Golfo Alexopoulos. Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936

Golfo Alexopoulos. Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003.

This book by Golfo Alexopoulos (University of South Florida) focuses on the history of disenfranchised people in Soviet Russia/the Soviet Union as a separate social group, looking at how they were constructed as a group from outside (i.e., by the state), how  they were constructed by local communities (from aside) and what identities they ascribed to themselves. Part of social engineering efforts to create a new man, which included a reward for successful social self-transformation and, thus, stimulated disenfranchised people to engage in a dialogue with power that would reforge them. Discusses social stratification, but – once again – in terms of class. Imposition of a new culture where “opposing behaviors associated with the two classes provided the salient markers of insiders and outsiders” (11).

In chapter 1, Alexopoulos discusses reasons which lay in the basis of the institute of disenfranchisement in the Soviet Union, interpreting it mainly as attempts at social engineering of the Soviet society.  Certain economic and cultural (religion) behaviour, as well as personal history (belonging to certain groups in pre-1917 society). 1930 as the turning year when being disenfranchised came to mean real social disadvantages, rather than simply inability to vote. Political and economic marginalization (esp. in terms of food supply). Ritual of rehabilitation. In chapter 2, Alexopoulos examines what social groups were vulnerable to disenfranchisement and argues that while a certain pattern might be traced, actually this punishment was often used in an arbitrary manner. She offers no statistical analysis whatsoever, which makes her analysis of the material in this chapter somewhat useless: this group was addressed, that group, too, and this one, and that one—what’s the point?

In chapter 3, Alexopoulos analyses Soviet discourse which regulated the practice of disenfranchisement, but her only instrument of discourse analysis is a search for the ways definition of the enemy was applied to potentially “alien” social elements. Her tendency to personify the Bolshevik leadership doesn’t make her a good favor: “Bolshevik leaders deeply distrusted their ability to track what they believed was an elusive and deceptive enemy” (94). In Chapter 4, Alexopoulos follows Hellbeck in her analysis how disenfranchised people constructed (in her case, reduced) their Selves through writing. She analyzes different narrative strategies that the disenfranchised used in their appeals, and argues that these strategies (of misfortune/ignorance/compulsion) worked to reinforce the relations of paternalism (see Siegelbaum in Fitzpatrick’s Stalinism. New directions). In Chapter 5, she looks more broadly at how they struggled to become re-enfranchised by conforming to the requirements of what it meant to be a Soviet citizen (one can add: delineating these requirements in the process).

Chapter 6 looks at the results of the Soviet disenfranchisement policy. “Through its policy of disenfranchisement and rehabilitation, the party forced people to transform their identities, change their economic practices and dependencies, and become productive and loyal laborers of the Soviet state—this in exchange for the full rights of citizens.” (159) She then builds links between the practices of disenfranchisement and the Great Terror.