There is no shortage of material on the social and cultural history of the Soviet Union – especially relating to pre-war Stalinism. It is a field that broke open in the second half of the twentieth century and has not looked back. Historians of the Stalinist social and cultural worlds have popularised many concepts and expressions that are now commonly used in reference to the USSR in this period: ‘social mobility’, ‘quicksand society’, ‘whisperers’, and so on.
This did, however, take time to filter through from the work of early historians to more popular perceptions and in the early 1990s the eminent Russian and Soviet scholar, Geoffrey Hosking, could still write:
Viewed from the West, the peoples of the Soviet Union tend to seem grey, anonymous and rather supine. When we see them on our television screens, marching in serried ranks past the mausoleum on Red Square, it is difficult to imagine them as more than appendages – or potential cannon fodder – for the stolid leaders whom they salute on the reviewing stand. This is, of course, partly the image the Soviet propaganda machine wishes to project. But is it not also partly the result of our way of studying the country? So many general works on the Soviet Union concentrate either on its leaders, or on its role in international affairs, as seen from the West. [1]
In 2020 it would be harder (but not impossible) to argue something similar to what Hosking put forward nearly 30 years ago. To be sure, portrayals of Russia still tend to be fairly superficial, at least in Australia, but ‘our way of studying the country’ no longer reflects the almost blinkered infatuation with high politics and ‘Kremlinology’ that Hosking referred to. Even the HSC Modern History National Study here in NSW, an entry into the basic contours of Russian and Soviet history from 1917 – 41, requires students to explore the social and cultural aspects of Stalinism as a key part of their study. It would also be hard to imagine university level courses dealing with this history and completely avoiding the ‘everyday lives’ of the Soviet people.
Life in Stalin’s Soviet Union (2019) edited by Kees Boterbloem from the University of South Florida is a good example of the kind of works that are now almost ubiquitous on university reading lists for courses in early Soviet history. They sit alongside more traditionally popular texts such as Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism (1999), Lynne Viola’s various books on the peasants under Stalin and Ronald Suny’s The Soviet Experiment (1998) which focused perhaps more than most traditional ‘textbooks’ on the national minorities within the USSR.
In the twelve chapters of this book, Boterbloem brings together an interesting range of scholars most of whom do not yet seem to have the gravitas of the Fitzpatricks, Violas and Sunys of the field – though Boterbloem and some of the other scholars such as David Shearer, Karen Petrone and Golfo Alexopoulos are by no means unknown. It is always refreshing to see more established scholars providing opportunities for younger historians to publish their research and this volume seems to achieve that to some degree.
In any historical field, there is a danger that as time passes and scholarship becomes more nuanced and eclectic, books like this can become impossible to pick up without a lot of prior reading and immersion in the field. That was not the case here. The chapters cover a range of well-known and eclectic themes making it useful for many contexts. For HSC Modern History teachers, many of the themes that require attention in ‘Russia and the Soviet Union’ National Study are covered here and without too much specialised language. Themes such as living standards, urban and rural life, education, gender and sexuality and religion all have distinct chapters providing good insight into contemporary thinking about life in the Stalinist system.
Some of the chapters provide particularly useful insights into the nature of Stalinism. For example, in her chapter on gender and sexuality (chapter 8: Gender and Sexuality), Amy Randall resists the temptation to caricature Stalin’s initiatives in the 1930s as either clearly retrograde (i.e. a ‘great retreat’) or progressive. She points out that the attempt to ban abortions (often seen as a conservative trend) was matched by policies increasing the demands on fathers to support children and families even in cases of divorce (seen here as more progressive). She also points out that even where family policy was more conservative, it found widespread resonance and acceptance in Soviet society where attitudes and values had not moved as far as the regime would have hoped. This, like much of the best social and cultural history of the past few decades, challenges the simplistic notion that Stalinism was simply a system characterised by top-down imposition of a pre-planned set of ideas enforced by brute power.
Many other chapters follow a similar pattern of teasing out the nuances and complexities of people and groups who lived through Stalinism. Larry Holmes, who has written much on the Soviet education system, for example, shows that the best laid plans of the Stalinist state rarely worked out in practice (chapter 9: The Educational Experience in Stalin’s Russia, 1931 – 45). Even in the 1930s when education policy was tightened (‘forcing’ children to spend more years at school) and geared for the purposes of mass industrialisation (through a greater emphasis on standardised examinations and other initiatives), thousands of children never met the state’s expectations. Like children everywhere, they skipped school, played up in class, and in many cases dropped out early. Teachers also found clever ways to ‘get around’ unhelpful state directives (perhaps as they do everywhere) and in many cases provided an education that was both interesting, progressive and enjoyable for students. Above all, Holmes argues that many children and families felt deeply indebted to the Soviet state for providing educational opportunities that opened doors to better jobs and better lifestyles than most citizens of the Russian Empire or the USSR could have dreamt of prior to the 1930s.
Not all of the themes or insights covered in Life in Stalin’s Soviet Union are necessarily ‘new’. Readers of Soviet social and cultural history will find much in this book that is argued elsewhere (often at book rather than chapter length) and there are also important gaps in the coverage of this book. For example, it was interesting that no chapter dealt exclusively with the problem of Stalinist 'identity' or 'subjectivity' which has been the focus of much discussion over the past two decades following the work of Jochen Hellbeck and others. But no manageable collection can cover everything and, together, these chapters provide a very helpful introduction to current research on many key themes that are fundamental to understanding the Stalinist social world.
This book would be worth having on the library shelf if your school chooses to do the USSR National Study as part of the HSC Modern History course. In the very least, it is useful further reading for teachers providing up-to-date scholarship that is more insightful than most commercial textbooks could ever be. It would also be useful for students who are confident readers to tackle as part of their wider reading for the course or for a research project such as the Historical Analysis.
Endnotes
[1] Geoffrey Hosing, A History of the Soviet Union (Final Ed.), HarperCollins, 1992, p. 1