SUMMARY:

The article serves a two-pronged goal: to introduce the text published under the “Archive” rubric and to substantiate the concept of “Soviet plebeian subjectivity” as a main interpretative framework for this text. The text itself is a transcript of oral recollections by Mark Miller (1916–99), tape-recorded by his daughters in the mid-1990s. The article interprets the biography of Miller, his narrative, and the very way it was recorded (from oral recollections) as evidence of the existence of a distinctive type of Soviet subjectivity disentangled from Bolshevik indoctrination. This subjectivity revealed itself in conscious attempts to navigate the stormy waters of high Stalinism, steering clear of the two extremes: collaboration with the regime and passive victimhood. Rather than a politically subversive act, this attitude was a result of the nondiscursive and nontextual nature of plebeian society, whose members processed information and communicated differently from the educated elite who participated in the public sphere through abstract ideas. The plebeian society dominated Russian urban centers from the turn of the twentieth century and predetermined the formation of the specific Soviet form of modern society after 1917 as “plebeian modernity” that persisted well into the 1950s. Numerous nonnormative Soviets, just as members of the urban plebeian society in Late Imperial Russia, were characterized by strategic opportunism, propensity to territorial mobility and changing places of employments, intensive intercommunal contacts, and indifference to ideological indoctrination (religious or political).