Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 by Timothy Johnston Read Free Book Online

in the Stalin-era Soviet Union, and also a clear example of bricolage in action. When it came to gathering news, as with the process of gathering food, Soviet citizens supplemented information provided by the official press with information from unofficial sources that was obtained by word-of-mouth. This creative bricolage brought together material from two contexts in order to create a third product that did not depend exclusively on either source.
     
     
72 See Chapter 5.
73 A. Inkeles and R. A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge Mass., 1959) and R. A. Bauer, A. Inkeles, and C. Kluckhohn, How the Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological and Social Themes (Cambridge Mass., 1956). For some exceptions, see G. Lefebvre, trans., J. White, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (London, 1973); C. Wickham, ‘Gossip and Resistance among the Medieval Peasantry’, Past and Present , 160.1 (1998), 3–24; A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000). In the Russo-Soviet context see:
O. Figes and B. Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (London, 1999); S. Smith, ‘Letters from Heaven and Tales of the Forest: “Superstition” against Bolshevism’, Antropologicheskii Forum , 3 (2005), 280–306.
Introduction xxxv
Rosnow and Fine, the leading sociologists of rumour, define a rumour as ‘information neither substantiated nor refuted’. 74 Once its contents have been demonstrated to be true or false, then it ceases to be a rumour and becomes either a fact or an error. Until the point of authentication, rumours function as ‘improvised news’ and analysis transmitted by word-of-mouth from one person to another. 75 Rumours are distinct from other word-of-mouth media in the emphasis they place on communication rather than entertainment or scandal. Gossip is the transmission of often verified information about a third party for the purpose of passing comment on it. Rumours hypothesize about unver- ified realities. 76 The Stalin-era Soviet Union was also inundated with tips. Shortages of basic necessities, such as food, as well as luxury goods like cinema tickets, made oral information a vital medium through which Soviet citizens found out about where and when to buy goods. Tips are distinct from rumours because they are exclusively informative: they do not contain an element of explanation. Another element of oral communication, which was particular to the USSR, was the anekdot . 77 Anekdoty wryly observed the absurdities of Soviet life, puncturing the pomposity of official rhetoric. Unlike rumours, they did not transmit information but passively commented on the lived experience of Soviet citizens. The distinctions between these different categories of speech are not absolute. Nonetheless rumours are a distinctly informational and analytical form of unofficial oral dialogue.
The nature of the Soviet system, with its officially mandated propaganda machine, lent a particular character to rumours ( slukhi ). Rumours were defined by their origin outside of the official mass media. They could only be authenticated or disproved in that context. This distinction between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ has recently come under attack as an example of applying non-Soviet categories to the USSR. 78 However, in this case, the definition of a rumour as ‘unofficial’ was a
     
74 R. L. Rosnow, and G. A. Fine, Rumour and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay
(Oxford, 1976), 4.
75 See: T. P. Johnston, ‘Subversive Tales? War Rumours in the Soviet Union 1945–1947’ in J. Fu¨rst, ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society Between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London, 2006), 59–78; T. Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumour (New York, 1966), 62.
76 G. W. Allport and L. Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (New York, 1965) , 165–7.
77 For a discussion, see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever ,