In the Soviet field, including and especially with regard to the contentious politics of empire, we have not gone far enough in theorizing emotions. What follows is part of a newly emerging attempt to examine the implications of recent theoretical work on the politics of emotions for research in the Soviet field. As “newly emerging” implies, I do not claim to be the first to advocate for attention to the emotional dimension of political life in the Soviet field.^[1] For one thing, emotions hover around our narratives as causal factors in explaining political outcomes, such as the path, form, and scope of the “Great Purges”; additionally, they have sometimes been objects of historical investigation.^[2] The writing of a “history of emotions,” in which historians of France, the United States, and other areas have only recently pioneered – the history of the formation, evolution, and import of “emotional cultures” in comparative context across time and space – has begun to filter through the historical profession at large, a phenomenon that has not escaped the gaze of historians of the Soviet period, and historians of “Eurasia” more generally.^[3] There have been efforts, sometimes paired with partial theorization of the emotions themselves, to highlight the role of emotions such as resentment, anger, and hatred, in national identity, ethnic conflict and ethnic violence.^[4] Nonetheless, historians of the Soviet period have not been in dialogue with the most recent theoretical work on the emotions of contentious politics.^[5] Nor have theorists of collective emotions considered the implications of Soviet cases of contentious politics for their categories, assumptions, and injunctions. Here I aim to contribute to launching such a two-way dialogue by focusing chiefly, though not exclusively, on one example of the “contentious politics” of collective emotions in the Soviet case: the episodes of strikes, protests, and other forms of collective action that occurred after the death of Stalin, and, in particular, in the early 1960s.^[6]
In launching this dialogue, it is necessary to be aware of both the innovative promise and worrisome shortcomings of the new theoretical work on collective emotions and contentious politics. Synthesizing bodies of literature such as the philosophy of emotions and theories of collective action, the most recent theoretical work produced by Mustafa Emirbayer and Chad Alan Goldberg combines a constructive critique of existing theories of emotion, existing theories of collective action, and some writings by American pragmatists such as Dewey and French critical theory such as the work of Pierre Bourdieu. In their theoretical formulation, emotions are not analytically separate from reason, but rather are necessarily intertwined with “embodied perceptions and judgments as well as bodily states, forces, energies, or sensations.” Their approach breaks with previous work on the nature of emotions that tended to regard emotions only as a reified thing possessed by an individual (as in a subjective “state of mind”) or exemplified by her actions. Instead, this new work examines theoretical issues related to collective emotions, understood not as the emotional state of a reified group such as a crowd, but as relationships in “psychical investments, engagements, [and] cathexes” that emerge between individuals and groups in a dynamic process. Their achievement is to have reconceived collective action, and, in particular, episodes of collective action involving contentious politics, as an interlocking network of dynamic emotional relationships that influence but cannot be reduced to other contexts of action, such as social structure or culture. In other words, they have not only insisted on giving emotions analytical autonomy; that is, separating out emotions from culture and social structure, just as in an earlier wave of theoretical innovation culture was separated from social structure. They have also argued that thereby holding out the possibility of emotions’ empirical autonomy can help us achieve greater understanding of the origins, process, and legacies of specific cases of contentious politics. This approach has great merits, among them the possibility that giving analytical autonomy to collective emotions can help us achieve greater understanding of the emergence (or not) of episodes of contentious politics, as well as their form and legacy. However, it is important that historians of the Soviet Union not accept uncritically the theoretical corpus that Emirbayer and Goldberg have provided.^[7] The assumptions and categories that make up their injunctions for future research themselves deserve critique.
As will be elaborated in more detail below, placing their theoretical vision in dialogue with cases of Soviet contentious politics suggests that the injunctions themselves still need refinement.^[8] Even if we assume that transcending the pernicious dichotomy between reason and emotion is desirable, it is questionable whether their call to look for the “intentional structure” in the emotions of “social movements, established institutions, or third parties” does the trick. First, as presently formulated, the wording itself seems to reproduce the pernicious distinction between reason and emotion. To be sure, the injunction attempts to transcend the reason/emotion dichotomy by calling for an examination of the “intentional structure in the various parties’ emotions.” But it is still the case that emotion’s “intentional structure” (reason) is implicitly contrasted with something else (feeling?). More importantly, only “intentions,” which evoke reason or at least judgement, get to have “structure”; emotions do not. Are Emirbayer and Goldberg inadvertently implying then, that they are still imagining emotions as unruly, disordered, and ephemeral – the very assumption against which they so persuasively inveigh? Also deserving of interrogation is their welcome suggestion to overcome the entrenched rational leader/emotional follower dichotomy by examining the emotional influences upon leaders as well. Yet, by exposing the pernicious (and ahistorical) nature of this dichotomy (and others), they necessarily invite us to search in their own injunctions for lingering epistemological dichotomies that themselves have negative consequences. One such instance that they fail to question is the tightly packaged dichotomy between “leaders” and “followers.” Another questionable (or perhaps limiting) assumption relates to their calls to explore analytically autonomous emotional logics alongside the other contexts (social structural and cultural) of collective action. As in the very theories of collective action that they both critique and build upon, their vision of the emotional context of action assumes that emotion is prior to action.^[9] To correct for this, we must also be sensitive to the way in which action, sometimes inadvertently, also changes the internal dynamics of collective emotions. Developed in dialogue with Soviet cases of contentious politics, these critiques nonetheless have implications for historians across fields.
Second, we must be sensitive to what is specific to Soviet cases of the collective emotions of contentious politics; given the universalizing nature of Emirbayer and Goldberg’s vision, this will require our thought and discipline. For one thing, as Emirbayer and Goldberg themselves acknowledge, what they provide is a general vision of the way in which the emotional context of action relates to the social structural and cultural contexts, not of the causal mechanisms that operate within the emotional context of action. It is also the case that they are not offering us a ready-made blueprint for historical research: despite explorations in how collective emotions change, theirs is a rather synchronic vision. The fundamental question, then, is: with regard to the contentious politics of collective emotions, to what extent do specific incarnations of a socialist polity in an imperial setting change, or at least refine, what we are being called upon to investigate, and how the investigation is to be carried out?
Thus, it is important to think about what the basic concepts of their injunctions – emotions, leaders, followers, the emotional context of power relations – mean in such a setting. With respect to the Soviet context, among the questions that arise about those basic categories is the following: What does it mean, in the Soviet case, to talk about the nature of emotion? It must be kept in mind that in the history of socialism in the USSR and elsewhere, socialist polities not only sought to prescribe the emotional repertoire and its means of expression, but used Marxist-Leninist-(Maoist) ideology to do so.^[10] The Bolsheviks, as well as other communist elites, were consummate emotion managers.^[11] Yet, although Emirbayer and Goldberg acknowledge the role of emotion managers, they do not apprehend the particular forms and goals of emotion management in a socialist polity. For example, they never raise the question of how an official discourse, or discourses, about emotions shape the “internal logic and organization of these emotional formations.”^[12] In non-socialist polities, too, there can be an official internal logic and organization of emotional formations, something Emirbayer and Goldberg seem not to recognize. In fact, they never make clear where collective emotions themselves reside – in the private sphere, in the public sphere, or somewhere in between? Nor have they broached the issue of how this might vary over space and time. What did it mean to be a “leader” of a movement in contexts in which the very phenomenon of contentious politics was, after the 17th Party Congress if not before, ideologically and rhetorically denied? As we will see below, in various cases of Soviet contentious politics from the 1920s to the early 1960s, the search for stable leadership and a stable corps of followers is in vain. Followers temporarily became leaders, and vice versa. These cases, therefore, suggest the need for an intermediate category, or even categories, between “leaders” and followers.” For other reasons, the Soviet case casts doubt on the assumption that it is easy to identify the leaders and the followers. Participants in many Soviet cases of contentious politics themselves represented the movement as leaderless, as (necessarily) having no inherent distinction between leaders and followers, as being “spontaneous.” On the other hand, official repression and associated documents identified leaders, but in so doing made the questionable assumption that the “leaders” were those who played a publicly visible role in inciting and inflicting violence against the state.^[13]
Finally, how might the socialist and imperial contexts change how we think about Emirbayer and Goldberg’s wise recommendation to include “emotional ties and investments” within the concept of power? How does an imperial setting – with “imperial” defined here, to quote a very recent commentary by the editors of Ab Imperio, as “one in which a system of unequal relations is imposed upon a subject group (e.g., an ethno-confessional minority or a socio-culturally defined group of population)”^[14] – affect the degree to which emotional ties and investments actually are a source of power? Are emotion and power ever not enmeshed? Do specific social structural contexts of action ever make the emotional context of action moot? How did the relative degree of autonomy that the emotional context of action have, relative to the social structural and cultural contexts, vary over the course of the lifespan of the Soviet experience?^[15] When it comes to the dynamics of emotional relationships (as opposed to reified states of mind) in a socialist and imperial setting, how much do aspects of self-understanding ignored by Emirbayer and Goldberg, such as gender, ethnic identity, and age, matter? In Soviet and other fields, how these different aspects of the participants’ identities interact in the formation of a logic of collective emotions needs to be a subject of research. No one article, of course, can or should definitively answer all of these questions. In fact, my goal here is to begin the process of asking the right questions.
As the very level of this questioning suggests, the intellectual vistas offered by Emirbayer and Goldberg’s vision to historians of the Soviet Union and other regions are unfamiliar and sweeping indeed. Not only, as we will see in more detail below, does that vision allow us to generate new hypotheses regarding the origins, process, and consequences of specific cases of contentious politics; it also has the potential to help us rethink the very nature of the categories that structure our narratives. To provide but one example, albeit an important one, granting the emotional context of action analytical autonomy might mean that class needs to be understood not just as a social structural or cognitive category, but also as an emotional one.
The first part of this essay surveys in somewhat cursory fashion the given constraints of space, treatments of emotion, collective or otherwise, in the extant historiography of contentious politics of the Soviet Union. After making general observations about emotions and power relations in the major approaches to Stalinism, I take stock of the assumptions about emotions and contentious politics in the historiography of the 1920s and 1930s, the “mass uprisings” of the early 1960s, and, finally, of the events in Novocherkassk from June 1-3, 1962, where striking workers and the Soviet authorities faced each other in what ultimately resulted in tragically fatal repression. I have several reasons for examining these three bodies of scholarship in tandem. First, I wish to explore how a rereading of one corpus of scholarship can help generate ideas for rereading another. Even more importantly, I seek to begin the process of exploring change and continuity in the collective emotions of contentious politics in the USSR – that is, I conceive of this piece as a first step towards writing a history thereof. Examining these discrete historiographies, I turn the tables as I begin the process of suggesting implications of examples from the Soviet case for Emirbayer and Goldberg’s (partially elaborated) theoretical vision. The essay ends with further reflections on the implications a “new” subfield of collective emotions in collective politics given the current state of historiography of the Soviet period.^[16]

TAKING STOCK: EMOTIONS AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE

Among the possible ways of surveying quickly and effectively how emotions have been treated in the historiography of the Soviet period, I proceed by examining the theorization (if only implicit) of “emotions” in the major paradigms that have been used to conceptualize the Stalinist era – paradigms that, moreover, have ramifications for our conceptualization of the Soviet period as a whole. These are the following: the “totalitarian” model; the “revisionist” school or model, including the closely associated modernization paradigm; and the “post-revisionist” and “post-post revisionist schools” (especially the subfield of Soviet subjectivity). Although mainly used to characterize scholarship produced in the “West,” these schools and paradigms have also had influence on historiography produced in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet space. But I also give separate attention to Soviet and post-Soviet scholarship, produced during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, on “mentalités.”^[17] Each paradigm/school differs in the way that emotions are treated; moreover (and this is a topic for a much more detailed essay focusing only on the historiography of emotions in the Soviet field) there are, to be sure, differences within each paradigm/school in the way that emotions are treated and (implicitly) theorized. But one common denominator among these schools/paradigms is that emotion, collective or otherwise, is ignored in the very conceptions of power that defines each paradigm/school.
In the totalitarian model, in which power is conceived in terms of the repressive will and mechanisms of the state necessarily derived from political ideology and political structure, state power is assumed to be the exercise of reason, even if it is reason gone awry or directed towards “irrational ends” – such as the irrational dream of building a socialist utopia. Institutions, as the product of political ideology and political structure, have no emotional lives; nor is attention given to the emotional dynamics within them. This is not to say that emotions have no place in the totalitarian model: as Stephen Kotkin has put it, “When it came to interpreting popular attitudes, great skepticism was shown toward published Soviet sources. Instead, disaffected йmigrйs were interviewed in depth for clues to the suppressed feelings assumed to lie behind propaganda and censorship.”^[18]
Nor did the revisionist model’s conception of power allot space to emotions. Among pioneers and practitioners of this approach, power (or really the strength and durability of “Stalinism”) was primarily conceived not as coercion but as the “state’s” achievement of legitimacy as the “values and ideals of the Stalin revolution” meshed seamlessly with those of the regime’s new elites.^[19] “Values” here are understood as preferences, judgments, and even action that stems from “reason.” As in the totalitarian approach, there is no attention given to the emotional dynamics within institutions. Nonetheless, even if there was no formal place for emotions in the conception of power advanced by the revisionists, emotions hover around the edges of their historical narratives. They do so, for example, in the aspirations and the “enthusiasm” of workers promoted from the bench into managerial and Party positions, of the children of workers and peasants who sought higher education, and so forth.^[20]
This divorce of power from emotions has continued even with the “post-revisionist” and “post-post revisionist” approaches. With its conceptualization of power relations on the “micro-level” beyond the state’s formal institutions, especially its “central state apparatus,” the post-revisionist approach’s attention to everyday, informal mechanisms of power (e.g., mutual surveillance, self-identification) in principle seems to have opened up space for emotions in the negotiation of power relations. But in practice, practitioners of this approach, such as Stephen Kotkin, have not made the emotional components of power a focus of the politics of everyday life. To be sure, power as discourse has, at times, led, if seemingly inadvertently, to narratives that let us hear discourses about emotions (e.g., Kotkin’s “Letter to Marfa,” in which one woman uses a discourse of shame to goad another woman into making her husband work harder).^[21] But, as in culturalist approaches in general, what is stressed is the cognitive element of such discourse. There is silence concerning the embodied feelings, sensations, and energies that constitute “emotion.”
It is in the work of the “post-post-revisionists,” specifically those such as Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck who have pioneered in the study of Soviet subjectivity, that emotions get the most frequent and direct discussion. In their invaluable emphasis on working on one’s “soul” as a defining part of the Bolshevik project, they would seem to have at least partially opened the door, if just a crack, for the integration of emotion into the concept of power. But such integration never really occurs, because they continue to conceptualize “power” as the contested negotiation of meaning in discourse, symbols, and other elements of the cognitive.^[22] Thus, there is no fundamental rupture with respect to the way that emotions were treated in relation to power by such “post-revisionists” as Stephen Kotkin. Emotions, in effect, become ideas, as in Hellbeck’s discussion of the culturally specific idea of fear (that is, that fear during the Great Purges was anxiety about not being self-vigilant enough, of not doing enough to cleanse the “dirt” from one’s soul) in ordinary Soviet citizens such as Stepan Podlubnyi. This privileging of ideas is evident in Jochen Hellbeck’s very definition of subjectivity, which, in the “Stalinist context,” he defines as a “capacity for thought and action derived from a coherent sense of self.”^[23]
It is by no means accidental that the Soviet subject in the totalitarian, revisionist, post-revisionist, and post-post revisionist schools never gets to negotiate relations of power into which “emotions” are fully integrated. Not only, for instance, is power defined cognitivistically – even if differently so – in each of these approaches. Moreover, the rational, unitary, and autonomous “liberal subject” that, as Anna Krylova has so helpfully shown, exists in all of them is defined by use of reason; emotion has no place. The very construct of the liberal subject, then, affirms the “pernicious postulate” of the “false dichotomy” between reason and emotion against which Emirbayer and Goldberg inveigh. But interestingly enough, both the estrangement of emotion from power and the opposition of reason and emotion persist in Krylova’s valiant attempts to go beyond the liberal subject. In positing an alternative, Krylova does not give space to “emotion,” collective or otherwise, in her concept of an “illiberal” subject.^[24] Yet, in calling for us to imagine a Soviet subject that is not unitary and is in “flux,” once again the door is opened, even if just slightly, for the integration of emotion (with the latter understood, to transcend the reason/emotion dichotomy, as involving intelligence, perception, and judgment) and power.
For different reasons, historiography produced on the Stalin and post-Stalin era in the Soviet Union left an ambiguous legacy with regard to the relationship between emotions and power. Lenin himself was sensitive to the emotional dimensions of politics, especially during revolutionary processes: “mood,” for example, was the “crucial Marxist-Leninist category for social psychology.” Other Leninist categories for understanding revolutionary processes that evoked the emotional realm – categories that were to influence historians of the Soviet period – were “‘instinct,’ ‘spontaneity,’ ‘feelings,’ ‘energy,’ ‘passion,’ enthusiasm,’ ‘anger,’ ‘hatred,’ ‘tiredness,’ ‘apathy.’”^[25] Lenin’s emotionally-laden concepts, then, had great potential for historians of revolutionary processes. During the Stalin era, however, the historiographical straightjacket of (a specific reading of) Marxism-Leninism had, as Roger Markwick noted, caused the study of subjectivity to be ideologically heretical.^[26]
When, in the wake of the 20th Party Congress, the “Thaw” began to melt away the most severe of these ideological restraints, two revisionist efforts in historical psychology emerged: a short-lived Marxist social psychology based on a revisionist reading of Lenin, and a historiographically influential, and longer lived “culturological tendency” that drew upon Bakhtin’s “carnival culture,” Tartu semiotics, and mentalitйs historiography.^[27] Toward the end of the Khrushchev period, there existed an institutional footing for discussing methodological issues related to social psychology. In Moscow’s Sector of Methodology in the Institute of History, directed by Boris Porshnev, a medievalist, the focus was “psychology, the individual and society.” In efforts to create a Marxist-Leninist social psychology, Lenin’s category of “mood” was, of course, fundamental.^[28] Although this “agenda for a Marxist historical psychology” seemed “promising” when the 1970s began, it remained unfulfilled. Marxist social psychology was defeated during the Brezhnev years, and only the “culturologists” remained alive in the effort to develop a historical psychology. Although emotions were objects of historical inquiry, there appears to have been no attempt to integrate, in a formal, theoretically self-conscious way, emotions and power. Nor, I would note, have scholars really examined how either the Marxist social psychologists or the “culturologists” imagined the relationship between power and emotion.
By the time that Soviet reform became collapse in the late 1980s, and Marxism-Leninism lost its hegemony in Soviet historiography, the concept of “mentalités” awaited students of Soviet “contentious politics.” (Indeed, the concept of “mentalités” enjoyed considerable popularity among those historians who, whatever the field, wanted to study culture or use it as a concept of analysis.^[29]) But larger trends in the world of post-Soviet historical studies would play a significant role in keeping historical analysis and the theorizing of emotions at bay. For one thing, even though there were attempts to revive Porshnev’s Soviet-era “seminar on historical [sic] psychology,” this was “convened under the banner of ‘historical anthropology’ because ‘historical psychology’ had proved an unwieldy concept: ‘Psychology had difficulty in employing historical criteria while historians had even more difficulty employing the categories of psychology.’” The study and concept of “mentalités,” rather than coming to involve a theoretical attempt to grapple with emotions, instead became for the most part “subsumed by ‘historical anthropology,’ a discipline that has since come to the fore in Russian historiography.” Yet, because historians in the former Soviet Union are working out their theoretical orientations, there is still talk about what a “historical psychology” might look like.^[30] And, there are some cultural historians, such as Andrei Zorin (now working at Oxford), who have focused on the history of emotions. For post-Soviet historians of contentious politics, such as V. A. Kozlov, emotions hover around the edges of historical narratives, but have not been integrated theoretically into the historical analysis of contentious politics. Thus, for different reasons, neither Western nor post-Soviet historiography of contentious politics, including and especially the “mass uprisings” of the early 1960s, has been in dialogue with the latest theoretical work on collective emotions.

TAKING STOCK: EMOTIONS AND CONTENTIOUS POLITICS IN (SOME) HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE SOVIET UNION

Those calling for an “emotional turn” in the Russian/Soviet field should be aware that emotions already act as explanatory causes – and important ones at that – in many narratives of contentious politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Workers’ anger, for example, drives protests, work stoppages, and strikes in the Ivanovo Industrial Region and elsewhere.^[31] Even those of us, such as Lynne Viola, who have sought to emphasize the “rationality” of the masses and the crowd make emotion the basic cause of collective action.^[32] In demonstrating sensitivity to the emotional states of individual historical actors and of the import of their aggregated emotions, even Western historians have often echoed the discourse about emotions (especially, for example, about workers’ “moods”) in Soviet documents.^[33] But aside from the determination to counter the official discourse of the masses as hysterical and irrational, and to attribute rationality to the actions of workers, peasants, and crowds, one struggles to find self-conscious stock-taking in theoretical assumptions made about emotions.
Unselfconsciously, it seems, historians of contentious politics of the 1920s and 1930s have tended to reproduce what Emirbayer and Goldberg consider to be the “pernicious postulates” regarding emotion. There are abundant examples of emotion and reason being portrayed as mutually exclusive. Of many possible cases in points, an important one is Rossman’s concept of “class”: “popular understandings of who was and was not a ‘worker’” are based on cognition alone. But in fact, as Rossman’s own sources tell us, class was as much an emotional as a cognitive category. Workers themselves constructed emotional relationships with each other in which they strategically used the stigma of shame as a spur to collective action, and, we can infer, to mark the boundary of the working class. In Teikovo in the early 1930s, for example, when a friend confronted a spinner with the threat “None of us is going to work, and you’ll be ashamed [if you do],” she was being neither purely emotional nor purely rational, but rather was engaging in what Emirbayer and Goldberg have called a “complex synthesis of strategic reasoning and passional assessment.”^[34] The question, then, is how we conceptualize this theoretically. Is it an example of what Emirbayer and Goldberg have called “emotional intelligence”? In this concept, which draws upon the thought of American pragmatists such as Dewey, “emotional intelligence” means “distinguishing among more or less intelligent ways of engaging emotionally with life contexts.”^[35] Or is this a case of intelligent emotions in that the example given is arguably one of what their emotions (anger, shame) helped these workers to know and understand, а la Dewey and the Greeks?^[36] Much more research would be needed to answer these questions definitively with respect to this particular case. But my larger point here is that we need to be mindful not only of calibrating carefully the concept with specific cases of Soviet contentious politics, but that in doing so we can contribute to refining the analytical distinctions between the concepts themselves.
In examples of the historiography under focus, likewise ingrained is the assumption of a “division of movement participants into rational leaders and emotional followers.” For example, the leaders of Viola’s bab’i bunty (peasant women’s protests) are consummate rational actors who take strategic advantage of the Soviet state’s leniency with regard to female troublemakers; however, it is the emotions (especially fear, as noted above) of the baby as a collective that propel this strategic rationality.^[37] One worrisome consequence of the tendency (few but inevitable exceptions granted) to divide participants in contentious politics in this way is that this assumption has created silences regarding whether, and how, leaders sought to manage their own emotions, and with what consequences for the form, path, and scope of collective action. There are also worrisome consequences regarding the pervasive and ingrained assumption that while the “emotions of social protest” are “evanescent” and “unstructured,” the rationality of institutions (such as the Party, the factory, etc.) is “long-lived” and enduring. In accounts of contentious politics of the interwar period, the emotional dimensions of institutions are not given attention, let alone theorized. Their emotional dimensions – for example, the kinds of transpersonal emotional relationships that existed within these institutions – is reduced to the state of mind of individuals (such as Party leaders, central, regional, or local)^[38] or assertions about the aggregated states of mind of the Party elite or subsections thereof (e.g., Olga Narkiewicz’s claim that “‘fear of a full-scale peasant revolution (whether real or imagined)’… induced the party leadership to pursue the policy of all-out collectivization in the late autumn of 1929”^[39]). Without more investigation of the emotional dimensions of institutions, whether those of the Party or state, we will not be able to test Emirbayer and Goldberg’s hypothesis that institutions themselves “structure opportunities for protest and defiance, mold ‘discontent into specific grievances against specific targets,’ shape ‘the collectivity out of which protest can arise,’ and even shape the form that protest takes.”^[40]
As the preceding remarks suggest, historians of Soviet contentious politics during the interwar period have treated emotions only as individual states of mind rather than “qualities of transpersonal ties, bonds, or relations.”^[41] In the historiography of social movements such as strikes and other labor conflicts involving collective action, for example, – a historiography in which social-structure theory dominates, even if implicitly, – workers get to have strong emotions, such as anger, rage, fear, and even panic.^[42] For workers in the IIR during the first five-year plan who were nearly starving because their rations and pay had been cut, these emotions even produced the “solidarity” that helped to launch strikes and other forms of collective action.^[43] This sounds reasonable enough. But in fact a logical step is missing. That is, it is unclear how emotions understood as only occurring on the individual, subjective level get translated into action that not only occurs collectively, but involves the “interdependence of individuals.”^[44] Because of their “solidarity,” workers seem to engage naturally in interdependent collective action that required coordination. As a result, we have a literature in which there is silence about the “coordinating mechanism[s],” including not only emotional ones “that translates individual into collective level phenomena.”^[45] Treating emotions only as individual states of mind has also reinforced the separation of emotions and power relations that has been a common denominator among different approaches to Stalinism and its legacies. To assume that emotions and power relations are separate means that we will not hear what the documents themselves are saying: that Soviet workers and peasants under siege understood that the two were necessarily intertwined.^[46] They understood that the dynamics of transpersonal emotions were an important component of power relations.
Narratives of contentious politics in the interwar period generally exemplify Emirbayer and Goldberg’s claim that it is “pernicious” to assume that collective emotions (and emotional configurations in general) lack analytical autonomy. This assumption is deeply embedded in the historiography. Whether accounting for the occurrence of strikes, bab’i bunty, or other forms of peasant protest, we have tended to explain the emotions of everyone in Soviet society “by something else.”^[47] Because most of us have (implicitly) drawn upon social structure theory to explain patterns of collective action, emotions (rage, anxiety, panic, fear, etc.) get portrayed as natural and inevitable, but secondary – byproducts of conflicts within social structures, caused, for example, by state attempts in forced capital accumulation in industries (e.g., textiles) granted inadequate resources to fulfill economic goals. Epiphenomenal emotions and a substructure of backwardness go hand-in-hand. Even when we have turned to “culturalist” explanations for collective action (solidarity, class identity, etc.), “collective psychology” is still dismissed “through reductionism to cognition.”^[48] Class identity and class solidarity, for example, are produced (e.g., in Rossman’s IIR workers, Koenker’s printers) by shared cognitive understandings of what it means to be a worker. By not entertaining the possibility that class cannot be reduced to cognition alone – that, in fact, it was a phenomenon as much felt as thought, a phenomenon generated by emotional intelligence – we have, perhaps, unduly simplified workers’ lives. We can also at least speculate that there are examples in our narratives of Emirbayer and Goldberg’s claim that it is problematic to assume that collective-psychological contexts of action necessarily “map onto,” or are isomorphic with, social structures and cultures.^[49] For example, if we gave analytical autonomy to collective-psychological “configurations,” might this lead us to posit an alternative hypothesis for why workers in Magnitogorsk and other locales resisted “less” than circumstances would have dictated? In other words, what role, whether in Magnitogorsk or elsewhere, did emotional contexts of power have in shaping the form, process, and scope of contentious politics? Even if the sources do not let us answer the question definitively in a particular case, it is important that we experiment with generating hypotheses in which some analytical autonomy for emotions is assumed.