SUMMARY:

The document published in the “Archive” section of this issue of Ab Imperio allows us to revisit the conventional views of Soviet society and subjectivity. Several years before his death, Mark Miller (1916–99) began narrating his recollections into a tape recorder, and there are reasons to believe that his narrative reproduced a version first articulated by Miller back in the 1960s. It is the story of a man who could and should have become a normative Soviet: a coeval of the Revolution, a worker, a decorated veteran of the two main Soviet wars. Yet he consciously and systematically avoided any connection with the Soviet state, preferring not even to work for a government enterprise. Never a Komsomol or Party member, Miller was also not a member of any “fifth column” and regarded himself as a patriot. His life story could fit into conventional explanatory narratives, only Miller opted to create his own narrative and stubbornly stuck to it for many decades. By refusing to accept the position of a victim of historical circumstances or a normative hero, Miller confirmed his unique and autonomous subjectivity as a nonnormative Soviet: probably quite typical for his working-class social milieu yet completely ignored by modern historians.
The first part of Miller’s recollections covers his early childhood in Ekaterinoslav (Dnipro) and his school years in the 1920s in Moscow, where his father became a successful businessman (a Nepman). After the crackdown on private enterprises in 1929, the Millers fled from Moscow and settled in Leningrad, where Mark began his lifelong career as a worker. The narrative of youthful enthusiasm and learning the basics of a mechanic’s trade, so reminiscent of other personal stories from the period, is conspicuously devoid of any mention of political activities (whether Komsomol or ideological rallies). In 1934, the family had to move to Kazan in the Middle Volga. Miller’s recollections depict a very unorthodox picture of the Soviet economy during the Second Five-Year Plan.