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.”^[1] 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.”^[2] 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.^[3] 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.^[4] 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.^[5] 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.^[6]
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.”^[7]

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.”^[8] 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.”^[9] 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].”^[10] 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.^[11] 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.^[12] 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.^[13] 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.^[14] 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.^[15]

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’.^[16] 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.^[17] 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.”^[18] 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.^[19] 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.”^[20] 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.”^[21] 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.”^[22] 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.^[23] 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.’”^[24] 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.^[25] 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.”^[26] 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.^[27] 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.^[28] 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.”^[29] 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.^[30] 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.^[31] 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.^[32] 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.^[33] 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.^[34] 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.”^[35] 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.^[36] 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.^[37] 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.”^[38]
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.^[39] 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.”^[40]

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.^[41] 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.”^[42] 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.^[43] 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.^[44]
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.^[45] 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.^[46]
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.^[47] 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.^[48] 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.^[49]
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.’”^[50] 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!