopes and expectations of those who had flooded into the cities in search of a better life. For such people these images constituted the promise of the future rather than a reflection of the present, and therefore their lack of correspondence with contemporary reality would not necessarily have cast doubt on the veracity of the regime’s metanarrative. While doubtless many others were less sanguine about the images, even the doubters (at least in Moscow) would have recognised the major changes made to the urban fabric of the capital. Building the socialist city The most important symbol architecturally of the bright communist future was to be the never-completed project for the construction of a Palace of Soviets. Virtually from the outset of Soviet rule, there was a feeling within the leadership that there was a need for an iconic building which would represent the new regime and communism both for the people within the new state and for those abroad. As early as November 1918 Kamenev had envisaged a ‘palace of the people’ which would be looked to not only by the people of Moscow but by the entire international proletariat.290 In December 1922 at the first congress of soviets in Moscow, Sergei Kirov (at the time the head of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan and a candidate member of the CC) called for the construction of a fitting monument within which the representatives of labour could meet . . . this building should be a symbol of the growing might and triumph of communism not only among ourselves but also over there, in the West . . . we have wiped from the surface of the earth the palaces of the bankers, landowners, and tsars . . . let us build in their place the palace of the workers and the labouring peasants, let us bring together everything in which the Soviet lands are rich, let us invest all our worker-peasant creativity in this monument and show our friends and enemies that we ‘semi-Asiatics’, we at whom the world continues to look down its nose, are capable of embellishing this wretched earth with monuments such as our enemies could never imagine, even in their dreams.291

Kirov proposed the construction of this workers’ palace on Okhotnyi Riad. However with Lenin’s death in 1924, the perceived nature of the building began to change, so that instead of being the symbol just of the radiant communist future, it would also be a memorial to the dead leader. Although this emphasis upon the building as a memorial to Lenin292 dissipated, especially after the construction of the permanent mausoleum on Red Square in 1930, its symbolic importance remained supreme. This

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was brought into stark relief by the decision, reportedly made by Stalin,293 to situate the Palace on the site where the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour stood. Completed to mark the victory over Napoleon, the Cathedral effectively functioned as the national church in Moscow, and by destroying it to build a monument to the communist future, a clear symbolic message was being sent. The proposed design also carried a clear message. The design was arrived at through a series of architectural competitions, judged ultimately by the political leaders,294 and concluding with a public announcement in February 1934 confirming the design by Boris Iofan, subject to further modification in consultation with two other architects, Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gel’freikh.295 The politically approved design marked a final defeat for constructivism and a green light for gigantism in architecture. As conceived, the Palace was to comprise a three-tiered right-angle podium surmounted by four round towers one on top of the other, with at the top a 100-metre-tall figure of Lenin.296 At some 416 metres in height, this building was claimed to be the tallest in the world. Had it been built, it would have dominated the Moscow skyline and the centre of the city. Furthermore the height was matched by its bulk. Terraced and colonnaded, surrounded by statues of revolutionary figures and located in its own open space, the building would have been overpowering. The decoration inside the building was to laud Soviet achievements.297 The building was seen as the centrepiece of the new Moscow, around which the general plan of development of the city adopted in 1935 (see below) turned. It was the representation of communist power and confidence, of the conviction that a new civilisation was being built in the USSR. Work on the foundations began in 1937 and despite claimed shortcomings in the work and its management,298 the framework for the building began to rise in 1940. Work was suspended in 1941,299 with many of the structural materials used in the early building work being recycled into the war effort. Despite the symbolic importance of this building, it was never completed.300 However it was important, not only because of the way it represented the bright shining future of communism, but because the high-level political involvement in the project reflected the strength of the drive for urban planning in Moscow and the clear political imperatives that were intrinsic in this process. In the initial decade and a half of Soviet rule, there had been no prescribed standards or styles laid down by the political authorities governing the design of buildings. The clear regime emphasis on the proletarian and the labour ethic had given some guidance, and the receptiveness of many in artistic circles at the time of the revolution to the new revolutionary ideas created a favourable environment for the


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flourishing of ideas of working-class representation. This suited the constructivists, whose belief in the coming together of form and function in a building suited them admirably to meet the demand for new workers’ facilities, like clubs. But even so, constructivism was unable to drive Russian classicism from the architectural battlefield in the 1920s. Accordingly, while much of the built environment that was developed during the 1920s had clear proletarian lines as its aspiration, there was no consistency of style. By the middle 1930s, socialist realism had become the doctrine that was to guide architecture, just as it operated in the other artistic disciplines. This was also the time (April 1932) when independent architectural organisations were abolished and all architects were united within the All-Union Society of Proletarian Architects (VOPRA) which, like its literary counterpart noted above, played a considerable role in giving architectural form to socialist realism.301 Part of the new ethos was the demand by the political leaders that architecture should reflect the bright future toward which society was marching. Such architecture needed to be bright, optimistic and confident, characteristics reflected in both the clear form of buildings and the upward sweep of the plan for the Palace of Soviets. Although this imperative towards clean lines and a soaring profile would not be realised until after the war, the notion that buildings should be of clean lines and decorated in such a way as to symbolise brightness and the future was evident in much of the new architecture of Moscow from the early 1930s, which saw the revival of Russian classicism, but with a considerable diversity of forms.302 The early efforts at urban planning had come to nought, but the first five year plan and the conviction that they were moving into a new phase on the path to communism gave new impetus to this. At the CC plenum in June 1931, Moscow gorkom secretary Lazar Kaganovich called for the planned reconstruction of Moscow, declaring that Moscow should be ‘a laboratory to which people from all over the Union will flock to study its experience’, and ‘a capital worthy of the proletarian state’ which would both win admiration abroad and show what a proletarian state could achieve.303 The plenum adopted a resolution304 instructing the gorkom and the city soviet to work out a plan for the longer-term development of ‘Moscow as the socialist capital of the proletarian state’. The plan was to embrace housing stock, provision of communal services (dining rooms, cafes, tea houses, snack bars and factory kitchens), energy supply, transport (including the construction of the Metro), paving of streets, water supply, sanitation, green areas and the general distribution of facilities throughout the city. No new factories were to be built in Moscow (or Leningrad) from 1932. Two features of this general instruction are worthy of note. First, there is no hint of monumentalism, or of

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transforming Moscow into a capital city dominated by prestige projects. Second, by reaffirming the importance of the urban environment, this effectively brought to an end the struggle that had been going on for some time in architectural circles between the so-called ‘urbanists’ and the ‘deurbanists’. The former sought the concentration of people, industry and facilities in major urban conurbations while the latter favoured a much more decentralised approach with the population being scattered and travelling into smaller urban centres when they needed to via a developed transport and communications network. Although the ‘de-urbanists’ continued to present plans for Moscow’s development that reflected their desire to remove the difference between town and country by remoulding the urban environment, from early in the 1930s they had lost the war. In the years immediately following the 1931 plenum, many proposals were aired as architects from different schools sought to have their views accepted by the political leadership. The most radical plan, emanating from the French de-urbanist Le Corbusier, was for the effective demolition of Moscow and its rebuilding from the ground up in a new form.305 However, such schemes had little chance of success, especially in light of Kaganovich’s July 1932 injunction to ‘proceed first and foremost from the historically established forms of the present city, rebuilding it in accord with the dictates of our epoch’ and ‘the direction for the future Moscow indicated by Comrade Stalin’.306 Ultimate responsibility for drafting the new plan fell to a group headed by Vladimir Semenov in the city’s Architectural Planning Directorate. The draft plan gained Stalin’s general approval in July 1934, with the designers being complimented for not succumbing to those who wished to turn Moscow into a big village and those who favoured hyper-urbanisation.307 The plan was formally approved in a joint decision of Sovnarkom and the CC in July 1935.308 The plan was to reflect the fact that ‘Moscow is the Red Capital of the Soviet Union, where the warm heart of world revolution beats with ardour, bringing freedom to all exploited and oppressed humanity. Revolutionary fighters world-wide see in Red Moscow the capital of their socialist motherland’,309 and to ensure that ‘the construction of the capital of the USSR and the architectural form of the capital fully expressed the greatness and beauty of the socialist epoch’.310 The decision confirmed that the planning of the city would rest on existing historical forms, that it must utilise the best forms of classical311 and new architecture and the achievements of technology, and that it must integrate the different parts of the city into a ‘genuine socialist city’. Population was to be limited to five million while the territory was to be approximately doubled. There would be a wooded belt, with fingers running into the city, around the newly defined urban area. Two new


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canals would be built, effectively encircling the city and increasing its water supply, and there would be significant work on the embankments of the existing rivers. New streets were to be built to relieve the centre of the city of through traffic. The city centre would be transformed by the construction of a major new road from Dzerzhinsky Square through Okhotnyi Riad and the Manezh to the site of the Palace of Soviets, whence it would swing off to Luzhniki and the Lenin Hills. There was to be much clearing away of buildings between Dzerzhinsky Square and the Palace site, with new government buildings and buildings of a public and scientific character being built along the new road. Red Square would be doubled in size, Nogin, Dzerzhinsky, Sverdlov and Revolution Squares ‘architecturally re-worked’, while Kitai Gorod and Zariad’e would be cleared of petty structures for the construction of new monumental buildings of state significance. Existing basic radial and circular roads would be widened to no less than 30–40 metres, three new roads intersecting the city were to be built, and the circular road system would be expanded. Other central city squares were to be enhanced with fine architectural buildings and suburban underpasses. Housing was to be expanded in larger blocks with a maximum height of six storeys,312 except on wide roads and those of symbolic significance where they could be seven, ten or fourteen storeys. Facilities supplying goods and services should be established in such a way as to serve a number of these housing blocks rather than being incorporated individually into each one. There was also to be substantial upgrading of the services available in the city. This was a comprehensive, ambitious plan for the redevelopment of Moscow. If carried out, it would have meant not just a dramatic improvement in the availability of housing stock and the provision of services, but, in contrast to the more modest aims of Kaganovich’s original proposal, it would have transformed the centre of the city into a monumental capital characterised by wide avenues and very large imperial-style buildings, with much of the historic centre destroyed. But this was a price that could be paid for the creation of the new socialist city. As the joint Sovnarkom-CC decision said, it must be ensured that ‘construction in the capital of the USSR and the architectural form of the capital fully reflected the greatness and beauty of the socialist epoch’. Two major construction works which were brought to fruition at this time had been set in train earlier in the decade. Announced in June 1931 and opened in July 1937, the Moscow–Volga Canal was a massive engineering undertaking. Some 126 kilometres long, an average 40 metres in width and five metres deep, including 17 weirs and dams, 13 pumping and power stations, 11 locks, 7 reservoirs, and 192 other capital installations313 (plus gigantic statues of Lenin and Stalin beside the main sluice

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gates), the scale of the canal was staggering. It linked Moscow to the Volga (and thereby the Baltic, White and Caspian seas), increased the water flow in the Moscow River and thereby made navigation easier, and expanded the water supply to the city. Although largely built by prison camp labour, this was lauded as a major achievement of socialist construction. The other major project was the Moscow Metro.314 The ground was first broken on this project in March 1932, with the first twelve kilometres of line connecting Sokol’niki with Gorky Park via Komsomol’skaia Square and Okhotnyi Riad, opened on 14 May 1935;315 the first train to run bore Stalin’s portrait on the front. Initially (until 1955) bearing the name Kaganovich,316 the Metro was a major project which, as its coverage expanded, had a significant effect on the lives of ordinary Muscovites. It was also significant symbolically at the time. Much was made of the way volunteers were central to its construction,317 how the speed of its construction far exceeded that of similar projects in the capitalist world,318 and how its glory reflected that of socialist society and of the capital’s modernity.319 But what was also important about the Metro was the design and decoration. Many of the Metro tunnels were located very deep in the ground, enabling them to double as air-raid shelters. What this meant for the design of the system is that many of the stations had exceptionally long escalators to carry people from the surface to the platforms. Furthermore the interior of the initial stations was highly decorative. Many were characterised by Greek-style columns, complex cornices, friezes, chandeliers, mosaics, elaborate statuary, stained glass and rare metals. Adoption for many of the stations of the island design whereby passengers going in both directions were served by the same platform created large, usually vaulted, areas well suited to portray the grandeur of Soviet civilisation;320 this also countered the sense of being underground, thereby fuelling the theme that Soviet citizens could overcome any obstacles. Rather than part of an underground railway, many of the Metro stations looked like elaborate houses of culture. The Metro appeared as a primary symbol of Stalinist Soviet culture, with its decoration providing a mythical microcosm of the new socialist society.321 Upon completion of the first stage in 1935, the Metro was hailed as the best in the world and indicative of socialism’s ability to conquer nature. Changing patterns of decoration in the stations showed the changing nature of Soviet symbolism and of the conception of Soviet society. The first stations (1932–5) were characterised by classical style (e.g. Palace of Soviets/Kropotkinskaia) or by a symbolism focused on a direct but limited conception of important features of Soviet society; e.g. Komsomol’skaia depicted four socialist archetypes: soldier, sailor, worker and collective farmer. The second wave of stations (1937–8) were more elaborate in


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terms of sculptures, mosaics and bas-reliefs, and portrayed a wider array of social categories. The Revolution Square stop had eighty bronze statues throughout the station, and these were of three broad social categories. First, military and political heroes of the revolution and the civil war, including workers, sailors, soldiers, a parachutist and a border guard with a dog.322 Second, heroes of labour and science, which included workers, kolkhozniks, inventors, scientists, students and male and female athletes, a spread which reflects the post-1936 breadth of acceptable social categories. Third, the nuclear family. Furthermore in the decoration of the stations, features like triumphal arches (Palace of Soviets station) and pillars reminiscent of Greek temples (Kirov and Sokol’niki stations) had traditionally marked the borderline between profane and sacred places, reinforcing the sense of the Metro as being a temple to the new civilisation. Some of the measures in the 1935 plan were implemented, at least in part. Tverskaia, renamed Gorky Street, was straightened and widened, with more than fifty buildings moved back from their original street line to a new position,323 a new storey and partial façade added to the Moscow Soviet building, and new, grand, apartment houses built on the lower reaches of the street. Gorky Street was presented as the model street of the new communist city. Considerable clearing took place in the central area, most importantly in Okhotnyi Riad which was cleared of buildings and thereby made into an area in which large numbers of people could assemble to be marshalled before marching into Red Square on the regime’s feast days. The Garden Ring road was widened (at the expense of many trees), embankments were built along the Moscow River, and there was much rebuilding along major exit routes from the city. But many of the other major developments that were planned did not eventuate: many major road developments, the doubling of Red Square, and the construction of a suite of major government buildings in the city centre all remained unstarted. However, during the 1930s, a number of important buildings were erected:324 Moscow Hotel (1936), Trade Union building (1931–6), Council of Labour and Defence building (1932–6; later Gosplan headquarters), Frunze Military Academy (1932–7), Northern River Station (1932–7), Tsentrosoiuz building (1928–37), Pravda building on Pravda Street (1931–7), house on Mokhovaia Street (1932–4), Ministry of Defence building (1934–8), Central Academic Theatre of the Army (1934–40), and Lenin Library (1928–41); also begun at this time but not completed until after the war was the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (1937–54). Particularly striking among these are the Council of Labour and Defence building and the Central Academic Theatre of the Army. The former dominated Okhotnyi Riad, with an eleven-storey symmetrical façade broken in the centre by a huge lintel above the third storey.

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It was a classical monumental building, exuding power but without being overbearing, and formed a symbolic ensemble with the Moskva Hotel opposite; all administrative buildings were to be tangible representations of state power, but it was here that this was most developed. The latter, situated on Commune (now Suvorovskaia) Square, was designed in the form of a tiered star and was the ‘dominant vertical force’ in pre-war Moscow.325 There was also demolition: Chudov Monastery (December 1929), Simonov Monastery (early 1930), Voskresenskie Gates (including the Iverskaia Chapel) at the entrance to Red Square (1931), the Golitsyn mansion near Okhotnyi Riad (1932), the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (December 1931–January 1932), the Sukharev Tower (April 1934),326 part of the Kitai gorod wall (1934) and Kazan Cathedral on Red Square (July–August 1936) were destroyed, the tsarist emblems on the Kremlin towers were removed in 1935 and replaced with back-lit red stars in 1937, Osip Bove’s triumphal gate on the road to Leningrad was destroyed (1936), and significant numbers of churches were closed; there were 224 working Orthodox churches in Moscow in 1930, but this fell to 100 in January 1933, 40 in 1937 and 16 in 1938.327 Kaganovich had personally had three churches demolished so that May Day ‘demonstration processions from the six districts of Moscow should all pour into Red Square at the same time’.328 In addition, some buildings were taken over and used for different purposes; for example Strastnoi Convent on Tverskaia became an anticlerical museum (closed March 1928), Rozhdestvenskii Convent became the Museum of the History of Chemistry in 1929 and Danilov Monastery became an orphans’ detention centre; the former city Duma building on Red Square became the Central Lenin Museum in 1936.329 Some street names were also changed at this time, although at a lower rate than in the 1920s.330 Although the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition was not completed until after the war, it opened in 1939. Occupying some 136 hectares, it was a celebration of collective agriculture. It contained working models of farms and factories and celebrated the agricultural successes of the USSR, all under the shadow of Sergei Merkurov’s gigantic statue of Stalin331 and Mukhina’s ‘Rabochii i kolkhoznitsa’, which topped the entrance gate. It was a celebration of plenty, achievement and socialism, with individual pavilions for each of the then ten non-Russian republics (but not for Russia), each designed to reflect a national republican theme and to represent the unity of all within the USSR. The theme was clearly the multinational nature of the country and the Soviet socialist community. The image was one of the Soviet people having cast off the chains of the past and now, under the leadership of the wise Stalin (whose quotations


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and images were liberally spread around the exhibition) were enjoying the bountiful plenty of socialism. The exhibition was representative of the society and its plenitude. It was shut in 1941 at the outbreak of the war. Major transformation had occurred in Moscow by the time of the war. However although significant changes had been made in the centre of the city, it is clearly not the case that the city was reworked into a new, obviously socialist, form. The Metro, Gorky Street, the reworked area along Okhotnyi Riad, new apartment buildings in the centre, the largescale road paving and some other buildings may have given a sense of the bright and radiant future, but much of the city remained untransformed when the war broke out. Furthermore, not only was most of this development in the central parts of the city, but much of the new accommodation was for the elite, broadly defined, rather than the working population. This was in stark contrast to the pattern of housing provision in the 1920s which was directed primarily at the working class and reflects the emphasis on merit rather than egalitarianism in the regime’s symbolic order. Nevertheless by the end of the 1930s, Soviet public speakers and publicists waxed lyrical about ‘socialist Moscow’, its achievements, and its role as a beacon to the world’s proletariat and symbol of the future. In 1935, Kaganovich had declared that the redevelopment of Moscow disproved the criticism that the Soviet Union offered a ‘barracks socialism’; this was the prefiguring of the life to come,332 with the reworked centre a clear representation of the building of socialism in practice. Ritual The reworking of the centre of Moscow was designed in part to facilitate enhanced performance of public ritual activity, something which took on a higher profile at this time. Ritual continued to express the principal theme of the regime’s metanarrative, the achievement of socialism through popular commitment, social unity and Stalin’s guidance despite the extent of opposition. Public demonstrations on the regime’s major feast days were more organised, structured333 and militarised during this period than they had been in the 1920s. From 1928 parades became, in Stites’ words, ‘more rigidly organized, politicized, militarized, and standardized’.334 The message of the celebration was combative, with sharp hostility to both foreign opposition and the hidden enemy within, and criticism of those workers who were not fully committed to the cause; marching workers carried placards reporting their plan over-fulfilment and promising to do even more in the future. A visitor to Moscow described the 7 November 1929 parade. He described how processions came along all the arteries into Teatral’naia Square, forming a human river. They carried

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flags, emblems and inscriptions on calico and moved towards Red Square. They sang songs, which those on the pavement joined in. The columns were constituted by different groups, each preceded by their own placards, emblems and sometimes music, and they often carried animated silhouettes worked by levers. Some silhouettes were related to the type of work the people did, such as a train for the railway workers; others were satirical and poked fun at enemies like Poincaré and Lloyd George. They also often carried proclamations, like ‘We are realising the plan in four years’ and ‘We form the labour front for socialist construction’. The overwhelming sentiment, according to this observer, was one of joy.335 As the processions proceeded, there were often speeches, poetry readings, theatrical and musical performances, much of it improvised and impromptu.336 City buildings were decorated with banners, as were the Kremlin walls, and the marchers saluted ‘reverently’ as they passed the Lenin mausoleum on which the leaders stood.337 The parades were also on a larger scale, and often characterised by large physical culture demonstrations.338 According to Stites,339 the number of troops and variety of units deployed in front of the Kremlin increased each year (except 1934 when there was a campaign for diplomatic peace and security) with a peak in 1939. The number of aircraft overflying also increased during this period. These demonstrations celebrated socialist achievements, emphasising the building of socialism and, in the second half of the 1930s, the friendship of the peoples of the USSR. The marchers carried placards through which they ‘swore to their leaders to fulfil their plans, held up evidence of their recent achievements in the form of production graphs, repeated work ethic oaths, displayed shame boards, and endorsed competition in the argot of combat.’340 They also parodied enemies, both at home and abroad. The laudation of Stalin was a major theme, especially later in the decade. The report of the celebration of the day of physical culture in 1935341 is indicative of this. Five thousand Pioneers march into Red Square: Their glances turn to the left side of the mausoleum where Stalin stands, smiling. The children carry slogans of woven natural flowers: ‘Greetings best friend of the Pioneers, comrade Stalin!’ ‘Thank you comrade Stalin for a happy life!’ The slogans soar over the column of pioneers from Dzerzhinsky region. From afar is heard a growing drone. Aeroplanes appear.342 They are arranged in such an order that they form the word ‘STALIN’. The name of Stalin soars over Moscow. Into the square comes the sports organisation, the Spartacists. At the head of the columns are huge placards with gold letters: ‘Greetings great Stalin’. With a song ending with the cry ‘Stalin hooray!’ forces of the Red Army go past the mausoleum.

Ritualised demonstrations/parades became particularly prominent during the 1930s, seemingly gathering impetus in the middle of the decade.


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These parades, demonstrations, carnivals and celebrations were means of emphasising national prosperity and the happy life. Lines of laughing and smiling people carrying symbols of high levels of production and high material standards of living reinforced the impression of prosperity and contentment with the comfortable lifestyle. In December 1935 (a month after Stalin’s ‘life has become more joyous’ comment) the New Year’s tree was re-introduced (it had been abolished in 1928 in the drive to do away with Christmas) and the commemoration of the centenary of Pushkin’s birth (February 1937) was announced. In 1936–7 there were campaigns devoted to the new constitution and in preparation for the December 1937 Supreme Soviet elections. The celebration of arctic and aviation heroes was prominent while preparations for the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution took place on a larger scale than previously. In addition, a number of new celebratory days were created: Air Force Day (third Sunday in August beginning in 1933; this joined Red Army Day and Border Guards Day established in the 1920s), All-Union Railway Worker Day (first Sunday in August beginning in 1936), Navy Day (last Sunday in July beginning in 1939) and All-Union Physiculturist Day (second Saturday in August beginning in 1939). These joined International Women’s Day, International Youth Day, and Shock Workers Day.343 At the official level, significant signs of hierarchy were re-introduced, reflecting the more general emphasis on merit over equality that was also implicit in the contemporaneous promotion of heroes. In 1934 the title ‘meritorious artist’ was introduced and academic degrees were restored. In 1935 military ranks and saluting were re-introduced, while among officials ties, white shirts and shiny black shoes became a kind of ‘uniform’,344 although Stalin continued to wear the simple military-style jacket he had regularly worn. New awards for personal achievement were created: the Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1928), the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Star were created in 1930, the Hero of the Soviet Union in 1934, Order of the Mark of Honour in 1935, the Badge of Honour in 1936, Hero of Socialist Labour in 1938, and the Stalin Prize for literature in 1939.345 At the more personal level, the re-emphasis on the family led to the disappearance of those invented ceremonies of family and community that had been introduced in the 1920s. The campaign against religious belief was pursued particularly vigorously in the early part of the 1930s, with church closures and the attempt to abolish Christmas. The qualities of the new Soviet man noted above were central in the imagery of the time. This also pervaded the party, with a code of behaviour emerging for party members, which included politeness and decorum, cultured

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behaviour, civility (and therefore a rejection of the sort of tough guy profile that had become common in the 1920s), a rejection of all forms of dissolute behaviour, and a commitment to and knowledge of MarxismLeninism.346 During this time, party life also became more ritualised. Perhaps the clearest instance of this was the treatment accorded to the leader. The Soviet system was one that did not have elaborate rituals for the crowning of a leader in the way that monarchies had. The post of party leader, the General Secretary, had been established in 1922 but was not mentioned in the formal party Rules until 1966, even though during the 1920s this was emerging as the most important position in the political system. There was no elaborate ceremony for the filling of this position; formally it was decided by the CC at a meeting immediately after the party congress had finalised the new composition of the CC itself. However as noted above, during the 1930s the announcement of the name of the General Secretary, Joseph Stalin, was invariably the occasion for tumultuous popular approbation by the assembled party members. It was not simply upon announcement of Stalin’s election that such applause and approbation broke out, but upon the mere mention of his name. The sort of affirmations of popular love and respect noted above in discussing the cult became a standard feature of party meetings, which were thereby transformed into occasions for the laudation of the leader. This ritualised laudation of the individual seemingly became one of the central purposes of party meetings. However, although the celebration of Stalin was a key element of such meetings, his personal involvement in those meetings was not as an emanation of power or glory. Generally he did not chair the meeting, he tended to sit among the meeting presidium and to one side rather than in the centre, and his demeanour was always one of modesty and almost self-effacement. In his person and the way he presented himself, he seemed the very antithesis of the all-powerful vozhd. But through this projection of Stalin, the myth of leadership had been transformed; the metanarrative now vested leadership in the charismatic individual rather than the infallible party. The laudation of the leader in party meetings was one aspect of the way in which those meetings during the 1930s became even more straitened and stylised than they had been in the late 1920s. When leading party figures gave reports, they were listened to in silence except when ‘spontaneous’ applause broke out either at the mention of Stalin’s name or at something that the speaker said, or there were shouted affirmations (e.g. ‘totally correct’, ‘that’s right’) of specific points. Generally other speakers arose to affirm the report, often adding embellishments of their own, but never deviating from the master narrative that was running through proceedings. The report was accepted unanimously, including


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the ‘Report of the CC’ which was delivered to each congress by the General Secretary. Votes for positions were not always declared to be unanimous with, for example, the election of membership of the CC being characterised by a sliding scale of ‘votes against’ various candidates. This was, in part, a mechanism for differentiating between the vozhd and his comrades. But all of these votes were overwhelming.347 The ethos of party meetings was one of unanimity. Opposition was not to be expressed. Indeed, those who were accused of involvement in oppositionist activity were required formally and openly to confess their malfeasance and throw themselves on the mercy of the party. This was a major feature of the show trials noted above, but it also occurred in party fora, where other party members were also invited to criticise the malfeasant.348 The major form that this took in the party was ‘criticism-self-criticism’ meetings. From the outset, these had been a means of promoting lowerlevel criticism of leaders, but it had generally only taken place when prompted from above. During the 1930s, on the back of calls for criticism and self-criticism from the centre, the party emphasis from the early 1930s on individual responsibility,349 and the search for those who were not performing satisfactorily, this became a major weapon in the struggle to remove deficient local and middle-ranking leaders.350 Imbued with the rhetoric of democracy and rank-and-file control over the leaders, criticism-self-criticism meetings became ritualised and stylised in a form that lasted into late Stalinism.351 Participants in the meeting would be called upon to criticise a particular leader, his actions and/or views. The critics were expected to take their lead from the chair of the meeting, usually a leading figure higher in rank than the person being criticised, or from recent authoritative articles in the press. At the conclusion of the criticisms, the person being criticised was expected to make a full confession of his/her failings and promise to work hard to overcome them. Abject confession was the only way such a person could hope to avoid serious consequences, but even this was often not enough. What was particularly important about this was the expectation that all members of the meeting would be involved in this process. It was not just about rooting out unsatisfactory performance; it was about collective incorporation into regime activity. Where this differed from the situation in the 1920s is that this was now also being required of elite members of the party rather than just those on lower levels, and it was more pointedly directed at individuals in contrast to the more collective focus of the 1920s.352 Unanimity was also a feature of all Soviet elections, not just the party. The declared turnout was always close to 100 per cent, of whom a similar proportion supported candidates of the ‘bloc of Communists and nonparty people’. Candidates would attend public meetings, give addresses,

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always following the master narrative contained in the party’s and its leaders’ statements, but they would stand unchallenged, further demonstrating the unanimity of the Soviet community. Outside election campaigns, popular meetings were often called to mobilise the populace around the latest campaign. At such gatherings the attendees were encouraged to become involved in public activity and, through their involvement, to commit to the regime and its aims. One important instance of this sort of meeting was those called to discuss the show trials and their results.353 By the end of the 1930s the Stalin cult had become the centrepiece of the Soviet metanarrative and the essential element which gave meaning to all the rest. In the metanarrative, time and space were conquered as fantastic achievements were realised through the efforts of the Soviet people led by comrade Stalin. The normal constraints of time and space were transcended as socialism was built; five year plans achieved in four years, hero projects brought to fulfilment against seemingly overwhelming odds, and heroic record-breaking exploits in all fields of endeavour. And the presentation of that society had, by the late 1930s and under the influence of socialist realism, taken the form of an idealisation of life characterised by happy people living in bright newly constructed urban environments, labouring in pleasant workplaces, living in spacious apartments with an array of consumer goods, and enjoying leisure time in congenial surroundings. While everybody knew that this idealised image had not been realised, the scale of change actually achieved and the promise this held for the future meant that this future seemed to be not something cut off from the present, but immanent in contemporary Soviet society. The claimed achievement of socialism in 1936 meant that structural change of major dimensions was not needed for the achievement of the communist ideal. But although this bright future was immanent in the present, its emergence was neither automatic nor inevitable. It required the guidance of ‘the helmsman’ and ‘genius leader’. It was only through his guidance that the present had been gained; the retelling of history from a teleological perspective both collapsed the distinction between past and present and effectively elevated Stalin to the position of the deus ex machina of history, the figure without whom the course of history would be very different. Stalin had to continue to fulfil this role, and thereby guarantee the shift into communism. In this way the Stalin cult gave coherence and meaning to the Soviet metanarrative as a whole. The teleological aim, communism, and the guarantor of its achievement, Stalin, were intimately linked because it was only through the latter that the present made sense and the future could be achieved.


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The myth of the Great Patriotic War With the outbreak of war in June 1941, a myth of the Great Patriotic War began to form, reinforcing the impact of the myth of external opposition. As in all of the combatant countries, the imagery that dominated the public sphere during the war years directly concerned the war and its course and much of it was simplified, stylised and stereotypical. A number of themes stand out: hatred and ridicule of the invader, and the heroism, both individual and collective, and love of country of the defenders. While these were evident in the main speeches given by political leaders and in the press,354 they appear particularly clearly in the poster art and paintings of the period.355 The first theme, representation of the enemy, was from the war’s beginning cast in terms both of ridicule and of emphasis upon the bestial nature of the fascist invaders.356 Resonating with the earlier theme of enemies outside the country, German forces were presented as intent on one thing: the violent destruction of the Soviet Union and the enslavement of its people. German soldiers were never shown in a flattering light, and sometimes not even in human form. Continuing the depiction of fascism at times during the earlier period, the enemy was sometimes shown as a monster,357 a wild beast,358 a wolf,359 or a vulture.360 Often, the enemy was suggested by a caricature of Hitler, as a manic person often with a claw for a hand,361 or a rough and ill-cultured brutish man shown either in the act of terrorising or destroying or having completed such;362 the enemy was often associated with atrocities.363 Sometimes a German soldier was depicted as an oafish incompetent,364 while many posters depicted them as either dead or being defeated in battle;365 some posters showed such defeats as following an over-confident and puffed up Hitler or German soldier heading towards battle.366 But reflecting the continued salience of the myth of internal enemies, there was also strong emphasis on the need to remain aware of the danger within. This danger was now seen less in terms of bourgeois remnants and more of fascist sympathisers. The enemy was hidden, with the common injunction to beware of spies and diversionists; the 1941 poster showing a woman with her finger to her lips and the statement ‘Don’t blab’ was a famous instance of this.367 This sort of concern for enemies in the ranks is a common development in societies during wartime, and in the Soviet case it was given apparent substance by things like the recent incorporation of some areas into the Soviet Union, the initial welcome German troops received in Ukraine, and developments like the emergence of the Vlasov forces (Soviet troops who fought on the German side). The high level of official concern about such enemies is reflected in the forced

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relocation in 1943–4 of a number of small national groups accused of collaborating with the Germans, and the incarceration of Soviet troops who had been prisoners of war of the Germans. Thus during the war, the picture of a society vulnerable to internal opposition remained strong. The danger posed by the fascist invader (and by their domestic supporters) was reflected in the portrayal of devastation and destruction, with large numbers of bodies of people killed, living people terrorised, the land devastated and the material plant destroyed. In these sorts of images, women and children were much more prominently represented than men. The prominence of women as victims is clearly reflected in the 1941 poster showing fire engulfing a building with a dead woman and a woman hunched over with her head in the crook of her arms in the background, and in the foreground a strong woman in a red dress rallying support, and the caption ‘Fascism – the most bitter enemy of women’.368 Images of dead women,369 sometimes with their children crying over them,370 sobbing women holding their dead children,371 women held captive,372 or simply suffering as a result of the devastation wrought by the Germans,373 were common in both posters and paintings. To save the women and children was portrayed as an important imperative in the expulsion of the invaders.374 Against this image of the enemy, the Soviet soldier always appeared in heroic mode; in the November 1941 decision on the mounting of celebrations in honour of the anniversary of the revolution,375 the bloodthirsty enemy seeking to destroy the freedom of the people of the USSR was contrasted with the heroic armed forces and people who were defending Soviet land and the life, honour and freedom of the peoples of the USSR. Whether in a group with arms at the ready and staring intently at the enemy,376 waiting to engage in battle,377 charging into battle,378 or actually engaged in battle,379 the Soviet soldier was a clean-cut, well-built, often fresh-faced youth, determined to give his all for the defeat of the enemies of his motherland. While the enemy was shifty, sneaky and not to be trusted, the Soviet soldier was firm, true and dedicated. This conception was at the heart of those images showing the strong and upright son going off to war and being urged by a parent to ‘be a hero’ or to ‘beat the enemy’,380 and later those showing a soldier being thanked for liberation from the German invaders.381 But the clearest representation of these qualities was in those posters of the ‘they shall not pass’ genre382 where a soldier is shown barring the path of the enemy’s advance; the defence of Moscow was an important case of this.383 Most of the representations of fighting men were of soldiers, but there were also posters showing airmen,384 sailors385 and partisans,386 all of whom shared the characteristics attributed to the soldiers.


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The hero was an important element in the myth of the war. Many individual members of the military were identified as heroes for their deeds (according to Sartori387 by the end of the war more than 10,000 people had been made Hero of the Soviet Union) while the title ‘Hero City’ was generated and initially awarded to Leningrad, Sevastopol’ and Stalingrad. There were three types of individual heroes:388 leading military figures honoured for their strategic planning and leadership role, those military men committing brave acts, often involving loss of their lives, and those martyrs who were tortured and died for the cause of defence of the Motherland. Examples of the first group, the leading military figures, were Stalin and Zhukov, but coverage was given to other commanders as well. The projection of these leaders in heroic form was much more prominent from 1943 when the tide of the war had turned than it was during the darker days of 1941–2. The second type of hero, those committing brave battlefield acts, were by far the most numerous sort. Examples include Aleksandr Matrosov who threw his body on an enemy machine gun and thereby sacrificed himself for his comrades, and the twenty-eight ‘Panfilov men’ who died fighting a German tank division on the Volokamsk highway. The third type of hero, the martyr, was present throughout the war, with the most famous of these being the Komsomol member Zoia Kosmodem’enskaia who was reported as having been captured by the Germans in December 1941 trying to set fire to a stable in a village where German forces were quartered. Despite torture, she refused to give the enemy any information and died with the words ‘it is happiness to die for my people’ and ‘Stalin is with us’ on her lips.389 The image of these latter two types of hero was ambiguous and is illustrated by Kosmodem’enskaia’s words. The source of their motivation was not always clear. There was always a strong element of the sense that they were acting on their own initiative and fighting for their comrades, the Motherland, and their people, that they were the true sons and daughters of the Rodina battling to save her from the fascist aggressors. But there was also an undertone in many of the stories, especially after 1942, that they were acting on the orders or encouragement of comrade Stalin. The national motivation was thus not unalloyed by an ideological element, with the latter becoming stronger the longer the war progressed. The projection of these heroes created a model of the dedication and sacrifice expected of the Soviet people, especially communists. It was also closely related to the projection of heroes from Russian national history (see below). But war wasn’t only the task of the military; the civilians in the rear had a crucial part to play. Male workers had a central role in the production of war material, as shown explicitly in the 1941 poster ‘More metal means

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more arms’,390 but they were also important in other jobs.391 Women too played a central part in the domestic supply of the war effort through their labour in the factories,392 on the farms,393 and in the construction industry.394 Women were shown as the close supporters of the soldiers at the front,395 and even fighting as partisans.396 The close relationship between front and rear was evident in those posters urging all efforts to be made for the front,397 both in the factory and farm;398 the famous poster showing an industrial bucket pouring molten steel into the form of a bomb which destroys a German tank is a good instance of this.399 It was also clear in the call for the supply of warm clothes to the soldiers,400 in the injunction that citizens were always to be on guard against the enemy and his actions;401 they were even portrayed as constituting a kind of citizens’ militia.402 Even children had a role in defending the Motherland; they were to tell their parents if they saw enemy forces,403 assist in production,404 and were even mobilised into recruitment for the front.405 The conflict was presented as a kind of people’s war, with the partnership between the Soviet people and their armed forces paramount; accordingly there was little attention given to the allies. The female form became an even more potent symbol during this time through its projection as the Rodina. This was evident right from the start with the classic 1941 poster showing a woman in rich red clothing with one arm in the air and the other extended holding a piece of paper with ‘Military oath’ written on it, against a background of bayonets and with the slogan ‘The Motherland is calling!’406 This is probably the most famous poster of the war and clearly shows the woman as the embodiment of the country. Another poster, from 1943, shows a woman holding a child, both dressed in red, and a red banner, urging on the Soviet soldiers in front of her, with the caption ‘For the Motherland!’407 Depiction of the woman in red and in a dominating place on the poster is a clear indication of the female personification of the country,408 while the continual use of the term Rodina is a clear expression of this sentiment. Another instance of this use of the female form is the 1943 poster which equates a woman who is tied up to a post with Ukraine, which at the time was under occupation.409 And when the Germans have been expelled, a woman in red welcomes the liberation of the Motherland.410 Women were also important in the emphasis upon the role they played in the maintenance of the Soviet family, which throughout the war years remained a symbolic focus of attention as the rock upon which the defence effort rested.411 As the tide of war began to turn, posters encouraged Soviet forces to advance ‘to the west’. As early as 1942 a poster by Viktor Ivanov showed Soviet forces on horseback routing German troops under the heading ‘Forward to the west red horsemen!’412 In 1943, this injunction was


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accompanied by an image of a woman looking towards the east from where the Soviet troops approached and appealing for help, with the advance being to achieve the ‘full liberation of the Soviet land’.413 Also in 1943 the Soviet advance was contrasted with the Germans’ march to the east, through depiction of that advance as being accompanied by the destruction of a German sign saying ‘to the east’;414 this was the road to victory.415 By 1944, this had become ‘on to Berlin’.416 Posters highlighted particular victories as they occurred – Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, Leningrad, Berlin. Liberation from German control and ultimate victory was marked in a number of ways. One common form was the giving of thanks directly to a soldier by a citizen, sometimes to the son by a parent,417 or generally from the populace to the ‘soldierliberators’.418 Others simply evoked a theme of celebration which, while it may not have been specifically linked with victory in the war, clearly assumed this.419 There was salute to the heroes,420 and glory to the victorious forces.421 Victory was also shown in the depictions of Soviet soldiers, usually happy and smiling, in Berlin.422 The people were now also shown as smiling and happy,423 a genre which continued the theme evident from 1944 that ‘you will live happily’.424 Sometimes posters showed material evidence of this happier lifestyle, such as the happy family going into a new house,425 or welcoming back their soldier son.426 Whereas victory and the happy life that it would bring constituted a consistent theme in the regime’s visual propaganda during the last part of the war in particular, a major theme emphasised throughout the war was the defence of the Rodina. This emphasis on the Rodina fitted in well with the myth of Russian statehood and its emphasis on the great figures of Russian history. The uneasy balance between nationalist and socialist themes and between Russian and Soviet themes which had been emerging during the late thirties shifted strongly in favour of Russian nationalism during the war, especially the first two years. Speakers from Stalin down evoked Russia’s past and the heroic figures who were prominent in the building and defence of the Russian state (see below), with the main pantheon of those figures comprising Aleksandr Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoi, Kuz’ma Minin, Dmitry Pozharsky, Aleksandr Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov. The names and images of these people were continually invoked as the metanarrative explicitly linked the victorious struggles of the past with the current conflict. The Russian past was a prominent theme in the popular culture of the war years, including literature, cinema, art and exhibitions.427 New military decorations were introduced in 1942 named after Suvorov, Kutuzov and Nevsky, in 1943 after the Ukrainian Khmelnitsky, and in 1944 Ushakov and Nakhimov.428 Perhaps the starkest indication of this changed emphasis was the 1944 renaming of the chief

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boulevard in Leningrad from Avenue of 25 October (and therefore marking the October Revolution) into Nevsky Prospekt (in honour of Aleksandr Nevsky who defeated the Teutonic Knights in the Battle on the Ice in 1242). In 1944 a new state anthem was introduced to replace the Internationale. The anthem was much more nationalist in tone than its predecessor, beginning with the injunction ‘An unbreakable union of free republics, United forever by Great Rus!’, although it later also included references to Lenin and Stalin.429 The nationalist theme was strongly represented in wartime art. One form of doing this was to use posters explicitly based on those used during the revolution and civil war.430 But the more important means of bringing this about was through the evocation of Russian historical figures, like Suvorov and Chapaev,431 or Nevsky,432 Donskoi, Minin, Pozharsky, Suvorov and Kutuzov.433 The shadowing of Soviet soldiers by figures wearing medieval Russian armour,434 or the simple depiction of these earlier warriors,435 was also common. The depiction of Hitler in the guise of Napoleon436 and the quotation of the words of Russian cultural or historical figures were other means of linking with the past.437 This essentially Russian nationalist appeal for the defence of the Rodina was a very strong theme throughout the war. The generally accepted view of the war years is that regime symbolism was dominated by such patriotic images, forcing socialist imagery from the scene. However this is not an accurate picture of the Soviet metanarrative during the war years. Certainly there was a strengthening of patriotic elements, as there was in all of the combatant countries, although from the time of the victory at Stalingrad there was renewed emphasis upon Stalin and the party. But what was seen in the USSR during the war was a continuation of the trend that had been developing in the second half of the 1930s, the intertwining of socialist and nationalist/patriotic images to produce a multi-faceted conception of Soviet socialist society. The decline of class imagery and its replacement by that of the Soviet people was a logical consequence of the definition of Soviet society contained in the 1936 Constitution and a continuation of the terms in which the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ imagery of the period of the terror was cast. This melding of socialism and nationalism continued apace during the war years. One element of this was the way the wartime metanarrative gave increased prominence to individual Soviet citizens, both soldiers and civilians, acting in ways not seemingly directly linked with the party and its norms. The seeming spontaneity of individual agency (such as soldiers throwing themselves under enemy tanks) and the expression in the press through published letters of personal sentiments and concerns


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has been seen implicitly as undermining the party’s control by suggesting its leadership was not needed.438 But while this sort of image did represent a change from the norm, the image of an individual acting seemingly independently was consistent with one important assumption from the second half of the 1930s, that the achievement of socialism meant the psychic commitment of Soviet citizens to the system and what it stood for. Citizens committed to socialist values were able to act without waiting for instructions because of their dedication to the cause. The family metaphor so common during the war was another expression of this, and was reinforced by the way the wartime metanarrative sought through the press to associate personal with national concerns and to interweave the personal experience of people with the wider national experience; individual tragedy and national tragedy were woven together, and the cement that united them was the socialist commitment of Soviet citizens. The metanarrative sought to ensure the melding together of Russian nationalism, Soviet patriotism and socialist commitment, and to root these in the consciousness of the populace. This is also evident in the art of the period. On most occasions when soldiers or military equipment were shown, a red star, the symbol of the Soviet military, is evident, while the red banner was also frequently shown on posters.439 Certainly there is little reference to October or to communism/socialism, but posters did show flags with the hammer and sickle440 or with the star symbol of the military,441 there were images of the Kremlin with red stars prominent over it,442 and the name of the country, USSR, did appear.443 The symbolism of the regime was also reflected in the way in which workers and peasants were sometimes shown holding the classic symbols of their classes and the centrepiece of the Soviet state emblem, blacksmith’s hammer and sickle.444 Relatively few posters featured either Lenin or Stalin, although Lenin’s profile did appear on military awards which individuals were sometimes shown as wearing,445 and in 1944 his profile towering over troops advancing dominated a poster with the slogan ‘Under the banner of Lenin – forward for the motherland, for our victory!’446 Final victory was sometimes shown as being celebrated under a disc containing the profiles of Lenin behind and Stalin in front.447 Stalin was sometimes evident through the quotation of his words448 or through the reference to things like the ‘Stalinist falcons’449 or the ‘Stalinist guard’.450 By 1944 railway workers were being called on to carry out the promise ‘given to comrade Stalin’,451 while by 1945 a poster showed a happy woman and child (who is waving a Soviet flag) dwarfing banners declaring ‘Glory to the hero-victors!’, ‘Glory to the Red Army!’, and ‘Glory to great Stalin!’.452 But while it is clear that the depiction of specifically Soviet symbols was a less significant theme in the wartime

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posters than that of the motherland and its defence, ideological symbols remained evident, particularly in the last years of the war. This melding of different elements also occurred in the initial official responses to the German attack. In his radio address of 22 June 1941,453 the first government response to the opening of hostilities, Molotov advanced the patriotic theme by declaring that the military were performing their duty to ‘the Fatherland, to the Soviet people’ and, invoking the defeat of Napoleon’s invasion, said that they would once again ‘wage a victorious war for our Fatherland, for our country, for honour, for liberty’. The people would respond in a way ‘worthy of real Soviet patriots . . . The Government calls on you, citizens of the Soviet Union, to rally still more closely around our glorious Bolshevik party, around our Soviet government, around our great leader, Comrade Stalin.’ He also evoked ideological imagery from earlier when he argued that the attack was not by the German people, ‘whose suffering we understand, but by the clique of bloodthirsty Fascist rulers of Germany.’ Although socialism and capitalism were not mentioned in his speech and the imagery was very much one of Soviet patriotism, the allegory of socialism versus capitalism continued to underpin it. Stalin too used both themes in his speech of 3 July 1941.454 He opened his speech with ‘Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! Men of our Army and Navy!’ He went on to invoke past military success against both Napoleon and the Germans (during the First World War), and declared that the Soviet people were standing side by side with the military ‘in defence of our native land’. He argued that the enemy was out to seize their land and its produce, ‘to restore the rule of landlords, to restore Tsarism’ and to destroy the multinational USSR. He invoked Lenin, ‘the great founder of our state’, and cited the ‘splendid virtue of the Bolshevik’ as what must motivate both the military and the peoples of the Soviet Union. Stalin argued that the enemy hated ‘our country which has ensured all working people labour in freedom and prosperity’, and called on the need for a ‘ruthless fight against all disorganisers of the rear, deserters, panicmongers, rumour-mongers, to exterminate spies, diversionists and enemy parachutists’. This was a patriotic war of all of the Soviet people against the German forces. Stalin ended by calling on all of the people to rally around the ‘Party of Lenin-Stalin’ and around the Soviet Government. The emphasis on the patriotic theme was clearly strong in this speech, but socialist themes were also present. The use of familial terms was significant but from the late 1930s evocation of family as a basis of group membership with Stalin was already established as a constituent part of the metanarrative. Socialist elements were also present at the celebration of the twentyfourth anniversary of the October Revolution in November 1941, when


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the Germans were at the gates of Moscow, and the regime marked the anniversary with a full-scale military parade through Red Square, after which the troops went straight to the front. In his major speech marking this occasion,455 Stalin addressed his listeners (this time party and state officials rather than the general populace as in July) as ‘Comrades’. He gave a characterisation of Soviet development from the ‘October socialist revolution’, declaring that the time of peaceful construction had now given way to a ‘war of liberation’ to defend the ‘honour and freedom of our Motherland’. The initial setbacks in the war, he declared, had ‘strengthened further the alliance of the workers and peasants, as well as the friendship of the peoples of the USSR’. The unity of the people in the face of this attack shows that the Soviet system is ‘the most stable’ in the world. Stalin declared that the fascists were imperialists who sought ‘the extermination of the great Russian nation, the nation of Plekhanov and Lenin, Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, Pushkin and Tolstoy, Glinka and Tchaikovsky, Gorky and Chekhov, Sechenov and Pavlov, Repin and Surikov, Suvorov and Kutuzov.’ Once again the patriotic theme was to the fore, but even though the term ‘socialist’ only appeared once in the description of the October Revolution, some of the formulations were resonant of the ideological strand: the worker-peasant alliance, the friendship of the peoples and the description of the invaders as imperialists all resonated with the socialist themes of the 1930s. But these remained less prominent than the patriotic themes. The next day in his speech in Red Square to the military,456 while again invoking patriotic themes, Stalin placed the figure of Lenin much more to the fore. He argued that the situation in 1918 had been much worse than it currently was and at that time the ‘spirit of the great Lenin animated us’. Furthermore the ‘spirit of the great Lenin and his victorious banner animate us now in this patriotic war just as they did twenty-three years ago’. He called on the forces to be inspired by ‘the manly images of our great ancestors’ – Nevsky, Donskoi, Minin, Pozharsky, Suvorov and Kutuzov – and he finished with ‘May the victorious banner of the great Lenin be your lodestar! . . . Long live our glorious Motherland, her liberty and her independence! Under the banner of Lenin, forward to victory!’457 In his speech on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the revolution in 1942,458 Stalin made even fewer allusions to the socialist nature of the Soviet Union. Although he addressed the gathering of party and state officials on 6 November as ‘Comrades’, and he referred to the twenty-fifth anniversary of ‘socialist revolution’ in our country, his discussion was focused precisely on the war and it was cast very much in terms that did not resonate with the socialist themes of earlier imagery. The war aims of the Anglo-Soviet-American coalition were described as

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the abolition of racial exclusiveness; the equality of nations and the inviolability of their territories; the liberation of the enslaved nations and restoration of their sovereign rights; the right of every nation to arrange its affairs as it wishes; economic aid to the nations that have suffered and assistance to them in achieving their material welfare; the restoration of democratic liberties; the destruction of the Hitlerite regime.

The central focus of his speech was the Soviet Motherland and its struggle together with its allies against the fascist invaders. However in the order of the day issued on the following day,459 socialist imagery was much more prominent. It began with ‘Comrades, Red Army men, commanders and political workers, men and women guerrillas! Working people of the Soviet Union! . . . On behalf of the Soviet Government and our Bolshevik party’ [I greet you on the twenty-fifth anniversary of] ‘the Great October Socialist Revolution.’ This was when ‘the workers and peasants, under the leadership of the party of Bolsheviks and the great Lenin established in our country the power of the Soviets’. Over the next twenty-five years the Motherland became ‘a mighty socialist industrial and collective farming power’ characterised by indissoluble fraternal friendship of the peoples of the Soviet state. In the face of the German onslaught, ‘socialist industry, the collective farm system, the friendship of the peoples of our country, and the Soviet state have displayed their stability and invincibility.’ In the order of the day marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army,460 the army was lauded for having defended the ‘honour, freedom and independence of our Soviet Motherland’ and defended the right of the people ‘to build their life in the way the great Lenin had taught’. Throughout the remainder of the conflict, the military was enjoined to ‘firmly remember the precepts of our great teacher Lenin’, while the ‘inspirer and organiser’ of the army’s victories was said to be the party of the Bolsheviks. In the order of the day for May Day,461 all were called upon to ‘remember the behest of our great Lenin’. While patriotic elements remained prominent in Stalin’s twenty-sixth anniversary of the revolution speech in 1943,462 there was a stronger assertion of socialist imagery than there had been in any of his earlier wartime addresses on this occasion. On this anniversary of the ‘Great October Socialist Revolution’, Stalin declared in the difficult days of 1941–2, ‘the people’ (rather than the military) had found the spirit to resist the blows of the enemy and had defended the ‘true precepts of the great Lenin’, the victory of October. Important in the turning of the tide had been work in the rear, including the development of powerful socialist industry. He particularly acknowledged the role of ‘our working class’, but also the kolkhoz peasantry, transport workers, intelligentsia and the ‘friendship of the peoples of our country’. However, he declared, the


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‘leading and guiding force of the Soviet people both in the years of peaceful construction and in the days of war has been the party of Lenin, the party of bolsheviks’. The great authority it enjoyed among the popular masses was a source of strength to the state. He also argued that the current war had shown the correctness of Lenin’s teaching. Patriotic themes remained important in 1944, but in the orders of the day there was also continuing recognition of some of the themes articulated in the 1943 anniversary speech. The role of the workers, Soviet peasantry and Soviet intelligentsia, the friendship of the peoples and the inspiring and organising role of the party were acknowledged.463 Interestingly, an ambiguity that had been present from the 1930s in referring to the country – Rodina/Motherland and Otechestvo/ Fatherland – remained in evidence. And on 1 January 1944 the new national anthem was unveiled with more nationalist lyrics. Socialist themes were again strongly to the fore in the last wartime ceremony to celebrate the revolution, in November 1944. In his speech,464 Stalin said that underlying the military blows against Germany were successes in the economy. ‘The socialist structure, which was the result of the October Revolution, gave our people and our army a great and invincible strength.’ He referred to the contribution of the working class, intelligentsia and kolkhoz peasantry, and Soviet women and youth in the labour force. He declared that the strength of Soviet patriotism lay ‘in the absence of racial or national prejudice and the deep devotion and belief of the people in their Soviet Motherland, the fraternal unity of the workers of all nations of our country’. Soviet patriotism combined the national traditions and interests of all the workers of the Soviet Union, with all nations and nationalities uniting in a single fraternal family. But significantly, on the morrow of victory, in his speech to the leaders of the military of 24 May 1945,465 Stalin declared ‘I would like to raise a toast to the health of the Soviet people and, first of all, to the Russian people. I drink first of all to the health of the Russian people because it is the most outstanding nation of all the nations comprising the Soviet Union.’ During the war, it was ‘the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the people of our country’. It has a ‘clear mind, stoic character and endurance’. When the government made mistakes, they remained true to it. ‘Long live the Russian people!’ The metanarrative’s promotion of historical national heroes during the war provided a pantheon within which Stalin could find a place. Although the laudation of him was less extensive in the first two years of the war, once the tide turned after Stalingrad, his image became more prominent once again. He appeared as the strategic genius whose guidance was central to the successful prosecution of the war. Increasingly his

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name was attached to orders which led to successful military engagements, while he was also the frequent object of what one scholar has termed ‘fawning personal testimonials’ whereby people donated for the war effort.466 As early as 1943 he was termed the ‘organiser of victory’,467 while in March of that year he was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union and in June 1945 Generalissimo; in June 1946 he was awarded the Order of Victory. Photographs of him became more common in 1944 and 1945,468 and increasingly he was shown wearing the elaborate uniform of high military office rather than the plain military-style uniform of earlier.469 But Stalin appeared not just as the latest in a long line of heroic Russian state-builders and defenders; he was the very symbol of a resurgent state, which had been severely challenged by the German invasion but had come through it stronger than it had been before.470 He thereby continued to embody both the socialist and nationalist themes, encapsulated in the cry that was said to be on Soviet soldiers’ lips as they attacked, ‘For Stalin, for the Rodina’.471 When the German banners were thrown at his feet at the victory parade on 24 June 1945 as he stood on Lenin’s Mausoleum, this multiple image of socialism and the Russian/Soviet Rodina was sanctified. In this way the war reconciled a tension that had been growing within the metanarrative as the myth of the building of socialism morphed into a more general myth of nationbuilding. This process, implicit in the original formulation ‘socialism in one country’, seemed to be realised with the war, which provided the justification for the coming together of the myths of Russian statehood and that of the building of socialism with the graphic symbol of the Rodina. The prominence of the war in the Soviet metanarrative, so dominant during the course of the conflict, quickly declined. This is reflected in the ritual surrounding victory. The first Victory Day parade occurred on 24 June 1945. To the sound of martial music, the supreme commander-inchief Georgy Zhukov rode a white horse out of the Spassky Gate to greet the assembled troops and their commander Konstantin Rokossovsky. After greeting the troops, Zhukov ascended the Mausoleum where Stalin and other party and state leaders watched proceedings, and delivered an address. Serried ranks of troops then proceeded through the square. The music stopped, and a long drum roll announced 200 soldiers approaching the Mausoleum bearing German battle standards, which they then cast at the front of the Mausoleum. The troops marched out of Red Square, and were followed by massed ranks of demonstrators representing the ‘great victorious Soviet people’. In 1946, this ritual was not repeated. Instead of a central parade there was a series of more localised, almost informal, events, although many of the buildings were


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decorated with banners of Stalin and military commanders. There were fireworks at night. From 1947 until 1965, the celebrations were restricted to meetings of veterans, visits to cemeteries and evening fireworks.472 In this way, while ritual activity integrated the war into normal life, it did so at the level of the ordinary citizen rather than the state. This was not to change until the mid-1960s, and it was also not until then that the myth of the Great Patriotic War gained real substance and profile; until then it remained very much a subordinate theme in the metanarrative. Post-war reconstruction The end of the war and the abolition of the sense of immediate threat, at least until the onset of the Cold War, raised again the issue of this relationship between socialism and nationalism. Although, as many scholars have noted, the level of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric increased substantially with the end of the war, this did not mean that nationalist elements disappeared from the metanarrative. Rather the sort of entwining of socialist and nationalist themes that had been consolidated during the war continued, but with the socialist more prominent than it had been. Stalin’s speech to the electors of Stalin district in Moscow on 9 February 1946 set the tone.473 Rooting the war in the development of modern monopoly capitalism, he argued that it had posed a great trial for the country and enabled judgement to be made about the performance of the state, government, party and people. He drew three main lessons from the war. First, the Soviet social system had successfully withstood the challenge and showed that the system was truly popular, that it grew from the people and enjoyed its support, and was a better form of organisation of society than any nonSoviet social system. Second, it showed the strength of the multinational nature of the state, which cultivated feelings of friendship and fraternal cooperation among the peoples of the USSR, and showed that the problem of cooperation among nations had been solved better than in any other multinational state. Third, the strength and power of the Red Army was confirmed. Stalin argued that the material basis for victory was created in the first three five year plans, and therefore in the course of Soviet industrialisation, and that the time had now come for reconstruction. And finally he argued that the party marched in alliance with the nonparty people, who should no longer be treated with distrust;474 they had fought in the war and made significant sacrifices, they were now separated from the bourgeoisie by ‘a barrier called the Soviet socialist system’, and the only difference between them and party members was the ‘formal’ one of party membership. In this way Stalin was expressing one of the principal themes of the myth of the Great Patriotic War as it was unfolding, that

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it had forged a ‘kinship of blood’475 between party and non-party people, and thereby consolidated the ‘moral-political unity of Soviet society’. Stalin’s message was reflected in the CC’s appeal for support for the candidates of the ‘bloc of communists and non-party people’ in the elections to the Supreme Soviet in 1946.476 The party was presented as always having worked for the interests of the people and having led the development of the country, including the defeat of fascist Germany, whose aim was ‘to destroy the Soviet state, seize our land, plunder the wealth of the country, annihilate millions of Soviet people, put our people to work, doom it to perpetual grief and suffering’. The moral-political unity of the Soviet people was demonstrated in this struggle. The Soviet state remained based on the equal rights and friendship of peoples, with workers of all the nationalities of the USSR in fraternal unity having developed their economy and culture. And in the hour of extreme threat, all peoples of the USSR came to the defence of their ‘Soviet Rodina’. ‘Soviet patriotism has united all nations and nationalities of our country into a single fraternal family’ under the ‘elder brother – the Russian people’. Now the task was to shift to increased development of socialist industry, transport and agriculture and to struggle for peace internationally. Stalin had clearly declared that victory was a Soviet rather than a Russian achievement, notwithstanding his toast to the Russian people some eight months earlier, and while much of his speech was cast within a broad ideological framework, he did not explicitly make socialism the source of military success. Stalin was projecting the recent victory in the war as a result of Soviet efforts rather than a drawing upon the spiritual reserves of the Russian people. He was not rejecting the Russian nationalist theme so much as emphasising the Soviet nature of the achievement, implying that while the Soviet period drew on the past and maintained many continuing links with the Russian past, it was also different. It was both Russian and new, drawing the best from the past while creating a new society. The Soviet community, the Soviet people, was now the collective entity projected by the metanarrative; ‘Sovietness’ was the touchstone. But the continued strength of the Russian nationalist strand in this period is evident in the campaign against anti-Russian ‘bourgeois nationalism’ that was central to the so-called Zhdanovshchina, Stalin’s promotion of Ivan IV, the prominent celebrations of Pushkin (on both the anniversary of his birth and death), the 800th anniversary of the foundation of Moscow in 1947, and erection of the statue to Moscow’s founder Yury Dolgoruky in Soviet Square in central Moscow.477 By 1950, the tone of the appeal to electors478 was quite different from what it had been in 1946. While the war was still a focal point, rather than being a celebration of military success, this appeal was couched much


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more in terms of the continuing imperatives of Soviet society. Now rather than simply ‘non-party people’, communists were to be found in a single bloc with non-party workers, peasants and intelligentsia, reviving the social categories introduced in 1936. This was seen as an expression of the indestructible moral-political unity of the Soviet people. The party had consistently worked in the best interests of the people, through revolution, socialist transformation and the Great Patriotic War, while in economics the achievement of the five year plan was linked to party leadership and socialist competition. The friendship and mutual assistance between the socialist nations of the USSR was strengthening and developing. Socialist democracy was growing in the USSR, while its peaceful foreign policy sought international peace. The party was leading the march to communism. The party had achieved success because it was linked with the masses and constantly gave voice to them. Criticism and self-criticism, and the healthy criticism of work, were essential. The primary image emerging from the metanarrative and its myth of building socialism at this time was one of a society unified under the leadership of the party which, having triumphed in the mortal challenge of the war, was going forward to build a new type of society. The vision was to be forward rather than back, a focus symbolically flagged by the 1947 change of Victory Day into an ordinary day and the above-noted cancellation of central festivities on that day. This was ably reflected in the poster art of the period. A dominant theme in the eight years following the end of the war was the happy new life enjoyed by the people of the USSR. This theme was set from the outset, with a May Day 1946 poster showing a crowd watching three people dance in Red Square, with planes flying above in the background.479 In the 1946 election to the Supreme Soviet, people were shown as voting ‘for happiness’,480 while a 1950 poster seemed to show the proof of this: an older man (not a worker; perhaps an intellectual) is sitting with a young boy in the cabin of a ship, and they are looking out of the window at a port with a modern city in the background, while the caption says ‘The people’s dreams have been realised’.481 Similarly in a poster from 1950, a group of schoolchildren are shown standing with their teacher gazing out of the window at a modern, new city; on the window sill is a globe of the world with a big red USSR in the centre.482 In contrast to the capitalist world, the people are confidently marching forward,483 secure in their rights,484 although their happiness depends upon their continued labour.485 In the countryside there was electricity,486 while in the country more broadly (in contrast to the West) there was opportunity for talented people to achieve their aspirations.487 The happy life in the Soviet Union was clearly reflected in the care and concern for infants,488 and in their happy and smiling faces,489 especially

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when enjoying the facilities provided by Soviet society.490 Particularly important here was the provision of new housing for the people.491 Involvement and success in sport were also symbolic of this,492 as was the workers’ enjoyment of holidays.493 Advertising for items of food and drink494 and for films495 also emphasised the happy lifestyle; a poster from 1946 showing an older man and a young boy sitting among a cinema audience, all eagerly watching the screen, is a clear symbol of this.496 Communism was explicitly referred to in this context, but it was not a major element.497 Victoria Bonnell summarises the posters of this period in the following way: ‘Saturated by a new-found imperial ethos and an intensified Stalin cult, these posters conveyed a vision of the “divine order” of Soviet society, in which abundance and harmoniousness were the essence of the new Stalinist imperial order.’498 The shop windows of the remade Gorky Street were an image of ‘luxury and plenitude’499 and a showpiece of Soviet socialism. And in an aspect that implied looking to the future, children were a prominent theme in post-war art.500 This new, happy life also involved new principles and moral rules of activity. Honouring the family and one’s elders,501 including teachers,502 and treating people in a fair or proper (kul’turnyi) way503 were elements of this. So too was thrift and personal saving504 and the love of learning,505 while children were also encouraged to work out and become involved in sport.506 As before, there was an emphasis upon both industrial labour507 and work in the fields508 as noble occupations, especially when helping to achieve the plan targets early;509 one poster even associated a worker in the city (he looks like an architect) with a medieval Russian knight.510 It was common for military veterans to be depicted as the new archetype of leader in the building of socialism. An important element in this new life was participation in Soviet elections, a theme which highlighted the democratic nature of Soviet society. Everyone was shown as either going to vote or actually voting, from Stalin himself,511 to young women, sometimes with children,512 both urban513 and rural,514 and older men.515 Those elected were shown as the servants of the people, with a poster from 1947 showing a female deputy giving advice to a woman with a child.516 But the real message about a renewed society was contained in a poster from 1950 which shows a female deputy standing at the podium being admired by two other female deputies, behind them a picture of Stalin with his words ‘There were not and could not be such women in former times.’517 One other feature of the depiction of people during this time is important, the decline in established class markers and the emergence of a broader conception of Soviet citizenship, or even ‘homo sovieticus’.518 Now the heroes of Soviet society came not only from a labouring background but from white-collar


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sections of society as well, with men appearing in suits and casual clothing as well as in work clothes. Moreover, rather than struggling to build socialism, these people were usually shown as enjoying the fruits of the establishment of a socialist society. It was also a multinational society, although Russians retained primacy. The unity of the society was a common theme in the mass parades of this period marking May Day and the anniversary of the Revolution. Both sorts of parades, which were revived in 1945, were led by sections of the military and included military hardware like tanks, armoured cars and artillery. These were followed by massed ranks of civilian demonstrators. While the composition of the demonstrators tended to differ from year to year (at least in the reports in Pravda), they all included broad crosssections of the Soviet people. The meeting was always addressed by one of the Soviet leaders, but never Stalin. These were rituals clearly designed to evoke the sense of unity and commonality of purpose of Soviet society. In line with this emphasis on unity in society, deficiencies in work were treated differently to the way they had been treated in the 1930s. There was concern over the ideological level of new entrants to the party who had come in during the war,519 but this was attributed to slackness and bureaucratism rather than hostile motives. The same seems to have applied with regard to deficiencies in the training and retraining of party and soviet workers.520 Also in party work, where there was an emphasis on work with cadres and ideological work,521 in agitation work among party members,522 and in mass political work in the mines,523 the emphasis was on faulty work practices rather than opposition. However, the oppositionist theme did not disappear, being strongly reflected in the public treatment given to the Leningrad Affair, the Mingrelian case and the Doctors’ Plot, while the anti-semitism implicit in the anti-cosmopolitan campaign and the Doctors’ Plot gave an ethnic tinge to this.524 While none of these reached anything like the scale of the campaigns of the 1930s, they did serve to reinforce the view that society remained vulnerable to those who did not share its values and they gave substance to the continuing veracity of the myth of internal opposition. This was connected with the revival of an emphasis on the international opponents of socialism. The new society remained under threat from outside, with the myth of external opposition projecting a picture of the continuation of the struggle between capitalism and socialism, especially with the onset of the Cold War and the division of the world into two ‘camps’.525 The image of the growth in strength of world socialism was apparent with the development of the people’s democracies in Eastern Europe and the coming to power of communist regimes in China, North Korea and North Vietnam, but the onset of the Cold War, the American development of atomic weapons, the

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formation of NATO and the development of American bases around the Soviet periphery were used to reinforce the earlier sense of hostile capitalist encirclement and of the homeland of socialism being under siege. But one change in the imagery that did occur at this time as a result of the proliferation of socialist states was that the conflict was now seen in terms of a broader ‘correlation of forces’ rather than simply a besieged Soviet fortress. The inevitability of war between capitalist states remained a given in the Soviet international outlook. Such international danger was a prominent theme in the poster art of the period. The firm Soviet soldier was often shown confronting a Western capitalist (thin, top hat, bow tie, black suit and white moustache, something like an Uncle Sam but not in the regular uniform) and preventing him from carrying out misdeeds.526 One poster showed an American soldier placing bases around the USSR, with a small man in his pocket spouting calls for ‘peace’.527 The nefarious activities of international capitalism contrasted sharply with the demand for peace that was shown as emanating from the Soviet people;528 a particularly striking poster from 1950 shows a giant worker holding a red banner with the slogan ‘We demand peace!’ thumping his fist down onto a table at which are seated nine statesmen.529 This concern was also reflected in posters glorifying the army,530 emphasising defence of the borders,531 and calling on the people to be vigilant;532 evoking the wartime experience, collaboration with the enemy was seen as something to be particularly guarded against. There was some mention of international support, in the form of the Chinese and Korean people,533 and in the alliance with the working class of the capitalist states, who were portrayed as suffering under the iniquities of that system. Central to the image of Soviet society in the metanarrative of the postwar Stalin years was the strength and importance of the Soviet party state. Evident in Stalin’s 1946 speech, this was a continuing theme throughout this period, with that state presented as the source of the happy life in Soviet society. A significant visual marker of the power and prestige of the state was the urban redevelopment of Moscow during this time.534 The key element of this535 was the construction of seven high-rise buildings, or ‘Moscow verticals’.536 In the post-war Soviet Union, facing a massive repair bill to enable the country to recover from the devastation of the war, including dealing with a major housing crisis, the construction of these buildings was a significant ideological statement. It was a clear assertion of the power of the Soviet state, both domestically and internationally, and gave substance to the call in 1949 for Soviet architects to ‘create outstanding works of socialist architecture which reflect the glory and greatness of the Stalinist epoch’.537 Furthermore by constructing these buildings which soared to the heavens, the impression of a country


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which had been devastated by war leaping forward was inescapable. And by towering over the levels achieved by the bell towers of old Moscow, the sense of superseding and leaving behind the past was palpable. Designed not to be a replica of the skyscrapers of the capitalist world, these high-rise buildings, were meant to give expression to the new Soviet way of life. These buildings through their size and their location, were meant to act as landmarks and to express the vibrancy and movement of the city. They were to be the means of drawing the different parts of the city together, converging on the still unbuilt Palace of Soviets. Originally there were to be eight of these high-rise buildings, located on strategically significant parts of the Moscow topography.538 Three were along an old line of fortifications on the Garden Ring: a joint office and apartment building on the highest point of the Garden Ring at Krasnye Vorota (1949–53), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Smolenskaia Square (1949–52), and an apartment building at Vosstaniia Square (1948–54). The Hotel Leningradskaia (1949–53) was built on Kalanchevskaia near the most important transportation node of the city because of the proximity to the termini of three railways. Two were built along the Moscow waterfront, the Hotel Ukraina (1949–56) on a promontory in the river on Dorogomilovskaia embankment, and an apartment building (1949–52) on Kotelnicheskaia embankment at the confluence of the Moscow and Yauza rivers. The final one was the University (1949–53) which was placed on the Lenin Hills from where it dominated the city. There was also to be an administrative building for the Ministry of State Security located on the river front in Zariad’e which would have formed a counterbalance to the Palace of Soviets on the other side of the Kremlin. However this was not built. Although the buildings differ in their details, they share a common structure, consisting of tiers, a heavy plinth several storeys up and a stepped elevation surmounted by a spire.539 These high-rise buildings became the architecturally dominant feature of the city, representing the high point of the triumphalist style that predominated in post-war Soviet architecture. Although they were not unique in that skyscrapers were also being built in the West, the fact that they were built in the midst of post-war reconstruction in the face of so many other demands was a telling ideological statement. So too was the fact that, with the partial exception of the University, these buildings served overwhelmingly the needs of the politico-administrative elite, not the ordinary people. The other major iconic development of the post-war Stalinist period was the continued expansion of the Metro. Virtually the only construction work that had been maintained during the war was extension of the Metro;540 in 1943–4 the third part of the system was opened, an extension of the radial line from Kursk station to Izmailovo. The twelve stations of

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the circular line, running beneath the Garden Ring, were completed between 1950 and 1954, and were replete with decorative motifs celebrating victory in the Great Patriotic War, including allusions to great military achievements in Russia’s past. Perhaps the most remarkable was Komsomol’skaia-Kol’tsevaia which was opened in 1952 and included an underground ‘Hall of Victory’ by Shchusev that dwarfed all earlier stations. It was also characterised by art nouveau-style decoration, and rather than the approach common earlier for representation of Soviet symbols, this station sought to project the dominance of the Russian state system through representation of the Russian past, including the great leaders Nevsky, Donskoi, Suvorov, Kutuzov, Lenin and Stalin.541 The new stations differed from their pre-war counterparts in their ‘wider use of decoration, particularly sculpture, monumental painting, and mosaics’,542 with this trend toward the synthesis of architecture and representative art best reflected in the new stations of the circle line and the new Arbat line. There was also substantial effort put into the construction of accommodation because of the acute shortage that remained after the war; in the late 1940s many workers continued to live in hostels or barracks, and many were in temporary rather than permanent structures.543 Many of the newly constructed apartment buildings had extensive decoration, designed to symbolise an ideal reality of the new and happy life, which was in sharp contrast to the mundane reality of contemporary everyday life. But in contrast to the past, this building programme was not at the expense of the widespread destruction of old buildings. There was instead a new focus on the preservation of monuments from the past, with the adoption in October 1948 of the first government decree since the 1930s designed to offer protection to cultural landmarks.544 A new Ten Year Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow was adopted in 1952, and this continued the theme of expanding available housing in the city.545 There was at this time some modification to the cultic heart of the regime, the area around Lenin’s Mausoleum on Red Square. In 1946, busts of four of the leaders buried there, Sverdlov, Frunze, Dzerzhinsky and Kalinin, were erected behind the Mausoleum; Zhdanov was added in 1948. Elsewhere new statues appeared; in 1947 it was decided to place a statue of Yury Dolgoruky (the founder of Moscow) in Sovetskaia Square where the Liberty Obelisk had been until 1941,546 while three years later the statue of Pushkin was moved from its original location on the Bul’varnoe Circle to Pushkin Square where the Strastnoi Convent had stood. As well as these developments in the capital, a number of ‘Great Projects of Communism’ were announced in August–September 1950. These included the Volga–Don Canal, the Grand Turkmen Canal, and a range of hydroelectric stations. All of these added to the Great Stalinist


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Plan to Transform Nature announced in October 1948 and meant as the vehicle for implementing some of the principles developed by the geneticist Trofim Lysenko. All of this development was presented as further evidence of the advantages of socialism and the beneficence of the Soviet state. The ultimate statement of this was progress toward communism, and here the XIX Congress of the party in October 1952 was significant. The XIX Congress declared the fourth five year plan a success and that the fifth would lead to a further upsurge in all branches of the economy and a growth in people’s material well-being, public health services and cultural level.547 The Congress also changed the name of the party to Communist Party of the Soviet Union because calling it ‘communist’ reflected more precisely the tasks of the party than ‘Bolshevik’ which was said to refer back to events at the II Congress.548 The Congress was also important for its theatricality. Stalin did not deliver the CC Report, which was given by Malenkov, and during that report Stalin sat alone and to the speaker’s right rather than among the other leaders. All speakers lauded Stalin and attributed the country’s successes to him. Also prominent at the Congress were expressions of the myth of external opposition represented by the danger posed by the international environment and the hostility of the ‘capitalist camp’, which was counterposed to the power of the ‘socialist camp’. Also important was the issue of transition from the lower stage of communism which was broached at this time. Stalin argued549 that before communism (the formula ‘to each according to his needs’) could be achieved, ‘we shall have to pass through a number of stages of economic and cultural re-education of society’,550 and three ‘main preliminary conditions’ had to be achieved to pave the way for such a transition: continuing expansion of social production with priority given to heavy industry and capital goods production, elimination of the difference between collective farm property and public property and replacement of commodity circulation by a system of products-exchange directed by the central government or some other body, and ensuring such cultural advancement of society as would secure for all members the all-round development of their mental and physical abilities which would enable them to receive an education that would in turn enable them to become active agents of social development.551 Only if these were achieved could ‘incipient contradictions’ be resolved and the path cleared for the transition to communism. Practically what these represented was, respectively, continuing emphasis on heavy and production goods rather than consumer goods, the continuing central role of the state, and the importance of values and education as a separate factor from changes in economic organisation. Stalin thus saw the Soviet Union as creating the

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preliminary conditions to prepare for the transition to communism. He was therefore implying that this would be a long process,552 and that there would be a number of stages during which the transition would occur. While a powerful and beneficent Soviet state and a happy people building towards communism were key elements of the Soviet metanarrative during the late Stalinist period, the central organising principle around which Soviet imagery and symbolism turned remained that of Stalin. The Stalin cult reached new heights at this time, both in terms of its saturation of society553 and the nature of the claims made for the vozhd. Celebration of his seventieth birthday in December 1949 was particularly full-blown, with the projection of his image onto a cloud over Moscow a high point554 and numerous meetings and celebrations of his birth and achievements. Perhaps reflecting Stalin’s leadership in the war and the future role of that conflict as a rival foundation myth of the regime, Stalin was ‘the Lenin of today’, while ‘Great Lenin in Stalin lives’.555 Stalin not only led the country to victory in the Great Patriotic War (he being the ‘most genius of generals of all times and peoples’556), but was responsible both for the development of the economy which made that victory possible and for the post-war development that was creating a happy life for Soviet citizens; as the ‘sun’, he was the very source of life.557 Reports addressed to him personally dedicated completed tasks to him, while the fulfilment of plans was often linked to his birthday. All achievements were due to him. Beloved of the people,558 he was unstinting in his love and concern for them in return. However in the midst of this wave of laudation, Stalin rarely appeared in public, his remoteness exaggerating the image of power and authority vested in him. The increased emphasis on Stalin writing rather than speaking, and thereby projecting his wisdom in written rather than spoken form, noted by Yampolsky is consistent with the remoteness of authority.559 This quality was also reflected in some of the artwork of the period.560 The Soviet metanarrative that evolved from the late 1920s until 1953 was characterised by a process of reflexive development, consisting of the interaction among the perceptions of the leadership, the values of Russian society generally, and the views of professional sub-groups in Soviet society. While broad social values helped to frame many aspects of the metanarrative, the narrower values of professional sub-groups helped to shape the metanarrative in their professional spheres, which in turn influenced the metanarrative overall. The role of writers and architects in this has been noted above, but a similar role was played by such ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ in other spheres as well.561 This often involved conflict within the professional group as various factions or schools struggled for supremacy, with the victors’ views becoming prominent in


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the metanarrative (e.g. the Pavlovians in psychology, the urbanists in architecture). This sort of cross-fertilisation was crucial for shaping the contours of the metanarrative, especially at the beginning of the 1930s when the Stalin leadership established tighter control over the different spheres of intellectual and productive life through organising them into state-sponsored organisations. The developing metanarrative rested on the basic structure established during the initial dozen years of Soviet rule while significantly changing the content and form of many of the symbols that made up the constituent myths of that metanarrative. Reference to the communist teleology, the presence of internal and external enemies and the role of a leading force to guide the community towards its teleology all remained key features of the metanarrative throughout this period, but their nature changed. With the rejection of NEP and especially the introduction of the new Constitution, the task in which the regime could now claim to be involved was unambiguously one of the construction of socialism and preparation for the transition to communism. But the achievement of the sort of socio-economic transformation that this new task implied did not mean the disappearance of opposition. Externally the hostility of the capitalist powers remained a constant in the Soviet metanarrative, realising its high point with the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War but remaining present in the form of the Cold War. The myth of domestic opposition was strongest in the metanarrative in the 1930s, but at the same time that opposition became more diffuse and less easy to identify; the decline of class categories meant that the symbols of the metanarrative used to signify opposition were less clearly defined, being reduced to the attitudes or actions of oppositionists. This placed a premium on having some means of identifying such people before they could do too much damage. The party seemed not to be able to do this given its apparent penetration by opposition in the 1930s. The solution came through the reworking of the myth of leadership and its promotion of the leader, comrade Stalin. The figure of Stalin was central in reconciling elements of the metanarrative that seemed to be in tension: the emphasis upon individual effort and achievement with the collectivist ethos, nationalism (Soviet and Russian) and internationalist socialism, the growing sense of hierarchy with the egalitarian ethos, the inability of the party to defend itself with the view of it as a community of the select. The figure of Stalin and his leadership was what gave a sense of coherence to all of these apparently contradictory themes. Through his intermediation, they could be brought together into a single Soviet metanarrative. But being the nub on which that metanarrative turned meant that when Stalin died, the danger of incoherence was significantly increased.

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A mature socialism? Stalin’s death removed the charismatic principal of what had become the keystone of the Soviet metanarrative and that which had mediated the diverse strands of Soviet symbolism, and thereby given them a degree of coherence. With him gone, it was not clear how the tensions between these symbolic elements of the metanarrative could be resolved. One potential answer was to treat Stalin the way Lenin initially had been treated, viz. to emphasise his writings and his actions as the indelible guide to the future against which all must be measured. But this approach was eschewed from the outset. Although Stalin was buried with full pomp and ceremony in what became the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum on Red Square, in the days after his death there was a dramatic shift away from the imagery of the vozhd; his picture, his words, and references to him were no longer everywhere in the Soviet public sphere, as they had been during his life. The charismatic legitimation that formerly had been vested in the figure of the vozhd was now the subject of an attempt to shift it onto the party. This was reflected in the announcement of Stalin’s death,1 which declared that the ‘peoples of our country unite even more closely in our great fraternal family, under the tested leadership of the Communist Party created and fostered by Lenin and Stalin.’ It also referred to ‘the teachings of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin’. However, by the XX Congress in 1956, where Khrushchev attacked Stalin in the so-called ‘secret speech’, Stalin had become a negative symbol. The Congress resolved2 that the CC should ‘implement thorough measures ensuring that the cult of personality – which is alien to marxism-leninism – will be overcome, that its consequences in all areas of party, state, and ideological work will be liquidated, and that the norms of party life and the principles of collective party leadership worked out by the great Lenin will be strictly implemented.’ Three months later, the transformation of the image of Stalin was extended. In June 1956 the CC issued a decision on the cult of personality and its consequences.3 The decision noted the way in which foreign 164


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opponents had concentrated their fire on the deficiencies the CC had spoken about at the XX Congress and were waging a major anticommunist campaign. It declared that in its criticism of the cult, the party was guided by the principles of Marxism-Leninism, and that both Marx and Lenin were opposed to the position of hero juxtaposed to the popular masses. The cult of personality of Stalin ‘contradicts the nature of the socialist order and had become an obstacle on the path of the development of socialist democracy and of the advance of Soviet society to communism’. Bold self-criticism was evidence of the strength and solidity of the party and the Soviet order and ensured that the cult of personality would never recur and that ‘henceforth the leadership of the party and country will be conducted collectively, on the basis of the execution of marxist-leninist policy, in conditions of expanded intra-party democracy, with the active creative participation of millions of workers, with the allround development of Soviet democracy.’ But if the metanarrative was to retain credibility, it had to provide an explanation of how things had seemingly gone so wrong, and it now sought to do this. The CC decision explained that the cult had arisen in conditions of massive transformation in society within the context of hostile capitalist encirclement. Stalin had begun as a defender of Leninism, gaining great authority and popularity in the struggle with its opponents in the 1920s, but his head had been turned by the eulogies addressed to him. His negative personal qualities noted by Lenin exacerbated this. Stalin became above criticism. Great damage was done by his precept that class struggle became increasingly bitter as the Soviet Union moved towards socialism because this was used as the pretext for crude violations of socialist legality and for mass repressions. This enabled the organs of state security to gain a special position, something which became even more complicated when it came to be headed by the criminal band of that agent of international imperialism, Lavrenty Beria. Nevertheless, a Leninist nucleus of leaders with a correct understanding of the needs of domestic and international policy emerged in the CC and took control of vital spheres during the war, bringing it to a successful conclusion. They could not act against Stalin because of the way that, in the eyes of the people, he was responsible for all of the successes of socialist construction, and therefore any attack on him would have been misunderstood, seen as an attack on those achievements, and received no support. Also many of his deeds became known only later. But while the cult inflicted serious damage on the party and society, it would be a crude error to see this as meaning a need for change in the social structure of the USSR or seeing the origins of the cult in the Soviet social order. The cult could not change ‘the nature of our social order . . . the nature of the

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socialist state, based as it is on social ownership of the means of production, the union of the working class and the peasantry and the friendship of peoples, although this cult did inflict serious damage on the development of socialist democratism and the rise of the creative initiative of millions.’ For almost forty years, power had been in the hands of the working class and peasantry. Despite the policy errors stemming from Stalin, society was not deflected from the correct course of development to communism. The system was declared to be genuinely democratic, and this had been central to the successes achieved in the construction of socialism and victory in the war. Democracy was evident in the way that power actually served and reflected the will and interests of the majority of the people, the toilers. ‘By liquidating the consequences of the cult of personality, restoring bolshevik norms of party life, expanding socialist democratism, our party has further strengthened its ties with the wide masses, still more closely united them under the great leninist banner.’ The metanarrative thus sought to neutralise the figure of Stalin and affirm the basic correctness of the Leninist party and its path. Henceforth, the rejection of the cult of personality became one of the claimed achievements of the party,4 even if in practice this was much less coherent than a full-scale rejection of the dead leader, who was still portrayed positively from time to time throughout this period. In 1961 Stalin’s body was removed from the Mausoleum because of the ‘serious infringements by Stalin of leninist precepts, the mass repressions against honest Soviet people and other actions in the period of the cult of personality’.5 Stalin’s image disappeared from the public sphere, his written works were no longer available, and his name disappeared from the geography of the USSR, with all things named after him, including most importantly the city of Stalingrad which became Volgograd in 1961, being renamed.6 With the dethroning of the image of Stalin, the metanarrative that had been constructed in the 1930s and 1940s was denied that keystone that had held it together and given it meaning. It needed replacement if the various myths that comprised the metanarrative were to continue to interact without excessive conflict and the regime’s symbolic message was to retain any coherence. Accordingly Stalin’s leadership was now passed, symbolically, to the party. From the time of Stalin’s death, the party was presented as the essential leader and guide in the construction of the new society with a real focus on the party’s ‘leading role’, a theme strongly pressed by Khrushchev in his conflict with Malenkov during the early to mid 1950s. The party was said to be devoted to the people’s interests and to enjoy their complete confidence and love. The correctness of the party’s policies was shown by the historic victories of socialism to which it


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had led the workers of the Soviet Union. The people were now advancing under party leadership to new successes of communist construction – improvement in material well-being, strengthening of defence capacity, search for peace in international relations, and development of fraternal friendship with China, the people’s democracies and progressive elements. The party was the ‘great directing and guiding force of the Soviet people in the struggle to build communism’. Central to its strength and power were its iron unity and monolithic solidarity, while its strength and invincibility lay in its indissoluble tie with the people. ‘The party sees as one of its foremost tasks the education of communists and of all toilers in the spirit of extreme political vigilance, in the spirit of firmness and implacability in the struggle against internal and external enemies.’ The party was now the key to success in all fields, being presented in the leadership myth and the metanarrative more generally as the repository of the sort of charismatic authority Stalin formerly had embodied: the rebuilding after the devastation of the war,7 ‘gigantic successes in the struggle to build communism in our country and to bring about peace in the whole world’,8 ‘in all domestic and foreign policy and practical activities’.9 The party’s CC was said to be correct in speaking out against the cult of personality, ‘the spread of which diminished the role of the party and the popular masses, belittled the role of collective leadership in the party, and frequently led to serious neglect in work.’ The CC would continue to struggle against its survivals, proceeding from the principle that the true creators of life were the popular masses. The CC also opposed attempts to deviate from the party’s general line favouring the preferential development of heavy industry, the construction of socialism in the country, and other theoretical questions.10 And in all of this, the party was guided by Leninism. But the party was not the only leader prominent in the metanarrative. With the disappearance of images of Stalin, Lenin became much more prominent as a symbol both of guidance and commitment than he had been prior to 1953. The cult of Lenin was revived, with representations of him and copies of his works filling Soviet shops in the way that those of Stalin had done. The cult’s revival was particularly evident in the attribution to him of responsibility for many of the sorts of successes that had formerly been associated with Stalin.With the shifting of the celebration of Lenin from the day of his death to the day of his birth, 22 April (the marking of his death was also changed from 22 January when it had been marked under Stalin, to 21 January, the day he actually died11), it was declared that for the thirty years after his death, the party, guided by the immortal teachings of Marxism-Leninism, had led the implementation of the Leninist plan for the construction of socialism in the country. The

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country was now engaged in the transition from socialism to communism. The path of the construction of communism was to be found in Lenin’s teachings. He was the ‘great vozhd of the workers and the founder of the Soviet socialist state’,12 and it was from him that the party’s authority was derived. The successful activities of the CC had been based on the ‘creative application of Marxist-Leninist teaching, the strictest observance of the principles of collective leadership and intra-party democracy, and the unswerving fulfilment of Leninist directives on the unbreakable link between our party and people. Through all these years the party has held high the great banner of the immortal Lenin.’13 He was shown, not through the prism of his death as in the 1920s, but as a vibrant, lifeloving, approachable yet decisive and wise leader. His empathy with children was a powerful theme, reinforced by his symbolic association with the Young Pioneers movement. As symbols of his place in Soviet life, the Lenin Prize for distinguished work in science, technology, literature and art was established, and his full collected works were to be published.14 And with the removal of Stalin’s body from the Mausoleum, this was now called ‘The Mausoleum of Vladimir Il’ich Lenin’ after the ‘immortal founder of the Communist Party and Soviet state, the vozhd and teacher of the workers of the whole world’.15 In February 1960, a decision was adopted on celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of the ‘great organiser and leader of the Communist Party, the founder of the Soviet state, beloved teacher and friend of the workers of the whole world’.16 Lenin was declared to be central to all of the party’s achievements, including the defeat of oppositionist forces. All the successes in foreign and domestic policy were the result of ‘the heroic labour of the Soviet people, the enormous organisational and educational activities of the Communist Party . . . the consistent implementation of its leninist line which was profoundly and creatively expressed in the historic decisions of the XX Congress of the CPSU.’17 The party, which had become a party of the ‘whole people’, had extended its guiding influence into all areas of social life. It had restored and continued the development of Leninist norms of party life and Leninist principles of collective leadership; the restoration of ‘Leninist norms’ in party life became one of the principal themes of the leadership myth throughout this period, and was seen to be central in overcoming the effects of the cult of personality. Enormous significance for the construction of socialism and communism, for the whole international movement was the open and bold condemnation by the party and its Central Committee of the cult of personality of I. V. Stalin. The party told the people the whole truth about the abuses of power in the period of the cult of personality and decisively condemned the errors, distortions and methods alien to


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leninism, engendered in the atmosphere of the cult of personality. The party has severely criticised the cult of personality, has overcome the distortions and errors of the past, and is steadily implementing measures which should fully exclude in the future the possibility of a repeat of such errors. These measures have found expression in the Programme and Rules of the party.18

This also became the touchstone of opposition as association with the cult of personality became incompatible with being a Leninist. This was the case with regard to the anti-party group and those who supported them; they came out against the Leninist course of the XX Congress and its measures designed to overcome the cult of personality and its consequences, they sought to maintain discredited forms and methods of leadership, and to slow down the development of new life in the party. The party had now closed ranks even more tightly, strengthened its ties with the people, and mobilised all its forces for the successful implementation of its general line. Factionalism, and any machination against the party line and party unity was against the interests of the people, of building communism. The Leninist principle of collective leadership had been restored through [t]he regular convocation of party congresses, CC plena, all elected organs of the party, general popular discussion of the most important questions of state, economic and party construction, wide consultation with workers in different branches of the national economy and culture has become the norm of party and state life. All the major questions of domestic and foreign policy have been widely discussed in our party, they have been the expression of its collective wisdom and experience.

The message here was clearly one of the party led by its collective leadership acting in a regularised fashion to guide the society into the bright future despite the activity of adherents to the cult of personality. The metanarrative’s focus on the party, Leninism, democracy and the criticism of Stalin was thus brought together in the reworking of the leadership myth in such a way as to emphasise collective leadership. Explicitly affirmed in the aftermath of Stalin’s death, and institutionally confirmed throughout this period by the new regularity with which party meetings were held, it was claimed that collective leadership was the chief modus operandi of the Soviet system. Furthermore this was explicitly described as being ‘Leninist’ in nature. This was a clear rejection of the symbolism of the personal vozhd and a commitment to the configuration of political authority said to have dominated before Stalin. However as Khrushchev consolidated his power, this collectivist image was challenged by a new cult of the leader. Taking off in the late 1950s,19 this took many of the same forms as the cult of Stalin – frequent pictures of Khrushchev, references to his words and guidance, presentation of him as clearly the

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one in charge, and exaggerated praise of him and his work – although the claims made for him were much less extreme.20 The leadership style portrayed was also very different to that of Stalin. Rather than the contemplative leader remote from the people as Stalin had been, particularly in the post-war years, Khrushchev was portrayed as an energetic, downto-earth, populist figure who liked nothing better than going down to the factory or farm to talk with ordinary people and dispense folk wisdom. A ‘praktik’ rather than an intellectual, Khrushchev was presented as a problem-solver, as someone who understood the problems in whatever field it was he was addressing and had a solution to them. The press widely covered his barnstorming trips across the Soviet Union (and the world), in particular his discussions with ordinary people and his willingness to interact with them on their own ground. His leadership was particularly associated with agriculture and the drive to increase farm production, but his leadership was extended into all fields, including culture and morals. The projection of Khrushchev in this way clearly presented him as primus inter pares, but it could not transform him into the mediator of the diverse strands of Soviet symbolism that Stalin had been. His figure and authority, and in particular his profile as a theoretician as well as his personal dominance, was not exalted enough to enable him to perform this role. Unlike under late Stalinism and despite the higher profile Khrushchev achieved, the representation of individual leaders was not a major feature of the art of the Khrushchev period. While representations of Lenin seem to have become more common in late Stalinism,21 in the Khrushchev era, Khrushchev, Lenin and Stalin seem rarely to have appeared in works of art.22 However the style of artwork did undergo an important change. Parallel to the disappearance of the image of the vozhd, art found its heroes not in great leaders but in the ordinary people. Harking back to what many saw as the ‘eternal values’ of the Russian people, socialist realism was transformed into a more traditional realism23 which sought to present its heroes in the form of ordinary Soviet citizens struggling with and overcoming the challenges of living in a society moving towards communism. This sort of representation, the hero as ordinary, well suited the image that Khrushchev projected. The higher public profile of Khrushchev was associated with his victory over the political opposition in elite councils. Sometimes in the myth of internal opposition as it unrolled at this time, such opposition was described in terms similar to those used under Stalin; in early 1955 Malenkov was accused of a ‘right-wing deviation’24 while the activity of some lower-level state officials was described as ‘anti-state behaviour’.25 When it was made an issue in the metanarrative, factionalism and opposition to the party were cast principally in terms of anti-Leninism, personal


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vanity and ambition. In June 195726 the anti-party group was accused of coming out against the party line just at the time when the party led by the CC and with the support of the people was making great efforts at further development of the economy, the continued rise in living standards, restoring Leninist norms in intra-party life, liquidating violations of revolutionary legality, broadening the ties between party and popular masses, developing socialist democracy, consolidating friendship among the Soviet peoples, conducting a correct nationality policy, and relaxing international tension to ensure a lasting peace. This group had opposed the course approved by the XX Congress; it tried to reverse the Leninist course towards peaceful coexistence among countries with different social systems, toward relaxing international tension and establishing friendly relations between the USSR and all peoples of the world. The group opposed all the policies recently set in place in industry, agriculture, public administration and foreign affairs, including the attempt to liquidate the consequences of the cult of personality and the violations of revolutionary legality. When their opposition to policy was rebuffed, they embarked on group struggle against the party leadership and committed that heinous sin from earlier in the party’s life, factionalism. They resorted to techniques of intrigue, reached a secret agreement against the CC, and violated party Rules and the X Party Congress resolution ‘On Party Unity’ drafted by Lenin. This manifestation of factionalism was said to have been decisively rebuffed and they were met with unanimous condemnation by the CC plenum. This sort of representation of their activity cast them as unalterably opposed to party policy and to the legacy of Lenin, simultaneously associating that legacy with the range of policy positions championed by Khrushchev in the preceding four years. Oppositionist activity was also criticised in October 1957,27 this time by Defence Minister G. K. Zhukov. He was accused of having violated Leninist party principles of leadership in the armed forces, of seeking to curtail the work of party organisations, political organisations and military councils, and of liquidating the leadership and supervision of the military by the party, its CC, and the government. Mobilising the imagery of the condemned cult of personality, it was claimed that a personality cult of Zhukov had begun to spread in the army with his personal complicity. Despite promotion and high honours from the party, Zhukov had become conceited and lost that party modesty that had been taught by Lenin. However most times the myth of internal opposition projected different symbols of opposition to those under Stalin. The background to this was the emphasis upon ‘socialist legality’ that emerged soon after Stalin’s death. This was presented as a major change from the Stalin period, implying both a greater sense of regularity in the treatment of criminal

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and oppositional activity and that deficient performance or oppositional activity would not necessarily lead to loss of life. During this period the image contained in the evolving metanarrative remained predominantly one of mistakes and deficiencies rather than political opposition. The struggle against bureaucratism, formalism and the use of old methods was said to be important,28 and there were said to be still some survivals from the past; for example, the need to strengthen scientific-atheistic propaganda was linked to the revived activity of churches and religious sects. Religious holidays were linked with such daily ills as drunkenness, mass killing of livestock, absenteeism from work and infringements of labour discipline.29 There were also deficiencies in the state apparatus which threatened the development of the economy;30 too much bureaucratism and concentration on paperwork rather than the concrete tasks of implementing party and state directives; the apparatus was said to be cut off from actual work, with little concern for the introduction into life of the newest achievements of science and technology. Economic development was also threatened by deficiencies in the training of party and soviet cadres.31 The isolated nature of the apparatus was reflected in the way that insufficient attention was being paid to the letters and complaints of workers.32 A range of deficiencies was pointed to in the activity of party and state bodies.33 At various times, but especially in the early 1960s, significant emphasis was given to the deficient performance of local and regional officials, especially in terms of the covering up of illegal or substandard performance,34 and although the level of threat to lower-level office-holders that this seemed to imply was considerable (for example, those who failed to fulfil plans and obligations were called ‘enemies of the socialist state’ and there were references to remnants of capitalist and private ownership psychology35), the campaign was not as powerful as it had been in the 1930s. Incompetence, bureaucratism, red tape, falsification and localism were the sorts of charges generally levelled against poor performance at this time, not political opposition. This concern at the failings of officials adequately and honestly to carry out their responsibilities was the reverse side of the emphasis upon popular supervision of officials discussed below. This focus on deficiencies and mistakes rather than political opposition is consistent with the view contained in the myth of building socialism that society was entering, and by 1961 had entered, a new phase of socialist development. Initially, the country’s development was seen in terms of the building and development of socialist society and economy, much as before, although in contrast with the Stalin period agriculture was now given a new prominence. In late 195336 the socialist agricultural economy was seen as a powerful industrial-technical base for the USSR to advance


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confidently along the path to communism. Part of this was to be the creation of an abundance of agricultural products on the basis of the mighty growth of socialist industry ‘as the leading force in the economy’. Solving this task would promote ‘the further strengthening of the union between the working class and the kolkhoz peasantry’. A good summary of the metanarrative’s image of where the country was at in its quest to achieve communism was contained in the February 1954 CC appeal to electors with regard to the forthcoming election to the Supreme Soviet.37 This picked up many of the elements present in the Stalinist symbolic framework. The country was involved in rebuilding after the devastation of the war, a rebuilding led by the iron will of the Communist Party and the Soviet government. Central to this was an upsurge in industrial production, which was the basis of the country’s defence capacity. In this ‘our glorious working class and our experienced, mature engineering-technical cadres more widely spread socialist competition for the resolution of the new enormous tasks.’ There had been successes in all sectors of the economy, including improved living standards and the development of socialist culture and science. The most important condition for the successful construction of communist society in our country is the tireless strengthening of the power of the Soviet socialist state – the stronghold of peace and the security of peoples. The basis of the force and strength of our state is the firm union of the working class and the kolkhoz peasantry, the moral-political unity of all Soviet society, the unbreakable friendship of the peoples of the USSR.

The party’s nationality policy was said to have liquidated antagonism between the peoples of the USSR to create unbreakable friendship. This friendship was forged and strengthened in the joint struggles of the peoples of the Motherland against foreign plunderers, tsarist autocracy and the yoke of capitalists and landowners. This fraternal union was strengthened by the shared blood spilt and the victories in the civil war, the Great Patriotic War and the victories of socialism. Soviet foreign policy sought peace and friendship among all peoples, and victory over aggressors in war. The Soviet system was declared to be the most democratic in the world, with wide participation by the popular masses and the participation of the best of the best in the leading organ of state power, the Supreme Soviet. The party saw its task to be the further development of Soviet socialist democracy to achieve the wider and more active participation of millions of workers in the administration of the state: it would struggle with bureaucratism, red tape and a scornful attitude to the needs and concerns of workers, and for socialist legality and the observance of citizens’ rights. All of this contrasted with the world of capitalism, with its economic crises, exploitation, unemployment, hunger and war.

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At the XX Congress, a number of changes were made in this image of the nature of Soviet society, changes which shaped a new, optimistic conception of the approach to communism. These were expressed principally in Khrushchev’s report and in the resolution on the CC Report.38 The resolution noted ‘that the leninist policy of the Central Committee and the Soviet government, and the heroic efforts of the Soviet people cooperating closely with all socialist countries, have led to gigantic successes in the struggle to build communism in our country and to bring about peace in the whole world.’ The image was now one of the increased strength of socialism internationally through the transformation of it into a world system, while the capitalist world remained characterised by deep contradictions. The general crisis of the capitalist system continued to deepen. Imperialist powers led by reactionary American circles sought to assert world dominance, including projecting US strength to Soviet borders, but popular struggle against this was growing. Soviet policy was based on the Leninist principle of peaceful coexistence between states with different social structures, with the Soviet aim the strengthening of peace and democracy. The policy of peaceful coexistence was now possible because war was no longer inevitable; the peaceful overthrow of capitalism was possible, as were multiple roads to socialism. Adoption of this position was significant because it reflects the way that Khrushchev had changed his position following the defeat of Malenkov; in his conflict with Malenkov (who had argued that war would be disastrous for all) he had argued that nuclear war would mean the end of capitalism and the victory of the USSR.39 The casting of the international environment in these more pacific terms of peaceful coexistence created a favourable situation for the qualitative development of Soviet society. And in the picture projected by the metanarrative, this was clearly happening in all spheres. Economic success, including rising standards of living, had been achieved, although there was still the need for further efforts in all spheres of the economy. The task was now to overtake and surpass the per capita production of the most advanced capitalist countries. There had been further strengthening of the union of the working class and kolkhoz peasantry, and the friendship and fraternal cooperation of all the peoples of the USSR. Nationality policy was based on the Leninist teaching that socialism not only did not eliminate national differences and characteristics but ensured the all-round development and flowering of the economies and cultures of all nations and peoples. Soviet democracy involved improving the operation of all organs and strengthening their ties with the masses. The strengthening of Soviet legality, the continued education of communists and toilers in the spirit of extreme political vigilance, and the strengthening of the armed forces which defend the socialist Rodina were


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all important. The party had gained new and major successes because ‘it was governed by the all-conquering teaching of marxism-leninism in all its domestic and foreign policy and practical activities, because it held to a firm and consistent course aimed at constructing socialism in our country and strengthening the international socialist camp, because it held high the banner of proletarian internationalism and friendship among peoples.’ The party’s guiding role in society was said to have been intensified since the XIX Congress, and it had become ideologically, politically and organisationally stronger. The CC had ended the ‘criminal conspiratorial activity of that dangerous enemy of the party and the people, Beria and his band’, which was a serious blow to the plans of imperialist intelligence agencies. The CC had made great efforts ‘to restore leninist norms in party life, to develop intra-party democracy, to inculcate the principles of collective leadership based on the conduct of a marxist-leninist policy, and to improve the style and methods of party work’, including increased criticism and self-criticism, which had heightened the activity of the party masses. A new party Programme was to be drafted to reflect the new circumstances, guided by the fundamental provisions of marxist-leninist theory, as creatively developed on the basis of the historical experience of our party, the experience of the fraternal parties of the socialist countries, the experience and achievements of the entire communist and workers’ movement, and also with due regard for the long-range plan being prepared for communist construction and the economic and cultural development of the Soviet Union.40

This image of society successfully marching towards communism was strengthened at the Extraordinary XXI Congress of the party in January– February 1959. It was said41 that the country had ‘entered upon a new period in its development, a period of the developed construction of communist society. The great goal of building communism, for the achievement of which many generations of people have struggled, is now being implemented in practice by the Soviet people under the leadership of the Communist Party.’ The country was now building communism, a development which reflected the leadership of the party and the way the CC had been following the Leninist course, basing all of its activities on the creative application of Marxist-Leninist theory. ‘The Communist Party has always been and will be victorious thanks to its loyalty to marxism-leninism, to the unity and solidarity of its ranks, the unbreakable ties with the people. In the leninist party the Soviet people see their experienced leader and teacher, in its wise leadership the guarantee of new successes of communism.’ Economically the task was to continue developing the material-technical base of communism, principally

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through the development of heavy industry; politically to further consolidate the Soviet socialist system and the unity and cohesion of the Soviet people, to develop Soviet democracy including the activity and spontaneity of the masses in building communist society, to expand the functions of social organisations in solving governmental problems, to enhance the organisational and educational role of the party and state, and to consolidate the union of the workers and peasants and the friendship of the peoples of the USSR; ideologically to heighten the communist consciousness of toilers, to overcome the remnants of capitalism in the consciousness of individuals, and to struggle with bourgeois ideology; internationally to strengthen the peace and security of the peoples on the basis of the Leninist principle of the peaceful coexistence of countries with different social systems, to end the Cold War and strengthen the socialist system and commonwealth of fraternal peoples. Socialism had achieved complete and final victory in the country, with all aspects of socialist society being consolidated. With the building of communism the level of socialisation of kolkhoz production would rise, and kolkhozcooperative property would merge with publicly owned property. There would be a gradual transition to the distribution of goods according to need rather than work when an abundance of consumer goods had been achieved and people worked willingly according to their capacities regardless of how much they received in the way of material goods. The current development of the socialist state saw the all-round growth of democracy, involving all citizens in the guidance of economic and cultural construction and the administration of public affairs. The role of the soviets would be enhanced and many functions currently fulfilled by state organs would be gradually transferred to social organisations. Volunteer militia and comrades’ courts would be important in ensuring the observance of the rules of the socialist community. However in a departure from the original Leninist conception, this did not mean the state would wither away: ‘The transfer of individual functions from state organs to social organisations will not weaken the role of the socialist state in the construction of communism, but will widen and strengthen the political basis of socialist society, and ensure the further development of socialist democracy. The Soviet state will be able to give even greater attention to the development of the economy, which is the material basis of our order.’ The state would defend the country from the imperialists, while the state security organs defended the state against agents smuggled in by imperialist powers. The function of defending the ‘socialist Otechestvo’ would die out only with the disappearance of the threat of imperialist attack. The metanarrative was prefiguring the new conception of a communist Soviet society that was to come.


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The fullest articulation of the future of Soviet society given in the metanarrative was found in the new party Programme introduced at the XXII Congress in October 1961. The congress resolution on the CC Report42 noted that ‘our Rodina has entered the period of the developed construction of communist society, when socialism has become solidly established in the countries of people’s democracy, and when there is occurring the stormy growth of the forces of progress and peace throughout the world.’ Extraordinary successes had been achieved in the construction of communism, with the course set by the XX Congress triumphing completely. Internationally, the forces of socialism, democracy and peace had grown, and the world socialist system had become stronger. ‘Now not imperialism but socialism determines the chief direction of world development.’ Capitalism was entering a deepening crisis. The forms and paths of development of the socialist revolution would depend on the concrete relationship of class forces in each particular country, the organisation and maturity of the working class and its vanguard, and the level of opposition of ruling classes. A chief issue remained that of peace and war. The foreign policy of the imperialist states was determined by the class interests of monopoly capital. Domestically, since the XX Congress the rate of communist construction had accelerated, with great successes in all branches of the economy. There had been serious qualitative changes in industry, construction and transport, and a major effort undertaken in the development of agriculture, including the virgin lands. There had been outstanding achievements in science and culture, including the flights of the first cosmonauts in history. Material well-being was rising, and socialist social relations were improving. The most important tasks of the party were the ‘creation of the material and technical base of communism, the development of socialist social relations, the formation of the man of communist society’. The logic that stemmed from the view that socialism had been achieved in 1936 was spelled out in the party Programme of 1961.43 This document declared that ‘Socialism has triumphed in the Soviet Union completely and finally’, while socialist revolutions in China, Europe and Asia had brought into existence a ‘world socialist system’44 which was expanding while the capitalist world was shrinking. This was the epoch of the transition from capitalism to socialism and of struggle between the two opposing social systems. The current party Programme was one ‘for the building of communist society’, a ‘society on whose banner will be inscribed “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. The party’s slogan “Everything in the name of man, for the benefit of man” will be implemented in full measure.’ Communism would deliver all from social inequality, oppression, exploitation and the horrors of war,

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and proclaim Peace, Labour, Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood and Happiness for all peoples of the earth. The building of this society, which was ‘an immediate practical task for the Soviet people’, rested on the successful transformation of the country achieved under the dictatorship of the proletariat initially established by the Great October Socialist Revolution. The Programme provided a short explicit statement of the contours of communist society: Communism is a classless social system with a single form of public ownership of the means of production and the full social equality of all members of society where, together with the all-round development of people, will grow productive forces on the basis of continually developing science and technology, all the sources of public wealth will flow more abundantly and realise the great principle ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. Communism is a highly organised society of free and conscious working people, in which public self-administration will be established, where labour for the good of society becomes the prime vital requirement of everyone, a necessity recognised by all, and the ability of each person will be utilised to the greatest benefit of the people.45

As well as the disappearance of class distinctions, socio-economic and cultural distinctions and differences in living conditions between town and country would disappear completely. The difference between mental and manual labour would also disappear as these merged in the production activity of the people, thereby eliminating the basis of the intelligentsia as a separate stratum. All would have equal status in society, and harmonious relations would exist between the individual and society on the basis of the unity of public and personal interests. Communist production would ensure society’s uninterrupted progress and would provide all of its members with material and cultural benefits according to their needs, individual requirements and taste. Needs would be satisfied from public sources. All able-bodied people would participate willingly in social labour and thereby contribute to the growth in the material and spiritual wealth of society; labour would be a genuinely creative process and a source of joy. Communism was the highest form of organisation of public life: ‘All production units and self-governing associations will be harmoniously united in a common planned economy and a uniform rhythm of social labour.’ The nations would draw closer together on the basis of a complete identity of economic, political and spiritual interests, of fraternal friendship and cooperation, a formulation which seemed to imply the disappearance of national differences and their submergence within an organic Soviet identity.46 This underpinned the notion of ‘the Soviet people’, a formation which transcended ethnic divisions, which assumed that a


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sense of common civic identity was being produced by the shared belief in socialism and pride in Soviet achievements, and which assumed that the full-scale construction of communism would lead to the nations drawing closer together until they merged. The party, as a ‘party of scientific communism’, promoted and fulfilled the tasks of communist construction, ensuring that it passed through the necessary stages of development. In the current decade (1961–70), in creating the material and technical basis of communism, the USSR would surpass the strongest and richest capitalist country, the USA, in production per head of population. In the following decade (1971–80), the material and technical basis of communism will be created and there will be an abundance of material and cultural benefits for the whole population; Soviet society will come close to a stage where it can introduce the principle of distribution according to needs, and there will be a gradual transition to a single form of public ownership. Thus a communist society will in the main be built in the USSR. The construction of communist society will be fully completed in the subsequent period.47

National economic planning would remain central, with communist construction presupposing the maximum development of democratic principles of management coupled with a strengthening and improvement of centralised economic management by the state. But the state as a body had changed its role compared with the dictatorship of the proletariat. The state’s task of suppressing the resistance of the exploiting classes had ended because of the abolition of such classes, leaving its chief functions, the organisation of the economy, culture and education, to develop in full measure. The socialist state had thereby entered a new phase of its development, beginning ‘to grow over into a nation-wide organisation of the working people of socialist society’; the state had lost its class character and become an all-people’s state, expressing the interests and will of all the Soviet people. Although the working class would continue to play a leading role in the stage of the full-scale construction of communism, it would have completed its function when communism was built and classes disappeared. The state would not at this stage wither away, but continue to carry out essential functions until ‘the complete victory of communism’ was achieved. As socialist democracy developed, the organs of government would be transformed into organs of public selfadministration. Such public self-administration, involving the direct participation of the people, would replace state administration, and the state as a separate entity would then wither away. The communist party, which had become ‘the vanguard of the Soviet people, a party of all the people’, retained an important role even after the socialist system had triumphed. It was concerned with the moral, or ideological, education of the people,

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and during the full-scale construction of communism it would remain as ‘the leading and guiding force of Soviet society’. The message presented in the Programme was that the full-scale construction of communism was under way, and that the present generation would live under communism. But although the emergent communist society would be characterised by harmonious self-administration, there was at least in the current period a continuing need for a powerful military because of the struggle with the declining capitalist world. Such struggle was seen principally in terms of peaceful coexistence, reflecting the view that communism could outperform and ‘bury’ its capitalist competitor, but the Soviet view remained underpinned by a two-camp view of the world. The myth of external opposition remained prominent. The image of society presented in the metanarrative at this time was thus a highly optimistic one; as early as 1956 Khrushchev had declared that they were embarked on ‘the construction of communist society’, and that ‘we have climbed to such summits, such heights, that we can see the wide vistas leading to the ultimate goal, a communist society’.48 The XXI Congress met in January 1959 to adopt a new seven year plan which was to usher in the period of the ‘full-scale construction of communism’,49 and it was then that Khrushchev announced the ‘final and complete’ victory of socialism and therefore the end of the danger of capitalist restoration, the end of class-based oppositional political crime, and the end of capitalist encirclement.50 For Khrushchev, socialism could grow over into communism without major structural changes.51 In this new stage of development, the internal divisions of the past were no longer present and there was expanded scope for popular participation in the administrative process; social and political cohesion were not reliant on the search for and suppression of enemies, but on popular involvement in public life. It was on this basis that Khrushchev emphasised the diminished role of state agencies and the transfer of many of their functions to public organisations.52 It was this conception that underpinned the notions of the ‘state of all the people’ and the ‘party of all the people’. These conceptions implied an integrative, inclusive model of political institution which eschewed the class categories evident in the past. It was also central to the principle Khrushchev espoused that officials were accountable to and could be criticised by the people. This was an expansion of the old notion of criticism/self-criticism, with the emphasis on criticism of those in leadership positions by ordinary people. Although this had a contested meaning, with Malenkov initially opposing this threat to incumbents and Khrushchev encouraging the criticism of state and, from 1960, party officials,53 the right of ordinary citizens to criticise officials remained a prominent theme in the metanarrative. The basis of this was the


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assumption that the people could be trusted because they were committed to the approaching goal of communism.54 So rather than Soviet society being one in which internal differences were a significant factor in making necessary the continuation of class-based rule through state institutions, the social unity associated with the building of communism enabled the expansion of popular initiative and the elimination of the special place of state institutions. Popular mobilisation remained a major element in the myth of building socialism during the Khrushchev era. Much was made of the mobilisation of people, in this case mainly youth, to work for the fulfilment of major projects like the Virgin Lands Scheme. A campaignist approach to this development in the early to mid 1950s and early 1960s saw much publicity given to the despatch of large numbers of young people to work in the virgin lands. This sort of mobilisation, which had been so widespread during the first five year plan, was essentially external to the regime’s institutional structures. This mobilisation of initiative and effort was seen as tangible proof of the commitment of youth to build the communist future. There was also an effort to use popular mobilisation to revive and strengthen existing institutions and their activity. Party bodies, the Komsomol, trade unions and soviets were all the focus of significant campaigns to expand popular involvement, while institutions like the druzhiny, comrades’ courts, and factory and housing committees were all presented as appropriate vehicles for volunteer activists to become politically involved. Even non-party members were encouraged to take part in some meetings of party and state bodies, a form of participation which not only gave the illusion of involvement in decision-making but also contributed to the principle that, as communism approached, selfadministration would replace separate administrative organs, thereby embodying the promise of the withering away of the state embedded in the metanarrative since its early years. However it also caused a degree of incoherence in the metanarrative because this conception seemed to clash with the myth of the leading role of the party. It seemed to symbolise the breakdown of the boundary between party and non-party members. Popular participation and the exercise of popular initiative was a major strand of regime symbolism under Khrushchev. This was related to the view of democracy. Democracy was an important theme throughout the period. The soviets were the means for the realisation of socialist democracy which, in contrast to bourgeois democracy which cut the masses off from the administration of the state, united workers with the state. In carrying out communist construction, the party and government were ‘realising the continued development of Soviet democracy, decisively overcoming the

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harmful consequences of the cult of personality, ensuring the wide participation of the working masses in the administration of the state.’55 This had revived the soviets and increased their role in economic and cultural construction, although there were still significant deficiencies in the way in which they were carrying out their tasks. This focus upon direct popular involvement in public life was consistent with notions of communism in the metanarrative from earlier periods of Soviet history. Also important was the vigorous and explicit association of communism with material plenty. Such an association had been present since the mid-1930s and was evident in the 1961 Programme. Both Khrushchev and Malenkov had used this symbol of material plenty in their conflict,56 and this remained a key tenet of the metanarrative throughout this period. An important element in this was the increased prominence given to agriculture; much attention was devoted to Khrushchev’s efforts to improve agricultural performance, including his visits to farms and exchanges with farmers, his championing of the Virgin Lands Scheme, and his 1955 campaign for the growing of corn. Increased consumption and an improved standard of living were seen as the direct associates of the approach of communism; the seven year plan of 1959 envisaged imminent all-round abundance. Although there was some tension in the image presented of the relationship between the traditional priority of heavy industry and popular consumption, the increased prominence of the latter compared with earlier periods was marked. This emphasis on increased consumption was part of the picture of the happy life under socialism being enjoyed within the Soviet Union. However, this association of communism with material plenty, added to the explicit timetable for the realisation of communism, marked a significant development in the metanarrative. Whereas before the promises of material plenty were indefinitely postponed, now the stated timetable provided people with a means of measuring how successful the regime was in achieving this aim. People could now measure the claims of the metanarrative against both their own personal experiences and a yardstick contained within the narrative itself, something which they had never been able to do in the past. This theme of a new and happy life was continued in poster art from the initial post-war period into the 1960s, with higher consumption levels a major theme. Unlike under capitalism, there was plenty for all, a theme shown by a poster depicting a woman and child (in New York?) counting their pennies while looking at milk while in the background a fat, cigarsmoking capitalist looks on.57 The provision of new housing,58 the ready availability of goods,59 the provision of good food in restaurants,60 and the increase in pay for improved work61 were all indications of the new and good style of life available to all in the USSR. A number of types of images


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reflected material plenty: happy peasant women holding grain,62 a peasant woman with a number of cows,63 happy and carefree children,64 and smiling adults, especially women.65 So too was leisure; as a poster showing men and women frolicking in the water holding a large beach ball declared, ‘Sun, fresh air and water increases the strength for work!’66 As a poster from 1961 declared, ‘The working week is being reduced, Taxes on the people are being liquidated, And life is good, And to live is good!’67 Advertisements for consumer goods68 and for films69 reinforced the image of plenty. The flight of Yury Gagarin as the first man in space was also an image of a society advancing towards new goals,70 as the image of space flight replaced the locomotive as the symbol of progress. This new way of life was characterised by principles of activity which helped to create the new society and constituted a form of communist morality.71 Respect for the elderly,72 and for all people,73 and pride in work,74 were all positive values in the new society. Children were expected to study assiduously, including doing their own homework,75 to help in doing the chores,76 to learn from their more skilled elders,77 and to treat the military with honour.78 Similarly, there were things that were not acceptable: drunkenness,79 fake healing,80 smoking,81 hooliganism,82 bribery83 and slacking; one poster declared ‘Who does not work shall not eat!’84 There was a continuing emphasis on the importance of labour, both in the city85 and the countryside;86 a striking poster from 1954 shows a young peasant woman looking in through the window while behind her trucks are carrying people off to work in the fields, with the caption ‘Field work does not wait!’87 The fulfilment of norms88 and the need to not waste a minute89 were elements in this labour theme. And while posters now frequently showed workers in white-collar occupations as opposed to being on the shop floor, there was also an anti-bureaucratic ethos in the demand that work not be shut away in an office, cut off from real life.90 This emphasis on the ordinary people, on the mobilisation of their efforts, was also evident in the posters about the opening up of the virgin lands;91 the image of young, enthusiastic people on their way to the new lands was evocative of the mobilisation ethos of the 1930s.92 Involvement in the political system through voting was also seen as important for the future development of society.93 While the emphasis on mobilisation and moral incentives for involvement and for work was high in the 1950s, in the 1960s the focus on moral incentives, now underpinned by the 1961 ‘Moral code of the builder of communism’, was joined by an emphasis on material incentives.94 The policy of increasing consumer goods production rested in part on a strengthened official commitment to the notion of peaceful coexistence. The world remained divided into hostile camps, but the belief in the

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inevitability of war had been replaced by that of peaceful coexistence. While this did not mean that the idea of capitalist opposition had been abandoned, it did imply that the continuing crisis in the capitalist world did not have to lead to conflict between the two social systems. Rather there could be a prolonged period of non-military competition between the two systems, a process in which it was believed that the greater productivity of communism would see that system prevail in this world-wide struggle. The quality of Soviet life was seen as key to success in this competition, with the early space successes presented as evidence of the superiority of Soviet society over its capitalist counterpart. In this sense, the association between communism and consumer goods production was linked to the perception of the nature of the relationship with capitalism. But while peaceful competition was the main game, because of the nature of imperialist decision-making circles, military provocation and tension could occur. Posters showed an aggressive West,95 something which required the further development of the Soviet defence might96 and continuing vigilance;97 one poster from 1953 made explicit reference to espionage, diversionary activity, wrecking and provocation.98 But the strongest theme in this regard was the demand of the Soviet people for peace and friendship;99 one particularly striking poster showed a young girl with her arm across her face and widened eyes, with the caption ‘War is not necessary!’100 Many posters on other themes had the dove of peace or the word ‘peace’ featured prominently,101 while there was also recognition of international socialist support.102 The recasting of the regime’s myths in the metanarrative under Khrushchev was therefore substantial. The dominant vozhd was replaced by the trinity of party (including collective leadership), Lenin and Marxism-Leninism, with the first of these the key element, and although the cult of personality was widely criticised, such a cult developed around Khrushchev. The hostility of the international environment was moderated by the notion of peaceful coexistence, although threat still remained. Domestically, the country was on the eve of communism, and with this the notion of domestic opposition was moderated. There was still the attempt to project an image of popular idealism, optimism, excitement, effort and commitment through the metanarrative’s focus on popular participation and democracy. But this was, to a degree, blunted by the association of communism with material plenty. Importantly, what this recasting of the regime’s symbolic framework did was to directly associate the achievement of communism with consumer plenty and provide an imminent timetable for this, effectively giving the population a means of measuring regime performance on the basis of their own personal experience. This was to prove dangerous.


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Developed socialism Under Brezhnev significant change came about in the myth of building socialism. In 1966 at the XXIII Congress, it was said that the party had been implementing the Programme for the establishment of the materialtechnical basis of communism, the further improvement of socialist social relations, and the communist education of workers, and was declared to be leading the people on the path of the construction of communism.103 In January 1967 discussion of the draft theses for the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution said that the ‘full and final victory of socialism’ had been achieved, and that ‘the construction of communism is the continuation and development of the great cause of the October Revolution’.104 The theses themselves declared that the victory of socialism had ‘established the economic, social, political and spiritual preconditions for the transition to the construction of communist society’, and that the chief task was now the ‘establishment of the material-technical base of communism on the basis of the development of science and technology, mechanisation and automation, and the continuous growth of the productivity of labour.’ However, later that year this focus on creating the basis for communism began to shift to the notion of ‘developed socialism’. Brezhnev first mentioned the ‘developed socialist society’ in his speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in 1967,105 and reiterated it at the XXIV Congress in March 1971 when he said that such a developed socialist society (which he said Lenin had referred to in 1918) had been built in the USSR.106 From this time the notion was widely discussed in Soviet public life. By 1972107 it was said to be a society characterised by five features: a high level of development to a new scale of magnitude of the union economy; the destruction of class and national antagonism and their replacement by a socially, morally and ideologically unified community, ‘the Soviet people’, which expressed itself through the all-people’s state; the unity of union and republican governments on the basis of democratic centralism, socialist federalism and Soviet socialist democracy; active participation of workers of all nationalities in the development of science, technology and culture, and the drawing together and mutual enrichment of the cultures of the socialist nations and peoples; confirmation of the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, socialist internationalism, and the friendship of the peoples. Although developed socialism involved the all-people’s state, rather than a shrinking away of the state as under Khrushchev, it was now to be perfected and continue to provide the advanced management that an increasingly complex economy required.

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The developed socialist society became the dominant paradigm in the myth of building socialism and the metanarrative, and it accordingly was given significant attention at the time of the introduction of the 1977 Constitution (when a new text and musical arrangement for a new state hymn were also introduced).108 Rather than being at the stage of full-scale construction of communism, the USSR was now said to be a ‘developed socialist society’. This was ‘an objectively necessary stage’ which preceded the shift to communism, and its recognition involved the implicit rejection of the sort of timetable that had been outlined in 1961. This new stage grew out of the fulfilment of the tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Developed socialist society was characterised by an all-people’s state109 (and therefore soviets of people’s deputies (cf. ‘toilers’’ deputies in 1936)) and by the communist party as ‘the vanguard of all the people’. In addition, there was ‘a new historical community of people, the Soviet people’, which had been ‘formed on the basis of the drawing together of all classes and social strata and the legal and actual equality of all nations and nationalities and their fraternal cooperation’. The highest goal of the Soviet state remained the ‘building of a classless communist society in which public communist self-administration will be developed’, although the Khrushchevian emphasis on the state withering away was now downplayed. The main tasks of the socialist all-people’s state were: creating the material and technical base of communism, improving socialist social relations and transforming them into communist relations, rearing the man of communist society, raising the material and cultural standard of life of the toilers, ensuring the security of the country, and furthering the consolidation of peace and the development of international cooperation.110

The communist party retained a ‘leading and guiding role’, although ‘socialist democracy’ would involve broader citizen participation, improvement of the state apparatus, the increased activity of social organisations, intensified people’s control, a strengthened legal basis for the state and social life, expanded publicity and the constant consideration of public opinion. Public ownership, vested in the state, was to apply in the economy, while labour, free of exploitation, remained the ‘primary vital need of every Soviet person’. The slogan ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his work’ was to apply. The people enjoyed a large range of rights, although enjoyment of these was not to harm the interests of society, the state or the rights of others, and people were to be able to develop their own individual creative forces, abilities and talents. The social foundation of the USSR remained the indestructible alliance of workers, peasants and intelligentsia, with the state working to strengthen social homogeneity by eradicating differences between classes, town and country, and intellectual


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and physical labour, and the drawing together of nations and nationalities. Such drawing together of the nations was to be on the basis of Soviet patriotism and socialist internationalism. However, the world remained hostile, and what was required was the struggle to strengthen world socialism (of which the Soviet Union was the centre) and the pursuit of peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems. The Soviet society projected here was seen to originate in the Great October Socialist Revolution, and its strength was shown in the Great Patriotic War. The new Constitution was referred to as ‘the constitution of developed socialism’,111 while the XXVI Congress of the party in February–March 1981 called for a new party Programme which was to reflect, inter alia, ‘the most important tasks of the construction of communism’.112 This notion of developed socialist society was further elaborated at the time of the sixtieth anniversary of the formation of the USSR in February 1982.113 Among its characteristics, this ‘mature socialist society’ had a single ‘national-economic complex’ which provided the material basis for the fraternal friendship of the peoples of the USSR as well as the material and spiritual potential of each republic and the country as a whole. It provided for the drawing together of all classes and social groups, all nations and nationalities, leading to the creation of a ‘classless structure of society in the historical limits of mature socialism’. Much was made of the spiritual unity of developed socialist society, of the way in which a new social formation had emerged, the ‘Soviet people’. During this period there were still references to ‘the union of the working class and kolkhoz peasantry, friendship of the peoples of the multinational Soviet Union, the unity of all workers around the CPSU’,114 and the working class was given primacy in the creation of the new society.115 Although there were differences within the society, they were not antagonistic; there were friendly classes, groups and interests united in the construction of communism. The equality, friendship and collaboration between nations and nationalities had been consolidated, and a ‘sound base’ established ‘for the blooming and drawing together (sblizhenie) of them’.116 The XXIV Congress affirmed the leading role of the working class, the unity of workers, kolkhozniks and intelligentsia, of all the Soviet people, and declared that there had been a further drawing together of all nations and nationalities to create a new historic community, the Soviet people. It also declared an intolerance for any manifestations of nationalism, chauvinism or national exclusiveness.117 Society was characterised by ‘moral-political unity . . . the monolithic unity of the party and people, the unbreakable friendship and fraternal cooperation of all the peoples of the great Soviet Union’.118 The ‘new cast of mind of Soviet society – the Soviet people’ had emerged on the basis of the dynamic development of

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the economy and the struggle for freedom and socialist construction.119 While there was still some currency given to the notion of the ‘Soviet man’ or a ‘man of a new type, of new morals’,120 the greater emphasis was on the new collective community, the Soviet people. The focus on economic abundance evident in the myth of building socialism in the Khrushchev period was scaled back under his successor, Brezhnev, with the primary emphasis now upon material sufficiency. The lowered expectation is clearly reflected in the propensity to compare performance with earlier periods of Soviet history rather than with the US,121 and the statement that the ‘growth of socialist productivity has established a solid base for the increase in the material welfare and culture of the Soviet people’,122 while in 1971, with major successes having been achieved in communist construction, a major step forward had been taken ‘in building the material-technical basis of communism, raising the living standard of the people, and augmenting the country’s might’.123 The party was said to be implementing a scientifically based economic strategy directed at achieving fundamental long-term aims including the consistent increase in the material and cultural level of the life of the people.124 The image was one of continual economic and social progress and of the country doing all it could to satisfy the people’s needs rather than an openended promise of material abundance. This does not mean that there was not still a need to strive for continued development; economic growth, higher labour productivity, and education for higher consciousness were all continuing themes in the regime’s metanarrative. Nevertheless the theme of the good and happy life was maintained throughout this period, with posters of the 1970s generally being more formal and declarative than those of the previous decade. As before, smiling women were a common symbol,125 but so too was the provision of facilities for families, like kindergartens126 and education.127 Material plenty was again an image that was projected – food,128 prosperous farms,129 – but also the enjoyment of human rights.130 Sport was a minor theme131 while leisure seemed more important.132 Like its workers labouring to extend the railway, the country was marching into the future.133 The brightness of this future seemed to be reflected in the Soviet achievements in space.134 As before, with this new way of life there were rules that should be followed. Men were encouraged to help women rather than leaving everything up to them,135 and to avoid drunkenness136 and bad language,137 while children were told never to lie.138 Couples were also encouraged to have more than one child.139 The labour ethos remained central to society, and although there was still a significant emphasis on the ordinary worker,140 there was also a call to ‘manage skilfully’.141 Workers were not to be lazy and waste time at work.142


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If developed socialism was the period before the achievement of communism, then the entry to this new period was something that did not require dramatic changes in course but was a logical consequence of what had gone before. One reflection of this was the changing contours of the building socialism myth’s message concerning popular participation. While there was much invocation of ‘socialist democracy’ and there was significant emphasis on the importance of continuing popular mass involvement in political life, now this was to be restricted overwhelmingly to the institutional contours of the political system. People were urged to become involved in bodies like the soviets, trade unions and factory committees, just as in the Khrushchev era, but now the emphasis was less on them acting as a check on their leaders and more on both the educative effects of such participation and their positive impact on the functioning of these bodies. Certainly there were invocations to socialist competition143 and instances of the mobilisation of people directly into campaigns for the completion of so-called ‘hero projects’ – the Baikal– Amur Mainline (BAM)144 and Bratsk hydroelectric station – and for the development of Siberia145 and grain procurement,146 but these were less frequent than the calls for involvement through the established institutions. Poster art was used to foster mobilisation. Workers were shown as creating a new world in Siberia,147 and through the extension of the railways,148 especially the Baikal–Amur Mainline.149 Youth were shown donating their time to assist in construction work,150 and were called on to honour their country through their work.151 A poster from 1975 showed a young worker against a background of the names of major industrial themes – including Kamaz, BAM, Ust’-Ilimsk GES, Stakhanovism and the promise to fulfil the tasks of the party – and the caption was ‘We are the young working class!’.152 The worker remained the central figure.153 However primary emphasis was on involvement through established institutional channels. This was also part of an overall emphasis on the regularity of functioning of the political system and its individual components. The focus on regularisation of political institutions and the downplaying of mass mobilisation outside those institutions was the reverse side to the emphasis upon the scientific-technological revolution. A common catchcry for this was the injunction that it was important to introduce the achievements of science and technology into production.154 It was to be through the systematic utilisation of new, scientific methods, both technological and managerial, that the necessary economic development was to be achieved; growth was to be intensive rather than extensive. No longer was the appeal to consciousness and will, both individual and collective, primary; now it was the application of the principles of the scientific-technological revolution that were central. The ‘scientific

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approach’ to decision-making was now the norm; or as Brezhnev argued at the XXIV Congress, the chief task now was ‘organically to combine the achievements of the scientific and technological revolution with the advantages of the socialist economic system.’155 What was required was ‘realism’ in planning, and the utilisation of scientific and technical advances to increase labour productivity. The metanarrative had in this way taken on an anti-voluntarist, distinctly technocratic cast, and the myth of building socialism had morphed into a more mundane myth of nationbuilding. The theme of the regularity of functioning of the political system was carried through to the conception of opposition and dissent. The dissident movement, which existed throughout much of this period, was ignored in the metanarrative, and when problems were acknowledged, these were usually attributed to deficiencies rather than opposition. But what is most striking compared with the Khrushchev period was the direction of this; if under Khrushchev the emphasis had been on trust of the people and suspicion of officials, then under Brezhnev the emphasis was clearly one of trust in officials. This was flagged from the beginning and represented in the aphorism ‘trust in cadres’; Brezhnev mentioned this as part of the notion of democratic centralism as early as the XXIII Congress in 1966.156 As it was stated at the XXIV Congress in 1971, what was needed was ‘trust and respect for cadres combined with principled exactingness in relation to them’.157 This does not mean that all officials were performing their duties satisfactorily; at successive party congresses and in between, officials were criticised for deficiencies in performance. The XXIII Congress criticised suppression of criticism, contravention of party and state discipline, the search for privileges, bureaucratic methods of leadership, a narrow departmental approach and localism.158 In his June 1966 election speech Brezhnev spoke of the need to combat bureaucratism and formalism, hooligans, criminals, bureaucrats, idlers, parasites and plunderers of public wealth.159 At the XXIV Congress in 1971 he referred to ‘money-grubbing, bribery, parasitism, slander, anonyous letters, drunkenness and the like’, violations of party and state discipline, abuse of office, suppression of criticism, and behaviour which casts a slur on the title ‘communist’.160 At the XXV Congress in 1976, he criticised red tape and formalism, failure to ensure the implementation of decisions, lack of self-criticism, loss of touch with the masses, promotion of toadies and bootlickers, fraud, false reporting, theft and localism.161 At the XXVI Congress in 1981, he noted infringement of party rules, morals and discipline, the use of administrative-economic methods in party work, poor verification of the implementation of decisions, formalism in work and the persecution of critics.162 At other times, and especially in the early


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1970s when there was an official exchange of party documents,163 there was also significant criticism of deficiencies in officials’ performance, but this was all within the context of a message of basic trust in officials. Important though the criticism of these sorts of failings was, the message was clear: while there may be deficiencies in the performance of some officials, this was overwhelmingly due to mistakes and shortcomings, not to oppositionist motives.164 Moreover talk about ‘socialist legality’ implied a regularised means of dealing with those whose performance was not up to scratch rather than the arbitrariness apparent under Khrushchev. But such criticisms constituted a minor theme in the regime’s metanarrative. The overwhelming image was one of officials labouring honestly and zealously for the well-being of all, an attitude which was at the heart of the trust in them that the regime called for. ‘Trust in cadres’ meant not only trust in the individual officials themselves, but in the system in which they worked. This was a theme which symbolically fused officials and system in a way it had not done before, and marked a sharp contrast in the leadership myth with the images from the Stalin period. It also rendered the myth of internal opposition anodyne. The focus on regularity and ‘trust in cadres’ was reflected right from the start of the Brezhnev regime. In its aesopian attack on the arbitrary and idiosyncratic nature of Khrushchev’s leadership, the new leaders criticised ‘hasty reorganisations’, ‘subjectivism’, ‘voluntarism’, and ‘hare-brained schemes’, and promised an end to arbitrary, personalist rule.165 This was associated with an emphasis on ‘collective leadership’. As well as frequent invocations of the principle of collective leadership (including its association with ‘socialist democracy’) when discussing the party, collectivism was expressed through the image of party and state bodies meeting in accord with the strict timetable that formally governed their work. Collective leadership was frequently associated with the notion of restoring Leninist norms of party life, something which was a significant theme during this time. This was often discussed in terms of democracy, criticism and self-criticism, elections and accountability, all of which served to emphasise notions of collective responsibility and the collective institutions of the party. Even when the cult of Brezhnev took off (see below), mentions of him often emphasised his leadership as part of the collective; for example: ‘the CC headed by comrade L. I. Brezhnev’;166 successes were linked to Brezhnev’s ‘fruitful activity in the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee’,167 while the ‘embodiment of the collective reason and will of the party’ were held to reside in the leading organs of the party and Brezhnev personally;168 from 1972, the term ‘the Politburo headed by General Secretary L. I. Brezhnev’ came into general

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use. These sorts of formulations, while acknowledging Brezhnev’s leadership, were a clear statement of the continuing importance of the collective principle. But within the regime’s symbolic framework and its focus on collective leadership, the figure of General Secretary Brezhnev did achieve a position of prominence. Emerging at the end of the 1960s and significantly stimulated by celebration of his seventieth and seventy-fifth birthdays in 1976 and 1981,169 the cult of Brezhnev was not as dominant in the media as that of Stalin nor as excessive in the claims made for him. The cult was projected through the press in the form of pictures of Brezhnev meeting with both ordinary people and foreign leaders, the frequent quotation of his words (including the republication of his speeches and articles in massive printruns), and through references to him in the press. The broad categories of types of reference that had occurred in the Stalin cult were also present in that of Brezhnev. However unlike Stalin, there could be no direct personal link with the regime founder Lenin, nor, because of destalinisation, could association with Stalin be used as a mode of elevation of Brezhnev; nor could any positive reference to Khrushchev be used to bolster Brezhnev’s authority. Nevertheless, an attempt was made to link him to Lenin. This took the form of references to him as a ‘Leninist’, a ‘leader of the Leninist type’, a ‘continuer of the cause of Lenin’, and as someone who had worked for the implementation of Leninist policy and the realisation of those ideals for which Lenin had struggled.170 The cult also sought to associate his name with success, both in those areas in which he worked before becoming party leader and nationally after 1964. A strong attempt was made to associate him with the victory in the Great Patriotic War and therefore with the new founding myth of the regime (see below). As the hype around the war escalated, his role was presented as increasingly significant. The 1978 publication of his small book of wartime memoirs, Malaia zemlia, and the award to it, along with his two other volumes of memoirs published in 1978 (Vozrozhdenie about the post-war successes in socialist construction in Ukraine, Zaporozh’e and Dnepropetrovsk, and Tselina about his time in Kazakhstan), of a Lenin Prize for literature in 1979 was perhaps the pinnacle of this. Once he had become General Secretary, both general and individual policy successes were associated with his name; for example, ‘With your many sided and tireless activity in the post of General Secretary of the CC CPSU are linked the major successes of our party in the regions of domestic and foreign policy.’171 Significantly, he was also lauded for the regularisation of political life and political processes. He was responsible for the creation of an atmosphere of ‘genuine creativity, strong moral health’, ‘optimism’,


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‘comradeliness’, the rule of ‘principle’ and ‘efficiency’ in the party and country, and restoration of ‘leninist norms’ in party and society.172 Brezhnev’s achievements were generally tempered by association with the party and its leading organs, with the focus on their regular functioning constituting an implicit check on his authority; although there were occasional references to him as the vozhd,173 this never became embedded in the metanarrative. Brezhnev’s words were frequently cited as justification for something, his speeches were reprinted in large press runs, and his words became the authoritative voice of the regime. They were presented as self-evident truths, designed to guide and inspire rather than be a source of argument and debate. They were ‘programmatic’ statements, often involving ‘a deep and all-round analysis’ of the issue under review,174 and constituted important contributions to Marxism-Leninism; they were ‘a wonderful fusion of wisdom, experience, and scientific foresight’ which inspired the people in their efforts to build communism.175 The notion of developed socialism was associated with his name, thereby giving him some standing in the domain of party theoretician. From late 1972, Brezhnev began making ‘programmatic statements’ at the CC whose ‘propositions and conclusions’ were taken up and endorsed by party organisations around the country, something that had never happened under Khrushchev and which clearly emphasised his importance as a thinker and leader. Brezhnev was also presented as the object of the people’s love, faith, gratitude and respect.176 He was depicted as someone who had spent his whole career working for the best interests of the Soviet people, struggling to achieve advances in their welfare and progress towards communism. He had a deep understanding of the people’s hopes, aspirations and problems and a firm commitment to work to realise those hopes and aspirations and overcome the problems.177 In tune with the people and their wishes, he exuded fatherly solicitude and in return received filial love and respect.178 Pictures often showed Brezhnev surrounded by ordinary people, with their faces showing respect and attention, but never the awe and unlimited love that had been the hallmark of many representations of Stalin with ordinary citizens. Brezhnev was the recipient of numerous state awards – by the end of his life, over 200 awards had been made to him179 – and of high office. In 1976 he became Marshal of the Soviet Union, the highest military rank, and his chairmanship of the Defence Council was publicly acknowledged, and in 1977 he was named chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, or state president. His name also came to adorn numerous factories, ships and other things throughout the Soviet Union, although it seems that only one major town, Naberezhnye Chelny in 1982, was named after him.

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While the Brezhnev cult was a significant part of the regime’s metanarrative from the early 1970s, it never dominated in the way that the Stalin cult had, and it never vested charismatic authority in its principal as that of Stalin had done. While there are many reasons for this – the divergence between the presented image of Brezhnev and the reality was much more readily apparent to people than it had been during Stalin’s era and Brezhnev never achieved the political dominance that Stalin had – an important one was the resurgence of the cult of Lenin. One of the principal drivers of this was the increased regularity of functioning of the political organs and the description of this as ‘Leninist’. Mention has already been made of the restoration of ‘Leninist norms’, something which was presented as the means to the restoration of health to the body politic. Policy was often described as being Leninist in nature and leaders were seen as being true ‘Leninists’. The Lenin Prize was a major award for achievement in various fields of endeavour.180 Numerous monuments to Lenin were built and Lenin museums opened or expanded in the 1970s and 1980s.181 But there was also increased emphasis on the person of Lenin himself, something stimulated by the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in 1967 and particularly the centenary of his birth in 1970.182 Lenin became the pre-eminent symbol in the metanarrative at this time. He was described as ‘the inspirer and organiser of the October socialist revolution, the founder and leader of the Communist Party and Soviet state, the fighter for the unity of the international communist movement’, while the people ‘again and again express their love for Il’ich’.183 But it was really the centenary of Lenin’s birth that saw the escalation of the cult. Preparations were announced in 1968.184 In the announcement, Lenin appears as the ‘genius continuer of the revolutionary teaching of Marx and Engels, the founder of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the vozhd of the greatest social revolution and the builder of the first socialist state in the world.’ His ideas exercised the greatest influence on the whole course of world development. Lenin was described as ‘the genius theoretician of the proletarian revolution and the socialist transformation of society’; as ‘the greatest leader of the proletarian revolution, as the founder and leader of the Bolshevik party, the vanguard of the working class, a party of a new type, the party of socialist revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, the party of the construction of socialism and communism, the highest form of socio-political organisation’; as ‘the founder and leader of the first socialist state in the world, the state of workers and peasants’; as ‘the acknowledged vozhd of the world proletariat, of the international communist movement’; and as ‘the ardent fighter for the freedom and happiness of the workers.’ Lenin worked all his life for the welfare of the


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workers, and the party was to firmly and without deviation follow the Leninist course. Lenin was presented not just as the founder of the Soviet state, but the spiritual father of the society. The decision also gave an indication of what the Leninist course, and the struggle for the implementation of Lenin’s behest, meant: doing everything necessary for the construction of communism, to increase the material and spiritual wealth of the socialist Otchizna; creation of the material-technical base of communism through growth of industry and agriculture, improving people’s welfare and culture, improving methods of administration of the economy, raising labour productivity, struggling for the acceleration of scientific-technical progress, encouraging confidence in the man of labour; strengthening the moral-political unity of the working class, peasantry, and national intelligentsia, and the fraternity and friendship of the peoples of our country; strengthening the Soviet state, developing socialist democracy, increasing the role and responsibility of the soviets and public organisations, attracting workers into the practical affairs of state administration, and educating the new man to be an active fighter for communism; strengthening the ranks of the Communist Party, preserving the unity of the party and people, strictly observing the Leninist norms of party and state life, being principled, business-like in work, modest, sensitive; strengthening discipline and organisation, being irreconcilable to antisocial acts and decisively combating shortcomings; defending the pureness of Marxist-Leninist theory, enriching it in accord with the concrete-historical conditions of social development, and struggling against any appearance of bourgeois ideology; constant concern for the growth of the defence might of the Soviet Rodina and to support the preparedness of the people and army to repulse the aggression of the imperialists, to defend the socialist Otechestvo; piously to implement one’s international duty, strengthen international proletarian solidarity in the struggle against imperialism and reaction, support the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against capitalist slavery and oppression, and support the national liberation movement; strengthen the power of the world socialist system, and the unity of the international communist and workers’ movement. This list of elements of Lenin’s behest effectively constituted a general legitimation of the main rhetorical programme of the Brezhnev leadership. By being rooted in Lenin, contemporary policy was given a significant ideological grounding. This is also reflected in one of the main slogans of the time: ‘Lenin is always with us’. As a symbol, Lenin was firmly

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harnessed to the Soviet present and future. The country was flooded with representations of the dead leader – busts, statues, posters, pictures, books – and commemorative speeches lavish with praise were the order of the day. On 23 December 1969, the CC adopted theses on the centenary of Lenin’s birth.185 These focused on the central role played by his thought. Lenin appeared as the translator of Marx and Engels’ thought into revolutionary practice, as the founder of the proletarian party of a new type and the theoretician and vozhd of the socialist revolution. Socialism was the embodiment of the ideas of Leninism, which were central in the construction of socialism. The party had defended those ideas against opponents, condemned the personality cult and subjectivism, and restored the Leninist norms of party life. Lenin’s ideas were at the heart of the socialist organisation of the economy, the overcoming of social and national distinctions, improvements in standards of living, and the development of the socialist world. Leninism was the banner of the peoples’ struggle against imperialism, for the revolutionary renewal of the world, in which was evident the growth of both socialism and of the opposition of capitalism/imperialism; Lenin’s ideas were central to proletarian internationalism. They were marching along Lenin’s road to communism with the programme for building communist society based on Lenin’s ideas, the importance of science and technology, the perfection of economic relations, the solution of socio-political problems (class, nationality, democracy) and the moulding of the new man. Lenin the figure was incarnate in the building of socialism. Ten years later, his birth was again the occasion for the elaboration of his image.186 He was the titan, the true and stoic follower of Marx and Engels, the genius theoretician, the greatest strategist and tactician of the world proletariat. To Lenin and the party of Bolsheviks fell the great mission of preparing and heading the first victorious socialist revolution in history, and uniting the theory of scientific socialism with the wide practice of the popular masses. ‘Leninism is the Marxism of the contemporary epoch, the sole, integral, continually developing teaching of the international working class.’ Lenin’s greatest historical service was the establishment of a proletarian party of a new type characterised by the unbreakable unity of scientific theory and revolutionary practice, ‘the inspirer and vozhd of socialist revolution and the construction of a new society . . . The world historical result of the activities of the CPSU and the Soviet people in the implementation of Leninist ideas was the construction of developed socialist society, in which all the more fully come to light the created forces of the new structure, its authentic human essence.’ The truth and indestructible force of Leninist ideas is shown in


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the fundamental changes in the appearance/cast of mind of the contemporary world. ‘All the activities of the party and people have been directed at the further strengthening of developed socialist society, at the establishment of the material-technical basis of communism, the improvement in social relations, the education of the citizens in the spirit of communist ideinost’ . . . The truth of the ideas of the great Lenin has permeated all the international activities of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.’ Lenin and Leninism became the primary ideological symbol of legitimacy. His words and example were used to justify the whole course of Soviet policy from 1917 into the future, while his image was the touchstone of orthodoxy, creativity, commitment and optimism. The elaboration of the Lenin cult in this way during these decades propelled Lenin to the central place among the symbols legitimising the Soviet system, fusing the myths of leadership and regime foundation. The evocation of Lenin in this way made even more stark the position of Stalin. There was no restoration of Stalin to the central corpus of the regime’s symbolic matrix,187 but nor was there the level of criticism of him that had been evident in the Khrushchev period. Rather than being an object of criticism, he largely disappeared from discussions of the history of the regime, while many of what had been described as ‘crimes’ during the Khrushchev era were now considered ‘mistakes’. However, symbolically there were some positive developments for Stalin: in 1970 a bust was erected over his grave on Red Square, and each of the ninetieth and hundredth anniversaries of his birth was marked by an article in Pravda.188 Lenin’s role as the founder and leader of the party, added to the prominent role the party seemed to be allocated in the construction of developed socialism, meant that the party became a significant element in the regime’s metanarrative. The party was said to have increased its political and organisational role in society and was the focus around which workers united.189 As the ‘leading and guiding force of Soviet society’ (the formulation that was to appear in the 1977 Constitution and become a common form of words from this point) and armed with Marxism-Leninism, the party ‘confidently leads the Soviet people on the path to the construction of communism, successfully implements its role as organiser and political leader of the whole Soviet people.’190 It had confirmed the Leninist principles of party life, strengthened intra-party democracy, including criticism and self-criticism, and maintained the purity of its ranks by both getting rid of those whose conduct compromised the calling of ‘communist’ and by ensuring high quality cadres through recruitment and training. It was united with the people who fully supported the policy line it was espousing, and it was leading them forward: ‘The full and final victory of socialism is the chief result of the

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revolutionary-transforming activities of the Soviet people under the leadership of the Communist Party.’191 The leading role of the party in socialist society was affirmed, but it needed to improve the forms and methods of party leadership and take a creative Marxist-Leninist approach to tackling the urgent problems of socialist development.192 Under developed socialism, ‘the party of all the people’ would retain its leading and guiding role even as popular involvement in the administration of the state expanded.193 The party also appeared on many political posters. A 1976 poster with Lenin’s head refers to the party as the ‘mind, honour and conscience of our epoch!’194 and, along with the Rodina, as ‘our thought and action (dela)’.195 It set the tasks workers were to fulfil;196 one poster from 1976 had a banner of the XXV Congress of the CPSU and a worker in a hard hat steering what looks like a factory, with a wheel comprising the words ‘quality of production, effectiveness of manufacturing’ and declaring that the people would follow the path of implementing the decisions of the congress.197 The unity between party and people was also a common theme.198 It was ‘the party of Lenin – the vanguard of the builders of communism’.199 The party’s historical position rooted among the populace was highlighted by the award of medals for fifty years’ membership in the CPSU in October 1981.200 The celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution marked a significant strengthening of the place of the foundation myth in the metanarrative. The enormous outpouring of serious discussion of the revolution and the wide array of artefacts produced in its celebration for a time propelled the revolution into central place in the metanarrative and strengthened its claim as the regime’s moment of foundation.201 The message projected about the revolution throughout this period was that it was the most important event of the twentieth century202 and the essential fundament of the socialist society that had emerged in the USSR. The original founding myth of the regime, Bolshevik success in 1917 followed by the struggle both to survive and to build socialism, was affirmed by this emphasis on the revolution and its historical importance. The revolution was evoked in posters, often stimulated by the fiftieth anniversary203 and declaring that the cause of October would live on;204 one poster from 1967 shows a red-coated worker striding across the countryside holding a red banner with the slogan ‘Fall in step with the revolution!’205 Posters also referred to communism,206 and acknowledged the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the USSR, usually in terms of the indissoluble union of republics and peoples.207 However, during the Brezhnev period, a new founding myth gathered strength, that of the Great Patriotic War.208 While this had always been recognised as a significant event in Soviet history, it was not until after the


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fall of Khrushchev that it became a prominent myth in the metanarrative. Under Khrushchev it had become acceptable for people to talk about the war and the regime did sponsor the construction of a significant number of war memorials, thereby opening up symbolic space for wartime memory where this had not been before.209 But these did not become a major element in the metanarrative until Khrushchev had fallen. Its growing importance was reflected in the restoration of the public holiday for Victory Day (9 May) in 1965. The marking of the war was a two-faced phenomenon: while celebrating the triumph of victory, they were also mourning the millions of war dead. The balance between these two was not constant, with the importance of the latter increasing over the course of this period.210 The focus on the war was projected particularly vigorously through popular culture – literature, films, artwork – as well as the official metanarrative. The Great Patriotic War, which through this name was symbolically linked with the Patriotic War of 1812, was marked by the erection of numerous monuments around the country,211 which gave material substance to the growing myth of the war. Staging posts in the growth of this myth were successive anniversaries. In January 1975 the thirtieth anniversary of the Great Patriotic War was foreshadowed.212 The image emphasised the way the party, people and armed forces had brought about victory over fascism and laid the basis for socialist construction and pursuit of the international peace policy. The thirty-fifth anniversary holiday213 was to take place under the banner of workers and the armed forces for the successful resolution of the tasks set by the XXV Congress and successive plena, for the strengthening of the economic and defence might of the USSR, under the banner of the further unity of the people around the Communist Party, the increased vigilance of the Soviet people, the consolidation of international solidarity with the peoples of the countries of the socialist commonwealth and the fraternal collaboration of their armed forces. The announcement thereby linked Soviet patriotism and socialist internationalism, the willingness to defend the Rodina and the achievements of socialism. In May 1984 the forthcoming fortieth anniversary of the Great Patriotic War was foreshadowed.214 Victory in the war was seen as opening the way for a strengthening of progressive forces. This was achieved by the Leninist Soviet state, and it demonstrated the monolithic unity of the party and people, the unbreakable union of the working class, kolkhoz peasantry and labour intelligentsia, the friendship and fraternity of the peoples of the USSR. Victory confirmed the powerful living force of Marxist-Leninist ideology. The inspirer and organiser of the Soviet people’s victory was the Leninist Communist Party. Important too was the creation of a new symbolic centre in Moscow, the ‘tomb of the unknown soldier’ with its eternal flame, in November

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1966.215 The flame was brought from the perpetual flame on the Field of Mars in Leningrad which, since 1920, had commemorated the martyrs of the revolution. This linked the two great foundation myths of the regime, October and the war, and formally elevated the myth of the war from the personal level it had been ascribed since 1946 to the level of regime symbolism. The tomb became a rival cultic centre to Lenin’s mausoleum,216 becoming the site of public ritual, from high acts of state like the minute’s silence on Victory Day, to the practice of newly-weds laying wreaths on the tomb. The national significance of the tomb was emphasised by the recognition at it of the thirteen hero cities of the war, the original three plus newly proclaimed ones: in 1965 Brest fortress, Odessa, Moscow and Kiev; in 1973 Novorossiisk and Kerch; 1974 Minsk; 1976 Tula; and in 1985 Murmansk and Smolensk. There were also memorials,217 museums and displays opened across the country, with the Central Museum of the Armed Forces of the USSR opening in new quarters in May 1965. But paradoxically there was no major war memorial built in Moscow. Since 1957, Poklonnaia Gora (Hill of Prostration) had been designated as the site of such a memorial, but for a variety of reasons construction did not commence until 1983 and it was not completed until after the Soviet Union had fallen.218 The war was also a common subject of political posters, often in terms of soldiers showing that victory ensured the safety of the motherland.219 The principal thrust of the myth of the Great Patriotic War was an intertwining of the two themes of glorious victory and enormous loss; it was a myth of collective sacrifice, salvation and triumph. The victory was attributed to the people, the party and the military, a sort of holy trinity of virtue which stood firm against the overwhelming might of the fascists. Resting upon a foundation of ‘military-patriotic education’ implemented throughout the country, it did not require much imagination to link the fascists with the contemporary threat posed by imperialism. But in the projection of the war, the method was essentially to depict it as a series of heroic exploits, all of which came together to prove the moral (and material) superiority of socialism. It was this breaking down of the war into a series of exploits or episodes (only the anniversaries of victories were marked) that facilitated the intertwining of the cult of the war with that of Brezhnev because this enabled his exploits to be presented as representative of the conflict as a whole. But the cost in terms of the loss of human life was also emphasised, something which was said to give moral weight to what the authorities sought to present as the logical result of the wartime experience, the Soviet peace policy. The attention to the war also stimulated an emphasis upon patriotism. One form in which this was expressed was through the juxtaposition of the


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notions of Rodina and internationalism. A common theme in the regime’s symbolic matrix remained the tying together of the notion of Soviet patriotism and socialist internationalism. While this was a means of bridging the old national–international dichotomy, it had a renewed currency and force at this time because of the way in which socialist forces elsewhere in the world were much more prominent politically and had a higher profile in Soviet foreign policy. Soviet patriotism and socialist internationalism were two qualities characteristic of the Soviet people.220 But as well as the invocation of Soviet patriotism, the symbolic discourse also used terms that had a more visceral, primordial tenor which seemed to relate to the ethnic community rather than the multinational, Soviet one – Rodina,221 socialist Rodina,222 socialist Otechestvo223 and socialist Otchizna.224 These sorts of formulations also fed into the theme of Russian nationalism, which seemed to gain strength during this period.225 But it also highlighted the link between domestic development and the international situation. The myth of external opposition during this period saw the emergence in 1971 of the notion of détente and its replacement of peaceful coexistence as the watchword of Soviet policy,226 despite the fact that both implied the presence of a hostile and aggressive capitalism. But this was a capitalism that was declining. The portrayal of the West invariably showed a society beset by social problems and clearly a less desirable place to live than under socialism. However despite its decay, capitalism and its partner, imperialism, initially typified most prominently by American imperialist aggression in Vietnam, remained a major danger; the deepening crisis of capitalism and the sharpening of its contradictions strengthened its adventurist nature and thereby endangered the peoples of the whole world. It was part of the sharp class struggle between two opposed social-political systems in the world arena;227 détente did not mean an end to struggle and competition. Within this context, Soviet foreign policy was portrayed as consistently being concerned with the pursuit of peace or, as it was called in 1982, the ‘Leninist strategy of peace’.228 The international hostility to the USSR and its allies remained a constant theme in poster art. Vietnam was one location where this was manifest,229 while some posters made clear that the chief enemy was the US.230 Aggressors needed to be rebuffed.231 However there was also recognition of some cooperation between East and West.232 But mostly the hostile environment was shown reflectively in the many demands for peace. This was often shown in the form of a woman and child,233 but there were also associations between sport (and in particular the Olympic Games, which were in Moscow in 1980) and peace234 and the Soviet soldier and peace,235 and symbolic designs, such as hands of three colours (associating the USSR with the former colonial world)

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pushing dark clouds away from the sun.236 A more immediate image was the call for an end to the arms race.237 Peace was also directly linked to the party and its policies.238 This picture of a hostile international environment was moderated somewhat by the image that the Soviet Union was not alone in its resistance to imperialist aggression and in the fight for peace. While the socialist side continued to be centred on the USSR and its allies in Eastern Europe plus the working class of the West, during this period a higher profile was achieved by allies in the third world, especially as the Soviet Union became more active in this region in the 1970s. The roster of governments recognised as ‘socialist’ (or ‘of socialist orientation’) grew, and, in many of those countries not governed by socialist governments, national liberation movements were counted as allies. As ties between the socialist states grew deeper and those with the workers in capitalist countries and the national liberation movements were strengthened, so the world socialist system was becoming stronger.239 This development and continued strengthening of the ‘world socialist system’, or sometimes the ‘international communist movement’, was altering the course of international affairs and creating ‘a new, socialist type of international relations, based on the principles of equality and national sovereignty, all-round mutually beneficial collaboration and the fraternal mutual help of socialist states.’240 It also meant that the USSR was not alone in its face off with capitalism but was part of the strengthening world communist movement,241 or, as it was termed in 1982, the strengthening solidarity of ‘the socialist commonwealth with all branches of the international communist, workers’ and national liberation movement’.242 The metanarrative during the Brezhnev period seems to have lost all sense of both excitement and urgency, both of which had been evident under Stalin and some echoes of which had remained under Khrushchev. Socialism was now mundane rather than exceptional, and seen overwhelmingly in terms of the ‘normal’. The image that the myth of building socialism projected under Khrushchev had been one of a society on the brink of communism and, accordingly, on the verge of experiencing material plenty. Under Brezhnev, this image was sharply changed. The less optimistic tenor of the imagery of society emerging during the Brezhnev period is reflected in the changed nature of the historical stage at which that society was deemed to be. While for Khrushchev the USSR had already reached the stage of the full-scale construction of communism, for Brezhnev society was in a prior stage, called developed socialist society. This change in nomenclature was not immediate; in November 1964 Brezhnev still referred to the way in which socialism had been completely victorious and that society was now involved in the full-scale


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construction of communism.243 However such formulations soon disappeared; for example, 1965 was the last year in which May Day and October Revolution slogans referred to building the material-technical basis of communism. From 1967 the notion of ‘developed socialism’ received increasing attention. Khrushchev’s ambitious target for the achievement of communism was quietly shelved. Along with this the metanarrative moved away from Khrushchev’s emphasis upon broadbased popular participation, the transformation of political and administrative into public organisations, the popular criticism of officials, and consumer goods production as the path to communism, replacing these with notions of technocratic management through the application of the principles of the scientific and technological revolution, the importance of the role of the official, the channelling of popular participation through existing political institutions, and all-round economic development. Although the term all-people’s state continued to be used, it was now not associated with notions of the shrinking of government and the growth of self-administration, as it had been under Khrushchev. Despite the growth of the dissident movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the image of the fundamental unity of the society remained largely unshaken, although the earlier exaggerated claims about the disappearance of class differences were dropped. The perception of the continuing basic hostility of the West remained, along with a conviction that this could generally be managed through the policy of détente. This symbolism of the ordinary was also reflected in urban development. Urban development in the post-Stalin period The sense of building a new society evident in the 1930s and the triumphalism and monumentalism of late Stalinism were weakened under Khrushchev and replaced by a sense of the mundane and the ordinary under Brezhnev. In terms of iconic structures, the most important of these was the reworking of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition into the Exhibition of Economic Achievements of the USSR (VDNKh).244 The Agricultural Exhibition had opened in 1939. It comprised a series of pavilions devoted to agricultural production, with its centrepiece a large statue of Stalin and its entrance gate topped by the socialist realist statue ‘Rabochii i kolkhoznitsa’ by Mukhina, which had been a main feature of the Soviet pavilion in the 1937 Paris Expo. When the Exhibition re-opened in 1954, the original design had been substantially reworked. From 1956 the statue of Stalin and the quotations from him that had decorated many of the buildings were removed. Although agriculture remained a prominent theme, represented by sheaves of wheat which were a common decorative

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element, there was a new emphasis on the production of the union republics with pavilions not just for sectors of production (like grain and meat), but also for the republics and some of the regions of Russia. The national pavilions were presented in a kind of stylised national form, designed to show the diversity, and yet unity, of the USSR. The overall style of decoration was a sort of ‘Soviet classicism’ with, in the words of one description, ‘lettuce leaves instead of acanthus leaves, sheaves of wheat instead of Corinthian capitals, rams’ horns instead of curly scrolls and monumental garlands of fruit’245 and statues of muscular men and women farmers. Set in a large, landscaped park with a pool where the statue of Stalin had stood, this was a vibrant representation of the Soviet Union and its productivity. However this message did not last. Renamed VDNKh in 1959, the exhibition saw the 1963 re-assignment of the republican pavilions to state ministries, which were made responsible for mounting exhibitions about their work. Now the Exhibition was more a mirror of ‘technological progress’246 than of the multinational Soviet socialist community. This emphasis was strengthened by the transformation of the Mechanisation of Agriculture Pavilion into the Space Pavilion in 1966 and the placement of a rocket where Stalin’s statue had stood. Despite the continued presence of the Friendship of Nations fountain that featured sixteen gilded bronze figures (one for each republic) dressed in national costume,247 the exhibition had lost its sense of embodying the multinational Soviet socialist community and had become a representation of Soviet technological prowess. It was no longer an organic vision of Soviet society but a site for displays which had no intrinsic coherence and often little merit. Construction of the Moscow Metro continued, with the creation of new lines snaking out into the further reaches of Moscow and the construction of stations to serve them. Generally, the later stations were built, the more austere and less decorative they were. Some major, or landmark, structures were erected under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, including the Luzhniki (Lenin) Stadium (1954–6), Ostankino Television Tower (1960–7), the restructuring of much of Kalinin Prospekt with modern high-rise buildings (1963–8), the building for the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (1964–9), the TASS building (1976), the building of the Academy of Sciences (begun in 1960s), and the House of Soviets of the RSFSR (1980; the so-called ‘White House’).248 Worthy of separate note is the Palace of Congresses built in the Kremlin in 1959–61. This building was a functional replacement for the Palace of Soviets, which was finally surrendered to history with the construction in 1958–60 of a swimming pool on its proposed site.249 The new Palace had modernised classical features, principally of white marble and glass, and was placed


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partly underground so that it would not dominate the Kremlin precinct. Other development projects included building work on Novokirovsky Prospekt, the construction of the New Tretiakov Gallery on Krymskaia embankment, and the facilities for the 1980 Olympic Games. A beginning was also made in 1983 on construction of a war memorial on Poklonnaia Gora, but this was halted by the Moscow party boss, Boris Yeltsin, in 1986. The city authorities also erected (1966–8) a replica of Bove’s Triumphal Gate (erected in honour of the 1812–14 war), which had been destroyed in 1936, on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. There was no coherent style characterising these buildings. The Palace of Congresses was classical but modern, the CMEA building innovative in its open book form, the high rises along Kalinin Prospekt were modern and similar to some buildings in the West, while the TASS building had clear constructivist elements. Accordingly there was no single image or message that emerged from this architecture; Stalinist triumphalism was replaced by a sense of the ordinary. The cultic centre of the regime was changed with the addition of Stalin’s body to that of Lenin in the Mausoleum and of his name over the door in 1953. Proposals to build a pantheon to his memory came to nothing. However his tenure in the Mausoleum was brief; in 1961 as part of Khrushchev’s destalinisation, his body was removed and buried behind the Mausoleum. In 1970 a bust was placed over the grave. Similar busts of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko were placed over their graves when they died in, respectively, 1982, 1984 and 1985. There were also changes in statuary elsewhere in the city. With destalinisation, all of the statues of Stalin disappeared and, reflecting the renewed emphasis on Lenin, representations of him multiplied throughout the city, both within public buildings and in the streets and squares. Virtually any building that Lenin had visited was now decorated with a memorial plaque marking the event: by 1980 Moscow had 130 ‘shrines’ to Lenin and 30 public statues and busts.250 In 1955 Kaganovich’s name was taken from the Metro and replaced with that of Lenin, and in this period many streets were renamed to pick up the name of the dead leader or his relatives. In 1958 a statue of Dzerzhinsky was placed in front of the Lubianka, and in 1961 a statue of Marx appeared in Sverdlov Square. In 1955 the Kremlin, closed to the public since the shift of the government there in 1918, was once again opened. But most changes to the city after the death of Stalin were brought about through the mass construction of housing. This was a high priority for the Khrushchev leadership, as he both criticised architectural styles and the performance of architects under Stalin,251 and pushed for the mass production of housing without the decorative embellishments that had been

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intrinsic to the end of Stalinism, thereby in the words of one scholar, launching ‘the process of architecture’s rapid subordination to the construction industry’.252 A standardised style of housing was promoted, principally of five-storey apartment blocks of reinforced concrete, which sprang up all over the city, much of it on the ever-moving outskirts. This was bland and devoid of decoration, designed to meet the housing crisis rather than project the power of the state. It was the provision of housing which was the centrepiece of the process of designing a new development plan for Moscow which began in 1960. This ‘Master Plan for the Development of the City of Moscow’, which was designed to turn Moscow into what the XXIV Congress called a ‘model communist city’,253 was finally confirmed by the Mossovet in July 1971.254 The plan was back-dated to 1961 and was to last twenty-five to thirty years. It envisaged a major expansion in housing provision and in the supply of public services (including the Metro), a zonal approach to spatial control which would have seen manufacturing and warehousing concentrated in particular ‘production zones’; some noxious factories were to be expelled from the city, historic landmarks preserved, parkland expanded, and the streets decorated with a ‘synthesis of the arts’. The development of Moscow was seen in terms of creating a ‘clear expression of the progressive ideas of our society, the social and scientific progress of the Soviet state’.255 Moscow’s development was thus meant to be representative of the growth of Soviet socialism. However there was little in the plan that was uniquely socialist or that would have distinguished the Soviet capital from similar plans for urban development in the West. Although there was an emphasis on public welfare and the provision of communal facilities, there was no sense that these were to replace the single-family occupancy of domiciles; indeed as the emphasis on housing made clear, this was quite the reverse. Furthermore with the proposed development distributed around the city rather than highly concentrated, lacking the physically imposing stature of the Moscow verticals, and being devoted principally to the construction of functional infrastructure rather than iconic buildings, while the architectural changes may have improved living standards, they did not represent a clarity of vision about the socialist future that matched the soaring idealism of earlier urban development. Although the post-Stalin period did see the continued destruction of old buildings, there was some moderation of this. Under Khrushchev, the closure of churches continued apace256 and the changing of street names reached a new high in 1964, more than any single year since 1922; they then declined, averaging five per year in the 1970s.257 By the mid-1960s, popular pressures for the retention of some of the past had strengthened, reflected in the creation in 1965 of the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of


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Historical and Cultural Landmarks (VOOPIK),258 and in the modification of the plans for the Rossiia Hotel to preserve neighbouring historic buildings, especially churches. This was a particularly symbolic move given that the Rossiia occupied the site originally chosen for the eighth of Stalin’s Moscow verticals, so the manipulation of plans for the Rossiia to accommodate neighbouring heritage buildings was significant. Post-Stalin ritual Throughout this post-war period, the regime continued to foster public displays on the designated feast days.259 Under both Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the feast-day parades were mounted on a more elaborate scale than they had been before. In May 1965, Victory Day was restored as a holiday and the mass parade of soldiers and military hardware across Red Square in front of the political leadership on top of the Mausoleum was resumed.260 Celebration of the feast days followed a general pattern, although with a significant difference between May Day and the anniversary of the revolution (see below). The following description is typical. On the day concerned, many of the streets and buildings of the capital were decorated with gigantic pictures of members of the Politburo; there were reports of a picture of Brezhnev standing at the tribune that was the height of an entire building.261 There were also large posters of the leaders on the buildings surrounding Red Square, and buildings were also decorated with red flags and bunting; artificial red carnations were on the tops of lampposts.262 On the façade of GUM was usually a banner with the profile heads of Marx, Engels and Lenin, usually with a hortatory slogan beneath and other slogans or representations of workers flanking them. The flagpoles in front of GUM carried the flags of the union republics. On the Historical Museum was usually a banner referring to some forthcoming event, anniversary or important policy issue. On the Kremlin walls were the coats of arms of the union republics and, directly behind the Mausoleum, of the USSR. During the parades, the leaders of the Soviet party and government stood atop the Mausoleum to take the salute, along with other important guests, like leaders of other socialist states or newly returned cosmonauts. Other foreign guests and members of the Soviet elite stood on the tribunes that flanked that structure. The chief days of celebration263 were May Day, after 1965 Victory Day, and the anniversary of the Revolution. There developed a clear contrast in the way the May Day and October Revolution celebrations were structured after 1969. Prior to 1969, both parades were begun by the Defence Minister emerging onto Red Square from the Spassky Gates at precisely 10.00 a.m. to greet the troops who had already assembled in the square.

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Having acknowledged each contingent of troops, the Defence Minister then ascended the Mausoleum, where the other leaders stood, to present the address. This is how the anniversary of the Revolution parade commenced from the time of Stalin to 1984. Throughout this time it was led by soldiers, tanks, artillery, missiles and other military hardware followed by gymnasts and dancers in traditional costumes; children gave flowers to the political leaders and received chocolates in return. In contrast, the post-1969 May Day parade was not led by soldiers. It was preceded by a recorded fanfare of trumpets from loudspeakers on the Kremlin wall, which continued to broadcast during the parade. The parade was led by schoolchildren, gymnasts and dancers in traditional costumes in their thousands, interspersed with floats carrying pictures of Lenin and current members of the Politburo, and by posters celebrating economic achievements. Many marchers also carried flags, banners, slogans and pictures. After about thirty minutes, the marchers changed; now ordinary representatives of the Soviet people, 100 abreast, marched across the square, many carrying flags and artificial flowers, some pulling floats with displays on them. Prior to 1969, both days had been referred to as a ‘military parade and demonstration of workers’; from 1969 only the anniversary of the Revolution was referred to in this way, with May Day being referred to as ‘The 1st May celebration’. From 1969, the two parades were clearly meant to symbolise different things: May Day the peaceful nature of Soviet society, and the anniversary of the Revolution the strength and military preparedness of the Soviet state. These different foci were reinforced by the more sombre aspect of the October Revolution celebration resulting from the drab attire of the marchers in November compared with the brighter spring clothes and the carrying of flowers and sprigs of greenery in May. However both still sought to project an image of the complete unanimity of a diverse Soviet society and to represent a model of social relations which was deemed to embody socialism. The Victory Day parade on 9 May264 was always led by the military and its hardware, the theme being not just the victory and the sacrifice which brought it about, but the military power and preparedness of the country. A regular form of public ritual was the election to Soviet legislative organs, the soviets. The elections retained the broad form they had had under Stalin. Candidates presented policy speeches to the electorate, with such speeches generally being little more than affirmations of the successes of the regime. On election day, voters were mobilised to turn out and vote, which they were described as doing almost unanimously; turnout was regularly said to exceed 99 per cent and candidates received close to 99 per cent support. Elections were rituals designed, among other things, to emphasise the moral and political unity of Soviet society.


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Another form of public ritual became more common towards the end of this period, the state funeral of recently deceased leaders. Brezhnev (1982), Andropov (1984) and Chernenko (1985) were all the subject of such a ritual. The funeral of Brezhnev set the model for the next two.265 A ceremonial meeting of the CC preceded the party leadership acting as an honour guard while the body lay in state in the Hall of Columns in the House of the Unions. The body was then borne on a gun carriage to Red Square followed on foot by the leading figures of party and state. In the square were assembled masses of people, including from the military. The leading political figures ascended the Mausoleum from where Andropov opened the memorial meeting. After speeches from a number of other people, the leaders carried Brezhnev’s coffin to the Kremlin wall where it was lowered into its grave. The state hymn and a military salute followed, after which the leaders returned to the Mausoleum to take the salute of the passing soldiers. A bust was subsequently placed over the grave.266 Most of these feast days also involved a component in which rather than the involvement of representatives of the general populace, it was higher members of the regime who participated, although with the spread of television these events were televised to the country more broadly. These were formal meetings held in the Kremlin, usually on the eve of a Red Square parade. A good description of such a meeting held on the eve of the anniversary of the Revolution has been given by Hedrick Smith.267 Brezhnev delivered the speech, which was followed by a variety of cultural items (operatic solos, folk dances, ballet) and a series of movie vignettes of high points in the regime’s life. When the lights came on after the movie, the stage was crowded by a massive choir, and in its midst was a spotlighted white statue of Lenin. The singing and music swirled around the statue and embraced the entire auditorium in a cloud of exultant enthusiasm and commitment that was meant to pick up all who were present and, in Smith’s words, ‘to awe and inspire, to revive faith among those grown hard, cynical or forgetful’. Turning to the institutional culture, ritual was important in the normal fora of the party as well. In the congress, many of the forms that had been evident under Stalin were maintained, with the increasing size of the congress anyway ensuring that this could not have become an effective decision-making body even if this had been desired. The basic legitimation functions of the congress – the formalisation of the party leadership and of policy through its official announcement, the expression of monolithic unity through both the nature of its proceedings and the fact of its being a culmination of cycles of unanimous elections from below, and the widespread enthusiastic support with which it was said to be met – were strengthened by the restoration of a regularity to its timetable after the

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disruptions of late Stalinism. From the first congress of this period (the XX in 1956), it took on the basic form it was to have until the last congress in 1990. The main accountability report was given by the First/General Secretary, thereby restoring the principle that had been breached at the XIX Congress in 1952. A separate report on the economy was given by the prime minister at the XX Congress in 1956 and the four congresses during the Brezhnev period; at the XXI Congress Khrushchev gave the only report, which was entitled as being on the economy, and at the XXII he gave the accountability report as well as a report on the new Programme; there was no separate economic report. These reports were the subject of extensive pro forma discussion but this was never critical, although local leaders did often use this as an opportunity to press local claims. The speeches were normally laudatory of the party leader, at increasing levels at each successive congress within the period of the tenure of each First/ General Secretary. The announcement of the new party leadership – the CC by the Congress and the Politburo by the CC – was approved unanimously and enthusiastically. The congress received formal greetings from a variety of bodies, usually including the military, Komsomol and Young Pioneers, and from visiting delegations of foreign communist and workers’ parties, and concluded with the singing of the Internationale. The overwhelming sense of unanimity and commitment was the dominant message to come from the ritualised activity in the congress. This had generally also been the pattern in the CC and in lower party bodies until Khrushchev sought to change it. Rather than an assembly in which speakers were listened to in general silence and where listeners passively accepted whatever they were told, Khrushchev championed a culture in which speakers and leaders (although he was less supportive when it came to him) were to be subject to interventions and questioning from the floor. Furthermore his championing of the involvement of nonparty members in party discussions and his own personalist and interventionist leadership style contradicted many of the ritualised behavioural norms whereby official bodies had generally functioned. His moves threatened to turn these gatherings into real venues for discussion. In this way, the established ritual of party meetings was challenged, with the authority of the First Secretary behind such a challenge. This was not a development like the earlier promotion of criticism and self-criticism, which had taken on its own ritualised forms. This seemed to suggest that criticism and dissent from below was acceptable even if it did not have prior substantive support from above. However this challenge to the ritualised forms of party gatherings was blunted once Khrushchev had been overthrown. Brezhnev’s emphasis on regularity and on the authority of the party, added to the removal of the right of non-party members to


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participate in party meetings, restored the ritualised nature of these assemblies. Once again, they reflected the myth of party unanimity. The downfall of Khrushchev was motivated by many factors, but clearly important among them was his inability to retain the support of officials in positions of responsibility below the centre. They were alienated by a series of institutional changes he introduced (for example, the sovnarkhozy in 1957 and the bifurcation of the party in 1962), but also important was the way in which he changed the ritualised nature of party meetings. This was important because the changes he introduced placed these officials under greater pressure: without any alleviation of pressure for performance from above, they now also had to contend with criticism from below. Their positions were made more insecure and their working lives more difficult. Certainly they no longer had to fear for their lives, but there is no doubt that they felt increasingly vulnerable. It is therefore little wonder that when Brezhnev came along and sought through the notion of ‘trust in cadres’ to restore their sense of security, they were eager to give him their support. Thus officials throughout the political structure, by acting in accord with the regular demands of their positions, confirmed the main thrust of the metanarrative as it developed under Brezhnev, that of the regularisation of procedures and processes and consequently the achievement of the teleology through a process of regular development. At the level of everyday life in the late 1950s and early 1960s, increased emphasis was given to ritual as the regime sought to build up a cycle of rituals designed to accentuate individuals’ membership of the broader Soviet community. Rituals of various sorts were promoted: regular life cycle (birth, marriage, death), formal entry into various collectives (Pioneers, Komsomol, school, receipt of passport, coming of age, and entry to army), labour (entry to the working class, socialist competition), and the calendrical cycle (new year, ending of winter, holiday of the birch).268 Some of these had originated in the early 1920s and then lapsed while others (like socialist competition) had been maintained throughout the Stalin period. The essence of these secular rituals was the commitment and obligations the individual owed (or in the case of the funeral, had paid) to the community. It was their membership of the collectivity and the way their identity was defined by that membership that was the overriding message emanating from these rituals. The image of society projected by the metanarrative during the Brezhnev period was a step back from the idealism and optimism of Khrushchev.269 The authority of officials and technically competent managers, the continuing crucial organising and managerial role of political institutions, the ordered and structured participation in public life through the channels provided by the regime, were all key aspects of

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developed socialism. And although the end goal was still seen to be the achievement of communism, and despite the beefing up of the symbol of Lenin as the source of authority for this, the path to it and mechanisms whereby it would be achieved were much more conservative under Brezhnev than they were at any earlier time in the regime’s life. The myth of building socialism had become a technocratic myth. Furthermore by propelling the myth of the Great Patriotic War into the position of foundational myth of the society, the uniquely socialist cast of Soviet society that had stemmed from the legitimating role of the October Revolution seemed to be compromised; there was nothing definably socialist about the war, so its role as a source of legitimation potentially called into question the regime’s socialist roots. The symbolism of the regime seeking to invest its legitimacy in the marching ranks of the ageing veterans was not the way to portray the Soviet Union as a vigorous country firmly on the march to the communist future. The evocation of the excitement of participating in the building of the new society, something which was tangible for many people in the 1930s, was very much weaker in the post-war era. Both the campaigns of Khrushchev and Brezhnev seemed pale by comparison with what had gone before, and although for many young people there may have been a sense of excitement, enthusiasm and commitment in endeavours like the Virgin Lands and BAM campaigns (at least at their beginning), this does not seem to have been evident among older members of the population. For many people involvement in public life had become purely ritualised with little real content or fervent belief,270 especially given the way in which the metanarrative had left itself open to measurement against reality in a new (and regime-designed) way. Nevertheless, by continuing to pursue their normal lives, by fulfilling their civil obligations and playing their parts in the activities mandated by the regime, the people continued to provide a basis upon which the metanarrative could rest, while professional groups continued through their activities to shape the contours of the metanarrative.271 The emergence of the dissident movement from the mid-1960s constituted a jarring note and showed that for at least a section of the population the metanarrative was not compelling, but the limited popular support they gained meant that the passive population offered no challenge to the continuing dominance of the metanarrative. It was unclear whether the emergence of such dissent marked a critical crack in the basis of the metanarrative or not. This would become clear under Gorbachev.

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By the time Gorbachev came to power in March 1985, the metanarrative was under considerable strain as a result of the post-Stalin changes and the danger of incoherence they introduced. The tying of communism overwhelmingly to the achievement of material abundance had desacralised that aim, while its association with a specific timetable (despite the attempts under Brezhnev to blur this) created a benchmark that people could use to judge the lack of progress towards it. The overshadowing of the myth of October by that of the Great Patriotic War and the projection of leadership in terms of effective administration, with the consequent rejection of charisma as a basis of authority, transformed the metanarrative into a conservative, even mundane and humdrum, discourse. The difficult economic circumstances that became apparent in the 1970s and the acknowledged growth of corruption at this time created a situation that seemed to be favourable for the articulation of new ideals and the introduction of changes to the system. But while there was widespread acceptance that some form of change was necessary both practically and morally (i.e. in the sphere of ideas, ideals and symbols), there was no agreement on either the nature or extent of such changes. Furthermore, although there was a potentially wide constituency that would have favoured change, this was not universal. Among many office-holders there was concern that change could have serious consequences for them personally, with the result that they were willing to act as a brake on change and, because of their strategic location in the political structure, they remained a significant influence on how both the course of policy and the discourse of symbols in the metanarrative unrolled. During this final period of the Soviet era, the metanarrative was subjected to a process of fundamental transformation which ultimately shattered it. This process was driven in part by the reinterpretation of old symbols through the injection into them of new meaning by political elites, combined with the rejection of some symbols and the transformation and displacement of others by actors outside the political elite. As earlier chapters have shown, the modification of symbols by elites has 213

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been a continuing feature of Soviet history, but what was different this time is that the change in meaning often involved the effective rejection of the established meaning, while the rituals that were associated with the established symbols also often acquired very different forms. The resultant new symbolic discourse ultimately became very different from that inherited in 1985. The role of non-central elite political actors in restructuring this discourse was greater during this period, especially from 1988, than at any other time in Soviet history. The activity of professional groups, especially historians and journalists, of informal groups, national movements, political parties as well as leading politicians outside the central decisionmaking group was fundamental to the course symbolic discourse took. But even allowing for such influence, the most important factor in driving change in the metanarrative over the whole period was the party leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Indeed, Gorbachev’s very election as leader seemed to symbolise change. Here was a young and vigorous leader in stark contrast to his three elderly and sick predecessors, a leader who from the outset seemed to offer a more open and approachable style of leadership than anyone in the past, including Khrushchev, because he did not carry the sort of baggage that Khrushchev had to bear as a former ‘Stalinist’. This style of leadership was evident in his practice of public walkabouts, which he pursued much more extensively (especially in the first few years) than any of his predecessors, and the image he portrayed of being open to debate and discussion. But, as soon became clear, it was not only the symbolism of the style of leadership that was important here. The first broad enunciation of Gorbachev’s views, and therefore the suggestion that the established metanarrative, including principally the myth of building socialism, might come under challenge, appeared before he became General Secretary, in December 1984.1 In retrospect, this speech introduced in embryonic form some of the themes which were to be significant elements of the symbolism associated with Gorbachev’s coming attempt to rework the myth of building socialism and, more broadly, Soviet society. But these were straws in the wind, encapsulated within a framework that remained traditionally Soviet. For Gorbachev, the current task remained the ‘perfection of socialism’, defined in a Brezhnevite way: ‘The contemporary stage of developed socialist society is characterised by deep changes in the whole system of socialist production relations on the basis of qualitative changes in the forces of production, deepening the interaction and inter-penetration of technical-economic, socio-political, and spiritual-ideological factors.’2 Although it was not explicit in this formulation, Gorbachev was actually adopting the Andropovite position, that the USSR was at the beginning of the stage of developed socialism, and that


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the transition through this stage was not automatic but would require continuing work at improving the Soviet system. Gorbachev noted the importance of ‘socialist self-administration’ and democratic centralism, which was seen as essential to the widening and deepening of socialist democracy. The intensification of the economy, whereby it would be shifted to a qualitatively new scientific-technical and organisationaleconomic level, was needed, with some attention devoted to various technical aspects of this process, including a reference to ‘commodity-monetary relations’ (which could be seen as a euphemism for market relations). But the speech, in sympathy with its name, also emphasised popular initiative and socialist competition, including a reference to Stakhanovism. The further development of socialist democracy was discussed in part in terms of improvement in the work of bodies like the soviets and organs of popular control, and the involvement of workers in the daily discussion and resolution of issues at their workplaces. The speech noted the importance of Marxism-Leninism and cited Lenin on a number of occasions, while also acknowledging the unity of the Soviet people. All of this was cast within an international context of the exhaustion of capitalism, its impending crisis and the undermining of détente, which was said to be leading to increasing confrontation with the socialist world. The image of Soviet society that was projected through this speech was consistent with the general imagery from the early 1980s. However, there were some concepts that were introduced in the speech which, despite having an established meaning within the traditional Soviet lexicon, were to have much greater significance and meaning in coming years. The first of these was uskorenie, or acceleration. This referred to the need for the acceleration of social and economic progress in order to overcome the slowing of growth in recent years.3 Although this did not simply mean increased economic production but implied a qualitative change (e.g. raising labour productivity rather than simply meeting increased quantitative targets), its focus was on economic improvement within the bounds of the existing structures rather than changing the nature of those structures themselves.4 However, this conception did constitute a shift of emphasis compared with what it had meant earlier. Under Brezhnev, the conception had been the ‘acceleration of scientifictechnological progress’, while now Gorbachev also referred to the ‘acceleration of socio-economic progress’; both aimed to achieve social justice. Such a shift represented a broadening of the original concept, but this did not constitute a major attack on the established symbolic constellation; it remained broadly within established parameters.5 This is shown by the fact that Gorbachev ceased to refer to ‘acceleration’ as his programme of reform shifted to one of transformation; he last used the term in a speech

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in April 1988.6 Thus while this image of acceleration of socio-economic development provided the main structuring for Gorbachev’s early attempts at economic reform, in itself it did not transform the myth of building socialism, although it did extend existing meanings. The term which was to become the dominating symbol of Gorbachev’s reform programme, perestroika, also appeared in this speech. Meaning ‘restructuring’ or ‘reconstruction’, Gorbachev used it with regard to three of the tasks he saw confronting Soviet society: the need for a ‘serious perestroika’ of the system of education of cadres, the perestroika of ‘the forms and methods of management’ (which was to involve a significant widening of the rights and an increase in the economic independence of enterprises with a strengthening of their responsibility for final results), and the ‘basic perestroika’ of social attitudes within the context of collectivism. As Archie Brown has pointed out,7 perestroika as a concept was both flexible and ambiguous, and could mean minor tinkering or major change. In the Soviet context of the early to mid 1980s when the notion of ‘reform’ was one that could not publicly be entertained, perestroika could mean almost whatever each politician wished it to mean. At this stage it did not have the revolutionary undertones it was later to acquire. Indeed Gorbachev had used this term earlier, principally in terms of the ‘psychological restructuring’ of those working in the economy,8 and this did have a more general provenance within the Soviet lexicon, so although here it was linked with education and management, its use did not necessarily presage a major change in regime symbolism. In the initial phases of Gorbachev’s leadership, wide sections of the elite interpreted it in this more limited fashion. Similarly his discussion of democracy, and the association of glasnost with it, did not necessarily challenge the existing constellation of symbols. In his speech, Gorbachev explicitly recognised that contradictions existed under socialism, although they were declared to be non-antagonistic, and that different interests occurred within the carapace of all-people’s interests;9 he referred to the interests of individual social, social-demographic and professional groups as well as the individual needs and interests of the personality as all having to be accommodated. He also emphasised popular initiative, the ‘human factor’, and the perfection of socialist democracy. However, he also declared that the norm of all public life within socialist democracy was glasnost, which he defined as ‘wide, timely and frank information’.10 Glasnost was seen as necessary in the work of all party and state organs, and was a means of combating bureaucratic distortions and all deficiencies, it made for better decisions and enabled effective supervision of their implementation. Glasnost, which is usually translated as openness or transparency, was not a new term, but in its


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traditional Soviet usage it was generally quite restrictive in its import.11 In this more restricted form, glasnost seemed to mean publicity, that the authorities would be more open in providing information for the populace, rather than implying that that populace may themselves have the right to air their views. Certainly at this stage, Gorbachev’s formulation was not seen as implying the sort of freedom of opinion which was to develop in later years. Thus the reference to glasnost and its association with democracy could be seen as broadly consistent with earlier usage and did not necessarily question the existing metanarrative. So when Gorbachev first set out his views in a coherent fashion, the symbolic associations he evoked could have been seen both within the elite and the society more broadly as potentially involving some change, but change within the established framework of Soviet discourse and practice, especially of the Andropov period.12 The possibility of more radical change was clearly there, but it was not so strong as necessarily to presage the assault on regime symbolism that was to come. In the early period following Gorbachev’s election as General Secretary in March 1985, there was little evidence of challenge to the Soviet metanarrative. Gorbachev was more critical of the state of the economy, and uskorenie (both of scientific-technological and socio-economic development) did become a significant theme from April 1985,13 and the antialcohol campaign beginning in 1985 did introduce some novel images into Soviet public culture.14 But generally the discussion of policy issues and evocation of symbolic formulations remained within established boundaries. The suggestion that there could be some change to this arose when Gorbachev addressed the myth of building socialism at the October 1985 CC plenum. Gorbachev did this when discussing revisions to the party Programme to be introduced at the forthcoming Congress in early 1986.15 He declared that acceleration was to be the core of the Programme (as well as of the Guidelines for the next five year plan and revised party Rules), but that this document was to be characterised by continuity in theoretical and political directives reflecting the correctness of the party’s Third (Khrushchevite) Programme, along with the creative development of theory. He said that formulations that had not stood the test of time had been reassessed, and that the Programme, based on Marxism-Leninism, was one of the further advance of society towards communism through the acceleration of socio-economic development ‘achieving on the basis of this a qualitatively new condition of Soviet society’.16 Socialism was not an independent social formation; there was no sharp division between the two phases of a single communist formation. The economy played a decisive role in society’s development, while social policy was an important means of accelerating economic development and bringing about an

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upsurge in the labour and socio-political activity of the people. There was a need for the broadening and deepening of socialist democracy, the development of genuine power by the people, openness and publicity, and grassroots control in all state and public organisations. Thus Gorbachev emphasised the extension of socialist democracy within the reaffirmation of the ‘correctness of the main content’ of the Khrushchevite Programme and its commitment to the communist future.17 At the same time he spoke of ‘perfecting socialism’, but warned against any attempt hastily to introduce communist principles and, significantly, he did not use the term ‘developed socialism’. While he therefore continued at this time to use the notion of communism as the ultimate goal to justify party policy, even if this was in a passing rather than emphatic fashion, Gorbachev ceased to invoke the Brezhnevite notion of ‘developed socialism’, thereby leaving open the question of the stage Soviet society was at and accordingly the strategies associated with it. And he did seem to resurrect elements of the Khrushchevian vision. At the XXVII Congress, which opened on the symbolically significant 25 February 1986 (the thirtieth anniversary to the day of Khrushchev’s first destalinisation speech at the XX Congress), Gorbachev continued to push the boundaries of the principal aspects of party symbolism, but without really exceeding those boundaries. His report to the Congress,18 which for the first time since 1930 included the word ‘political’ in its title, was a little more adventurous than the resolution adopted on his report, but it generally remained within the broad symbolic parameters of the metanarrative inherited from the past. It acknowledged that the country was in the stage of developed socialism,19 but that this was characterised by society’s ‘qualitative transformation’ towards a new state of socialist society. This reaffirmed the principle that the achievement of communism was not an automatic process but had to be guided. This was implicit in Gorbachev’s criticism of the economic slowdown in the 1970s, something that he attributed partly to a ‘peculiar psychology – how to improve things without changing anything’, the psychology that was characteristic of the ‘era of stagnation’, as the Brezhnev period was now coming to be known. It was also evident in his reiteration of the need for the acceleration of socio-economic development. Furthermore, his description of acceleration was more expanded than it had been in April 1985. It included in the economic field: increased rates and a new quality of growth involving the intensification of production on the basis of scientific and technological progress, structural reconstruction of the economy and effective forms of management, and organising and stimulating labour; indeed in a break with the Soviet past, he called for a ‘radical reform’ in economic management,20 while also advocating ‘socialist self-administration’.21 But the


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notion of acceleration also involved an active social policy and a consistent emphasis on the idea of social justice, improved social relations, renewed forms and methods of work of political and ideological institutions, deepening of socialist democracy and the overcoming of everything that holds back social progress (specifically inertness, conservatism and stagnation). Furthermore, he declared, the acceleration of society’s development was impossible without the ‘further development of all aspects and manifestations of socialist democracy’. Thus while continuing to emphasise the Brezhnevite theme of scientific and technological progress, Gorbachev pushed his notion of acceleration to encapsulate much wider sectors of society and, potentially, to involve much more than simply the improved state of operation of existing institutions and processes. Indeed, this was explicit in his call for ‘the most thorough reorganisation of the socialist economic mechanism’, although he seemed immediately to moderate this by saying that this was, of course, already under way. Gorbachev endorsed some of the central pillars of Soviet symbolic discourse by affirming the continuing guidance of Marxism-Leninism, the vanguard role of the working class, its leadership of the alliance with the peasantry and intelligentsia, October as the basis for solving the nationalities problem, the party as the ‘guiding force and principal guarantor of socialist self-management’ and the continuing contradictions in the international arena. However, having endorsed these principles, he seemed immediately to cast doubt on some of them. On ideology, he called for creativity and innovation in order to transcend the limits of accustomed but outdated notions and declared that some of the conclusions of the last party Programme had proved not to be correct. The class alliance was associated with recognition of the existence of the diversity of social interests, while in the area of nationality relations, contradictions were still present. And in the international arena, he called for new approaches to those that had gone before, jettisoning both the class approach to international relations and the idea of the inevitable victory over imperialism, and substituting the notion of ‘regional conflicts’ for the more charged notion of ‘struggle for national liberation’.22 In terms of the party, there was also some qualification. The party was seen as the highest form of self-governing socio-political organisation. However, it needed to be free of any ‘infallibility complex’ and to be characterised by the perestroika of party work to enable it to implement the course set by the April 1985 plenum. This was to be done through the promotion of democracy in the party, the application of the principles of collective leadership and criticism and self-criticism, the exercise of ‘kontrol’, and a responsible attitude to the work at hand. The party had to learn to work in a new way. This criticism of the party as an institution (as opposed to those who

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worked in it) was a rejection of any suggestion in the leadership myth that the party was the bearer of charisma. Gorbachev’s speech thus took up established themes in the Soviet metanarrative and gave them a twist which suggested that they needed some reworking. But this did not constitute a rejection of the overriding concepts of the symbolic discourse. And the implicit criticism was in part moderated by the Congress resolution on Gorbachev’s report,23 which was more positive and less critical of the shortcomings perceived by Gorbachev. Much of the resolution restated the positions Gorbachev had espoused. It asserted the importance of Marxism-Leninism and the party’s faithfulness to it, along with its ‘ability deeply to understand and realistically evaluate the situation, draw the correct lessons from experience, find the path to the resolution of pressing problems, overcome all that is obsolete and out of date’. While Gorbachev noted the need to overcome accustomed but outdated notions, the resolution said that Marxism-Leninism and the party were the means of doing this. The resolution also noted the importance of acceleration of both socioeconomic development and scientific-technological progress, and of their role in achieving ‘a qualitatively new state of society’. This had to involve the restructuring (perestroika) of the economic mechanism, of economic policy, of the management mechanism and of the psychology of activity. These were necessary to overcome the recent economic shortcomings, which were a result of the failure to recognise the need to shift the economy onto an intensive basis. The resolution recognised the leading role of the proletariat in the class alliance, while also noting classes and social groups had their own specific interests (a formulation which did not seem to go as far as Gorbachev had done), as well as the successes of nationality policy while noting continued problems of nationalism, chauvinism and localism. It called for improvement in the political system, including the strengthening of glasnost and a deepening of democratic principles in action. The resolution also called for improvement of the party’s leading role in all spheres of life and the basic restructuring of party work. This was to involve a strengthening of inner-party democracy, seen principally in terms of the traditional notions of collective leadership and criticism and self-criticism. In the international sphere, the bifurcated image outlined by Gorbachev was repeated. The congress adopted a new edition of the party Programme.24 For Gorbachev,25 the Programme reiterated the theoretical and political guidelines that had stood the test of time but, given that much had changed since the Third Programme had been written in 1961, some of the estimates and conclusions of that document had been proved to be incorrect. The idea of the practical building of communism had been


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premature as had some of the deadlines for solving problems. Accordingly, while the main goal of the 1961 Programme, the construction of a communist society, was reaffirmed,26 the strategy for its attainment had to be modified to fit in with the changed circumstances. The Programme provided a much starker picture of society and its future even than the 1977 Constitution had, let alone Khrushchev’s optimistic vision of 1961; evocations of communism were less prominent in the 1986 document than in its predecessor. The Programme recognised that socialism had become a reality in the country as the Soviet people led by the party implemented the plan for the construction of socialism worked out by Lenin. It declared that the country had entered the stage of developed socialism, but that it was ‘a programme for the planned and all-round perfection of socialism [pointedly not ‘developed socialism’27], for Soviet society’s further advance to communism through the country’s accelerated socio-economic development.’ This means the task was perfection of what exists, not creation of something new; despite attacks from various sides, a ‘socialist society was essentially built’, and following the victory in the war and subsequent recovery, the ‘victory of socialism in our country was final and complete’. However, this process was now seen as far more complex than it had been envisaged twenty-five years earlier: it was now seen to be characterised by ‘unevenness, complexity and contradictoriness’. The party had done ‘a great deal to eliminate the consequences of the personality cult, deviations from the Leninist norms of party and state guidance, and to rectify errors of a subjectivist, voluntaristic nature’. Through acceleration of socio-economic development, it would overcome the slowdown associated with the 1970s and 1980s and move society toward communism. Socialism and communism were declared to be ‘two consecutive phases of one communist formation’, with no distinct line dividing them. According to the Programme, socialism involved: the means of production in the hands of the people, an end to exploitation, social oppression, the rule of a privileged minority and the poverty and illiteracy of millions of people; the planned development of productive forces and scientific and technological progress which brings a steady growth in the people’s well-being; ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his work’, with wide public provision of social benefits; alliance of working class, collective farmers and intelligentsia, with equal rights for all, a reliable path into the future for the young and social security for veterans of labour; national equality, and the friendship and brotherhood of all peoples and nationalities; genuine democracy, involving broad and equal citizen participation in the management of production and public and state affairs; freedom, human rights and dignity, along with the conditions for the development of the individual; the

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dominance of a truly humanistic Marxist-Leninist ideology is established, with people having access to all sources of knowledge, and an advanced socialist culture embracing all the best that has been created in world culture; and a socialist way of life has been created. This edition of the Programme simply repeated the notion of communism contained in the 1961 Programme. In addition it declared that communism signifies the transformation of the system of socialist self-administration by the people, of socialist democracy, into communist public selfadministration. The involvement of all citizens in administration meant that the state would increasingly become a transitional form ‘from a state to a non-state. The activities of state bodies will become non-political in nature, and the need for the state as a special political institution will gradually disappear.’ But achievement of all of this required fundamental restructuring in the economy and in work generally. Turning to social policy, the Programme noted that differences in society were disappearing – class, town and country, and nations; indeed, the Programme declared that the nationalities question had been successfully solved, with the nations and nationalities ‘steadily and voluntarily drawing closer together on the basis of equality and fraternal cooperation’, a process that in the long term would lead to the ‘complete unity of the nations’. The state had become an all-people’s state as the dictatorship of the proletariat had accomplished its tasks and evolved into the political power of all of the working people; the state was the main tool for perfecting socialism. While promoting socialist self-administration by the people through participation in decision-making, the party would remain the leading force in society. The party was now an all-people’s party. It had an important role to play in the ideological, political, labour and moral education of the Soviet people which was important for ‘moulding harmoniously developed, socially active individuals combining cultural wealth, moral purity and a perfect physique’. Internationally, the world remained divided into two camps. This was an era of competition between the world system of socialism and capitalism which, although its general crisis was deepening, remained strong and dangerous. Peaceful coexistence remained important. The Programme thus maintained the broad view of where society was heading that had been embedded in the myth of building socialism, seeing acceleration of socio-economic development as the means of achieving this. Its discussion of the things that were necessary in order to make this happen was traditional in tone, talking about things like various aspects of the intensification of production, the advance of Soviet democracy, the party’s leading role and the application of Leninist principles. There was no prominence given to either glasnost or perestroika. The Programme,


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like the resolution, fitted largely within the existing frame of Soviet symbolism. Thus the XXVII Congress did not bring about a substantial reworking of the symbolic discourse of the Soviet state. Both major documents from that gathering, the resolution on Gorbachev’s report and the party Programme, were less adventurous than Gorbachev’s report, but even this remained substantially within the bounds of the existing metanarrative. However, there were straws in the wind which suggested the challenge that was forthcoming. Following the Congress, the notion of perestroika became much more prominent and its meaning more expansive. Gorbachev initiated this in a speech at Togliatti in April 1986 when he declared that ‘Perestroika must occur in each work place, in each labour collective, in the organs of management, in party and state organs, including the Politburo and the government’.28 For Gorbachev, perestroika now meant more than a narrow restructuring within the economy; it involved a change in the work patterns and practices of all institutions within the USSR. It was taking on the all-embracing sense,29 the generalised meaning of largescale change that it was later to possess in the popular vernacular both inside and outside the USSR. By June for Gorbachev, the ‘first lessons of perestroika’ were in, and they ranged far beyond the bounds simply of economic activity,30 while in the following month, the expanded new range of perestroika was clear in the title of a Gorbachev speech: ‘Perestroika is urgent, it concerns everyone and everything’;31 indeed, in this speech, Gorbachev directly associated perestroika with all-embracing and comprehensive change, even revolution: ‘Perestroika is a word of broad meaning. I would say that there is a degree of similarity between it and the word revolution.’ At the same time, the boundaries of glasnost were also widening. The failure of the Soviet media to report the Chernobyl nuclear accident in April 1986, paradoxically, provided an indirect stimulus to the growth of a more vigorous and, ultimately, open press. While this was not immediately evident, by the end of 1986 there had been the beginning of investigative and more accurate reporting, some liberalisation in the cultural sphere and the investigation of social problems that had formerly been left unspoken. While this was still restricted and nothing like the levels of freedom that were to be achieved in later years, this partial relaxation of political restrictions began the redefinition of glasnost that was to culminate in a close approximation to a free press. In symbolic terms, this meant that the image of tight central control was slipping; henceforth society would not only respond to the rulers in the form of a reflexive mirror, but would begin to shape symbols and their meaning openly in a form that was markedly different from that projected from the top.

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With both perestroika and glasnost undergoing some reworking in 1986, it was in early 1987, at the January CC plenum, that a public recasting of the third central symbol of the myth of building socialism, democratisation, began. Traditionally, democratisation had referred to a range of measures that were seen as part and parcel of political, including party, life: collective leadership, criticism and self-criticism, democratic centralism, and popular involvement. At the XXVII Congress Gorbachev had affirmed the importance of the increased democratisation of society for acceleration, and at the CC plenum in January 1987 he returned to this theme. But what was new about the conception of democratisation that he gave32 was not only that this was seen as it always had been as an antidote to evils such as bureaucratism and other sorts of official failings, but that increased emphasis was now placed on democracy as the means of mobilising popular energy, enthusiasm and commitment to achieve a new type of society. He also proposed to give democracy practical teeth by changing the ritualised practices that historically had been associated with it. Party elections, he declared, were to shed their purely formalistic character, with voters having the choice from among a number of competing candidates chosen by secret ballot. There should be full and frank discussion of issues within party bodies, with no one having to fear making open criticism of those in office. This means of strengthening control from below (which in his view was not meant to negate the principle of democratic centralism whereby, once made, decisions were binding) was also to be reflected in the broader society where democratisation implied increased control over the work of party and state bodies and their personnel. Associated with this was strengthened glasnost, and no zones in society closed to criticism. This broadening of the established notion of democracy, both in terms of its meaning and the patterns of action with which it was becoming associated by Gorbachev, was the first major occasion when the reworking of Soviet symbols produced direct elite resistance. The plenum was postponed on three occasions, and when Gorbachev’s colleagues spoke, many of them spoke in more general and platitudinous terms and clearly conceived of democracy in the old form. Fuelled in their concerns by the postChernobyl beginning of more independent discussion in the press, they were much more comfortable with the old conception of democracy than the new. While supporting the principle of democratisation, the plenum decision33 made no mention of the proposals for multi-candidate elections. The resolution expressed many of the more established formulations associated with democracy – the development of criticism and self-criticism, especially from below, the education of all cadres in an uncompromising spirit of irreconcilability towards deviations from the norms of socialist morality, and the need for a widened base of socialist democracy. It also


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called for the widening of glasnost and, in referring to perestroika, stated that ‘the final aim of perestroika is the renewal of all sides of life of our society, giving to socialism the most contemporary form of social organisation, the fullest exposure of the creative potential of the socialist order.’ However, significantly, at this time there was also a material challenge to the ritual that was embedded in the established symbol of democracy. The conduct of some competitive elections for local soviets34 and for some 120 party secretaries during 198735 challenged the established ritual of an uncompetitive vote in Soviet elections, and did so in a way that was public and clearly visible to all who wished to see. As the established ritual of Soviet elections began to appear more problematic, so the uncertainty surrounding the symbol of democracy/democratisation increased. So by early 1987 the metanarrative was becoming more ambiguous and blurred as Gorbachev pushed for a radicalisation of many leading symbols while the growing resistance to him within the leadership tried to limit that radicalisation by projecting the symbols more in the form that had traditionally been current. During 1987, the uncertainty surrounding the boundaries of these symbols – perestroika, glasnost and democratisation – continued to grow. This is reflected in the CC decision in March 1987 foreshadowing the seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution later in the year, and the CC appeal to the Soviet people in honour of this. Although the CC decision36 declared that they were in a ‘situation of deep perestroika of all spheres of life of society’ and referred to the acceleration of socioeconomic development and scientific-technological progress, the overall tenor of the document neither elaborated on these principles nor gave them any particular emphasis. Rather it declared that the need was to draw on the experience of socialist construction for the resolution of new tasks. The CC’s appeal37 emphasised the importance of the October Revolution, which had led to the establishment of socialism in the country, and it referred in passing to the overcoming of infringements of socialist legality, voluntarist mistakes and the ‘tendencies to stagnation’. The appeal did give somewhat greater prominence to perestroika than the decision had done: it declared that the decisions of the January 1987 plenum armed the party and people with the theory of perestroika and mobilised them for ‘deep reforms’ aimed at giving socialism contemporary forms of social organisation, referred to the ‘deep reconstruction’ (rekonstruktsii) of the economy, and claimed that the people had become interested in perestroika, that there was a need to struggle and fight for perestroika, and that the people needed perestroika. The appeal also supported the all-round development and widening of democracy, conditions of full glasnost and the election of responsible people. But these

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were passing references in a document that was much stronger on the creative sources within the socialist experience for the resolution of problems than it was on the need for the more radical solutions that seemed to be involved in the changes to symbols contained in Gorbachev’s speeches. This emphasis on the creative potential within Soviet socialism, and therefore on the continued salience of the more established ways of doing things, was a reflection of the more conservative conception of the central symbols of this period held by sections of the political elite in contrast to the view of Gorbachev and represents an attempt to buttress the primacy of October and socialism in the regime’s foundation myth.38 Such an emphasis also seemed at odds with the imagery evoked by Gorbachev’s speeches to the XX Congress of the Komsomol in April39 and to the CC plenum in June 1987,40 entitled respectively, ‘Youth is the creative force of revolutionary renewal’ (which emphasised criticism and glasnost), and ‘On the tasks of the party in the radical restructuring of economic management’. In this latter speech, Gorbachev defined perestroika as the means for harmonising the individual and public interests that arise in society, while the following month he referred explicitly to ‘socialist pluralism’,41 a revolutionary ideological formulation that called into question both the party’s capacity to represent the views of the whole of society and the image of a monolithically united Soviet community. The view of the past as providing an adequate source for the resolution of contemporary problems was even more at odds with the symbolism of a speech he delivered before party veterans, workers and activists in October 1987,42 when he declared that in leading what he termed ‘revolutionary perestroika’,43 the party had commenced with itself. This speech was a strong affirmation not only that the party was leading perestroika but that it still had work to do to improve the way in which it was working, and that the changes envisaged by perestroika were revolutionary in nature; rather than past methods being suitable, Gorbachev was calling for revolutionary change. A major symbolic occasion loomed in November 1987 with the seventieth anniversary of the Revolution. The widening range of glasnost had continued apace during the year, with the question of Soviet history and Stalin an important element of this. In February 1987 Gorbachev had declared that there must be no ‘blank pages’ in Soviet history and literature,44 an attitude which encouraged the publication of increasingly open investigation and criticism of the past, and this process created some build-up of expectations about how this would be handled in the seventieth anniversary celebrations. In his speech,45 Gorbachev reaffirmed the revolutionary nature of perestroika, but his view of the Soviet past did not alter the established myth. He affirmed the correctness of the


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socialist alternative chosen in 1917 and surveyed in a positive fashion the course of Soviet development. He recognised the existence of ideological disputes in the 1920s and criticised ‘Trotskyism’ which he said was defeated by the party’s leading nucleus, headed by Stalin, which had acted to defend Leninism. He supported socialist construction in the 1930s, including, despite some ‘excesses’, collectivisation, but he criticised the ‘administrative-command system’ which had taken control and prevented the realisation of democracy. This, supported by the ‘erroneous’ theory of the aggravation of class struggle during socialist construction, ‘made possible the personality cult, violations of legality, and the wanton repressive measures of the thirties’. The abuse of power led to real crimes and wholesale repression; according to Gorbachev ‘many thousands’ of people were repressed. Stalin personally made an incontestable contribution to the construction of socialism but also committed gross political errors and abuses. But the cult of personality was not inevitable, and was roundly rejected by the party at the XX and XXII Congresses. Gorbachev lauded the Soviet effort and victory in the war and noted how in the post-war period, subjectivist errors had handicapped socialism’s advance to a new stage. The development of a ‘pre-crisis situation’ in the last years of Brezhnev’s life dictated the need for action recognised by the April 1985 plenum. Gorbachev’s brief survey of Soviet history broke no new ground, and was actually quite conservative in its evaluation of the Stalin period and the excesses of it. As the press discussion of this expanded during 1988, the limited vision of the past reflected in Gorbachev’s speech was soon superseded by the wave of revelations in the press about aspects of the Stalin period that, in effect, called into question much of the thrust of the imagery of socialist advance that dominated the Soviet metanarrative. These revelations meant that the symbol of October, for the last seventy years the foundation symbol of the advance towards the bright future, was being reworked so that, in the eyes of many, rather than being the harbinger of a new dawn of peace, equality and prosperity, it had introduced a period of intense suffering and cruelty. Rather than introducing the bright future, it had artificially closed off avenues of development that may have been more favourable for society as a whole. In practice what this meant was that the foundation myth of the republic no longer reflected simply the views of the elite, but was being transformed in revolutionary ways by increasingly active elements in society as a whole. The symbol of October and its meaning was slipping from the hands of the central political elite. Turning to perestroika, Gorbachev’s speech saw this as not only overcoming the problems of the past, but imparting to socialism the most contemporary forms corresponding to the conditions and needs of the

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scientific-technological revolution and the intellectual progress of Soviet society. This involved the ‘revolutionary renewal’ of society. He saw perestroika as a ‘definite historical stage’ requiring the profound renewal of all aspects of society’s life. This was seen in terms of ‘the full theoretical and practical re-establishment of Lenin’s conception of socialism’, thereby giving perestroika a Leninist lineage; perestroika combined continuity and innovation, the historical experience of Bolshevism with the contemporaneity of socialism. The key to perestroika continuing what the October Revolution had begun was democratisation of all social life (‘The democratisation of society is at the core of perestroika’) and radical economic reform. He also noted the need for the party to take on the tasks of perestroika more seriously in its own internal life. Turning to the international situation, Gorbachev re-emphasised the theme that had been developing since 1987, the notion of new thinking which had an emphasis on universal human values rather than class interests, and conceived of Europe as a ‘common European home’46 rather than an arena of hostility. He noted Soviet initiatives on arms limitation and reduction, and the view that stable agreements to reduce competition and hostility with the capitalist world were not only possible but essential.47 Here was the recasting of established notions about the Soviet place in the world and, in particular, the continuing hostility of the capitalist West; the myth of external opposition was now under direct challenge. Gorbachev’s address (which had actually been watered down by the Politburo before delivery), and in particular his handling of the Stalin period, was clearly a compromise between Gorbachev who was privately more critical of Stalin, and other members of the leadership who were opposed to a critical approach to Soviet history.48 But there were also differences over the notion of perestroika. At the CC meeting to hear Gorbachev’s speech prior to its public delivery,49 where Yeltsin delivered his scathing attack on the slow pace of perestroika, the obstructionist activity of Ligachev within the party leadership and the increasing glorification of Gorbachev, most of the speeches were critical of Yeltsin, and so reaffirmed a more conservative conception of perestroika. While Yeltsin had urged that they needed to take the revolutionary path and act in a revolutionary way and revolutionise the activities of the party, no one endorsed this call. Ligachev referred to the radical reform and democratisation of the country, but most speakers, if they discussed perestroika at all, did it in a way that ignored the radical edge that Gorbachev had recently given to it, thereby implicitly suggesting a view that was closer to the moderate notion of perestroika of 1985. The speeches at the plenum made clear the different conceptions of perestroika that were emerging within the political elite; the view of many like Ligachev that the success of


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perestroika lay in its being kept consistent with the past principles of Soviet socialism, the view of Gorbachev and his immediate supporters that perestroika needed to break from some aspects of the past while retaining other (‘Leninist’) aspects, and the view towards which Yeltsin had now begun to move, that the Soviet past needed to be transcended completely. The meaning of the myths of building socialism and of regime foundation were both in dispute within the central elite. The seventieth anniversary of the October Revolution and the increasing evidence of disagreement over the basic symbols of the Soviet polity focused mainly on the question of the relationship between the Soviet past, including the prevailing conception of socialism, and perestroika. Gorbachev confronted this head-on in a series of speeches in the first part of 1988.50 He argued that perestroika was entering a new, second phase, characterised by the transformation of strategy (which had been worked out in the first phase) into real policy, which was to lead to society’s revolutionary transition to a qualitatively new state. However not everyone in the country was ready for this. Perestroika was the ‘continuation of the revolution’ and therefore involved struggle, but this was not a struggle against ‘antagonistic, warring sides with opposing class interests’, but against ‘the time-serving interests of groups and sometimes even ambitions’.51 It was wrong, he declared, to refer to the ‘enemy of perestroika’ or to claim that there was a threat from nepmen, kulaks, Trotskyists and Dans.52 While acknowledging that there were people opposing perestroika on the basis of their views of their own personal interests,53 Gorbachev noted that the principal impediment to perestroika was conservatism, which was nourished by a dogmatic mentality, the habit of thinking in stereotypes, the fear of everything new, and selfish interests. These were a reflection of the alienation that occurs under socialism when it is deformed by authoritarian-bureaucratic aberrations.54 Such deformations – the effect of the cult of personality and the command-administrative system established in the 1930s, bureaucratic, dogmatic and voluntarist distortions, and the stagnation of the late 1970s and early 1980s – had prevented society from realising fully the Leninist principles of a new society that had been opened up by the October Revolution. The struggle for perestroika was to be conducted through discussion and argument within a context of the recognition of ‘socialist pluralism of opinions’.55 Gorbachev was thus linking the present opposition to perestroika to the way the promise inherent in October had been subverted by developments in the system in the period after Lenin had died. The corollary of this was to strengthen the association between perestroika on the one hand and Lenin and socialism on the other. Gorbachev was thereby seeking to tie his political position to a version of the myths of October and the building of socialism.

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Gorbachev did this by casting perestroika as both restoring the Leninist essence to socialism and personifying Leninism in practice. Perestroika was about tapping the potential of socialism that had been prevented from developing by the historical distortions. Through glasnost and democratisation, perestroika was stimulating people’s political and social activity and, far from besmirching the Soviet past and Leninism as some had claimed, was realising the true potential of socialism. The Soviet people made their historic choice in 1917, and it was through perestroika that the system’s real potential could be realised. This was the translation into practice of Lenin’s view that society should be governed through the broadening of democracy. The CC’s task was to ‘firmly adhere to Leninist positions and do everything necessary to expand the potential of socialist democracy, to deepen the process of perestroika on the basis of socialist values’.56 Rather than stepping back from socialism, from Marxism-Leninism, from what had been won by the people, perestroika involved rejection of the dogmatic, bureaucratic and voluntarist legacy which had nothing in common with MarxismLeninism and socialism, and the use of creative Marxism-Leninism, which involved an objective, scientific analysis of reality. Criticism and a fearless search for truth were the essentials of this approach, with the wide development of criticism and glasnost being limited only by the interests of society, of socialism, of the people. In Gorbachev’s view, they were renewing socialism and restoring its true Leninist meaning: ‘In Lenin’s view, socialism makes it possible to ensure a pluralism of views, a pluralism of interests and needs, and to ensure that these interests and needs are met.’57 Gorbachev also suggested that renewal involved changes to the political system, including alteration to the role of the party and restoration to it of a vanguard role, as Lenin had envisaged. But the recognition of the legitimacy of the pluralism of interests cast into doubt two central elements in traditional Soviet symbolic discourse: the capacity of the party to represent society’s interests, and the monolithic unity of that society. What is important about this conception of perestroika is that in early 1988 Gorbachev was clearly trying to frame the contemporary situation in terms of the established Soviet symbols in the myth of building socialism while at the same time injecting new meaning into them. Perestroika was a renewal of the aims of October and Lenin, the realisation of socialism. There were opponents of this, but their opposition was not class in nature, but attitudinal. Therefore according to Gorbachev, they could be won around to support this claimed revival of Lenin. If he could associate his policies with Lenin and the legacy of October, he could delegitimate the opposition and provide a firm ideological foundation for the changes he wished to introduce at the XIX Conference. But it was precisely this association that the critics of perestroika sought to prevent.


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Parallel with the changes to symbolism domestically, Gorbachev was also reworking the major symbolic strands of Soviet foreign policy and the myth of external opposition. From the outset, Gorbachev projected an image of reaching accommodation with the West. The notion of the ‘common European home’ noted above emphasised the things which united the continent rather than divided it, while Gorbachev’s calls for the reduction and even abolition of nuclear weapons presumed a very different sort of relationship with the West to that which had prevailed before. Rather than peaceful coexistence as a different form of class struggle, the international scene was now being presented less in dichotomous, antagonistic, terms and more in terms of the basic commonalities that different peoples shared. What underpinned this was the primacy of universal values over narrow class interests.58 Rather than a struggle in which one side would prevail over the other, international relations was now about different peoples working out ways of living together. This meant that people had the right to choose their own path of development,59 including, for Eastern Europe, the capitalist or socialist path, and within socialism, which model to aspire to. This was a very significant change to the metanarrative; not only did it leave open the right of people to choose their own historical pathway, but it also rejected the established Soviet position that there was only one real model of socialism, that of the USSR. This emphasis on universal human values instead of the two-camp class approach, of the need to learn from others’ experiences, paved the way for the development of aspirations for the Soviet Union to become a ‘normal’ (or in some formulations, ‘civilised’) society and even for assumptions about the coming together of Soviet and Western systems. This denied the long-established claim that Soviet society was intrinsically superior, morally and politically, to those of the West, and constituted acceptance of the position that emerged during the Brezhnev period, that the Soviet future was not unique and different to that of the West. Critics attacked the attempt to link perestroika with the established symbols of the regime in a number of ways. One was to argue that perestroika was inconsistent with Marxism-Leninism, socialism and the Soviet heritage, and that it was eroding the achievements of Soviet socialism.60 Another was to complain about the focus on historical events and especially the historical revisionism that this produced. This was a central part of the critique contained in the famous Andreeva letter of March 198861 which emphasised the way in which historical revisionism had distorted history and besmirched the past, especially in relation to the role of Stalin. But more fundamentally, citing Ligachev’s report on education to the February 1988 plenum, the letter emphasised the importance of class analysis and class interests as opposed to the common human values increasingly being

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emphasised in perestroika. It argued that what was important was the class essence of the changes under way in the country, and in particular the identity of the class that was the guiding and mobilising force of perestroika. The letter identified two ideological currents which claimed to be in favour of perestroika but which actually worked to exterminate socialist values. The first, ‘some kind of left-liberal dilettantish socialism’, claimed to expound a humanism that was devoid of any class nature, and supported individualism over proletarian collectivism, fawned over the achievements of capitalism while saying that the Soviet people had built the wrong sort of socialism, falsified the country’s history and noted only the mistakes and crimes while ignoring the achievements. Its supporters were accused of substituting scholastic ethical categories for social and political criteria of the development of society and had a ‘cosmopolitan’ tendency which denied the important contribution of the Great Russians. The second current was called ‘guardians and traditionalists’ who wanted to move back to the social forms of pre-socialist Russia, to ‘peasant socialism’. These neo-Slavophiles, while accurately criticising the psychosis of consumerism, misunderstood the historical significance of October and the history of the country, especially the class struggle in the countryside. The letter argued that the actions of these forces meant that socialist, scientific ideology was being eroded, glasnost was being manipulated and extrasocialist pluralism propagated, all of which impeded the restructuring of social consciousness. The important point about this analysis was not the accuracy or otherwise of the description of these groups, but that it sought to appeal to the sort of class-based analysis characteristic of the earlier Soviet period, and it sought to cleave perestroika from the socialist heritage with which Gorbachev had sought to associate it. From this time on, the symbols Gorbachev sought to project were challenged from three directions. First, the popular perception that his reforms were failing to deliver the improvements he promised, and therefore the symbolic discourse in which he engaged was meaningless. If Gorbachev was unaware of this, it was brought home to him sharply by his interactions with people during his visit to Krasnoyarsk in September 1988. Second, the growing tide of criticism from regime functionaries, including from within the elite. The nature of this criticism was essentially a mix of the restatement of old symbolic maxims along with increasingly shrill assertions about the portending chaos and loss of power by the party that would ensue unless the current course was abandoned. This message – restore established meaning to the symbols and reinforce their hegemony practically or the system will collapse – was the consistent underpinning of opposition to Gorbachev throughout the remainder of the regime’s life. Third, a growing group of independent politicians


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(represented most importantly by Yeltsin and some of the republican leaders) began to argue that the changes Gorbachev had introduced were neither sufficiently radical to resolve the society’s problems nor being implemented at sufficient speed to have any hope of success. This line of attack, which became much stronger from 1989, ultimately led to the rejection of the Soviet metanarrative altogether. The metanarrative abandoned? The XIX Conference in mid-1988 outlined a ‘radical reform’ of the political system which promised to usher in a dramatically new institutional framework for political life. The institutional changes foreshadowed in the resolutions adopted by the CC for the Conference in May 198862 and the Conference decisions themselves63 involved competitive secret ballot elections in party and state bodies, limited tenure for office holders, new state legislative and executive structures, the investing of real normative authority in the legal system, the adoption by the party of a true vanguard role through the separation of party and state functions and the withdrawal of the party from day-to-day administrative functions, and the widespread public discussion of issues. This agenda constituted, in effect, the transformation of the political system, although it was not at that time referred to in this way. Gorbachev provided the ideological framing for this in his speech to the Conference.64 In the final section of his report, entitled ‘Through revolutionary perestroika to a new image of socialism’, Gorbachev emphasised the party’s commitment not to evade difficult or painful issues but to continually search for and base itself on the truth. Glasnost was seen to be central to this and to the creation of a new political and moral climate in society, and it presupposed a plurality of opinions on all issues, the free play of different points of view, and open discussion; criticism and self-criticism, not the gagging and persecution of critics, was implicit in glasnost. The restoration of truth and justice, renunciation of everything that deformed socialist ideology and practice and the destruction of stereotypes and dogmas were not, as some people claimed, eroding the principles and pillars of socialism or maligning its history. He declared the continuing commitment to develop all truly socialist values and eliminate everything that distorts revolutionary theory and the image of socialism. The discussions that had occurred had confirmed the correctness of the socialist choice made by the people in 1917, and through their support for perestroika they had once again voted for socialism. Everything that deformed socialism in the 1930s and led to its stagnation in the 1970s had been renounced. He declared that what was wanted was a socialism

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that would be cleansed of the sediment and distortions of past periods and that inherits all the best that is born of the creative thinking of the founders of our teaching, that has been implemented through the labour and effort of the people, that expresses their hopes and aspirations. We want a socialism that absorbs all the progressive experience of world development, that in full measure utilises the achievements of human progress.

The main features of the qualitatively new state had emerged, and these could be outlined. Socialism was a system: of true and tangible humanism, with the development of society directed at satisfying all people’s needs and their advancement through the labour, creativity and energy of the people themselves; with an effective dynamic economy based on various forms of public and personal property, in which working people were the masters, there was a direct connection between earnings and the results of labour, and a combination of centralised decision-making on structural matters with the broad independence of production units as commodity producers; of social justice combining social guarantees and observance of the principle of distribution according to work done, with individual ability rewarded; of lofty culture and morality, inheriting and multiplying the finest achievements of humanity’s spiritual and moral heritage, rejecting consumerism, amorality and cultural primitivism but encompassing ecology; of genuine people’s rule where working people could express their needs and interests and participate in running social processes, where the alienation of people from the government was overcome; a society of socialist self-administration by the people, of profound and consistent democracy in running economic and social processes, and where the rule of law (termed a ‘socialist rule of law state’ earlier in the speech, and something very different from the earlier notions of ‘socialist legality’),65 openness and glasnost prevailed; where ‘socialist pluralism of opinion’ existed;66 of true equality of all nations and nationalities where they could achieve social and spiritual advancement and mutual enrichment, where internationalism and fraternity rule, and where there is no strife between nations and no nationalist or chauvinist prejudices; which because of its nature and interests aspires to peace and cooperation between fraternal socialist countries and to normal civilised relations between all nations and states. What was not enumerated in these qualities but was a major theme in his speech was a redefinition of the party’s ‘leading role’, the view that the


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party should be a real vanguard, extracted from day-to-day administrative tasks67 and exercising broad ideological and moral leadership over those members of the state apparatus whose job it would be to govern; the party as an institution was not to govern, but it was to rule through its members and the confidence residing in it on the part of the people. This democratic and humane image of socialism, this qualitatively new state of society, was an important stage in the advance to communism. This would be achieved through revolutionary perestroika, which was itself guided by the vitality of Marxist-Leninist teaching. There is much in this conception of socialism that is consistent with earlier formulations in the Soviet metanarrative, but there are also some significant innovations. Important is the relative absence of references to Marxism-Leninism or Leninism, and to traditional ideological categories and formulations.68 Consistent with Gorbachev’s earlier positions, class categories are abjured and a class basis of analysis has not been used. Instead there is an emphasis on broader, non-class factors, such as humanism, the achievements and heritage of humanity as a whole,69 and the rule of law, recognition of legitimate differences in Soviet society, and an economy characterised by different forms of property (a conception that foreshadows the notion of a market-based economy), all concepts which reject both a narrow class basis and reliance only upon the socialist heritage. This Gorbachevian conception of socialism is thus more broadly based than its Soviet forebears and less firmly resting on a basis of proletarian class interest. Furthermore, what gave it a more radical edge compared with earlier formulations is that it was associated with a series of institutional reforms which were designed to go some way towards achieving the principles comprising it. The importance of this connection between the image of socialism and the institutional reform measures designed to achieve it is evident in the way in which the critics of perestroika generally rejected neither perestroika as a concept nor all of the principles enunciated above. Certainly many of those critics rejected the shift away from class analysis,70 emphasising such things as the class basis of law and the centrality of proletarian interests, and comparing such a non-class approach to that of liberalism. But most criticism was directed at the practical reform measures, their implementation and effects. Critics both at the Conference and outside it pointed to the way the party’s leading role was not being re-defined but actually undermined by the increasing levels of questioning of the past and the emergence of autonomous political and social activity; the monolithic unity of society was being fractured by a cacophony of voices, demands, complaints, charges and criticisms which called into question not just the practical governability of society but the very ideological basis upon which

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it rested; glasnost was everywhere being abused by those who sought to undermine the established structure; in the guise of seeking historical truth, the Soviet experience, especially during the 1930s, was being besmirched and its great achievements either belittled or ignored; economic reform had not brought improvements to living conditions and economic performance but was leading to disorganisation and the erosion of the significant economic and social gains of Soviet socialism, like equality. While all of these criticisms related to the state of contemporary society, they for the most part rested upon an image of what Soviet society looked like in the earlier metanarrative. For such critics, the danger was that perestroika was destroying Soviet society as they knew it, not so much because that was its intent (although some already saw Gorbachev as a traitor, seeking to sell out the Soviet Union to the West), but because of the unintended forces perestroika had unleashed. Thus just as Gorbachev sought to justify his position on the basis of a reworking of the myth of building socialism through a new formulation of Soviet socialism, so his critics assumed an image of socialism embedded in the established myth of the building of socialism. It was at this time that this more traditional model of Soviet society came under even more sustained attack as a result of the expansion of a process that had begun with the radicalisation of glasnost following Chernobyl and had been strengthened by the emergence of the issue of Stalin and historical revision in 1987. This process was the widening of debate outside the bounds of the political elite and its taking a public and less controlled form. As glasnost provided the room for editors and public figures increasingly to raise and discuss matters in the public domain,71 established controls over what could be said and written weakened. By early 1988 there was a vigorous public discussion of democratisation,72 with many participants espousing positions much more radical than those supported by Gorbachev. Although this discussion was cast overwhelmingly within the paradigm of perestroika liberally interpreted, by 1988 there were already some who rejected that paradigm.73 Not only did the emergence of this public discussion place increased pressure on the images of Soviet socialism espoused by both Gorbachev and his more conservative elite opponents, but for the first time since the early years of the regime, it meant that the political elite no longer had the sort of monopoly they had formerly enjoyed on the public framing of the metanarrative within which Soviet politics and the life of the citizenry were conceived. The symbols of the Soviet polity were under open challenge. The image of Soviet socialism linked with the institutional changes introduced at the XIX Conference and put into practice in the following months, an image that represented a fundamental reworking of the major


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elements in the myths of building socialism and of leadership, was elaborated on by Gorbachev in speeches over the next twelve months.74 This was a society in which the effect of perestroika, glasnost and especially democratisation were creating a new sort of political structure within which both the Communist Party and individual communists were expected to find a new place. Although much of the terminology used to describe this new situation was formally the same as that which had been used during earlier decades of Soviet rule, the combined effect of more than three years of change under the banner of perestroika and the institutional changes of the XIX Conference invested that terminology with a radical, even revolutionary, edge that formerly had been absent. Throughout, Gorbachev was insistent that the party had to continue to exercise a leading role in society, but by simultaneously seeking to withdraw the party from the immediate directing role it had had in administrative affairs and demanding that it exercise its leadership through the moral suasion and authority of individual party members, he was suggesting a much more hands-off role than the party had ever had before. Moreover, he argued that the party should be subject to the overall supervision or monitoring of the people, and by creating a new legislative structure characterised by competitive and free elections, he established an institutional means whereby that supervision could theoretically be exercised. A premium was thus placed on the party winning over and retaining the confidence of the people, with the failure of individual parts of the party being held responsible for those setbacks the party experienced in the 1989 elections.75 He was insistent that the party had a crucial leadership role to play in guiding the country into its new future, but that it could do this only if it became a model of democratisation in its internal affairs. This meant the vesting of real authority in the party’s elected organs at the expense of the apparatus, multi-candidate elections to party posts, full and honest discussion of issues and performance, and the devolution of some powers to lower, including republican, bodies, although he was insistent, citing Lenin, that the party should not have a federal structure. This would enable the party to unify diverse interests into a common policy, although he did acknowledge that the whole political spectrum that was emerging within Soviet society could not be encapsulated in the party; only those of a socialist orientation could play a part. Furthermore through full discussion, the Leninist principle of the combination of freedom of opinion and unity of action, of democracy and centralism, could be achieved. While discipline in the party was important, it was to come about through authority and conviction rather than order and command. Interestingly, the electoral platform adopted by the CC in January 198976 was addressed to ‘Dear comrades, dear citizens’.

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Turning to society more generally, Gorbachev argued that the USSR should be a ‘law-governed socialist state’, in which courts were independent and the law was supreme: even the party had to operate within the law. In the legislative field, this meant that the soviets should be invested with full authority, with the party playing its leading role of policy direction through the activity of its members, not administrative direction. This distinction between the functions of the party and the soviets, respectively leading and deciding, was justified by reference to Lenin and was seen as reviving the system of soviets as Lenin had understood it.77 The elimination of the command-administrative system and its replacement by socialist democracy and socialist pluralism rested on the activism of the people, and this could be seen in the positive development of mass movements and organised groups at the grass-roots level,78 although this view of November 1988 was modified by July 1989 through recognition that some social movements were ‘anti-socialist’ and therefore not positive.79 Important among these were some nationalist groups, although Gorbachev seemed convinced that they were deluded and that the application of the principles of the Leninist nationality policy within a context of democratisation and glasnost would be sufficient to bring them to their senses. He continued to reject any notion of a multi-party system and private property, both of which were seen as being alien to the socialist tradition and as representing a lack of clear consciousness on the part of their proponents. However, in late 1988 and early 1989 Gorbachev began to talk in positive terms about the market mechanism as a means of organising economic life, although he argued that the market had to be regulated and the image he projected was one of a mixed economy.80 Resistance was still seen principally in terms of inertia, the continued presence of old ideas and old thinking, and the continuing hold of dogmatism on people rather than outright opposition, although he recognised that there was some of this too. But overwhelmingly, the people were seen to be on the side of perestroika, which, according to the CC electoral platform, was strengthening the alliance of the ‘working class, peasantry and intellectuals’.81 Gorbachev remained intent on affirming the socialist and Leninist nature of this vision. Many of the individual elements of it were accorded a Leninist heritage – the revised relationship between party and soviets, the unitary nature of the party, the positive acceptance and principled operation of criticism and the unity of democracy and centralism were all asserted to be Leninist in nature. He also vigorously defended the socialist choice, arguing in January 1989 that socialism had not ‘failed’ despite the earlier ‘authoritarian-bureaucratic corruption of socialism and such forms of socialist order that suppress the people’s initiative, estrange them from


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every sphere of vital activity and disparage one’s dignity’.82 Instead, through perestroika, socialism’s potential was being tapped as society was renewed, brought to a new stage, on the basis of the principles of socialism. Furthermore, Gorbachev83 described NEP as a ‘road to socialism’ that had been cut short by a departure from Marxism and mistaken decisions at the end of the 1920s, leading to the application of commandadministrative methods to the agricultural economy. The conclusion he drew from his analysis of Soviet agricultural history was that the greatest danger was the deformation of Lenin’s concept of revolutionary socialist change, which meant the vital creative activity of the masses. This was a not very subtle argument for the Leninist nature of the course upon which Gorbachev saw himself to be engaged. The relevance of the NEP period had been underlined by the rehabilitation of the greatest champion of NEP in the mid to late1920s, Nikolai Bukharin, in February 1988. But this image of a society in which politics was structured very differently from the traditional Soviet model, despite being championed by the party General Secretary, was far from being hegemonic in Soviet society. By the end of 1988 and especially early in 1989, national groups were already beginning to sketch out a future in which the Soviet federation, if it survived, would be radically different to what it was at that time, thereby shattering the myth of the unshakeable unity of multinational Soviet society. Forces were also emerging in society that were moving towards challenging the hegemony of the party through support for a multi-party system resting on the competitive electoral process about which Gorbachev had spoken. And there was significant uncertainty within the party at both elite and lower levels about the vision that Gorbachev was espousing. In January 1989 he acknowledged the existence of criticism from the right about going too far and too fast and from the left about not going far enough or fast enough, but he rejected both of these as being a negation of the socialist choice and of the meaning and purpose of perestroika.84 However it is clear that within the leading ranks of the party, significant numbers of people did not share Gorbachev’s vision. In a meeting of the CC in July 1989,85 speaker after speaker mounted the podium and criticised the current state of affairs. Few of them really criticised the language Gorbachev used to sketch out his vision, but their criticism was essentially of the content which he had poured into the traditional Soviet symbols, and of the consequences of both this change in meaning and the institutional changes introduced to realise his programme. They agreed with Gorbachev that the party should remain the leading political force in society, but they believed that the changes in train were going to make that impossible. The demand that the party should not dominate and replace the soviets was a traditional Soviet theme

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(podmena), but in Gorbachev’s vision the institutional relationship between party and soviets would be changed so much that the party’s influence let alone leadership was under threat. They would all have agreed on the importance of popular involvement in political life, but for the critics this should be through the institutional channels dominated in the traditional way by the party, not in the way Gorbachev envisaged.86 And many were opposed to the emphasis on the market in the structuring of economic affairs, seeing this as a selling out to capitalism. Thus their position, although not specifically articulated in terms of an alternative vision to that of Gorbachev, was nevertheless founded squarely on such a vision: that contained in the established metanarrative, albeit with some renovations to bring it abreast of the times. Gorbachev’s vision, while it may have had incoherent bits, was overall quite evident, and for the critics its revolutionary nature compared with that of the past threatened to bring down the whole Soviet structure as they knew it. In all of the outlines of his vision that Gorbachev had given since coming to power in 1985, the main lacuna had been the nationality question. Initially he had publicly articulated the standard image of nationality relations in the USSR: the development of all nations was a function of their having come together in a voluntary union to create an unshakeably united multinational Soviet society from which national antagonisms had been eliminated.87 He returned to this question in the September 1989 CC plenum.88 Gorbachev noted how the national question had recently become exceptionally sharp. He argued that former mistakes and current difficulties had their origins in the repression of earlier times and infringement of the Leninist principles of nationality policy. Solution of these problems lay through perestroika, which was based on Lenin’s ideas and principles, through the radical reform of Soviet society. National selfdetermination had to be realised through reform of the federal system, raising the powers and legal status of the union republics, allowing national cultures and languages to develop, ensuring the rights of citizens throughout the country, and improving the division of labour across the USSR, which would enable greater economic autonomy for the republics. He rejected the claim that the introduction of capitalism into the economy was the only means of resolving the country’s problems, and reaffirmed the role of perestroika as the means for creating a voluntary union of republics in a Soviet federation based on the maximum economic independence of the republics and regions along with a strengthening of the economic complex as a whole. Nationalism and chauvinism of the sort being seen at that time in the Baltic republics were seen as a blow against ‘the processes of renewal of the Soviet federation, of society as a whole’.89 The image he projected was one of free people voluntarily united in the


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Soviet federation, pursuing their interests through that system. But Gorbachev’s support for federalism did not extend to the party; although republican party organs should have greater independence, Gorbachev remained opposed to a federal party, favouring a unitary one united on the basis of common political and ideological positions. However, the problem for the Soviet elite was that a conception of the national issue framed overwhelmingly in traditional Soviet terms, even while recognising recent ethnic assertion and seeing perestroika as the means of resolving difficulties, was never going to be satisfactory in the conditions of the late 1980s. The freer environment, ethnic mobilisation and the growth of national front movements, and the emergence of a more plural politics in Moscow meant other actors were seeking to frame this issue in their own terms, and those frames were in many cases incompatible with the symbolism of Gorbachev’s position. The mobilisation of the Crimean Tartars in the summer of 1988 and of sections of the populations of the Baltic republics in August, along with the emergence throughout the year of national front movements, all represented a phenomenon of ethnic mobilisation that punctured the myth of the unshakeable unity of the multinational state. The myth of the voluntary union of the peoples was also destroyed at this time with official acknowledgement of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which had brought the Baltic states into the union. In 1989 ethnic tension and conflict occurred in a number of parts of the country. But what was important about the rise of such activity was that increasingly ethnic leaders publicly articulated positions on the national question which rejected the images contained in the established Soviet metanarrative. Most important were leaders in the Baltic republics who embarked on a course of asserting increased sovereignty from the centre (meaning they claimed for themselves the right to override Soviet laws with republican laws), and by the end of 1989 there was already talk of secession from the union. This was the path which would lead to the Baltic states’ declarations of independence in early 1990. This trajectory constituted the complete rejection of the symbolism of the multinational Soviet federation embedded in the myth of building socialism which Gorbachev was continuing to espouse and its replacement by conceptions of new types of polities on the Soviet space. As with the image of the Soviet past, radically different conceptions of the polity were arising from within the society at large, independent of the central Soviet elite. The symbols of multinational unity were no longer either hegemonic or at the free disposal of the central political elite. At the same time as the national platform was being worked out, given the changes that had been occurring in Soviet society, party leaders were also thinking about the need for a new ideological basis, in the form of a new

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party programme. In his speech at the September 1989 plenum about the convocation of the XXVIII Congress,90 Gorbachev noted that obsolete theoretical notions were being decisively updated, and that there were significant debates occurring about all of the cardinal issues facing society as it experienced the process of revolutionary renovation. Despite such change, he said, a ‘new humane and democratic image of socialism’ had not emerged; for this the expansion of perestroika was necessary, including the restructuring of the party on the basis of democratic principles. Gorbachev went some way towards providing this ideological base in November 1989.91 In this speech, Gorbachev reached back to the writings of Marx and Engels to argue that what was important was not to impose ready-made schemas on society, but in a Marxist/Leninist fashion to analyse social processes as they were developing. He acknowledged the possibility of multiple variants of socialism, which were seen as a function of the varying levels of development of social productive forces and the uniqueness of the historical, national and cultural traditions of different peoples. Neither the founders of Marxism nor Lenin were responsible for the distortions of the Leninist principles that had been set in place after October, and even now great efforts had to be made to overcome the effects of those distortions. The means of doing this was perestroika, which involved the rejection of the authoritarian-bureaucratic system and the establishment of a democratic social organism, and reliance on the socialist choice of 1917, including the Leninist road to socialism through NEP. The party, which itself required radical renewal, was to hold a central place in this organism. The importance of the message contained in this speech is that Gorbachev was emphasising the way in which perestroika was a direct continuation of the Marxist and Leninist essence of the Soviet system that had been distorted by the commandadministrative methods of the 1930s. It was thus shoring up perestroika against the increasing attacks upon it as being a betrayal of October and of the Soviet metanarrative giving substance to this, and asserting the strength of its ideological credentials. But in doing so, it was also seeking to deny the continuing relevance of aspects of the Soviet experience. Like Khrushchev before him, Gorbachev sought to claim a ‘Leninist’ lineage while rejecting an identifiably ‘Stalinist’ one. But what is striking about this attempt to sketch out an ideological basis for the party is that the future was not discussed in terms of communism. This was no longer the hegemonic concept in the metanarrative to which conceptions of the future were tied.92 By late 1989 the continued role of the party as the ruling institution in the country was coming under increasing attack. The results of the election for the Congress of People’s Deputies in March and subsequent debate in the


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legislature, the increasingly radical stance taken by national front movements and the growth of independent politicians in Moscow, all called into question the viability, not to mention desirability, of continued communist party rule. The clearest evidence for this was the debate that emerged over the proposed removal of Article 6 from the Constitution, the article which guaranteed the party’s ‘leading and guiding role’. While ultimately agreeing with this measure, Gorbachev declared firm adherence to the Leninist conception of the vanguard party. He said: At the current fateful stage of our country’s development a strong political party, capable of uniting all healthy forces of the people to deal with the historic task of renewing socialism is vitally needed . . . We see the CPSU as a consolidating and unifying force, and the guarantor of the revolutionary renewal of the land of the soviets, the preservation and increase of its might, and the strengthening of its international authority and prestige. It is also clear to us that the party’s authority, and confidence in the party, are determined by the extent to which it successfully performs its role as society’s political vanguard.93

A strong, united party was seen to be crucial for the successful renovation of society, and although the party had many administrative-command vices, it retained its basic socialist worth and this was the basis for its renewal.94 This was a good illustration of the way Gorbachev took an established symbol and invested it with new meaning. While reaffirming the principle of the vanguard party, Gorbachev argued that that role had to be exercised in a very different way to how it had been before. The party should remain as the leading and guiding force, but owing to its withdrawal from a direct administrative role following the decision of the XIX Conference, it was to exercise that role through its projection of moral authority earned through the positive role it played. Shorn of its structural dominance, in Gorbachev’s view, the party could retain its predominant position because of its evident worth reflected in its performance. But this was, in effect, a hollowing out of the traditional symbolism of party rule in the leadership myth of the metanarrative because its dominance was now dependent not upon charismatic authority stemming from its unique role in the historical process, but upon popular opinion. The central thrust of the Soviet metanarrative was further undercut by the draft new party platform discussed at the February 1990 CC plenum.95 Two aspects of this were significant: the ideological basis, and concrete developments in Soviet society. The central thrust of the ideological basis was said to be ‘humane and democratic socialism’, which was the outcome of reliance by the party upon the legacy of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and its creative development of socialist ideas as applicable to contemporary reality. Given the strengthening of the development of critical and oppositionist conservative and radical forces, it was on this

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basis that a new platform was needed to unite healthy forces around the aims and tasks of revolutionary transformation. The nub of this new platform was to be the renewal of socialism. While the party remained dedicated to the socialist choice made in 1917, it was departing from a dogmatic interpretation of this and refused to sacrifice people’s real interests to schematic constructions. The prejudices of the past and ideological taboos were being rejected, while the party was making use of everything of value which other societies had developed. In this sense, the legacy the party would seek to draw on was not just that stemming from Marx, Engels and Lenin,96 but from non-socialist sources as well. The simplistic class approach was to be rejected in favour of universal, international values. This position downplayed the traditional ideological heritage of the party, making that heritage only one of a number of possible influences upon which it drew. No matter how often the Marxist-Leninist heritage was declared to be the most important foundation, its claim to be the unique source of the party’s guidance was effectively destroyed. At the more practical level of what was going on in Soviet society at that time, the picture evoked in the platform, too, was at significant variance with the traditional Soviet view. The focus remained on democratisation and the implementation of the measures adopted at the XIX Conference. There was an acceptance that democratisation led to the growth of political pluralism (not ‘socialist pluralism’), and that this could lead to the development of a system of competitive political parties. The Communist Party committed itself to working and maintaining dialogue with such bodies as long as they based themselves on the Constitution and the social system inherent in it, presumably an oblique reference to the ‘socialist choice’. Within this pluralism, the party would continue to struggle to maintain its ruling position, but it would do so without constitutional or political guarantees, through the public defence of what it stood for. The destruction of its institutional advantages would continue through the creation of a presidency with plenipotentiary powers, the delimitation of functions between party, state and economic organs, and the subjection of the party to the law through the creation of a law-based state. The decline in party power in the economic sphere also seemed to be heralded by the reference to radical economic reform leading to a ‘planned market economy’,97 something for which the groundwork had been laid by the qualification of the image of the centrally planned economy by earlier economic reform measures, including most importantly the emergence of cooperatives in 1987. The decline in centralised party control that this implied was also evident in the discussion of federalism, and the confirmation of the need for increased republican autonomy and the capacity


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of republican authorities to make a wider range of decisions concerning the lives of their citizens; there should be self-determination in a renewed federation. The changed role of the party was to be reflected in the way it functioned internally. The earlier emphasis on rank-and-file activism and the accountability of elected bodies to their constituents was strengthened, along with the argument that the party should be a decision-making rather than an administrative body. Accordingly, different parts of the party were to be allowed to have their own platforms, a decision with clear implications for the federal system and the unitary nature of the party, and the steps toward transforming the leading organs of the party from ones having an administrative orientation into ones of a representative nature that had been set in train in 1988 should be continued. There needed to be within the party recognition of the pluralism of opinions, freedom of criticism, diversity of approaches and platforms, and the minority’s right to uphold its views subject to mandatory fulfilment of majority decisions. This image brought together the trends that had been developing since 1988. A non-class approach resting on notions of universal human values, a political system in which there would be competition for power, an economic system with significant market elements, and a pluralistic communist party which through the vibrancy of its internal life would be able to maintain its leading and guiding role, was a stark contrast to the images in the established Soviet metanarrative. And it was one that stimulated wide dissent inside the party. Some, like Yeltsin,98 rejected this vision because they believed it did not go far enough in the democratisation of society. However most critics came from the opposite position to Yeltsin. Their criticisms amounted to complaints about the way in which the changes implemented under Gorbachev were destroying the Soviet system. They complained about the shift away from Marxism-Leninism in the direction of vacuous ideas which gave no vision for the future, about the loss of working-class support for the party because of the policies it pursued, about the erosion of the party’s position and consequent endangerment of the socialist choice, about the destruction of the ideological and political unity of both the party and Soviet society, and about the threat to the Soviet federation. This intra-party criticism was matched by criticism from without as the increasingly politically diverse nature of Soviet society was manifested in the expansion of independent publications and groups which either rejected party rule as a whole or sought such changes to it as to render it a completely different system. In the face of this sort of criticism, the image projected by the Gorbachev leadership was unable to generate significant unity around the symbols of Soviet power. The XXVIII Congress of the party in July 1990 adopted a programmatic declaration entitled ‘Towards a humane, democratic socialism’.99

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The draft had been discussed at the February plenum, but because of the strength of opposition that it had evoked within party ranks, it was now adopted not as a formal party programme but as an interim ‘policy statement’ to remain in force until a party commission could produce a new programme. It constituted a major attempt to rework the metanarrative. The image of Soviet society that it presented was much more critical than any earlier formal statements had been. It began by acknowledging that both the society and party were in ‘crisis’, but that the roots of this lay not in deficiencies in the socialist idea itself, but in the deformations to which that idea had been subjected in the past. ‘Statisation of all aspects of social life and dictatorship by the apex of the party-state in the name of the proletariat gave rise to new forms of man’s alienation from property and power and led to misrule and lawlessness.’ Distortion of socialist principles was already creating problems in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, while in the second half of the twentieth century the ‘authoritarian-bureaucratic system’ prevented necessary changes being made. Despite mistakes by the leadership of the party and country in recent years, perestroika ‘marked a radical shift toward a policy of renewal and liberation of the country from social forms alien to socialism’. In renouncing its former role as the nucleus of the command system of administration and seeking to become a socio-political organisation, the party was going through a period of difficult and radical change. With increased political activity by diverse groups within the country, the party saw its task as becoming a ‘party of civic concord’, ensuring constructive cooperation between the sociopolitical forces with a stake in ending the crisis and restructuring the society on democratic lines, and uniting those who were creating people’s prosperity and spiritual values through honest labour. The party sought the renovation of the social system within the framework of the socialist option. The declaration then went on to give an idea of the sort of society that the party was striving for, one of humane, democratic socialism rather than an authoritarian-bureaucratic system. Socialism, the ideals of the October Revolution, and the achievements of the Soviet people remained central to its task, but there was a need to distinguish in the country’s past between those tangible achievements on the one hand, and the things bred by Stalinism and stagnation on the other. The party favoured ‘a creative approach to the theory and practice of socialism, and their development through the constructive conceptualisation of the historical experience of the twentieth century and the legacy of Marx, Engels and Lenin, free of dogmatic interpretation.’ It had to ‘make use of the best achievements of human reason and the world’s accumulated experience of running the economy, resolving social problems and promoting democratic


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institutions.’ The party was described as the party of ‘the socialist option and communist perspective’. Humane, democratic socialism was defined as a society in which: the purpose of social development was the human being; alienation from political power and material and spiritual values was overcome, and the individual became involved in social processes; on the basis of diverse forms of ownership and economic management, working people were transformed into the masters of production, there was strong motivation for high labour productivity, and the best conditions for the progress of productive forces and the rational use of the environment were provided; social justice and social safeguards for the working people were guaranteed; the sole source of power was the sovereign will of the people; subject to control by society, the state guaranteed protection of the rights, freedoms, honour and dignity of the individual regardless of social status, sex, age, national background or religion, and the free competition of all socio-political forces acting within the law. Society worked for peaceful and equal cooperation among nations and respected the right of each nation to determine its own future. In terms of the action programme that the document then spelled out, a number of elements were interesting in light of the positions contained in earlier programmes. Civil rights and liberties like those contained in earlier documents were recognised, but now they were to be according to ‘internationally recognised standards’. Widespread social services were guaranteed. In discussing the economy, the document recognised a diversity of property types, including the private property of working people, and committed the party to a staged transition to a market system (which was seen as being indivisible from socialism), albeit with some strategic areas remaining under state management; equivalence in economic relations between rural and urban areas was to be brought about. There should be a civil society, with all groups and communities having rights guaranteed by law. The state would be law-based, with the dictatorship of any class, party, grouping or the managerial bureaucracy ruled out and where all citizens would have guaranteed access to participation in state and public affairs and to filling positions. There would be universal, direct and equal suffrage, and an independent legal system. Relations among nations in the USSR would be democratised, with nations having the right to self-determination, including secession, although the party would seek to preserve the integrity of the renewed Union as a dynamic multinational state. Internationally, the world was no longer seen in two-camp terms; the USSR sought improved, friendly relations with all. While the party bore responsibility for the parlous situation in the country, there should be

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no accusations against honest communists of either past or present generations. The party firmly renounced political and ideological monopoly and the usurpation of the functions of state and economic administration. The party had to become a genuine political party which reflected the interests of the working class, peasants and intelligentsia, and acted within the framework of civil society. It would seek political leadership in free competition with other socio-political forces, which logically meant that it could lose that position, and would seek to perform the following functions: theoretically, work out the strategy and tactics of socialist renovation on the basis of a scientific analysis of the objective trends of social development and theoretical assessment of its prospects, taking into account the different interests of social groups; ideologically, defend its world outlook and moral values, advocate its goals and policy, and draw the citizens into it and to its side; politically, work among the population and in work collectives, cooperate with public organisations and mass movements, strive to win seats in the bodies of power through elections, and form the corresponding executive bodies, engage in parliamentary activity and fulfil its election programme; organisationally, conduct work to fulfil its programmes and decisions, and renounce formalism and the nomenklatura approach to personnel work. Inner-party relations would be profoundly democratised, drawing all members into discussion, allowing freedom of criticism and competitive secret elections with free nomination for responsible party posts. The image of society contained in this document was radically different from any that had gone before because it challenged the very fundamentals of Soviet society as it had previously been presented in the metanarrative. It used the term ‘democratic socialism’, a formulation redolent of the ‘social democracy’ which had been so criticised throughout Soviet history for being but a sham of democracy in the West. It envisaged private property and a market economy, the rule of law rather than the dictatorship of class, the party shorn of its political and ideological monopoly and administrative control (almost reducing it to a brokerage role), and the party’s need to compete for influence with other socio-political forces. Combined, all of these constituted a society very different in its form and operation from the classic Soviet model reflected in the established metanarrative, and represented the sort of revolutionary transformation about which Gorbachev had been talking. Gorbachev recognised the revolutionary nature of this vision, and in his speech to the Congress100 sought to justify the changes. He strongly defended perestroika, arguing that while


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mistakes had been made over the preceding five years, the current difficulties actually stemmed from the legacy that had been inherited plus the resistance to change offered by the bureaucratic stratum in managerial structures and the social forces associated with it (i.e. leading cadres who preferred the old methods and stubbornly clung to the past), by nationalist and destructive forces who sought to use the energy of the people for their own selfish ends, and by those who were pushing for a bourgeois system through the attempt to solve present difficulties by putting the country on a capitalist footing. In the face of such enemies, much had been achieved. Reflecting the new emphasis on a market economy, Gorbachev argued that the shift to a market economy did not involve a swerving from the road to socialism because, given that working people were to be the genuine masters of the means of production, there would be no scope for exploitation. Furthermore, he argued, stratification and inequality could occur under socialism because the socialist principle provided for property distinctions if they stemmed from the nature and amount of work performed or from the talent, initiative and creativity of the individual. During his speech, Gorbachev advocated privatisation of productive capacity without using that word. He argued that they were currently at a turning point in the process of perestroika and the radical change of society within the framework of the socialist option. Perestroika had emerged within the framework of the socialist option to profoundly democratise and humanise society. Part of this was new political thinking which was predicated on the primacy of universal human values. Understanding of revolutionary change, Gorbachev argued, required a revision of the entire view of socialism. The perestroika movement was a new revolution and a logical follow-up to the cause begun in the Great October Revolution. Answers to current problems needed to be sought not in quotations from the classics by Marx, Engels and Lenin, but from actual analysis of the concrete situation, which was the fundamental law of Marxist dialectics. What was needed was a consistently creative approach to the theory and the practice of socialism, to understanding the experience of the twentieth century, and to the heritage of Marx, Engels and Lenin and other eminent exponents of revolutionary and progressive thought. Gorbachev was thus arguing that the current vision of society and the policies that had to be implemented were a result of the application of both Marxist methods and the lessons of international experience to the current situation. This situation was new, and in contrast to earlier, Gorbachev did not argue that the answer was to restore the Leninist essence that had been lost under the deformations of the Stalin period. Rather the answer lay in the creative development of socialism along lines

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suggested not only by the socialist ideological heritage, but by the combined experience of humankind. This constituted a fundamental reformulation of the Soviet metanarrative, and it enraged many in the party. The debates in the Congress showed widespread and bitter opposition to much of what Gorbachev had said. Most speakers rhetorically accepted perestroika, but many were critical of its effects and in particular of the way it was undermining the principal elements of Soviet socialism, including the party, the planned economy and Soviet federalism. However no one, not even those like Yeltsin and members of the Democratic Platform who publicly left the party at this time, had a coherent view of the future with which to replace that presented by Gorbachev. The increasing incoherence of the image of the Soviet future that had been developing in the metanarrative during the Gorbachev period was significantly exacerbated at this time. This was fuelled by the breadth of views that were now emanating from across the country about the future, particularly driven by the pressures for a review of the federal arrangements emanating from some republican capitals in the wake of the republican elections, and the strengthened drive towards the end of 1990 for a radical reworking of economic arrangements. In the case of the former, demands ranged from the outright dismantling of the USSR through a revised federation constructed on a truly voluntary basis to some who sought to maintain the old structure relatively unchanged, while in the latter the pressures for a shift to a fully market economy emanated not only from among various economists in Soviet institutes, but from a group of economists appointed by the Soviet and Russian governments, and therefore speaking with a level of official imprimatur.101 Thus not only was the official view in a state of significant flux and uncertainty, with the principal symbols of the traditional conception blurred and under challenge, but it was also in danger of being crowded out of the public arena by the diversity of views coming from elsewhere in society. Not only was the Soviet metanarrative itself becoming increasingly incoherent, but as more actors from outside the central party elite became increasingly active in pressing more and more radical positions, competing narratives emerged to challenge the metanarrative. As nationalists in the republics rejected the very idea of the USSR and ‘democrats’ in Moscow rejected the party, new narratives of political action emerged to gain popular support and undermine the hegemony of the Soviet metanarrative. With the metanarrative under pressure externally and becoming increasingly disjointed internally, the nine months before the putsch saw its increasing disintegration as growing numbers of people in society rejected its premises and Gorbachev, in reacting to the erosion in support for his policies and for the union, sought increasingly radical responses.


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This only served to further undercut the myths that comprised the metanarrative. In his speech to the October 1990 plenum,102 Gorbachev referred to the period of transition to the NEP as analogous to the current period. This required communists to radically change their forms of thinking and methods of action. He emphasised NEP as a ‘Leninist idea’, its importance for the destiny of the revolution, and the way in which opposition to it among the party leadership was very costly for the country and for the idea of socialism. The party currently faced a test of similar scale in its ability to retain its status as a ruling party. This would be determined by how it behaved in this time of the transition to the market, of the reformation of the multinational state, and of forming new political structures in society. He strongly endorsed the shift to the market, vigorously rejecting the view that it constituted a betrayal of workers’ interests and a restoration of capitalist exploitation. Rather market conditions made possible the realisation of the socialist principle ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his work’, while assuming continuing state regulation of social and economic processes and a developed system of social guarantees and protection. In terms of property, enterprises should belong to the labour collectives, with the state retaining control of key sectors. Turning to the reformation of the multinational state, Gorbachev supported a new union of sovereign states, which would integrate the country. He criticised nationalists and chauvinists who sought to break the country up, and criticised what he called outrages against monuments to Lenin, symbols of statehood and national culture, and graves of servicemen. He argued that within the context of the growing reality of political pluralism and a multi-party system, the party had to cooperate with other political trends and organisations and was ready to enter a coalition with all progressive patriotic forces. At the December 1990 and January 1991 plena, Gorbachev103 went even further in reconceptualising the nature of the union. He called for the preservation and radical renewal of the union on the basis of the sovereign republics. Constitutional order needed to be restored, illegal armed activity rejected, and there was a need to ‘develop the best traditions of friendship of the peoples and internationalism, to take the path of bringing closer together the nations and ethnic groups of our country and of mutually respecting national uniqueness’.104 A new name was even coined for the country, Union of Sovereign Soviet Republics (a name which would have retained the initials, SSSR). Power in the country must be profoundly democratic and operate through the law-based state. These reactions to the increasing pressures for greater autonomy, and even independence, from Moscow by the union republics shows how, under this pressure from below, the established image of the USSR was

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fracturing. The myth of a single united people marching towards socialism was impossible to sustain in the face of this pressure, with the result that the symbol of the union projected by the centre was one which envisaged a federation of a very different sort to that which had prevailed formerly. On the eve of the putsch against Gorbachev, a CC plenum adopted, but only for further discussion, a new draft programme entitled ‘Socialism, Democracy, Progress’.105 Acknowledging the difficult situation the country was experiencing, the programme was presented as the basis for rallying communists and all supporters of the socialist choice,106 those who cared about the future of the fatherland, civil peace and prosperity for the peoples of the USSR. The party was seen as placing the interests of the working people first, and as being ‘the party of social progress and democratic reforms, the party of social justice and universal values, the party of economic, political, and spiritual freedom’. The party was to be guided in its political activity by the interests of all-round social progress, the principles of humanism and universal values, the principles of democracy and freedom in all of their manifestations, the principles of social justice, the principles of patriotism and internationalism, and the interests of the country’s integration into the world community as a single economic, information and cultural space. The programme acknowledged the importance of the October Socialist Revolution and the belief of many in the possibility of creating a just socialist society. However the tragedy was that ‘the task of building socialism was utterly distorted and weighed down by mistakes, tyranny and gross distortions of the principles of socialism and people’s power’. The mixed economy introduced by Lenin’s NEP was overthrown in favour of a monopoly of state ownership and the administrative-distributive system. Instead of civil peace and the development of democratic institutions, there was an emphasis on increased class struggle, coercion and repression, a choice for totalitarianism and ‘barracks’ socialism. The party became the tool of the hyper-centralised bureaucratic administration of society. The party now unreservedly condemned the crimes of the Stalin era. A coming to grips with this had begun at the XX Congress of the party in 1956, but the causes of the problem were not understood, leading to ‘gross miscalculations’ in defining the prospects in the party programme of 1961 and the failure of attempts at change. Only with perestroika and glasnost was the necessary change possible. But the process of transformation had been far more difficult than imagined, because of both the legacy of the past and contemporary problems in implementing new measures. The document articulated a series of goals for the party. Among these were:


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in the political system: development of a multinational Soviet state as a truly democratic federation of sovereign republics, building a rule-oflaw state with democratic institutions and separation of powers, safeguarding the rights and freedoms of citizens and bringing human rights legislation into line with international norms, and strict observance of the rule of law; in the sphere of national relations: equality of all peoples and nations, the right to self-determination, internationalism and the strengthening of the multinational community of peoples, protection of the interests and rights of small peoples and national groups, normalisation of national relations and the settlement of inter-ethnic conflict on the basis of law, dialogue and civil and national consensus, prevention of forced population migrations, and struggle against national extremism, chauvinism, racism and discrimination; in the economy: restructuring of the national economy on the basis of different forms of ownership – state, collective, private, shareholding and cooperative, shift to a regulated market, and all-round integration of the country into the world economy. There were other measures designed to improve people’s standards of living, including retention of many of the social services available under the Soviet system. Internationally, positive relations were to be sought with all countries. Realisation of all of these aims would lead to a society of humane, democratic socialism, founded on: – a mixed economy oriented to the growth of popular well-being with wide opportunities for scientific and technological progress; – the combination of economic efficiency with the principles of social justice, distribution according to the results of labour, and citizens’ social protection; – a civil society, political and ideological pluralism, the possibility for different social groups to express their interests, and their cooperation; – genuine people’s power realised in the forms of representative and direct democracy, supremacy of the law, and guarantees of the constitutional rights and freedoms of citizens; – science, education and culture oriented to the ideals of humanism and to universal values, and universal access to their achievements.

This would be a society the ‘aim and centre of which is man free from exploitation and from all kinds of social oppression and endowed with full civil rights and the broad potential to develop and manifest his abilities and to satisfy his diverse needs.’ Although founded as an organisation of the working class, change in society meant that the party now represented the interests of all working people. This included industrial workers, peasants and intelligentsia, as well as women, youth and the elderly. Freedom of conscience, including

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religious belief,107 was recognised. The party had to democratise itself and work among the people for the realisation of its aims, gaining their support through the electoral process to establish its position in the organs of state. Party members were to have the right openly to express their opinions on anything, and they had the right to adhere to atheist convictions or to believe. Ideologically the party was committed to humane, democratic socialism: While restoring and developing the initial humanist principles of the teaching of Marx, Engels and Lenin, we include in our ideological arsenal all the wealth of our own and of world socialist and democratic thought. We regard communism as the historical perspective, the social ideal founded on universal values, on the harmonious unity of progress and justice, on the free self-realisation of the individual.

In his speech proposing the adoption of the draft,108 Gorbachev reaffirmed the positions he had taken at the XXVIII Congress, calling for a fundamental alteration in the whole viewpoint regarding socialism. He argued that the crisis of society in the mid-1980s which necessitated perestroika was not a crisis of part of the social organism but of the very model of barracks-style communism, of the ‘totalitarian and bureaucratic system created by Stalin’. Although after Stalin many elements of the totalitarian legacy were abandoned, the old command-administrative system based on the absolute supremacy of state ownership remained at the root of power and administration. The reform effort could not be stopped because on part of it – the correlation of socialism with the market – the whole future of the socialist idea depended. Indeed, he argued, socialism and the market were indivisible because only through this means could the principle of distribution according to labour be realised. This implied a mixed economy, with various types of ownership, like NEP which had been chosen by Lenin. Gorbachev saw the current draft programme as breaking decisively with outmoded ideological dogmas and stereotypes and seeking to bring their philosophy and politics into accord with the experience of the development and vital requirements of the country and people. Within this context, the CPSU, which expressed the interests of the labourers, acted as a ‘party of democratic reforms, political and economic freedom, social justice and values common to all mankind, as a party actively fighting for general civil accord’. Although the party should seek to represent the working people and their interests, it needed to aim to resolve tasks common to the whole country and people. The party remained committed to the socialist organisation of public life, deriving its ideological arsenal not only from Marxism-Leninism as in the past, but from ‘the riches of our and the world’s socialist and democratic thought’. Gorbachev recognised that the programme merely


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noted communism, and he declared that experience ‘provides no grounds for thinking that this aim is realistically attainable in the foreseeable future, but the communist idea – the free development of each person is the condition for the free development of all – has been and remains an attractive guideline for mankind’. But in this light, he rejected what he said were calls to change the name of the party into socialist or socialdemocratic, not because these were inappropriate, but because it was sufficiently important as to require resolution at a party congress or perhaps by referendum. He accused those who criticised the party for adopting a social democratic orientation of ‘communist fundamentalism’, of revisiting the disputes of the years of revolution and civil war whereas both the party and social democracy had changed. In the multi-party system, the party needed to act by political methods of persuasion and argument. This was clearly a foreshadowing of the transformation of the party from a communist to a social democratic one consistent with the changes seen in the society as a whole. The draft programme was an attempt effectively to give shape to a new metanarrative to replace the increasingly incoherent one that had been evolving up until this time, and it did so principally by recasting the myths of building socialism, leadership and (especially external) opposition, and by reworking the legitimation function played by the regime’s foundation myth. While it gave nodding recognition to some of the chief elements of the established Soviet metanarrative – the importance of October, the problems caused by Stalin, the principle of a multinational union, and communism as an attractive teleological aim – in the sort of society it envisaged it departed significantly from the established metanarrative. Its conception of a pluralist political system in which the Communist Party was only one actor, of a mixed economy with a significant private component, of a structure of human rights which guaranteed individual autonomy and freedom, and of a society run on the basis of universal human values, meant that the programme offered a vision of society which contrasted sharply with that evident in the metanarrative at the opening of the Gorbachev period. These changes were logical extensions of the way the metanarrative had been developing in the previous five years, but their cumulative effect is ample testimony to the way that development had during this time rendered the established metanarrative incoherent. The failure of the putsch saw the end of any pretensions the Soviet metanarrative still had to occupying a hegemonic position in the society. Increasingly challenged over the preceding eighteen months, its capacity to claim hegemonic status was destroyed with the collapse of Soviet power. From 21 August 1991 as the Soviet Union itself fragmented, the territorial base for the overarching Soviet metanarrative disappeared.

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That metanarrative was replaced by a variety of different emergent narratives in various parts of the country, with many of these being violently opposed to many of the chief themes of the Soviet metanarrative. Gorbachev, still formally the president, tried to maintain some links with the Soviet metanarrative as it had been developing prior to August, but his rejection of key elements of it (especially the party) meant that politically he alienated those who still looked to that metanarrative without convincing its opponents that he had separated himself from it. This also meant that the views he was espousing lacked any overarching integrating principle. Some elements of the Soviet metanarrative continued to be taken up and pressed by the communists, but these were now reduced to only one of an increasing number of political forces in society, and it seemed that most of those vocally and vigorously rejected the Soviet metanarrative. From the time of the putsch, the former Soviet metanarrative, as a hegemonic metanarrative, was dead. The reworking of ritual The reworking and ultimate disintegration of the regime’s metanarrative was paralleled by similar processes in ritual in Soviet society. This was particularly the case within the party, where a number of the established practices and patterns were overthrown. For a start, Gorbachev was a much more activist and populist General Secretary than any of his immediate predecessors had been. His image was of someone more dynamic, accessible and empathetic, someone who cared personally about the state of his people and was anxious to find out firsthand about their concerns. While this sort of image faded somewhat later in the period when many accused him of being deaf to much of the criticism and complaint facing him, the model of leadership which he seemed to embody was very different from what had gone before. Compared with Khrushchev he appeared sophisticated, compared with Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko he was engaged. Furthermore, there was no leader cult of the sort that had embraced Brezhnev. Although there was exaggerated praise of him at the XXVII Congress in 1986 and his supporters frequently praised the quality of his thought, no cult along the lines of earlier leaders emerged. In part this may have been a reflection of Gorbachev’s personal preference, but it was also a result of the opposition to him that developed within party ranks. Regardless of the cause, the absence of a cult was a striking difference from what had gone before. The growth of opposition to Gorbachev was also central to changes that occurred in the conduct of meetings of leading party and state bodies. The tradition, even generally under Khrushchev (although this was clearly not


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the case on the occasion of his overthrow), was that while meetings may have witnessed stringent if usually aesopian criticism of what had happened under former leaders, there was no open criticism of the current leader or his policies. However this changed under Gorbachev. Within the Politburo and the CC there were often critical exchanges on policy, especially as the period wore on,109 but it was in the more public fora – the XIX Conference, XXVIII Congress and sessions of the Congress of People’s Deputies and Supreme Soviet – that this change was most evident. In these fora, Gorbachev and the policies he propounded came under vigorous and public attack in a way that had not been seen since the transformation of the party congress in the mid-1920s. These meetings saw the unregulated clash of opinions as opponents of the General Secretary and his policies rarely held back in voicing their disapproval. It was testimony both to the political skills of Gorbachev and to the residual authority in his office that in the face of such opposition, he was often still able to get formal agreement to the position he was espousing.110 Within the state sphere, where from 1989 the new legislative organs were fractious affairs, there was a significant change in the way they functioned, and this was because they were no longer controlled by the party. The transformation of the ritual of voting in elections from a simple ratification of the choice of candidate made by the party into a real choice between competing candidates ensured that the membership of legislative bodies was much more diverse than it had been in the past. It also meant that all members of the legislature were no longer subject to party discipline, thereby creating a more independent and less predictable assembly. The ritual of the docile meeting obediently accepting what it was told by the speaker was gone as these became arenas within which the clash of opinions was paramount. The destruction of this ritual of obedient and disciplined participation was also evident in the mass spectacles mounted by the regime. The most dramatic instance of this was the 1990 May Day parade, which was effectively taken over by anti-regime demonstrators. But this was also reflected in the way the regime treated this celebration. The number of slogans issued by the CC (in 1991 by the Politburo rather than the CC) fell dramatically from sixty in 1985 to fourteen in 1991. And the overall message they conveyed changed considerably. Reference to communist construction ceased after 1985, while use of the term ‘Leninist’ (course, banner, policy) disappeared from 1988;111 references to the party disappeared in 1990. References to these ideological symbols were displaced by slogans addressing contemporary practical problems. A similar process of desacralisation occurred with regard to the October Revolution, socialism and communism. From the outset, Gorbachev and his supporters continued rhetorically to justify their policies in terms of

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socialism and communism, and this remained the case with regard to socialism through to the August 1991 putsch; in comparison, in the latter stages of Gorbachev’s rule, the notion of communism was little more than mentioned in passing. While the historical commitment to socialism remained, even if in the distinctly social democratic form it had taken by August 1991, a rationale could be made for continued acknowledgement of the importance of October. This was the occasion of the ‘socialist choice’, when the path was set for the socialist future. However, as the vision of socialism became more clouded, and it ceased to be highly distinctive from societies in the West, and indeed as people talked more frequently about the need for the USSR to become a ‘normal’ country, the salience of October was called into question. While, unlike many of its opponents, the regime never rejected the October Revolution, its celebration of that event became more down key and even defensive. Over the course of this period, the number of slogans for the celebration of the anniversary of the revolution shrank: forty-four in 1985 to seventeen in 1990, and in 1990 these were referred to as the slogans of the Politburo rather than the CC. Throughout, the slogans continued to include references to October (idea, cause, ideals), to Lenin (cause, ideals, banner, policy),112 and to the party, but from late in the period slogans with ideological references were overwhelmed by those relating to the immediate problems the country faced. Rather than a celebration of the founding act of the state, the marking of October became another ritual devoid of ideological content that could appeal to a broad public. The response within society told the tale: many of those groups that had emerged onto the political stage in the late 1980s to early 1990s rejected the October Revolution and the society it brought with it, while the response of much of the rest of the populace was one of growing indifference to October. Celebration of it was, by 1990, even more contrived than it had been at any time in the past, with widespread popular apathy the norm. Such a sentiment also seems to have been strong within the ranks of party functionaries. A similar trajectory characterised that other fundamental symbol of legitimacy, Lenin. In the first three years of his rule, Gorbachev relied heavily on Lenin the person as a symbol to justify both his policies and his personal authority. It was Lenin and returning to the genius of Lenin that was the primary focus rather than ‘Leninism’, especially in this initial period.113 Throughout, Gorbachev emphasised Lenin’s personal qualities and circumstances, his reactions to problems and challenges, as he sought to justify his own behaviour. But he also referred to Lenin’s writings to sustain his policies, with the best example being his tendency, most marked in the middle of the period, to cite Lenin’s support for NEP (and therefore


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to quote from Lenin’s last letters and articles) in support of his ever more radical economic policy. However, increasingly in the late 1980s, Gorbachev’s use of Lenin was running into difficulties. As he gradually dismantled the main planks of the Leninist political system following the XIX Conference, the evocation of Lenin as support rang increasingly hollow. Moreover this was also a time when Lenin’s image in society more broadly was undergoing dramatic change. As part of the increasingly free historical discussion that unrolled following Gorbachev’s 1987 reference to ‘blank pages’ in Soviet history, those professional groups of historians and journalists who, along with other professional groups, had been so important in the past in the reflexive development of the metanarrative, now began to push the symbols of that metanarrative beyond its bounds. The role of Lenin was a central feature. The focus of discussion among historians writing in the press soon shifted from freeing Leninism from its Stalinist distortions to a more objective evaluation of Lenin himself.114 People like Vasily Seliunin, Gavriil Popov, Igor Kliamkin and Aleksandr Tsipko stimulated a radical, critical and principled discussion of Lenin which stripped away many of the myths that had been generated during the Soviet period. The publication of newly available historical documents and photographs portrayed Lenin in a new light, as a much less kindly and gentle leader than he had formerly been portrayed. The resultant tarnishing of the symbol of Lenin among at least part of the Soviet population115 diminished its capacity to provide strong justification for policy positions or political actions. This became evident in the public sphere. In 1989, the future of the Lenin Mausoleum and of Lenin’s body within it became an object of public discussion, with one person taking matters into their own hands by exploding two bombs near it.116 Some of the fifty-two museums that were devoted to Lenin throughout the country were closed, while from 1990 there were a number of cases of statues of Lenin being either defaced or removed.117 In spring 1990 the large white statue of Lenin that had stood behind the tribune in the Palace of Congresses where the Congress of People’s Deputies met was removed and replaced by a smaller bust. In 1991 the changing of place-names began, with the most important being the renaming of Leningrad as St Petersburg in September of that year.118 The symbolic dominance that Lenin had exercised was clearly shaken, with Gorbachev rarely mentioning him by 1990. However the figure of Lenin still retained some authority for many people; a generally positive view of Lenin was evident in a public opinion poll taken in Leningrad in June 1990, while in the referendum twelve months later in the same city, 55 per cent of people were against changing the name of Leningrad.119 When the putsch occurred and was crushed, in Moscow and throughout most of Russia (in contrast to other union republics and to the fate of statues

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of many other prominent Bolsheviks) monuments to Lenin were left relatively untouched. While the symbols of October and Lenin were both to a degree undermined in their capacity to evoke positive sentiments across the population, the Great Patriotic War seems to have continued to have significant resonance. However this became something of a two-edged sword; while the authorities sought to emphasise both the glory of victory and the massive cost in deaths, critics used the war to criticise the Soviet regime (see below). In 1985, the fortieth anniversary of war’s end, the normal Victory Day parade was held, preceded by a ceremonial meeting of party and government leaders in the Palace of Congresses.120 The parade, reviewed by Gorbachev and party and state leaders standing on Lenin’s Mausoleum and addressed by Defence Minister Sergei Sokolov, comprised troops many of whom were in period costume and accompanied by military hardware from the war. In the evening, the focus shifted to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier where the official leadership group observed a minute’s silence, followed by the revolutionary hymn ‘You Fell Victim’ which pealed out through a single bell. However in following years, even the Great Patriotic War was desacralised. The official narrative of the war was undercut by a series of historical revelations, including the myth of voluntary Baltic accession to the USSR, the belated initial response to German hostilities, the role of NKVD troops and punishment detachments, and the Katyn massacre. By 1990, the context of Victory Day was very different from what it had been five years earlier. While there was still immense pride in the victory, sadness in the losses and anger at the destruction, there was also a feeling among some that the regime had stolen victory from the people,121 reflected in both the regime’s incompetence in waging the war and the (in part resultant) material deprivation suffered by the people after the war. The main exhibition hall, which on the forty-fifth anniversary of the victory might have been expected to have a major display on the Soviet achievement, had an exhibition which emphasised the Russian rather than the Soviet defence of the Fatherland. There was a lack of decoration on the streets, and fewer veterans took part in the festivities.122 Gorbachev’s speech emphasised the costs of the war and the lessons to be learnt from it, and stressed the role of the people, not the party, in the victory. The parade that followed was more modest and less extravagant than those earlier, even though it comprised basically the same elements: veterans, serving military men and period hardware. And rather than just the normal fare of military marches, some of the music of Okudzhava was played during the parade. As a celebration of Soviet achievement, the occasion was a very lacklustre affair.


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Political posters were not a major means of projecting regime symbols during this period. In part this was because of the importance of other types of media, especially newspapers and television. Furthermore, as with these other arms of the media, as the period wore on the regime ceased to enjoy monopoly control over the production of posters; opposing forces were able to use this medium to project contrary messages. Nevertheless, posters were still used to project the regime’s message, or at least messages in accord with some of the policies pursued by Gorbachev. Glasnost and the development of alternative views,123 and peace,124 were calls that reflected official policy; a poster from 1987 showing women marching firmly forward carrying pictures of bombs with crosses through them saying ‘If not Me and You, then who?’,125 while officially a poster for peace, also resonated with Gorbachev’s question of the same type about bringing change to the USSR. There were references to socialism126 and attempts to link perestroika with the 1917 revolution,127 but other depictions of the Soviet past were more critical. Criticism of the straitjacket imposed by the party,128 of collectivisation,129 and of Stalinism130 all appeared in posters. In terms of urban development, significant change began to occur towards the end of this period, but this was not change that would shore up the by this time sagging regime’s metanarrative. In the last seven years of Soviet rule, under Gorbachev, in the more relaxed atmosphere of perestroika, those seeking to preserve landmarks from the past became increasingly active. The campaign to save the Lefortovo district from a major road development was a significant victory for preservation against development.131 But symbolically more important was the beginning of the dismantling of the Soviet architectural heritage toward the end of this period. In mid-1990, the bust of Lenin in the Mossovet was permanently removed from the council room,132 in November 1990, the cornerstone of the building of a replica of the Kazan Cathedral (torn down in 1936) was laid on Red Square, in October 1990, a memorial to those who perished in the gulag was established in front of the Lubianka; and in January 1991 the House of Scientific Atheism was closed down. In August 1991, the statue of Dzerzhinsky was removed from its place in front of the Lubianka, while elsewhere in the city the representations of other Soviet luminaries (including Kalinin, Sverdlov and Pavlik Morozov) were also removed. Somewhat paradoxically, in 1990 there were some seventy buildings in Moscow bearing a plaque noting Lenin’s presence at some time in the building, and these remained overwhelmingly undisturbed.133 The removal of Soviet names from regions, streets and squares had also begun in 1988, gathering speed in later years.134 The names of Brezhnev, Zhdanov and Voroshilov were removed from Moscow raions, while

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among those whose names were removed from streets and squares were Marx, Gorky, Dzerzhinsky, Frunze, Kirov, Kuibyshev, Sverdlov and Kalinin. Also removed were some references to the revolution and its anniversary, and to the collective farm. More broadly throughout the country, the names of many towns and villages were changed, often restoring the names they had before gaining names resonant with the Soviet ethos, although in many cases wholly new names were applied.135 Much of this was done by local authorities in response to pressures from mobilised groups of citizens. Over the course of his time in office, Gorbachev completely recast the metanarrative’s symbolic constellation of Soviet society. The notion of communism disappeared, while by mid-1991, socialism seems to have been transformed into social democracy. Along with this, the notion of democratisation changed from eliminating formalism from the operation of party and state bodies into the vesting of real decision-making power in the hands of the rank-and-file populace. With this went notions of the monolithic unity of the people and the party, the transformation of the party’s leading and guiding role from being based on administrative means to having to win it in electoral competition, and finally a recognition that it might not be able to continue to play such a role. The vesting of real authority in state organs and the withdrawal of the party’s administrative control was the logical expression of this. The single-party state was undermined by the recognition of the legitimacy of political pluralism and the assumption that the diverse interests in society could be mediated best through a democratic process rather than the ideological guidance of the party. In the economy, the shift was from the primacy of planning to the equation of socialism with the market. In terms of the values which were thought to underpin social development, there was a significant downgrading of egalitarianism and increased emphasis upon freedom. Class and the primacy of the proletariat disappeared in favour of a universal humanism. This was also evident in the international sphere where the initial idea of peaceful coexistence and détente as a form of class struggle was superseded by a view which no longer considered class struggle central. There was a growing emphasis on interdependence and universal interests and values, on the possibility of harmonious relations between capitalist and socialist systems, and upon human civilisation. This represented a fundamental transformation of symbolic (and intellectual) discourse which shattered the Soviet metanarrative; all of the myths, with the exception of that of the war, were fundamentally recast in ways overwhelmingly at odds with the way they had been before. As a result, the hegemonic narrative collapsed. Alternative symbols were thrown up by


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the increased diversity of politically active groups, and while it is not clear that any of these alternatives offered a coherent vision of the future, by the end neither did that coming from Gorbachev and those around him. Too many of the elements of the Gorbachevian vision were seen by one side to have Soviet provenance and by the other to have no Soviet roots. His vision ended up by satisfying few, and was clearly unable to generate the sort of commitment that was needed to sustain the system.

6


The quest for legitimation, or the recognition of its right to rule, is a primary aim of every political regime. Acceptance of its right to rule greatly facilitates that rule and can be an important stabilising factor. In pursuit of this, regimes adopt (either implicitly or explicitly) legitimation programmes. These are coherent patterns of behaviour and statement which seek1 to generate a sense of authority by tapping into the various ideal type modes of legitimation, like those listed in Chapter 1. In ideocratic regimes like the Soviet, which feature an overriding metanarrative, that metanarrative is a central vehicle for the projection of such a programme. In this way, the themes of the metanarrative constitute effective appeals for the authority of the regime. So, too, do the myths. At a general level, six Soviet myths can be associated with seven modes of legitimation used by the Soviet regime at various times: Myth of regime founding: ideocratic and teleological legitimation Myth of building socialism: teleological, ideocratic, nationalist, performance and democratic legitimation Myth of leadership: ideocratic, teleological, charismatic, performance, democratic and legal-rational legitimation Myth of internal opposition: ideocratic, teleological and performance legitimation Myth of external opposition: ideocratic, teleological and nationalist legitimation Myth of victory in the war: ideocratic, teleological, performance and nationalist legitimation. As the metanarrative and the myths changed over the life of the regime, so the patterns of legitimation sought by the regime changed. Throughout the entire Soviet period, at least until the last few years, prominent within the metanarrative were appeals to both the ideocratic and teleological modes of legitimation. Central to this was the ideocratic nature of the regime; with a formal, codified ideology underpinning the regime and its purpose, this was always intrinsic to the regime’s attempts at legitimation. Similarly always present throughout all stages of the 264


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regime’s life up until about 1988 was the teleological mode of legitimation. Even though the conception of communism may have changed at various times, especially from the mid-1960s, throughout most of the regime’s life the aim of leading society into communism remained central to the regime’s stated purpose. Thus these two modes of legitimation, ideocratic and teleological, remained both relatively constant in and central to the regime’s legitimation programme throughout most of the life of the Soviet regime. However, the patterns of the other modes of legitimation changed over the different periods. During the first period, 1917–29, nationalist legitimation was a strong theme, as the metanarrative emphasised the strength and danger posed by enemies abroad, even if at times this nationalist appeal was screened by the focus on international revolution. The notion of defending the socialist motherland against such opposition was a strong continuing theme. But so, too, was the construction of a notion of charismatic legitimation for the party and, following his death, Lenin. The projection of the image of the party under vigorous attack but always correct in its pursuit of the communist millennium, and of the role played by Lenin and his thought in this, was a clear articulation of an assertion of authority based on a charismatic claim. The strength of the myth of internal opposition at this time reflects an appeal to performance legitimation as well as reinforcing both the ideocratic and teleological modes. The prominence of these myths in the metanarrative waxed and waned during this period, with the result that none of the modes of legitimation was dominant over the others over the whole period. During the second, Stalinist, period, the overwhelming symbol of legitimation expressed through the metanarrative was that of personalised charisma vested in Stalin. The notion of the charismatic authority of the party largely disappeared as the personalised authority of the vozhd came to dominate all; the system was legitimate because comrade Stalin was its leader. But there were also subordinate strands of legitimation as well. The coming together of the notions of Soviet patriotism and internationalism provided the basis for the projection of a sense of Soviet nationalist legitimation, although this was from the mid-1930s tinged with Russian nationalism, which was further heightened during the Great Patriotic War. The increased emphasis on democracy and the new Constitution in the mid-1930s had echoes of both democratic legitimation and legalrational legitimation, although the latter was clearly in tension with the overwhelming power of the charismatic principle, and neither sat easily with the claims based on the continuing struggle with domestic opposition that were so prominent in the 1930s. And finally, the focus on improved standards of living in the second half of the 1930s made performance

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legitimation relevant. But these types of legitimation were all subordinate to what became the principal mode during this period, the charismatic authority of Stalin. In the post-Stalin 1953–85 period, the mix of modes of legitimation changed significantly with the disappearance of personal charisma as an appropriate form of legitimation. The attempt was made to shift charismatic legitimation onto the party as an institution while at the same time boosting the significance of regime performance through the partial redefinition of the teleological aim in terms of improved lifestyles. The nationalist appeal remained significant, particularly in terms of the continuing emphasis upon international hostility in the Cold War, and the post-1965 prominence of the myth of the Great Patriotic War. The rejection of the notion of personal charisma was accompanied by increased emphasis upon both democratic and legal-rational legitimation, both of which were seen to be embodied in the claims for increased regularisation of the functioning of the institutions. However, as seen in Chapter 4, this was much stronger during the Brezhnev years than those of Khrushchev. The decline of the myth of internal opposition during this period meant that this no longer fed into the regime’s legitimation programme. Finally, during the Gorbachev period, with the undermining of the metanarrative and the consequent rejection of much of the basis upon which Soviet legitimation had sought to rest, the reform programme sponsored by Gorbachev ultimately sought to base itself on a combination of democratic and legal-rational legitimation. The aim was to create a system which rested on a new set of regularised principles and procedures, and therefore on these two bases of legitimation. The inability to bring this about was connected with the collapse of the USSR as a political system. The effectiveness of these varied appeals was dependent upon the reception of the metanarrative by the three groups in Soviet society noted above: the central political elite, the subordinate political class and the general populace. As the foregoing analysis shows, over the seventy-four years of the Soviet regime, one of the metanarrative’s most obvious characteristics has been its elasticity. The capacity of the metanarrative to change, principally through the reworking of symbols in existing myths, was extensive. The myth of the regime’s foundation saw the revision of the history of October, and later the regime, first to emphasise the role of Stalin and then to remove it, the emergence of Leninism and its later modification by the rise and fall of ‘Stalinism’, and its later partial supplantation by the myth of the Great Patriotic War. The myth of building socialism witnessed the 1920s–30s shifts in the evaluation of the peasantry and the role it would play; the changing identity of the proletariat,


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especially its 1930s widening to embrace white-collar workers; the changing conception of communism, especially its conceptualisation overwhelmingly in terms of material plenty, and the changing timetable for its achievement; the different understandings of the nature of popular participation and involvement, especially in the 1950s–80s, and its general morphing into a myth of nation-building. The leadership myth was characterised by the emergence of personalised authority in the person of Stalin, followed by its destruction following his death and the revival of the attempt to invest the party with a form of institutional charisma. The myth of internal opposition experienced the varying identification of opposition groups in society, and the shift from intra-party opposition as acceptable prior to 1921 to its being unacceptable after that date; the decline in the salience of class categories in the mid-1930s; and the disappearance of enemies within from the mid-1950s. The myth of external opposition saw changes in the evaluation of the threat posed by specific countries within a context of continuing foreign challenge. And all of the myths were recast in the last six years of the regime’s life. The magnitude of these changes was immense, but it should not be assumed that there were no consistent threads running through the period. The metanarrative was consistent into the 1980s in: its teleological affirmation of communism as the aim of the society; the working-class essence of the society and system; the central role played by communists/the party in the achievement of the teleological aim; and the continued existence of hostility and challenge to the regime from the outside world. But despite these consistencies, the level of change and inconsistency was very high. A certain level of change in the metanarrative was only to be expected over the course of the life of the regime. Had it not changed at all, it would quickly have become stultified, out of touch and clearly irrelevant to the course of Soviet history. But nevertheless, given the high levels of change and the fact that some of the changes involved a direct reversal of former positions, questions arise over the level of belief in and acceptance of the metanarrative on the part of sections of Soviet society, and the degree of coherence within the metanarrative itself. These questions are linked. The question of belief is also raised by the way in which the message of the metanarrative did not match the experience of those who were listening to it; personal counternarratives were common as individual experience was often not consistent with either the details or the optimism of the metanarrative. This would have applied to many with regard to such claims as those about the oppositional activity of various categories of people at different times, the emphasis from the mid-1930s on material plenty, and even the powers attributed to Stalin personally. In cases like these where their own personal experience, or in the case of Stalin common sense, did

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not match the images projected in the metanarrative, what effect did this dissonance have? It is, of course, impossible precisely to judge the levels of commitment to the metanarrative and the ideology that underpinned it on the part of any group within Soviet society; even after the end of the regime’s life there was widespread popular commitment to some of the fundamental values at the core of socialism, like freedom, equality, fairness, justice and opposition to exploitation.2 However, some progress can be made in this regard. The discussion will look at the three groups identified in Chapter 1, the general population, the subordinate political class, and the central political elite, in turn. It is important to recognise that what the Bolsheviks sought from those over whom they ruled was not merely support, although in the regime’s early years when the new state was under direct threat during the civil war they would gladly have accepted this, but genuine commitment to the cause with people acting in support of the regime and its aims because they believed in them. The Bolsheviks’ aim was to encapsulate the populace within the intellectual universe constituted by the metanarrative, to have people see the world through the concepts and images of which the metanarrative consisted, and thereby to internalise the values the regime espoused. Genuine adoption of this world view, and the use of it to understand and interpret the world, was what the Bolsheviks sought. This level of psychic commitment could not be achieved on the basis of a passing acquaintance with the metanarrative but required extended (or perhaps intensive) exposure to it in order to generate the sort of conviction desired by the elite. This means that this level of commitment is unlikely to have been present within the mass of the population until at least the early to mid 1920s. Before then, while there may have been widespread support for the Bolsheviks in many areas, especially in opposition to the Whites during the civil war, the sort of levels of commitment the Bolsheviks sought would not have had time to develop. Most of the populace had not been exposed in any systematic fashion to the Bolsheviks’ message, and although much of this may have touched a responsive chord among sections of the populace, it is unlikely to have produced the sort of commitment the regime desired. However, once the conflict had ended and the regime began more systematically to extend its tentacles throughout the country, and in particular as its propaganda effort was stepped up, more people would have become exposed to the regime’s message in a regularised fashion. As time passed and the centre’s ability to dominate public communications increased, such exposure should have become more intense.3 Accordingly, the likelihood of the sort of psychic commitment noted above should have increased.


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By the late 1920s, Bolshevik language had come to dominate the public sphere.4 This meant that members of the public, when they had to interact with the regime and its agents, had to use the language and the concepts contained in the metanarrative. They had to define themselves in terms of the principal images and symbols of the metanarrative, and they had to be aware of the themes coming through that metanarrative if they were to be successful in their interactions with those in authority. Of course, the hegemonic position occupied by Bolshevik language in the public sphere did not necessarily mean, of itself, widespread and genuine commitment to it and its values by the populace. Indeed, for large sections of the population at this time, much of the Bolsheviks’ language was if not incomprehensible, then very confusing. Many reports testify to the way that there was widespread lack of understanding among the populace as a whole of what the Bolsheviks were saying.5 But even when the language was used by ordinary members of the populace, the use of the symbols, terms and themes of the metanarrative in dealings with officials could, in principle, have been play-acting, with people speaking in the way that they knew they were expected to speak without really embracing the metanarrative as a whole. There was clearly both popular resistance to the language of the metanarrative and the use of it in a way which effectively sought to suborn its meaning;6 the mispronunciation of slogans to turn the words into something else, the use of puns and aphorisms to distort meaning and the employment of irony to project dissident meaning were all common occurrences at this time. In some cases this would have reflected opposition to the regime and its metanarrative on the part of the speaker, but in many instances this was probably individuals simply seeking to exert some control over their lives rather than an outright rejection of political authority.7 Sometimes, too, the language would have been used as a cover not for political opposition, but to hide an unacceptable class background8 or perhaps simply private doubts; overwhelming public commitment could shield the presence of private doubts.9 Many went through the ritual activities demanded by the system with little belief in the values behind what they were doing.10 It is also important to realise that, no matter how all-encompassing the metanarrative was, it could not embrace absolutely every aspect of people’s lives. When with friends and family, perhaps even workmates, people did act outside the metanarrative; they did not restrict themselves to the language of the regime and the conceptions it sought to push, but got by through use of a discourse which may not have been opposed to the metanarrative, but was different from it. Such personal language persisted throughout the Soviet period. However as a study of personal diaries written in the 1920s and 1930s has shown,11 many citizens did identify with the revolutionary project and

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defined themselves in terms of its chief symbols, especially their collective adherence to the common revolutionary cause.12 They saw their own identity as being bound up with the collective enterprise of the building of socialism, and their personal development as socialist people as being part of that larger process. In this sense, their very being was bound up with membership of the collective and living the metanarrative; their personalities were submerged within the metanarrative. This internalisation of the metanarrative meant that they were the ‘new Soviet man’, with their personal transformation part of the remaking of society as a whole. In this sense the population were ‘ideological agents’, intertwining the metanarrative with their own subjectivities.13 This sort of acceptance of the metanarrative assumes that there would have been a propensity to accept the substantive claims of that metanarrative, although this was not inevitably the case.14 Acceptance of that metanarrative, and both its relationship to reality and its own propensity to change, would have been assisted by two aspects of the metanarrative prior to 1953. First, the doctrine of socialist realism, which dictated that representations must be of a future that was immanent in the present, with the result that many of the claims of the metanarrative were effectively promises for the future rather than descriptions of the present. As such, the veracity of the metanarrative was not called into question by the divergence between what was being said and people’s real life experiences. Moreover for many people who had moved from the countryside into the city in search of work in the new industrial centres created by the first five year plan and after, this future-oriented image actually matched their hopes and expectations. They went into the cities, where they experienced often appalling living and working conditions, in the belief that they were creating better opportunities if not for themselves, then at least for their children. And for many of those who were able to gain promotion from the shop floor into an administrative position, the so-called vydvizhentsy, the improved conditions were actual reality. Furthermore the supply of consumer goods, at least in the capital, did improve in the latter half of the 1930s. While that reality may not have matched the image of material plenty projected through the metanarrative, their experience was one of an improving life situation which seemed to reaffirm the basic promise of the metanarrative’s myth of building socialism. Second, the myth of charismatic leadership vested in Stalin after 1929. The growth of the Stalin cult and the attribution of all-seeing wisdom to Stalin provided a perfect rationalisation for changes in the claims made in the metanarrative. His wisdom and his desire to do what was best for the people was sufficient to explain changes in the line that was being expressed. In this sense, there was a means of claiming an overall


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coherence to the metanarrative as it developed from the 1930s to 1953; despite the changes in the myths that made up the metanarrative, the direct reversals of former positions and claims that on the face of it seemed ludicrous, the integrating factor was that they were taking place at Stalin’s behest and accorded with his capacity to guide society to the communist millennium. Clearly not everyone accepted the rationality that stemmed from the claims made for Stalin; for example, there was significant scepticism about the way heroes of the revolutionary pantheon were in the mid to late 1930s turned into enemies,15 and the outbreak of conflict with Germany in June 1941 led to some popular questioning of Stalin and his leadership.16 But for those for whom the metanarrative had taken on a psychic importance, who had adopted it as part of the collective psyche of which they considered themselves to be members, the authority of Stalin may have been sufficient to overcome any doubts that the sudden changes of line may have aroused. And the excitement of being part of the construction of the new society, a development which in the 1930s was clearly evident to all of those living and working near the new construction sites that were spread across the country, would have reinforced the conviction that they were on the correct path. The war years, particularly after the tide turned and ultimate victory was achieved, reinforced belief in the Soviet metanarrative for many people. This would have been most marked among Russians, with there being widespread evidence of alienation from the regime among various of the non-Russian ethnic groups, especially Ukrainians. But an important element in the effect of the war on the metanarrative was that it was an inclusive force. For many sections of the Soviet populace who prior to the war may have felt themselves outside or at best marginal to the Soviet symbolic community, in particular the peasants, the growing myth of the war as it developed during and after the conflict effectively integrated them into the symbolic body politic.17 From being either enemies or victims, which many probably felt in the wake of collectivisation, through their part in the war the peasants were transformed into part of the heroic and victorious Soviet people, able to live the metanarrative like many of their urban cousins. Furthermore, a particular effort had been made during the war to link personal and national concerns, thereby interweaving individuals’ personal and family myths and experiences with those of the country as a whole, reinforcing a sense of membership of the symbolic community that emerged victorious in 1945. Thus there are grounds for arguing that, during the Stalinist period, much of the metanarrative did resonate positively among the mass of the populace, and there was widespread belief and commitment in the common Soviet cause.

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Turning to the subordinate political class, for them too exposure to the metanarrative was essential for their internalisation of it. But it would have been easier for them than it was for the populace at large because their working lives were bound up with the metanarrative at all times and they were subject to significantly more in the way of political education than the general population. Fulfilment of their roles within the political apparatus was dependent upon their ability to function within the metanarrative and its themes. Doubtless some within the political apparatus at various times harboured the same sorts of doubts and reservations that were present among the populace at large, although for some this may have been muted (at least for a time) by the idealism that had drawn them into party ranks. But they had to operate within the milieu of the metanarrative, in the sense that all of their official dealings within the political structure would have been framed in these terms. The instructions coming down from above and the reports going the other way, the meetings they attended and the speeches they gave, were all cast in terms of the metanarrative. The autobiographies that they had regularly to write were, in the words of one scholar, ‘informed by the eschatological motifs that permeated the Bolshevik discourse’,18 while even at the lowest levels, party meetings were conducted within the discourse of the metanarrative.19 Enveloped within this milieu, contributors and witnesses to the massive changes under way in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and also pragmatically aware of what was needed to ascend the political ladder, it would be unusual if officials did not adopt the metanarrative as a constituent part of their personae. And of course for them, too, the obvious evidence of the country’s development would have reinforced the sense of the correctness of the metanarrative. The central political elite were the chief moulders of the metanarrative, and there is no reason to believe that they were not committed to its basic structure and concepts. Clearly many of the twists and turns in that narrative would have been seen cynically by members of the elite, especially when those twists and turns involved new attacks upon members of the elite itself. However, the basic concepts and language that comprised the metanarrative structured the way these people spoke and presumably thought. While the proceedings of political bodies that were public or semi-public – like the party congress and central committee – were conducted in terms of the metanarrative, so too were those interactions of the elite which were not subject to public scrutiny, and therefore lacked any sense of an imperative to act artificially in ways consistent with the metanarrative. The proceedings of the Politburo, although circulated to a limited range of officials, were essentially closed, and yet discussion here was for the most part conducted in the terms of the metanarrative.20 So,


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too, were letters exchanged between individual members of the elite,21 and Stalin’s dinnertime addresses to his comrades.22 In the words of Robert Service, ‘what was said in wider circles was said in more or less the same language and with the same force in the innermost recesses of the central party leadership’.23 But does it really matter whether there was genuine conviction among these groups, or is it sufficient for the rituals to be conducted, for the principles of the metanarrative to be observed? Some have argued that it was not necessary that people believed, only that they acted as if they believed.24 It is certainly true that central to the functioning and stability of the system was that people had to act in accord with the themes of the metanarrative; both linguistic and practical ritual had to be maintained if the system was to survive. However it is hardly credible to argue that such activity could be maintained and observed over a long period of time unless there was at least a core of belief within the respective audiences. If everyone was simply acting out a part which was not based in their own personal beliefs and values, the whole structure would have been hollow and without substance. Ritual without the associated belief and commitment assumes a shadowy aspect and is a much weaker structure than it appears. However while the logic of the arguments for belief sketched above and the evidence of genuine enthusiasm by members of the populace in their involvement in these rituals noted by foreign observers before the war suggests widespread substantive commitment, following Stalin’s death that commitment seems to have been hollowed out, at least to a degree. Two key developments within the metanarrative during the Khrushchev period undermined the coherence-maintaining mechanisms of that narrative noted above and laid the basis for the erosion of belief in it, and thereby in the entire Soviet project. The first development involved the transformation of the myth of charismatic leadership. While the death of Stalin removed the principal of that myth, the demolition of Stalin’s authority by Khrushchev destroyed the notion of personal charismatic authority which had been used to integrate the various strands of the metanarrative. The apparent inconsistencies and contradictions in the metanarrative had been subsumed under the all-encompassing claim for Stalin’s infallible guidance. While in terms of pure logic this may have been a nonsense, for believers seeking to make sense out of the metanarrative that encompassed society, this was a way of giving it some order. Without such an authority figure who could impose order on apparent disorder, the danger was that the logic and coherence of the metanarrative would disappear. By rejecting the notion of a single charismatic leader in the Stalin mould, Khrushchev ensured that such a figure could not re-emerge and therefore the metanarrative would lack a single

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authoritative personal voice. The attempt to transfer such charismatic authority onto the party,25 or perhaps restore what had been there from the beginning of the Soviet regime but had been superseded by the personalised authority of Stalin, was but a pale reflection of Stalin’s personal charisma. This was in part because, owing to its omnipresence throughout Soviet society, the party lacked the sense of mystery that distance from the people afforded to the leader in the Kremlin that was so important in investing charismatic authority in his figure. Without a supreme personal arbiter, the metanarrative ran the risk of fraying and becoming excessively diffuse. In part in an attempt to deal with the way this had been occurring under Khrushchev, the Brezhnev leadership significantly enhanced the role of the myth of the Great Patriotic War in the metanarrative. As indicated earlier, from the mid-1960s, the Great Patriotic War became one of the dominant elements in the metanarrative, with the emphasis upon the role that this played in shaping post-war Soviet society. While this certainly appealed to wide sections of the Soviet population, it also served in part to undermine one of the principal myths of the metanarrative. From the outset, the focus of the metanarrative had been on the building of a new society on the basis of the achievements of the Great October Socialist Revolution. After the enhancing of the myth of the Great Patriotic War, especially in conjunction with the increased prominence of Russian nationalist themes from this point on,26 the unique place of October seemed to be called into question. With the emergence of the war as a virtual foundation myth, with the argument that Soviet society was being shaped overwhelmingly by that war, the role of October as setting the country on the path to socialism seemed to be diminished. This meant that the specifically socialist origins of the country were being obscured by an event which was shared with a large number of countries that were anything but socialist in orientation. This diminution of the ideological claims for the system was consistent with the shift in the conception of communism which occurred at this time. The second key development relates to the myth of building socialism, and in particular to communism and its approach. Crucial here were two things: timing, and the conception of communism. In terms of timing, before 1961 the metanarrative had never been explicit about when communism would be achieved, with socialist realism pushing this into the indeterminate future. It was always seen as in the future, and although at times there were indications its achievement was not far off, the metanarrative never set out a definite timetable. This meant that contemporary society could always be seen as a work in progress, as the present within which the future was immanent but which remained very inferior to that


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future. Because of the uncertainty of the date of the achievement of communism, there was no clear yardstick against which progress towards that goal could be measured. However when a more finite idea of the arrival of communism appeared in the metanarrative in 1961, a timescale was established which, at least in theory, enabled judgements to be made about how progress towards that goal was proceeding. Furthermore, unlike in the past when the achievement of communism was seen to be outside the life span of much of the existing citizenry, this end point placed it clearly within the expectations of many Soviet citizens. But what made this end point even more dangerous for the metanarrative was the changing conception of communism. Communism had always been seen in part in terms of improved lifestyles and greater supply of goods and services, and this had gained increased prominence in the second half of the 1930s. But until the postStalin era, this had always been associated with a very strong emphasis upon the building of a new type of society, one characterised by qualities which were in stark contrast to the capitalist societies of the West. The October Revolution as the source of socialist development was crucial here. Communism was seen as qualitatively different, as an ideal society in which all of the negative features of the capitalist West were absent, where a new type of individual would, through labour, help in the construction of this new world. However during the post-Stalin period, and especially from the mid-1960s, while both elements remained in the conception of communism, the balance between them shifted. Overwhelmingly when communism was discussed, especially after 1964, the emphasis was on material plenty and the way that people’s needs and desires would be met in full under communism. However when communism was seen primarily in these terms, and when there was a specific point at which it was expected that communism would be achieved and that point was not far off, the opportunity was opened up for people to compare their current circumstances with what was promised and to make a judgement about progress towards the teleological goal. The economic decline that became apparent in the 1960s and the beginning again of an economy in which shortages became more common, thus not only constituted a criticism of the regime’s economic management, but more seriously undermined this basic theme of the metanarrative. If economic plenty was to be the rule by 1980, the absence of clear and discernible progress towards it in the 1970s undercut the promise of the metanarrative. So unlike earlier, when the discrepancy between promise and reality could be rationalised through reference to the indeterminate future, now that discrepancy was a direct reflection of people’s immediate circumstances. The eroding effect of this on the metanarrative should not be underestimated.

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The effect of this may have been exacerbated by the prominence achieved by the myth of the Great Patriotic War. With the chief symbolic elements of that myth, collective suffering, sacrifice and salvation, with the victory achieved due to the unity of party and people, there was an expectation on the part of the people that their efforts would be rewarded in the post-war period. In this context, the regime’s inability to ensure material plenty represented not just a shortcoming of regime performance, or a compromise of the communist aim, but a betrayal of the myth of the war.27 The enormous sacrifices and sense of collective unity for the common good seemed to count for nothing; economic difficulties seemed to mock the singleness of purpose and immense achievement that pulsated through the myth of the war. In this sense, the metanarrative and its myth of the war turned poor economic performance into betrayal and generated a crisis of legitimacy for metanarrative and regime. Furthermore, by conceiving of communism more fully in terms of material plenty and downplaying the ideal society aspect, the metanarrative robbed the Soviet project of its clearly definable difference from its Western competitors. Indeed, the sense developed that the direction Soviet society was going in was to become more like that of the West. This was aided by both the downgrading of the myth of October with its claims for the socialist basis of the Soviet path, and the way in which from the 1960s the Soviet population gained greater access to and knowledge about the West than they had ever had before. Both through increased travel, especially by Westerners to the Soviet Union but also Soviet citizens to countries outside the USSR and in some cases the communist bloc, and heightened exposure to information about and from the West, citizens were able to make more independent judgements about conditions there than they had been able to before. Sections of the population, particularly among the youth, even developed sub-cultures based upon their perception of Western culture.28 In the mental comparison with the West that was going on in many parts of Soviet society, the image of the metanarrative often suffered. This became even more the case during the perestroika era, when a wide range of publications began to publish material that in earlier years would have been forbidden. This included not only information about the world outside the USSR, but also material relating to the Soviet past which was damning of aspects of that past. For the first time in print, broad-ranging criticisms of the Soviet project and its effects on the people and country were given an airing within the Soviet Union, and the effect of this was clearly to puncture many of the myths which that system had perpetuated. While there was a limit to how much the general populace cared about things like the murder of the Polish officers at Katyn and the scale of the camp population under Stalin, many


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of the revelations during this time were damaging to major symbols in the metanarrative in the eyes of the populace, particularly for many of the intelligentsia (a group with a crucial part to play in the maintenance and transmission of the metanarrative and for many of whom questions like Katyn and the camp population were very important) the revelations were highly erosive of commitment to the metanarrative. The strength of the metanarrative had been that it was largely unchallenged within the Soviet Union, and that therefore Soviet citizens had no alternative views upon which to base their own personal perceptions and little direct opportunity to conceive of alternatives. However, as such avenues opened up, even narrowly, people gained greater capacity to look outside the metanarrative.29 In this sense, the notion of communism was normalised, or made ordinary, thereby relegating the Soviet Union to one among the ranks of countries rather than being in any sense exceptional. The Soviet project lost much of its lustre and sense of exceptionalism, a development reflected in the growth of cynicism widely noted among the populace at this time. Although they continued to play their part in regime rituals as the system demanded, this was increasingly without engaging with the substance of those rituals, without the sense of commitment and belief that for many had been there before. The sense of people living their lives encapsulated within the terms of the metanarrative, something which was always more aspiration than reality, eroded as this no longer defined the limits of their consciousness quite as much as it had before.30 The erosion of commitment and the growth of incoherence in the metanarrative was fuelled by the post-Stalin decline in repression, leading ultimately to the surge of independent political activity that characterised late perestroika. Two elements of repression were relevant, the regime’s mobilisation of force, and the operation of systems of mutual surveillance. The former was exercised through the coercive instruments of the state and reached its peak in the purges of the late 1930s, while the latter played itself out through both the fear and the reality that some of one’s fellow citizens were informants. Both factors had the effect of discouraging the public articulation of counter-views to the metanarrative, thereby reinforcing the media monopoly enjoyed by the state and therefore the unchallenged dominance of the public sphere; this was what observers called the ‘immobilization of social imagination’, or the ‘futility of publicly expressing negative thoughts’.31 With the death of Stalin and Khrushchev’s attempt to move toward a more regularised system, some of the appearance of arbitrariness that had surrounded the activities of the security apparatus in the 1930s and 1940s disappeared. Although the KGB remained active under Brezhnev, especially with regard to the dissident movement, the post-war period saw some relaxation of state

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pressure on the population. But this does not mean that mutual surveillance within the population also declined. Indeed, the Khrushchevian emphasis on enhanced popular participation, by expanding the areas of public activity, may even have increased the dimensions of popular surveillance, although this may have been at least partly rolled back under Brezhnev. It had been this combination of fear of the state and distrust of fellow citizens that had been at the root of the much remarked upon difference between the public and private lives of Soviet citizens. As repression declined, the opportunity to speak out against the metanarrative expanded. Prior to 1986 this had been done semi-publicly by a very small segment of the population. It was only dissidents who were for any extended period both willing and able to express their views in an oppositional form, but even this group could not generate a coherent counternarrative to the Soviet metanarrative. However, the relaxation of pressure on society did encourage many more ordinary citizens to begin to think and, within limits, talk independently. When the restraints were lifted under perestroika, dissentient views burst forth where before they had been suppressed. The fact that the media monopoly was also breached at this time further encouraged a diversity of views and opinions. Thus if repression was important for restraining the fraying of the coherence of the metanarrative, once it was lifted there was greater scope not only for discussion of the inconsistencies in the metanarrative, but even for the emergence of counternarratives. People could highlight how the metanarrative was contradicted by their own experiences, they could show how it was inconsistent in itself, and they could even suggest alternative formulations. The relaxation of repression enabled people’s voices to be heard independently, thereby tolling the death knell of a metanarrative that had itself become internally incoherent. How did this increased incoherence of the metanarrative affect the subordinate political class? As among the general population, throughout the post-war period there were elements within this group who remained true believers in the communist ideal. However there were also others for whom the metanarrative lost its persuasive appeal. The best indication of this was the massive growth in corruption by officials during this period, but especially beginning in the mid-1960s when the centre operated a lax cadre supervision policy.32 Brezhnev’s ‘trust in cadres’ policy, which effectively meant that lower-level officials were left to perform their functions with little attempt at continuing higher-level supervision, meant that the scope for pursuing personal venal interests was expanded for those occupying official office. While the occupation of such posts had always involved privileges and access to scarce goods,33 this had generally been regulated and routinised. However, from the 1960s the limits that had


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formerly applied (and the discretion with which much of this had been pursued) seemed to fall away as increasing numbers of officials sought to use their positions for personal gain. What exacerbated this was the economic difficulties that began at this time, thereby setting up the situation of official plenitude beside general increasing economic scarcity. This sort of activity clearly contradicted the image of the official contained in the metanarrative (selflessly serving the cause of communist construction) and ran directly counter to the main emphases of development in that metanarrative; the illegal enrichment of officials was clearly not part of the image of communism at the heart of the metanarrative, even when communism was conceived in terms of material plenty. This was particularly the case in the 1980s when many officials, often with encouragement from party authorities, branched out into commercial activities on their own behalf.34 Thus as the metanarrative became more diffuse and ragged in the post-Stalin years, it also seemed to be becoming less compelling for significant numbers of party and state officials. It is possible that a similar process was occurring within the central political elite, although evidence of this is more difficult to obtain. Certainly in their public statements prior to the perestroika period, Soviet leaders continued to use the argot and phraseology of the metanarrative. This began to change during the second half of the perestroika period as some of the terminology began to take on a different meaning and some of the established symbols, like communism, began to disappear from speech. The adoption of a social democratic programme at the end of the Soviet period is clear evidence of how far many of the elite had moved. Such a shift also appears to have occurred in their less public interchanges, as the established metanarrative structured their discussions less and less.35 The way elite conflict unrolled during this period, and the process of radicalisation among those seeking change, is dramatic testimony to the way in which they were moving to a position of rejecting the metanarrative and seeking elsewhere for inspiration. But similarly the conflict demonstrated the presence of a significant section of the elite that remained committed to the metanarrative and its message. Those who opposed Gorbachev and his supporters in the changes they sought to introduce generally did so on the basis of an avowed commitment to the metanarrative and the system which it represented. While certainly over time, even among those who retained their commitment to the metanarrative, many meanings within that metanarrative underwent change, there was a core of elite members who retained their belief in and commitment to the Soviet system and what it stood for right until the end. Nevertheless it is clear that among the elite, as in both the general populace and the subordinate political class, there was a significant group for whom the metanarrative lost its appeal. And given that

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the metanarrative had relied for its development on a reflexive process, the rupturing of that mechanism through the erosion of belief in any of the three main constituencies would have seriously damaged the capacity of the metanarrative to remain dominant in society. The erosion of commitment to the metanarrative in this way36 was a crucial development in the delegitimation and ultimate collapse of the USSR. Central to the creation of the Soviet system had been the drive to transform Soviet citizens, to make them into the ‘new Soviet man’ who was to differ fundamentally from the type of people who had gone before. The metanarrative was important in this process, both providing a programme whereby the system could steer itself and a culture within which citizens were to become embedded. The attempt to transform people in this way, which involved the replacement of their world view by that contained in the metanarrative, was a major means whereby the regime exercised power. The metanarrative, by projecting a world view that the citizenry were to adopt as their own and internalise, was a principal weapon for the consolidation of the regime. Accordingly when that metanarrative could no longer convey a coherent set of symbols and images, its ability to act as an effective weapon of regime power was significantly affected. While the economic slowdown undoubtedly propelled the country in the direction of crisis, the decay of the metanarrative and its appeal was a crucial factor in delegitimating the regime and thereby making for its collapse. As the chief vehicle of ideocratic legitimation of the system, the loss of authority on the part of the metanarrative had significant implications for the regime’s general legitimation programme. As an ideocratic regime, it was critical for Soviet authorities to be able to articulate the regime’s values for its community. When the regime ceased being able to do this, its capacity to continue to maintain itself in power was severely impaired. This inability to project its values in a way that would make its people accept them was because of a change in the post-Stalin balance between what Yurchak calls37 the performative meaning of ritual and speech (what is important is the action, not the meaning behind it) and the constative meaning of ritual and speech (meaning people were involved because they understood and accepted the substance of the ritual/speech), with the latter becoming much more important than the former, and the reworking of the constative meaning by Gorbachev and those around him.38 The problem for Gorbachev was that he could not generate a new metanarrative which could rally widespread support among either the subordinate political class or the population at large before supporters of the old metanarrative moved against him in August 1991. The decay of the established metanarrative not only undercut the attempt at ideocratic legitimation, it also undermined the notion of


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teleological legitimation. The claim for legitimacy in terms of the achievement of the teleological goal of communism, a claim that had greater currency for members of the subordinate political class than for the population as a whole because this was the rationale for the role they played in society, was difficult to sustain once the timetable for its achievement had been passed. Indeed, this was part of the whole process of decay of the metanarrative itself. Furthermore, because this goal had ultimately been expressed more in terms of material plenty, the failure to achieve that goal, associated with the economic difficulties that began at the end of the 1960s, meant that any attempt to claim legitimacy on a social eudaemonic basis was bound to fail.39 This would have undercut any attempt to claim legitimacy on the basis of regime performance. The prospects for any attempt to seek to maintain a sense of regime legitimacy based on the appeal of charismatic authority within the metanarrative had been undercut by destalinisation and the inability of the party to don the charismatic mantle in the eyes of either populace or officials. The only way charisma could have functioned to legitimate rule was for a figure coming from outside the metanarrative, but this would have meant by definition the replacement of the Soviet system as it stood. Nationalist legitimation did appear a possible strategy in the eyes of some officials, but this could not occur on a pan-Soviet basis. By part way through the perestroika period, the myth of the multinational union was already fraying, making the notion of Soviet nationalism an oxymoron for large parts of the Soviet people. But a reliance on Russian nationalism, which was what some advocated, was equally impossible for that majority of the populace who were not Russians. Democratic legitimation also did not seem to be a viable basis for regime legitimation given that the reworking of the symbol of democracy within the metanarrative had led to a practical situation in which significant parts of the Soviet populace rejected the idea of the continuation of the USSR. Although in March 1991 a majority of Soviet citizens expressed their support for the continuation of the USSR,40 strategically located groups in some of the republics did not. In any event, elites in the fifteen republics were not willing to place decision-making power in the hands of the electorate, thereby undermining any chance of union-wide democratic legitimation. Furthermore a real shift in a democratic direction would have destroyed the central power structure of the traditional Soviet system. And the final possible mode of legitimation, legal-rational legitimation, was impossible at least in the short term because of the way the system itself seemed unable to guarantee the sorts of processes that could evoke widespread support because of their overly ritualistic tenor.

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All of this does not mean that the decay of the metanarrative was the single factor which brought the Soviet Union down, but it does mean that that decay was a central element in the collapse of the regime. The changes made to the myths of which the metanarrative consisted, and the increasingly ambiguous and contradictory nature of the symbols which comprised those myths had, by the time the regime fell, destroyed any semblance of coherence the metanarrative may have had. In the short term this may not have mattered, had a section of the central political elite not sought to bring substantial change to the system and thereby exacerbated the problems of the metanarrative. But once the elite was divided and the metanarrative became an arena for that conflict, the nature of the changes sought by Gorbachev and those around him were always likely to lead to the possible collapse of the system because, unlike the victors in earlier bouts of Soviet elite conflict in the 1920s, early 1930s and mid1950s, they sought changes which involved political mobilisation from outside party ranks. Under these conditions, the metanarrative was bound to be found wanting unless it was able to be reformed far more radically and quickly than proved possible. The growing incoherence of the metanarrative was the logical precursor to the collapse of the regime.

Notes

1 IDEOLOGY, METANARRATIVE AND MYTH 1. This follows the work of Foucault. See in particular Foucault (History); Foucault (Discipline): and Foucault (Power/Knowledge). 2. In particular, see Kotkin (Magnetic) and Kotkin (‘The State’). For another use of the term civilisation, see Sinyavsky. 3. See the excellent discussion in Hedin. 4. For a stimulating study of identity which is consistent with this, see Fitzpatrick (Tear Off), esp. chs. 1–4. Also Kotkin (Magnetic). 5. Kertzer (Politics), p. 16. 6. Malinowski, pp. 100–1. 7. Edelman (Politics), p. 14. 8. Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986), p. 20, cited in Kertzer (Politics), p. 17. 9. Edelman (Politics), p. 2. 10. On this, including the way the Soviet ‘tovarishch’ differed from its pre-Soviet form, see Stites, pp. 133–5. For a list of changes, see Gorham, pp. 24–6. 11. For the development of this language as the dominant mode of discourse, see Gorham, and Smith (Language). 12. For a discussion of the infrastructure of this, see Brooks (Thank You), ch. 1. 13. Distinguishing between what comprises part of the metanarrative and what does not must inevitably be a matter of judgement. However, one would expect that the principal political statements emanating from the regime’s leading circles would encapsulate the main themes of the metanarrative. This is why most linguistic evidence for the metanarrative has been taken from official decisions and leaders’ speeches. 14. One way of getting some sense of this is to look at the slogans that were issued annually for regime feast days, especially 1 May, although this is not comprehensive. For one study of pre-war slogans, see Lasswell et al., ch. 10. 15. This does of course mean that there is an element of arbitrariness in what has been included and what not. The main criterion is: what is essential to the understanding of the regime and its trajectory? 16. White (Bolshevik), p. 18. 17. Bonnell, p. 5. 18. For the organisational moves underpinning this, see “O perestroika literaturnokhudozhestvennykh organizatsii”, KPSS v rez., vol. 5, pp. 407–8. 19. Kertzer (Politics), p. 123. Also see Edelman (Symbolic), p. 17 and Lane, p. 11.

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Notes to pages 15–29

20. According to Moore and Myerhoff, p. 17, it may be that ‘social reality and social relationships are endlessly stated and restated in allegedly empty ritual behaviors, which when viewed analytically are found to convey a wealth of social agreements essential for ongoing interactions.’ 21. Kertzer (Ritual), p. 1. For good introductions, see Bell, and Muir, Introduction. 22. For example, see Bourdieu, pp. 105–6, and Foucault (Power/Knowledge). 23. See Hoare and Smith, and Smith (Language). 24. Scott (Seeing), esp. Parts 1 and 2. 25. Scott (Seeing), ch. 2. 26. For an earlier argument about the structuring of activity in this way, see Elias. 27. Lotman and Uspenskij, p. 28. 28. For example, Ulam, ch. 2. 29. For one study which shows how individuals helped to shape the culture through their actions, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Becoming Soviet’, Fitzpatrick (Tear Off), pp. 3–26. 30. See Kenez. 31. For examples of official performance in this regard during the discussion of the 1936 Constitution, see Petrone, pp. 193–8. 32. For a study of the way in which symbols may mount an implicit appeal by ostensibly saying one thing while surreptitiously referring to something else, see Mendelberg. This is a study of the way electoral appeals on the basis of law and order in many US elections of the twentieth century also triggered racial prejudice by casting those appeals in terms of the overwhelming depiction of blacks as criminals or ne’er-do-wells. Welfare has been another issue in which this has been common. It is often referred to as ‘dog whistling’. 33. See Scott (Domination) and (Weapons). 34. This builds mainly on Holmes, ch. 1 and Gill (‘Changing’). 35. This is where the argument that communist societies sought legitimation through their ideology belongs, but it provides for much broader arguments about the sharing of values between regime and populace. 36. For a discussion of this, see Rigby (‘A Conceptual’), pp. 19–21. 37. On this see the classic Weber, vol. 2, ch. xiv. 38. For a study of this in the Soviet case, see Brudny, ch. 1. 39. For a discussion of this, although the term eudaemonic is used rather than performance, see Holmes, pp. 15–16. 40. This is, of course, the fundamental principle of legitimation in liberal democratic societies. 41. See Poggi, pp. 101–4.

2 FORMATION OF THE METANARRATIVE, 1917–1929 1. Not to mention functional literacy; by 1920, 59.9 per cent of people over the age of eight reported that they could not read or write. Kenez, p. 73. 2. Gorham, and Kenez, pp. 255–6. On problems of standardisation and projection of language, see Smith (Language). 3. Rigby (Communist Party), p. 52. 4. For the development of state symbols, see Singaevskii. 5. Pravda, 14 April 1918. 6. Stites, pp. 85–7. 7. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, Marx and Engels, vol. 1, pp. 32–61.


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8. V. I. Lenin, ‘Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia’, Lenin (Pol’noe), vol. 33, pp. 1–120. 9. Karl Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, Fernbach, pp. 346–7. 10. When the means of production became common property, the term ‘communism’ could be used. Lenin (‘Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia’), p. 98. 11. Lenin (‘Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia’), p. 96. At the VII Congress, Lenin said that they were in the first stage of the transition to socialism and that the number of phases depended on European revolution. Sed’moi, p. 142. 12. Respectively, Izvestiia, 8, 9 and 10 November 1917. 13. The first two are in V. I. Lenin, ‘Sotsialisticheskoe otechestvo v opasnosti’, Lenin (Pol’noe), vol. 35, pp. 357–8, and the third in V. I. Lenin, ‘K istorii voprosa o neschastnom mire’, Lenin (Pol’noe), vol. 35, p. 244. 14. ‘Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic’, adopted 10 July 1918, Unger, pp. 24–40. 15. ‘Constitution (Fundamental Law) of The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’, ratified 31 January 1924, Unger, pp. 58–73. 16. Although the 1918 Constitution referred to a ‘Federated Soviet Republic’, the structure was not even formally a federal one. 17. ‘Po natsional’nomu voprosu’, Dvenadtsatyi, pp. 691–7. 18. ‘Programma rossiiskoi kommunisticheskoi partii (bol’shevikov)’, Vos’moi, pp. 390–411. 19. For its formal acknowledgement as a new type of state, see the VII Congress resolution on the writing of the Programme, ‘Ob izmenii nazvaniia partii i partiinoi programmy’, Sed’moi, pp. 176–7. 20. For the rejection of the established notion in socialist thought of a ‘people’s militia’, see the resolution from the VIII Congress of the party, ‘Po voennomu voprosu’, Vos’moi, pp. 412–23. 21. This was a major point of debate in the party. For Lenin’s continuing support for the use of tsarist era specialists, see Deviatyi, pp. 24–5. 22. For Lenin’s call for a ‘firm alliance’ with the middle peasantry on the part of the proletariat and semi-proletariat in the villages, see Vos’moi, pp. 346–54. For the Congress resolution, which talks about the need for a ‘powerful and lengthy agreement of the proletariat with the poor and middle peasantry’, see ‘Ob otnoshenii k srednemu krest’ianstvu’, Vos’moi, pp. 429–32; quotation on p. 429. 23. Aleksandr Apsit, ‘God proletarskoi diktatury’, Baburina (Soviet), no. 2. 24. Bonnell, p. 23. 25. On the Bolsheviks having to construct notions of class in the Russian context, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘The Bolshevik Invention of Class’, Fitzpatrick (Tear Off), pp. 29–50. 26. Unknown artist, ‘1917g – Oktiabr’ – 1920g’, Baburina (Soviet), no. 15. 27. Nikolai Kogout, ‘Oruzhiem my dobili vraga’ (1920), Baburina (Soviet), no. 19. 28. Bonnell, p. 27. 29. Vladimir Lebedev, ‘Rabotat’ nado – vintovka riadom’ (1920), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), p. 56, no. 58. 30. Dmitrii Moor, ‘1oe maia vserossiiskii subbotnik’ (1920), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 68. For an example of a woman possessing the paraphernalia of a blacksmith but not actually using it, see unknown artist, ‘Chto dala oktiabr’skaia revoliutsiia rabotnitse i krest’ianke’ (1920), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), p. 29. 31. Respectively A. Zelenskii, ‘Chtoby bol’she imet’ – nado bol’she proizvodit’, A. Radakov, ‘Negramotnyi – tot-zhe slepoi’, S. Davydov, ‘Prestupnik tot, kto rezhet molodniak’, and unknown artist, ‘Krest’ianin! Poka ty derzhizh’ v rukakh krasnuiu vintovku nikto ne posmeet derznut’ na tvoiu svobodu’, Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), nos. 66, 67 and 70, pp. 28–29, and Baburina (Soviet), no. 23.

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32. Although for a striking representation of a single female peasant, see the 1918 poster by Ignatii Nivinskii, ‘Zhenshchiny idite v kooperatsiiu’, Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), p. 26. 33. Aleksandr Apsit, ‘Grud’iu na zashchitu petrograda!’ (1919), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 52. 34. Unknown artist, ‘Tol’ko tesnyi nerazryvnyi soiuz rabochikh i krest’ian spaset Rossiiu ot razrukhi i goloda’ (1920), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 67. 35. Nikolai Kochergin, ‘1e maia 1920 god’, Baburina (Rossiia), p. 69. 36. Aleksandr Apsit, ‘Da zdravstvuet soiuz rabochikh i krest’ian’ (1920), Baburina (Soviet), no. 18. 37. Dmitrii Moor, ‘Ty zapisalsia dobrovol’tsem?’ (1920), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 49, p. 20. 38. Nikolai Kochergin, ‘Ochered’ za vrangelem!’ (1920), Baburina (Soviet), no. 17. 39. White (Bolshevik), pp. 36–7. 40. Echoes of classical themes are evident in the 1920 poster by Sergei Ivanov, ‘1e maia. Da zdravstvuet prazdnik trudiashchikhsia vsekh stran’, Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 63, p. 27. This shows a lithe woman wearing a long flowing gown with long blonde hair, floating above a crowd and casting roses on the crowd below. Bonnell, p. 73 attributes the form of this poster to the influence of Isadora Duncan who was visiting Russia at this time, but the woman’s dress and flowing hair is redolent of the way high-class women and goddesses were presented in classical art. Other classical symbols, like winged horses, chariots and altars also occasionally appeared at this time. For example, Vladimir Fidman, ‘Vtoraia godovshchina Krasnoi Armii’ (1920), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 230, p. 72. 41. Dmitrii Moor, ‘Smert’ mirovomu imperializmu’ (1919), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 59, p. 26. For the presence of biblical symbolism appearing in some posters, including the so-called ‘ten commandments of the proletarian’, see White (Bolshevik), pp. 37–8. 42. Unknown artist, ‘Za edinuiu rossiiu’ (1919), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 51. 43. Boris Zvorykin, ‘Bor’ba krasnogo rytsaria s temnoi siloiu’ (1919), White (Bolshevik), p. 35. 44. El Lissitzsky, ‘Krasnym klinom bei belykh’ (1920), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 28. 45. Viktor Deni, ‘Kazhdyi udar molota – udar po vragu’ (1920), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 31. 46. Viktor Deni, ‘Ili smert’ kapitalu. Ili smert’ pod piatoi kapitala!’ (1919), Baburina (Soviet), no. 4. 47. Viktor Deni, ‘Kapital’ (1920), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 64, p. 27. 48. Viktor Deni, ‘Liga natsii’ (1919), White (Bolshevik), no. 3.29, p. 59. 49. For a slightly different description, see Bonnell, pp. 189–90. 50. Unknown artist, ‘Bednota! Tekh kto podderzhivaet protianutyi k tebe kulak, zastav’ protianut’ nogi’ (1918?), Baburina (Soviet), no. 5. 51. Dmitrii Moor, ‘Vrangel’ eshche zhiv dobei ego bez poshchady’ (1920), Baburina (Soviet), no. 12. 52. Unknown artist, ‘Osteregaites’ men’shevikov i eserov’ (1920), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 65, p. 27. 53. Petr Kiselis, ‘Belogvardeiskii khishchnik terzaet telo rabochikh i krest’ian’ (1920), White (Bolshevik), no. 5.13, p. 96. 54. Viktor Deni, ‘Kapital’ (1920), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 64, p. 27. 55. Viktor Deni, ‘Antanta’ (1919), Bonnell, fig. 5.2. 56. Dmitrii Moor, ‘Sovetskaia repka’, White (Bolshevik), no. 3.8, p. 46. 57. Nikolai Kochergin, ‘Kapital i Ko’, Bonnell, fig. 5.6. 58. Given that most of these posters were produced in independent workshops where the artists worked virtually under licence, they also represent a form of regime co-optation of part of the creative intelligentsia into the creation of the regime’s foundation myth.


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59. In his ‘April Theses’, Lenin saw the Russian as the first in a wave of European revolutions to emanate from the war. V. I. Lenin, ‘Zadachi proletariata v nashei revoliutsii. (Proekt platformy proletarskoi partii)’, Lenin (Pol’noe), vol. 31, pp. 149–86. 60. For his first explicit rejection of revolutionary war, see ‘Tezisy po voprosu o nemedlennom zakliuchenii separatnogo i anneksionistskogo mira’, Lenin (Pol’noe), vol. 35, pp. 243–52. 61. ‘Sotsialisticheskoe otechestvo v opasnosti’, Lenin (Pol’noe), vol. 35, p. 357. 62. Sed’moi, pp. 10–16 and 142–4. 63. See Bukharin’s speech to the VII Congress, Sed’moi, pp. 24–31; for Trotsky, see p. 65. 64. Desiatyi, pp. 35–8 and 404. 65. J. V. Stalin, ‘Oktiabrskaia revoliutsiia i taktika russkikh kommunistov’, Stalin (Voprosy), pp. 107–14. 66. The most concise outline of Left Communist views appeared in the Moscow-based journal Kommunist, 20 April 1918. For a fuller statement, issued as a commentary on the 1919 party Programme and written by two prominent Left Communists, see Bukharin and Preobrazhensky. 67. See the comments by Sapronov and Osinsky at the IX Congress. Deviatyi, pp. 51–3 and 115–18. For Trotsky’s outline of his position, see pp. 91–114. 68. For the views of the Workers’ Opposition, see Kollontai, and the draft resolution proposed by Shliapnikov at the Tenth Congress of the party, ‘Organizatsiia narodnogo khoziaistva i zadachi soiuzov’, Desiatyi, pp. 819–23. 69. Actually, bureaucratism acquired two meanings; as well as the absence of democracy represented by the separation of decision-makers from the masses, it could also mean red tape and inefficiency. It is the latter meaning that the leadership often used, especially when under attack, while the opposition tended to emphasise the former. Priestland, pp. 98–100. 70. Vos’moi, pp. 61–2. 71. Vos’moi, pp. 69–70, 164, 170, 188, 194–7, 199–200 and 212. For suggested remedies to bureaucratism, see the Programme, Vos’moi, p. 397. 72. ‘Ob ocherednykh zadachakh partiinogo stroitel’stva’, Deviataia, p. 280. The establishment of the Control Commission was also seen as a weapon against bureaucratism. ‘Ob ocherednykh zadachakh partiinogo stroitel’stva’, Deviataia, p. 281 and ‘O kontrol’nykh kommissiiakh’, Desiatyi, p. 577. 73. Deviataia, pp. 280–1. 74. For the explicit link between privilege and bureaucracy, see Maksimovsky’s comments at the Tenth Congress. Desiatyi, p. 250. 75. Desiatyi, p. 59. 76. Desiatyi, pp. 2–3 and p. 118. 77. ‘Ob edinstve partii’, Desiatyi, pp. 571–3. 78. Desiatyi, p. 152. For Bukharin drawing an explicit link between a declassed working class and the need for proletarian dictatorship, see Desiatyi, p. 220. 79. A single-party government existed following the withdrawal of the Left SRs from the government in the wake of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Leading oppositionist parties, the Mensheviks, SRs and Kadets, had all been subjected to ‘administrative measures’ involving the arrest of party leaders, the closure of their presses, and the effective break-up of the parties in 1918. They were finally suppressed in 1921–2. 80. Desiatyi, pp. 584–5. 81. V. I. Lenin, ‘Doklad vserossiiskogo tsentral’nogo ispolnitel’nogo komiteta i soveta narodnykh komissarov o vneshnei i vnutrennei politike ee dekabria’, Lenin (Pol’noe), vol. 42, p. 159.

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82. Odinnadtsatyi, pp. 23–5. For Trotsky’s view that it was to be temporary until new, centralised and planned methods of distribution of the productive forces and means to the different branches of the economy were in place, see Dvenadtsatyi, p. 310. 83. Desiatyi, pp. 403–15 and 437–44. 84. This was Lenin’s so-called ‘Testament’. Lenin (Pol’noe), vol. 45, pp. 363–406. 85. On Bukharin, see Cohen, ch. v. 86. ‘O partstroitel’stve’, KPSS v rez., vol. 3, pp. 146–7. 87. ‘Ob itogakh diskussii i o melkoburzhuaznom uklone v partii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 3, pp. 153–4. 88. ‘O prieme rabochikh ot stanka v partii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 3, pp. 184–5. 89. Trinadtsatyi, p. 235. 90. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XIV s’ezd, p. 963. 91. ‘O zadachakh partii v dele vydvizheniia rabochikh i krest’ian v gosapparat’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 157–60. 92. Vos’maia, pp. 21–2. By 1921 Lenin was saying that the peasants needed to help the town by giving wood on credit to the state. At the same time, he argued for the replacement of grain requisitioning by a tax in kind. Desiatyi, pp. 35–8 and 403–15. 93. For a complaint about the growth of a petty bourgeois mood in the party, see Kosior’s comments at the Eleventh Congress. Odinnadtsatyi, p. 128. 94. Odinnadtsatyi, p. 545. 95. For the development of this, compare the provisions in the party Rules of 1919, 1922, 1925 and 1934. Respectively, KPSS v rez., vol. 2, pp. 201–9 and 573–83; vol. 3, pp. 474–89 and vol. 6, pp. 133–45. 96. Vos’moi, pp. 86 and 199–200. For a call for the increased proletarianisation of the party, along with the expulsion from it of bourgeois elements, see Desiatyi, pp. 236–41. 97. ‘O sindikalistskom i anarkhistskom uklone v nashei partii’, Desiatyi, pp. 574–6. 98. Dvenadtsatyi, pp. 115–16. 99. ‘Ob ekonomicheskoi politike’, KPSS v rez., vol. 2, p. 420. 100. ‘Ocherednye zadachi partii v sviazi s vosstanovlenniem khoziaistva’, KPSS v rez., vol. 2, p. 466. 101. ‘Ocherednye zadachi partii v sviazi s vosstanovleniem khoziaistva’, KPSS v rez., vol. 2, p. 472. 102. ‘O rabote RKP v derevne’, Dvenadtsatyi, p. 717. 103. Trinadtsatyi, pp. 146–55 (Trotsky). 104. Trinadtsatyi, p. 233 (Stalin) and XIV s’ezd, pp. 540–1 (Kuibyshev). 105. ‘Ob ochistke partii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 2, pp. 438–43. On peasants flooding into the party as a partial cause of the chistka, see Odinnadtsatyi, pp. 385–8. 106. Odinnadtsatyi, pp. 102–5, 167–8, 434–5, 463–4 and 647. For the relevant part of the resolution, see ‘Ob ukreplenii i novykh zadachakh partii’, Odinnadtsatyi, pp. 545–6. 107. Dvenadtsatyi, pp. 37–45. For the relevant part of the resolution, ‘Po otchetu ts.k. RKP’, Dvenadtsatyi, p. 671. 108. Dvenadtsatyi, pp. 118, 150–1, 154, 431–3. For the resolution, ‘Po otchetu ts.k. RKP’, Dvenadtsatyi, p. 673. 109. Trinadtsatyi, pp. 88, 100, 601 and 604; i.e. who will be victorious over whom? 110. Trinadtsatyi, pp. 388 and 437. 111. Trinadtsatyi, p. 452. 112. ‘O rabote partii sredi derevenskoi bednoty’, KPSS v rez., vol. 3, pp. 413–17. 113. XIV s’ezd, pp. 46–8. For Zinoviev’s claim that he did not forget about the middle peasants as Stalin charged and his view of this question, see XIV s’ezd, pp. 110–27. The Congress resolution noted that although the socialist part of the economy was growing,


114. 115. 116.

117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133.

134. 135. 136. 137. 138.

139. 140. 141. 142.

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there were contradictions in this growth in the form of the growth of private capital in both urban and rural areas. XIV s’ezd, pp. 958–9. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XIV s’ezd, p. 960. Compare Stalin’s speech with those of Zinoviev and Kamenev. Respectively, XIV s’ezd, pp. 8–55, 97–129 and 244–75. At the XIV Congress Zinoviev argued that a single country was sufficient for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, but for the final construction of socialism, revolution in other countries was necessary. XIV s’ezd, p. 429. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XIV s’ezd, p. 956. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XIV s’ezd, p. 960. ‘O khoziaistvennom polozhenii strany i zadachakh partii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 70 and 71. ‘Ob itogakh sovkhoznogo i kolkhoznogo stroitel’stva’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 120–33. ‘O rabote v derevne’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 232–49. Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 1, pp. 66–70. Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 2, pp. 1207 and 1233. Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 2, pp. 1419–21 and ‘O rabote v derevne’, Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 2, p. 1459. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 2, pp. 1431–3. ‘O direktivakh po sostavleniiu piatiletnego plana narodnogo khoziaistva’, Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 2, pp. 1441–54, quotation on p. 1444. ‘O putiakh pod’ema sel’skogo khoziaistva i nalogovom oblegchenii seredniaka’, Shestnadtsataia, p. 635. ‘O khlebozagotovkakh tekushchego goda i ob organizatsii khlebozagotovitel’noi kampanii na 1928/29 god’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 315–23, esp. p. 316. ‘Politika khlebozagotovok v sviazi s obshchim khoziaistvennym polozheniem’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, p. 349. ‘O kontrol’nykh tsifrakh narodnogo khoziaistva na 1928/29 god’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 368–83. ‘O verbovke rabochikh i regulirovanii rosta partii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 387–94. ‘Po vnutripartiinym delam’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 429–36. ‘Ob itogakh i blizhaishchikh zadachakh bor’by s biurokratizmom’, Shestnadtsataia, p. 642. For Stalin’s 1928 charge that lower-level officials failed to see the class nature of the party’s policy and sought to conciliate the kulaks, see J. V. Stalin, ‘First Results of the Procurement Campaign and the Further Tasks of the Party’, Stalin (Works), vol. 11, pp. 15–16. ‘O chistke i proverke chlenov i kandidatov VKP(b)’, Shestnadtsataia, p. 659. ‘O piatiletnem plane razvitiia narodnogo khoziaistva’, Shestnadtsataia, p. 626. ‘O podniatii trudovoi distsipliny’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 413–19. ‘O kul’turno-prosvetitel’noi rabote profsoiuzov’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 424–8. For Lenin’s view that a lack of culture among communists enabled bourgeois officials to take the upper hand, see Odinnadtsatyi, pp. 29–38. On communists losing their sense of party feeling when they came into contact with the spetsy, see Shkiriatov’s comments at the Twelfth Congress, Dvenadtsatyi, pp. 244–5. ‘Shakhtinskoe delo i prakticheskie zadachi v dele bor’by s nedostatkami khoziaistvennogo stroitel’stva’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 324–33. Odinnadtsatyi, pp. 624–9. ‘Ob antisovetskikh partiiakh i techeniiakh’, KPSS v rez., vol. 2, p. 590. Also ‘Ob itogakh perevyborov sovetov’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, p. 40. Dvenadtsatyi, pp. 11–27 and 385–7. The speaker was Krasin. At the Tenth Congress there had been official support for the granting of concessions to Western capitalism. See Lenin’s comments at the Tenth Congress, Desiatyi, pp. 443 and 551. For the

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143.

144. 145.

146. 147. 148.

149. 150. 151. 152.

153. 154. 155. 156.

157. 158. 159. 160. 161.

162.

Notes to pages 52–5 Congress resolution, ‘Sovetskaia respublika v kapitalisticheskom okruzhenie’, Desiatyi, pp. 610–12. For example, see the cartoon by Dmitrii Moor which sought to link external opposition in the persons of Mussolini, Poincaré and Curzon with the Mensheviks, Pravda, 13 April 1923. Trinadtsatyi, pp. 62–7. ‘Tezisy o zadachakh kominterna i RKP(b) v sviazi s rasshirennym plenumom IKKI, priniatye XIV konferentsiei RKP(b)’, KPSS v rez., vol. 3, pp. 385–94. Here it was declared that although an ‘immediate revolutionary situation in Europe’ did not exist because of the stabilisation of capitalism, ‘the revolutionary situation generally undoubtedly remains’, p. 387. For Stalin’s view that the capitalist stabilisation was unstable, see his report to the Fourteenth Congress, XIV s’ezd, pp. 9–12. Trinadtsatyi, pp. 39–41, 49, 60 and 307. Also ‘Otchet TsK RKP(b)’, pp. 783–8. ‘O partiinom stroitel’stve’, KPSS v rez., vol. 3, p. 353. XIV s’ezd, p. 54. Similarly, later in the Congress, Antipov remarked that Kamenev had said that we cannot build socialism without the aid of the West European proletariat, but we can and will build socialism here. XIV s’ezd, p. 241. In his concluding remarks, Zinoviev said that the bourgeoisie could be overthrown in a single country, but that for the final construction of socialism, the strength of a single country, especially a peasant country like Russia, was insufficient. The proletariat of a number of leading states is necessary for this, hence the need to support revolution in other countries. He also cited Stalin to this effect, XIV s’ezd, p. 429. The Congress resolution cited Lenin to the effect that the country possessed ‘all that is necessary for the construction of full socialist society’, and that the party must struggle for the victory of socialism in the USSR. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XIV s’ezd, p. 958. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XIV s’ezd, p. 957. ‘O mezhdunarodnom polozhenii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 175–87, esp. p. 175. See Meyer, pp. 1–25. This general view was also enunciated by Stalin in his address to the XV Congress in December 1927. Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 1, pp. 43–53. Also ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 2, pp. 1429–31. J. V. Stalin, ‘Foundations of Leninism’, Stalin (Works), vol. 6, p. 196. Palmer (Dictatorship). On the weakness of the notion of opposition at this time, see Halfin, pp. 52–7. Trinadtsatyi, p. 235. This association of the opposition with the bourgeoisie and the claim that the former were the objective agents of the latter was a common claim. For example, Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 1, pp. 347–54. Trinadtsatyi, p. 266. At the XIII Congress, Zinoviev had labelled critics of the party line as ‘objectively Menshevik’ in nature. Dvenadtsatyi, pp. 52–3. ‘O vnutripartiinoi demokratii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 3, p. 142. ‘O partstroitel’stve’, KPSS v rez., vol. 3, p. 147. Zinoviev, December 1923, cited in Daniels, p. 221. For Lenin and class consciousness as central rather than any talk of ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’, see Deviatyi, pp. 21–2. For Bukharin and democratism not being a universal principle, see Desiatyi, p. 222. Desiatyi, pp. 2–3 and 118.


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163. Dvenadtsatyi, p. 200. For his later outline of the conditions under which discussion was acceptable, see Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 1, pp. 80–1. 164. Trinadtsatyi, pp. 106–9 and ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, Trinadtsatyi, p. 599. For the apotheosis of unity given by Trotsky, see Trinadtsatyi, pp. 158–9. 165. ‘O vystuplenii t. Trotskogo’, KPSS v rez., vol. 3, pp. 323–31. 166. ‘Ob itogakh diskussi i o melkoburzhuaznom uklone v partii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 3, pp. 152–60. Henceforth in the 1920s the discussion of opposition was almost always couched in terms of deviations. For Stalin’s definition of a deviation, see XIV s’ezd, p. 46. 167. On the use of these, including earlier use of ‘path’, see Brooks (Thank You), pp. 48–51. The opposition also accused the party leadership of deviating from Leninism. 168. L. Kamenev, ‘Leninizm ili Trotskizm?’ and I. Stalin, ‘Trotskizm ili Leninizm?’, Zinoviev et al., pp. 3–70 and 71–95. 169. XIV s’ezd, p. 292 (Andreev). 170. XIV s’ezd, p. 418 (Rykov). The Congress resolution declared ‘The leading role of the party can be fully ensured only through the absolute unity of will and cohesion of party ranks, the maintenance and strengthening of Bolshevik proletarian discipline in the party.’ ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XIV s’ezd, p. 963. 171. XIV s’ezd, pp. 713–14 (Zinoviev) and 718–19 (Bakaev). 172. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XIV s’ezd, p. 963. For a slightly different view, see Stalin’s comments at the Fifteenth Congress. Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 1, p. 76. 173. ‘Ob itogakh perevyborov sovetov’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4. p. 41. 174. ‘Ob oppositsionnom bloke v VKP(b)’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 105–16. For a similar setting out of the issues, see Stalin’s comments to the Fifteenth Congress, Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 1, pp. 82–7. 175. The quotation is attributed to Trotsky’s ‘Peace programme’ written in 1922. 176. ‘Declaration of the Eighty Four’, May 1927, cited in Daniels, p. 284. 177. Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 2, p. 1390. Although some did say in late 1927 that the opposition were counter-revolutionaries. Halfin, p. 229. 178. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 2, p. 1434. Also ‘Ob oppositsii’, Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 2, pp. 1468–70. 179. ‘Po vnutripartiinym delam’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, p. 434. 180. ‘O piatiletnim plane razvitiia narodnogo khoziaistvo’, Shestnadtsataia, p. 627. 181. This conception of being part of the elect had cultural resonance with traditions of collectivism and sobornost’. On sobornost’, see Sergeyev and Biryukov, pp. 32–4. On collectivism, see Kharkhordin, and on dualism in the culture, Lotman and Uspenskij. 182. Dvenadtsatyi, pp. 61–2, and J. V. Stalin, ‘Foundations of Leninism’, Stalin (Problems), pp. 92–4. 183. ‘Ob ocherednykh zadachakh partiinogo stroitel’stva’, Deviataia, p. 279, and ‘O edinstve partii’, Desiatyi, p. 572. 184. Stalin’s comments and ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 1, p. 81 and vol. 2, p. 1434. Self-criticism was seen as central to the party elections occurring at the end of 1928. See Izvestiia tsentral’nogo komiteta rossiiskoi kommunisticheskoi partii (bol’shevikov) 31 (235), 21 October 1928, pp. 3–5; 37–8 (258–9), 31 December 1928, p. 11; 2–3 (261–2), 31 January 1929, p. 6; 10 (269), 12 April 1929, pp. 5–6; 17–18 (276–7), 29 June 1929, p. 2. 185. ‘O samokritike’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 338–42. 186. ‘Po vnutripartiinym delam’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 429–36. 187. ‘O partiino-prosvetitel’noi rabote v gorodakh sredi rabochikh s tochki zreniia ee ideinogo soderzhaniia’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, p. 60.

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188. For the Bolsheviks’ echoes of the Orthodox Church’s use of the term ‘chistka’ to signify cleansing the body from malignant elements, see Kharkhordin, pp. 134–40. 189. Mikhail Cheremnykh, ‘Pobeda revoliutsii v sotrudnichestve rabochikh i krest’ian’ (1925), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 82, where the worker is shown as a factory worker holding a shifting spanner while he shakes hands with a peasant. 190. Boris Kustodiev, ‘Leningradskoe obshchestvo smychki goroda i derevnei’ (1925), Baburina (Soviet), p. 47. 191. Maksim Ushakov, ‘Krest’ianka, ukrepliai soiuz rabochikh i krest’ian – on sdelaet SSSR nepobedimym’ (1925), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 83. For a poster from 1924 showing a female worker giving books to a female peasant, thereby symbolising both the independent role of women and the proletarian-peasant smychka, see Luka Emel’ianov, ‘Znanie i trud novyi byt nam dadut’ (1924), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), no. 32. 192. Bonnell, pp. 73 and 197. 193. Abram Starchevskii, ‘10 let oktiabria’ (1927), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 88. 194. Bonnell, p. 28. 195. Adolf Strakhov-Braslavskii, ‘Raskreposhennaia zhenshchina – stroi sotsializm!’ (1926), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 41. 196. Raev Makarychev, ‘Kazhdaia kukharka dolzhna nauchit’sia upravliat’ gosudarstvom, Lenin’ (1925), Barkhatova, no. 15, p. 32. 197. Adolf Strakhov-Braslvskii, ‘Raskreposhennaia zhenshchina – stroi sotsializm!’ (1926), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 41. 198. Vasilii Baiuskin, ‘Rezinotrest Moskva. Galoshi s markoi treugol’nik’ (1925), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), no. 39. 199. Bonnell, pp. 207–9. 200. Mikhail Cheremnykh, ‘Novye den’gi, stoiashchie tverdo, ukrepliat khoziaistvo derevni i goroda’ (1924), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 80, p. 31. 201. N. Valerianov, ‘Rabotnitsy i krest’ianki vse na vybory’ (1925), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), no. 42. 202. Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Maiakovsky, ‘Luchshikh sosok ne bylo i net’ (1923), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 170, p. 55. 203. Unknown artist, ‘Luchshe na D-V papirosy’ (1925), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 522, p. 166. 204. Vladimir Maiakovsky and Aleksandr Rodchenko, ‘Priezzhii s dach iz gorodov i sel’ (1923), Barkhatova, no. 3i, p. 47. 205. On the way, posters promoted state-produced commodities in preference to those produced by nepmen and therefore sought to create an association between the Soviet community and the availability of goods: see Cox, pp. 119–52. 206. Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), nos. 571, 573, and 575, pp. 182 and 183, and Barkhatova, nos. 5454–9, pp. 68–72. 207. Aleksandr Rodchenko, ‘Chitaite zhurnal Molodaia Gvardiia’ (1924), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 170, p. 55. 208. Aleksandr Mogilevskii, ‘Esli knig chitat’ ne budesh’ skoro gramotu zabudesh’ (1925), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 42. 209. The same could be said for the advertising of Soviet films. For example, posters for the new film ‘Battleship Potemkin’, Aleksandr Rodchenko, ‘Bronenosets Potemkin 1905’ (1925), Barkhatova, no. 57, p. 70. 210. A. Soborova, ‘Materi ne podkidyvaite detei!’ (1925), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 450, p. 145. 211. Unknown artist, ‘K bor’be za rabochee delo BUD’ GOTOV’ (1926), Barkhatova, no. 22, p. 39.


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212. V. Izenberg, ‘Iunye lenintsy – deti Il’icha’ (1924), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 454, p. 145. 213. Unknown artist, ‘Oktiabr’skaia revoliutsiia – most k svetlomu budushchemu’, Baburina (Rossiia), p. 90. 214. For poster no. 14 in this series, ‘Istoriia VKP(b)’, see Barkhatova, no. 14, p. 31. 215. Unknown artist, ‘Da zdravstvuet mezhdunarodnyi den’ rabotnits 8 marta’ (1926), Barkhatova, no. 16, p. 33. 216. P. Shukmin, ‘Pod znamenem VKP(b) po puti lenina idem k sotsializmu’ (1927), Baburina (Soviet), no. 48. 217. Nikolai Kotov, ‘Stroitel’stvo sotsializma’ (1927), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 89. 218. Aleksandr Samokhvalov, ‘Sovety i elektrofikatsiia est’ osnova novogo mira’ (1924), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 403, p. 130. 219. Konstantin Iuon, ‘Pri uslovii polnogo kooperirovaniia my by uzhe stoiali obeimi nogami na sotsialisticheskoi pochve’ (1927), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 75, p. 30. 220. For Engels on the abolition of the division between town and country, see Engels, p. 281. 221. This is the description used in the joint Sovnarkom-CC decision on the 1935 General Plan of Moscow, but it adequately encapsulates the view present from the earliest years of the Soviet period. ‘O general’nom plane rekonstruktsii goroda Moskvy’, KPSS v rez., vol. 6, 241. 222. Letter to Lunacharsky, in Bowlt, p. 185. 223. ‘Dekret o pamiatnikakh respubliki’, Dekrety II, pp. 95–6. This decree called for monuments in honour of the tsar to be pulled down and set in train work to produce monuments celebrating the great days of the Russian socialist revolution. The first models for these monuments were to be ready for judging by 1 May, by which time the city also had to be decorated. The decree also called for the replacement of emblems, street names and flags by those evocative of revolutionary, labouring Russia. According to Stites, p. 67, as late as August 1918 the removal of arms, portraits and crowns from official buildings was still not complete. 224. Fulop-Miller, p. 91. 225. Colton, pp. 107–8. 226. For the list see Izvestiia, 2 August 1918. Dekrety III, pp. 118–19. 227. Bowlt, pp. 186–7, Lodder, pp. 67–82 and Taylor (Art), pp. 56–63. 228. They were, in descending order, Marx, Engels, Liebnecht, Lasalle, Bebel, Campanella, Mel’e, Winstanley, More, St Simon, Val’ian, Fourier, Jaures, Proudhon, Bakunin, Chernyshevskii, Lavrov, Mikhailovskii and Plekhanov. This is an odd list, and it is not clear who Mel’e and Val’ian were. 229. Fulop-Miller, pp. 91–3. 230. Efremov, pp. 21–9, Colton, pp. 110–11 and 813 and Stites, p. 66. 231. Bursa, pp. 163–9. 232. It was removed in 1948 because it had fallen into disrepair. Bowlt, p. 189. 233. Abramov, and Tumarkin (Lenin), pp. 189–206. 234. Colton, pp. 105–7. 235. On this and the plan for ‘greater Moscow’, see Khan-Magomedov (Pioneers), pp. 272–3. 236. Colton, pp. 233–6. 237. Colton, pp. 238–46. 238. Cited in Kopp (Town), p. 46. 239. Cited in Berton, p. 199. More generally there were regime attempts to provide some protection to the legacy of the past. Stites, pp. 76–8.

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240. These were the Central State Restoration Workshops created by Sovnarkom in 1918, the Department for Museum Affairs and Protection of Landmarks in the Commissariat of Enlightenment, and the Commission on the Preservation of Landmarks of the Mossoviet. Colton, pp. 111–12. In the eight years following the revolution, 10,000 buildings of special interest were brought under state protection and restoration work carried out on 3,000 of them. Berton, p. 201. 241. N. Kupreianov, ‘Grazhdane khranite pamiatniki iskusstva’, Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), p. 23. 242. Papernyi, p. 14. 243. Kozlov, p. 21. 244. Khan-Magomedov (Pioneers), chs. 1 and 4–6. 245. Arkhitektura Moskvy, pp. 84–9, 108–11 and 120–1. 246. The general ideological predisposition in favour of communal as opposed to private living was also reflected in policy decisions. For example, see the 1919 Programme of the Party, ‘Programma’, Vos’moi, pp. 390–411. 247. There was an attempt to construct separate houses for families comprising separate cottages with gardens and picket fences in the Sokol’ housing estate in Krasnopresnenskii raion in 1923, but this mode of housing provision was soon abandoned as impractical. Berton, p. 209. 248. The term was first adopted at a conference of the Association of Contemporary Architects (OSA) in 1928. Bray, p. 86. 249. Kopp (Town), p. 115. 250. Such experiments took a number of forms: communal settlements where individual houses were associated with joint facilities in public buildings, an idea linked to the garden city notion, and communal buildings which included both private housing and communal facilities. For some of the experiments, see Khan-Magomedov (Pioneers), pp. 343–6. 251. Berton, p. 210. For an argument about the way the Narkomfin house was meant to encourage the development of new social structures and patterns of activity, see Buchli. 252. ‘Po voprosam propagandy, pechati i agitatsii’, Dvenadtsatyi, p. 707. 253. Khan-Magomedov (Pioneers), p. 483. 254. For a stimulating analysis along these lines, see Stites. 255. Geldern (Bolshevik), p. 8. 256. ‘Dekret o pamiatnikakh respubliki’, Dekrety II, pp. 95–6. 257. Tolstoy et al., p. 20. 258. For one description, see Tolstoy et al., p. 49. 259. For a description of that in Petrograd, see Stites, pp. 84–5. 260. For a contemporary description, see Izvestiia, 3 May 1918, cited in Tolstoy et al., pp. 49–50. 261. For the decision that this would be the day the revolution was celebrated, see the VtsIK decision of 16 September 1918. Dekrety III, p. 352. 262. Stites, p. 88. See the instructions reprinted in Tolstoy et al., pp. 55–6. 263. Stites, pp. 91–2. 264. As in May Day, there was no unity in the decoration of different parts of the city. For a list of places and artists from Petrograd at this time, see Tolstoy et al., pp. 69–70. 265. Lenin (Pol’noe), vol. 37, pp. 132–74. 266. Stites, p. 91. 267. The military was probably even more prominent in Petrograd, where the Neva was used as a stage upon which ships from the navy could conduct manoeuvres and act as a base for fireworks and lighting.


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268. It was very popular and was repeated some 250 times in the barracks, camps and squares across Petrograd over the following seven months. Geldern (Bolshevik), pp. 125–7. 269. Geldern (Bolshevik), pp. 127–8. 270. Tolstoy et al., p. 25, Geldern (Bolshevik), pp. 185–93 and Fulop-Miller, pp. 133–4. 271. Tolstoy et al., pls. 128–33. 272. The same point applies to the ‘mock trials’ that were staged from 1920. See Wood, pp. 235–48. 273. Stites, p. 99. Thereby reflecting a certain sense of moral superiority over civilian society. The May Day and October Revolution marches were basically similar in structure and decoration at this time. 274. Izvestiia, 4 May 1924. 275. In the 1929 May Day march, there were fifty-four vehicles. Tolstoy et al., pl. 173. 276. Stites, p. 100. 277. Pravda, 9 November 1922. 278. This period also witnessed attempts by the Komsomol to generate alternative activities to Christmas and Easter. See Lane, p. 130. 279. Kenez, p. 138 and Velikanova, pp. 184–5. Some of these were soon abandoned. See a list in Lane, p. 154. 280. Fulop-Miller, p. 194. 281. Examples cited by Fulop-Miller were Oktobrina, Konstitutsia, Revoliutsiia, Chervonets, Spartak, Tekstil, Rem (revolutionary electrification), Vladelina, Stag Plamennyi (banner of flame), Fevralina, Kommuna and Maina (May Day). For further examples, see Stites, pp. 111–12. 282. Lane, p. 68. 283. Fulop-Miller, p. 195. 284. Lunacharsky, p. 117. 285. Fulop-Miller, p. 196. 286. In 1917 at the VII Congress the report of the CC was given in two parts, the organisational by Sverdlov and the political by Lenin. Thereafter, a single report was delivered. 287. Odinnadtsatyi, p. 178. The Presidium’s recommendation to end the debate was also overturned on the floor (p. 186). 288. Gill (Origins), p. 141. 289. Only Trotsky at the XV Conference was able, through his rhetorical abilities, to overcome this. For Kamenev’s suggestion that this was organised, see XIV s’ezd, p. 244. However, because of the delegate selection process, explicit organisation was probably not necessary by this time. 290. XIV s’ezd, p. 288. 291. XIV s’ezd, p. 713, Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 2, p. 1398. 292. Indeed, no opposition supporter was even elected to the XV Congress as a full (voting) delegate. Daniels, p. 317. 293. Danilov et al. 294. XIV s’ezd, p. 242 and ‘Po vnutripartiinym delam’, KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 437–8. 295. Gill (Origins), p. 148. 296. At the VII Congress Lenin acknowledged that party members had the right to disagree with and criticise the CC and even to agitate within the party against its decisions. Sed’moi, pp. 221 and 269. 297. ‘O edinstve partii’ and ‘O sindikalistskom i anarkhistskom uklone v nashei partii’, Desiatyi, pp. 571–3 and 574–6. 298. ‘Ob oppozitsii’, Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 2, p. 1469. This was actually prefigured by Bukharin in 1921 when he said that what was needed was not mechanical but

296

299.

300. 301. 302. 303. 304. 305.

306. 307. 308.

309. 310. 311.

312. 313. 314.

315. 316. 317. 318.

319. 320. 321. 322. 323.

Notes to pages 78–82 ideological unity: ‘a single party with a single psychology and a single ideology’. Desiatyi, p. 230. Also Zinoviev in 1924 when he called on oppositionists to come before the party congress and acknowledge that they were wrong and the party was correct. Trinadtsatyi, p. 106. Pravda, 17 October 1926 (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Piatakov, Sokol’nikov and Evdokimov) and 26 November 1929 (the Right Opposition), and Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 2, pp. 1417–18 (United Opposition). On this campaign and its later development, see Kojevnikov, p. 35. On Russian Orthodox forerunners, Kharkhordin, ch. 1. Trinadtsatyi, p. 158. Moscow News 25 (19 June 1988), p. 10. Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 1, pp. 530–1. On his objection to excessive praise on his fiftieth birthday, see Velikanova, pp. 54–5. For the praise, Pravda, 23 April 1920. Even among oppositionists. See Kollontai’s statement: ‘Not in vain will the rank-andfile worker speak with assurance and reconciliation. Ilyich will ponder, he will think it over, he will listen to us. And then he will decide to turn the party rudder toward the Opposition.’ Kollontai, p. 48. Tumarkin (Lenin), pp. 80–5 and ch. 3. Dvenadtsatyi, pp. 5, 8–9 and 523. Kosior referred to the ‘genius mind and genius experience of Lenin’. Dvenadtsatyi, p. 103. The Lenin Institute was established in 1923 as the repository for his works, and the Central Lenin Museum was created in 1924; similar museums were established in some regional cities. Velikanova, pp. 149–51. For some details on publication of his works, see Velikanova, pp. 117–18. The Lenin Library was also established in 1924, becoming the official state library in 1925. Dvenadtsatyi, p. 89. Dvenadtsatyi, pp. 92, 93, 95, 96 and 97. Respectively Trinadtsatyi, pp. 3–4 and 814. Emphasis in original. For greetings to the congress with these sorts of invocations, see Trinadtsatyi, pp. 12–21, 545 and 549. The notion of ‘Leninism’ actually emerged in 1923. Tumarkin (Lenin), p. 120. Tumarkin (Lenin), pp. 134–64. For a personal report, see Duranty, ch. XVIII. On the religious overtones of the cult, see Velikanova, pp. 163–90. Pravda, 30 January 1924. The making of such vows was also common in many of the mourning meetings held around the country. Tumarkin (Lenin), p. 153. The first place was named after Lenin in 1917, and by 1923 some ten towns bore his name. Murray, pp. 130 and 167, and Bursa, pp. 165 and 167. A street in Petrograd had been named after him in November 1923. Velikanova, p. 63. In 1918 the first agit-train was called the ‘Lenin train’. On the decision to embalm, see Velikanova, pp. 89–106. Trinadtsatyi, pp. 707–9. KPSS v rez., vol. 3, pp. 157–8. For the April 1924 VtsIK decree ‘On the proper manner of the production and distribution of busts, bas-relief, pictures etc. representing V. I. Lenin’, see Bown, p. 59. For examples, see Velikanova, pp. 188 and 202–3. Also see Kolonitskii, pp. 210–28. Tumarkin (Lenin), p. 208. Velikanova, p. 166. The first recorded portrait of Stalin was in 1922. Bown, pp. 29 and 30. White (Bolshevik), p. 25.


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324. V. Deni, ‘Tov. Lenin ochishchaet zemliiu ot nechisti’ (1920), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 46. 325. He appeared along with Marx to mark the second anniversary of the revolution. Guerman, no. 383. 326. Tumarkin (Lenin), p. 105. 327. A. Strakhov, ‘1870–1924’, Baburina (Soviet), no. 44. 328. Iulii Shass and Vasilii Kobelev, ‘Lenin i elektrofikatsiia’ (1925), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 40. 329. Iulii Shass, ‘Radio’ (1925), Barkhatova, no. 12. 330. Aleksandr Rodchenko, ‘Partiia v gody imperialisticheskoi voiny 1914–1916’ (1926), Barkhatova, no. 14. 331. Unknown artist, ‘Nash glavnyi lozung – blizhe k massam’ (1927), Barkhatova, no. 78. 332. Raev Makarychev, ‘Kazhdaia kukharka dolzhna nauchit’sia upravliat’ gosudarstvom’ (1925), Barkhatova, no. 15. 333. Efim Cheptsov, ‘Meeting of a Village Party Cell’ (1924), Guerman, no. 154. 334. For example, Volodarsky (1925), Kamenev (1925) and Stalin (1927), Barkhatova, nos. 9, 10 and 77. 335. On the first ‘Lenin Corner’, at the All-Russian Agricultural and Domestic Industry Exhibition, which opened in August 1923, see Tumarkin (Lenin), pp. 126–7. For the standardisation of the corners and their presence in peasant huts in 1925, see Velikanova, pp. 118–20 and 168. The development of the ‘Lenin Corner’ (or ‘Red Corner’ as it was sometimes called) was an instance of the regime taking over an existing practice, the icon corner in people’s houses, and investing new meaning in it. 336. Benjamin, p. 72. Benjamin was in Moscow from December 1926 to February 1927. Benjamin also remarked that pictures of Lenin were being sold alongside icons. Lenin had been the subject for a bust at least as early as 1920. Nikolai Andreev, ‘Lenin’ (1920), Guerman, no. 276. 337. Riggio and West, p. 82. For reports of representations of Marx, Stalin and Bukharin, see pp. 151 and 172. 338. For example, compare Trotsky’s ‘On Lenin’ (June 1924) and ‘Lessons of October’ (October 1924), Zinoviev’s ‘Leninism. An Introduction to the Study of Leninism’ (October 1925), and Stalin’s ‘Foundations of Leninism’ (April–May 1924). 339. Trinadtsatyi, p. 599 and XIV s’ezd, p. 84. 340. See Stalin’s address to the XIV Congress. XIV s’ezd, p. 46. Trotsky and his supporters were accused of being a petty bourgeois deviation at the XIII Conference, KPSS v rez., vol. 3, p. 156, while the Workers’ Opposition was a ‘syndicalist and anarchist deviation’ at the X Congress. Desiatyi, p. 574. 341. J. V. Stalin, ‘The Right Danger in the CPSU(B)’ (19 October 1928), Stalin (Works), vol. 11, p. 244. 342. Trinadtsatyi, pp. 36 and 110. 343. XIV s’ezd, pp. 8 and 508. 344. XIV s’ezd, p. 128. When Krupskaia spoke in a way that was critical of both leadership and opposition, it was met with silence (p. 166). 345. Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 1, pp. 43 and 91. 346. XIV s’ezd, p. 275. 347. XIV s’ezd, p. 397. 348. Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 1, pp. 38 and 358. There was also a call of ‘Long live the vozhd of the Red Army com. Voroshilov’, and an invocation of ‘Glory to our old iron fighters: coms Rykov, Bukharin, Stalin, Petrovsky and Kalinin, glory’, p. 360.

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349. Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 1, p. 5. Only Rykov got stormy applause, and some of the others were greeted with silence. 350. Piatnadtsatyi, vol. 1, p. 230. 351. Scott (Weapons).

3 THE STALINIST CULTURE, 1929–1953 1. J. V. Stalin, ‘The Tasks of Business Executives’ (4 February 1931), Stalin (Works), vol. 13, p. 43. 2. Payne, pp. 286–8. 3. On the role of film in promoting Soviet development, see Widdis, esp. ch. 6, and Taylor (Film), pt II. 4. ‘O kontrol’nykh tsifrakh narodnogo khoziaistva na 1929/30g’, Danilov et al., vol. 5, pp. 544–5. 5. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XVI s’ezd, p. 711. This was also reflected in the emergence of a number of publications that sought to show the surge of industrial development in the most positive light. Among these were Nashi Dostizheniia and SSSR na stroike. 6. For a report about such slogans on factory walls, see Martin, p. 57. 7. This slogan first appeared in late 1929. Pravda, 1 September 1929. 8. ‘O kontrol’nykh’, pp. 544–5. 9. ‘O zadachakh profsoiuzov v rekonstruktivnyi period’, XVI s’ezd, pp. 735–41. 10. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XVI s’ezd, pp. 713–14. 11. Gustav Klutsis, ‘V boi za piatiletku, Za bol’shevistskie tempy, Za oboronu SSSR, Za mirovoi oktiabr’ (1931), Groys and Hollein, p. 60. 12. Iurii Pimenov, ‘Vse na smotr!’ (1928), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 204, p. 64. 13. Aleksandr Deineka, ‘Mekhaniziruem Donbass’ (1930), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 91, p. 34. 14. Gustav Klutsis, ‘Razvitie transporta odna iz vazhneishikh zadach po vypolneniiu piatiletnego plana’ (1929), Barkhatova, no. 95. 15. Iurii Pimenov, ‘Vse na smotr!’ (1928), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 204, p. 64. 16. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Vasha lampa, tovarishch inzhener!’ (1933), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 342, p. 111. 17. Iosif Iang and Avenir Chernomordik, ‘Opytnye rabochie, ne izdevaites’ nad molodymi’ (1930), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 343, p. 111. 18. Viktor Koretskii and Vera Gitsevich, ‘Svobodnye rabochie ruki kolkhozov promyshlennost’ (1931), Barkhatova, no. 150, p. 158. 19. Gustav Klutsis, ‘Pod znamenem lenina Za Sotsialisticheskoe Stroitel’stvo’ (1930), Barkhatova, no. 137, p. 145. This is an interesting poster because it shows scenes of industrial development surrounding a red banner and the head and shoulders of Lenin, but he is being shadowed by a head and shoulders of Stalin. 20. Aleksandr Deineka, ‘Mekhaniziruem Donbass’ (1930), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 91, p. 34. 21. Dmitrii Bulanov, ‘Udarnoi rabotoi transportnoi kooperatsii pomozhem vypolneniiu i perevypolneniiu tranfinplana’ (1931), Barkhatova, no. 155, p. 162. 22. Nikolai Dolgorukov, ‘Na shturm chetvertogo poslednego goda piatiletki’ (1931), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 102. 23. Konstantin Vialov, ‘Bol’shevistskimi tempami pustim v srok’ (1931), Baburina (Soviet), p. 62.


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24. On the latter see Nikolai Dolgorukov, ‘Transportnik, vooruzhaias’ tekhnicheskimi znaniiami, boris’ za rekonstruktsiiu transporta’ (1931), Barkhatova, no. 153, p. 160. 25. Iakov Guminer, ‘2 + 2 = 5 arifmetika vstrechnogo promfinplana plius entuziazm rabochikh’ (1931), Barkhatova, no. 154, p. 161. 26. Aleksei Kokorekin, ‘Ob’edinim vse sily nauki s tvorcheskoi energiei rabochego klassa’ (1932), Baburina (Soviet), p. 68. 27. Vladimir Shtranikh, ‘Izobretai! Dorogu rabochei smekalke!’ (1929), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 108. 28. This reflected the CC resolution of 11/3/31 on visual propaganda which said it was to be ‘a powerful tool in the reconstruction of the individual, his ideology, his way of life, his economic activity’ and a means of ‘entering the consciousness and hearts of millions of people’. Cited in Bonnell, p. 37. This meant that visual propaganda was to be not only exhortatory but about the reconstruction of the individual. 29. The statue is discussed and pictured in Bonnell, pp. 42–3 and 121–2, and fig. 1.16. 30. Literaturnaia Gazeta, 25 May 1932, cited in Golomstock, p. 84. 31. Cited in Golomstock, pp. 85–6. 32. Pravda, 17 August 1934. 33. Pravda, 6 May 1934. 34. This builds on Holz, pp. 74–7. 35. Clark (Soviet Novel), chs. 1–3. 36. Vera Korableva, ‘Idi, tovarishch k nam v kolkhoz!’ (1930), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 88, p. 33. 37. Unknown artist, ‘Traktory i iasli – dvigateli novoi derevne’ (1930), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 455, p. 146. 38. Gustav Klutsis, ‘Udarniki polei, v boi za sotsialisticheskuiu rekonstruktsiiu’ (1932), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 213, p. 66. 39. A. Lobanov, ‘Vypolnim polnost’iu i v srok plan khlebozagotovok’ (1930), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 383, p. 123. Although the Lobanov poster also showed kulak opponents of collectivisation. 40. Bonnell, p. 116. 41. Viktor Koretskii, ‘SSSR v rezul’tate sovkhoznogo i kolkhoznogo stroitel’stva stal stranoi samogo krupnogo sel’skogo khoziaistva v mire’ (1931), Barkhatova, no. 146, p. 154. 42. Dmitrii Bulanov, ‘Uberem polia v srok’ (1930), Barkhatova, no. 145, p. 153. 43. V. Gushchin, ‘Bol’shevistskoi volei pobedim zasukhu’ (1933), Barkhatova, no. 214, p. 218. 44. Vasilii Elkin, ‘Kazhdyi Kolkhoznik, Kazhdaia Brigada, Kazhdaia MTC dolzhni znat’ PLAN bol’shevistskogo SEVA’ (1931), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 111. 45. One very widespread poster was Gustav Klutsis, ‘Vypolnim plan velikikh rabot’ (1930), Barkhatova, no. 139, p. 147. 46. In the case of Leningrad workers, three years. See the poster by an unknown artist, ‘Leningrad vyzyvaet’ (1930), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 106. For four years, see the poster by an unknown artist, ‘Udarnym tempom polnym khodom za piatiletku v chetyre goda’ (1930), Baburina (Soviet), p. 55. 47. Sergei Sen’kin, ‘Ukrepim industrial’nuiu moshch’ sovetskogo soiuza! Vvedem v stroi kramatorskii zavod tiazhelogo mashinostroeniia’ (1932), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 103. 48. Vasilii Elkin, ‘Profsoiuzy – na bor’bu za vstrechnyi v 10 mln. tonn chuguna v 1932 godu’, Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 208, p. 65. 49. Gustav Klutsis, ‘Vsia Moskva stroit metro’ (1934), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 218, p. 67.

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50. Adolf Strakhov-Braslavskii, ‘Dneprostroi postroen’ (1932), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 104. 51. Viktor Deni, ‘Est’ metro!’ (1935), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 219, p. 67. 52. G. Kun, ‘Privet velikomy stalinu Kanal MOSKVA–VOLGA otkryt!’ (1937), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 106, p. 37. 53. P. Yastrzhembskii, ‘Vsesoiuznaia Sel’sko-Khoziaistvennaia Vystavka Otkrytie 1 avgusta Moskva’ (1939), Groys and Hollein, p. 40. 54. Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), p. 109. 55. A. Zhigunov, ‘K pobede kommunizma v nashei strane! K pobede kommunizma vo vsem mire, vpered!’ (1927), Barkhatova, no. 77, p. 90. 56. Gustav Klutsis, ‘Iz rossii nepovskoi budet rossiia sotsialisticheskaia’, Barkhatova, no. 140, p. 148. 57. Pavel Sokolov-Skalia, ‘Poezd idet ot st. SOTSIALIZM do st. KOMMUNIZM’ (1939), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 407, p. 131. 58. Gustav Klutsis, ‘Da zdravstvuet SSSR otechestvo trudiashchikhsia vsego mira’ (1931), Groys and Hollein, p. 53. 59. Bonnell, p. 9. 60. Aleksandr Deineka, ‘Rabotat’, stroit’ i ne nyt’ (1933), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), no. 56. 61. For a poster combining both see Mytnikov-Kobylin, ‘8 marta boevoi prazdnik trudiashchikhsia zhenshchin vsego mira’ (1932), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 214, p. 66. 62. Mariia Bri-Bein, ‘Rabotnitsa, boris’ za chistuiu stolovuiu’ (1931), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 345, p. 112. 63. E. Ignatovich, ‘V pokhod za chistotu!’ (1932), Barkhatova, no. 192, p. 197. 64. Vasilii Svarog, ‘Zhenshchiny v kolkhozakh – bol’shaia sila’ (1935), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 388, p. 124. This poster is citing Stalin’s words. 65. For an interesting poster which juxtaposes child-minding with work on the farm, including tractor-driving, see the 1930 poster by an unknown artist, ‘Ne zabyvaite o rodil’noi pomoshchi i konsul’tatsiiakh v kolkhozakh i sovkhozakh’ (1930), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), p. 47. 66. Nataliia Pinus, ‘Zhenshchiny v kolkhozakh – bol’shaia sila’ (1933), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 387, p. 124. 67. Ol’ga Deineko, ‘Zhenshchina, na parovoz’ (1939), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 411, p. 132. 68. Valentina Kulagina, ‘Mezhdunarodnyi den’ rabotnits – den’ smotra sotsialisticheskogo sorevnovaniia’ (1930), Barkhatova, no. 148, p. 156. 69. Gustav Klutsis, ‘Molodezh’ – na samolety’ (1934), Barkhatova, no. 203, p. 207. In an advertisement for toothpaste from 1938, a young woman is shown dressed as a pilot. Izrail Bograd, ‘Sanit zubna pasta’ (1938), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), p. 85. 70. Agitatsiia, p. 49. 71. Valentina Kulagina, ‘My budem gotovy k otrazheniiu voennogo napadeniia na SSSR’ (1931), Groys and Hollein, p. 49. 72. Marina Volkova and Nataliia Pinus, ‘Da zdravstvuet ravnopravnaia zhenshchina SSSR’ (1938), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 105, p. 37. 73. Vera Livanova, ‘Privet sovetskim zhenshchinam, schastlivym docheriam sotsialisticheskoi rodiny!’ (1939), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), p. 60. 74. Gustav Klutsis, ‘Komsomol’tsy na udarnyi sev’ (1931), Barkhatova, no. 144, p. 152. 75. Vladimir Lyushin, ‘Komsomol-udarnaia brigada piatiletki’ (1931), Baburina (Soviet), p. 67. 76. Unknown artist, ‘Komsomol’tsy Metro’ (1934), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 119.


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77. Sergei Sen’kin, ‘Leninskomu komsomolu dostoinuiu smenu’, Barkhatova, no. 210, p. 213. 78. Genrikh Futerfas, ‘Stalinitsy! Shire front stakhanovskogo dvizheniia!’ (1936), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 113. This poster shows the upper body of Stalin towering over the head and shoulders of Khrushchev and Kaganovich, who in turn are looking over assembled ranks of Stakhanovites. 79. Pavel Sokolov-Skalia, ‘Cheliuskintsam i spasshim ikh geroicheskim letchikam plamennyi proletarskii privet!’ (1934), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 102, p. 36. 80. Viktor Deni and Nikolai Dolgorukov, ‘Slava stalinskim sokolam – pokoriteliam vozdushnoi stikhii!’ (1937), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 260, p. 83. 81. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Kolkhoznik, okhrani svoi polia ot klassovikh vragov’ (1933), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 316, p. 102. 82. Boris Efimov, ‘Doloi kolkhozy! My-s za kolkhozy’ (1933), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 89, p. 33. 83. Viktor Deni, ‘Trubka Stalina’ (1930), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 87, p. 33. This shows them being blown away by the smoke of Stalin’s pipe, and was reproduced in Pravda. 84. Mikhail Cheremnyk, ‘Sektant – kulatskii petrushka’ (1930), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 85, p. 32. 85. Dmitrii Moor, ‘Chernye vorony gotoviat razboinichii nabeg na SSSR’ (1930), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 95, p. 35. On religion more generally, see Yurii Pimenov, ‘Za promfinplan, za piatiletku v 4 goda, protiv religii’ (1930), Baburina (Soviet), p. 56. This poster associates religion with wrecking, grasping behaviour, drunkenness, loafing and waste. 86. Konstantin Rotov, ‘Tol’ko belogvardeiskoi svore vygodno rabochii klass possorit’ (1930), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 340, p. 110. 87. Viktor Deni, ‘Vragi piatiletki’ (1929), Bonnell, pl. 6. Also see Bonnell, pp. 210 and 213. 88. Ekaterina Zernova, ‘Doloi imperialisticheskuiu voinu’ (1929), Baburina (Soviet), p. 50. 89. Viktor Deni, ‘Rot front’ (1932), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 96, p. 35. 90. Kukryniksy, ‘15’ (1932), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 99, p. 36. This poster shows the capitalist with a swastika on his jacket. 91. Viktor Deni, ‘Stavka interventov bita!’, Baburina (Rossiia), p. 96. 92. Boris Klinch, ‘Sil’nee ogon’ po klassovomu vragu!’ (1933), Barkhatova, no. 209, p. 212. 93. Unknown artist, ‘Sotsialisticheskim nastupleniem preodoleem soprotivlenie klassovogo vraga, trudnosti i umnozhim dostizheniia’ (1931), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 97. 94. Iosif Iang and Avenir Chernomordik, ‘Iz rabochei gushi vygonim p’iushchikh!’ (1929), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 421, p. 136. 95. Unknown artist, ‘Besposhchadnaia bor’ba s raskhititeliami obshchestvennoi sobstvennosti’ (1932), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 430, p. 138. 96. Ivan Chashnikov and Boris Ioganson, ‘Son na rabote – na ruku vragam rabochego klassa’ (1931), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 405, p. 131. 97. Unknown artist, ‘Padenie truddistsipliny razrushaet transport’ (1931), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 409, p. 131. 98. Dmitrii Bulanov, ‘Iz shkol i klubov uraganom otkroi ogon’ po khuliganam’ (1929), Barkhatova, no. 85, p. 97. 99. Aleksei Laptev, ‘Ne bei rebenka’ (1929), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 452, p. 145. 100. J. V. Stalin, ‘The Right Deviation in the CPSU(B)’, Stalin (Works) vol. 12, pp. 37–41. This was supported by Kaganovich. Kaganovich (Ob itogakh).

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101. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta VKP(b)’, XVI s’ezd, p. 713. Also see ‘Po otchetu TsKK-RKI’, XVI s’ezd, p. 717. 102. ‘O kontrol’nykh tsifrakh narodnogo khoziaistva na 1929/30g’, Danilov et al., vol. 5, p. 545. 103. J. V. Stalin, ‘Concerning Questions of Agrarian Policy in the USSR’, Stalin (Works), vol. 12, pp. 147–78, esp. p. 173. This was acknowledged in an official party decision of 5 January 1930. ‘O tempe kollektivizatsii i merakh pomoshchi gosudarstva kolkhoznomu stroitel’stvu’, KPSS v rez., vol. 5, p. 73. 104. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta VKP(b)’, XVI z’ezd, p. 712. 105. ‘Tseli i zadachi politicheskikh otdelov MTS i sovkhozov’, KPSS v rez., vol. 6, p. 21. 106. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XVI s’ezd, pp. 711–12. See Kaganovich’s argument linked to this, Kaganovich (Ob itogakh). 107. J. V. Stalin, ‘Industrialisation of the Country and the Right Deviation in the CPSU(B)’, Stalin (Works), vol. 11, pp. 256–62. 108. ‘Ob itogakh i dal’neishikh zadachakh kolkhoznogo stroitel’stva’, Danilov et al., vol. 5, p. 554. 109. ‘Ko vsem partiinym, profsoiuznym, komsomol’skim i khoziaistvennym organizatsiiam’, KPSS v rez., vol. 5, pp. 76–80, esp. pp. 78–9; ‘O dal’neishei rabote po regulirovaniiu rosta partii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 5, pp. 87–9. 110. J. V. Stalin, ‘The Results of the First Five-Year Plan’, Stalin (Works), vol. 13, p. 189. 111. ‘O perevyborakh sovetov’, KPSS v rez., vol. 5, pp. 244–8. 112. ‘Tseli i zadachi’, pp. 21–2. 113. ‘O kontrol’nykh’, pp. 546, 551 and 552. For similar sorts of claims about the Eismont, Tolmachev, Smirnov et al. anti-party group, see ‘Ob antipartiinoi gruppirovke Eismonta, Tolmacheva, Smirnova A. P. i dr’, KPSS v rez., vol. 6, pp. 32–3. 114. ‘O kontrol’nykh’, p. 552. Also see ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XVI s’ezd, p. 716. 115. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XVI s’ezd, pp. 713 and 715–16. 116. ‘O samokritike’ (2 June 1928), KPSS v rez., vol. 4, pp. 338–43. 117. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XVI s’ezd, pp. 714–15. 118. ‘Po otchetu TsKK-RKI’, XVI s’ezd, pp. 717–21. 119. Another vehicle for this was the production novels which began appearing at this time. Priestland, pp. 229–35. 120. J. V. Stalin, ‘Against Vulgarising the Slogan of Self-Criticism’, Stalin (Works), vol. 11, p. 137. 121. ‘O chistke partii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 6, pp. 45–50. 122. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta’, XVI s’ezd, pp. 711 and 714. 123. Brooks (Thank You), p. 137. 124. ‘Itogi pervoi piatiletki i narodnokhoziaistvennyi plan 1933 goda – pervogo goda vtoroi piatiletki’, KPSS v rez., vol. 6, p. 8. 125. ‘O vtorom piatiletki plane razvitiia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR (1933–1937gg)’, KPSS v rez., vol. 6, pp. 104–24. 126. ‘Organizatsionnye voprosy. Partiinoe i sovetskoe stroitel’stvo’, KPSS v rez., vol. 6, p. 124. 127. Priestland, pp. 282–3. 128. ‘Voprosy promyshlennosti i transporta v sviazi so stakhanovskim dvizheniem’, KPSS v rez., vol. 6, pp. 284–5. 129. ‘Itogi proverki partiinykh dokumentov’, KPSS v rez., vol. 6, pp. 295–7. 130. This was dated 2 March 1930. J. V. Stalin, ‘Dizzy with Success’, Stalin (Works), vol. 12, pp. 197–205. 131. Scott (Weapons) and (Domination).


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132. Viola (‘Popular’), pp. 17–43. On officials’ use of ‘family groups’ to thwart central policy, see Gill (Origins), ch. 5. 133. This is the basic message of Fitzpatrick (Tear Off). On the regime imposing categories, see Shearer. 134. ‘Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’, adopted 5 December 1936, Unger, pp. 140–58. 135. At the XVII Congress, the so-called ‘Congress of Victors’, Stalin was more ambivalent about claiming the achievement of socialism. In his report, he talks about recent economic successes occurring ‘on the basis of the successful building of socialism’, and says that ‘the socialist form of social and economic structure – now holds undivided sway and is the sole commanding force in the whole national economy’, but also that ‘we are advancing towards the formation of a classless socialist society’. J. V. Stalin, ‘Report to the Seventeenth Party Congress on the Work of the Central Committee of the CPSU(B)’, Stalin (Works), vol. 13, pp. 315, 316 and 357. 136. The terminology is interesting. From the early 1930s, the term ‘proletarii’ had increasingly been used for formal and ceremonial purposes and the term ‘rabochii’ for others. Fitzpatrick (‘Bolshevik Invention’), pp. 39–40. 137. In contrast, in the 1939 party Rules, while the party exercises leadership of the working class, peasantry and intelligentsia, it is also referred to as ‘the leading organised detachment of the working class of the USSR, the highest form of its class organisation’. ‘Ustav vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (bol’shevikov)’, XVIII s’ezd, p. 677. 138. Stalin (O proekte). 139. Stalin (O proekte), p. 9. 140. Stalin (O proekte), pp. 10–13. 141. Cited in Hoffman, p. 149. 142. See Stalin (‘Right Deviation’). 143. Brooks (Thank You), p. 141. 144. Hoffman, p. 75. 145. For a discussion which shows the way the conception of opposition associated with the Kirov murder broadened, see Goldman, ch. 2. 146. ‘On the Terrorist Activities of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Counter-Revolutionary Bloc’, McNeal (Resolutions 1929–1953), p. 176. 147. Partiinoe stroitel’stvo 17 (15 October 1935), p. 1; 19–20 (15 November 1935), pp. 50–1; and 22–3 (15 December 1935), p. 75. 148. ‘Itogi proverki partiinykh dokumentov’, KPSS v rez, vol. 6, p. 300. 149. For the 1937 electoral regulations which introduced this measure, see Partiinoe stroitel’stvo 6 (20 March 1937), pp. 3–4. 150. For Stalin’s discussion of the nature of Soviet elections, see I. V. Stalin, ‘Rech’ na predvybornom sobranii izbiratelei stalinskogo izbiratel’nogo okruga goroda moskvy’, 11 December 1937, Stalin (Sochineniia), vol. 1 (xiv), pp. 256–65. The new Constitution accorded voting rights to all citizens, including those who had formerly been barred (e.g. White Guards, priests, dispossessed kulaks), weighted urban and rural votes equally, and provided for election by individual candidate rather than by list and through secret ballot. In the election campaign the party was said to be standing in a bloc with non-party workers, peasants, employees and intelligentsia, and its appeal was the successes that the country had achieved under its stewardship. ‘Ko vsem izbirateliam, rabochim, rabotnitsam, krest’ianam i krest’iankam, k krasnoi armii, k sovetskoi intelligentsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 6, pp. 418–24. 151. Pavel Karachentsov, ‘Za sotsialisticheskuiu rodinu, za schastlivuiu zhizn’ golosuet polnopravnaia sovetskaia zhenshchina!’ (1937), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 117.

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152. The 1937 painting by Vasilii Yakovlev, ‘Starateli pishut pis’mo tvortsu Velikoi Konstitutsii’. Agitatsiia, p. 125. 153. ‘Ob oshibkakh partorganizatsii pri iskliuchenii kommunistov iz partii, o formal’nobiurokraticheskom otnoshenii k apelliatsiiam iskliuchennykh iz VKP(b) i o merakh po ustraneniiu etikh nedostatkov’, KPSS v rez., vol. 7, pp. 8–17, esp. pp. 8 and 12. Italics in original. 154. Pravda, 31 January 1937. 155. Brooks (Thank You), pp. 147–8 and 157. 156. See also the discussion of the December 1937 film ‘Lenin in October’, which projects the same message, in Petrone, pp. 163–5. 157. On the way different party leaders referred to the opposition in different ways, signalling differences in their views about the nature of the enemy, see Priestland, pp. 382–8. 158. Pravda, 27 March 1938, cited in Priestland, p. 391. 159. P. Vandyshev, ‘Pomogai Krasnoi Armii vypavlivat shpionov i diversantov’ (1941), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 317, p. 102. 160. Boris Prorokov, ‘Fashizm – vrag kul’tury’ (1939), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 110, p. 38. 161. Mikhail Cheremnykh, ‘Chtob is etoi lapy vypal nosh – Antifashistskogo fronta sily mnozh’!’ (1938), Baburina (Soviet), p. 79. 162. Bonnell, pp. 214–16. 163. ‘Tretii piatiletnii plan razvitiia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR (1938–1942 g.g.). Rezoliutsiia XVIII s’ezda VKP(b) no dokladu tov. V. Molotova’, XVIII s’ezd, pp. 648–50. 164. This was part of the turn away from the ‘little man’ to the ‘big man’, from the ‘cult of the masses’ to the ‘cult of the hero’, identified in Soviet culture. See Dunham, Clark (Soviet Novel), and Clark (‘Utopian’). 165. I. V. Stalin, ‘Rech’ na pervom vsesoiuznom soveshchanii stakhanovtsev’, Stalin (Sochineniia), vol. 1 (xiv), pp. 94–5. 166. Many officials were wary of the effects of popular mobilisation as a means of increasing production, preferring to put their faith in technical solutions to economic problems, and therefore sought to give little more than lip service to Stakhanovism. Priestland, pp. 341–6. 167. Pravda, 30 August 1938. 168. J. V. Stalin, ‘Rech’ na pervom vsesoiuznom soveshchanii stakhanovtsev’, Stalin (Sochineniia), vol. 1 (xiv), p. 91. 169. For such awards to 140 heroes, see Pravda, 9 December 1935. 170. On heroes, see Fitzpatrick (Everyday), pp. 71–5, Chatterjee, pp. 143–58 and Clark (Soviet Novel), pp. 124–9. 171. Bergman, pp. 139–50. 172. See Kalinin’s comments in Pravda, 18 August 1936. 173. Palmer (Dictatorship), p. 239. 174. McCannon (Red) and McCannon (‘Positive’), pp. 346–65. 175. Petrone, ch. 3. 176. McCannon (Red), pp. 119–28. For towns named after the aviators, see Bursa, p. 174. 177. For an argument about how sculptors should not succumb to the ‘cult of the personality’ in their work by emphasising individualistic ‘great men’ but must show the class essence of figures, see I. Vobli, ‘Kak oformliat’ krasnuiu stolitsu’, Stroitel’stvo Moskvy 3, March 1931, pp. 34–7. 178. Stalin’s speech to the graduates from the Red Army Academy, Pravda, 6 May 1935. Stalin (Sochineniia), vol. 1 (xiv), pp. 58–66.


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179. ‘On the Organization of Party Propaganda in Connection with the Publication of the History of the VKP(b). Short Course’, McNeal (Resolutions), vol. 3, pp. 196–9. 180. The figure of Stalin was an intrinsic part of the metanarrative; he was not a figure standing outside it and providing authority, but an essential constituent aspect of it; cf. Yurchak, p. 26. 181. Sarah Davies suggests the cult declined in 1939–41. Davies (‘Cult’), p. 134. Based on a survey of the number of times Stalin’s name is mentioned in Pravda editorials in May of each year, Alekseev suggests there were troughs in 1938–40 and 1942–3. Alekseev, p. 9. Also see the discussion in Brandenberger (‘Stalin’), pp. 249–70. 182. Popov, pp. 5–9. 183. Up until 1934, ‘vozhd’ had been used to refer to leaders at various levels, including local party organisations, but after 1934 it was applied only to Stalin. Stites, p. 248. 184. The presentation of Lenin underwent a change, as noted below. He continued to be the subject of new museums – for example, five Lenin museums opened in 1938 in Leningrad alone – but from the late 1930s the collections were structured in accord with the picture presented by the Short Course. Also in the 1930s the authorities began to mark and sometimes reconstruct places he may have briefly visited. Velikanova, pp. 154 and 157–8. 185. ‘K 50-letiu tov. Stalina’, Partiinoe stroitel’stvo 1 (1930), pp. 3–4. 186. Pravda, 5 June 1930, 21 January 1931 and 22 April 1932. 187. Pravda, 10 November 1931. 188. Pravda, 21 January 1938. 189. From 1933 there was also a change in nomenclature in the shift from references to things like the ‘party of Lenin’ or the ‘CC of Lenin’ to the ‘party/CC of Lenin and Stalin’. 190. But by no means exclusively. Lenin remained a primary symbol of the regime. For a comparison of the two cults, see Velikanova, pp. 125–35. 191. XVIII s’ezd, p. 174. Emphasis in original. 192. This historical revisionism was also evident in the articles published on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Stalin’s birth. Pravda, 21 December 1939. 193. Respectively, Pravda, 22 January 1934, 2 May 1933, 8 June 1934, 13 June 1936, 24 August 1934 and 8 October 1938. 194. Brooks (Thank You), p. 61. 195. Lyons, pp. 40–1. 196. Pravda, 10 February 1930, 7 September 1932, 29 March 1934 and 10 December 1936. 197. Pravda, 5 March 1933. 198. Respectively, Pravda, 9 June 1936 and 1 May 1939. 199. Brooks (Thank You), p. 65. 200. XVIII s’ezd, p. 170. 201. Respectively, Pravda, 12 June 1939, 1 May 1933, 4 May 1938, 22 January 1934 and 9 December 1935. 202. Pravda, 5 October 1935. 203. L. Kaganovich, ‘Velikii mashinist lokomotiva istorii’, Pravda, 21 December 1939. 204. Pravda, 21 December 1939. 205. L. Beria, ‘Velichaishii chelovek sovremennosti’, Pravda, 21 December 1939. 206. For a reference that evokes the notion of prayer from a flyer to Stalin, see McCannon (Red), p. 106. 207. See the comments of Chkalov cited in McCannon (Red), p. 107.

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208. Beria (‘Velichaishii’). 209. Respectively, Pravda, 10 September 1936, Dzhambul, Songs and Poems (Moscow: 1938), cited in Sokolov, p. 743, and Pravda, 3 May 1941. 210. Agitatsiia, p. 52. 211. Groys and Hollein, p. 149. 212. Agitatsiia, p. 89. 213. On the cultural significance of authority expressed through the military uniform, see Yampolsky, pp. 107–8. 214. Pravda, 19 June 1934, 2 September 1935 and 25 September 1936. 215. Pravda, 24 June 1935. 216. Respectively, Groys and Hollein, pp. 146–7 and Agitatsiia, p. 101. 217. Pravda, 3 July 1930. 218. Pravda, 16 January 1935. 219. Pravda, 1 February 1935. 220. Pravda, 17 May 1935. For a discussion of the structure of such meetings, see McCannon (Red), pp. 106–7. 221. Izvestiia, 18 August 1938, cited in Bergman, p. 148. 222. For a discussion of this and how it continued throughout Soviet history, see Khapaeva and Kopossov, pp. 963–87. 223. On the artistic representation of Stalin during this time, see Plamper, pp. 19–50, and Bown, ch. 2. For one contemporary analysis, see Bazili. 224. On representations of Stalin in letters to party and state leaders, see Davies (‘Cult’), pp. 131–47. This was the basis for what Brooks (Thank You) has called a moral economy whereby in return for the bountiful gifts of socialism, the people gave to their leader their commitment, energy, dedication and love. 225. On the kinship analogy, see Clark (‘Utopian’), pp. 180–99. For similar references relating to Lenin, see Velikanova, pp. 215–23. 226. Clark (Soviet Novel), pp. 114–35. 227. For literary representations, see Marsh, ch. 4. 228. Feuchtwanger, pp. 85–6. For Stalin’s answer to Feuchtwanger’s comment about the bust, see Brooks (Thank You), p. 67. 229. Stites, p. 234. On proposals, rejected by Stalin, to rename Moscow Stalinodar, see Starkov, pp. 126–7. John Murray gives some different figures. He argues that in the time that Stalin was General Secretary, the number of large and small towns named after Soviet figures was: Kirov 23, Lenin 16, Stalin 12, Artem 10, Ordzhonikidze 8, Dzerzhinskii, Kaganovich, Kuibyshev and Molotov 6 each, Voroshilov and Kalinin 5 each, Budennyi, Volodarskii, Frunze, Chkalov and Shaumyan 4 each, Dzhambul, Mikoian, Kotovskii, Sverdlov and Chapaev 3 each, and Zhdanov 2. Murray, p. 51. Many places had their names changed to ones more evocative of the regime and its imagery, while in non-Russian areas many names were russified. And with the upheavals of the Stalin era – collectivisation, industrialisation, exiling of small nationalities, incorporation of new territories (Baltic states, Bessarabia, Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad) – many more new units were created that required names, and many of these acquired a regime flavour. For the argument that towns acquiring the names of political figures often became cultic centres of those figures, see Khapaeva and Kopossov, p. 970. 230. On the ‘orientalising’ nature of this, reflected in the portrayal of non-Russians in traditional folk dress compared with the Russians in jacket and tie or military uniform, see Brandenberger (National), pp. 93–4 and 303 n. 84, and Kettering (‘Sverdlov’), pp. 39–42. 231. On the symbol of Rodina, see Petrone, pp. 53–6. On the ‘great family’ with Stalin as father, see Clark (Soviet Novel), ch. 5.


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232. Both the 1935 celebration of the non-Russian nations and the 1939 Agricultural Exhibition were excellent vehicles for projecting this message. 233. He argued that the revolution had meant that workers gained a fatherland and that defence of that fatherland was necessary for the achievement of socialism. J. V. Stalin, ‘The Task of Business Executives’, Stalin (Works), 13, pp. 31–44, esp. pp. 40–1. 234. See Miller; Oinas, pp. 45–56; and Hoffman, pp. 171–3. 235. A. V. Morozova, ‘Pro lestnitsu-chudesnitsu’, Pravda, 25 December 1935, translated in Miller, pp. 152–4. During the early 1930s Uzbek folk artists had performed poems about Lenin, Stalin, the October Revolution, collectivisation, the success of cotton farming, and the cultural revolution, with an anthology being published in 1935. Miller, p. 11. 236. Anton Lavinskii, ‘Tesnaia sviaz’ s trudiashimsia – zalog moshi krasnoi armii’ (1927), Barkhatova, no. 76, p. 89. 237. Mikhail Dlugach, ‘Osoaviakhimovtsy, v sovmestnykh manevrakh s RKKA gotov’tes’ k oborone SSSR’ (1930), Barkhatova, no. 165, p. 171. 238. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Zashchita otechestva est’ sviashchennyi dolg kazhdogo grazhdanina SSSR!’ (1941), Barkhatova, no. 207, p. 210. 239. Mariia Bri-Bein, ‘Kazhdaia komsomolka dolzhna obladet’ boevoi tekhnikoi Oborony SSSR’ (1932), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 236, p. 75. 240. N. Borov and Grigorii Zamskii, ‘Usilim oboronu morskikh granits SSSR’ (1932), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 239, p. 75. 241. Anton Lavinskii, ‘Krasnaia armiia shkol grazhdanina’ (1927), Barkhatova, no. 75, p. 89. 242. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Nasha armiia est’ armiia osvobozhdeniia trudiashchikhsia’ (1939, quoting Stalin), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 247, p. 78. 243. Vasilii Elkin, ‘Da zdravstvuet krasnaia armiia – vooruzhennyi otriad proletarskoi revoliutsii’ (1933), Barkhatova, no. 187, p. 192. 244. Gustav Klutsis, ‘Da zdravstvuet nasha schastlivaia sotsialisticheskaia rodina. Da zdravstvuet nash liubimyi velikii Stalin!’ (1935), Barkhatova, no. 205, p. 209. 245. Aleksei Kokorekin, ‘Da zdravstvuet nepobedimaia Krasnaia Armiia!’ (1937), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 244, p. 78. 246. Iosif Iang, ‘Krasnaia armiia vernyi strazh strany sovetov’ (1930), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 125. 247. Aleksei Kokorekin, ‘Da zdravstvuet krasnaia armiia Vernyi strazh zavoevanii oktiabria’ (1933), Baburina (Soviet), p. 71. 248. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Podat’ ruku pomoshchi bratskim narodam Zapadnoi Ukrainy i Zapadnoi Belorussii – nasha sviashennaia obiazannost’!’ (1939), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 126. 249. Nikolai Zhukov, ‘Da zdravstvuet sovetskie letchiki, gordye sokoly nashei rodiny!’ (1939), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 263, p. 83. 250. Viktor Dobrovol’skii, ‘Da zdravstvuet moguchaia aviatsiia strany sotsializma!’ (1939), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 261, p. 83. 251. Viktor Deni, Nikolai Dolgorukov and A. Yumashev, ‘Kto silen v vozdukhe, tot v nashe vremia voobshche silen’ (1938), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 265, p. 84. 252. The actual quotation is ‘Life has become better, comrades; life has become more joyous, and when you are living joyously, work turns out well.’ I. V. Stalin, ‘Rech na pervom vsesoiuznom soveshchanii Stakhanovtsev’, Stalin (Sochineniia), vol. I (xiv), p. 89. 253. See the tables loaded with food in Arkadii Plastov’s 1937 painting ‘Kolkhoznyi prazdnik’, Bown, pp. 12–13. 254. On material well-being see Stalin (Report to the Seventeenth Party Congress), Works, vol. 13, esp. pp. 340–6.

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255. Grigorii Shegal’, ‘Doloi kukhonnoe rabstvo!’ (1931), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 90, p. 33. 256. Boris Deikin, ‘8 marta den’ vosstaniia rabotnits protiv kukhonnogo rabstva’ (1932), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 97, p. 35 which shows a woman from a factory helping another woman out from under the drudgery of housework. 257. Groys and Hollein, p. 221. 258. Vera Gitsevich, ‘Razvernem massovoe stroitel’stvo stolovykh!’ (1932), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 215, p. 66. 259. Poskrebyshev, ‘Daesh’ iasli’, Barkhatova, no. 161, p. 167. 260. Georgii Rublev, ‘Tsentral’nyi park kul’tury i otdykha, Krymskii val no.9’ (1931), Barkhatova, no. 160, p. 166. 261. This had also been a theme in the late 1920s. Sergei Vlasov, ‘Spartakiada’ (1927), Barkhatova, no. 80, p. 92. For the 1930s, see Aleksandr Deineka, ‘Rabotat’, stroit’ i ne nyt’!’ (1933), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 494, p. 156. 262. Unknown artist, ‘Foto apparat na sluzhbu sotsialisticheskomu stroitelstvu’ (1931), Barkhatova, no. 162, p. 168. 263. Evgeniia Georgieva, ‘Teper’ i ia budu s korovoi’ (1934), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), p. 53. 264. Gustav Klutsis, ‘Kul’turno zhit’ – proizvoditel’no rabotat’ (1932), Barkhatova, no. 190, p. 195. 265. Konstantin Zotov, ‘Liuboi krest’ianin, kolkhoznik ili edinolichnik imeet teper’ vozmozhnost’ zhit’ po-chelovecheskii’ (1934), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 460, p. 147. 266. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Schastlivye rodiatsia pod sovetskoi zvezdoi!’ (1936), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), p. 78. 267. Petr Karachentsov, ‘Za sotsialisticheskuiu rodiny, za schastlivuiu zhizn’ golosuet polnopravnaia sovetskaia zhenshchina!’ (1937), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 117. 268. Lazar Lisitskii and Sof’ia Lisitskaia, ‘Kto slaven i znaten v strane sotsializma’ (1938), Baburina (Rossiia), p. 112. There is a quotation from Stalin on this poster. 269. Marina Volkova, ‘Leninskaia natsional’naia politika – zalog sotsialisticheskogo rastsveta otstalykh natsional’nostei sovetskogo severa’ (1934), Baburina (Soviet), p. 60. 270. Konstantin Urbetis, ‘Pri sovetskoi vlasti stalosia, o chem prezhde v skazkakh mechtalosia’ (1935), Baburina (Soviet), p. 64. 271. For Stalin’s comment, see I. V. Stalin, ‘Rech’ na pervom vsesoiuznom soveshchanii stakhanovtsev’, Stalin (Sochineniia), vol. 1 (xiv), p. 89. 272. B. Efimov and Mark Ioffe, ‘Zhit’ stalo luchshe, zhit’ stalo veselee’ (1936), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 100, p. 36. 273. Pavel Sokolov-Skalia, ‘Cheliuskintsam i spasshim ikh geroicheskim letchikam plamennyi proletarskii privet!’ (1934), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 102, p. 36. 274. Although some posters did refer to dirigibles. Isaak Rabichev, ‘Daesh’ sovetskii dirizhibl’ (1930), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 63. 275. Viktor Dobrovolskii, ‘Da zdravstvuet moguchaia aviatsiia strany sotsializma!’, Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 92. 276. Palmer (Dictatorship), chs. 7 and 8. 277. Petr Karachentsov, ‘Bol’shevistskii privet otvazhnym zavoevateliam severnogo poliusa! Net takikh krepostei, kotorykh bol’sheviki ne mogli by vziat’ (1937), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 262, p. 83. 278. Aleksandr Zelenskii, ‘Novost’. Trebuite vsiudu v pachke papirosy ‘Safo’ (1929), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 526, p. 167. 279. Unknown artist, ‘Ia p’iu pivo i vody tol’ko zavoda Iuzhnaia Bavariia’ (1928), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 527, p. 167.


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280. Aleksandr Zelenskii, ‘Luchshaia dlia obuvi pasta ‘Shtoko’’ (1929), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 192, p. 61. 281. A. Miller, ‘Vsem poprobovat’ pora by, kak vkusny i nezhny kraby’ (1938), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 534, p. 169. 282. A. Miller, ‘Belaia noch’.’ Pudra. Dukhi. Krem’ (1937), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 84. 283. Boris Takke, ‘Shokolad s molokom. Mossel’prom’ (1929), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 56. 284. Izrail’ Bograd, ‘‘Sanit’ – zubna pasta’ (1938), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 85. 285. A. Koltunovich and L. Zolotarevskii, ‘V magazinakh soiuzmekhtorga imeiutsia v bol’shom vybore belich’ i manto’ (1937), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), no. 70. 286. Anatolii Bel’skii, ‘Chapaev’ (1935), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 572, p. 182. 287. Hoffman, chs. 1 and 3. 288. Bown, p. 114. Excellent examples of these stereotypes are to be found in many of the paintings of Aleksandr Deneika during this period. 289. Petrone, passim; Hoffman, pp. 130–1, 144, 154 and 183; Brooks (Thank You), pp. 243–5; Davies (‘Cult’), p. 144–7; and Davies (‘Us against Them’), pp. 70–89. 290. Pravda, 12 November 1918. 291. Izvestiia, 31 December 1922. 292. There were many other proposals for memorials to the dead leader at the time which were separate from the proposed iconic building. 293. On Stalin’s role in making the decision, see F. I. Chuev, ‘Tak govoril Kaganovich: Ispoved’ stalinskogo apostola’, Chuev (Kaganovich-Shepilov), p. 56. For a more sceptical view, see Hoisington, p. 62. Also see Khan-Magomedov (‘K istorii’), pp. 21–3, and the discussion in Gentes, pp. 78–82. On Kaganovich’s responsibility for much of the destruction of old Moscow, see Evseev, pp. 173–91. Kaganovich was worried that because he was Jewish he would be blamed for the destruction of the Cathedral. 294. Molotov was in charge of the preparations for the building of the Palace. As early as August 1932 Stalin had said that Iofan’s design was ‘the best’, while in May 1933 the Politburo adopted his design as the winner of the competition. For Stalin’s view, see his letter of 7 August 1932 to Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Molotov, Khlevniuk et al., p. 269. For the Politburo decision, see the Politburo Protocol 137, 56/43, RGASPI f.17, op. 163, d.981 (10 May 1933). 295. Pravda, 20 February 1934. For the designs, see Stroitel’stvo Moskvy 3, March 1932, pp. 13–34; 5–6, May–June 1933 (whole issue is entitled ‘Dvorets sovetov – pamiatnik leninu’); 3, March 1934, pp. 4–11. 296. Doubts were raised about the wisdom of such a statue in terms of how it would be constructed, wind resistance, and visibility; it was argued that owing to weather conditions and air quality, the statue would be invisible from the ground for 275 days per year. RGASPI f.82, op. 2, d.504, l.120–7. On Molotov opposing such a statue and being persuaded to go along by Stalin and Voroshilov, see Chuev (Sto), p. 265. 297. For precise directions on this coming from the Politburo, see Politburo Protocol 64, 92, RGASPI f.17, op. 163, d.1199 (26 September 1938). For further details, see the report from head of construction Prokof’ev. RGASPI f.82, op. 2, d.506, l.26–39. 298. The head of construction, Mikhailov, and his two deputies were arrested in 1937 as ‘enemies of the people’, and there were frequent reports about poor work on the job. On the arrest, see RGASPI f.82, op. 2, d.504, l.155–8. On deficiencies in work, RGASPI f.82, op. 2, d.504, l.129–34; d.505, l.8–38, 69–71, 97–124, 139–42, 144; d.506, l.1, 2–20, 76–9.

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299. For suspension of work owing to sub-soil water levels, see the 29 May 1941 report, RGASPI f.82, op. 2, d.506, l.80. 300. This was despite continuing appeals to Molotov and Stalin by the head of construction Prokof’ev and chief architect Iofan. RGASPI f.82, op. 2, d.506, l.98 (1941); 99–100, 101, 104–6 (1942); 108–9, 112, 113, 115–16 (1943); 124, 125, 126, 127, 128–40 (1945); 146 (1946); 148–53, 154 (1947); 160–1 (1948); 162–3 (1949); and 164 (1952). 301. On debates at this time, see Hudson, and Kopp (Town). 302. Individual buildings were separately commissioned from teams of architects, so there remained room for variation in architectural design, even if it was all subject to political oversight. 303. Kaganovich (Za sotsialisticheskuiu), p. 15. 304. ‘O moskovskom gorodskom khoziaistve i o razvitii gorodskogo khoziaistva SSSR’, Pravda, 17 June 1931. 305. Colton, pp. 274–7. 306. Cited in Colton, p. 274. 307. The report is in Pravda, 30 July 1934. 308. ‘O general’nom plane rekonstruktsii goroda Moskvy’, Pravda, 11 July 1935. Also in General’nyi plan, pp. 1–20. Also see Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 17 July 1935. Plans were also approved by the end of the 1930s for thirteen other cities of the USSR. 309. General’nyi plan, p. 34. 310. ‘Rezoliutsiia partaktiva g. Moskvu po dokladu tovarishcha Khrushcheva, N.S.’, 13 July 1935, General’nyi plan, p. 28. 311. In 1936 modern design was censured as ‘formalist’, and the 1937 I Congress of the Union of Architects signed on to this. Berton, p. 222. Franker use of classical and renaissance motifs was apparent from the 1930s. 312. As early as 1926 a regulation had banned buildings exceeding six storeys within the Garden Ring, although some as high as ten storeys had already been built there. KhanMagomedov (Pioneers), p. 404. 313. Colton, p. 257. 314. On the metro and its iconic status, see Jenks, pp. 697–724. On the development of the tramway system, see Andreevskii, pp. 49–101. 315. The metro was foreshadowed in Kaganovich’s June 1931 speech noted above. He discussed the course of its construction and its relationship with the plan of Moscow in July 1934, Kaganovich (O stroitel’stve), in December 1934 (Poslednii etap), and its opening in May 1935 (Pobeda). 316. On workers wanting to call it after Stalin but this being overruled by the General Secretary, see Bouvard, p. 39. 317. Bouvard, pp. 61–4. 318. Kaganovich (O stroitel’stve), pp. 13–14. 319. Kaganovich (Pobeda), no page no. 320. For some comparative dimensions, see Jenks, p. 710. 321. Kosarev, pp. 114–33 and Kettering (‘Sverdlov’). 322. The dog was a well-known symbol of the security services. Jenks, p. 711. Inclusion of a figure from the security services was significant at this time given the current heightened climate of suspicion about ‘enemies of the people’. 323. Castillo (Gorki), p. 62. For a contemporary discussion, see Chernyshev. 324. For a discussion of these, see Arkhitektura Moskvy. Also Ryabushin and Smolina. 325. Arkhitektura Moskvy, p. 181.


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326. For Kaganovich’s reasoning behind this, plus his fear that the Jew Kaganovich and Georgian Stalin would be seen as destroying ‘Russian’ monuments, see Chuev (Kaganovich-Shepilov), pp. 57–8. 327. The number of state-protected buildings in Moscow also fell; from 216 in 1928 to 117 in 1932 and 74 in 1935. Colton, pp. 267–8. 328. Cited in Stites, p. 243. 329. The re-use of ecclesiastical buildings was a common practice. For example, Novodevichy Convent became workers’ housing and then a museum before being returned to the Church after the war, Donskoi Monastery became a museum of atheism and then of architecture, Novospasskii Monastery became a forced labour camp, and Andronikov Monastery became a forced labour camp, a workers’ hostel and then a museum of early Russian art. Brooke, pp. 247–50. 330. Between 1929 and 1935 they averaged twelve per annum, but only five per annum between 1936 and 1952. Colton, p. 837. 331. For a picture, see Bown, p. 83. 332. Pravda, 20 May 1935, p. 3. Although for a description of the attempt to build a socialist city in Magnitogorsk that does have echoes of the notion of ‘barracks socialism’, see Kotkin (Magnetic), ch. 3. 333. On the way in which such celebrations represented a particular view of the structure of Soviet society and how they could also be means of dissent, see Petrone, ch. 2. 334. Stites, p. 228. 335. Vildrac, pp. 25–8. 336. Fulop-Miller, pp. 136–9. 337. Riggio and West, p. 67. These observations relate to the march on 7 November 1927. 338. The first physical culture parade was in 1931. Petrone, p. 30. 339. Stites, pp. 228–9. 340. Stites, pp. 219–20. 341. Pravda, 1 July 1935. 342. According to one visitor to Moscow in the 1930s, at one May Day parade there were 500 aeroplanes flying in formation. Martin, p. 174. 343. For a list of actual holidays as at 1941, see Binns (pt 1), pp. 604–5 n. 5. 344. Stites, p. 234. 345. Singaevskii, pp. 175–207. 346. Hoffman, ch. 2. 347. For the argument that 270 delegates voted against Stalin at the XVII Congress, see Medvedev (K sudu), pp. 315–16. According to Radzhikovsky, Stalin received 300 votes fewer than Kirov. Leonid Radzhikovsky, ‘December 1’, Moscow News 48, 27 November 1988, p. 6. 348. For an excellent discussion of this sort of forum, see Getty (Samokritika), pp. 49–70. 349. This was reflected in the development of heroes discussed above. In regard to criticism and self-criticism, see Kharkhordin, pp. 142–66. 350. Getty (Origins). 351. Kojevnikov. 352. Getty (Samokritika), p. 59 and Kharkhordin, pp. 142–66. 353. Goldman, pp. 80–6. 354. Brooks (Pravda), pp. 9–27. Also Geldern (‘Radio’), pp. 44–61. 355. For one discussion of the way posters reflected specific events in and stages of the war, see Aleksandr Shkliaruk, ‘Za nashu pobedu!’, Baburina (Plakaty), pp. 5–15. 356. Pisiotis, pp. 141–56.

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357. Aleksei Kokorekin, ‘Bei fashistskogo gada!’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 25. 358. Viktor Klimashin, ‘Bei nemetskikh zverei!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 128. 359. Viktor Ivanov and Ol’ga Burova, ‘Vrag kovaren – bud’ na cheku!’ (1945), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 190. 360. Viktor Deni, ‘Uznal fashistskii sterviatnik, chto u nas – ne iagniatnik!’ (1944), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 173. 361. Kukryniksy, ‘Besposhchadno razgromim i unichtozhim vraga!’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 5. This showed Hitler’s head and shoulders breaking through a copy of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact. For variations on the image of Hitler, see nos. 13, 20, 21,58, 64, 68, 102, 162, 174 and 196. 362. Viktor Deni, ‘Litso gitlerizma’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 60. Also see posters nos. 103, 129 and 138. 363. Aleksei Sittaro, ‘Krov’ za krov’. Smert’ za smert’’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 81. 364. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Vpered na zapad, krasnye koninki!’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 77. 365. Kukryniksy, ‘B Moskve kalachi, kak ogon’ goriachi’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 39. 366. Viktor Deni, ‘Na Moskvu! Khokh! Ot Moskvy: Okh!’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 66. 367. Nina Vatolina and Nikolai Denisov, ‘Ne boltai!’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 31. 368. Nina Vatolina, ‘Fashizm – zleishii vrag zhenshchin’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 61. 369. Kukryniksy, ‘My zlomu vragu vse otrezhem puti’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 92. 370. Leonid Golovanov, ‘Za chest’ zheny, za zhizn’ detei’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 86. 371. Dementii Shmarinov, ‘Otomsti!’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 88. 372. Fedor Antonov, ‘Boets krasnoi armii! Ty ne dash’ liubimuiu na pozor i beschest’e gitlerovskim soldatam’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 87. 373. Fedor Antonov, ‘Syn moi! Ty vidish’ doliu moiu . . . Gromi fashistiv v sviatom boiu!’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 90. 374. Leonid Golovanov, ‘Spasem sovetskikh rebiat ot nemtsev!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 114. 375. ‘O prazdnovanii XXIV godovshchiny velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., no. 7, pp. 249–50. 376. Dementii Shmarinov, ‘Fashisty ne proidut!’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 10. 377. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Kazhduiu puliu – v nemtsa!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 113. 378. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Za rodinu, za chest’, za svobodu!’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 16. 379. Nikolai Zhukov, ‘Bei nasmert’!’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 95. Also see the 1942 painting by Aleksandr Deineka, ‘The Defence of Sebastopol’. Bown, p. 147. 380. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Bud’ geroem!’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 2. 381. Fedor Antonov, ‘Synok rodimyi moi!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 115. 382. Nikolai Zhukov, ‘Nemetskii tank zdes’ ne proidet!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 111. 383. Boris Mukhin, ‘Zashchitim rodnuiu Moskvu’ (1941) Baburina (Plakaty), no. 56. 384. A. Voloshin, ‘Taran-oruzhie geroev! Slava stalinskim sokolam’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 37. 385. Aleksei Kokorekin, ‘Za rodinu!’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 99. 386. Kukryniksy, ‘Dolg platezhom krasen’ (1941) Baburina (Plakaty), no. 62. 387. Sartori, p. 176. 388. Following Sartori, pp. 176–7. 389. Sartori, p. 185. On the question of the veracity of the Kosmodem’enskaia image, see Sartori, pp. 182–91. 390. Nikolai Avvakumov, ‘Bol’she metalla – bol’she oruzhiia!’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 26.


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391. For example, as a war correspondent, Aleksei Kokorekin, ‘V etoi frontovoi svodke est’ i moi boevoi trud!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 134. 392. For example, Vladimir Serov, ‘Zamenim!’ (1941), and Aleksei Kokorekin, ‘Vse dlia pobedy! Frontu ot zhenshchin SSSR’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), nos. 28 and 83. 393. Viktor Ivanov and Ol’ga Burova, ‘Traktor v pole – chto tank v boiu!’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 84. 394. Vladimir Serov, ‘My otstoiali leningrad. My vosstanovim ego!’ (1944), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 153. 395. Veniamin Pinchuk, ‘Zhenshchiny goroda lenina! Usilim pomosh’ frontu, pomozhem krasnoi armii gromit’ vraga!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 122. 396. Tat’iana Eremina, ‘Partizany, mstite bez poshchady!’ Baburina (Plakaty), no. 80. 397. Explicitly in Lazar’ Lisitskii, ‘Vse dlia fronta! Vse dlia pobedy!’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 68. 398. Tat’iana Eremina, ‘Ubrat’ urozhai do edinogo zerna’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 43. Peasants were also important for the rebuilding of the agricultural economy once the Germans had been driven from their particular areas. For example, Arkadii Plastov, ‘Vosstanovim!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 133. 399. Petr Karachentsov, ‘Ural frontu’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 97. 400. Nikolai Denisov and Nina Vatolina, ‘Grazhdane sovetskogo soiuza, sdavaite teplye veshchi dlia krasnoi armii’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 63. 401. Aleksei Pakhomov, ‘Tovarishchi! Ukrepliaite gruppy samozashchity v domakh!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 108. 402. Isaak Rabichev, ‘Ot narodnoi mesti ne uiti vragu!’ (1941) Baburina (Plakaty), no. 46. 403. Aleksei Pakhomov, ‘Rebiata, zashchishchaite rodinu! Vyslezhivaite vragov, soobshchaite vzroslym!’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 33. 404. Viktor Ivanov and Ol’ga Burova, ‘Uchashchiesia remeslennykh, zhelezno dorozhnykh uchilishch i shkol FZO!’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 82. 405. Leonid Golovanov, ‘Moi papa geroi! A TY?’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 135. 406. Iraklii Toidze, ‘Rodina-mat’ zovet!’ (1941), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 272, p. 86. 407. Iraklii Toidze, ‘Za rodinu-mat’!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 137. 408. Nina Vatolina, ‘Fashizm – zleishii vrag zhenshchin’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 61. 409. Nikolai Zhukov and Viktor Klimashin, ‘Boets, Ukraina zhdet tebia!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 118. 410. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Osvobozhdenye sovetskie liudi!’ (1945), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 176. See also poster no. 178. 411. On the portrayal of women during the war, see Kirschenbaum (‘Our City’), pp. 825–47. 412. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Vpered na zapad krasnye konniki!’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 77. 413. Leonid Golovanov, ‘Doblestnye voiny, krepche beite vraga! Vpered na zapad, za polnoe osvobozhdenie sovetskoi zemli!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 112. 414. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Na zapad!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 131. 415. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Doroga k pobede!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 139. See also poster no. 187. 416. Leonid Golovanov, ‘Doidem do berlina!’ (1944), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 160. 417. Fedor Antonov, ‘Synok rodimyi moi!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 115. 418. Aleksei Kokorekin, ‘Voinu-pobediteliu – vsenarodnaia liubov’!’ (1944), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 170. 419. Vasilii Sur’ianinov, ‘S velikim prazdnikom, tovarishchi!’ (1944), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 171. 420. Viktor Klimashin, ‘Saliut geroiam!’ (1945), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 181.

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421. A. Gorpenko, ‘Slava stalinskoi gvardii!’, (1945), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 180. 422. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Vodruzim nad berlinom znamia pobedy’ (1945), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 191. 423. Nina Vatolina, ‘Zhdem s pobedoi!’ (1945), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 189. 424. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Ty budesh’ zhit’ schastlivo!’ (1944), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 152. 425. Nina Vatolina, ‘Ty khrabro voeval s vragom – voidi, khoziain, v novyi dom!’ (1945), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 201. 426. Mariia Nesterova-Berzina, ‘Dozhdalis’ (1945), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 203. 427. For a discussion of the popular culture, see Brandenberger (National Bolshevism), ch. 9. 428. Other awards included the Medal for Military Service (1938), Medal for Valour (1938), Order of the Patriotic War (1942), Order of Victory (1943), Order of Glory (1943), Order of Maternal Glory (1944), and Medal for Partisan of the Patriotic War (1943). Singaevskii, pp. 175–207. 429. For the text, see Geldern and Stites, pp. 406–7. 430. Dmitrii Moor, ‘Ty chem. Pomog frontu?’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 12. 431. Kukryniksy, ‘B’emsia my zdorovo, kolem otchaianno – vnuki Suvorova, deti Chapaeva’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 11. 432. Pavel Korin’s 1942–3 painting, ‘Aleksandr Nevsky’. Bown, pp. 150–1. 433. Petr Aliakrinskii, ‘Pust’ vdokhnovliaet vas v etoi voine muzhestvennyi obraz nashikh velikikh predkov’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 71. 434. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Slavna bogatyriami zemlia nasha’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 17. 435. Dementii Shmarinov, ‘V bogatyrskikh podvigakh vnuchat vizhu delovskuiu slavu!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 120. 436. Nikolai Dolgorukov, ‘Tak bylo . . . tak budet!’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 4. 437. Psokolov-Skalia, ‘Rossii dvinulis’ syny’ (1942), citing Pushkin, Baburina (Soviet), no. 87. 438. Brooks (‘Pravda’), p. 19. 439. Iraklii Toidze, ‘Klianus’ pobedit’ vraga!’ (1943), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 106. 440. Dementii Shmarinov, ‘Fashisty ne proidut!’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 10. 441. Nikolai Avvakumov, ‘Smert’ nemetsko-fashistskim zakhvatchikam!’ (1944), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 157. 442. Viktor Klimashin, ‘Pervomaiskii saliut pobediteliam!’, Baburina (Plakaty), no. 192. 443. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Geroiam truda – nash boevoi privet!’ (1944), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 158. 444. For a classic image, showing a male worker holding the hammer and a female in peasant’s blouse holding a sickle, see Viktor Ivanov, ‘Krasnoi Armii-Pobeditel’nitse – chest’ i slava!’ (1944), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 159. 445. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Porabotal na slavu!’ (1944), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 147. 446. Anatolii Vasil’ev, ‘Pod znamenem lenina – vpered za rodinu, za nashu pobedu!’ (1944), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 167. 447. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Nashe znamia – znamia pobedy!’ (1945), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 195. 448. Viktor Ivanov and Ol’ga Burova, ‘Nasha pravda. Beites’ do smerti!’ (1942), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 73. 449. Pavel Vandyshev and Leonid Torich, ‘Slava geroiam otechestvennoi voiny! Slava stalinskim sokolam!’ (1941), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 36. 450. A. Gorpenko, ‘Slava stalinskoi gvardii!’ (1945), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 180. 451. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Zheleznodorozhniki! Vypolniaite slovo, dannoe tovarishchu stalinu!’ (1944), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 166.


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452. Nikolai Kochergin, ‘Slava pobediteliam!’ (1945), Baburina (Plakaty), no. 207. 453. ‘Radio Address by M. Molotov’, The German Attack on the USSR (London: AngloRussian Parliamantary Committee, July 1941), pp. 3–4. 454. Stalin, ‘Vystuplenie po radio’, Stalin (O velikoi), pp. 9–17. 455. I. Stalin, ‘24ia godovshchina velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, Stalin (O velikoi), pp. 18–36. 456. I. Stalin, ‘Rech’ na parade krasnoi armii’, Stalin (O velikoi), pp. 37–40. 457. Under ‘the banner of Lenin’ was also mentioned in some of the orders of the day issued in the name of the commissar of defence. See ‘Prikaz narodnogo komissara oborony’ no. 55, 23 February 1942 and no. 130, 1 May 1942, Stalin (O velikoi), pp. 41–8 and 49–58. 458. I. Stalin, ‘25ia godovshchina velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, Stalin (O velikoi), pp. 61–77. 459. ‘Prikaz narodnogo komissara oborony’, Stalin (O velikoi), pp. 78–81. 460. ‘Prikaz verkhovnogo glavnokomanduiushchego’, Stalin (O velikoi), pp. 88–96. 461. ‘Prikaz verkhovnogo glavnokomanduiushchego’, Stalin (O velikoi), pp. 97–104. 462. I. Stalin, ‘26ia godovshchina velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, Stalin (O velikoi), pp. 109–26. 463. ‘Prikaz verkhovnogo glavnokomanduiushchego’, 23 February 1944 and 1 May 1944, Stalin (O velikoi), pp. 134–41 and 142–7. 464. I. Stalin, ‘27ia godovshchina velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, Stalin (O velikoi), pp. 152–69. 465. ‘Vystuplenie tovarishcha I. V. Stalina na priëme v kremle v chest’ komanduiushchikh voiskami krasnoi armii’, Stalin (O velikoi), pp. 196–7. This was captured in a 1947 painting by Mikhail Khmelko, ‘To the Great Russian People’. Bown, p. 201. Khmelko was Ukrainian. 466. Brooks (‘Pravda’), p. 23. 467. Brooks (Thank You), pp. 187–8. 468. The annual number of photographs of Stalin on the front page of Pravda changed as follows: 1940 – 19, 1941 – 21 (14 before June), 1942 – 9, 1943 – 8, 1944 – 17 and 1945 – 37. 469. Yampolsky, pp. 107–8. 470. The new military uniforms, with more elaborate insignia, epaulettes and braid, introduced in spring 1943 symbolised a more hierarchical image of the military, and one which went with the renewed focus on the powerful state. 471. On this beginning in 1939 at the battle of Lake Khasan, see Brooks (Thank You), p. 155. 472. Tumarkin (Living), pp. 103–4. 473. I. V. Stalin, ‘Rech’ na predvybornom sobranii izbiratelei Stalinskogo izbiratel’nogo okruga goroda Moskvy’, Stalin (Sochineniia), vol. 3 (xvi), pp. 4–7. Also Speeches. 474. For the way war service often wiped away earlier misdemeanours, see Weiner (‘The Making’), pp. 654–8. 475. Weiner (Making Sense), p. 23. 476. ‘Ko vsem izbirateliam, k rabochim i rabotnitsam, krest’ianam i krest’iankam, k voinam krasnoi armii i voenno-morskogo flota, k sovetskoi intelligentsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 7–16. 477. Brandenberger (National Bolshevism), pt 3. On the way in which the post-war discussion of collaboration during the war had an at least implicit anti-Ukrainian undertone, see the discussion in Weiner (Making Sense), pp. 139–90.

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478. ‘Ko vsem izbirateliam, rabochim i rabotnitsam, krest’ianam i krest’iankam, k voinam sovetskoi armii i voenno-morskogo flota, k sovetskoi intelligentsia’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 203–13. 479. Petr Golub’ and Anatolii Chernov, ‘Pogliadi: poet i pliashet vsia Sovetskaia strana’ (1946), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 111, p. 39. 480. Boris Ioganson, ‘Za schastlivuiu iunost’ golsuet Sovetskaia molodezh’ (1946) Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 117, p. 40. 481. Aleksei Lavrov, ‘Sbylis’ mechty narodnye!’ (1950), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 128, p. 43. 482. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Liubite rodinu!’, Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 123. 483. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Pri kapitalizme . . . Pri sotsializme!’ (1948), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 130, p. 43. 484. Viktor Koretskii, ‘V stranakh kapitalizma – bespravie truda!’ (1948), Snokpov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 361, p. 115. 485. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Moe schast’e zavisit ot vashikh uspekhov!’ (1947), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 359, p. 115. 486. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Kolkhozam, sovkhozam, MTS – elektroenergiiu’ (1950), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 415, p. 132. 487. Yurii Chudov, ‘I my budem letchikami!’ (1951), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 129. 488. Nikolai Zhukov, ‘Okruzhim sirot materinskoi laskoi i liubov’iu!’ (1947), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 466, p. 149. 489. Mariia Bri-Bein, ‘Slava nashei liubimoi rodine!’ (1950), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 477, p. 152. 490. Vladimir Ladiagin, ‘Vsiudu svetlye, krasivye my sady otkroem detskie’ (1946), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 468, p. 149. 491. Viktor Govorkov, ‘S novosel’em!’ (1946), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), no. 81. 492. Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), nos. 503–10, pp. 160–1. 493. Mariia Nesterova-Berzina, ‘Trudiashchimsia – zdorovyi otdykh!’ (1948), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 118. 494. Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), nos. 519, 542–5, 547 and 550, pp. 164 and 171–3. 495. Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 578, p. 183. 496. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Kino – v massy!’ (1946), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 570, p. 180. 497. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Vo imia kommunizma’ (1951), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 412, p. 132. Lenin and Stalin were shown in this poster discussing something while looking at a map. 498. Bonnell, p. 10. 499. Rüthers, p. 256. 500. Bown, p. 192. 501. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Chest’iu semi dorozhi!’ (1949), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 360, p. 115. 502. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Chest’ i slava sovetskomu uchiteliu!’ (1951), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 470, p. 150. 503. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Kul’turno torgovat’ – pochetnyi trud!’ (1949), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 362, p. 115. 504. Georgii Bedarev and Nikolai Popov, ‘Starshego slyshai razumnuiu rech’: – den’gi v sberkasse nado berech’!’ (1949), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 472, p. 150. 505. Ruben Sur’ianinov, ‘Liubite knigu — istochnik znaniia’ (1952), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 475, p. 151. 506. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Esli khochesh byt’ zdorov – zakaliaisia!’ (1950), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 128.


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507. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Komu dostaetsia natsional’nyi dokhod?’ (1950), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 125, p. 42. For the theme of rebuilding after the war, see Viktor Koretskii, ‘Vosstanovim!’ (1947), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 112. For paintings see Pavel Sokolov-Skalia et al., ‘On the Great Stalinist Construction Site’ (1951) and Anatolii Levitin and Iurii Tulin, ‘A Fresh Edition of the Factory Newspaper’ (1950), Bown, pp. 198 and 199. 508. Viktor Govorkov, ‘V poru rabochuiu pashut noch’iu!’ (1947), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 353, p. 113. For the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, see Vera Livanova, ‘Gotov’tes’ k vsesoiuznoi sel’skokhoziaistvennoi vystavke’ (1950), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 391, p. 125. For paintings, see Aleksandr Bubnov, ‘Corn’ (1948) and Andrei Mylnikov, ‘In Peaceful Fields’ (1950), Bown, pp. 194 and 195. 509. Viktor Ivanov, ‘5-letky v 4 goda – vypolnim!’ (1948), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 351, p. 113. 510. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Slava russkomy narodu – narodu-bogatyriu, narodu-sozidateliu!’ (1946), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 109. 511. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Za narodnoe schast’e!’ (1950), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 115, p. 40. 512. Viktor Ivanov and Ol’ga Burova, ‘Ia golosuiu za kandidatov bloka kommunistov i bespartiinykh!’ (1947), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 116, p. 40. 513. Boris Ioganson, ‘Za schastlivuiu iunost’ golosuet sovetskaia molodezh’!’ (1946), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 117, p. 40. 514. Viktor Ivanov and Ol’ga Burova, ‘Vse na vybory!’ (1947), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 121, p. 41. 515. Iraklii Toidze, ‘Ia starik, vy menia ponimaete’ (1947), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 118, p. 40. 516. Leonid Golovanov, ‘Deputat – sluga naroda’ (1947), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 120. 517. Mikhail Solov’ev, ‘Takikh zhenshchin ne byvalo i ne moglo byt’ v staroe vremia’ (1950), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), no. 100. 518. Bonnell, p. 10. 519. ‘O roste partii i o merakh po usileniiu partiino-organizatsionnoi i partiino-politicheskoi raboty s vnov’ vstypivshimi b VKP(b)’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 24–30. 520. ‘O podgotovke perepodgotovke rukovodiashchikh partiinykh i sovetskikh rabotnikov’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 39–48. 521. ‘O rabote ts.k. KP (b) Belorussii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 80–93 (January 1947). 522. ‘O nedostatkakh i merakh uluchsheniia raboty s agitatorami v stalingradskoi partiinoi organizatsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 152–7 (November 1947). 523. ‘O sostoianii partiino-politicheskoi raboty na ugol’nykh shakhtakh donbassa’ (February 1948), KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 165–70. 524. For the argument that this reflects a vision of Soviet society cast primarily in Russian terms, see Brandenberger (National Bolshevism), ch. 14. 525. See the notion of ‘camps’ in Pravda, 5 October 1947. 526. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Ne balui!’ (1948), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 114, p. 39. 527. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Frazy i . . . bazy’ (1952), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 134, p. 44. 528. Konstantin Ivanov, ‘Miru-mir’ (1951–2), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 129, p. 43. 529. Viktor Koretskii, ‘My trebuem mira!’ (1950), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 126, p. 42. 530. Leonid Golovanov, ‘Krasnoi armii – slava!’ (1946), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 251, p. 79. 531. Petr Karachentsov, ‘I v kazhdom propellere dyshit Spokoistvie nashikh granits!’ (1952), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 268, p. 85. 532. Petr Golub’, ‘Ne boltai u telefona!’ (1951), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 329, p. 106.

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533. Respectively, Viktor Ivanov, ‘Pust’ zhivet i krepnet nerushimaia druzhba i sotrudnichestvo sovetskogo i kitaiskogo narodov!’ (1951) and Viktor Koretskii, ‘Koreiskii narod ne slomit’!’ (1953), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), nos. 133 and 132, pp. 44 and 43. 534. During the war, President Mikhail Kalinin had argued for the construction of ‘socialist cities’, even if this was more expensive than a simple rebuilding. The construction of Stalingrad in particular reflects this priority. Bown, pp. 141–3. On the plans for the rebuilding of Soviet cities with significant monumental centres, see Kosenkova. 535. The fate of the war in Soviet symbolism is evident here in the absence of any plan to create a symbolic centre to its memory in Moscow. Nor was a monumental centre of memory erected in Leningrad. On Leningrad, see Kirschenbaum (Legacy), ch. 4. 536. For the 13 January 1947 resolution on these buildings, see Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 28 February 1947, Gershkovich and Korneev, and Vas’kin and Nazarenko. 537. Kul’tura i zhizn’, 1949, cited in Berton, p. 236. 538. On the individual buildings, see Arkhitektura Moskvy, pp. 240–55. For a general discussion, including the significance of their location, see Schlögel,ch. 2. 539. Tarkhanov and Kavtaradze, p. 141. 540. For a partial list of when Metro stations were built, see Schlögel, p. 287. 541. Tarkhanov and Kavtaradze, p. 165. The station also displayed the text of Stalin’s 7 November 1941 pronouncement. Bouvard, p. 213. 542. Ryabushin and Smolina, p. 29. 543. Colton, p. 344. 544. ‘On Measures to Improve the Protection of Cultural Landmarks’: Colton, p. 351. Important in this was restoration work done on Andronikov Monastery as part of the preparations for the 800th anniversary of the foundation of Moscow. 545. See the comments by Yasnov at the XIX Congress, Pravda, 12 October 1952. 546. The statue was not finished until 1954. For a picture, see Bown, p. 189. 547. ‘Direktivy po piatomu piatiletnemu planu razvitiia SSSR na 1951–1955 gody’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 262–85. 548. ‘Ob izmenenii naimenovaniia partii’, KPSS v rez, vol. 8, p. 285. 549. J. V. Stalin, ‘Concerning the Errors of Comrade L. D. Yaroshenko’, Stalin (Economic), pp. 59–86. 550. Stalin, ‘Concerning the Errors’, p. 68. 551. Stalin, ‘Concerning the Errors’, pp. 68–70. 552. Some Soviet theorists seem not to have agreed with this view, but their opinions carried much less authority than those of Stalin. Weiner (Making Sense), pp. 33–4. 553. For a report of representations of Stalin and other leaders during the celebration of the revolution in 1945, see Neyret, p. 70. Stalin even appeared in the first monument to the war erected in Stalingrad. For a comment by John Steinbeck in 1947 about the ubiquity of images of Stalin, see Bown, p. 175. 554. Demaitre, p. 80. For one description of the birthday celebrations, see Brooks (Thank You), pp. 219–23. 555. Respectively, Pravda, 21 January 1947, and Dzhambul, ‘My pomnim den’’, Chtenie (Grade 4 reader) (Moscow, 1950), p. 17. 556. Pravda, 21 December 1945. Also see the 1948 painting by Fedor Reshetnikov, ‘Generalissimus I. V. Stalin’ and, in a different vein, Fedor Shurpin, ‘The Morning of Our Motherland’ (1948). Bown, pp. 164 and 178–9. On the depiction of Stalin with a map as suggestive of his authority, see Yampolsky, pp. 108–9. 557. M. Isakovskii, ‘Pesnia o Staline’, Rodnaia rech’ (Grade 3 reader) (Moscow, 1945), p. 134.


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558. See the piece of collective statuary by Evgeniia Blinova and Pavel Balandin, ‘I. V. Stalin among the People’ (1950) which was placed in Taganskaia Metro station and the 1949 painting by Dmitrii Mochalskii, ‘They’ve Seen Stalin (After the Demonstration)’. Bown, pp. 177 and 180. 559. Yampolsky, p. 109. 560. For example, Nikolai Tomskii’s 1947 statue ‘Stalin’ and Dmitrii Nalbandian’s 1950 painting ‘A Great Friendship’. Bown, pp. 176 and 179. 561. For example, on history see Barber and Enteen, and on psychology Joravsky. On Gorky’s role and developments at this time, see Fitzpatrick (‘Culture and Politics’).

4 AN EVERYDAY VISION, 1953–1985 1. ‘To All Party Members, To All Toilers of the Soviet Union’, McNeal (Resolutions), vol. 4, pp. 22–4. 2. ‘Po dokladu tov. N. S. Khrushchev “O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh”, XX s’ezd, vol. 2, p. 498. 3. ‘O preodolenii kul’ta lichnosti i ego posledstvii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 9, pp. 111–29. 4. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS’, XXII s’ezd, vol. 3, p. 220. 5. ‘O mavzolee Vladimira Il’icha Lenina’, XXII s’ezd, vol. 3, p. 362. 6. In 1957, the CC decided that no town should bear the name of a living person, so many towns then reverted to their former names. On the removal of Stalin’s name, see Bursa, pp. 180–1. 7. ‘Ko vsem izbirateliam, k rabochim i rabotnitsam, krest’ianam i krest’iankam, k sovetskoi intelligentsii, k voinam sovetskoi armii i voenno-morskogo flota’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 346–58. 8. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XX s’ezd, vol. 2, p. 409. 9. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XX s’ezd, vol. 2, p. 422. 10. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XX s’ezd, vol. 2, p. 424. 11. Pravda, 11 January 1955. 12. ‘O dne pamiati V. I. Lenina’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 453–4. 13. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XX s’ezd, vol. 2, p. 409. 14. Respectively, ‘O leninskikh premiiakh za naibolee vydaiushchiesia raboty v oblasti nauki, tekhniki, literatury i iskusstva’, KPSS v rez., 9, pp. 136–8, dated 15 August 1956, and ‘Ob izdanii pol’nogo sobraniia sochinenii V. I. Lenina’, KPSS v rez., vol. 9, pp. 154–5, dated 8 January 1957. 15. ‘O mavzolee Vladimira Il’icha Lenina’, XXII s’ezd, p. 362. 16. ‘O 90-i godovshchine so dnia rozhdeniia V. I. Lenina’, KPSS v rez., vol. 9, pp. 512–17. 17. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS’, XXII s’ezd, vol. 3, pp. 220–2. 18. ‘Po otchetu’, XXII s’ezd, vol. 3, p. 220. 19. Alekseev, p. 10. 20. For examples of references to him, see many delegates’ speeches from the XXI Congress, Vneocherednoi. 21. Bown, pp. 181 and 183. 22. Nor was there much emphasis on the party or the October Revolution. 23. Groys, p. 76 and Bown, p. 230. 24. Pravda, 3 February 1955. 25. Pravda, 15 March 1953 and 21 March 1954. 26. ‘Ob antipartiinoi gruppe Malenkova G. M., Kaganovicha, L. M., Molotova, V. M.’, KPSS v rez., vol. 9, pp. 184–9.

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27. ‘Ob uluchshenii partiino-politicheskoi raboty v sovetskoi armii i flote’, KPSS v rez., vol. 9, pp. 209–11. 28. ‘O dal’neishem uvelichenii proizvodstva zerna v strane i ob osvoenii tselinnykh i zalezhnykh zemel’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 387–8. 29. ‘O krupnykh nedostatkakh v nauchno-ateisticheskoi propaganda i merakh ee uluchsheniia’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 428–32. 30. ‘O sushchestvennykh nedostatkakh v strukture ministerstv i vedomstv SSSR i merakh po uluchsheniiu raboty gosudarstvennogo apparata’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 438–45 (1954). By the early 1960s there were also serious problems in the performance of party officials. For example, N. S. Khrushchev, ‘Razvitie ekonomiki SSSR i partiinoe rukovodstvo narodnym khoziaistvom’, Pravda, 20 November 1962. 31. ‘O merakh po dal’neishemu uluchsheniiu podgotovki rukovodiashchikh partiinykh i sovetskikh kadrov’, KPSS v rez., vol. 9, pp. 106–10. 32. ‘O ser’eznykh nedostatkakh v rassmotrenii pisem, zhalob i zaiavlenii trudiashchikhsia’, KPSS v rez., vol. 9, pp. 251–5. 33. ‘O sostoianii i merakh uluchsheniia massovo-politicheskoi raboty sredi trudiashchikhsia stalinskoi oblasti’, KPSS v rez., vol. 9, pp. 421–35. 34. Gill and Pitty, esp. pp. 102–14. In particular on Riazan oblast, pp. 108–9. 35. Pravda, 22 January 1961. 36. ‘O merakh dal’neishego razvitiia sel’skogo khoziaistva SSSR’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 303–45, esp. p. 345. 37. ‘Ko vsem izbirateliam, k rabochim i rabotnitsam, krest’ianam i krest’iankam, k sovetskoi intelligentsia, k voinam sovetskoi armii i voenno-morskogo flota’, KPSS v rez., vol. 8, pp. 346–58. 38. ‘Otchetnyi doklad Tsentral’nogo Komiteta Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza XX s’ezdu partii. Doklad Pervogo sekretaria TsK KPSS tov. N. S. Khrushcheva’ and ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS’, XX s’ezd, vol. 1, pp. 9–120, and vol. 2, pp. 409–27. 39. Izvestiia, 13 June 1954. 40. ‘O podgotovke novoi programmy kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza’, XX s’ezd, p. 499. 41. ‘Po dokladu tovarishcha N. S. Khrushcheva “O kontrol’nykh tsifrakh razvitiia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR na 1959–1965 gody”’, Vneocherednoi, vol. 2, pp. 429–55. 42. ‘Po otchetu tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS’, XXII s’ezd, vol. 3, pp. 205–27. 43. ‘Programma kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza’, XXII s’ezd, pp. 229–335. 44. This conception went by a number of different names, and these are illustrated in successive slogans for the May Day and October Revolution celebrations. Up until 1956, reference was to ‘the people’s democracies’, 1957–60 ‘the socialist camp’, and 1960–4 ‘the world socialist system’. 45. Programma (1961), p. 274. 46. The launching of a campaign against local nationalism in 1959 is instructive here. 47. Programma (1961), p. 276. Bold in original. 48. N. S. Khrushchev, ‘Otchetnyi doklad tsentral’nogo komiteta kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza XX s’ezdu partii’, XX s’ezd, vol. 1, p. 118. 49. N. S. Khrushchev, ‘O kontrol’nykh tsifrakh razvitiia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR na 1959–1965 goda’, Vneocherednoi, vol. 1, p. 106. 50. Khrushchev, ‘O kontrol’nykh’, p. 107. 51. Although he still seems to have envisaged a number of stages in this process. In the words of one scholar, ‘in Khrushchev’s view, socialism was an historical phase consisting of two


52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

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stages – basic socialism and the full-scale construction of communism – and communism would be a phase that also would include two stages, basic communism and finished communism.’ Evans (‘Developed Socialism’), p. 94. Although this position from 1959 was changed in the 1961 Programme which called for the direction of mass activism through state agencies. See the discussion in Breslauer. Although the anti-parasite campaign of the early 1960s seems to throw this into some question. ‘Ob uluchshenii deiatel’nosti sovetov deputatov trudiashchikhsia i usilenii ikh sviazei s massami’, KPSS v rez., vol. 9, p. 157. Differences over this were a major feature of that conflict. Breslauer, pp. 24–30. Viktor Govorkov, ‘U nikh lish’ dlia bogatykh izobilie. A my stremimsia k izobiliiu dlia vsekh’ (1957), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 138, p. 45. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Stroit’ prochno, sdavat’ dosrochno!’ (1955), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 358, p. 115. Viktor Ivanov and Ol’ga Burova, ‘Rabotniki legkoi promyshlennosti i torgovli!’ (1955), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 363, p. 116. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Zasluzhite pokhvalu!’ (1954), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 369, p. 117. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Kak rabotal – tak i zarabotal’ (1964), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 338, p. 108. Vera Livanova and Tat’iana Livanova, ‘Khleb rodine!’ (1962), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), no. 114. Oleg Savostiuk, ‘Khoroshi moi krasavitsy – vsem na vystavke ponraviatsia!’ (1955), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 142. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Bud’ schastliv, rodnoi!’ (1955), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 446, p. 142. Vasilii Sur’ianinov, ‘S prazdnikom 8 marta’ (1963), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), no. 115. Vladimir Kalenskii, ‘Solntse, vozduk i voda mnozhat sily dlia truda!’ (1962), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 518, p. 163. Viktor Ivanov, ‘I zhizn’ khorosha, i zhit’ khorosho!’ (1961), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 372, p. 118. Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), nos. 541 and 546, pp. 171 and 172. Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), nos. 580–90, pp. 184–6. Valentin Viktorov, ‘Slava pervomu kosmonavtu Iu.A. Gagarinu!’ (1961), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 147, p. 47. This is reflected in the presence in the Programme of a so-called ‘moral code of the builder of communism’. Programma (1961), pp. 317–18. Mariia Marize-Krasnokutskaia, ‘Starikam u nas pochet!’ (1956), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 131, p. 43. Evgenii Solov’ev, ‘Gumannye otnosheniia i vzaimnoe uvazhenie mezhdu liud’mi’ (1962), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 143, p. 46. Mariia Marize-Krasnokutskaia, ‘Liubim potrudit’sia – est’ chem pogordit’sia!’ (1960), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 484, p. 153. Sof’ia Nizovaia, ‘Ia sama!’ (1956), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 478, p. 152. Sof’ia Nizovaia, ‘Ty trud drugogo uvazhai, sam nasoril, sam ubirai!’ (1954), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 480, p. 153. Vasilii Sur’ianinov, ‘Budesh’ masterom!’ (1954), Baburina (Soviet), no. 111. Galina Shubina, ‘Nosi s chest’iu!’ (1956), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 482, p. 153.

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79. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Net!’ (1954), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 420, p. 134. 80. M. Gol’din, ‘Von znakarei! Oni ne lechat, lish’ obiraiut i kalechat!’ (1959), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 432, p. 138. 81. Nikolai Ignat’ev, ‘Tabak – iad. Bros’ kurit’!’ (1957), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 434, p. 139. 82. Yurii Chudov, ‘Borites’ s khuliganstvom!’ (1956), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 435, p. 139. 83. Boris Rezanov, ‘On postig odnu nauku – kak vernee vziatki brat’’ (1956), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 440, p. 140. 84. Oleg Masliakov and Efim Tsvik, ‘Von darmoedov s teplen’kakh mest! Kto ne rabotaet, tot ne est!’ (441), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 441, p. 140. 85. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Molodoi inzhener, v tsekh!’ (1956), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 374, p. 118. 86. Boris Reshetnikov and Aleksandr Dobrov, ‘Noch’ – rabote ne pomekha!’ (1956), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 366, p. 116. 87. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Polevye raboty ne zhdut!’ (1954), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 173. 88. Oleg Savostiuk, ‘My vypolnili normu . . . A vy?’ (1954), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 365, p. 116. 89. Evgenii Abezgus, ‘Tseni rabochuiu minutu!’ (1964), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 373, p. 118. 90. Konstantin Ivanov and Veniamin Briskin, ‘Blizhe k zhizni, k zhivomu delu!’ (1954), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 370, p. 117. 91. V. Gorlenko, ‘Osvoim golubuiu tselinu!’, Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 396, p. 126. On mobilisation for other projects, see Viktor Ivanov, ‘Podvigi smelykh zhdut!’ (1964), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 140, p. 45. 92. Vladimir Seleznev, ‘Na novye zemli edemte s nami!’ (1954), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 139, p. 45. 93. Vera Livanova, ‘Golosuite za dal’neishii rastsvet nashikh gorodov i sel!’ (1957), Snopkov et al. (Zhenshchiny), no. 107. 94. Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), p. 109. 95. Nikolai Tereshchenko, ‘Ostanovit’ agressora!’ (1958), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 135, p. 44. 96. Dmitrii Piatkin, ‘Letat’ vyshe vsekh, dal’she vsekh, bystree vsekh’ (1954), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 269, p. 85. This focused on aeroplanes, the arm of the defence forces which best conveyed a sense of an advanced country. 97. Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), nos. 322–37, pp. 104–7. 98. Boris Shirokorad, ‘Bditel’nost’ – nashe oruzhie. Bud’te bditel’ny!’ (1953), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 324, p. 104. 99. Nikolai Tereshchenko, ‘Da zdravstvuet mir!’, Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 474, p. 151. 100. Viktor Ivanov, ‘Ne nado voiny!’ (1962), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 148, p. 47. 101. Vera Livanova, ‘S novym godom mira i druzhby!’ (1956), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 141, p. 45. 102. Yurii Kershin and Samarii Gurarii, ‘Da zdravstvuet vechnaia, nerushimaia druzhba i sotrudnichestvo mezhdu sovetskim i kubinskim narodami’ (1963), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 146, p. 47. 103. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS’, XXIII s’ezd, vol. 2, pp. 299–317. 104. ‘O podgotovke k 50-letiiu velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, pp. 123–39. The theses were adopted at a plenum in June 1967. ‘O tezisakh Ts.K. KPSS k 50-letiiu velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, pp. 181–234.


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105. L. I. Brezhnev, ‘Piat’desiat let velikikh pobed sotsializma’, Brezhnev, vol. 2, p. 92. 106. L. I. Brezhnev, ‘Otchetnyi doklad tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS XXIV s’ezdu kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza’, XXIV s’ezd, vol. 1, pp. 62–3. For earlier use of the term, see Evans (‘Developed Socialism in Soviet Ideology’), pp. 412–13. 107. ‘O podgotovke k 50-letiiu obrazovaniia soiuza sovetskikh sotsialisticheskikh respublik’, KPSS v rez., vol. 12, pp. 184–200. 108. ‘O proekte konstitutsii soiuza sovetskikh socialisticheskikh respublik’ and ‘O gosudarstvennom gimne sovetskogo soiuza’, KPSS v rez., vol. 13, p. 191. For an earlier new ‘song of the Rodina’, see Pravda, 9 November 1958. This also marked the introduction of a new Constitution Day, 7 October to replace the 5 December day that had begun in 1936. 109. On the vagaries of the use of this term, see Breslauer, pp. 170–1. 110. Constitution (1977), Unger (Constitutional Development), p. 233. 111. ‘Osnovnye napravleniia ekonomicheskogo i sotsial’nogo razvitiia SSSR na 1981–1985 gody i na period do 1990 goda’, XXVI s’ezd, vol. 2, p. 154. 112. XXVI s’ezd, vol. 1, p. 376. References to marching forward to ‘the victory of communism’ continued to appear in feast-day slogans into the 1980s. 113. ‘O 60-i godovshchine obrazovaniia Soiuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik’, KPSS v rez., vol. 14, pp. 247–63. 114. ‘Po otchetnomu doklad’, XXIII s’ezd, vol. 2, p. 299. 115. ‘O podgotovke k 50-letiu velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’ (4 January 1967), KPSS v rez., p. 129. 116. ‘O podgotovke k 50-letiu velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’ (20–21 June 1967), KPSS v rez., vol. 11, pp. 209 and 211. 117. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XXIV s’ezd, vol. 2, p. 233. 118. ‘O podgotovke k 50-letiiu obrazovaniia soiuza sovetskikh sotsialisticheskikh respublik’, KPSS v rez., vol. 12, p. 184. 119. ‘O 60-i godovshchine velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 13, p. 166. 120. ‘O podgotovke k 50-letiiu velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, pp. 127–8. In 1972 he was described as showing devotion to the cause of communism, to socialist patriotism and internationalism, to high labour and socialpolitical activism, implacability towards exploitation, oppression and national and racial prejudice, and class solidarity with the workers of all countries. ‘O podgotovke k 50-letiiu obrazovaniia soiuza sovetskikh sotsialisticheskikh respublik’, KPSS v rez., vol. 12, p. 193. 121. Breslauer, p. 138. 122. ‘O tezisakh Ts.K. KPSS k 50-letiiu velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, p. 207. 123. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’ (XXIV s’ezd), KPSS v rez., vol. 2, p. 226. 124. ‘O 60-i godovshchine velikoi oktiabrskoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 13, p. 165. 125. Miron Luk’ianov and Vasilii Ostrovskii, ‘S prazdnikom vas, devushki!’ (1966), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 144, p. 46. 126. B. Teders, ‘Grudnomu rebenku mesto v iasliakh, a ne v tundre’ (1967), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 492, p. 155. 127. Bilen Karakashev and Liliia Levshunova, ‘Znaniia – vsem!’ (1972), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 156, p. 49. 128. Timofei Liashchuk, ‘Na urozhaiu svitle sviato laskavo prosim zavitati’ (1967), Baburina (Soviet), no. 117.

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129. Valerii Rybakov, ‘Zhivotnovodstvu – narodnuiu zabotu!’ (1966), Baburina (Soviet), no. 144. 130. Nikolai Babin, Igor Ovasapov and Anatolii Yakushin, ‘Slav’sia, otechestvo nashe svobodnoe!’ (1978), Baburina (Soviet), no. 178. A series of rights are listed on a red banner. 131. Mikhail Manuilov, ‘Spartakiad narodov SSSR’ (1975), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 513, p. 162. 132. For posters advertising films, see Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), nos. 587–98, pp. 185–8. For a poster raising the possibility of a boat trip, see Sergei Sakharov, ‘Volgo-baltiiskii vodnyi put’ imeni V. I. Lenina’ (1965), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 568, p. 179. Also no. 445, p. 141. 133. Arkadii Arsen’ev, ‘Dorogu v budushchee prodolzhim!’, Baburina (Soviet), no. 174. 134. Anatolii Rudkovich, ‘Vremia, vpered!’, Baburina (Soviet), no. 155. 135. Anatolii Rudkovich, ‘Muzhskuiu silu – na pomoshch’ zhenshchine!’ (1970), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 378, p. 119. 136. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Iz rabochei gushi vygonim p’iushchikh’ (1966), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 442, p. 141. 137. Konstantin Ivanov, ‘Nashe uslovie – doloi skvernoslovie!’ (1981), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 443, p. 141. 138. Galina Shubina, ‘Ne lgi nikogda!’ (1965), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 488, p. 154. 139. Vasilii Stepanov, ‘Odin rebenok – khorosho, dva – luchshe!’ (1968), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 493, p. 155. 140. Leonid Nepomniashchii, ‘Kazhdyi den’ – udarnyi!’ (1980), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 187. 141. Viktor Govorkov, ‘Khoziaistvui umelo!’ (1966), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 376, p. 119. 142. Mels Erzhanov, ‘Vot chto len’ i sladkii son dali lodyriu v sezon’ (1967), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 371, p. 117. 143. ‘O dal’neishim uluchshenii organizatsii sotsialisticheskogo sorevnovaniia’, KPSS v rez., vol. 12, pp. 138–46. 144. For its beginning, see ‘O stroitel’stve baikalo-amurskoi magistrali’, KPSS v rez., vol. 12, pp. 437–9. On progress on another prestige project, the ‘food programme’, see ‘O proekte prodovol’stvennoi programmy SSSR na period do 1990 goda’, KPSS v rez., vol. 14, pp. 274–315. Specific mentions of the development of Siberia and the Far East and of BAM occurred in feast-day slogans from 1979. 145. ‘Direktivy XXIV s’ezda KPSS po piatiletnemu planu razvitiia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR na 1971–1975 gody. Doklad Predsedatelia Soveta Ministrov SSSR tovarishcha A. N. Kosygin’, XXIV s’ezd, vol. 2, pp. 4–66, esp. p. 44. 146. Breslauer, p. 208. 147. Boris Parmeev, ‘Sibirskii razmakh!’ (1980), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 188. 148. Arkadii Arsen’ev, ‘Dorogu v budushchee prolozhim!’ (1977), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 189. 149. Viktor Mekhant’ev, ‘BAM – truda i zhizni shkola’ (1975), Baburina (Soviet), no. 172. 150. Igor Ovasapov, ‘Trudovoi semestr – na otlichno!’ (1975), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 191. 151. Miron Luk’ianov, ‘Slav’ stranu trudom svoim!’ (1976), Baburina (Soviet), no. 173. 152. Anatolii Yakushin, ‘My – molodoi rabochii klass!’ (1975), Baburina (Soviet), no. 171. For the tenth five year plan, see Baburina (Soviet), no. 157. 153. For a poster showing a female worker giving advice to what appear to be female peasants, see Yurii Mokhor, ‘Zvan’e rabochee my poluchili, Budem trudit’sia, kak Vy nas uchili!’ (1982), Baburina (Soviet), no. 111. 154. ‘O merakh po dal’neishemu razvitiiu obshchestvennykh nauk i povysheniiu ikh roli v kommunisticheskom stroitel’stve’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, pp. 237–51.


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155. L. I. Brezhnev, ‘Otchetnyi doklad tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS XXIV s’ezdu kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza’, XXIV s’ezd, vol. 1, p. 82. 156. L. I. Brezhnev, ‘Otchetnyi doklad tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS XXIII s’ezdu kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza’, XXIII s’ezd, vol. 1, p. 89. Brezhnev had spoken about ‘trust in cadres’ during 1965–7, introducing ‘exactingness’ into the aphorism in 1968. Pravda, 30 March 1968, Breslauer, p. 195. 157. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XXIV s’ezd, vol. 2, p. 239. 158. The Congress resolution repeated Brezhnev’s criticisms. XXIII s’ezd, vol. 2, p. 307. 159. Pravda, 11 June 1966. 160. XXIV s’ezd, vol. 1, p. 109. 161. XXV s’ezd, vol. 1, pp. 88–97. 162. XXVI s’ezd, vol. 1, pp. 87–93. 163. Gill and Pitty, pp. 119–22. 164. There were suggestions that such deficiencies were a result of the remnants of a private ownership or bourgeois mentality. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XXIII s’ezd, p. 317. 165. Pravda, 7 November 1964. 166. Partiinaia zhizn’ 1 (1977), p. 7; 22 (1977), p. 15; 11 (1978), p. 5. 167. Partiinaia zhizn’ 1 (1977), p. 4. 168. Pravda, 19 December 1976. 169. For a graph showing the average number of mentions of Brezhnev in the press, see Alekseev, p. 10. For his seventy-fifth birthday, see the lavish book by Golikova. Also see the lavish praise given to him at the XXV and XXVI congresses. 170. Pravda, 19 December 1976 and 20 December 1976; Partiinaia zhizn’ 1 (1977), p. 4, and 2 (1978), p. 5; and Kommunist 18 (1976), p. 9, and 9 (1977), p. 5. 171. Pravda, 19 December 1976. 172. Pravda, 19 and 20 December 1976. 173. Pravda, 19 December 1976. The first instance of the use of this term with regard to Brezhnev was a speech by Kirilenko on 15 October 1976. Brown (‘Political’), p. 310. 174. Partiinaia zhizn’ 1 (1977), p. 5; 13 (1977), p. 16; and 23 (1977), p. 15. 175. Pravda, 19 December 1976. 176. Kommunist 9 (1977), p. 5; Partiinaia zhizn’ 1 (1977), pp. 3 and 6; 4 (1978), p. 3; and 1 (1979), p. 4. 177. Partiinaia zhizn’ 1 (1977), p. 3 and Pravda, 19 December 1976. 178. Pravda, 19 December 1976 and Kommunist 3 (1978), p. 14. 179. Bacon, p. 8. These included four Hero of the Soviet Union medals (three after 1966), the Order of Lenin with Gold Star (for bravery in the war), the Lenin Prize for literature, and the Peace Prize. For a list of his awards, see Kudriashov, pp. 204–9. 180. For the attempt to boost the significance of the Lenin Prize in September 1966, see ‘O leninskikh i gosudarstvennykh premiiakh SSSR v oblasti nauki i tekhniki, literatury i iskusstva’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, pp. 102–3. 181. Velikanova, pp. 158–61. 182. This was one of a large number of anniversaries celebrated during this period. These included the 150th anniversary of Marx’s birth in May 1967; 50th of the October Revolution in November 1967; 50th of the foundation of the Cheka in December 1967; 50th of the Komsomol in October 1968; 50th of the first All-Union Subbotnik in April 1969; 150th of Engels’ birth in February 1970; 50th of the Pioneers in March 1972; 70th and 80th of the II Congress of the RSDRP in April 1973 and March 1983; 70th and 80th of the 1905 revolution in December 1974 and December 1984; and 50th of the first five year plan in December 1979.

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183. ‘O podgotovke k 50-letiiu velikoi oktiabrskoi revoliutsii’ KPSS v rez., vol. 11, pp. 123–4. 184. ‘O podgotovke k 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Vladimira Il’icha Lenina’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, pp. 333–47. 185. ‘K 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Vladimira Il’icha Lenina’, KPSS v rez., 11, pp. 472–517. On the construction of a new visual image of Lenin for the centenary, see Yurchak, p. 55. 186. ‘O 110-i godovshchine so dnia rozhdeniia Vladimira Il’icha Lenina’, KPSS v rez., vol. 13, pp. 419–29. 187. Although on proposals in leading circles to rehabilitate him in February–March 1969, see Medvedev (Dissent), pp. 26–8. There was also some refurbishing of his image in some scholarly circles. 188. ‘K 90-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia I. V. Stalina’, and ‘K 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia I. V. Stalina’, Pravda, 21 December 1969 and 21 December 1979. 189. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XXIII s’ezd, p. 299. 190. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XXIII s’ezd, p. 306. 191. ‘O tezisakh Ts.K. KPSS k 50-letiiu velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, p. 200. 192. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XXIV s’ezd, pp. 240–1. 193. For its increasing role in developed socialism, see ‘O godovshchine obrazovaniia Soiuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik’, KPSS v rez., vol. 14, p. 255. 194. Nikolai Babin, ‘Partiia um, chest’ i sovest’ nashei epokhi!’ (1976), Baburina (Soviet), no. 156. 195. Elmira Shakhtakhtinskaia, ‘Nashi pomysly i dela – rodine, partii!’ (1976), Baburina (Soviet), no. 161. 196. Anatolii Yakushin, ‘My – molodoi rabochii klass!’ (1975), Baburina (Soviet), no. 171. 197. Veniamin Briskin, ‘XXV s’ezd KPSS’ (1976), Baburina (Soviet), no. 179. For the XXVI Congress, see no. 183. For the XXVII Congress, Baburina (Rossiia), no. 203. 198. Miron Luk’ianov and Vilen Karakashev, ‘Narod i partiia ediny’ (1984), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 182. 199. Ven’iamin Briskin, ‘KPSS partiia Lenina – avangard stroitelei kommunizma’ (1981), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 186. 200. ‘O znake “50 let prebyvaniia v KPSS”’ and ‘Polozhenie o znake “50 let prebyvaniia v KPSS”’, KPSS v rez., vol. 14, pp. 218–19. 201. ‘O podgotovke k 50-letiiu velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, pp. 123–39. 202. ‘O 60-i godovshchine velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 13, p. 160. 203. Vilen Karakashev, ‘Oktiabriu 50 slava’ (1967), Baburina (Soviet), no. 135. 204. Aleksandr Meerzon, ‘Znamia revoliutsii ne pomerknet v vekakh’ (1966), Baburina (Soviet), no. 133. 205. Oleg Savostiuk and Boris Uspenskij, ‘Revoliutsionnyi derzhite shag!’ (1967), Baburina (Soviet), no. 137. 206. Leonid Bel’skii and Vladimir Potapov, ‘Uchimsia kommunizmu, stroim kommunizm!’ (1978), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 193. 207. Baburina (Soviet), nos. 152 and 153. 208. On treatment of the war, see Tumarkin (Living). 209. Kirschenbaum (Legacy), ch. 6. 210. Brooks (Thank You), p. 243.


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211. For the most grand, that on Mamaev Kurgan above Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), unveiled on 15 October 1967, see Palmer (‘How’), pp. 373–407. 212. ‘O 30-letii pobedy sovetskogo naroda v velikoi otechestvennoi voine 1941–1945 godov’, KPSS v rez., vol. 12, pp. 503–8. 213. ‘O prazdnovanii 35-i godovshchiny pobedy sovetskogo naroda v velikoi otechestvennoi voine 1941–1945 godov’, KPSS v rez., vol. 13, pp. 430–1. 214. ‘O 40-letii pobedy sovetskogo naroda v velikoi otechestvennoi voine 1941–1945 godov’, KPSS v rez., vol. 14, pp. 582–9. 215. ‘O sooruzhenii v moskve pamiatnika ‘mogila neizvestnogo soldata’ s vechnym ognem slavy’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, p. 104. 216. Similar centres developed elsewhere in the country. The most striking was the massive monument on Mamaev Kurgan in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) opened in 1967. The opening of the Pisarevskoe Memorial Cemetery in Leningrad in 1960 had created a war-focused centre in that city. 217. For some partial figures, see Binns, pt II, p. 180. 218. See Pamiatnik and Tumarkin (Living), pp. 215–21. 219. Gennadii Shurshin, ‘1945 vo imia zhizni’ (1965), Baburina (Soviet), no. 118. 220. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XXIII s’ezd, p. 316. Sometimes the term used was ‘proletarian internationalism’, ‘O podgotovke k 50-letiiu velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, p. 123. 221. ‘O podgotovke k 50-letiiu velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, pp. 126 and 127 (although in this case there was a reference to the ‘peoples of our Rodina’). 222. ‘O tesizakh Ts.K. KPSS k 50-letiiu velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, p. 194 (this reference tied the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people into the freedom and independence of the socialist Rodina). 223. ‘O podgotovke k 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Vladimira Il’icha Lenina’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, p. 344 (this reference actually combined mention of the Soviet Rodina with the socialist Otechestvo). 224. ‘O podgotovke k 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Vladimira Il’icha Lenina’, KPSS v rez., vol. 11, p. 343. 225. Brudny. 226. Although ‘peaceful coexistence’ was still used, principally in terms of relations with the capitalist states and the US in particular. 227. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XXIII s’ezd, pp. 303–4 and 317. 228. ‘O 60-i godovshchine obrazovaniia Soiuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik’, KPSS v rez., vol. 14, p. 258. In particular see Brezhnev’s speech to the XXIV Congress. XXIV s’ezd, pp. 46–55. 229. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Polozhit’ konets agressii vo V’etname!’ (1965), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 149, p. 47. On Chile, see Evgenii Kazhdan, ‘Chili Sentiabr’ 1973’ (1973), Baburina (Soviet), no. 168. 230. Evgenii Kazhdan, ‘Konstitutsiia SshA’ (1981), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 159, p. 50. 231. Viktor Koretskii, ‘Net proshcheniia agressoram!’ (1966), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 160, p. 50. 232. Evgenii Kazhdan, ‘Soiuz-Apollon’ (1975), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 197. 233. Mikhail Gromyko, ‘Nam nuzhen mir’ (1973), Snopkov et al. (Shest’sot), no. 491, p. 155. 234. Mikhail Avvakumov and Ol’ga Volkova, ‘Sport, mir, druzhba!’ (1980), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 198.

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235. Veniamin Briskin, ‘Velikii podvig sovetskogo soldata, slaviat blagodarnye narody!’ (1969), Baburina (Soviet), no. 132. Also no. 136. 236. Vilen Karakashev, ‘Miru-mir’ (1965), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 199. For a different design, see Faruk Kagarov, ‘Mir’ (1971), Baburina (Soviet), no. 158. This poster cites some words from Brezhnev. 237. Ruben Sur’ianinov, ‘Net gonke vooruzhenii!’ (1976), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 202. 238. Oleg Masliakov, ‘XXVI s’ezd KPSS Programma mira’ (1982), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 192. Brezhnev was directly associated with the message of this poster. 239. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XXIII s’ezd, p. 304. 240. ‘O tezisakh’, p. 223. Also see pp. 230–1 for the argument that the October Revolution led to fundamental changes in the whole system of international relations and made the struggle between socialism and imperialism the core of world politics. 241. ‘O 60-i godovshchine velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 13, pp. 169, 170 and 172. There was also recognition, the Czechoslovak invasion notwithstanding, that socialist construction needed to take into account not only the general laws of socialist construction, but each country’s specific features. ‘Po otchetnomu dokladu’, XXIV s’ezd, p. 222. 242. ‘O 60-i godovshchine obrazovaniia Soiuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik’, KPSS v rez., vol. 14, pp. 257–8. 243. Pravda, 7 November 1964. 244. Arkhitektura, pp. 224–31. 245. Tarkhanov and Kavtaradze, p. 160. 246. Gambrell, p. 33. 247. Castillo (‘Peoples’), p. 737. There were sixteen republics until the transformation of the Karelian-Finnish Union Republic into an autonomous republic in 1956. 248. On these individual buildings, see Arkhitektura Moskvy, and Ryabushin and Smolina. 249. Although the abandonment of this project was reflected in the renaming of the Metro stop built to serve the Palace from the Palace of Soviets to Kropotkinskaia in 1953. 250. Colton, p. 365. 251. See his comments at the December 1954 All-Union Conference of Builders and the editorial in Pravda, 10 November 1955. For Khrushchev’s speech, see Khrushchev. Some architects were also stripped of the Stalin Prizes they had been awarded. 252. Cooke, p. 138. As Cooke argues, under Stalin individual buildings were separately commissioned from teams of architects, so there remained room for architectural design from professionals. 253. XXIV Congress. The term was adopted from Brezhnev’s speech to the electors of the Bauman district on 11 June 1971, ‘Interesy naroda, zabota o ego blage – vysshii smysl deiatel’nosti partii’, Brezhnev, vol. 3, p. 387. 254. ‘O general’nom plane razvitiia g Moskvy’, Stroitel’stvo i arkhitektura Moskvy, 7–8, July–August 1971, p. 2. This issue of the journal discusses aspects of the plan. 255. ‘O general’nom plane’, p. 2. 256. For some figures, see Brudny, p. 44. Some 25 per cent of functioning churches in Moscow were closed. 257. Colton, pp. 554 and 557. 258. For its foundation and the argument that it came principally from pressure from below, see Dunlop, pp. 66–9. 259. For the Soviet ritual calendar as at 1977, see Lane, pp. 289–90. For a list for 1967, see McDowell, pp. 269–70. For a 1953 list, see Binns, pt II, p. 170.


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260. Khrushchev had followed Stalin’s lead in this: informal commemoration through meetings of veterans, visits to museums and cemeteries and night-time fireworks. 261. Kéhayan, pp. 90 and 96. 262. Weir, p. 57. 263. As well as these regular feast days, such celebrations could also be held on other, more ad hoc, occasions e.g. the successful return of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin to earth on 12 April 1961. 264. Smaller memorial meetings were held on this day around the country as well. 265. For a report on Brezhnev’s funeral, see Golos Rodiny 46 (2346) (November 1982). 266. This ceremony was in stark contrast to the treatment that had been accorded Khrushchev when he had died in 1971; he was buried in a private ceremony in Novodevichy cemetery, and above his grave was placed a striking sculpture by the abstract artist Ernst Neizvestny, whom Khrushchev had publicly criticised in 1962. 267. Smith (Russians), 340–1. 268. Descriptions of these will be found in Lane, chs. 5–8, and Binns, pt II, pp. 272–6. 269. One marker of this can be seen in the slogans adopted for the annual May Day and October Revolution marches. These also decreased in number markedly over this period, from around 100 at the end of Khrushchev’s rule to between fifty and sixty in the early 1980s. 270. For an insightful discussion from a Western journalist in Moscow in the early 1970s, see Smith (Russians), ch. xi. 271. For the example of historians, see Markwick.

5 THE VISION IMPLODES, 1985–1991 1. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘Zhivoe tvorchestvo naroda’, 10 December 1984, Gorbachev (Izbrannye), vol. 2, pp. 75–108. 2. Gorbachev, ‘Zhivoe tvorchestvo naroda’, p. 80. 3. Gorbachev, ‘Zhivoe tvorchestvo naroda’, pp. 77 and 80. 4. However Gorbachev’s reference later in the speech to the changing nature under socialism of commodity-money instruments like price, value, profit and credit and the need to look at these, albeit within the context of the planned nature of the economy, may have been a forerunner of his thinking in the economic sphere. Gorbachev (‘Zhivoe tvorchestvo naroda’), p. 82. 5. Cf. Robinson, pp. 97–9. 6. Brown (Gorbachev Factor), p. 122. 7. Brown (Gorbachev Factor), pp. 123–4. 8. Brown (Gorbachev Factor), p. 123. 9. Gorbachev, ‘Zhivoe tvorchestvo naroda’, pp. 81 and 83. 10. Gorbachev, ‘Zhivoe tvorchestvo naroda’, p. 95. 11. It was even in the 1977 Constitution (Article 9) in the discussion of socialist democracy where it was bracketed with ‘publicity’. 12. During Andropov’s short tenure as General Secretary, an emphasis upon greater discipline and order was associated with a recognition of the need for change. 13. ‘O sozyve ocherednego XXVII s’ezda kpss i zadachakh, sviazannykh s ego podgotovkoi i provedeniem’, Gorbachev (Izbrannye), vol. 2, pp. 154, 157 and 159. 14. See White (Russia). 15. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘O proektakh novoi redaktsii programmy kpss, izmenenii v ustave kpss, osnovnykh napravlenii ekonomicheskogo i sotsial’nogo razvitiia sssr na 1986–1990 gody i na period do 2000 goda’, Gorbachev (Izbrannye), vol. 3, p. 5.

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16. Gorbachev, ‘O proektakh’, p. 5. 17. He declared that ‘The basic theoretical and political provisions of the third Programme are retained in its new edition’. ‘O proektakh’, p. 6. 18. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘Politicheskii doklad tsentral’nogo komiteta kpss XXVII s’ezdu kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza’, XXVII s’ezd, vol. 1, pp. 23–121. 19. Although he also argued that this term had been used by some to hide the real problems confronting society. ‘Politicheskii doklad’, p. 117. 20. The word ‘reform’ had been absent from official Soviet discourse since the demise of the ‘Kosygin reforms’ at the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. For Gorbachev’s use of the term, see ‘Politicheskii doklad’, p. 54. 21. This had earlier been associated with the ‘activisation of the human factor’. Gorbachev, ‘O proektakh’. 22. See the discussion in Grachev, pp. 73 and 104. 23. ‘Po politicheskomu dokladu tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS’, XXVII s’ezd, vol. 1, pp. 530–53. 24. ‘Programma kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza’, XXVII s’ezd, vol. 1, pp. 554– 623. 25. Gorbachev, ‘Politicheskii doklad’, p. 116. 26. Which is why this was seen as a new edition of the Third Programme rather than a new Fourth Programme. 27. On the relationship between acceleration and developed socialism, see Robinson, pp. 103–6. 28. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘Bystree perestraivat’sia, deistvovat’ po-novomu’, Gorbachev (Izbrannye), vol. 3, p. 330. 29. Vadim Medvedev, cited in Brown (Gorbachev Factor), p. 123. 30. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘O piatiletnem plane ekonomicheskogo i sotsial’nogo razvitiia SSSR na 1986–1990 gody i zadachakh partiinykh organizatsii po ego realizatsii’, Gorbachev (Izbrannye), vol. 3, pp. 420–4. 31. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘Perestroika neotlozhna, ona kasaetsia vsekh i vo vsem’, Gorbachev (Izbrannye), vol. 4, pp. 35–52. 32. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘O perestroike i kadrovoi politike partii’, Pravda, 28 January 1987. 33. ‘O perestroike i kadrovoi politike’, KPSS v rez., vol. 15, pp. 353–68. 34. On this, see Hahn, pp. 434–47. An experiment in this regard was announced in March 1987. 35. Partiinaia zhizn’ 11 (June 1988), p. 15. 36. ‘O podgotovke k 70-letii velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 15, pp. 376–82. 37. ‘K sovetskomu narodu’, KPSS v rez., vol. 15, pp. 382–90. 38. Y. K. Ligachev, ‘Navstrechu 70-letiiu Velikogo Oktiabria’, Pravda, 24 March 1987, and the comments by Ligachev and Biriukova at a CC Conference in May, Pravda, 23 May 1987. 39. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘Molodezh – tvorcheskaia sila revoliutsionnogo obnovleniia’, Gorbachev (Izbrannye), vol. 5, pp. 11–31. 40. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘O zadachakh partii po korennoi perestroike upravleniia ekonomikoi’, Pravda, 26 June 1987. 41. Gorbachev (Prakticheskimi), p. 16. 42. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘Partiia revoliutsii – partiia perestroiki’, Gorbachev (Izbrannye), vol. 5, pp. 351–70. 43. Perestroika was also referred to as a ‘revolution’ in his book published in 1987, Gorbachev (Perestroika), pp. 48 and 71. Also the title to chapter 1 refers to perestroika’s ‘revolutionary essence’.


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44. Pravda, 14 February 1987. 45. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘Oktiabr’ i perestroika – revoliutsiia prodolzhaetsia’, Gorbachev (Izbrannye), vol. 5, pp. 386–436. 46. Gorbachev had first used these words on a visit to Britain in December 1984. Grachev, p. 63 n. 45. 47. For the fullest exposition at the time of Gorbachev’s view of a less confrontational world, see Gorbachev (Perestroika). 48. Ligachev, ‘Navstrechu’ and Ligachev, pp. 284–97. Also Brown (Gorbachev Factor), p. 168 and Chernyaev, pp. 123–4. 49. For the transcript, see ‘Plenum tsk kpss – oktiabr’ 1987 goda. Stenograficheskii otchet’, Izvestiia tsk kpss 2 (289), February 1989, pp. 209–87. 50. ‘Demokratizatsiia – sut’ perestroiki, sut’ sotsializma’, ‘Revoliutsionnoi perestroike – ideologiiu obnovleniia’ and ‘Cherez demokratizatsiiu – k novomu obliku sotsializma’, Gorbachev (Izbrannye), vol. 6, pp. 18–32, 58–92 and 204–15. These were addresses to, respectively, a meeting with heads of mass media, ideological institutions and artistic unions (8 January 1988), the February CC plenum (18 February 1988), and another meeting of heads of mass media, ideological institutions and artistic unions (7 May 1988). 51. ‘Demokratizatsiia – sut’ perestroiki’, p. 19. 52. ‘Cherez demokratizatsiiu’, p. 207. ‘Dans’ is a reference to the Menshevik F. I. Dan. 53. Or as the official reply to the so-called Andreeva letter (see below) described them: ‘the militant, selfish interests of those who have grown accustomed to living at the expense of others and do not want to forego the habit’. ‘Printsipy perestroiki: revoliutsionnost’ myshlenniia i deistvii’, Pravda, 5 April 1988. 54. ‘Cherez demokratizatsiiu’, pp. 208–9. 55. ‘Revoliutsionnoi perestroike’, p. 61. Gorbachev had earlier spoken of ‘pluralism of opinion’ in September 1987 Pravda, 30 September 1987, cited in Brown (Rise), p. 32. 56. ‘Demokratizatsiia – sut’ perestroiki’, p. 28. 57. ‘Cherez demokratizatsiiu’, p. 212. 58. Gorbachev had enunciated this as early as February 1987. See his speech ‘Za bez’iadernyi mir, za gumanizm mezhdunarodnykh otnoshenii’, Gorbachev (Izbrannye), vol. 4, pp. 376–92. 59. Although present since 1987, this was enunciated in a symbolically important forum, the UN, in 1988. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘Vystuplenie v organizatsii ob’edinennykh natsii’, (Izbrannye), vol. 7, pp. 184–202. 60. This is consistent with the comments of Valentin Chikin, editor-in-chief of Sovetskaia Rossiia, at the January meeting with heads of mass media, ideological institutions and artistic unions to the effect that it was important not to disrupt the continuity of socialist development. Gorbachev (Democratization), pp. 38–9. 61. ‘Ne mogu postupat’sia printsipami’, Sovetskaia Rossiia, 13 March 1988. For the official response, ‘Printsipy perestroiki: revoliutsionnost’ myshlenniia i deistvii’, Pravda, 5 April 1988. 62. ‘Tezisy tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS k XIX vsesoiuznoi partiinoi konferentsii’, KPSS v rez., vol. 15, pp. 595–616. 63. ‘O khode realizatsii reshenii XXVII s’ezda KPSS i zadachakh po uglubleniiu perestroiki’, XIX vsesoiuznaia, vol. 2, pp. 112–20. 64. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘O khode realizatsii reshenii XXVII s’ezda KPSS i zadachakh po uglubleniiu perestroika’, XIX vsesoiuznaia, vol. 1, pp. 18–92, esp. pp. 85–92. 65. For an argument that the rule of law was not meant to limit the party’s activities, see Robinson, pp. 128–9. This seems to rest on the view that the rule of law was to apply only to administrative bodies and since the party was not meant any longer to be involved in

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66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

Notes to pages 234–40 administration, this would not restrict its activities. This seems an unnecessarily narrow interpretation and not what Gorbachev seems to have intended. Also see Brown (Gorbachev Factor), p. 176. ‘O glasnosti’, Pravda, 5 July 1988. Although the suggestion that the party secretary should also be the chief executive of the soviet was not consistent with this principle. A stark example of the refusal to use a standard formulation is the fact that the second point referred to a direct connection between earnings and the results of labour rather than the established ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work’. A stark practical recognition of this was the official acknowledgement of the 1,000-year anniversary of the Christianisation of Rus in the middle of 1988. On Ligachev’s views, see Robinson, pp. 144–8. On historical revisionism, see Davies (Soviet History) and Wheatcroft. For a review of this, see White, ‘Gorbachev’, pp. 128–36. For example, the Democratic Union that was founded in May 1988 considered itself an opposition political party, and favoured a multi-party system and mixed economy, and rejected cooperation with, and the leading role of, the Communist Party. Spravochnik, p. 56. In particular, see ‘O prakticheskoi rabote po realizatsii reshenii XIX Vsesoiuznoi partiinoi konferentsii: Doklad na plenume TsK KPSS’, Pravda, 30 July 1988; ‘K pol’novlastiiu Sovetov i sozidaniiu pravovogo gosudarstva’, Pravda, 30 November 1988; Narashchivat’ intellektual’nyi potentsial perestroiki, 6 January 1989 (Moscow: Novosti, 1989); ‘Doklad na plenume TsK KPSS’, Pravda, 11 January 1989; ‘Ob agrarnoi politike KPSS v sovremennykh usloviiakh’, Materialy (15–16 March 1989), pp. 34–78; Na perelomnom etape perestroika, 29 March 1989 (Moscow: Novosti, 1989); and ‘Perestroika raboty partii – vazhneishaia kliuchevaia zadacha dnia’, Pravda, 19 July 1989. ‘Perestroika raboty partii’. Pravda, 13 January 1989. ‘K pol’novlastiiu Sovetov’. ‘K pol’novlastiiu Sovetov’. ‘Perestroika raboty partii’. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘Zhiznennaia neobkhodimost’ sotsial’no-ekonomicheskikh preobrazovanii na sele’ (15 November 1988), ‘Ob osnovnykh napravleniiakh vnutrennei i vneshnei politiki SSSR’ (30 May 1989) and ‘Zakliuchitel’noe slovo na pervom s’ezde narodnykh deputatov SSSR’ (9 June 1989), Gorbachev (Izbrannye), vol. 7, respectively pp. 113, 573 and 594. This formulation, based as it was on class categories, was in much less usage in public discourse during this period, and especially in its latter stages, than earlier in Soviet history. Narashchivat. ‘Ob agrarnoi politike’. Narashchivat. ‘Po-novomu osmyslit’ funktsii i rol’ partii v obshchestve’, Pravda, 21 July 1989. This was the discussion that followed Gorbachev’s speech ‘Perestroika raboty partii’. For criticism following the Congress of People’s Deputies election, see Robinson, pp. 159–61. For example, see his 8 May 1985 speech on the fortieth anniversary of the war. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘O natsional’noi politike partii v sovremennykh usloviiakh’. And for the platform adopted by the CC based on his speech, see ‘Natsional’naia politika partii


89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95.

96.

97. 98. 99.

100. 101.

102.

103.

104. 105.

106.

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v sovremennykh usloviiakh (platforma KPSS)’. Respectively, Materialy (19–20 sentiabria, 1989), pp. 14–43 and 212–35. This form of words related specifically to the decision of the Lithuanian party to break from the CPSU. See ‘O resheniiakh XX s’ezda kompartii litvy’, Materialy (5–7 February 1990), p. 348. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘O sozyve ocherednego XXVIII s’ezda KPSS’, Materialy (19–20 sentiabria 1989) , pp. 7–13. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘Sotsialisticheskaia ideia i revoliutsionnaia perestroika’, Pravda, 26 November 1989. According to Archie Brown, the last time Gorbachev used the term ‘communism’ positively was in his speech to the XIX Conference. Brown (‘Rise’), p. 38. ‘Vystuplenie M. S. Gorbacheva na Plenume TsK KPSS no voprosam II S’ezda narodnykh deputatov SSSR’, Pravda, 10 December 1989. See Gorbachev’s speech on the declaration by the Lithuanian party that it was leaving the CPSU, M. S. Gorbachev, ‘V edinstve partii – sud’ba perestroiki’, Pravda, 26 December 1989. For Gorbachev’s speech, see ‘O proekte platformy TsK KPSS k XXVIII s’ezdu partii. Doklad M. S. Gorbacheva’, Pravda, 6 February 1990. For the draft Platform, ‘K gumannomu, demokraticheskomu sotsializmu’, Pravda, 13 February 1990. For the debate, see Pravda, 6–9 March 1990. At the CC plenum in March 1990, Gorbachev explicitly rejected calls to eliminate the word ‘communist’ from the party’s name. Pravda, 12 March 1990. For the, again, very critical debate, see Pravda, 12, 17, 18, 19 and 20 March 1990. On Gorbachev’s acceptance of the notion of a market economy in May 1989, see Brown (Gorbachev Factor), p. 138. For Yeltsin’s comments at the plenum, see Pravda, 6 February 1990. For the draft that was adopted, see ‘K gumannomu, demokraticheskomu sotsializmu’, Pravda, 15 July 1991. There were some changes in this from the version presented to the Congress. For this, see Pravda, 27 June 1991. The original draft was adopted at the February 1990 plenum. See Materialy 1990, pp. 353–82. Pravda, 3 July 1990. This was the source of the famous 500 Days programme for the transition to the market drawn up in August 1990 by a working group appointed by joint decision of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. For a translation of the programme, see Yavlinsky et al. ‘Vstupitel’noe slovo general’nogo sekretaria TsK KPSS M. S. Gorbacheva’, Materialy (8–9 oktiabria 1990), pp. 6–14. For the debate, much of which was critical, see pp. 48–194. ‘Toward the Renewal of Our Union State’, TASS, 10 December 1990. FBIS-SOV90–238, 11 December 1990, pp. 36–41. For the CC decision, see TASS, 12 December 1990. FBIS-SOV-90–240, 13 December 1990, pp. 44–5. TASS, 3 February 1991, FBIS-SOV-91–023, 4 February 1991, pp. 24–6. ‘Sotsialism, Demokratiia, Progress’, Kommunist 12 (1382), August 1991, pp. 3–15. The revised programme was actually produced by an informal working group convened by Gorbachev that bypassed the official programme commission. Nezavisimaia gazeta, 3 August 1991. On the deliberations of the official commission, see Izvestiia Ts.K. KPSS 2, 1991, pp. 16–24 and 4, 1991, pp. 13–16. A formulation which redefined the socialist choice from its earlier meaning of setting the broad path of socialist development to something which people could choose to support or not support. Robinson, p. 184.

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107. Consistent with this had been the announcement by the Yeltsin government of Russia that Christmas Day 1991 would be a public holiday. 108. M. S. Gorbachev, ‘O proekte novoi Programmy KPSS’, Pravda, 26 July 1991. Also see Sandle (‘Final’), pp. 1131–50. 109. See Chernyaev. 110. The clearest instances of this were the April 1999 CC plenum when he was able to get the retirement of 110 members of the CC and Central Auditing Commission despite their expressed reluctance to go along with this, and the XXVIII Congress agreement about the party programme. On the CC speeches, see Pravda, 27 April 1989. 111. Although the 1988 slogans referred to ‘the teaching of Marx-Engels-Lenin’, and the 1989 slogans to Marxist-Leninist teaching as ‘the ideological basis of the revolutionary renewal of socialism’. Pravda, 17 April 1988 and 16 April 1989. 112. In 1988 the ‘revolutionary renewal of society’ was explicitly linked with the figure of ‘great Lenin’. There was also a reference to Marxism-Leninism as the ideological basis of this renewal, and to ‘Bolshevik-leninists’. Pravda, 24 October 1988. 113. For discussion of the use of Lenin, see Scherrer, pp. 54–69; Smart, pp. 5–22; and Gooding (‘Lenin’), pp. 403–22. 114. Scherrer, p. 61. Also Davies (Soviet History). 115. Although the limits of this should be recognised. On continuing high levels of admiration for Lenin in late 1990, see Gooding (‘Lenin’), p. 413. Such levels were much lower in Moscow than elsewhere in the country. 116. Scherrer, pp. 55–6. 117. For some information, see Murray, pp. 164–5. 118. Murray, ch. 4. By 1970, some half of Soviet populated places had had their names changed, and this figure was even higher for parts of towns, like streets, squares and suburbs, and for farms. The number of places commemorating Lenin in their place-names was high, with estimates ranging up to 337 in the 1980s. Murray, pp. 42, 133 and 166. On Leningrad, see Kirschenbaum (Legacy), ch. 8. 119. Khapaeva and Kopossov, pp. 972–3 and 977. 120. It was at this meeting that Gorbachev’s mention of Stalin stimulated a burst of applause. Tumarkin (Living), p. 35. 121. Tumarkin (Living), pp. 202–5. 122. Tumarkin (Living), pp. 190 and 193. 123. Gennadii Komol’tsev, ‘Glasnost’!’ (1988), Baburina (Rossiia), nos. 208 and 209. 124. Mikhail Avvakumov and Ol’ga Bolkova, ‘Mira Tebe, budushchee planety zemlia!’ (1986), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 196. 125. Ludmila Tarasova, ‘Esli ne Ia, ne Ty, to kto?’, Baburina (Rossiia), no. 210. 126. Viktor Votrin, ‘Molodezh’ u nas trudoliubivaia, gotovaia k podvigu, predannaia sotsializmu’ (1986), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 185. 127. Leonid Bel’skii and Vladimir Potapov, ‘Perestroika – prodolzhenie dela oktiabria!’ (1988), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 206. 128. Liudmila Kovaleva, ‘Narod, zabyvaiushchii svoiu istoriiu, obrechei povtorit’ ee’ (1988), Baburina (Rossiia), no. 212. 129. Aleksandr Vaganov, ‘Kollektivizatsiia 1929’ (1989), Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 163. 130. Efim Tsvik, ‘Ne dadim povtorit’sia!’, Snopkov et al. (Russkii), no. 164. 131. Colton, pp. 593–4.


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132. It had actually been physically removed in May and confirmed in July. Colton, p. 637. 133. Murray, p. 55. 134. For some details of the 5 November 1990 decision of the Moscow City Soviet to ‘restore historic names’, see Murray, pp. 52–3. 135. For a list, see Murray, pp. 156–61.

6 IMPACT OF THE METANARRATIVE 1. They may not aim to do this exclusively, although in many cases they do. Often they are actions or statements designed to achieve other ends (e.g. articulate policy) which also have a legitimating function. 2. For example, see the primacy of social over political rights in respondents’ answers in a November 1994 survey. Levada, p. 8. For a study which emphasises continuing support for an enhanced role of the state, see Miller et al., ch. 6. Such sentiments were doubtless also motivated by the economic difficulties of the initial post-Soviet period. 3. Although it is important not to exaggerate the extent of regime coverage and control of the country during the whole pre-war period, which remained patchy and somewhat episodic. Gill (Origins). 4. Gorham, ch. 6. 5. Gorham, pp. 26–34. 6. Payne, pp. 243–4; Davies (‘Us against Them’), pp. 70–89; Gorham, pp. 26–31 and 131; and Viola (‘Popular’), pp. 17–43. 7. Gorham, p. 31. 8. Fitzpatrick (Tear Off), and the case of Stepan Podlubny in Hellbeck. 9. Kotkin (Magnetic), pp. 358–9. 10. For example, see Figes, p. 344 and for the post-war period, Yurchak, pp. 15–16. 11. Hellbeck. Presumably the fact that these were private and personal writings means that they accurately reflect the true values and beliefs of the authors. 12. Writing about oneself was a conscious and frequently encountered experience, since people had a continual need to submit their autobiographies to the authorities. Hellbeck, p. 26. 13. Hellbeck, p. 13 discusses this in terms of ideology. 14. Hellbeck shows that some had difficulty reconciling the message with the reality. Hellbeck, pp. 104–7. 15. For example, see Weiner (Making Sense), pp. 62–6. 16. For example, see Figes, p. 433. 17. Weiner (Making Sense), p. 365. 18. Halfin, p. 146. 19. For an example, see the discussion of the operation of the control commission in the late 1920s in Halfin, pp. 285–326. 20. Anderson et al. 21. Kosheleva et al. and Khlevniuk et al. 22. Nevezhin (Zastol’nye) and (Stalin). 23. Service, p. 133. 24. Kotkin (Magnetic), p. 220. 25. For Weber’s comments on what he called the ‘charisma of office’, see Weber, vol. 2, pp. 1139–41. 26. Brudny. 27. For an argument about the wartime experience creating a sense of community sharply at odds with post-war Soviet reality, see Kirschenbaum (Legacy), p. 108.

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28. On the notion of the ‘imaginary West’ reflected in such things as music, clothes, designer labels and slang, see Yurchak, ch.5. 29. The rise of the dissident movement is one reflection of this. 30. On people living partly within and partly without what he calls Soviet ‘authoritative discourse’, see Yurchak, esp. chs. 4–7. 31. Feher et al., p. 41 and Urban, p. 36. 32. On corruption and its extent, see Gill and Pitty, chs. 2–4; Holmes, chs. 4 and 5; and Clark (Crime). 33. Vozlenskii. 34. Gill (Bourgeoisie), ch. 3. Also Radaev et al.; Gaidar; Kotz and Weir; and Kryshtanovskaia and White. 35. Cherniaev et al. 36. Even given the continuing popularity of some socialist values noted above. 37. Yurchak, pp. 15–16 and passim. He refers to the ‘performative shift in authoritative discourse [which enabled] people to develop a complexly differentiating relationship to ideological meanings, norms and values’, p. 28. 38. Yurchak makes this point, but in doing so he sees Gorbachev as providing an external critique of the metanarrative (what Yurchak calls the discursive regime), whereas Gorbachev clearly was operating from within that metanarrative. Yurchak, pp. 292–3. 39. For a discussion of Soviet legitimation in the terms used here, see Gill (‘Changing’), pp. 247–66. 40. The referendum results are in Pravda, 27 March 1991.

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Index

acceleration, 89, 97, 195, 215, 217–18, 220–2, 224–5, 330 All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, 92, 95, 133–4, 203, 317 Andreeva letter, 231, 331 Andropov, Yu., 205 anniversary of the revolution, 32, 62, 70–2, 142, 149–50, 157, 185, 194, 207, 209, 258, 297 Apsit, A., 32–3, 285–6 art, 9, 11–12, 32–3, 35, 65, 68–9, 92–4, 110, 118, 141, 145–7, 155, 158, 160, 162, 168, 170, 182, 189, 201, 286, 293, 311, 339, 341, 343–4, 348–50 aviation, 53, 113–15, 124, 137 Baidukov, G., 114 Baikal–Amur Mainline, 189 Bakh, A., 115 Beliakov, A., 114 Beria, L., 118, 165, 175, 305–6 blacksmith, 32–4, 59, 147, 285 Borodin, A., 122 bourgeois, 30–1, 40–3, 46, 48, 51–2, 57, 73, 85–6, 97, 99, 101, 107–9, 111, 141, 154, 176, 181, 195, 249, 288–9, 325 bourgeoisie, 6, 27, 30–1, 40, 42, 46, 48, 50–1, 54, 57, 61, 98, 107–8, 153, 289–90 Bratsk hydroelectric station, 189 Brezhnev, L., , 185, 190–5, 198, 200, 202–5 , 207, 209–11, 213, 215, 218, 227, 231, 256, 261, 266, 274, 277–8, 323, 325, 327–9, 339–40, 343, 349 Brodsky, I., 82, 119 Bukharin, N., 38, 44, 80, 99, 239, 287–8, 290, 295, 297, 340–1 bureaucratism, 40–1, 47–8, 51, 58, 99, 101, 157, 172–3, 190, 224, 287 capitalism, 29–31, 35, 37, 40, 47, 49–52, 56, 61, 91, 96, 99, 103, 110–1, 148, 153,

352

157, 173–4, 176–7, 182, 184, 196, 201–2, 215, 222, 232, 240, 289–90 capitalist, 2, 29–30, 35, 37–8, 42, 49–52, 54, 56, 58, 67, 85, 90–1, 96–9, 102–3, 105, 110–1, 132, 155, 158–9, 161, 163, 165, 172, 174, 177, 179–80, 182, 184, 195, 202, 228, 231, 249, 251, 262, 275, 290, 301, 327 Chapaev, V., 146, 306, 309 charismatic legitimation, 24, 78, 79, 120–1, 138, 164, 167, 194, 243, 264–6, 270, 273, 281 Cheliushkin, 96, 114 Chernenko, K., 205, 209, 256, 350 Chkalov, V., 113–14, 120, 305–6, 339 civilisation, 2, 122, 128, 132–3, 262, 283 class struggle, 27, 48, 50–1, 91, 97, 99, 101, 118, 165, 201, 227, 231–2, 252, 262 collective leadership, 79, 167, 169, 191, 219 collectivisation, 2, 14, 47, 50–1, 59, 88–91, 94, 97, 104, 106, 227, 261, 271, 299, 306–7 communism, 6, 14–15, 24–5, 27–30, 34, 36, 38, 40–1, 48, 55, 67, 74, 82–3, 85, 95, 105, 107, 111, 117–18, 127–9, 140, 147, 155, 161–3, 165–70, 173–5, 177, 179–89, 193–8, 202, 212–13, 217–18, 220, 235, 242, 254–5, 257, 262, 265, 267, 274–6, 279, 281, 285, 321, 323, 333 Constitution, 30, 62, 96, 105–6, 109, 111, 118, 146, 163, 186–7, 197, 221, 243–4, 265, 284–5, 303, 323, 329, 345 criticism, 21, 40, 47, 51, 53, 57–8, 78, 92, 99, 100–2, 108, 135, 139, 155, 165, 169, 175, 180, 190–1, 197, 203, 210–1, 218–20, 224, 226, 230, 232–3, 235, 238–9, 245, 248, 256–7, 275, 291, 311, 332 cult of leader, 121, 191–7 cult of personality, 79, 164, 166–9, 171, 182, 184, 227, 229

Index Danilin, S., 114 democracy, 38, 40–1, 43, 47, 51, 54, 56–8, 61, 78, 100–1, 108, 139, 155, 165, 168–9, 171, 173–4, 176–7, 179, 181, 184–6, 189, 191, 195–7, 215–16, 218–22, 224–5, 227, 230, 234, 237–8, 248, 252–3, 255, 262, 265, 281, 287, 290, 329 democratic, 22, 39–42, 57, 77, 150, 156, 166, 173, 179, 185, 190, 215, 220, 224, 235, 242–3, 245–6, 248, 251–4, 258, 262, 264–6, 279, 281, 284 Democratic Centralists, 39, 76 Democratic Platform, 250 democratisation, , 224–5, 228, 230, 236–8, 244–5, 262 developed socialism, 187, 198, 203, 214, 218, 221 deviation, 47, 57, 61, 83, 170, 195, 291, 297 Dneprostroi, 89, 95, 300, 348 Dolgoruky, Yu., 154, 160 Donskoi, 145–6, 149, 160, 311 Dzerzhinsky, F., 80, 131, 136, 160, 205, 261 Efanov, V., 119 election, 27, 55–6, 58, 60, 75–6, 98, 109, 137–40, 154–6, 173, 190–1, 208–9, 214, 217, 224–5, 233, 237, 242, 248, 250, 257, 284, 291, 303, 332 enemies, 35–7, 40, 42–3, 52, 58–9, 67, 73, 89, 96–103, 107–10, 112, 115, 121, 127, 136, 141–2, 163, 167, 172, 180, 249, 265, 267, 271, 309–10 Engels, F., 2, 71, 95, 164, 194, 196, 207, 242–3, 246, 249, 254, 284, 293, 325, 334, 341, 347 Evdokimov, G., 80, 296 Exhibition of Economic Achievements of the USSR, 203 Federov, E., 114 first five year plan, 89, 270 Frunze, M., 84, 133, 160, 262, 306 funeral, 80–1, 209 Gagarin, Yu., 183, 329 Gel’freikh, V., 128 General Secretary, 79, 138–9, 191–2, 210, 214, 217, 239, 256–7, 306, 310, 329 Gerasimov, A., 118 glasnost, 216, 220, 222–6, 230, 232–4, 236–8, 252 Glinka, M., 122, 149 Gorbachev, M., , 212–20, 223–4, 226–33, 235–43, 245, 248–52, 254–8, 260–2,

353 266, 279–80, 282, 329–34, 336, 340–1, 343–4, 346, 350–1 Gorky, M., 19, 80, 94, 115, 125, 132–3, 135, 149, 156, 262, 319, 343, 348 Park, 290 Street, 115, 133, 135, 156 town, 178 Grand Turkmen Canal, 160 Great October Socialist Revolution, 150, 178, 187, 274 Great Patriotic War, 141, 153, 155, 160, 162–3, 173, 187, 192, 198, 200, 212–13, 260, 265–6, 274, 276, 327 Gromov, M., 114 heroes, 14, 70, 96, 112–15, 118, 120–3, 125–6, 133, 137, 143, 145, 151, 156, 170, 271, 304, 311 ideocratic legitimation, 2, 5, 264–5, 280 ideology, 2–3, 5–7, 17, 24, 34, 65, 86, 99, 176, 185, 195, 199, 219, 222, 232–3, 264, 268, 284, 296, 299, 335 imperialism, 34–5, 165, 177, 195–6, 200–1, 219, 328 Industrial Party, 51, 96–8, 101 industrialisation, 2, 13, 38, 43–4, 47–51, 56, 59, 64, 85, 89, 90–1, 97, 99–100, 102, 153, 306 international revolution, 36–7, 49, 52, 56, 60, 85, 106, 265 Iofan, B., 128, 309–10 Ivan the Terrible, 122, 348 Kaganovich, L., 116–17, 123, 129–32, 134–5, 205, 301–2, 305–6, 309–11, 340, 342, 344–5 Kalinin, M., 50, 120, 160, 204, 261, 297, 304, 306, 318 Kamenev, L., 47, 49, 64, 79–80, 83–4, 108, 127, 289, 290–1, 295–7 Karpinsky, A., 115 Khmelnitsky, B., 145 Khrushchev, N., , 117, 164, 166, 169–70, 174, 180–2, 184–5, 188–93, 197, 199, 202–7, 210–11, 214, 218, 221, 242, 256, 266, 273–4, 277, 301, 319–20, 328–9, 339–40, 345 Kirov, S., 108, 127, 133, 262, 303, 306, 311 Kliamkin, I., 259 Komsomol, 22, 96, 98, 132, 143, 160, 181, 210–11, 226, 295, 300, 325 Kosmodem’enskaia, Z., 143, 312 Krenkel, E., 114 Kuibyshev, V., 54, 262, 288, 306

354

Index

kulaks, 35, 46–9, 51, 57, 59, 91, 96–8, 100, 102–3, 106, 108–9, 229, 289, 303 Kutuzov, M., 145–6, 149, 160 leadership, 4, 6–7, 10, 38, 40, 43, 45–7, 49–50, 54–9, 65, 72, 75–8, 80–4, 86, 90, 99, 100, 102, 110–11, 117–19, 121, 123, 127, 130, 134, 138, 143, 147, 150, 155, 162, 164–9, 171, 175, 180, 184, 190–2, 195, 197–8, 205, 207, 209–10, 213–14, 216, 219–20, 224–5, 228, 235, 237, 240, 243, 245–6, 248, 251, 255–6, 260, 264, 267, 270, 273–4, 287, 291, 297, 303 Left Communists, 37–8, 287 Left Opposition, 38, 47, 49 legal-rational legitimation, 25, 264, 281 legitimation, 2, 24–5, 71, 120, 195, 209, 212, 255, 264–6, 280–1, 284 Lenin, V., 2, 29–30, 37, 39–41, 43–5, 55–6, 59–60, 62–3, 65–6, 70–6, 79–84, 86–7, 89–91, 93, 95, 99–100, 110, 113, 115–17, 125, 127–8, 131, 133–4, 136–7, 146–50, 152, 159–60, 162, 164–5, 167–8, 170–1, 184–5, 192, 194–7, 200, 204–5, 207–9, 212, 215, 221, 228–30, 237–40, 242–3, 246, 249, 251–2, 254, 258, 260–1, 265, 285, 287–90, 292–8, 304–7, 315–16, 325–6, 334, 339, 343–4, 346, 350–1 Leningrad, 55, 59, 63, 81, 84, 108, 129, 134, 143, 145–6, 157, 200, 259, 299, 305, 318, 327, 334, 345, 351 Leninism, 18, 53, 55, 57–8, 61, 72, 79–80, 82–4, 102, 117, 165, 167, 169–70, 196, 220, 227, 230, 235, 258, 266, 290–1, 296–7, 350 Leninist, , 37, 55–8, 83, 85, 87, 100–2, 106, 117, 125, 153, 165, 167–9, 171, 174–5, 191–2, 194–7, 199, 201, 221–2, 228–30, 235, 237–8, 240, 242–4, 249, 251, 257, 259, 334, 340 Ligachev, E., 228, 231, 330–2, 346 Lissitsky, El, 34 locomotive, 34, 95, 102, 118, 183 Lunacharsky, A., 41, 62, 65, 293, 295, 346 Lysenko, T., 115, 161 Magnitostroi, 89 Malenkov, G., 161, 166, 170, 174, 180, 182 Marx, K., 2, 29, 63, 71, 82, 95, 164–5, 194, 196, 205, 207, 242–3, 246, 249, 254, 262, 284–5, 293, 297, 325, 334, 342, 347

Marxism, 2, 7, 42, 57–8, 62, 66, 117, 138, 165, 167, 184–5, 193, 196–7, 215, 217, 219–20, 230–1, 235, 239, 242, 245, 254, 334, 340 Marxism-Leninism, 2, 58, 66, 117, 138, 165, 167, 184–5, 193, 197, 215, 217, 219–20, 230–1, 235, 245, 254, 334, 340 Matrosov, A., 143 mausoleum, 63–4, 73, 81, 127, 136, 152, 160, 164, 166, 168, 200, 205, 207–9, 259–60 May Day, 70–2, 74, 82, 90, 118, 134, 150, 155, 157, 203, 207, 257, 294–5, 311, 320, 329 Mayakovsky, V., 81 metanarrative, , 2–6, 8–10, 12, 14–16, 18, 20–6, 29, 35, 41, 43, 45, 47, 58, 61, 69, 75, 77–8, 83, 85–90, 94–5, 97, 100–7, 109–10, 116, 121–4, 126, 135, 138, 140, 145–6, 148, 151–5, 158, 162, 164–7, 169–70, 172–4, 176–7, 180–2, 184, 186, 188, 190–1, 193–4, 197–9, 202, 211, 213–14, 217–18, 220, 223, 225, 227, 231, 233, 235–6, 240–3, 245–6, 248, 250, 255, 256, 259, 261–2, 264–83, 305, 336 Metro, 95, 96–8, 101, 123, 129, 132–3, 135, 159, 204–6, 300, 310, 318–19, 328, 339, 344–5 Michurin, I., 115 Military Opposition, 39, 75 Minin, K., 64, 122, 145–6, 149 mobilisation, 22–3, 31, 34, 39, 43, 51, 88–9, 91, 98, 103, 181, 183, 189, 241, 277, 282, 304, 322 modernity, 2, 44, 53, 126, 132 Molotov, V., 50, 80, 84, 111, 114, 148, 241, 306, 309–10, 315, 350 Morozova, A., 123, 307 Moscow, , 13, 24, 54, 61–8, 70–1, 80–2, 95, 115, 117–18, 121, 127–31, 133–5, 142, 145, 149, 153–4, 158–60, 162, 199, 201, 204–7, 241, 243, 250–1, 259, 261–2, 287, 293, 296–7, 306, 309–11, 318, 328–9, 332, 334–5, 337–51 Moscow-Volga Ship Canal, 95 Mukhina, V., 92, 134, 203 Mussorgsky, M., 122 myth, 2–5, 15–17, 20, 22, 29, 36, 38, 40, 45, 48–50, 52, 54, 69, 71–2, 75, 78, 83, 86, 89, 91, 96, 98–100, 104, 106, 110, 117, 121–2, 124, 126, 138, 141, 143, 145, 152–3, 155, 157, 161–3, 167–72, 180–1, 185–6, 188–92, 198, 200–2,

Index 211–14, 216–17, 220, 222, 224, 226, 228, 230–1, 236, 239, 241, 243, 252, 255, 260, 265–6, 270–1, 273–4, 276, 281, 286 Nakhimov, P., 145 nationalist, 24, 98, 111, 145–6, 151–4, 234, 238, 249, 264–6, 274 NEP, 37, 44–5, 48–50, 58–60, 66, 89, 91, 95, 97, 163, 239, 242, 251–2, 254, 258, 341 Nevsky, A., 122, 145–6, 149, 160, 314 October Revolution, 4, 65, 73–4, 83, 86, 146, 148, 151, 185, 198, 203, 207, 212, 225, 228–9, 246, 249, 257, 275, 295, 307, 319, 320, 329, 344 opposition, 4–6, 33–6, 38, 40–3, 45–50, 52, 54–61, 73, 75–8, 82–4, 86, 88–9, 96–9, 102–4, 106–7, 109–10, 121, 135, 141–2, 157, 161, 163, 169–72, 177, 180, 184, 190–1, 196, 201, 228–32, 238, 246, 250–1, 255–6, 264–9, 287, 290–1, 295, 297, 303–4, 332 Ordzhonikidze, S., 57, 116, 306 Papanin, I., 114 party, 4–5, 7–9, 19, 21–4, 26–7, 29–31, 34, 37–8, 40–51, 53–60, 67, 69, 72, 74–91, 98–105, 107, 108–11, 115–17, 119, 121, 137–9, 146, 148–55, 157–8, 161, 163–70, 172–3, 175, 177, 179–81, 184–97, 199–200, 202, 205, 207, 209–11, 214, 216–25, 227–8, 230, 232–5, 237–9, 241–8, 250–4, 256–8, 260–2, 265–7, 272, 274, 276, 279, 281–2, 285, 287–91, 295–6, 302–6, 319–20, 331–4, 341, 344 patriotism, 122, 147–8, 151, 154, 187, 199–200, 252, 265, 323 Pavlov, I., 115, 149 peasants, 6, 13, 21, 30–8, 40, 42–53, 56–7, 59, 61, 70–2, 85–6, 89–91, 94–6, 98, 100, 102–3, 105–6, 112, 125, 127, 147, 149–51, 155, 166, 173–4, 176, 183, 186–7, 194–5, 199, 219, 232, 238, 248, 253, 266, 271, 285–6, 288, 290, 292, 297, 303, 314, 324 perestroika, 216, 219–20, 222–31, 233, 235–42, 246, 248, 250, 252, 254, 261, 276–7, 279, 281, 283, 330–3 performance legitimation, 21, 24–5, 48, 71, 97, 104, 108, 135, 139, 153, 172, 182, 184, 188, 190–1, 205, 211, 236–7, 243, 264–6, 276, 281, 284, 320

355 Peter the Great, 122, 351 Petrograd, 34, 63, 71, 81, 294–6 petty bourgeois, 40–1, 43, 45–8, 51, 54, 57, 83, 86, 99, 288, 297 Piatakov, G., 78, 296 Pimenov, Yu., 124, 298, 301 polar, 114–15 Popov, G., 259, 305, 316, 348 posters, , 5, 10–11, 28, 32–6, 58–60, 63, 71, 81–2, 91, 94–7, 115, 118, 123, 125–6, 141–2, 144–7, 156, 158, 183–4, 188, 196, 198, 200–1, 207–8, 261, 286, 292, 308, 311–12, 324 Pozharsky, D., 64, 122, 145–6, 149 Programme, 31, 39–40, 102, 169, 175, 177–8, 180, 182, 185, 187, 210, 217, 219–20, 222, 245–52, 285, 287, 294, 321, 330, 342 proletariat, 5–6, 27, 30–4, 36, 38–53, 55–7, 59, 61, 73–4, 78–9, 81, 86–7, 95, 98–100, 102, 105–7, 112, 117–19, 122, 127–9, 135, 175, 178–9, 186, 194–6, 220, 222, 232, 235, 246, 262, 266, 285–7, 290–2, 327 Proletkult, 73 purge, 48, 58, 100–1, 103, 109 Pushkin, A., 66, 122, 137, 149, 154, 160, 314 Red Army, 28, 33, 72, 74, 123, 136–7, 147, 150, 153, 297, 304 Right Opposition, 44, 47, 51, 57, 296 Rimsky-Korsakov, N., 122 ritual, , 15–16, 22, 25, 68–70, 72–3, 74–5, 78, 80, 88, 135, 152, 200, 208–11, 225, 256–8, 269, 273, 280, 284, 328 Rodina, 122, 143–6, 151–2, 154, 174, 177, 195, 198–9, 201, 306, 313, 323, 327 Rokossovsky, K., 152 Rudzutak, Ya., 80 Rules, 46, 102, 138, 169, 171, 217, 288, 303 Russian statehood, 122, 145, 152 Rykov, A., 119, 291, 297–8 saboteurs, 101, 107, 111 Schegal, G., 119 scientists, 115 self-criticism, 58, 78, 100–2, 109, 139, 165, 175, 180, 190–1, 197, 210, 219–20, 224, 233, 311 Seliunin, V., 259 Shakhty, 51, 97–8, 101 Shchuko, V., 128 Shchusev, A., 63–4, 160

356

Index

Shirshov, P., 114 shock work, 91, 94, 112 Sibiriakov, 114 smychka, 28, 45, 47, 50, 59, 61, 86, 90–1, 97, 292 socialism, 4, 6, 16, 28–30, 34, 36–8, 40, 44–5, 47–53, 56–7, 59–62, 72, 84–7, 89–93, 95–7, 99, 102–3, 105–7, 111, 113–14, 116, 118, 121–2, 124–6, 132, 134–5, 140, 146–8, 152–7, 161, 163, 165–8, 172, 174, 177, 179, 180–2, 185–90, 193–4, 196–202, 206, 208, 212, 214, 216–18, 221–2, 224–5, 227, 229–31, 233, 235–6, 238, 241–3, 245–9, 251–5, 257, 261–2, 264, 266, 268, 270, 274, 285, 289–90, 303, 306–7, 311, 320, 326, 328–30, 334 socialism in one country, 38, 87, 106, 152 socialist pluralism, 226, 229, 232, 234, 238, 244 socialist realism, 10–11, 92–4, 118, 123–4, 127, 129, 140, 170, 203, 270, 274 Sokolov, S., 260, 300–1, 306, 308, 317, 349 soldier, 33, 123, 132, 141–2, 145, 158, 199, 201 spectacles, 71–2 Stakhanov, A., 112 Stakhanovism, 14, 91, 96, 112, 215, 304, 349 Stalin, J., , 38, 45, 49–50, 52–5, 58, 75, 80, 84, 87, 89, 93, 95, 97, 102, 104–7, 110–25, 128, 130–1, 134–5, 137–8, 140, 143, 145–54, 156–8, 160–72, 191–4, 197, 202–3, 205–9, 211, 213, 226, 228, 231, 236, 249, 252, 254–5, 265–7, 270, 273, 275–7, 279–80, 287–91, 296–8, 300–11, 315–16, 318–19, 328–9, 334–5, 338–45, 347–50 Stalinist civilisation, 2 statues, 62–3 Suvorov, A., 145–6, 149, 160 Sverdlov, Ya., 131, 160, 205, 261, 295, 306, 310, 345 teleological legitimation, 25, 29, 38, 43, 140, 255, 264–7, 275, 280 Timiriazev, A., 115 Tomsky, M., 76, 80, 119 trial, 97, 108, 110, 113, 153 Trotsky, L., 39, 47, 57, 78–9, 83–4, 108, 287–8, 291, 295–7 Trotskyism, 55–6, 83, 227 Trotskyists, 38, 96, 229 Tsiolkovsky, K., 115

Tsipko, A., 259 Turksib, 89–90, 348 Ulyanov, D., 119 United Opposition, 38, 47, 56–7, 296 Ushakov, F., 145, 292 Vickers engineers, 97, 101 Victory Day, 152, 155, 199–200, 207, 260 vigilance, 98, 101, 109–10, 167, 174, 184, 199 Virgin Lands Scheme, 181–2 Volga–Don Canal, 89, 160 Voroshilov, K., 84, 114, 116, 119, 123, 261, 297, 306, 309 war, 141–53 War Communism, 27, 39, 42, 44–5, 65, 85, 346 White Guard, 35, 73, 108 White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal, 89 Williams, V., 115 women, 32, 59–60, 67, 72, 95–6, 119, 124, 142, 150–1, 156, 183, 188, 204, 253, 261, 286, 292, 313 workers, , 8, 13, 30–6, 38, 40, 43–5, 47–9, 51–3, 57, 59, 66, 70–4, 79–82, 89–91, 93–6, 98–101, 103–6, 111–12, 115, 117–18, 127, 129, 132–3, 135, 143, 147, 149–51, 154–8, 160, 165, 167–9, 172–3, 175–6, 181, 183, 185–9, 194–5, 197–9, 202, 207–8, 210, 215, 226, 251, 253, 267, 292, 296, 299, 303, 307, 310–11, 314, 323–4 Workers’ Opposition, 39, 76, 287, 297, 345 working class, 32, 34, 36, 39, 41–2, 45, 47–53, 57, 60, 67, 86, 90–1, 95, 98–9, 103, 105–6, 113, 123, 129, 135, 150–1, 158, 166, 173–4, 177, 179, 187, 189, 194–6, 199, 202, 211, 219, 221, 238, 245, 248, 253, 267, 287, 303 world revolution, 37, 52, 56, 72, 130 wreckers, 51, 96, 101, 107, 109, 111 Yeltsin, B., 205, 228, 233, 245, 250, 333–4 Yenukidze, A., 116 Young Pioneers, 82, 168, 210 youth, 92, 95, 137, 189, 226 Yumashev, A., 114, 307 Zhdanov, A., 92, 160, 261, 306 Zholtovsky, I., 64 Zhukov, G., 143, 152, 171, 307, 312–13, 316 Zinoviev, G., 47–9, 55, 75, 79–80, 83–4, 108, 288–91, 296–7, 351 Zvorykin, B., 34, 286

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