Models of selfhood and subjectivity: The Soviet case in historical perspective

Slavic Review

Volumn 67, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 967-986

  Chatterjee, Choi ^a   Petrone, Karen ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63849095595     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/27653033     Document Type: Review

References (135)

1. For an excellent example of this type of work, see Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandier, eds., Self and Story in Russian History (Ithaca, 2000).
2. Jerrold E. Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Eng., 2005), 3-44.
3. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, 1991).
4. We thank Deborah Field for emphasizing the role of agency in understanding the formation of the self.
5. Andreas Schönle, ed., Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions (Madison, 2006);
6. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World , trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968);
7. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973).
8. Eric Naiman, "On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them," Russian Review 60, no. 3 (July 2001): 307-15;
9. Irina Paperno, "What Can Be Done with Diaries," Russian Review 63, no. 4 (October 2004): 561-73.
10. See also Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia (Ithaca, 1997). Thus Boris Wolfson in his essay on the writer Iurii Olesha's diaries has two distinct goals. While he documents Olesha's efforts at self-surveillance and self-censorship as the writer tries to attain the status of the new man, Wolfson is equally interested in Olesha's attempts to create a new literary form and language by purging plots, characters, and excessive literary ornamentation from his prose. Wolfson, "Escape from Literature: Constructing the Soviet Self in Yuri Olesha's Diary of the 1930s," Russian Review 63, no. 4 (October 2004): 609-20.
11. Thus Paperno, in her nuanced analyses of Soviet memoirs and dreams, is careful to present the idiosyncratic voices of her subjects along with her conclusion that there was "a sense of self derived from the experience of fear, repression, and deprivation imposed by the state; a self worthy to be submitted as historical material." Paperno, "Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience," Kritika 3, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 609;
12. Irina Paperno, "Dreams of Terror: Dreams of Stalinist Russia as a Historical Source," Kritika 7, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 793-824. Paperno makes a conscious attempt to sustain the multilayered subjectivity of her subjects and the distinctiveness of their inner lives within her larger generalizations about Soviet subjecthood.
13. Lilya Kaganovsky, "How the Soviet Man Was (Un)Made," Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 577-96. For a historical reading that is particularly sensitive to literary concerns, see Anna Krylova, "In Their Own Words? Soviet Women Writers and the Search for Self," in Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M Gheith, eds., A History of Women's Writing in Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), 243-63.
14. David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New York, 2000);
15. David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 (Ithaca, 2003);
16. Peter Holquist, Making War and Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).
17. David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002);
18. Choi Chatterjee, Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910-1939 (Pittsburgh, 2002);
19. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of Nations (Ithaca, 2005);
20. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 {Ithaca., 2001);
21. Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, 2004);
22. Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, 1994).
23. See also Frederick Cooper's critical discussion on the overextension of the term modernity by historians in his monograph, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005).
24. The most famous example from this corpus of European literature is of course Adolphe, the Marquis de Custine's classic 1839 text , Empire of the Czar: A Journey through Eternal Russia (New York, 1989);
25. Irena Grudzinska Gross, "The Tangled Tradition: Custine, Herberstein, Karamzin, and the Critique of Russia," Slavic Review 50, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 989-98.
26. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994);
27. see also Marshall T. Poe, "A People Born to Slavery": Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476-1748 (Ithaca, 2000).
28. John Lewis Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States: An Interpretive History (New York, 1990);
29. Christopher Lasch, The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution (New York, 1962);
30. Norman Saul, Concord and Conflict: The United States and Russia, 1867-1914 (Lawrence, 1996);
31. Frederick F. Travis, George Kennan and the American-Russian Relationship, 1865-1924 (Athens, 1990);
32. William Appleman Williams, American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947 (New York, 1952).
33. David Charles Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
34. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996);
35. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, 2003);
36. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York, 1991).
37. See especially E. H. Carr's multivolume The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923 (New York, 1950).
38. Theodore H. Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? A Reappraisal of the Russian Revolution, 1900-1930 (Philadelphia, 1964), 206.
39. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1966).
40. Ibid., 315.
41. Ibid., 325.
42. Carl Friedrich and Zbignew K. Brzezinski's Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1956);
43. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics (New York, 1967);
44. Bertram Wolfe, An Ideology in Power: Reflections on the Russian Revolution (New York, 1969).
45. See also Choi Chatterjee, "Ideology, Gender, and Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Historical Survey," Left History 6, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 11-28. In addition to Friedrich and Brzezinski, the classics of the totalitarian school of historiography include Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1963);
46. Adam Ulam, Unfinished Revolution (New York, 1960);
47. Donald W. Treadgold, Twentieth Century Russia (Chicago, 1959);
48. Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). And for a recent view based on archival evidence, see Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York, 1993);
49. Vladimir Brovkin, ed., The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and the Civil Wars (New Haven, 1997).
50. See Stephen Cohen's excellent critique of this school in his Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (New York, 1985).
51. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (New York, 1968);
52. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York, 1973);
53. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (New York, 1990);
54. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, trans. Phyllis B. Carlos (New York, 1986).
55. Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).
56. Moshe Lewin was one of the more vocal proponents of Soviet modernization and the convergence theory; see his perceptive work, The Gorbachev Phenomenon (Berkeley, 1991).
57. See also, Mark Edele, "Soviet Society, Social Structure, and Everyday Life: Major Frameworks Reconsidered," Kritika 8, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 349-73.
58. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures; Selected Essays (New York, 1973);
59. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985);
60. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990);
61. Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers'Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia, 1989);
62. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988);
63. William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (New York, 1980);
64. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963);
65. Ronald Grigor Suny's article offers an excellent account of the paradigm shift from social to cultural history. Suny, "Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics," Russian Review 53, no. 2 (April 1994): 165-82.
66. Sheila Fitzpatrick. Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, 2005), 8-9.
67. Ibid., 151.
68. Ibid., 113.
69. Ibid., 152.
70. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y., 1959).
71. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999);
72. Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917-1921 (Cambridge, Eng., 1970);
73. Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington, 1978).
74. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 14.
75. Ibid., 22.
76. Ibid., 147-55;
77. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Eng., 1977);
78. Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, trans. Randal Johnson et al. (Stanford, 1998);
79. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1988).
80. "Governmentality," in Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, eds., The Essential Foucault (New York, 2003), 229-45.
81. Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck have accused Kotkin of insufficiently theorizing Soviet subjectivity, but we believe that Kotkin facilitated Foucault's acceptance in our field. See their review, "Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin's 'Magnetic Mountain' and the State of Soviet Historical Studies," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 3 (1996): 456-63.
82. Works consulted by Foucault include, Madness and Civilization (New York, 1965);
83. Discipline and Punish (New York, 1977);
84. The History of Sexuality (New York, 1978).
85. See also Rabinow and Rose, eds., The Essential Foucault; Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982);
86. See Jerrold Seigel's penetrating analysis of Foucault's writings on self in his Idea of the Self, 603-50;
87. James Miller's biography, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York, 1993) is an excellent introduction to the life and thought of the philosopher.
88. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (London, 1988).
89. Michel Foucault. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality (New York, 1985), 2:29.
90. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999);
91. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006);
92. Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000);
93. and Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). On Foucault's applicability to a non-western context, see Laura Engelstein, "Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia," American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April 1993): 338-53;
94. Jan Goldstein, "Framing Discipline with Law: Problems and Promises of the Liberal State," American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April 1993): 364-75;
95. and more recently, Jan Plamper, "Foucault's Gulag," Kritika 3, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 255-80.
96. Benda Hofmeyr, "The Power Not to Be (What We Are): The Politics and Ethics of Self-Creation in Foucault," Journal of Moral Philosophy 3, no. 2 (July 2006): 215-30;
97. T. J. Berard, "Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, and the Reformulation of Social Theory," Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 29, no. 3 (September 1999): 203-27.
98. Halfin and Hellbeck show how individuals who enthusiastically supported the Bolshevik project actually constituted themselves through their engagement with revolutionary ideology. Halfin emphasizes that the communist biographies were essential tools for the molding of the self and the purification of the soul. To be absolutely pure, however, communists also had to see into the souls of others and assess their purity. Evaluation of self and surveillance of others were thus thoroughly intertwined. Halfin, Terror in My Soul, 7.
99. See Svetlana Boym's interesting comments on Hellbeck's construction of Soviet subjectivity. "Kak sdelana 'sovetskaia sub'ektivnost''"? Ab Imperio 3 (2002): 285-97.
100. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 3.
101. Ibid., 93-94.
102. Ibid., 114.
103. See also Anna Krylova, "The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies," Kritika 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 119-46;
104. Yanni Kotsonis, "'No Place to Go': Taxation and State Transformation in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia, Journal of Modern History 76, no. 3 (2004): 531-77.
105. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 12.
106. Eric Lohr, "The Ideal Citizen and Real Subject in Late Imperial Russia," Kritika 8, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 173-94.
107. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994);
108. Barbara Walker, Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture and Survival in Revolutionary Times (Bloomington, 2005),
109. The history of domesticity and everyday life is beginning to attract the attention of both Russian and western scholars. See G. Andreevskii, Povsednevnaia zhizn' Moskvy v stalinskuiu epokhu, 1920-1930-e gody (Moscow, 2003);
110. Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, eds., Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Bloomington, 2006);
111. N. B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn': Normy i anomalii, sovetskogo goroda 1920/1930 gody (St. Petersburg, 1999);
112. N. B. Lebina, Entsiklopediia banalnostei: Sovetskaia povsednevnost'. Kontury, simvoly, znaki (St. Petersburg, 2006);
113. N. B. Lebina and A. N. Chistikov, Obyvatel' i reformy: Kartiny povsednevnoi zhizni gorozhan v gody NEPa i khrushchevskogo desiatiletiia (St. Petersburg, 2003);
114. Stephen Lovell, Alena V. Ledeneva, and Andrei Rogachevskii, eds., Bribery and Blat in Russia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s (London, 2000);
115. Timo Vihavainen, Normy i tsennosti povsednevnoi zhizni: Stanovlenie sotsialisticheskogo obraza zhizni v Rossii, 1920-1930-e gody (St. Petersburg, 2000).
116. Quoted in Boym, Common Places, 34.
117. Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, Eng., 1976).
118. Boym, Common Places, 30. Historians who have investigated the forms and nature of prerevolutionary private, domestic, and intimate life include, Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton, 1985);
119. Mary W. Cavender, Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate and Local Loyalties in Provincial Russia (Newark, 2007);
120. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1991);
121. Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, 2003);
122. and John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca, 2007).
123. Boym, Common Places, 150.
124. Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in fin de-siècle Russia (Ithaca, 1992);
125. Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925 (Ithaca, 2002).
126. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
127. See Craig Calhoun's excellent review essay, "Morality, Identity, and Historical Explanation: Charles Taylor on the Sources of the Self," Sociological Theory 9, no. 2 (Autumn 1991): 232-63.
128. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006) raises these possibilities in the post-Stalin era.
129. Beth Holmgren has also argued about the importance of the gendered domestic sphere in the framing and shaping of Soviet political dissidence. See Holmgren, Women's Works in Stalin's Time: On Lidiia Chukhovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam (Bloomington, 1993).
130. Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, trans. William Tempter (Princeton, 1995).
131. Susan A. Crane, "Historical Subjectivity: A Review Essay," Journal of Modern History 78, no. 2 (June 2006): 434-56;
132. Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Boston, 1996);
133. Ruth Behar, Translated Women: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Boston, 1993);
134. Philip Carl Salzman, "On Reflexivity," American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (September 2002): 805-11;
135. Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994).