Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (22 page)

^{212
HIP A. 30, 642, 58.}

^{213
Mem. Scott,}
Duel for Europe
, 101.

^{214
Mem. Zenzinov,}
Vstrecha s Rossiei
, 164.

^{215
HIP. A. 35, 1493, 60.}

^{216
Proc. GARF f. 8131, op. 31a, d. 69730, l. 8; d. 64009, l. 9; d. 82681, l. 6.}

40
Being Soviet

When listeners at agitational meetings asked, ‘Why has the USSR not
taken Kars from Turkey?’ or commented that ‘it is necessary to give Turkey and ultimatum: if you don’t give it back then we will have it by force’, they were not expressing themselves within the language of Official Soviet Identity. However, they were trying to make sense of what seemed to them to be the current trajectory of government policy.
^217
This
bricolage
driven attempt to make sense of the world characterized the comments of a number of individuals prosecuted for anti-Soviet agita- tion during the Pact Period. A.A.S. defended himself in court that he had made ‘critical statements on various political questions but I did not consider them anti-Soviet’. He had struggled to reconcile the discrep- ancy between official claims that the USSR did not want foreign land and the reality of current policy.
^{218
E.N.E. did not deny in court that}
she had expressed disbelief in the claims that the Red Army had occupied Bessarabia without a shot. Her defence was that ‘in the period of the war with the White Finns they also did not report about the losses but her husband was at the front’.
^{219
Several respondents to HIP also}
noted that, ‘Purely logical arguments were against the propaganda. Everybody thought: “How could such a country as small as Finland invade the Soviet Union?”’
^{220
P. Gonev describes his chauffeur’s}
attempt to reconcile official rhetoric with his personal observations of life in Poland: ‘Comrade Colonel, didn’t we come to Poland to liberate our brothers? . . . But I have seen no class brothers of mine . . . A peasant has three or four horses, five or six cows; there is a bicycle in front of every house . . . There is something here that I don’t understand.’
²²¹

As new information became available and as Official Soviet Identity
fragmented, Soviet citizens were forced to engage in
bricolage
in order to make sense of the world around them. They were not stepping outside of the Soviet habitat nor, in the main, were they engaging in acts of resistance. There remained large numbers of people who thought and articulated themselves within the categories of the official press. How- ever, the gap between Official Soviet Identity and unofficially obtained information became wider than ever before during the Pact Period. The exalted rhetoric of liberation sat uncomfortably alongside the cold

^{217
Inf. Livshin and Orlov,}
Sovetskaia Propaganda
, 76.

^{218
Proc. GARF f. R8131, op. 31a, d. 12737, l. 5.}

^{219
Proc. Ibid. d. 92227, ll. 22–4.}

^{220
HIP. A. 36, 1582, 32; A. 4, 33, 19.}

^221
Fischer,
Thirteen Who Fled
, 37.

The Liberator State? 1939–41
41

pragmatism of the Finnish and Baltic occupations. Most Soviet citizens
responded to this situation creatively, deploying the tactics of the habitat to piece together a composite image of global affairs.

CONCLUSION

Official Soviet Identity played a powerful role in shaping the mentality
of Soviet citizens in this period. The bravery with which Soviet divisions fought in the Finnish War—in one case only 58 men survived from 2,000 that were surrounded—is symptomatic of the pride many residents of the USSR felt in their state.
^{222
Official Soviet Identity}
resonated most powerfully with its audience at the points where it intersected with other identities. The most passionate letters from the Finnish War brought together calls to defend Leningrad, mothers and children with the rhetoric of Soviet liberation. In these situations the official press provided a powerful avenue for citizens to articulate their anger and anxiety.

However, the official press lost its near monopoly on information
about the outside world in this period. The experience of war after 1941 only exaggerated some of these tensions as Soviet citizens interacted in far greater numbers with regions beyond their borders. However, the process of ‘opening up’ began before 1941. This significant shift occurred at the same time as Official Soviet Identity began to fragment to some degree. Many respondents to HIP later identified the Pact Period as a moment of awakening, when they lost faith in the Soviet system. Some claimed that they lost their innocence after the ‘comedy’ of August 1939; others spoke of how ‘after the war with Finland people no longer trusted the government as they had previously’; and still others said that ‘After [seeing] Poland we said that it was all lies’.
^{223
This narrative of travelling from unconsciousness to consciousness was a}
common trope of Soviet literature and it is unsurprising that many of those who had since left the USSR spoke in these terms.
^224
However,
there is no doubt that the Pact Period was a time when ‘tactics’ such as
bricolage
, became increasingly necessary if ordinary citizens wanted to

^{222
Zenzinov,}
Vstrecha s Rossiei
, 40.

^{223
HIP. A. 4, 34, 25; A. 30, 642, 58; A. 30, 642, 40.}

^{224
K. Clark,}
The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual
(Bloomington, 2000), 6–22.

42
Being Soviet

piece together a coherent picture of the Soviet relationship with the
outside world.

The rumours and behaviour of Soviet citizens expose certain aspects
of the collective
mentalit
^´
e
of this period. First, despite the reassuring promises about the wisdom of Stalin’s peaceful foreign policy, Soviet citizens regarded war rumours as credible and passed them on during the Pact Period. This anxiety reflected, to some extent, the success of the official press which had cultivated a bunker mentality during the 1920s. The threat of invasion had become a structural feature of the Soviet mindset and ordinary citizens routinely interpreted domestic and international events as harbingers of war.
^{225
Second, the behaviour}
of Soviet citizens in the borderlands demonstrated that they were not impervious to the lure of foreign goods and capitalist luxury.

The following chapters examine how the diplomatic and cultural
aspects of Official Soviet Identity, and the dual images of the outside world as a threat and a land of opportunity evolved during the Great Patriotic War and the last years of Stalin’s life.

^{225
Golubev, ‘}
Esli Mir
’.

PART II

BEING SOVIET DURING THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR

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2

Perfidious Allies? Britain, America, and Official Soviet Diplomatic Identity 1941–1945

The Wehrmacht invaded the USSR on the morning of 22 June 1941.
Within a few hours, German assault units penetrated up to 50 kilo- metres into Soviet territory. The Soviet leadership, completely unaware of the reality of the situation, ordered the troops to go on the offensive late on the evening of June 22.
^{1
In reality, the beleaguered Soviet troops}
were already scrambling into retreat, and by 27 June the German flag flew in Minsk, 300 kilometres from the border and a third of the way to Moscow. Over the coming weeks, hundreds of thousands of troops were encircled in Wehrmacht pincer movements, and on 2 October Opera- tion Typhoon, the drive for Moscow, began.

By December the offensive was exhausted and the capital was saved.
Nonetheless, the early weeks of the war came as a huge shock to many Soviet citizens. After years of boisterous talk about smashing the enemy, the Red Army was cut to pieces and the very fabric of Soviet society seemed ready to fall apart. The summer of 1942 was an equally traumatic time as the German forces rallied and drove deep into the Soviet southern flank towards the oil-rich Caucases. In order to stem the panic, Stalin issued the infamous Order 227, ‘Not a Step Back’, on 28 July 1942 in a desperate attempt to stop the retreat. As the front stabilized, once again, the Soviet forces amassed themselves in the area around Stalingrad where the German 6th Army was exposed. By late November the ring had closed around the 300,000 Wehrmacht troops and only a handful survived.

After the decisive battle at Stalingrad, the Red Army forces began
their slow and costly drive to Berlin. The tank battle at Kursk in the

^{1
J. Erickson,}
The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin’s War with Germany, Volume 1
(1983), 130–5.

46
Being Soviet

summer of 1943 reiterated the newfound dominance of the Soviet
forces, and Operation Bagration in the summer of 1944 drove the German forces out of Belorus and cleared much of Eastern Poland. By early 1945 Red Army troops were in Eastern Prussia, and Berlin itself surrendered after a month-long battle in early May. On 9 May, the population of the USSR broke into delirious celebration at the news that the Germans had unconditionally surrendered.

The following two chapters examine how Soviet citizens engaged with
Official Soviet Identity between the German invasion and the fall of Berlin. This chapter focuses on the diplomatic identity of the USSR in relation to their wartime allies. The Great Patriotic War transformed what it meant to be Soviet. In 1941 the Soviet Union was an isolated state, reliant on a fragile alliance with Nazi Germany. By 1945 it had become the military driving force within the anti-Hitler coalition. The new version of Sovietness that emerged in the war was most clearly expressed in hatred of the Germans. The official press lacerated the Wehrmacht as a ‘robber horde’ of voracious, blood-thirsty savages, whilst government cartoonists created image after image of physically and morally subhuman Germans.
^{2
This unremitting hatred of Germany}
burnished the official identity of the Soviet Union as a moral beacon within the international community. The war was, quite simply, a struggle of darkness against light.

The recent literature of Soviet wartime identity has largely focused on
this simple, antithetical relationship with Nazi Germany.
^{3
The follow-}
ing two chapters examine Soviet self-creation in relation to their Anglo- Saxon allies after 1941. The historiography of the Grand Alliance has tended to focus on the relative contributions of the Great Powers to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
^{4
This book focuses instead on how the}
Alliance was experienced at the time. It examines how Britain and America, the centres of world capitalism and the inspiration behind the ‘Finnish threat’ of 1940, suddenly became brothers-in-arms in the