In Search of Soviet Podlinnost´

Back in the 1990s, two circumstances came together: the “linguistic turn” reached historians of Russian and Soviet history and the “archival revolution” opened new possibilities for investigation. This made it possible to find new answers to the question of which statements—private or public—made by people living under totalitarian regimes are more believable and to what extent “common” people internalized Bolshevik values. Since then, the discovery of a “Stalinist subject” that sincerely tended to articulate itself through totalitarian discourses and practices had a huge impact on the study of Stalinism and promoted the appearance of a wide range of works dealing with “subjectivity” under Stalin and later in the post-Stalin era.¹ Anatoly Pinsky’s edited volume is a contribution to this ongoing research endeavor.

The term “Soviet subjectivity” appearing in the title is more an umbrella term for various ways of looking at the actors’ level than an operational concept. The authors, for example, differ not only on the question of how a subject is constituted but also on the question of its possibility to judge and to act independently. Also, not all contributors favor ego documents for the analysis of “subjectivity.” The editor’s attempt to distinguish three conceptual forms of “subjectivity” used by the contributors functions, unfortunately, only on a quite abstract level and thus only partially clarifies the problem. There seems, however, to be at least one common premise formulated by Pinsky: the paradox that after the end of mass terror, the Soviet state became with time more branched and stable. This development fostered the strengthening of individual tendencies toward more autonomy and creative self-expression, which in turn undermined the attempts of various Soviet authorities to create normative Soviet subjects.

The texts in the first section of the volume deal with the “macrolevel”: that is, with discourses and practices considered to be crucial for the understanding of the “subjectivity” of a considerable number of Soviet people. Cynthia Hooper shows in her text on Soviet writers and filmmakers how difficult the search for “authenticity” (podlinnost´) and happiness was after mass terror had abated, when Soviet authorities had to reconcile “that what the people want with that what people should want in their opinion” (40). Hooper shows that Soviet filmmakers and writers like El´dar Riazanov or Vasilii Aksenov were still dedicated to the normative values of the Soviet state, although they extended the boundaries of personal possibilities for Soviet people. However, while it seems to be true that these cultural figures thought in similar categories to, for example, state propagandists, it is not entirely clear why all of Hooper’s historical actors saw “this sometimes absurd and disturbing Soviet social-economic structure” (29) as a guarantee of podlinnost´. Such a view implies that Soviet film-makers and writers have been unable in principle to distinguish between morals and politics and therefore unable to undock Soviet (or “humanistic”) moral goods from the Soviet “social-economic structure.” It is also doubtful whether the opposition of podlinnyi and mnimyi (delusionary) actually originated in the 1930s, when the distinction between “true” and “false” Communists reached an unprecedented peak, or was a much older problem.

Maria Maiofis writes about children’s choral studios as a place where Soviet values and virtues such as discipline, collectivity, devotion to work, and solidarity were internalized. Maiofis argues that in the absence of terror the Soviet project was in great need of new, positive forms of mobilization. This led to growth in the number of children’s choral studios and finally to their absolute dominance in the Soviet Union. She also points to the fact that many former members of the studios maintained a nostalgic form of loyalty to their former collectives even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Another contribution to the problem of podlinnost´ is offered by Mikhail Rozhanskii in his paper on Soviet films dealing with Siberia in 1959. Rozhanskii’s finding is that with the “semantic...