Soviet Diary as a Medium of Communality and Intersubjectivity: A Study of a Collective Diary

385 Ab Imperio, 3/2002 Yasuhiro MATSUI SOVIET DIARY AS A MEDIUM OF COMMUNALITY AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY: A STUDY OF A COLLECTIVE DIARY One of the most fascinating research trends in the post-Soviet historiography is the analysis of surviving diaries written by ordinary people during Stalin’s reign. There is no doubt that Jochen Hellbeck is a leading historian of this new trend and his articles are a very interesting and ambitious attempt to override a long lasting debate between the totalitarian and revisionist schools. It seems, however, that by basing his work on select diaries, Hellbeck has excessively focused on one aspect of Soviet subjectivity.1 This becomes evident by the prominence of terms starting with “self”: “self-transformation”, “self-perfection”, “self-purification” and so on. Certain individuals profiled in Hellbeck’s work – Podlubnyi,Afinogenov, etc. – are extraordinarily serious about remaking themselves and seek to amalgamate their self-identities 1 This analysis of Hellbeck’s approach to Soviet subjectivity is based on the following articles: Jochen Hellbeck. Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931-39) //Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. 1996. # 44; Idem. Writing the Self in the Time of Terror: Alexander Afinogenov’s Diary of 1937 // Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler (Eds.). Self and Story in Russian History. Cornell University Press, 2000; Idem. Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts // The Russian Review. 2001. No. 60. 386 Y. Matsui, Soviet Diary as a Medium of Communality and Intersubjectivity... with Stalinist values. In addition, these subjects’ behavior and way of thinking leave us with the image that they are lonely, confronted with the regime and its socialist construction projects without any real human relations or interaction with others. Frankly speaking, this reminds us again of the atomization thesis touted by totalitarian theorists. Hellbeck himself seems to partially admit as much, noting that the totalitarianists’ “view of society as being ‘atomized’ by the totalitarian regime comes tantalizingly close to Podlubnyi’s experience,” although he distinguishes himself from the totalitarian school, which assumed the existence of a private sphere expressing a ‘real’self distinct from the Stalinist value system.2 In any event, the emphasis on the meaning of diaries as a tool of self-purification and self-identification with the regime leads to the image that Stalin’s Russia was a totalitarian society to a much greater degree than even most totalitarian theorists could conceive. I propose a different approach to Soviet subjectivity by analyzing a different kind of diary. This short essay will give an overview of a collective diary and examine communal and interpersonal relations among ordinary people under Stalin and after. * * * Several students sharing a dorm room and studying at the faculty of literature at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute (Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut) began keeping the collective diary. In 1932, four female students set up a domestic commune (bytovaia kommuna) and 2 Hellbeck. Fashioning the Stalinist Soul. P. 359. The last point is the most important in Hellbeck’s view. He emphasizes that there could be no subject and no self distinct from the value and political system of a given regime. Even if this premise were to be accepted, it seems that the varying extent to which each subject comprehended the “nature” of the regime and attempted to distinguish oneself from its value system should not be underestimated. For example,A. G. Man’kov, a white-color worker and a student in the 1930s, grasped the Stalinist regime in a distinctive totalitarian framework and criticized the hardships of daily life in his contemporarily composed diary. It is likely that he acquired such a perception through extensive reading. Reading, in general, is supposed to be significant in making self. But reading, contrary to writing and speaking, has a possibility to open self toward the outside world and a different value system. Man’kov reached a kind of totalitarian theory through reading about the Italian Fascism and comparing it with the regime in which he lived. See A. G. Man’kov. Iz dnevnika 1938-1941 gg. // Zvezda. 1995. No 11. Pp. 182, 193-194. And see Yasuhiro Matsui. Youth Attitudes Towards Stalin’s Revolution and the Stalinist Regime, 1929-1941 // Acta Slavica Iaponica...