The Soviet State and the Individual

279 Ab Imperio, 3/2002 Jeremy SMITH THE SOVIET STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin have performed a great service in drawing our attention to the question of subjectivity and consciousness in the Soviet Union. I have long been uneasy with the picture of Soviet citizens either as obedient tools of an overbearing and ruthless political system (totalitarian ) or as ever-suffering and largely passive, prone only to occasional and often symbolic protest (revisionist). While I think their case is still far from proven, any attempt to understand soviet individuals as capable of independent thought and judgement is to be welcomed. From Hellbeck’s analysis of diaries of the 1930s, I would like to draw attention to one particular finding, most evident in the case of Galina Shtange, whose diary “shows an inversion of the hierarchy of the public and private spheres found in liberal thought”.1 The work-place now became the location where the true individual could be expressed, while the home became the scene of drudgery and alienation. If this is how most Soviet citizens felt, then the Soviet communists are to be congratulated: this is exactly what Karl Marx had in mind. In his early writings in particular, Marx focussed on the alienation the worker feels from his or her labour because of the way the process of production is organised under capitalism. This was to be reversed under communism, where the worker would find his or her true self through labour. While Engels also identified the home and family as a 1 Jochen Hellbeck. Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-era Autobiographical Texts // Russian Review. July 2001. Pp. 355-6. 280 J. Smith, The Soviet State and the Individual site of alienation, and would no doubt have disapproved of the continued existence of this institution in its old, oppressive form, at least they would have found satisfaction in the fact that Shtange had accomplished at least half the transformation on a personal level. Marx and Engels were never clear as to precisely where consciousness came from, vaguely drifting between economic determinism on the one hand and the ideological hegemony of the ruling class on the other. It was left to Bolshevik Marxists, who had to deal in more practical terms with the actual consciousness of workers and peasants, to formulate this question more clearly. Put very crudely, individual (and group) consciousness could be traced to two main sources: 1) The day-to-day conditions and experience of existence, especially material conditions, which can be traced ultimately back to economic factors but which are prone to sudden disturbance through group struggle; 2) The intervention of external human agents, through propaganda and ideology, exerting their influence on the individual, especially when able to capitalise on experiences generated by the first source of consciousness. This dichotomy of sources of consciousness, sometimes characterised as “objective” and “subjective” factors, lies, after all, at the core of Lenin’s concept of the revolutionary party, and the balance between the two is a major theme of his polemics with Rosa Luxemburg. I would like to suggest that this dual approach to individual consciousness , often characterised as belonging only to Lenin’s pre-revolutionary strategy, prevailed throughout the NEP. If the dichotomy is accepted as correct , then the following explanation in an OGPU report for a surge in strike activity in western Russia for July 1922 is flawless in its logic: “In July, the picture has changed: we are receiving information, on the one hand, about a whole series of strikes, and on the other hand, about a revival of work by Mensheviks and SRs. Of course, these two developments are closely linked to each other, since the general material position in the reporting month has not really deteriorated”.2 If material conditions have not changed, then the only possible explanation for a turn for the worse in the mood of workers is the propaganda and agitational efforts of anti-Soviet parties. These themes as explanations for unrest remain constant throughout the OGPU reports of the 1920s. Unrest is linked either to directly economic factors or to the activities of anti-soviets, oppositionists, nationalists, kulaks, clergy or whoever, never to a general...