Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s

by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Book Overview

Here is a pioneering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by a leading authority on modern Russian history. Focusing on the urban population, Fitzpatrick depicts a world of privation, overcrowding, endless lines, and broken homes, in which the regime's promises of future socialist abundance rang hollowly. We read of a government bureaucracy that often turned life into a nightmare, and of how ordinary citizens tried to circumvent it. We also...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195050010
• ISBN13: 9780195050011
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Everyday life and the state under Stalin

Sheila Fitzpatrick, specialist in the Stalin period of the USSR, has written a counterpart to her history of peasants and their lives in this era (Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization). Here, in "Everyday Stalinism", she chronicles the urban experience of life under Stalin during the 1930s, with all its paranoia, hardship and oddities. The book is focused in particular on the relationship of daily life and the state, with relatively little attention for cultural history. However, making much use of the Harvard Project interviews with Soviet citizens from this period, she offers a compelling and fascinating view into the attitude of Soviet citizens towards the state, towards Stalin, and towards each other. Much more than just a tale of survival under threat of secret police, Fitzpatrick shows how people got by in terms of getting consumer goods, getting ahead, and getting even. Of course the Great Purges are given due attention, but what is particularly interesting is that in this book we see those events, as well as the earlier show trials, from the bottom up: not the political history of Stalin eliminating his enemies, but a struggle for power between the Party elites (largely received with disinterest by the general populace), and subsequently a series of rapid repressive maneouvres that descend onto the unsuspecting middle level. Fitzpatrick pays excellent attention also to social policy and what effect this had on women, social and ethnic minorities, and so on. The USSR as an "affirmative action empire" has been well chronicled: The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Wilder House Series in Politics, History, and Culture). Nevertheless, Fitzpatrick's overview is clear and cogent, and we get also get a good idea of the immense advances in literacy, cultural knowledge and general outlook that were made in roughly the period 1927-1937. Whereas in 1926 only 57% of those aged between 9 and 49 were literate, in 1939 81% of the whole population was literate. Similarly, the entire mass of the population learned basic culture such as appreciating poetry, washing regularly, using soap and towels, not leaving cigarette butts everywhere and not spitting on the floor, etc. Striking is the amount of critical letters and appeals that people kept sending to Party and Politburo leaders in the (often, but not always vain) hope of redress of grievances or changes in policy. This was already a set tradition dating back to Czarist times, but was maintained during the Revolution and post-Revolutionary period in the form of public debate in leftist papers and letters to Lenin (see Voices of Revolution, 1917). This gives us a good indication however of the public opinion in the Stalinist days, to which Fitzpatrick usefully adds the NKVD reports of overheard conversations and the like. This surprisingly indicates that skepticism towards Stalin himself as well as th

Must read

If you have an interest in Stalin and the 1930's, which include the purges, this book is a must for you. For the most part I study the Military and Political history of the early Soviet Union and I had this book on my shelf for years before I finally decided to read it. But once I began I was amazed at myself that I had waited so long to finally dive into this book! The author has really done her research and it shows! The reader will get a much better and broader understanding of what life was like in the 1930's and how a new state was coming into its own. Why certain groups or 'classes' were being targeted by the state and what happened to them. How some changed their entire lives just to get away from the OGPU and later NKVD. And interestingly enough the policies implemented by the state worked against making it a safer place. As they aggravated one group after another through trials and forced movements they made enemies where in the past there might not have been any. It began to dawn on the government that these people would only seek vengeance once they were freed from punishment and it also created the idea that these people would be enemies for life. This, to a certain extent, explains why during the "Great Purge" which started in 1937 those released from GULag camps or special settlements, etc, were once again picked up and tried and sent to either prison or were executed. The examples the author draws upon are an excellent representation of the time period and people's thoughts recount what they felt and desired while living through this turbulent, to say the least, decade. The one aspect of the Stalinist period that should be kept in mind, and appears throughout the book, is that no one was really safe in this time. From Communist officials who were being denounced by the hundreds to the regular man on the street who could be denounced because his apartment was bigger than his neighbors, or NKVD officials, one of whom a week before committing suicide visited and drank with the families of people who were denounced and he had to arrest and lastly even to Stalin's inner circle which witnessed the likes of Kaganovich losing his brother and Molotov his wife. A great contribution to the literature on Soviet Union under Stalin!

Stalinism from a different angle.

I've read several dozen works on the Soviet era between the October revolution and the Second World War, from Pipes to Conquest and including Solzeynitsin's "Gulag" trilogy. While Solzeynitsin focused on the impact of those who were swept up in the great terror of the '30s, "Everyday Stalinism" looks at the impact on the average individual's daily life in the cities of the USSR. Unlike the Pipes/Conquest terror-as-a-psychopathic-spasm-and-if-you-don't-believe-that-you're-a-revisionist school, Fitzpatrick is more focused on Stalinism at the common level. How it was maintained and what its effects were. And, surprisingly, many people supported or benefited from it by filling the spaces of those "liquidated" or informing and denouncing rivals in love or work. The real fear wasn't always the KGB at 4am but a neighbor or acquaintance at work. The sad truth is that many were co-opted by the system and worked within it to support the party.Addressed is the commonly held belief then that no matter what you may have done since the revolution, if you had been born into an "enemy class" then you were in a sense marked for life. The commoness of this view is highlighted in Fitzpatricks account. the irony of this is that those who rose up to replace the liquidated were themselves given bourgeois rewards.Fitzpatrick does excellent work in guiding the reader throught the beauracratic, social and economic difficulties of the average Soviet citizen. Well researched and well written this can be read as an introduction to the era or especially as a valuable look at Stalinism from the perspective of the urban "masses". Fitzpatrick, unlike the Conquest/Pipes school, does better at facing the sad and bitter truth that the system- while terryifing for some- was held together and supported by many who benefited. Even today walking the streets of St Petersburg, you will see many in the older generation holding pictures of Stalin in a sort of reverence. The co-opting of the culture and population is, to me, the most troubling aspect and legacy of Stalinism. Everyday Stalinism could function as an interesting companion piece to Orwell's 1984.Well done.

An excellent read

A well-written book, by a leading professor in the field!! Fitzpatrick has taken many different documents and worked them together to describe what city-life was like in the Soviet 1930's. This is the companion to her book "Stalin's Peasants", which describes peasant life during this same time period. Fitzpatrick describes what the average life of a Russian city-dweller was like, using many different stories. She ends the book by comparing life during this time to three different things. I will let you read the book to see what they are!!

Everyday Stalinism.

Life in Stalin's Russia must have been extremely hard for all concerned, yet Sheila Fitzpatrick has managed to create a fascinating and readable book. There is a great deal of detail based on meticulous research, but at the same time there is an awareness of ordinary people, and some humour: if you needed to invent a new life for yourself, it was best to claim that you had been born in Kiev, since their records were destroyed in the Civil War. The strongest message comes at the end, that with everything "homo sovieticus" had to endure, he/she was a survivor. As a teacher of 20th century history I can totally recommend this book to anyone, student or general reader, who wants to understand this period and these remarkable people.