Davies, Sarah. Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934-1941.

Davies, Sarah. Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934-1941. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

“The aim of this book is simple: to ‘release’ [the voices of “ordinary” people] and allow them to speak for themselves as far as possible” (1). She aims her agenda as a study of how people responded to the Great Retreat (which makes her framework pretty schematic) and Great Terror. She enters a debate with Kotkin and Kenez (who allegedly argue that the Soviet propaganda subdued other forms of discourse and made people ‘speak Bolshevik’, even without believing it), arguing that “new documents” demonstrate that popular dissent was wide-spread—true, but there was a huge difference between public discourse (where it was only possible to ‘speak Bolshevik’) and private discourse (where a huge possibility of discourses could exist). Emphasizes certain ‘carnivalesque’ elements in the use of official language (use of ‘second meanings’ to ‘steal’ first official meanings, thus deconstructing the official rhetorical and propagandistic clichés and models) – p. 8.

But then the book is built in a very simplistic way: the author takes a certain political or social phenomenon of Stalinism, looks at archival files about it, and deduces that there was a certain (but, of course, far from universal) popular opposition to it. So what? Is it really surprising that there was opposition to, say, the prohibition of abortions or the increase in bread prices? She seems to battle some old version of Sovietology at the time when it was long far from being on the cutting edge of scholarship about Soviet history.

Interestingly, she describes the rise of Stalin’s personality cult by 1936, although she doesn’t explain why it was supported (and it was!) from below. She, actually, resorts to explaining it through propaganda: okay, it did play a major role, but how did it resonate in the public opinion? When it comes to the analysis of public opinion, she once again repeats that there were those who believed and those who didn’t. The conclusion: “The [Stalinist propaganda] machine itself was far from omnipotent, lacking sufficient resources and personnel to make it fully effective” (183) – and what did she expect to find, an Orwellian state? The whole conclusion repeats the main theme of the book: some believed, some didn’t, some fell prey to propaganda, some remained immune.