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.
COLLECTIVE EMOTIONS AND CONTENTIOUS POLITICS: THE EARLY 1960s

In this section, I explore the usefulness of the concepts of “contentious politics” and “collective emotions” for rethinking aspects of the socio-political “crisis” of the early 1960s in the Soviet Union. Between 1959 and 1962, urban violence perpetrated both by the Soviet authorities and by ordinary Soviet citizens occurred throughout the Soviet empire. In addition to Novocherkassk, discussed in detail below, episodes of urban unrest flared up in such far-flung places as Biisk (in the Altai), Murom and Aleksandrovsk (in the central industrial region), Temir Tau (Kazakhstan), and Krasnodar (in the North Caucasus). In Moscow, Leningrad, Vyborg, Chita, and other cities, Soviet citizens distributed pamphlets, wrote grafitti on the wall, and in various other ways expressed discontent with life in the Soviet Union, with complaints ranging from Khrushchev to food supply to pay cuts. Terrorist threats against Khrushchev’s life, as well as increased crime and other social pathologies, rounded out the symptoms of what V. A. Kozlov has called a “socio-political crisis.”^[50] The proximate causes or catalysts of what the regime called “mass disorders” were diverse. Some cases of urban violence and urban discontent occurred after price hikes for foodstuffs in early June, 1962. But other episodes (e.g., Biisk) seemed to emerge from tense interactions between the Soviet authorities (especially police) and Soviet citizens. In a number of cases, rioters successfully mobilized others by claiming that the police had beaten or otherwise used unlawful physical violence against those detained. Though varied in origins, form, and scope, the underlying cause, according to most students of the event, was the same: underlying structural imbalances in the Soviet economy and their meaning in the context of Khrushchev’s promises about the material plenty that would define communism. Economically, the regime’s efforts to overcome a shortage of goods (agricultural and consumer) had to mean higher retail and purchase prices. Not only did this go against the Stalinist trend of lowering prices, but it flew in the face of expectations generated by Khrushchev’s reform communism.
In this historiography, we once again find that the assumptions that have been made regarding emotions have created silences and blindspots in our narratives. However, the pernicious postulates that Emirbayer and Goldberg have found in scholarship on collective action, and contentious politics more generally, do not map neatly onto the historiography. To be sure, the dichotomy between (good) reason and (bad) emotion is almost always assumed. But Emirbayer and Goldberg would be surprised to find that the distinction between emotional leaders and rational followers does not always exist. In fact, V. A. Kozlov, in his analysis of the events in Murom and elsewhere, at times reverses the distinction between emotional leaders and rational followers; leaders sometimes “express the instinct” of the crowd (Murom), and, being of a “certain psychological type,” they “lead a crowd and take advantage of the individual’s ability to comprehend reality.”^[51] The emotions of the leaders (sometimes said to be generated by alchohol) distort the reason of their followers. In yet another variant, leaders have hybrid identities in that they are depicted as being both rational and emotional. During the riots in Krasnodar on January 15-16, 1961, rioters broke into the military commander’s office, and Soviet authorities shot and killed a seventeen year-old student named Savalev. At this point, new leaders appeared. One such follower-turned-leader, Aleksandr Kapasov, is portrayed in a very complex way: on the one hand, Kozlov casts him, somewhat stereotypically, as the rational leader of the emotional crowd who headed a “highly organized and solemn funeral procession.” On the other hand, Kapasov is also cast as an emotionally immature brute who “knock[s] in [the] head[s] those who did not react quickly enough to the command to take off their hats.” Further complicating any attempt to reconstruct the techniques of emotional management that leaders in riots such as Krasnodar used with their followers is this: as was the case with many so-called “hooligans” whom the Soviet authorities arrested for their participation in “mass disorders,” under questioning, the rioters attributed their actions to alcohol. One participant in the Krasnodar events, Anatolii Liashenko, said under questioning that he was “possessed by a mysterious force” after drinking at the end of his work day.^[52] Perhaps this was a weapon of the weak he and others deployed to deflect responsibility for their actions and hence get a lighter punishment than they otherwise would have.^[53] Even when Kozlov and others give leaders such as Kapasov emotions, we still do not get a sense of how the mobilizers sought to manage their own emotions, not to mention how their followers might have helped them in this endeavor
In our efforts to understand the cause and process of the “mass disorders” of the early 1960s, it has also been limiting to think of emotions as only reified, individual states of mind. True, we have what might seem to be exceptions to this claim. Kozlov, describing the origins and anatomy of a riot at the Biisk (outdoor) market on June 25, 1961, writes that “hostile personal relations developed between the police and local hooligans.” But it turns out that the content of the emotional dynamics (even in terms of retrospective representations) is drained out at the expense of privileging the cognitive dimension of these “relations.” After he notes that “official attempts to negotiate ended in a complete failure due to certain social-psychological mechanisms that created full alienation between the two groups of actors,” he gives examples of cognitions: the us/them distinction, and rhetoric of “vile beasts” and “fascists.” As in the historiography of contentious politics during the interwar period, our narratives have granted contentious claimants – whether Party leaders or workers – a wide range of emotions. In anatomies of collective action, emotions tend to be just as important as organizational resources in determining the form and scope that contentious politics takes.^[54] But perhaps because workers of the early 1960s are generally assumed to have had even fewer opportunities for, and experience in, organizing themselves (electing delegates, forming strike committees, etc.) than did their counterparts of the interwar period, there tends to be even less attention to how individual emotions get translated into coordinated, collective action.^[55]
Kozlov, providing a general introduction to “mass uprisings” during the “socio-political crisis” of the early 1960s, skirts the problem of coordination of collective action, or how emotions conceptualized as individual states propel collective action that requires coordination. Echoing official documents, he asserts that “provoking public disorders” in the “circumstances” of the “country’s worsening socioeconomic situation at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s” was “an exceptionally simple matter”:

“All that is needed for people in a crowd to blame the existing political situation for their own personal problems is one or two individuals who are ready to suffer for the people or who possess a weakened instinct of self-preservation, sometimes as the result of drunkenness, or who have a personal interest in disorders, such as liberating a comrade from the police. As a result, from behind the anonymity of the crowd there emerges a readiness to act.”^[56]

Nonetheless, Kozlov inadvertently shows us that leaders themselves realized that they had to help produce this readiness to act. In fact, he even comes close to recognizing the emotional relationship that the above-mentioned Kapasov forged with his followers, writing of Kapasov’s having “fired up the crowd with accusations that the military commander had killed the youth Savalev.”^[57] Readers also learn that Kapasov’s leadership of the “crowd” involved placing Savalev’s body in a conspicuous place so more could see it, and displaying the victim’s bloody coat over his head while saying, “Look here, these are the brains of a worker.” Ultimately, though, Kozlov reduces Kapasov’s strategic attempts to use his emotional relationship with his would-be followers as a coordinating mechanism to the leader’s own belief (or his own “psychological mechanism”) that “seeking vengeance for an innocent victim will bring no retribution, for the state would not dare to challenge popular justice.”^[58] Kozlov goes further in recognizing emotional relationships as a collective coordinating mechanism in his account of Zinaida Klochkova, who played a significant role in mobilizing the crowd during the riots in Aleksandrov on July 23-24, 1961. We learn, for example, that during the attack on the police station, Klochkova threatened the “sober-minded with reprisals such as burning down their homes.” When other women criticized her behavior (“she is a woman, what does she think she is doing”), Klochkova retorted “Shut up, you bitches, or I will slit your throat” [zamolchite, padly, a to gorlo peregryzu].”^[59] Interestingly enough, while Kozlov labels Kapasov’s emotionally laden coordinating mechanisms “belief” or a “psychological mechanism,” he classifies Klochkova’s efforts as “hysterical activism” – in other words, as the stereotypically gendered actions of a Soviet baba, though he does not go so far as to use this expression.^[60] Kozlov, then, has gendered the coordinating and leadership methods used by rioters. But more research is needed to establish the role of gender in such methods – a subject ignored, by the way, in the genderless theoretical world of Emirbayer and Goldberg. What is clear is that these and other rioters themselves understood well that emotions were part of power relations. In fact, if riots leaders had not employed this emotional intelligence, it is unlikely that the riots would have escalated to the degree that they did.
It has also been at once routine but costly to approach the study of the contentious politics in the early 1960s with the untested assumption that collective emotions, or the emotional context of action, necessarily lack analytical autonomy. In Western, Soviet, post-Soviet historiography of the “mass uprisings” of the early 1960s, and more generally, the “socio-political crisis” of those years, emotions – understood as individual states and aggregates thereof – are imagined as the natural and inevitable product of socio-economic difficulties, whether manifested in rising prices, diminishing supply of basic food stuffs, lower pay rates, inadequate housing, or other areas.^[61] This seems reasonable enough. But this reasonable assumption has had its costs, namely a potentially limited, teleological, and thus ahistorical understanding of their causes and origins. Rather, granting collective emotions analytical autonomy can help us develop a new hypothesis regarding the origins of the disorders. If the emotional context of action does not map directly onto the structural and cultural contexts of action, then this frees us to consider the possibility that the emotional context of action can, in certain cases, not be derivative of those contexts, but have causal consequences that are equal to, or greater than, those other contexts. With respect to the “mass disorders” of the early 1960s, this would allow us to formulate the hypothesis that the emotional context of action – especially what was perceived by some ordinary citizens as the official claim that this new stage of socialism, and great progress toward communism, were about different kinds of emotional relationships – is essential for explaining the origins (and perhaps) the process of collective action. With regard to the process, in several cases of urban violence in the early 1960s, leaders sought to diminish the fear of potential participant by claiming “in our day, they don’t shoot.” Termed by Kozlov a deceptive “myth,” such claims can also be read as ordinary Soviet citizen’s emotional intelligence about official use of violence in the context of Khrushchev’s having asserted that socialism and lawless violence against the Soviet people were incompatible.^[62] Moreover, treating emotions as a product of something else (most fundamentally, of social structure and/or culture) has led to an undue emphasis on emotional mobilization as the means for attaining collective goals such as higher wages, lower prices, and better living conditions. Hence, with regard to the “mass disorders” of the early 1960s (as well as other cases of collective action), we have not considered that producing new styles and dynamics of emotional comportment might have been one of the goals of such actions.^[63] Finally, granting analytical autonomy to the emotional context of collective action can help us shift the focus of our analytical efforts from the causes of the crisis to a more expansive conceptualization of what the crisis produced. In the historiography in question, as well as that of collective action in the history of the USSR more generally, we have privileged the causes and effects of the structural and cultural contexts of collective action. But if we give greater emphasis to the emotional context of collective action, and do not see it as a product of more fundamental structural and cultural contexts, it is also likely that we will be more sensitive to how action, in turn, changed the very dynamics and mechanisms of emotional relationships.^[64]

COLLECTIVE EMOTIONS AND CONTENTIOUS POLITICS: NOVOCHERKASSK, JUNE, 1962

On June 1, 1962, following simultaneous price hikes for basic foodstuffs and a decrease in pay, workers in the steel shop at the Novocherkassk Locomotive Works (NEVZ) walked off the morning shift. Later that day, some workers blocked the Saratov-Rostov railroad line and broke into the police station. On June 2, workers at NEVZ and other factories, as well as curious residents of the city, joined in a peaceful march from the factory, located in the northern outskirts of the city, to the city’s Party headquarters (gorkom), the former ataman’s palace. The demonstrators, who included women and children and who eventually swelled to several thousand, carried portraits of Lenin, sang revolutionary songs, and in some cases wore festive holiday dress. A few workers broke into the gorkom in the late morning and addressed the crowd from the balcony; they left the gorkom by early afternoon under orders from a platoon. In the very early afternoon on June 2, with the gorkom now back in the hands of the authorities, General Oleshko, head of the Novocherkassk garrison and commander of the Tank Division, ordered the crowd to leave the square in front of the gorkom. After another warning went unheeded by the demonstrators, soldiers arranged in two columns (or ranks) in front of the faзade of the building fired warning shots up in the air. Some have claimed that a second volley of warning shots was fired. In any case, not long after the first volley of warning shoots, dozens lay dead or wounded. To this day, it has not been definitively established who did the shooting, but the investigation of the Chief Military Procuracy in 1990-1991 blamed KGB snipers firing from the roof of the gorkom. The 24 who died were buried secretly, in all but one case without the presence of relatives, in cemeteries in Rostov oblast’.^[65] Among the 114 persons who were tried, seven were sentenced to death, and, eventually, posthumously pardoned. Despite the Soviet authorities’ attempts to prohibit news about the shootings from spreading throughout the USSR, word got out – not just among dissidents and not just in the foreign press. Rather, evidence suggests it was also a topic in everyday interactions between Soviet citizens.^[66] From the very moment that the military forces fired, the battle to decide what Novocherkassk was, and what its violence meant, raged quietly among and between Soviet political elites and ordinary citizens.
In explaining the origins and process of the tragic events in Novocherkassk, almost all who have written about the strike (everyone from Solzhenitsyn to Iurii Bagraev of the Chief Military Procuracy), have stressed social structural factors. Emphasis has been placed not just on the higher prices and lower pay, but also on the especially grim conditions of byt endured by the workers. Condemned by the Soviet regime as the work of “hooligans” and criminals, Novocherkassk has, on the other hand, been sometimes been portrayed by Western historians as but a “price riot.”^[67] All accounts of the events, except for the most abbreviated, also acknowledge that the “insensitive” response of the NEVZ factory director, B. N. Kurochkin, to the workers’ concerns was the spark that set off the work stoppage. The only account that departs significantly from the social structural model is that of P. P. Siuda, who, as a NEVZ worker, participated in the first day’s events and exercised something of a leadership role before being arrested and imprisoned.^[68] Siuda did not dismiss workers’ anger about the price rises and the pay decrease; he also emphasized the difficult living conditions (including still residing in barracks) that some workers faced. But he did veer slightly from the social structural model: his account of the strike begins with Khrushchev’s attempts to humanize socialism (ochelovit’ sotsializm), in which, he says, the “people believed.”^[69] For Siuda, it was not the material factors themselves, but the meaning that workers gave them in the context of Khrushchev’s reforms that propelled the strike and shaped its form. Although workers were angry about the price hikes and lower pay, they never would have gone on strike, says Siuda, had not Kurochkin treated them in a condescending and disrespectful manner: “not in a business-like way, but haughtily, in a lordly manner.”^[70] Although, in terms of models and theories of collective action, Siuda’s interpretation of the strike’s beginnings draws from social structural and cultural approaches, he makes the flaws in Kurochkin’s emotional relationship to the workers the catalyst. What follows is an attempt to highlight the assumptions made in the historiography of Novocherkassk regarding emotions; moreover, I suggest reasons why our understanding of the strike and its repression could benefit from giving greater prominence to the emotional context of action in conjunction with the social structural and cultural contexts.
The default assumption that reason and emotion are mutually exclusive has shaped the historiography on Novocherkassk in significant, yet sometimes limiting ways. The authors of official Soviet discourse on Novocherkassk were, no doubt unwittingly, following in the tradition of “classical theories of collective action,” in which there exists an “equation of the passional aspects of social movements with irrationality, impulsiveness, and psychopathology.”^[71] In official Soviet discourse such as the Politburo documents published in Istoricheskii arkhiv in 1993 and the summary of the investigation of the Chief Military Procuracy, crowd behavior is portrayed as, in Emirbayer and Goldberg’s partial paraphrase of Le Bon, “irresponsible, unrestrained, and ‘at the mercy of external exciting causes’” in that it is the work of “hooligan” and “criminal” elements.^[72] One can find, in official documents, a number of examples of Le Bon’s claim that “‘[its] powerlessness to reason aright prevents [it] from being capable of discerning truth from error, or of forming a precise judgment on any matter.’”^[73] Even V. A. Kozlov, in taking issue with the “hooligan” and “criminal” background of irrationally emotional strikers and other protesters at Novocherkassk, only reaffirms the official denigration of emotions and the necessary dichotomy between reason and emotion.^[74] Sources provide ample evidence not yet reflected in secondary accounts that strike leaders as well as followers were deeply aware of the emotional dimension of mobilizing workers. To this end, they engaged in different types of “emotion work.” Testifying before the GVP, I. N. Miliutin, a NEVZ locksmith, related how, in the mid-afternoon on June 1, he tried to get the few, older workers who had not gone on strike to do so: “He began to shame them, calling them strikebreakers, since they weren’t supporting workers who wanted to improve their living conditions.”^[75] But describing this as “hysteria” seems an oversimplification. In fact, available sources suggest that for as much panic, fear, shame and anger as they are said to have been feeling, Soviet elites – Party officials, Army commanders, and even KGB officers – all spent much effort trying to manage the emotions of the strikers and would-be fellow travelers.^[76] To give but one example, Solzhenitsyn mentions that some witnesses have claimed that non-Russians were brought in to do the shooting (presumably to head off emotional solidarity between them and the workers); their job completed, Russians were quickly brought in to replace them.^[77] Whether or not this actually happened, Solzhenitsyn’s remarks alert us to the importance of considering the ethnic dimensions of the collective emotions of contentious politics – a topic that, as noted above, is ignored by Emirbayer and Goldberg.
Sources also provide some evidence that emotional change – or altered dynamics of emotional relationships – was not just a means to an end (making the strike a general one and reversing the price hikes and lower wages), but also, as Emirbayer and Goldberg put it, an “intrinsic goal of mobilization as such.”^[78] Not only did Siuda’s account of the strike place tremendous emphasis on the fact that the people (narod) had come to believe in the process of humanizing socialism, or, arguably, creating a socialism defined by “new” and “different” types of emotional relationships based on honesty, trust and respect – an expectation that Kurochkin violated by treating the workers with disdain, disrespect, and even hostility.^[79] A number of workers expressed frustration about the kind of emotional relationships they had with the Soviet authorities and its local representatives. In some cases, when workers (e.g., Andrei Korkach, a strike leader sentenced to death) used emotional language to convince others to strike, their arguments were just as much a critique of workers’ emotional relationships with the authorities as they were about how unjust the price hikes and wage reductions were.^[80] According to the summary of testimony before the Chief Military Procuracy, it was the authorities’ failure to treat them with respect, or indeed, to engage in dialogue with them at all that preceded workers’ decisions to make the strike general, commit violence, and march to the gorkom.^[81] It seems possible to suggest that the march to the gorkom on June 2 was not only about reversing the price hikes and wage reductions, though these goals were certainly central, but also about having face to face emotional interaction with Party leaders. In exploring this and other hypotheses with respect to Novocherkassk and other cases of contentious politics, it may be that the retrospective testimony of participants (in some cases, given almost thirty years after the fact), says more about the discourse of the emotional context of action at the time of writing or reflecting than about what ordinary people expected at the time in terms of a truly “socialist” or “communist” dynamic of emotional relationships.^[82] Still, even if the way of talking about emotions as dynamic relationships might have been specific to the time of writing or reflection, the sources do provide evidence that workers regarded working on emotional relationships and generating emotional investment as a crucial part of mobilization during the strike, and that their goals of lower prices, better pay, improved living conditions, and the fulfillment of socialism’s promise of better emotional relationships with those in authority were inextricably intertwined.
In the historiography of Novocherkassk, another pernicious corollary of the general dichotomy between reason and emotion has been a lack of attention to the emotional dimension of institutions. This has lead to an overly simplified and flattened history of the Soviet institutions – Party, army, factory management, KGB – that were crucial to political outcomes in Novocherkassk. Even if the sources do not allow us to reconstruct the network of emotional dynamics that actually existed in a given institution (over time), there is evidence to suggest that they would allow us to reconstruct different styles of emotional comportment within institutions, official expectations thereof and change over time, and retrospective assessments of the emotional dynamics of institutions and their consequences. In the summarized testimony before the GVP, there are fascinating characterizations of the NEVZ factory administration’s relationship to workers, emotional relationships within the city police department in Novocherkassk, the emotional dynamics between Generals Pliev and Oleshko, not to mention those within the Presidium.^[83] Moreover, this lack of attention to emotional relationships and the intelligence of emotions within institutions has prevented us from having greater understanding of the process whereby these institutions “shape the collectivity out of which protest can arise.”^[84] We need to consider the possibility, for example, that workers experienced themselves as a class in part because of emotional dimensions of these institutions, especially the hostility of Kurochkin, the factory manager, and Basov, the head of the Rostov obkom. In extant historiography of collective action in the Soviet case, it is the idea of class, or at times the shared language of class – putting it in Marxist categories, class consciousness – that prompts collective action.^[85] Rather, as the above examples suggest, we also need to be sensitive to how “class” – understood not as an idea (which replicates privileging of cognition in culturalist approaches to collective action) but as an intelligent emotion – is produced through action.^[86] By action, I mean not just going on strike, marching to the gorkom en masse, and seeking dialogue with Party and state leaders to attain lower prices for food and reduced work norms. Rather, by action I also mean the rationally designed “emotion work” – such as singing “the International,” other revolutionary songs, and even “Hostile Whirlwinds” (Vikhri vrazhdebnye) – whereby demonstrators came to think of themselves emotionally as a “class.”^[87]
The ingrained assumption that emotions are but individual states of mind has also limited our understanding of the Novocherkassk events. For one thing, this assumption has produced a deafening silence about the emotional dynamics, investments, and relationships within a given collective. We have tended to imagine erroneously the emotions of collective (group, class, profession, workers in the same factory) as homogenous because they are the natural and inevitable product of the same socio-economic circumstances (or, for Marxists, of the same relationship to the conflict between relations and forces of production). This assumption has blinded us to evidence in sources regarding emotional conflict within a collective and its import for the form and process of collective action. An excellent example comes from P. P. Falynskov, one of the witnesses called to testify before the Chief Military Procuracy in 1990-1991.^[88] Falynskov, the Deputy Commander of the 406th Heavy Tank Regiment’s Political Department, was sent on June 1, 1962 to gain information on the situation at NEVZ. Having arrived with a group of soldiers at the factory, Falynskov recalled that he saw a crowd of hundreds of workers on the factory’s square. What he observed was not a collective defined by homogenous emotions, tactics, or goals, but rather a group of workers whose emotional dispositions were internally divided and in flux:

“When he arrived there, he saw hundreds of agitated workers on the factory square, who greeted him in an unfriendly way. A group of workers approached who overturned the radio car. But other workers who had gotten indignant at this behavior put the car back on its wheels. At the same time, those assembled on the square demanded that the others not interfere and that they leave, promising, that they would take care of things themselves.”^[89]

The fact that the assumption that emotions are individual states of mind has lead to insufficient attention to coordinating mechanisms is especially unfortunate in the case of Novocherkassk. By mid-morning or so on June 1, two to three thousand NEVZ workers were on strike; by noon, the number had climbed to as high as seven thousand.^[90] How did this happen, and what did coordinating mechanisms generated from emotional intelligence (or intelligent emotions) have to do with it? For Solzhenitsyn, Novocherkassk was “unorganized, leaderless, unpremeditated, it was a cry from the soul of a people who could no longer live as they lived.”^[91] Baron does tell us is that “militants” made the rounds of many NEVZ division. But what did they say, and how did they seek to relate emotionally to workers, and vice versa? These questions need to be explored if and when researchers are able to view the thirty-one volumes of testimony complied by the Chief Military Procuracy, as opposed to just the 170 page summary. Even in the latter source there is evidence that strategic “emotion work” was an integral element of coordination, and that female workers were especially instrumental.^[92] It remains unclear whether, in comparison to other episodes of urban violence in the early 1960s, there was anything exceptional about the coordinating mechanisms used by workers at Novocherkassk.^[93]
In the case of Novocherkassk, granting the emotional context of action analytical autonomy can help us generate new questions for research. As in the case of the urban violence of the early 1960s more generally, it would allow us to investigate the importance of collective emotions, whether among workers or between them and the Soviet authorities, in the origins and development of the strike and the violence. The summary of the testimony obtained by the Chief Military Procuracy, for example, includes examples of mutual perceptions of emotional states (by workers and authorities) as driving events.^[94] Interesting though these comments on the complexity of collective emotions during Novocherkassk are, in interpreting them it must be kept in mind that they are filtered through the passage of time and are generally summarized in the third person by the author of the text, General Yuri Bagraev. However the may be interpreted, one thing is clear: despite the challenges of the sources, it is necessary to move towards putting the contentious politics of collective emotions during and after the Novocherkassk events in comparative perspective to analogous phenomena during the interwar period, as well the post-Khrushchev period of Soviet history.

LOOKING (FURTHER) FORWARD: EMIBAYER AND GOLDBERG’S INJUNCTIONS AND RESEARCH IN THE EMOTIONS OF THE CONTENTIOUS POLITICS OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE

As the preceding three sections have suggested, Emirbayer and Goldberg’s theoretical vision can help generate new questions and approaches regarding the contentious politics of the interwar years, the urban disorders of the early 1960s, and Novocherkassk in particular. Stepping away somewhat from these specific bodies of historiography, in this section I explore some of their larger implications for research in the collective emotions of contentious politics more generally, whether in the Soviet “empire of nations” or elsewhere.^[95]
First, and least controversially, it is time for us to write our own history, to invoke the words of Elizabeth Perry, a China specialist, of the “origins, evolution, and contemporary implications,” of Soviet “emotion work.” The cases examined above suggest the importance of emotion work in mass mobilization (as both means and goal thereof), something to which historians of the Soviet period have given insufficient attention.^[96] Such efforts would be a helpful corrective to the very small corpus of scholarship on emotion work, and techniques thereof, of Communist movements and polities among their respective “masses.” This would necessarily involve a research agenda of examining how those who were opposed to, and resisted or subverted state policies, turned to the state’s own “toolkit” of techniques of emotional mobilization to counter and contest official policies and their implementation.
To the unaccustomed eye, it might seem impossible, because of the limitations of sources, to carry out some of Emirbayer and Goldberg’s injunctions, whether in the Soviet field or in the histories of other regions. It is my hope that the rereadings of the historiography above suggest that we need to accustom our eyes to looking in our sources – even in official ones such as the summary of the testimony compiled by the Chief Military Procuracy in the case of the Novocherkassk events – for voices that can speak to these issues. I suggest that it is really our perspective, rather than a lack of sources, that is the biggest obstacle to such investigation.^[97] Even if the sources do not permit us to reconstruct the “actual” emotional relationships that existed between individuals and within institutions, there is a good chance that they would permit us to reconstruct aspects of the techniques and practices used to try to create certain collective emotions, or norms of “collective emotional comportment” between individuals and within institutions.^[98]
Finally, let us examine the implications of these cases of Soviet contentious politics for what remains incomplete in Emirbayer and Goldberg’s “collective-psychological approach to political life.” Their injunctions, as they admit, focus only on what they call “mappings,” or the “typologies” of how the three contexts of action (social structural, cultural, and emotional) relate to one another. “Mechanisms,” on the other hand, are “recurrent causal sequences of general scope,” or, “collective-psychological processes that can be found to operate in a diversity of empirical cases.” The question that needs to be before us is this: How, then, can empirical research in the Soviet field contribute to the completion of this theoretical vision for the role of collective emotions in political life? I have in mind here not just its potential contribution to establishing by means of induction the content of mechanisms, but also to evaluating critically their proposed conceptual apparatus of the binary distinction between “mappings” and “mechanisms.” How do we know that the binary distinction between “mappings” and “mechanisms” is not another “false epistemological couplet,” to use Bourdieu’s words? They are perhaps aware of this possibility when they assert that mappings and mechanisms are “mutually constitutive and interdependent” and that “this formulation helps to overcome the artificial and misleading tendency in sociological theory to distinguish rigidly between ‘sensitizing concepts’ and ‘causal analysis.’”^[99] But a few reservations are in order. The authors imply that these recurrent “causal mechanisms” in emotional processes will be universal, and that they will not vary significantly from culture to culture and across time and space. Or is there something specific about these causal mechanisms in a socialist polity and, if so, what? Having done empirical research when and as the theoretical vision is being completed, might we need to make a distinction between mechanisms that do not vary across time and space, with another kind of mechanism that does?
In conclusion, historians of the Soviet Union have much to gain from going further in theorizing the emotions of contentious politics. Even though this theoretical vision is not fully completed, it has, as this essay has suggested, the value of prompting us to ask new (or at least partially new) questions and potentially revise our answers about the causes, processes, and outcomes of politics that are contentious, episodic, and transgressive. At the same time, by bringing empirical research in Soviet cases of contentious politics into dialogue with this unfinished theoretical vision, we can contribute to its ongoing refinement. For one thing, our research supports some of the critiques – sometimes made in bald fashion without adequate elaboration and evidence – that Emirbayer and Goldberg have made regarding how emotions had been theorized in relationship to contentious politics and collective action in particular. But this dialogue, preliminary as it is, has also begun to suggest how theorists of contentious politics might tweak their initial assumptions in light of empirical research in the Soviet case. May that process continue!