In the wake of World War II with tensions between the two great powers on the rise again a culture of anti-communism which saw the USSR as the very embodiment of the communist threat was on the rise again. This anti-communist culture was grounded in manichean antinomies. For many Americans and many elite Americans the USSR was a "totalitarian" land of terror where the powers that be brainwashed their subjects and kept them in metaphorical and actual chains, the very opposite, of course, of the "free" and "democratic" United States.
This manichean tale of good and evil, good "democracies" and capitalists and evil "totalitarians" and "commies" was never, of course, accepted by all of the American population anymore than the manichean tale of a predatory US was accepted by all Soviets. Some Americans of the more apologetic as opposed to polemical persuasion, for instance, saw the Soviet Union as an expression and embodiment of a utopia to come. Additionally, in the wake of the countercultural florescence of the mid 1960s and 1970s some American academics began to break with the dominant manichean tale of good and evil that was dominant Sovietology in the US. Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism, Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) is one of the many books that attempts to replace the manichean and polemical passion play approach to the USSR with an empirically grounded one.
Fitzpatrick's book, like reality, is more complex and nuanced than those of either the apologetic or polemical manichean schools. Fitzpatrick lets the facts of urban life in Russia during the 1930s do the talking, facts derived from Soviet archives opened after the fall of communism and the rebirth of Russia. In eight heavilly documented chapters Fitzpatrick explores the omnipresence of the Soviet state, the shortages common during the era, how the Russian urban population dealt with these shortages, the utopian ideology of coming plenty that was at the heart of utopian Soviet culture, the situation of outcasts in urban 1930s Russia, the impact of the power of the state and shortages on Soviet families in urban Russia of the 1930s, the attempt by the Soviet state to make new Soviet men and women in urban Russia in the 1930s, state surveillance and denunciations in urban Russia in the 1930s, and the impact of periodic purges against the privileged of the "old regime", the "bourgeoisie", "kulaks", and eventually Soviet officials and the Soviet intelligentsia in 1930s urban Russia.
What struck me while reading Fitzpatrick's book was how much Soviet culture, like national cultures in general--see the civil or civic religion of the US, for instance--were and are meaning systems, meaning systems akin to another meaning system, religion. The Soviet state had its sacred mission, it preached the gospels of a radiant future of plenty and Soviet communism as the end of history as humans knew it with a missionary zeal. It had its own symbols and rituals such as the red flag, the Internationale and May Day. It had its sacred scriptures such the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Josef Stalin. It had its sacred catechism, the Short Course of the History of the Communist Party of the USSR. It had its heroes such as its Stakhanovites and the heroes of a variety of socialist realist novels. It had its heretics and demons including "foreign counterrevolutionaries", the "bourgeoisie", "kulaks","wreakers", and "enemies of the people". It even had its millenarianism, the golden age that would bring in the radiant future with its Edenic plenty.
Very highly recommended. The best book on Stalinism I have read.
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