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239 7 “Renegades of socialism” and the making of Bolshevik political Culture i n an influential essay of 1985, the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick persuasively argued that the civil war was the formative experience of the Bolshevik party.1 She directed her argument primarily at an interpretive tradition that sought the origins of Stalinist mentalities and institutions in Lenin’s prerevolutionary writings, and her work formed part of a larger historiographical shift away from ideas and inevitability, toward contingency, circumstance, and the exigencies of war in the development of Bolshevik authoritarianism. This chapter suggests that a concept of experience based on the work of the anthropologist Victor Turner can introduce greater analytical precision to the commonsense notion of a formative experience and can build on the observation that so many key Bolshevik practices took shape in the civil war. For Turner, experiences are “distinguishable, isolable sequences of external events and internal responses to them.”2 An experience opens with a breach or a shock, it develops through time and as process, and it culminates, however open-endedly, in some kind of resolution or conclusion. Turner’s concept of experience incorporates both objective events and the subjective interpretation of events by participants, but anthropologists and others have long since abandoned the commonsense assumption that experiences happen to autonomous subjects whose outlook and sense of self has ontological priority. Experience, in fact, is better understood as “a process by which, for all social beings, subjectivity smith_text_3.indd 239 2/21/11 2:40 PM 240 / “Renegades of soCialism” is constructed,” as the feminist scholar Teresa de Lauretis has put it.3 Turner has also argued that the meaning of an experience is only fully constituted as it is expressed (or “squeezed out” of the experiential process) and enacted in ceremonies and rituals. A ritualized performance is thus the “proper finale” of an experience and can be one of the most important ways for a group to construct its identity. By organizing and performing the stories embedded in experiences , stories through which people make sense of themselves and their world, such rituals and ceremonies facilitate individual and collective self-definition by drawing on, and staging, shared experiences.4 Such a perspective on experience , ritual, and the making of Bolshevik subjectivity in the civil war can illuminate the deeper workings of the Bolshevik imagination long after the events that shaped it had receded from view. toward the sR trial In the first decades of Soviet history, two related Bolshevik rituals—apology rituals and show trials—dramatized the triumph of the Communist Party’s general line and the destruction of opposition to it. These rituals were important in building party identity and offer an excellent window on the party’s self-image and culture. In the ritual of self-criticism and apology that former oppositionists and party members who had otherwise erred were called on to perform in appropriate party settings—from local cell meetings to party congresses—former oppositionists were expected to affirm the correctness of the victorious line and to confess unconditionally the crime of having opposed it. The ritual process reassimilated the repentant oppositionist to the party, restored party unity, and opened the way for the penitent’s return to party work. Show trials were similar in many respects, although they had a much larger public audience. Crucially, however, they did not transform the status of the former oppositionists . The main figures in the big show trials of the 1930s played roles similar to those they had played in apology rituals throughout the decade, but their exclusion from the party remained unchanged and they were shot. The show trials thus lacked the redressive quality characteristic of the apology rituals. Like apology rituals, however, the great show trials of the 1930s helped shape the identity and cohesion of the Stalinist majority in the party by throwing into sharp relief the treacherous crimes that separated the former oppositionists from the main body of the party.5 The first big Soviet show trial was the trial of more than twenty Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) in the summer of 1922, a performative finale to the civil war that served as the model for later show trials, codified some of the conventions of apology rituals, and organized the master plot used in both. The SR trial was by no means the first political trial in Soviet history. Since early 1918, the Revolutionary Tribunal attached to the Central Executive Committee had smith_text_3.indd 240 2/21/11 2:40 PM...

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