Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Fitzpatrick Details the Heartless Brutality of the Soviet Regime
Oxford University Press • 1999 • 288 pages • $27.50
Free people are a peculiar lot. Eventually their lives become so leisurely that they manufacture unnecessary hardships purely for the exercise or the entertainment found in such challenges. Witness the super-successful television show, “Survivor,” in which contestants willingly forsook all modern conveniences simply to show off their hearty ruggedness (and to win $1 million, of course).
This type of diversion is the byproduct of freedom and prosperity. Captive people afford themselves no such entertainment for their very lives are little more than a relentlessly brutal, never-ending game of “Survivor” in which there are no commercial breaks or season-ending finales, only constant, inescapable drudgery mixed with fear.
Such was life for Soviet subjects in the 1930s, as revealed by Oxford University historian Sheila Fitzpatrick in her book Everyday Stalinism. In a concise and illuminating way, Fitzpatrick details the heartless brutality of the Soviet regime—its paralyzing, random rule of terror; cold-blooded, methodical ethnic and social cleansing; and cruel, premeditated eradication of hope, prosperity, and happiness.
Focusing entirely on the 1930s, the height of Stalin’s tyranny, Fitzpatrick reveals a horrifying world of misery and despair that was the everyday life of the average “Homo Sovieticus.” To chronicle this wholly impoverished existence, Fitzpatrick sets her book into topical chapters, each explaining a particular subject of Soviet life, such as economic hardship, family disorder, or the ubiquitous presence of the NKVD (the predecessor of the infamous KGB) and other government spies.
Fittingly, Fitzpatrick begins her book on everyday Soviet life with a chapter on the state titled, “The Party Is Always Right.” She opens by noting, “Few histories of everyday life start with a chapter on government and bureaucracy. But it is one of the peculiarities of our subject that the state can never be kept out, try though we may.”
Indeed, Fitzpatrick’s wide-ranging research shows that the ever-present state was by far the most important force shaping the lives of Soviet citizens in the 1930s. She reports the findings of an American academic who interviewed Russian women in the 1990s about their family lives. He found that these women dated their lives not by important family events such as marriage and child-bearing, as Western women do, but by acts of the state, such as food shortages or the Great Purges. Diaries that Fitzpatrick pored through also reveal the extent to which Soviet oppression directed the daily thoughts of Soviet subjects.
“These Stalin-era diaries are particularly interesting for the amount of time and thought their writers gave to public affairs, especially if one defines that concept broadly to include the economy and the availability or otherwise of consumer goods,” she writes. “Private life and personal emotions are of course present in the diaries, but they seem confined and crowded by public events and pressures, always liable to be thrust from center stage by some external crisis.” In Stalin’s Soviet Union, every detail of life was directed by the state. There was no refuge to which the Soviet captive (the residents of the Soviet Union certainly weren’t citizens) could escape from the omnipresent forces of government and live, even for a short time, just as they pleased.
Americans may think of government every now and then—on tax day or when we have to renew our driver’s licenses or when we have to call the police. But the Soviet resident thought about the government all day, every day. From rising in his cramped, government-provided apartment and devouring his state-rationed breakfast; through performing his mundane government job and enduring the paternalistic rantings at the state-organized meeting he was required to attend; to whispering conversations to avoid the ears of government spies—the average Soviet’s every waking moment was touched in some way by the state.
Fitzpatrick relates terrifying tales of brainwashed children turning their parents in to the authorities, husbands and wives disavowing each other, and friends and neighbors spying on one another at social gatherings and even funerals. People needed passports to travel from town to town within their own country and permission from the government simply to place a flowerpot on the windowsill.
Simply put, life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s was one long, never-ending game of “Survivor” in which the stakes literally were life or death. In uncovering the brutal facts of “everyday Stalinism,” Fitzpatrick has dealt another very powerful blow to the myth of the benevolent socialist state.
Drew Cline is director of publications for the John Locke Foundation.
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