In the past decade, new sources and new methodological approaches have combined to produce a range of exciting new scholarship in the field of Soviet history. Some of the most important and innovative research has focused on the topic of Soviet subjectivity.^[1] This research has demonstrated that Soviet state power was not only repressive, but also productive, in that it created new forms of self-identification which some people accepted and internalized. In order to gauge citizens’ internalization of officially prescribed identities, it is necessary to gain access to their inner thoughts, and to analyze how the Soviet system shaped their sense of self. Because individuals think and act according to their understanding of themselves and their place in the world, their sense of self determines their ability to become subjects, or actors, in everyday life. Subjectivity – the capacity to think and act based on a coherent sense of self – is therefore a crucial area of inquiry for historians of the Soviet period.

The totalitarian model presented the Soviet system as terrorizing the population into complete subservience, forcing people to hide their true selves or eliminating their sense of self altogether. Revisionists and historians of resistance countered that individuals in Soviet society did have a sense of themselves and their interests, and that they supported or opposed policies based on self-interest. But some post-revisionist thinkers have argued that Soviet citizens’ sense of themselves and their own interests did not arise independently of the system in which they lived. These scholars have criticized the tendency to assume that people had a pre-existing sense of self-interest that transcended the historical specificities of their time and place.^[2] According to this view, historical agency exists, but it is not the agency of free-thinking, self-made individuals, as depicted in liberal thought. Instead, state power, official discourse, and subjectivizing practices play a role in constituting individuals as subjects.^[3]

Jochen Hellbeck has persuasively argued that Soviet authorities purposefully set out to make people into revolutionary subjects.^[4] Rather than seeking to repress or obliterate people’s sense of self, Soviet institutions and propaganda were intended to foster conscious citizens, who would voluntarily participate in the building of socialism and derive their sense of self from doing so. In this way, state power was productive, for it offered people a coherent sense of self and purpose. The objective of Soviet authorities was to make citizens understand their lives as part of the larger revolutionary project. For those who accepted their place in this project, Soviet power offered an opportunity to contribute to something of world historical importance, the creation of a socialism that heralded a new era for humankind.

Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin have highlighted Soviet practices of subjectivization – the process by which individuals were inculcated with a sense of themselves as participants in the grand crusade of building socialism. Political agitation, education, and even gulag prison camps (where “bourgeois elements” were supposedly reformed through hard labor) all provided means to instill in people a new consciousness – an awareness of themselves as historical agents in the process of revolutionary transformation. Soviet authorities also required people to engage in autobiographical writing and speaking to make them reflect on their lives. Collective autobiographies such as the factory history project enlisted thousands of workers to write the story of Stalinist industrialization. The theme of these officially sponsored autobiographies was not only how workers built a new world, but how building it transformed them into new people – fully conscious subjects who had realized their human potential. Students, Komsomol members, and candidates for Party membership were required to recite their autobiographies in a way that depicted their own coming to consciousness.^[5]

The Soviet system was not unique among modern political systems in promoting a sense of self among its citizens. While autocracies of the old regime expected the population simply to obey the monarch, modern systems were based on the ideal of popular sovereignty, in which all citizens were to play an active part in politics. Even non-democratic political systems in the modern era have required that their citizens not simply obey orders, but participate, based on an understanding of the national interest and their role in attaining it. In fact the very notion of the self in modern European thought is one in which people develop an awareness of their moment in history and of themselves as historical agents. The Soviet system shared an emphasis on its citizens’ sense of self with other modern political systems, systems, but at the same time distinguished itself by the type of self it sought to cultivate. This self was not to be individualistic; instead, according to Soviet ideology, individuals could only find fulfillment by joining the collective. In contrast to Western societies, where the liberal self was constituted by ownership of private property and a system of legal protections and individual rights, the Soviet system promoted an illiberal subjectivity, where private life was eradicated and individuals were supposed to reach their full potential through participation in social life.

A number of other values and qualities followed from the principle of collectivism. The prominent Soviet educator Anton Makarenko emphasized “the real solidarity of the working people,” “the abolition of greed,” and “respect for the interests and life of [one’s] comrades.”^[6] Soviet political leaders stressed the elimination of egotism and selfishness. In 1933 Lazar Kaganovich said to a Young Pioneer leader, “I am asking how much our children have progressed in truly human terms with respect to how they relate to one another, with respect to getting rid of the mentality of the past, egotism, vanity, selfishness, with respect to getting rid of all the bad elements that have lingered from the past.” Kaganovich went on to express his doubt that the population had progressed very far in eliminating these “vestiges of the past,” but the fact that he was so insistent on the need for children’s transformation illustrates that even the most ruthless Stalinists hoped to cultivate lofty human qualities.^[7]

A 1937 lead article in Pravda highlighted modesty as an essential Communist quality. It contrasted Party leaders’ modesty with the “vanity,…pride, [and] haughtiness” of capitalist society, and stated that modesty presupposed “respect for labor, people, and the masses, and a faith in the moral and creative strength of the collective.”^[8] A Komsomol journal in 1940 boasted that the Soviet Union was creating “a generation of new people, for whom lying, deviousness, chauvinism, hypocrisy…and other abominations of bourgeois society are foreign.”^[9] The New Soviet Person, then, was supposed to be free of the selfish egotism and hypocrisy of capitalist society. Devotion to the collective would bring out in people the highest human qualities – selflessness, modesty, honesty, and sincerity.^[10]

Did Soviet citizens accept and internalize this new identity and these new values? To gauge citizens’ responses to official discourse and subjectivizing practices, Hellbeck has utilized the personal diaries of people who lived in the Stalin era. These diaries reveal that some people did adopt Soviet values and strive to become the New Soviet Person. Diarists sought to chronicle the building of socialism and described their own lives as part of this larger collective struggle. In this way they represented ideal Soviet subjects, who achieved self realization by understanding their lives in terms of the overall revolutionary project. Even a worker who in his diary denounced the Stalinist regime for capitalist exploitation did so using official terminology and with the hope that real socialism might ultimately be achieved. Other diarists described material hardship under Stalinism, but did so in order to emphasize their heroic sacrifice in building socialism.^[11]

While I find Hellbeck’s evidence extremely compelling in the cases he examines, I would caution against generalizing about the Soviet population as a whole and its internalization of official identities and values. It is apparent not only from episodes of overt resistance to Soviet policies, but from widespread defiance of Soviet cultural and behavioral norms that a large proportion of the Soviet population did not emulate the model of the New Soviet Person. This model was backed by material incentives, coercive force, and a very powerful narrative of collective achievement and self-fulfillment. But the Soviet master-narrative of people joining the collective struggle to build socialism was not the only narrative available for people to make sense of their lives. The Russian intelligentsia had a long history of questioning and challenging autocratic authority, and this history was depicted in literary and autobiographical works which Soviet dissidents could draw upon. For its part the Russian peasantry had developed strategies of subversion and passive resistance, and these behaviors were bolstered by an oral tradition – songs and tales – which articulated a worldview quite contrary to the official Soviet story.^[12]

In future examinations of Soviet subjectivity, we should be attentive to the interplay of official and unofficial discourses, and the hybrid identifications developed by various segments of the population. The peasant oral tradition to which I refer did not remain static and instead evolved in relation to social changes and official discourse. And peasants’ identities evolved as well – collectivization, migration to cities, official propaganda, and subjectivizing practices altered their lives and senses of self forever. But to fully understand the evolution of identities and the forging of new subjectivities, we must take into account alternatives to official discourse which people also drew upon to understand themselves and their place in the world. Such an inquiry would build on the pioneering work of Halfin and Hellbeck and would further enrich our analysis of how people lived and thought under Soviet socialism.