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

In this informative survey of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Sheila Fitzpatrick outlines a tale of struggle, hardship, and occasional triumph of the Soviet people in their everyday lives. This was an era of a growing and industrializing society full of its problems and accomplishments, and how its citizens had dealt with their lives in a decade that started with collectivization and ended with the winding down of the Terror and war scares. Fitzpatrick clarifies that this is a study about urban lives during the 1930s (she already covered rural lives in an earlier book). She defines ordinary lives for the Soviet context as shopping, travelling, celebrating, telling jokes, finding an apartment, getting an education, securing a job, advancing in one’s career, cultivating patrons and connections, marrying and raising children, writing complaints and denunciations, voting, and avoiding any contacts with the secret police. It sounds mundane for us in our contemporary lives, but for the industrializing Soviet society in the 1930s, it was usually an adventure remembered for better or worse. Consumer goods (with the occasional exception of food after the 1932-1933 famine) and housing were usually in short supply. Average citizens would live in crowded barracks, apartments, and dormitories either waiting to find bigger housing space or getting along with their neighbors. The citizens (especially the well-off) would attempt to make connections with Communist Party and government officials in order to improve their material conditions. Fitzpatrick does clearly outline that these times certainly were not a walk in the park, often times even difficult, however those were also times of great improvement for the Soviet people. Education was much easier (and free!) to access for the entire population (assuming that there is either space or availability where one citizen lives), greater access of cultural activities and leisure time never before in Russian history, and women were finally able to leave their old patriarchal lives and work or pursue a career they desired (despite reinforcement of Soviet family values and sexist values that no amount of government laws and decrees could eliminate). Everyday Stalinism uses both primary and secondary resources to outline the history of the 1930s Soviet Union. Primary sources range from the Soviet Archives (secret police files on public opinion was widely used), memoirs of people who lived during that time (many of which came from the Harvard Project), and from newspapers and articles from that time. Secondary sources were used to fill in the gaps provided (those sources were from studies from other scholars who focused on a specific aspect of the 1930s Soviet Union). This gives the book much credibility to the reader, although it has started to show its age. Part of Fitzpatrick’s thesis was that the general quality of life usually went worse in certain years of the decade, and public opinion, jokes, and quips from Soviet workers can attest to that. However, as Robert C. Allen reveals in his superb study of the Soviet economy Farm to Factory, Soviet life overall in the 1930s massively improved when compared to the tsarist era and the NEP period (the 1920s). Fitzpatrick does acknowledge that fact in her later studies if my knowledge is correct, some update in Everyday Stalinism can be useful. Fitzpatrick’s book is very useful when getting a general understanding of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. It does not go into exact detail of every aspect of that time period, but it points in the right direction for history students, scholars, and readers. It can be overwhelming at times, but it is certainly a good read.

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.

In 1929 the economies of the capitalist world crashed. In the same year the First Five Year Plan pushed the USSR to extraordinary growth. By 1936 Hitler crushed democracy and passed the Nuremberg Laws, in that year Stalin delivered a new Constitution, guaranteeing rights of dissent and religious freedom. Many on the left enthused about this great experiment in socialism, perhaps no longer an experiment, but actually working.They were wrong of course. The 1930s were bleak for citizens of the Soviet Union. Here we read their testimony. She takes her evidence from diaries and letters, to interviews, to memories. The focus is on the urban experience and on everyday life, everyday life in extraordinary times.We begin in 1929, when private trading was criminalized. Shops and stalls, merchants and traders vanished – as did the goods and services they had purveyed. Scarcity became the central fact of life.Lives were also lived in fear. The Soviet regime was exceptionally punitive in its approach to control. The book ends with a climax of terror, the Great Purges.But that was not the whole story. Through education the system offered opportunity. People from poor backgrounds had increased life chances. There were millions of new and challenging jobs. It was a very mobile society. Enthusiasm for modernization was high among young people, hardship accepted as the price for the cause. The regime managed to represent the nation, as shown in the Great Patriotic War. Beyond that in day-to-day living people negotiated their way through bureaucratic incompetence and shortages. They got by, they survived. Connections and contacts – so-called blat – kept the wheels turning. There were as many ways to avoid the NKVD as to get a bigger room for your family or shoes for your children.But many were outcast and persecuted and everyone had to be careful. Loss of job, eviction from your home, exile, prison and ultimately execution – all might follow from an argument with a neighbour, who then denounced you to the secret police.It is not easy to categorize this state. “a peculiar hybrid”. She invokes analogies – a prison [of course], a conscript army, a boarding school and even a soup kitchen. Soviet citizens too were many kinds of people – “ a string-puller, an operator, a mouther of slogans..But above all ,a survivor”. Of course, not all survived.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Soviet Union underwent one of greatest experiments in social engineering ever known. In embarking on this experiment Stalin's regime wanted to do more than refashion a backward, peasant country into a modern, urban one. It wanted to create a new kind of human being, liberated of acquisitive, individualistic instincts.This book details what it was like for the Russian, urban inhabitants to live through this experiment. It is a fine, judicious and balanced assessment of the complex facets of ordinary people's everyday experience under Stalinism in the 1930s.Foremost of these experiences was scarcity: scarcity of food, consumer goods, housing space - scarcity of everything in other words. `Things mattered enormously in the Soviet Union of the 1930s,' writes Fitzpatrick, `for the simple reason they were so hard to get'. (p.40). Scarcity became a permanent defining feature of the system and although it was not what the regime's planners intended to happen, it certainly reinforced the state's control over the lives of its citizens. It was through the state that any material reward would come. But this being the case, citizens were compelled to resort to extra-legal means of circumventing the power of this state to dispense goods and rewards. Foremost among these was the practice of `blat' - getting things done by pulling strings or working one's connections, in return for future favours. Those of those course that had no strings to pull or such clout suffered for it. But the climate of scarcity necessitated such strategies (and at all levels) and unless the regime could create abundance, which it didn't, it could never overcome it.In practical terms, scarcity assumed lethal dimensions with famine in the early 1930s but even in better years, overcrowding in communal apartments, which didn't tend to bring out the best in people, and a unrelenting, enervating struggle to track down the essentials of life were constant sources of stress. If you could get something to eat, you also had to worry about acquiring something as basic as a knife and fork to eat it with, for these too were in short supply.Interestingly, the Soviet Union in the 1930s did not seek to achieve a strict equality of outcome. It differentiated material rewards - cars, better apartments - to those that it considered were deserving of such entitlement. Stakhanovite workers were prominent recipients of state largess. Moves in the 1920s to abolish differentiation in status were curtailed: ranks were reintroduced into the Red Army (modelled on Tsarist ranks) and the civil service. The regime also placed great emphasis on social mobility (with considerable success) and the creation of new intelligentsia composed of former workers, and endowed these groups with greater material reward and social prestige.Moreover the regime frowned on what some might consider `proletarian' behaviour, such as leaving cigarette butts around the place, spitting, coarseness in manner and speech etc. It openly proclaimed its `civilising' mission to the culturally backward. . Some aspects of this were positive - condemning drunkenness and wife beating for example. Interestingly, the regime also tightened laws on divorce and introduced strict controls on abortion. In contrast to contemporary anti-abortionists in the United States, Stalinist anti-abortion laws were not inspired by concepts of a foetus' `right to life' but of the putative effects of abortion on the health of the woman, plus concerns about a falling birth rate.How much support did the regime have? The paradox of a police state is that it is desperately concerned what people think of it, despite denying its subjects any easy means of finding out, like allowing freedom of critical expression. The opening of the archives of the former secret police was something of a boon for historians in trying to gauge this. However, given that speaking one's mind in a police state could land you in a lot of trouble, this is not easy to discern. Certainly the regime had strong support among the young. Solzhenitsyn recalled that he and his peers, born in the same year as the revolution, thought that it was theirs and that the privations and sacrifices were a necessary step to a brighter future. Fitzpatrick also offers a thought-provoking observation on the terror of late 1930s: party members, many of which had enthusiastically availed themselves of the opportunity for social advance the regime offered, found themselves condemned by the regime they served for promoting leadership cults, gathering networks of patrons and so on. Many paid for these supposed infractions with their lives. But such behaviour was a routine feature of Soviet governance. But had ordinary citizens the temerity to condemn such behaviour before received an official cue to do so in the years before the terror, they would have risked being condemned as anti-Soviet. The terror in part fed on popular resentments created by the regime's very own policies: namely, anger at differentiation in privilege and reward under Stalin's rule.As mentioned, this is a book about the experiences of urban, Russian inhabitants. The experiences of non-Russian nationalities are left out. Some matters like the persistence of religious faith, which would surely illuminate to what extent the regime was successful in refashioning its citizens' consciousness, are barely touched on. These limitations are a shame. But nonetheless this is excellent social history of everyday life under Stalinism. One certainly gets a very strong impression of what it was like to experience first hand Stalin's experiment as a member of the `little cogs' of the Soviet system in the 1930s.

Fitzpatrick is a leading authority on Stalinism and its effect on the Soviet people, and this book holds up to that high praise. This is a definitive account of how the Soviet urban citizenry lived in the Stalin era, namely the 1930s. A wide variety of topics are covered, from housing to food to clothing to the purges. Fitzpatrick demonstrates how the common people survived through this unusual time, showing both the good and the bad, and noting it was mostly bad. It is slightly limited in that it only looks at the Russian urban population, specifically those in Moscow and Leningrad, a fact Fitzpatrick makes clear at the outset and notes that the other republics would have had different experiences. She also doesn't look at the rural population, covering that in her other book, "Stalin's Peasants." A solid work from a highly respective scholar, it is an easy read and something anyone interested in life in the Soviet Union should read.

Um texto envolvente e importante para conhecer um pouco da vida cotidiana e individual da Rússia dos anos de 1930. A autora é uma das maiores especialistas mundiais em História da URSS é esse texto leva ao público mais geral um pouco do conhecimento do que foi a vida normal em tempos extraordinários.

prompt and correct