Private Life in Stalin’s Russia: Family Narratives, Memory and Oral History

For many years, we knew next to nothing about the private lives of ordinary Soviet citizens during Stalin’s reign. Until very recently, the social history of the Soviet Union written by Soviet and Western historians alike was limited entirely to the public sphere – politics and ideology, and the collective experience of the ‘Soviet masses’. The individual (insofar as he or she appeared at all) featured mainly as a letter-writer to the Soviet authorities (that is, as a public actor rather than a private person or member of a family).

Sources were the obvious problem. Apart from a few memoirs by great writers, there was practically no reliable evidence about the private sphere of family life. For ordinary people in the Soviet Union, for the tens of millions who suffered from repression, their family history was a forbidden zone of memory – something they would never talk or write about.

During the Soviet period, the personal collections (lichnye fondy) built up in the state and Party archives belonged in the main to well-known public figures in the world of politics, science and culture; their documents were carefully selected by their owners for donation to the state. The memoirs published in the Soviet Union were also generally unrevealing about the private experience of the people who wrote them, although there are some exceptions, particularly among those published in the glasnost period after 1985. The memoirs by intellectual emigrés from the Soviet Union and Soviet survivors of the Stalinist repressions published in the West were hardly less problematic, although these were widely greeted as the ‘authentic voice’ of ‘the silenced’, which told us what it had ‘been like’ to live through the Stalin Terror as an ordinary citizen.¹

By the height of the Cold War, in the early 1980s, the Western image of the Stalinist regime was dominated by these intelligentsia narratives of survival, particularly those by Evgeniia Ginzburg and Nadezhda Mandelshtam, which provided first-hand evidence for the liberal idea of the individual human spirit as a force of internal opposition to Soviet tyranny. This moral vision (symbolized by the ‘victory of democracy’ in 1991) had a powerful influence on the amateur memoirs written in enormous numbers after the collapse of the Soviet regime.² But while these famous memoirs speak a truth for many people who survived the Terror, particularly for the intelligentsia strongly committed to the ideals of individual liberty, they do not speak for the millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, including many victims of the Stalinist regime, who did not share this inner freedom or feeling of dissent, but on the contrary, silently accepted and internalized the system’s basic values, conformed to its public rules, and perhaps even collaborated in the perpetration of its crimes.

The diaries that emerged from the archives seemed at first more promising. ³ Alongside other autobiographical writings, such as the questionnaires (ankety) or short biographies that people had to write at almost every stage or their career (for example, on entering a university or institute, on joining the Party, or applying for a job), diaries have provided the main evidence for the recent boom in studies of ‘Soviet subjectivity’. Loosely based on Foucault’s concept of the ‘culture of the self’, this intellectual boom began with Stephen Kotkin’s argument, in his book Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, that Soviet citizens in the 1930s, far from being simply downtrodden, were in fact empowered by learning to ‘speak Bolshevik’ (that is, by mastering and manipulating the official discourse of the Soviet regime).⁴ The younger and more recent exponents of this Foucauldian argument, such as Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin, have moved in a slightly different direction, emphasizing from their reading of literary and private texts (above all diaries) the degree to which the interior life of the individual was dominated and entrapped by the regime’s ideology. According to Hellbeck, it was practically impossible for the individual to think or feel outside the terms defined by the public discourse of Soviet politics, and any other thoughts or emotions were likely...