Samokritika rituals in the Stalinist Central Committee, 1933-38

Russian Review

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 49-70

  Arch Getty, J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0002246529     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0036-0341.571999057     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. Sean Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1985)
2. See Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1983)
3. and idem, The Living & The Dead: The Rise and Fall Of The Cult Of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994)
4. On the Stalin cult see Graeme Gill, "Personality Cult, Political Culture, and Party Structure," Studies in Comparative Communism 17:2 (1984): 111-21
5. and J. Arch Getty, "The Politics of Stalinism," in The Stalin Phenomenon, ed. Alec Nove (New York, 1992), 104-63
6. On civic ceremonies see Christel Lane, The Rites Of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society: The Soviet Case (Cambridge, England, 1981)
7. and for festivals see James Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917-1920 (Berkeley, 1993)
8. J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (New York, 1985)
9. Berthold Unfiled, "Rituale von Konfession und Selbstkritik: Bilder vom stalinistischen Kader," Jahrbuch fur historische Kommunismusforschung (1994): 148-64
10. Alexei Kojevnikov, "Rituals of Stalinist Culture at Work: Science and the Games of Intraparty Democracy circa 1948," Russian Review 57 (January 1998): 25-52
11. It may well be that "social reality and social relationships are endlessly stated and restated in allegedly empty ritual behaviors, which when viewed analytically are found to convey a wealth of social agreements essential for ongoing interactions." See Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff, "Secular Ritual: Forms and Meanings," in Secular Ritual, ed. Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff (Amsterdam, 1977), 17
12. Good summaries are Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton, 1994)
13. and the contributions in Journal of Contemporary History, no. 12 (1981)
14. The classic work is Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York, 1915)
15. Representatives here are Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (Oxford, 1965)
16. Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York, 1986)
17. and Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York, 1970)
18. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973)
19. and idem, "Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power," in Wilentz, Rites of Power, 13-40
20. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. and trans., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London, 1971)
21. Maurice Bloch, Ritual, History and Power: Selected Papers in Anthropology (London, 1989)
22. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, England, 1977)
23. and "Symbolic Power;" in Identity and Structure: Issues in the Sociology of Education, ed. Denis Gleeson (London, 1977)
24. See, for example, David Parkin, "Ritual as Spacial Direction and Bodily Division," in Understanding Rituals, ed. Daniel de Coppet (London, 1992), 14
25. The relationship between ritual and ideology is well-studied and controversial. For some, like Geertz, ideology is conveyed in ritual as cultural byproduct; for others, including Bloch and Bourdieu, ritual is a specific and often conscious strategy of power. For a discussion of these views see Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1992), 175-95
26. See Moore and Myerhoff, "Secular Ritual," 7-8
27. and Bloch, Ritual, History and Power, 123-30
28. Kojevnikov found that "although the structure of the discourse was quite rigid, the critical content and the outcome of the discussion depended very much upon the activity of players." See his "Rituals of Stalinist Culture," 29-36, for examples of other Stalinist "genres of discourse." See Getty, Origins, 149-57, for examples of meetings which got out of control
29. See also Unfried, "Rituale von Konfession"
30. and Klaus-Georg Riegel, Konfessionsrituale im Marxismus-Leninismus (Graz, 1985). Unfried correctly identifies self-criticism's socializing and initiation effects on the individual. In the present article, I more often refer to apology rituals than to samokritika because, even though they are often synonymous, the former term is more evocative of my emphasis on group dynamics than on individual effects or motivations
31. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, 1990), 57
32. For a treatment of apology as a "remedial ritual" or "remedial interchange" see Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York, 1971), 113-16
33. See Wilentz, Rites of Power, chaps. 1-7
34. Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii (RTsKhIDNI), Moscow, f. 17, op. 2, d. 511, ll. 178-84
35. See Bloch, Ritual, History and Power, 25, 123
36. and Bell, Ritual Theory, 122
37. Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1989, no. 5:74, 84
38. For Ezhov's speech at the December 1936 plenum see RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 575, ll. 11-67
39. Clifford Geertz wrote that elites "justify their existence and order their actions in terms of a collection of stories, ceremonies, insignia, formalities, and appurtenances. ... It is these ... that mark the center as center and give what goes on there its aura of being not merely important but in some odd fashion connected with the way the world is built." The distinction between "trappings of rule and its substance become less sharp, even less real" the closer they are examined ("Centers, Kings, and Charisma," 15)
40. Voprosy istorii, 1992, no. 10:6
41. and Voprosy istorii, 1994, no. 1:12-13
42. In an analogous outcome, in the philosophical dispute of 1947, Georgii Aleksandrov performed a successful samokritika apology. Although he lost his current post, he was given another responsible position (Kojevnikov, "Rituals of Stalinist Culture," 29-31)
43. Tsentral'naia khraneniia sovremennoi dokumentatsii, Moscow, f. 89, op. 48, d. 19, l. 1
44. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 193-94
45. Feliks Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym (Moscow, 1991), 390, 413, 432
46. For a discussion of "transcripts" see Scott, Domination
47. Bourdieu, "Symbolic Power," 118
48. See Sally F. Moore, "Political Meetings and the Simulation of Unanimity: Kilimanjaro 1973,"
49. See J. Arch Getty, "Afraid of Their Shadows: The Bolshevik Recourse to Terror, 1932-1938," in Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Neue Wege der Forschung, ed. Manfred Hildermeier and Elisabeth Mueller-Luckner (Munich, 1998)
50. Terence S. Turner, "Transformation, Hierarchy and Transcendence,"
51. Eva Hunt, "Ceremonies of Confrontation and Submission,"
52. and Sally F. Moore, "Political Meetings," all in Moore and Myerhoff, Secular Ritual, 60-61, 144, and 170, respectively
53. Scott, Domination, 49, 58
54. The relationship between Stalin and the nomenklatura in the terror is the subject of J. Arch Getty, In Word and in Deed: Repression and the Soviet Communist Party, 1932-1939 (forthcoming 1999)