Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 by Timothy Johnston Page A

official information and rhetoric. Soviet citizens could not escape official ideas about the outside world in the way they could fail to turn up for an election rally. Despite the fact that avoidance involved the attempt to escape the coercive influence of Soviet power, it can still be considered a ‘tactic of the habitat’. Creative avoidance strategies such as feigning illness, job changing, and blat’ , were so endemic, that they became distinctive features of the Soviet environment. To describe them as resistance is to stretch that term beyond its usefulness. Even when they were dodging Soviet power, Stalin-era citizens often did so in a distinctively Soviet manner.
Performance, reappropriation, bricolage , and avoidance embedded Soviet citizens within the habitat of Soviet power. They differed from resistance, which involved stepping outside of the habitat of Soviet power and finding an external pattern of behaviour and speech in order to subvert the government. 107 They were everyday strategies of
     
103 Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants , 286–95; Viola, Peasant Rebels , 48–63; Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia, 92–100.
104 See: Johnston, ‘Subversive Tales’.
105 Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace , 20–3.
106 Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. See also: Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany , 112–17, 167–9.
107 J. J. Rossman, Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop
Floor (Cambridge Mass., 2005), 2–7.
Introduction xli
living within the Stalin-era system. In his description of ‘speaking Bolshevik’, Kotkin cites de Certeau, Foucault, and Bourdieu as his sources of inspiration. 108 My ‘tactics of the habitat’ are less influenced by Foucault’s notions of all-embracing discourse and owe rather more to de Certeau’s notion of everyday creativity.
This account of everyday creativity is not a pious attempt to separate ordinary Soviet citizens from Soviet power and salvage their ‘dignity’. 109 Official Soviet Identity played a key role in shaping the landscape within which these ‘tactics’ were deployed. Nonetheless there was not simply a view ‘from above’ and a subversive rival view ‘from below’ about the outside world in this period. 110 A binary model of ordinary people, subsumed by official discourse or rebelling against it, obscures the complexities of life in the Stalin-era USSR. Most Soviet citizens neither lived as automatons nor struggled against Soviet power. They innova- tively negotiated their way through Soviet society, drawing on the ‘tactics of the habitat’ that were a key element of what it meant to be Soviet in this period.
The model of ‘tactics of the habitat’, rather than support or resis- tance, is particularly appropriate in relation to Official Soviet Identity in the post-1939 era. As Chapter 1 argues, the Soviet occupation of the Polish, Finnish, and Romanian borderlands in 1939–40 meant that Soviet citizens were no longer living in a closed informational system. During the pre-war 1930s Soviet citizens had very few alternative sources of information concerning the outside world. Few individuals travelled into or out of the USSR and the mental horizons of the Soviet population were firmly focused within the confines of the Soviet Union. 111
The outbreak of conflict in Europe shattered this informational seal around the USSR. As one former Soviet citizen explained, ‘For us “abroad” opened itself in 1939, after the occupation of Poland, Latvia etc. Here our attitudes changed drastically. The ones who were there
     
108 Kotkin, Magnetic Moutnain, 22–3, 237.
109 L. Engelstein, ‘New Thinking about the Old Empire: Post-Soviet Reflections’, Russian Review , 60. 4 (2001), 489. See also: A. Krylova, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies’, Kritika, 1.1 (2000), 119–46.
110 For this approach, see R. Magnusdottir, ‘Keeping up Appearances: How the
Soviet State failed to Control Popular Attitudes Towards the