The Way It Was in the USSR
SOSIN, GENE
The Way It Was in the USSR Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times By Sheila Fitzpatrick Oxford. 304 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by Gene Sosin Former Director of...
...What a pity that even in the post-Soviet era of democracy and freedom, Russians still cannot say without sarcasm "life has become more cheerful...
...Arepresentative sample was selected from the thousands of refugees who remained in the West after World War II, having experienced life in the Soviet Union "on their own skin," as the Russians say...
...But it was largely the privileged Communist elite and key segments of the intelligentsia (especially engineers and writers) who could obtain sufficient food, goods, services, and decent apartments...
...In an incisive chapter, "A Time of Troubles," Fitzpatrick points out that the favored target of the first 20 post-revolutionary years, "class enemies," was expanded in 1937 to include "enemies of the people," focusing on members of the Communist managerial elite...
...Morozov was made a hero of Soviet youth in 1937...
...There were fearful things that affected Soviet life and visions that uplifted it, but mostly it was a hard grind, full of shortages and discomfort...
...occupation...
...She inspired Sergei Prokofiev to write Peter and the Wolf and was the narrator at its premiere in 1936...
...and the realistic fiction of Anatoli Rybakov (Children of the Arbat, Fear) and Yury Trifonov (House on the Embankment...
...Of course, millions of citizens did not survive the 1930s, and millions more died during the War...
...neither I nor the young people around me had any anti-Soviet feelings...
...I asked them who he was, although I was fully aware of his fame, having described him in my doctoral dissertation on theater and drama for Soviet children...
...Fitzpatrick tells the story of Pavlik Morozov, a Pioneer who denounced his father as a hoarder of grain and was subsequently murdered by angry relatives...
...It was a tumultuous decade...
...scapegoating, purging, bullying subordinates, deferring to officials, lying about social origin...
...High-level secret police defectors like Walter Krivitsky and Alexander Orlov also provided information...
...the memoirs of widows of purge victims (like Anna Larina, wife of Nikolai Bukharin, Lenin's favorite Bolshevik, and Nadezhda Mandelshtam, wife of the renowned ill-fated poet...
...We simply found in the heroic tension involved in the building of a new world an excuse for all the difficulties...
...Fitzpatrick cites the parents of Elena Bonner, the future wife of Andrei Sakharov, who were Communists in senior jobs...
...She had been an internationally famous impresario, who began producing plays for young audiences in 1918 while still a teenager...
...The Russian-speaking Harvard team (which included my wife Gloria and me) learned firsthand the attitudes of former ordinary citizens concerning the positive and negative aspects of byt—everyday life...
...the samizdat writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other lesser-known dissidents...
...Since it was impossible to conduct such a survey inside the Iron Curtain, these witnesses offered the Project's ultimate sponsor, the Human Resources Research Institute of the United States Air Force, a unique opportunity to determine what Soviet life was really like before the German invasion in 1941...
...The combination of privation and favoritism did cause resentment of the regime, but for many ordinary people, particularly the country's youth, the vision of a Socialist future of abundance justified the sacrifices they were making...
...Even the most ardent supporters of Stalin's regime were not exempt from the "Great Purges," the sweeping political terror that marked the latter part of the '30s...
...There were even special camps in Gulag for 'wives of traitors to the motherland.' " Perhaps because she is primarily concerned with the impact of the purges on average individuals, she doesn't mention that Sats survived almost 20 years of incarceration and returned to Moscow...
...But to many young people in the 1930 she was an icon—brave, self-sacrificing and willing to challenge unjust local authority, parental or not...
...It was, she concludes, "a life of random disasters and of manifold daily irritations...
...In the post-Stalin era she resumed her brilliant career...
...The atmosphere of undaunted struggle in a common cause—the completion of a factory —engaged our imagination, roused our enthusiasm, and drew us into a sort of front-line world where difficulties were overlooked or forgotten...
...from the hours wasted in queues and lack of privacy in communal apartments to the endless bureaucratic rudeness and red tape and the abolition, in the cause of productivity and atheism, of a common day of rest...
...Additional devastating details began to surface during the glasnost era and continue to do so today, thanks to the opening of some KGB and other government archives and stories appearing in Russia's now uncensored press...
...Yet the young Soviet activists of the Pioneer and Komsomol organizations often incurred the wrath of their elders straggling against the corruption and obscurantism of local officials...
...Meanwhile, emigres like David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky exposed the forced labor system, and a pleiad of other Mensheviks wrote on various topics both in these pages and in the Sotsialisticheski Vestnik (Socialist Courier...
...Natalia Sats [director of the Moscow Children's Theater and wife of the trade minister, Izrail Veitser] ended up in a whole room of 'wives' in Butyrki prison, including the wife of Marshal Tukhachevsky...
...I met her shortly thereafter...
...He later became a repellent symbol to Russian intellectuals...
...As longtime readers of The New Leader are aware, significant contributions to the West's understanding of Soviet reality were made even before Stalin's death in 1953 by perceptive American journalists like William Henry Chamberlin, Eugene Lyons and Isaac Don Levine...
...The purpose of the "Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System" was to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the USSR by interviewing displaced persons...
...On my first trip to Moscow in 1959,1 visited the small park named for him near the center of the city...
...One girl replied without a trace of affectation: "Love for one's homeland is stronger than love for one's father...
...Morozov's mystique among the young endured well beyond the 1930s...
...Fitzpatrick herself frequently cites various Project respondents who described their prewar existence as not "normal," primarily because of privation and hardship: "Famine hit all the major grain-growing regions in 1932-33, and in addition...
...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Former Director of Program Planning, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty...
...The earliest comprehensive study of Stalin's Russia was conducted in 195051, when Harvard University's Russian Research Center sent a team of American specialists to Munich, West Germany, then still under U.S...
...author of the forthcoming "Sparks of Liberty" A true picture of Joseph Stalin's "evil empire" has been emerging in the 45 years since his death...
...She presents her findings against the backdrop of frenzied industrialization and collectivization, rising literacy, heroic deeds, gathering war clouds, and increasing repression...
...When they told me of his fate, I responded: "But denouncing one's own father is a serious thing, isn't it...
...For the greater part of the urban population, life revolved around the endless struggle to get the basics necessary for survival—food, clothing, shelter...
...But Fitzpatrick has distilled in one volume the essence of Russian byt in the '30s: "'getting' goods legally and illegally, using patrons and connections...
...petitioning, denouncing, informing...
...Towns were swamped with new arrivals from the villages, housing was drastically overcrowded, and the rationing system was close to collapse...
...life has become more cheerful," a judgment that was endlessly disseminated in Soviet propaganda...
...bad harvests caused major disruptions in the food supply in 1936 and 1939...
...Everyday Stalinism is not a page turner, and plowing through the mass of data is sometimes wearisome...
...The wives of the most prominent figures were "routinely arrested along with or shortly after their husbands...
...They enjoyed special rations, access to restricted stores and highquality workplace cafeterias...
...Those interviews have been studied by scores of academicians and have spawned many articles and books—The Soviet Citizen by Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer was one—whose theses have been confirmed in recent decades...
...Sheila Fitzpatrick has painstakingly examined virtually everything currently available in constructing a composite portrait of urban Russians' everyday life during the 1930s...
...Nevertheless, Stalin declared in 1935 that "life has become better, comrades...
...As I photographed a bronze statue of the martyred boy standing defiantly, grasping a flag and wearing a real red neckerchief, two preteen schoolgirls came down the path...
...Fitzpatrick quotes another Harvard interviewee: "In spite of the material difficulties...
...Its sources have included Nikita S. Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Communist Party Congress of 1956...
Vol. 81 • December 1998 • No. 14
