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

cannot be considered a source, because they are not truth- ful. 89
You have to have a very careful attitude towards them [rumours] and check on them. 90
However, they did not regard the two as intrinsically in competition with one another. Indeed, they often spoke of cross referencing material from one source against information from another: ‘Even the members of the party among themselves don’t believe everything that they read in the Soviet newspapers . . . Conversations with members of my family or with friends were very important.’ 91
The creative products of this rumour bricolage were not necessarily highly original, in the sense of demonstrating great inventiveness. Their creativity, in de Certeau’s terms, was of an everyday kind and involved
     
     
85 Inkeles and Bauer, The Soviet Citizen , 164–5, 169.
86 These are of the 272 (83%) who answered. Of those citing friends a third specified close friends. HIP. ‘Code Book A’ , 60.
87 HIP. A. 3, 25, 10 (A schedule interview, book 3, respondent 25, page 10. Now
online).
88 For a further discussion see: T. Johnston, ‘Rumours in the Stalin-era USSR: A Theoretical Introduction’, in Slukhi v Rossii XX veka: neformal’naia kommunikatsiia i ‘krutye povoroty’ rossiiskoi istorii’/Rumors in the XX century Russia: Informal Communica- tion and ‘Steep Turns’ of Russian History (Moscow, 2010).
89 HIP. A. 12, 153, 46.
90 HIP. A. 1, 5, 47.
91 HIP. A. 1, 8, 74.
xxxviii Being Soviet
the bringing together of information from two contexts to create a composite product. 92 It is comparable to Sawyer’s description of jazz improvisation: the soloist does not seek to create something entirely new but draws upon well-established tropes, combining them in a novel configuration. 93 Soviet citizens drew upon previous incarnations of Official Soviet Identity as well as the current press, and pre-existing assumptions about the nature of international relations, to create a composite image of the world.
The historiography of the Soviet 1930s has largely treated rumour as an arena of subversion. 94 Viola describes them as an ‘offstage social space for the articulation of peasant dissent’. 95 But rumouring was too widespread a pastime to be exclusively associated with resistance. If rumouring was an act of resistance, then all Soviet citizens were resisters. The authors of HIP drew the same conclusion. They found that respondents who had been most strongly opposed to the regime actually relied less on rumour as a source of information. 96 Respondents who were positively inclined towards the government used rumours as a means of staying up to date with what was going on. 97 They concluded, on the basis that they had an unusually anti-Soviet sample, that their results underestimated the ubiquity of rumour as a means of transmit- ting information in the Soviet Union.
The archival sources from the Stalin era also reveal a large number of what might be called ‘loyal rumourers’. Rumours of invasion, price rises, or the abolition of the kolkhozy were often passed on by individuals who were depressed or frustrated by the information they transmitted. They wrote to warn the Soviet leadership of a forthcoming event, or bemoaned to their work colleagues that something was about to
     
     
92 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life .
93 R. K. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (Oxford, 2006), 223–36. See also: J. Liep, ‘Introduction’, in J. Liep, ed., Locating Cultural Creativity (London, 2001), 7.
94 S. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after
Collectivisation (Oxford, 1994), 5–6; Everyday Stalinism, 184–5.
95 Viola, Peasant Rebels, 64–5.
96 Bauer and Inkeles, The Soviet Citizen, 164, 169. C. Kluckhohn, A. Inkeles, and
R. A. Bauer, ‘Strategic Psychological and Sociological Strengths and Vulnerabilities of the Soviet Social System: A Final Report submitted to the Director Officer Maxwell Air