We can find similarly extreme examples of apparently genuine love for the Revolution in the Soviet countryside. Maurice Hindus writes of a letter he received from Nadya, a young woman he met in a small town on the Volga, remarking that “not even love” could replace her joy in the Revolution.Her enthusiasm for collectivization was ardent: “The very air here is afire with a new spirit and a new energy.”
Equally noteworthy is her lack of empathy for those hurt by the Revolution, for her letter contained “no allusion to the peasants' inner turmoil, as though it were only an incidental trifle.”Another young woman Hindus met, Vera, explicitly disagreed that the state's liquidation of the kulaks was at all terrible, exclaiming that it was “Nothing of the sort!” What we would label today as repression was to her simply a natural and necessary step in the inevitable progress towards completion of the Revolution. “Sometimes you have to be unkind,” Vera argued, but “the proletarian must triumph.”
Such passionately loyal attitudes were not limited to the younger generation. Though much older than Nadya or Vera, Galina Shtange refers in her diary to the Revolution as “this wonderful movement [which] has taken such hold of me that I just can't sit idly by.” When awarded a shock-worker certificate, she is unable to find words to express her joy.
She feels intense pride when invited to the Kremlin, and is so touched by the sight of Stalin that “tears welled up in my eyes.” She follows these words with actions, planning to enrol in a nursing course that fall. The experiences and actions of these not untypical women are hard to account for with a purely Totalitarian interpretation, and are much better explained by the Revisionist school's emphasis on genuine party loyalty and revolutionary fervour.
We may glean insights into the workings of this loyalty and fervour when we encounter in Shtange's account her passionate resolve, just as in Nadya's letter and Vera's conversation, to “be ready for any encounter with enemies, which we have plenty of.” In all three accounts, and in Soviet parlance in general, “enemies” abound: ubiquitous, relentless, and formidable, often appearing in their slightly more specific guise of “traitors”, “saboteurs”, “spies”, “foreign propagandists”, “reactionaries”, or “bourgeois elements”.
These terms and the stereotypes they represent are rarely elaborated upon or deeply examined; they seem to exist largely as shorthand for demonizing dissent and motivating unity. When citizens like Shtange take “enemies” at face value without rooting this term in reality, they withdraw from examining their own language, and, in so doing, cease to engage in any criticism of the regime's terms. Labels themselves suffice as reasons for death sentences.
In Fashioning the Stalinist Soul, Jochen Hellbeck goes further, questioning whether a Soviet citizen in the Stalin era could “articulate a private identity distinct from the political system,” and suggesting that no such identity could even have existed. Hellbeck's approach explains the loyalty of citizens by positing that they could not identify themselves in terms other than those of the Revolution; resisting the regime would in essence be identical to resisting ones own identity.
Much the way Shtange unthinkingly uses the term “enemy,” Hellbeck's subject of study, a man named Podlubnyi, accepts without question the Party's definition of the term “kulak.” More incredibly, though Podlubnyi actually is a kulak, he chooses not to rebel against the regime but instead tries to change himself into a more acceptable citizen. Hellbeck points out that Podlubnyi never condemns “the coercive nature of the system but [instead condemns] his own behavior in it.” To Hellbeck, Podlubnyi exhibits loyalty to the state because he could not conceive of himself doing otherwise.
Though Hellbeck's phenomenon of personal identity may help to explain much of the loyalty in the Soviet state, it cannot be taken as an absolute doctrine. It seems untenable that no space existed in which one could create a concept of self-identity independent of the state's concepts and terminology. Indeed, many peasants ridiculed the state's vocabulary, such as the woman in Hindus's account who asked “And what was my sin?... I was a koolack, a beast, a monster that had to be crushed.”
Clearly, this woman had no illusions that she was a monster of any sort. Equally unhappy with the regime's policies, many Muslims argued that unveiling women would turn them “into prostitutes.” Though Hellbeck's analysis sheds light on Podlubnyi and perhaps millions like him, it cannot explain the outright hostility felt towards the regime in countless other cases.
Evidently, both schools of thought have merit. The Totalitarian stream emphasizes fear of the Party, while the Revisionist stream emphasizes love of the Party and suggests that in some cases it is nearly impossible not to love the Party. It is often tempting to reach for one interpretation to explain one citizen's experiences, and the other interpretation to explain another's. However, in many cases, both interpretations can be valuable. For example, Shtange's intense love of the Party existed alongside her unwillingness to publish information about her husband's prison sentence.
This self-censoring may be easily interpreted as evidence of Shtange's fear of the regime. Thus, in Shtange's case, we might benefit by refusing a Manichean approach, applying only one label or the other. Instead, she may be understood as occupying a place on a spectrum, somewhere between the solely Revisionist and purely Totalitarian interpretations. This type of approach, applying opposite concepts to the same individual, may not be as contradictory as it first seems. Consider a religious analogy: God-loving people are oftentimes God-fearing people as well. In our Soviet examples, God is replaced by Stalin, and faith replaced by loyalty to the Party.
In this sense, the two seemingly opposite interpretations may be viewed as necessary parts of a larger whole. The staying power of the Soviet regime cannot be explained merely with reference to its repressive and coercive elements, nor can it be adequately understood by looking only at the enthusiastic and genuine support of many of its citizens. Instead, we may apply both the Totalitarian and Revisionist interpretations to Soviet society as a whole, and to particular citizens as individuals, in order to more fully comprehend the nature of Soviet power.
