In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

34 Chapter Two He Does Not Love Us When We Are Dirty Dear little grandfather Lenin, we want to tell you that we have become very good. We study diligently. We already read and write well. We make lots of pretty things. We wash ourselves carefully every morning and wash our hands every time we eat. We want to make our teacher happy. He does not love us when we are dirty. —Letter from schoolchildren to V. I. Lenin (1922) W I T H L E N I N as the state’s father figure, Soviet children needed clean hands to make “pretty things.” On propaganda posters, in brochures , and in public lectures Bolsheviks preached the virtue of hot water, soap, and scrub brushes.1 Physical hygiene became a sign of mental hygiene which could only be accomplished with political hygiene. A 1920 propaganda poster entitled “Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of the Unclean” depicts Lenin perched on a globe with a broom, sweeping the earth free of bloated capitalists, autocrats, and religious figures, the “unclean” (nechist’) who would infect Soviet citizens with the ideas of the past. In the battle against intellectual dirt, political rhetoric was filled with terms drawn from the washroom, and removing people tainted by the past would provide a much-needed “cleansing” (chistka). At every opportunity the vanguard instructed their pupils on mental and physical cleanliness, using Lenin, the propaganda-poster teacher, as both model and threat: “he does not love us when we are dirty.” More than anything, a clean mind was signaled by clean words. All members of early Soviet society were encouraged to rid their speech of “coarse, rude, and hard expressions” that might signal a dirty mind. Even before the revolution, worker activists often equated swearing with a lack of culture.2 At least one prerevolutionary trade union prohibited cursing because it was seen as a sign of “the lack of respect for the human personality that exists under the bourgeois system.”3 After the revolution, efforts He Does Not Love Us When We Are Dirty 35 to clean up workers’ speech continued. Leon Trotsky, in his 1923 book Problems of Life (Voprosy byta), reasoned that “the struggle against ‘bad language’ is a condition of intellectual culture, just as the fight against filth and vermin is a condition of physical culture.”4 And Trotsky was not alone; Michael Gorham, in his extensive study of language change in the Soviet Union, asserts that there emerged in the 1920s “a dominant discourse of language purism.”5 Campaigns such as the 1923–24 Komsomol (Communist Youth Organization) “struggle for cultured speech”6 were launched to clean up the speech—and therefore the minds—of Soviet youth. And this language purism extended far beyond merely eradicating swearwords. “Language hygienists” also targeted dialect and nonstandard lexicon and grammar , all of which were connected, like swearing, with political backwardness in the early Soviet period.7 Dirty, sloppy words communicated dirty, sloppy thoughts. And despite the fact that workers (and avant-garde writers such as Mayakovsky) often saw hygienic speech as bourgeois, there was a concentrated effort throughout the early Soviet period to stop the proletariat from using swearwords, dialecticisms, and poor grammar and compel them to adopt the clean, efficient language espoused by Trotsky, the Proletkult, and the productionists, among others. Throughout the early Soviet period we see satire used as a device to expose and silence the villains who refused to speak the clean language of Communism.8 HYGIENIC SATIRE Propagandists took advantage of increasing literacy in the early Soviet period to make the written word a constant presence in work and leisuretime activities. As citizens moved from factory to gymnasium, they were surrounded by a wallpaper of behavioral instruction generated from every level of society. Hallways, fences, and factories were plastered with propaganda posters, and at every workplace and university “wall newspapers” (stengazety) imparted the “culture of everyday life” (kul’tura byta) to Soviet citizens. “Culturedness” encompassed an astonishing array of topics from personal hygiene to political awareness to poetry—and all of it in the service of Soviet ideology. One poster might advise citizens to wash their vegetables and the next to read more books. The vanguard of the revolution had an enormous task in imparting this knowledge to a population of newly literates , many of whom did not share their enthusiasm for clean fingernails and Pushkin. Nevertheless, imparting culturedness was given top priority. Reading rooms were quickly set up all over the country...

Share