Hooligans in Khrushchev's Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw

3. Making Hooliganism on a Mass Scale: The Campaign against Petty Hooliganism

96 3 Making Hooliganism on a Mass Scale The Campaign against Petty Hooliganism Khrushchev’s Thaw is often presented as a period of increased experi­ mentation and official toleration. In many ways, this interpretation is undeniably true, especially in the cultural sphere. Khrushchev may have aimed his attack on the Stalinist cult of personality to discredit his remaining rivals and accelerate his rise to political power. But, his critique also generated significant collateral damage by challenging and inadvertently discrediting entrenched Stalin­era orthodoxies and authority figures in a variety of fields outside of elite politics.1 In the atmosphere of excitement, anxiety, and ideological uncertainty that emerged, spaces opened for ambitious actors to challenge their shell­ shocked elders and to experiment with and argue about alternatives to established modes of Stalinist being, believing, and behaving. Taking ad­ vantage of the mixed messages and frustrating silences of Khrushchev’s stop­and­go de­Stalinization, artists rediscovered and revived the formerly repressed movements of the avant­garde from the New Eco­ nomic Policy era, from constructivism and suprematism to Meyerhold’s biomechanics. Using the new openness of the era of peaceful coexistence, they began to advocate and experiment with the forbidden fruits of Western modernism, from atonality and nonrepresentational abstrac­ tion to the theater of the absurd. Unofficial subcultures and performance sites, featuring jazz musicians and beat poets, proliferated and spread Making Hooliganism on a Mass Scale 97 through a rapidly urbanizing post­Stalinist society hungry for the escapism, entertainment, and commodities of Western consumerism and pop culture.2 A new cultural environment of hesitant pluralism and highly limited autonomy arose as Soviet citizens argued out the meanings of a Thaw whose limits official statements often left undefined and amorphous.3 However, the Thaw was more than a time of increased official toler­ ance and relative cultural experimentation. It was also a time of increas­ ing official intolerance and intensified social discipline during which a utopian state accelerated its efforts to civilize Soviet society (riddled in the eyes of state actors by continued capitalist survivals and alien ideals) around a uniform code of communist morality.4 In addition to cautious liberal policies that promised limited cultural pluralism and socialist legality, the de­Stalinizing state was also actively engaged in parallel illiberal projects during the mid­ to late 1950s that entailed identifying the moral “others” who existed outside its civilizing mission and subjecting these stigmatized social groups to forms of increased police persecution and reformative reeducation that often violated the regime’s new legitimizing rhetoric of socialist legality. For young artists, students, and intellectuals chafing under the stale orthodoxies and authorities left over from the Stalin era, the second half of the 1950s was (in retrospect if not in reality) a golden age of relative artistic freedom and intellectual rebirth. For those individuals who were unlucky enough to be labeled “parasites,” “gypsies,” or “petty hooligans,” the same period was an era marked by an emphasis on increased repres­ sion, arbitrary state power, and unrestrained policing that, seemingly, had little to do with socialist legality or permissive pluralism. Coexisting with liberal Thaw­era policies, therefore, was an illiberal exercise in repressing moral deviants and state­defined undesirables. And at the heart of this illiberal project was a campaign against petty hooliganism that seemed to contradict many of the policies associated with the de­Stalinizing society of the Khrushchev reforms. If de­ Stalinization promised to roll back the discredited policies of the dead dictator, the petty hooligan campaign signaled a partial revival of Stalin­ ist policing tactics and their extension to previously unpunished minor offenses. If de­Stalinization promised a society that respected Leninist norms of socialist legality, the petty hooligan campaign instead threw legal oversight and protections overboard in the name of expanding and accelerating a punishment process from which no deviant, no matter how seemingly insignificant, was supposed to escape. 98 Making Hooliganism on a Mass Scale By empowering them to go after minor forms of misbehavior, the petty hooligan decree gave policemen a powerful and flexible new weapon in the Soviet state’s ongoing battle to enforce and instill good behavior in its human subjects. For besides being a crime­fighting tool, the petty hooligan campaign also served as a tool for sculpting a more civilized social body out of the rough manners and mores of a working class that the Party­state loved more in theory than reality. Helping...