Dunham, Vera. In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction.

Dunham, Vera. In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990.

An exploration of the so-called Big Deal between the Stalinist leadership and what Dunham describes as “Soviet middle class.” Dunham argues that in order to govern the Soviet society, the VKP(b) abandoned the revolutionary agenda and instead “a tacit concordat was formed by Soviet leadership with the resilient middle class… The leadership had been forced to put a premium on skill, on productivity, on performance, instead of on political adroitness and ideological orthodoxy.” (4-5). Without any access to archival historical sources and very sceptical of official Soviet documents, Durham took Soviet “middlebrow fiction” as a historical source to prove that a conversion of values occurred in the period of late Stalinism. She argues that socialist realism acted as a middle ground between Soviet leadership and the Soviet middle class: the first shaped values it required, the second used it to provide feedback to the regime.

Her approach is, however, very straightforward. Dunham takes fictional details as elements Soviet social reality: this approach stripped all other functions of literary writing off, as if they did not exist. Also, due to the nature of her sources, Dunham had to deal with cultural categories (intelligentsia and meshchanstvo, in particular) as they were used in Soviet socialist realism as social categories. This made her perspective very dependent on the perspective of her sources; she in many cases reduced to analysis to pure functionalism (this detail/element of a plot is used in order to achieve a certain social function). On p. 48, for example, she discusses a fragment from a novel about a Soviet shock-worker who, in reward of his work feats, was given a private house. Dunham argues that this is an evidence of a kind of tacit rehabilitation of private property; but the excerpt itself (she quotes it extensively) is framed in very different metaphors: not those of property, but those of rural life. And the most important thing she doesn’t mention: it implies a different mode of social relations: the official Soviet discourse of the first post-war decade, both on textual and visual levels, did not deem it appropriate that material things could be used for social differentiation; neither was it a proper “concordat” between the Soviet leadership and the Soviet “middle class,” since material objects had to be regarded not as objects of consumer desire, as an objects of purchase, but rather as a reward for state service. This is very different from “middle class values”: this is a totally different work ethics.

While the approach was novel and is certainly very stimulating, the mixing of Western social categories (middle class) as experienced by Dunham in her American life with Soviet cultural categories (intelligentsia) as described in Soviet postwar novels proved to be very misleading for her.