SUMMARY:

This is the second and concluding part of the English translation of the recollections of Mark Miller (1916–99) (the first part was published in Ab Imperio 1/2017). Several years before his death, Miller began narrating his recollections into a tape recorder, and there are reasons to believe that his narrative reproduced a version he had first articulated 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, except that he 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 second part of Miller’s recollections covers the period of high Stalinism (ca. 1937–1947). In the nominally socialist economy, he managed to run a semiprivate enterprise in Kazan using the Soviet regime’s tacit surrender of consumer-oriented production and services to cooperatives. Inefficient and deprived of means for independent economic activity, Sovietized cooperatives still allowed entrepreneurial individuals to succeed in the gray market zone.
In January 1940, Miller was pressed into “volunteering” for the infamous Soviet–Finnish war, which he describes with a combination of disgust and sarcasm. His critical attitude to the war notwithstanding, Mark Miller was awarded the Medal for Courage. Soon after the end of the war with Finland, in October 1940 he was called into service again, being demobilized only in 1946, having spent seven years in the army. He participated in the Soviet–German war from day one, observing the lavish preparations for the victorious assault against Germany and the failure of the army command to coordinate the war effort. In the mess of the summer of 1941, he managed to break out of encirclement, only to become a prisoner of war soon thereafter. With his personal knowledge of Kazan Tatars, while in captivity he declared himself a Tatar to explain his circumcision. He managed to escape, and walked over 1,000 kilometers (650–700 miles) to the east, before reuniting with the Red Army. He was lucky to survive typhus and pass clearance in the Soviet filtration camp, and was sent to serve in the North, not far from the places where he had fought in 1940 with the Finns. His recollections allow historians to revisit the conventional views of Soviet society and subjectivity