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Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s

By Sheila Fitzpatrick ( Oxford University Press, USA )

Release Date: 2000-05-11
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Product Description
Here is a pioneering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by a leading authority on modern Russian history. Focusing on the urban population, Fitzpatrick depicts a world of privation, overcrowding, endless lines, and broken homes, in which the regime's promises of future socialist abundance rang hollowly. We read of a government bureaucracy that often turned life into a nightmare, and of how ordinary citizens tried to circumvent it. We also read of the secret police, whose constant surveillance was endemic at this time, and the waves of terror, like the Great Purges of 1937, which periodically cast society into turmoil.

Amazon.com
Most popular books about the Stalin era feature the big names and a firm narrative shape: Robert Conquest's The Great Terror; Alan Bullock's Hitler and Stalin. Some books yield their revelations at a glance, like the stunning The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia.

But scholar Sheila Fitzpatrick is famous for letting the common people and the facts speak for themselves, in all their complexity. Her new book on Soviet life in the 1930s--based on research in newly opened archives--does for urbanites what her Heldt Prizewinning Stalin's Peasants did for rural victims. The many witnesses in this fascinating horror story cast doubt on Stalin's notorious 1935 slogan "Life has become better, comrades; life has become more cheerful."

A comment made by a victim of Ivan the Terrible would be more apt: "We Russians don't need to eat; we eat one another and this satisfies us." Famine, caused by bad weather and worse policies, plagued the decade, and life became a chronic struggle to wrest crumbs from an incompetent bureaucracy. Stalin's sly methods of deflecting blame from the state onto allegedly disloyal citizens provoked orgies of denunciation (which could backfire on denouncers). A mad starch factory director forbade comrades to get shaves or haircuts at home--it would have been disloyal to the factory's hairdresser. One kid, Pavlik Morozov, reported his father for grain hoarding in 1937, was murdered by relatives, and became a national hero to kids. Andrei Sakharov's future spouse Elena Bonner was shocked at her 9-year-old brother's response to his father's arrest: "Look what these enemies of the people are like--some of them even pretend to be fathers." The celebrated Moscow Children's Theater put on The Squealer, a drama strikingly like Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront.

Fitzpatrick gives a sense of what it really was like to live under the satanic circus master Stalin: it was beyond Kafka, and it was bloody hard work. --Tim Appelo

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Product Reviews:

Explains How Russia Survived Stalinism ( givbatam3 )
After years of reading about Stalin and the repressive, impoverished terror state he created, I was always baffled how any society could survive such upheaval, repression and suffering, and even meet its greatest test, the German invasion of the USSR, and triumph over it.
Sheila Fitzpatrick answers my question, in this fine book, showing how the average urban citizen of the USSR confronted the almost unbelievable difficulties of life in that country under its megalomaniacal dictator.

It first must be understood that Stalin was a genius in knowing how to crush a country's population without leading to a revolt or total collapse into apathy. For example, it is mistakenly believed that all expressions of dissatisfaction with the regime were ruthless punished. While it is true that any criticism of Stalin was dealt with in a most harsh manner, the citizenry was actually encouraged to complain about corrupt or inefficient minor officials and functionaries. Satirical publications like Krokodil would print cartoons lampooning corruption and inefficiency in Soviet society. Citizens could write letters to high officials with complaints about bad treatment they had received from bureacrats and officials (this doesn't mean, however, that anything would be done about the complaint). Fitzpatrick includes examples of these cartoons in the book. The government realized that this was a good way to have the population let off steam without pushing them towards revolt.
Another important point Fitzpatrick makes is that the regime saw to it that a few members of the peasantry or working class would be given rewards for being super-productive (the Stakhanovites) and would become entitled to receive extra food or consumer goods not available to the general public. This made everyone else think that may, they too, might some day have the chance to move up in society. Fitzpatrick also describes at length how "blat" (connections) gave some average people who had contact with priviledged members of society the ability to get extra "goodies" such as consumer goods, entrance to good schools, etc. Thus, many people felt that they were somehow "benefitting" from the system and it was in their interest to support it. Massive propaganda campaigns were also mounted showing statistics claiming that things were supposedly getting better and that in the near future, there would be a marked improvement in the standard of living ("just a little more sacrifice and paradise will be just around the corner"). Fitzpatrick points out that the regime generally opposed implementing a system of rationing, because rationing is an open admission that an item is in short supply, whereas abolishing rationing and instead having everyone stand in long lines to obtain the item leads people to think that the shortage is local or temporary.
Of course, the question still remains how millions of people could be carted off to the GULAG in Siberia or shot without the people rising up against this. The answer is that people in different social groups in society had little contact with those outside the group and there was a general indifference about what happened to people in those other groups. Stalin was careful not to purge all sectors of society at one time. First he started with the peasants during the collectivization campaign in the early 1930's, where he eliminated millions of "Kulaks". He also went after the urban workers in the "Five Year" Plan campaign that started in 1929. By the mid-1930's, he had eased up on them, and then turned on the intelligentsia and Communist Party members. After them, he went after the military. Fitzpatrick quotes people from that period who actually thought the purge of the intelligentsia was a good thing because workers saw that arrogant bosses and managers were being elminated. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a student at the time and he commented that most students didn't care what happened to their professors...it might mean they wouldn't have to take a difficult exam if their teacher disappeared one day. After purging the intelligentsia, Stalin turned back on the workers and instituted draconian punishments on people who were more than 20 minutes late to work (too bad if there wasn't room on the streetcar-that is no excuse!).

One colorful point Fitzpatrick makes is that during Stalin's time, people stopped giving their children traditional Russian names which were associated with the Church and peasantry such as Trofim and Marfa, and instead tended to give "higher-class" names often taken from 19th century Russian literature such as Anatoly, Gennadi, Yevgeny, Svetlana and the such. Enthusiastic Communist Party members would invent names such as MELSOR (for "Marx, Engels,Lenin, Stalin, October Revolution"), Ninel ("Lenin" spelled backwards), or Vladlen (contraction of "Vladimir Lenin"
- a friend of mine born in the USSR has a brother-in-law with that name).

This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in this horrific part of history. The most important thing to remember is the final line of the book - the Soviet citizen under Stalin is best understood as a survivor.

Everyday life and the state under Stalin ( mccaine_nl )
Sheila Fitzpatrick, specialist in the Stalin period of the USSR, has written a counterpart to her history of peasants and their lives in this era (Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization). Here, in "Everyday Stalinism", she chronicles the urban experience of life under Stalin during the 1930s, with all its paranoia, hardship and oddities.

The book is focused in particular on the relationship of daily life and the state, with relatively little attention for cultural history. However, making much use of the Harvard Project interviews with Soviet citizens from this period, she offers a compelling and fascinating view into the attitude of Soviet citizens towards the state, towards Stalin, and towards each other. Much more than just a tale of survival under threat of secret police, Fitzpatrick shows how people got by in terms of getting consumer goods, getting ahead, and getting even. Of course the Great Purges are given due attention, but what is particularly interesting is that in this book we see those events, as well as the earlier show trials, from the bottom up: not the political history of Stalin eliminating his enemies, but a struggle for power between the Party elites (largely received with disinterest by the general populace), and subsequently a series of rapid repressive maneouvres that descend onto the unsuspecting middle level.

Fitzpatrick pays excellent attention also to social policy and what effect this had on women, social and ethnic minorities, and so on. The USSR as an "affirmative action empire" has been well chronicled: The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Wilder House Series in Politics, History, and Culture). Nevertheless, Fitzpatrick's overview is clear and cogent, and we get also get a good idea of the immense advances in literacy, cultural knowledge and general outlook that were made in roughly the period 1927-1937. Whereas in 1926 only 57% of those aged between 9 and 49 were literate, in 1939 81% of the whole population was literate. Similarly, the entire mass of the population learned basic culture such as appreciating poetry, washing regularly, using soap and towels, not leaving cigarette butts everywhere and not spitting on the floor, etc.

Striking is the amount of critical letters and appeals that people kept sending to Party and Politburo leaders in the (often, but not always vain) hope of redress of grievances or changes in policy. This was already a set tradition dating back to Czarist times, but was maintained during the Revolution and post-Revolutionary period in the form of public debate in leftist papers and letters to Lenin (see Voices of Revolution, 1917). This gives us a good indication however of the public opinion in the Stalinist days, to which Fitzpatrick usefully adds the NKVD reports of overheard conversations and the like. This surprisingly indicates that skepticism towards Stalin himself as well as the general system was reasonably widespread, despite the "cult of the personality".

Overall, this is a well written and interesting history of urban life in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. It must be emphasized though (as this is not directly apparent from the book description) that it only deals with urban life, and only the 1930s. Neither WWII nor the post-War Stalinist period is discussed.

Must read ( akagodsent )
If you have an interest in Stalin and the 1930's, which include the purges, this book is a must for you. For the most part I study the Military and Political history of the early Soviet Union and I had this book on my shelf for years before I finally decided to read it. But once I began I was amazed at myself that I had waited so long to finally dive into this book! The author has really done her research and it shows!

The reader will get a much better and broader understanding of what life was like in the 1930's and how a new state was coming into its own. Why certain groups or 'classes' were being targeted by the state and what happened to them. How some changed their entire lives just to get away from the OGPU and later NKVD. And interestingly enough the policies implemented by the state worked against making it a safer place. As they aggravated one group after another through trials and forced movements they made enemies where in the past there might not have been any. It began to dawn on the government that these people would only seek vengeance once they were freed from punishment and it also created the idea that these people would be enemies for life. This, to a certain extent, explains why during the "Great Purge" which started in 1937 those released from GULag camps or special settlements, etc, were once again picked up and tried and sent to either prison or were executed.

The examples the author draws upon are an excellent representation of the time period and people's thoughts recount what they felt and desired while living through this turbulent, to say the least, decade. The one aspect of the Stalinist period that should be kept in mind, and appears throughout the book, is that no one was really safe in this time. From Communist officials who were being denounced by the hundreds to the regular man on the street who could be denounced because his apartment was bigger than his neighbors, or NKVD officials, one of whom a week before committing suicide visited and drank with the families of people who were denounced and he had to arrest and lastly even to Stalin's inner circle which witnessed the likes of Kaganovich losing his brother and Molotov his wife. A great contribution to the literature on Soviet Union under Stalin!

Impressed so far ( coodugain )
Clearly it is well researched and (notwithstanding the author's Introduction) cuts through a lot of the politicised waffle that tends to accompany other books dealing with this period. You get an idea of the human and personal dynamics that were operating at the time. In short, the insight gained is sometimes surprising even when you think you know a lot about this period of history, i.e. the October Revolution and socialist construction. Only half way through the book as a matter of fact but you can tell from the outset that what you're reading is a study of substance that genuinely serves to inform the reader. I would say the author is one who is prepared to let facts speak for themselves.

Clear, concise, filled with information ( writerrad )
This is a good, necessary, and essential book. It is compact and precise. Its aim is to provide massive information about Stalinist Soviet Union in the 1930s. It does so not by the analysis of high politics or the significant political events, but through a depiction of everyday life of urban inhabitants of the Soviet Union during these years.

Fitzpatrick tries to remain neutral, but so many of the disastorous conditions she records were clearly brought on by the Stalin bureaucracy's fear, its fear of workers, its fear of the intellectuals, its fear of those who held positions under Tsarism, its fear of those who had belonged to opposition factions in the Communist party, and fear of itself.

Whether what she provides is "new" is irrelevant except to the academically twisted. What she does is provide the realities of life in the USSR in those years as personally experienced whether in the cold, rancorous, barracks and apartments filled with four or five families of the plebian cities, or the luxurious dachas of the rising bureaucracy.

The strength of this book is its compactness and clarity and its lack of digressions. Fitzpatrick produces a very high amount of understandable information per page.

The one weaknesses of the book is that in order to do this, she tends to assume the reader's knowledge of Soviet history in the late 1920s and early 30s, particularly, "the cultural revolution," though many, especially popular, readers may know little or nothing about this. Perhaps this just invites the reader to explore the work of Fitzpatrick and her colleagues on these questions.

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