Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism

Fitzpatrick in Everyday Stalinism looks at how the Soviet urban society worked on the daily level, but unlike Stephen Kotkin in Magnetic Mountain she approaches this subject in a very straightforward way. Once she argues that “for Homo Sovieticus, the state was a central and ubiquitous presence,” (3) she starts examining her material a statist perspective, and her agenda to explore the entire everyday life during Stalinism (her narration encompasses a broad variety of topics ranging from shortages of food to new strategies of consumption to life in exile to new gender roles and models), often prevents her from digging deeper into the research problems she analyzes. The most important issue about her method is related to her interpretation of sources. She claims to explore the Soviet everyday life on the basis of official documents that preserved voices of ordinary people (such as party reports on public sentiment), but in many cases what she deals with is internalized elements of public discourse that Soviet people were able to produce “on demand” (hence “speaking Bolshevik” in Kotkin), but which hardly reflected their genuine everyday strategies. One example is her chapter on “palaces on Monday” (67–88) where she deals entirely with this discursive level of historical process (both in its original and “profane” versions) but doesn’t discuss how people actually lived (through) those cultural phenomena she describes. Another issue related to her use of sources is how she, despite her attempt to address the whole of urban population of Soviet Russia, reduces the ‘voice’ of Soviet people to intellectuals. While discussing the social sentiment in the 1930s, she makes a point that “the generation that grew up in the 1930s” was sincere in its beliefs that it was building a bright communist future, arguing that “most memoirs about this period… recall the idealism and optimism of the young, their belief that they were participants in a historic process of transformation…” (68) Just several pages before that, she was discussing Soviet hooliganism, blat and protection as important phenomena of the Soviet everyday life. It is hard to believe that Soviet hooligans or young workers from школы фабрично-заводского ученичества or children of people from the world of blat and protection were likely to share ideals of young intellectuals—those who authored the memoirs that Fitzpatrick later used to make an overgeneralized statement about beliefs and values of an entire generation. This turns her analysis of “everyday Stalinism” into a very nuanced and detailed examination of how the Soviet leadership constructed, voluntarily or not, the level of the everyday, but barely touches upon a related problem: how Soviet daily routine changed the nature of the political process in Soviet Russia. In some cases, Fitzpatrick mentions certain ambiguities in implementation of Soviet social policies which… “had enormous practical disadvantages,” (27) or, in the case of commodity shortages, that “even Stalin’s personal interest in the problem failed to produce results.” (45) But she takes these conflicts for granted without explaining why, despite a drive toward a total(itarian) state, Stalin and his political circle tolerated or were unable to cope with these ambiguities or problems—something which is much easier to explain if we accept that just as the Stalinist leadership was shaping and “reforging” the Soviet society, so the Soviet society (which included, among other things, implementers of the Great Terror, Soviet scholars, rank-and-file members of Soviet culture who stood behind socialist realist cultural production, etc.) was shaping and “reforging” the Stalinist leadership—or was positioning it, to use terminology of Bourdieu. After all, Fitzpatrick herself argues that it was only due to the “second economy” where the role of the state was only repressive (62–65) that the entire industrialization project became possible.