| Contents |
Introduction: A Conservative Agenda -- Part One. Anguish -- The Omnipresent Conspiracy : Imageries of Politics and Social Relations in the 1930s -- Catching Spies, Trapping the System -- Between the Catastrophe and the Promised Land : Public Mood, Popular Hopes, Elite Fears, and Mass Terror -- Part Two. Anger -- From Revolution to Daily Routine : Endemic Violence, Suspicious Youth, Angry Bolsheviks -- Citizens between Indignation and Resignation : Loyalty and Lost Hope -- Rebels -- Part Three. Folkways -- Breaking Step, Enjoying Carnival : Unorthodox Folklore -- Exploring Frontiers : Entrepreneurship, Continuities, and Changes -- Virtuous Girls Building a Sinful World : Misadventures of Modernity, Limits of the Thinkable, and the Politics of Folkways -- Epilogue: Dilemmas of History. |
| Scope and content |
"This study offers original perspectives on the politics of everyday life in the Soviet Union by closely examining the coping mechanisms individuals and leaders alike developed as they grappled with the political, social, and intellectual challenges the system presented. As Gábor T. Rittersporn shows, the 'little tactics' people employed not only helped them endure the rigors of life during the Stalin and post-Stalin periods but also strongly influenced the system's development into the post-Soviet era. For Rittersporn, citizens' conscious and unreflected actions at every level of society defined a distinct Soviet universe. Terror, faith, disillusionment, evasion, folk customs, revolt, and confusion about regime goals and the individual's relation to them were all integral to the development of that universe and its culture. Through a meticulous reading of previously uncovered archival material, Rittersporn identifies three related responses--anguish, anger, and folkways--to the pressures all people encountered and shows how these responses in turn altered the way the system operated. Rittersporn finds that the leadership generated widespread anguish by its inability to understand and correct the reasons for the system's persistent political and economic dysfunctions. Rather than locate the sources of these problems in their own presuppositions and administrative methods, leaders attributed them to omnipresent conspiracy and wrecking, which they tried to extirpate through terror. He shows how the unrelenting pursuit of enemies exacerbated systemic failures and contributed to administrative breakdowns and social dissatisfaction. Anger resulted as the populace reacted to the notable gap between the promise of a self-governing egalitarian society and the actual experience of daily existence under the heavy hand of the party-state. Those who had interiorized systemic values demanded a return to what they took for the original Bolshevik project, while others sought an outlet for their frustrations in destructive or self-destructive behavior. In reaction to the system's pressure, citizens instinctively developed strategies of noncompliance and accommodation. A detailed examination of these folkways enables Rittersporn to identify and describe the mechanisms and spaces intuitively created by officials and ordinary citizens to evade the regime's dictates or to find a modus vivendi with them. Citizens and officials alike employed folkways to facilitate work, avoid tasks, advance careers, augment their incomes, display loyalty, enjoy life's pleasures, and simply to survive. Through his research, Rittersporn uncovers a fascinating world consisting of peasant stratagems and subterfuges, underground financial institutions, falsified Supreme Court documents, and associations devoted to peculiar sexual practices. As Rittersporn shows, popular and elite responses and tactics deepened the regime's ineffectiveness and set its modernization project off down unintended paths. Trapped in a web of behavioral patterns and social representations that eluded the understanding of both conservatives and reformers, the Soviet system entered a cycle of self-defeat where leaders and led exercised less and less control over the course of events. In the end, a new system emerged that neither the establishment nor the rest of society could foresee"-- Provided by publisher. |
