Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (12 page)

^{152
E. Zubkova,}
Poslevoennoe sovetskoe Obshchestvo: Politicka i Povsednevnost’ 1945–53

(Moscow, 2000), 3–14;
Russia After the War
. See also: D. Filtzer,
Soviet Workers and
Late-Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System After World War II (Cambridge, 2002), 157; A. A. Danilov and A.V. Pyzhikov,
Rozhdenie sverxderzhavy:
SSSR v pervye poslevoennye gody (Moscow, 2001), 10; Fu¨rst, ‘Importance of Being Stylish.’

^153
Weiner,
Making Sense of War
, 17. See also: Danilov and Pyzhikov,
Rozhdenie

sverxderzhavy
, 10.

lii
Being Soviet

that the Peace Campaigns were enormously successful at mobilizing
their participants, but that the participants also reappropriated the campaigns as platforms for the articulation of their personal sentiments and private grief.

Chapter 5 tracks the shifting official posture towards Anglo-American
civilization, and in particular its cultural and scientific products, after 1945. It argues that Soviet scientists deployed a whole array of ‘tactics of the habitat’ in order to circumvent the new dictates against Western science or use the shifts within official policy to discredit their rivals. It also suggests that, despite official denunciation, capitalist cultural products, such as film and music, enjoyed widespread popularity in the post-war years. It closes with an examination of how Western films and clothing became markers of counter-cultural, though not necessari- ly anti-Soviet, identity in the final years of Stalin’s life.

By the end of Stalin’s life a new, self-confident, and assertive Soviet
identity had emerged that sought to project power and patronage across the globe. That self-confidence was also reflected in the turn away from reliance on capitalist technology and culture. The Stalinist state of the 1950s understood its place within the global community in completely different terms from the Stalinist state in the 1930s. Cold War Official Soviet Identity was not simply a reanimation of the pre-war era. It was a fresh version of Sovietness that was shaped by the early Cold War and continued to influence the Soviet project until its demise in 1991.

These two chapters also challenge the standard chronology of the
post-war years. The disorder, criminality, and starvation of the first post-war months ensured that wartime conditions did not come to an end until 1947.
^{154
The Soviet government also fought a running ‘civil}
war’ in the western borderlands against Ukrainian and Baltic partisans until the summer of 1947. The turning point within Official Soviet Identity in both diplomatic and cultural terms also came in 1947. The image of the post-war period as a monolithic bloc is, therefore, challenged in favour of a more subtle picture. Many of the defining features of the war experience continued long after the guns had stopped firing.

^{154
For a similar argument see: J. Fu¨rst, ‘Introduction—Late Stalinist Society: History,}
Policies and People’, in Fu¨rst, ed.,
Late Stalinist Russia
, 1–3.

PART I

BEING SOVIET IN THE PRE-WAR ERA

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1

The Liberator State? The Crisis of Official Soviet Identity during the Pact Period 1939–1941

The Nazi–Soviet Pact, signed on 24 August 1939 in Moscow, defined
the next two years of Soviet diplomacy. It opened the door for Hitler’s invasion of Poland on 1 September that prompted Britain and France to declare war on Germany. Between August 1939 and June 1941 the USSR was a nervous bystander looking in on the European war that seemed increasingly likely to result in a German victory. Whilst the battle raged elsewhere, the Soviet Union began ‘nibbling’ territory from Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, and Romania in order to shore up its defences. This territorial expansionism, and the de facto alliance with Germany, led to a breakdown of relations with Britain and France who regarded the USSR as an unofficial enemy. The Anglo-French Joint Chiefs-of-Staff discussed a pre-emptive attack on the USSR several times in 1939–41.
¹

The Nazi–Soviet Pact that initiated this period came as a shock to many
people both inside and outside the USSR. Even senior members of the Politburo, such as Beria, had no warning of what was coming.
^{2
The Soviet}
Union had spent the 1930s positioning itself as the leading light of the anti-fascist coalition. European communist parties led the way in building anti-fascist Popular Front coalitions, whilst Soviet weapons and expertise fought to keep the Italian and German-backed nationalists at bay in Spain. The precise reasons behind the USSR’s sudden shift from head of the anti-fascist alliance to de facto German ally remain under debate.
³

^{1
P. R. Osborn, ‘Operation Pike: Britain Versus the Soviet Union, 1939–1941’,}

Contributions in Military Studies,
190 (2001).

^{2
S. Beria, ed., F. Thom, trans, B. Pearce,}
Beria: My Father
(London, 2001), 51–2.

^{3
For a summary of the debate, see: G. Gorodetsky,}
Grand Delusion: Stalin and the
German Invasion of Russia (New Haven, 1999), 1–10.

4
Being Soviet

British and French timidity at Munich in the face of German demands
had certainly raised question marks about collective security. Nonetheless, the Soviet press continued to write in hopeful tones about anti-fascist cooperation after Munich, and a fresh round of talks with Britain and France was launched in the summer of 1939.
^{4
Even Stalin and Molotov}
seem to have regarded an alliance with Germany as an unlikely prospect until a couple of weeks before the Pact was signed.

Global events moved at great speed during the Pact Period, and
Official Soviet Identity was forced to evolve in order to keep pace. It was an era defined by German military success. Norway, Belgium, Holland, and France fell in the spring of 1940; Yugoslavia and Greece followed in 1941. After years of anti-fascist propaganda, Soviet news- papers were forced into cautious approval of the expansionist Third Reich. They also needed to find a narrative to explain the new Soviet policy of land acquisition. Eastern Poland became part of the USSR in September 1939 and was followed by bloodless takeovers of the Baltic States and the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina in June–July 1940. In Finland the process was much less simple. The government in Helsinki refused to buckle under diplomatic pressure, and between December 1939 and March 1940 the Red Army fought a costly war to force the Finnish frontier northwards and away from Leningrad. The rapprochement with Germany and the occupations of the borderlands radically reshaped Official Soviet Identity in diplomatic and cultural terms. Many of the narratives that emerged in this era became staples of Official Soviet Identity in later years and shaped what it meant to be Soviet beyond Stalin’s death.

This brief period of turmoil offers an ideal window within which to
begin an examination of how Soviet citizens engaged with Official Soviet Identity. The relationship between the USSR and the outside world mattered to ordinary people at this time. With the army at war, or in an advanced state of readiness, and industry fully mobilized, Soviet citizens read the papers and listened to lectures on international affairs with great enthusiasm. What they read and heard offered little assur- ance: official explanations of the diplomatic identity of the USSR became increasingly confusing and incoherent as the months passed.
Pravda
insisted that the Soviet policy of peace was paying dividends. However, ordinary people could see that the state was engaged in

^4
Pravda,
21.03.1949, p. 12;
Ogon¨ek,
1939: 10 (undated), 5–6.

The Liberator State? 1939–41
5

headlong rearmament and preparation for war. The occupation of the
borderlands also flooded the oral news network with fresh information about the outside world. As a result, the gap between official rhetoric and observed reality began to widen. As the Pact Period went on, Soviet citizens were forced to rely more than ever on the ‘tactics of the habitat’ in order to make sense of the rapidly shifting events in the world around them.

OFFICIAL SOVIET IDENTITY IN THE PACT PERIOD

The Soviet press provided little or no warning that an agreement
might be signed with Hitler’s Germany in the summer of 1939. On 19 August, only five days before the Pact was agreed, the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) issued a statement denying Polish stories that the negotiations with Britain and France were failing and on 14 August
Pravda
declared that ‘A war of the Soviet Union against

fascism would be a most just and legal war’.
^{5
In July there were vague}

mentions of trade talks in Berlin that culminated in the Soviet–German
trade agreement on 21 August.
^{6
However, beyond this, the official}
press did nothing to prepare its audience for the fact that the policy of anti-fascist cooperation was about to be abandoned and an effective alliance signed with the USSR’s sworn enemy.

Official Soviet Identity changed overnight on 24 August 1939. The
new version of Soviet identity that emerged out of the Pact centred on the wisdom of the Stalinist peace policy that had kept the USSR out of the European war.
Pravda
explained that the agreement with the previously reviled fascists ‘reflected the long term peace policy of the Soviet Union’ and provided for ‘good neighbourly relations between the two countries’.
^{7
On 27 August Voroshilov, who had chaired the failed}
negotiations with Britain and France, offered an interview to
Izvestiia
in which he explained that the Pact had been necessary because the Western powers had refused to take Soviet security concerns seriously.
^{8
Molotov emphasized these themes a few days later in a speech to the}
Supreme Soviet: the USSR did not want enemies if it could avoid having them, and the Pact had secured peace for the Soviet people.
⁹

^5
Pravda
, 14.08.1939, p. 4.
^6
Pravda
, 21.08.1939, p. 1.

^7
Pravda
, 24.08.1939, p. 1.
^8
Pravda
, 27.08.1939, p. 1.

^9
Pravda
, 01.09.1939, p. 1.

6
Being Soviet

Throughout September 1939, the Soviet press engaged in a vocal
bout of Germanophilia. Previously reviled papers, such as
Volkishcher Beobachter
, were cited with approval and Hitler’s speeches were printed at length.
^{10
German military successes in Poland were not trumpeted,}
but their technological and organizational excellence was compared

favourably to the ‘laughable mouselike fuss’ of Anglo-French operations
in Western Europe.
^{11
When Ribbentrop visited Moscow in September}
to sign a Friendship and Border Agreement, his visit was hailed as a symptom of the new accord between the two powers and ‘another glorious confirmation of the policy of peace’. The ‘agitators for war’ in the Western governments now bore the ‘responsibility for continuing the conflict’.
^{12
The USSR had abandoned collective security and repos-}
tured itself as a friend of Germany and a state outside of the growing international conflict. In the process it had adopted an entirely new diplomatic identity.