Thank You, Comrade Stalin!

Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War

Jeffrey Brooks

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691088679, 9780691004112
• eBook ISBN: 9781400843923
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Thank you, our Stalin, for a happy childhood." "Thank you, dear Marshal [Stalin], for our freedom, for our children's happiness, for life." Between the Russian Revolution and the Cold War, Soviet public culture was so dominated by the power of the state that slogans like these appeared routinely in newspapers, on posters, and in government proclamations. In this penetrating historical study, Jeffrey Brooks draws on years of research into the most influential and widely circulated Russian newspapers--including Pravda, Isvestiia, and the army paper Red Star--to explain the origins, the nature, and the effects of this unrelenting idealization of the state, the Communist Party, and the leader.

Brooks shows how, beginning with Lenin, the Communists established a state monopoly of the media that absorbed literature, art, and science into a stylized and ritualistic public culture--a form of political performance that became its own reality and excluded other forms of public reflection. He presents and explains scores of self-congratulatory newspaper articles, including tales of Stalin's supposed achievements and virtue, accounts of the country's allegedly dynamic economy, and warnings about the decadence and cruelty of the capitalist West. Brooks pays particular attention to the role of the press in the reconstruction of the Soviet cultural system to meet the Nazi threat during World War II and in the transformation of national identity from its early revolutionary internationalism to the ideology of the Cold War. He concludes that the country's one-sided public discourse and the pervasive idea that citizens owed the leader gratitude for the "gifts" of goods and services led ultimately to the inability of late Soviet Communism to diagnose its own ills, prepare alternative policies, and adjust to new realities.

The first historical work to explore the close relationship between language and the implementation of the Stalinist-Leninist program, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! is a compelling account of Soviet public culture as reflected through the country's press.

Notes

Prologue

1. Jeffrey Brooks, “The Zemstvos and the Education of the People,” in The Russian Zemstvo, ed. Terence Emmons and Wayne S. Vucinich (Cambridge, 1982), 266-78.

2. Russkii istoriko-etnograficheskii atlas “Russkie” (Moscow, 1963).

3. Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton, N.J., 1985); and idem, “Two Tandem Revolutions in Russian Culture: The Modern and the Pop,” Common Knowledge (Winter, 1998-99). See also Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime (Princeton, N.J., 1992); A. Reitblat, Ot Bovy k Bal'montu (Moscow, 1991); A. V. Blium, “Russkaia lubochnaia kniga vtoroi poloviny xix veka,” Kniga. Issledovaniia i materialy (Moscow, 1981), 94-114; Richard Stites, Soviet Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society in Russia since 1900 (Cambridge, 1992).

4. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 360, 366; Paolo Cherchi Usai, Lorenzo Codelli, Carlo Montanaro, and David Robinson, eds., Silent Witnesses, Russian Films, 1908-1919 (London, 1989), 16-18.

5. Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), The Trial Begins, trans. Max Heyward; and On Socialist Realism, trans. George Dennis (New York, 1960), 147.

6. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York, 1955), 4-24.

7. Pravda, September 1, 1943.

8. My argument is informed by observations about human agency in Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge, 1985), 15-44, 97-114); idem, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); and Harry G. Frankfurt, “The Freedom of the Will and the Concept of the Person,” Journal of Philosophy 63, no. 1 (January 1971): 5-20. Carlos J. Moya summarizes this literature in The Philosophy of Action: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1990). I also draw on Paul Ricoeur’s distinction between act and event in Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago, 1992), 67-87.

9. E. P. Thompson utilized “moral economy” to describe a “consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community in “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 79.

10. Quoted in Evgenii Ermolin, Materializatsiia prizraka. Totalitarnyi teatr sovetskikh massovykh aktsii 1920-1930-x godov (Iaroslav’, 1996), 48.

11. The Russian is daesh’. See Boris Efimovich Galanov, Zapiski na kraiu stola (Moscow, 1996), 25; “Daesh’ iasli” (1930), in Affiches constructivistes Russes (Moscow, 1992), 89; “Daesh’ BAM!” (1980), in Plakat v rabochem stroiu (Moscow, 1980), 15; and the journal Daesh’ (1929).

12. Andre Siniavksii notes Stalin’s theatricality in “Stalin—Kak geroi i khudozhnik stalinskoi epokhi,” Sintaksis 19 (1987): 106-25, as does A. Antonov-Ovseenko in Teatr Iosifa Stalina (Moscow, 1995). See also Steven Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995).

13. Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, trans. and ed. Jerrold L. Schecter and Vyacheslav V. Luchkov (Boston, 1990), 104.

14. Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad (New York, 1994), 284.

15. The editor of Krasnaia zvezda, D. Ortenberg, notes that the Soviet Information Bureau reported the loss of Smolensk in mid-August, a month late (Iiun’–Dekabr’ sorok pervogo [Moscow, 1986], 98). I did not find a report in Pravda.

16. L. Kosheleva, V Lel’chuk, V. Naumov, O. Naumov, L. Rogovaia, and O. Khlevniuk, eds., Pis'ma I. V. Stalina V. M. Molotovu, 1925-1936 gg. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1995), 207.

Chapter One

The Monopoly of the Printed Word: From Persuasion to Compulsion

1. O partiinoi i sovetskoi pechati. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1954), 173.

2. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York, 1960), 354, 356.

3. O partiinoi i sovetskoi pechati, 179.

4. V. I. Lenin o pechati (Moscow, 1974), 359-64; Neil Hardin, Lenin's Political Thought (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1983), 1:162-762, 2:210; Peter Kenez, “Lenin and Freedom of the Press,” in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, ed. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites (Bloomington, Ind., 1985); Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life. Worlds in Collision (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 2:224-26.

5. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochineniia, 5th ed. (Moscow, 1960-70...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• One: The Monopoly of the Printed Word: From Persuasion to Compulsion
• Two: The First Decade: From Class War to Socialist Building
• Three: The Performance Begins
• Four: The Economy of the Gift: “Thank You, Comrade Stalin, for a Happy Childhood”
• Five: Literature and the Arts: “An Ode to Stalin”
• Six: Honor and Dishonor
• Seven: Many Wars, One Victory
• Eight: The Theft of the War
• Epilogue: Renewal, Stagnation, and Collapse
• Notes
• Index