Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin have performed a great service in drawing our attention to the question of subjectivity and consciousness in the Soviet Union. I have long been uneasy with the picture of Soviet citizens either as obedient tools of an overbearing and ruthless political system (totalitarian) or as ever-suffering and largely passive, prone only to occasional and often symbolic protest (revisionist). While I think their case is still far from proven, any attempt to understand soviet individuals as capable of independent thought and judgement is to be welcomed.

From Hellbeck’s analysis of diaries of the 1930s, I would like to draw attention to one particular finding, most evident in the case of Galina
Shtange, whose diary “shows an inversion of the hierarchy of the public and private spheres found in liberal thought”.^[1] The work-place now became the location where the true individual could be expressed, while the home became the scene of drudgery and alienation. If this is how most Soviet citizens felt, then the Soviet communists are to be congratulated: this is exactly what Karl Marx had in mind. In his early writings in particular, Marx focussed on the alienation the worker feels from his or her labour because of the way the process of production is organised under capitalism. This was to be reversed under communism, where the worker would find his or her true self through labour. While Engels also identified the home and family as a site of alienation, and would no doubt have disapproved of the continued existence of this institution in its old, oppressive form, at least they would have found satisfaction in the fact that Shtange had accomplished at least half the transformation on a personal level.

Marx and Engels were never clear as to precisely where consciousness came from, vaguely drifting between economic determinism on the one hand and the ideological hegemony of the ruling class on the other. It was left to Bolshevik Marxists, who had to deal in more practical terms with the actual consciousness of workers and peasants, to formulate this question more clearly. Put very crudely, individual (and group) consciousness could be traced to two main sources: 1) The day-to-day conditions and experience of existence, especially material conditions, which can be traced ultimately back to economic factors but which are prone to sudden disturbance through group struggle; 2) The intervention of external human agents, through propaganda and ideology, exerting their influence on the individual, especially when able to capitalise on experiences generated by the first source of consciousness. This dichotomy of sources of consciousness, sometimes characterised as “objective” and “subjective” factors, lies, after all, at the core of Lenin’s concept of the revolutionary party, and the balance between the two is a major theme of his polemics with Rosa Luxemburg.

I would like to suggest that this dual approach to individual consciousness, often characterised as belonging only to Lenin’s pre-revolutionary strategy, prevailed throughout the NEP. If the dichotomy is accepted as correct, then the following explanation in an OGPU report for a surge in strike activity in western Russia for July 1922 is flawless in its logic: “In July, the picture has changed: we are receiving information, on the one hand, about a whole series of strikes, and on the other hand, about a revival of work by Mensheviks and SRs. Of course, these two developments are closely linked to each other, since the general material position in the reporting month has not really deteriorated”.^[2] If material conditions have not changed, then the only possible explanation for a turn for the worse in the mood of workers is the propaganda and agitational efforts of anti-Soviet parties. These themes as explanations for unrest remain constant throughout the OGPU reports of the 1920s. Unrest is linked either to directly economic factors or to the activities of anti-soviets, oppositionists, nationalists, kulaks, clergy or whoever, never to a general dissatisfaction with Soviet rule. Under this approach, consciousness can be altered by a twin assault on material deprivation and the organised sources of opposition at the same time as organising mass propaganda. It can be linked to Soviet efforts to improve the short-term economic situation at the same time as repressing opposition parties and factions, and investing heavily in education, propaganda, and the presence at all levels of society of reliable Party activists. The other side of blaming discontent on the activities of anti-Soviet or opposition elements was to highlight shortcomings of communist party organisations or individuals in combating those activities. “Lack of vigilance” was as much responsible as the positive efforts of opponents for the misguided ideas of citizens. Thus in 1922 Lenin charged Stalin and Dzherzhinsky not with direct involvement in the debacle of the “Georgian Affair”, but for political responsibility based on their non-intervention.

It seems to me that this sort of dichotomy is different, but not altogether dissimilar, from Halfin’s distinction between diehard and temporarily misled oppositionists (or rather, the distinction which Halfin claims the communists made). The significant difference is that in Halfin’s description of “Inquisition Communist Style” there is a shift away from viewing consciousness as something everchanging and malleable towards something given and permanent – of the two types of oppositionist (typified by Trotsky and Zinoviev), one is an irredeemable deviant, the other is at heart a good communist who has been temporarily led astray. There is a tension here which I can also see at work in some of the diaries analysed by Hellbeck: individuals like Podlubnyi whose background marks them out as “formers” are engaged in a personal struggle to transform themselves, but at the same time are aware that it is a near-impossible task to escape their class heritage. The shift becomes clearer after, and at points during, the Cultural Revolution. Whole groups of people: kulaks, specialists, entire nationalities, became irredeemable enemies. When consciousness is no longer deemed to be alterable, there is only one recourse: Terror. Terror is, among other things, a way of getting people to behave in ways which they do not want. Its widespread practice does not seem to me to contradict the arguments of Soviet subjectivity, if we accept that the regime simply gave up on altering the consciousness of certain groups of people. Terror was, of course, in use in the 1920s but what happened in the 1930s, in part, was that the groups of people who were beyond redemption became ever larger. A good example of an ideological transformation underpinning this shift can be seen in the treatment of nationalities: as Terry Martin has recently shown, whereas the korenizatsiia policies of the 1920s attempted to transform the consciousness of non-Russians, in the mid-1930s a primordial view of nationhood emerged which implied that individuals were stuck with particular characteristics ascribed to them by their nationality. And if you were unfortunate enough to be a Pole, Finn, German, Korean, Chechen, or later Jew, and so on, all the worse for you. All this is not to say that attempts to fashion consciousness were abandoned under Stalin. Certainly they continued, and as Hellbeck’s diaries show, they were at least on occasion successful. If this seems contradictory, then so it is, but we should not expect absolute consistency in the Soviet system.

Stalin’s style of Revolution from Above, it seems to me, did not rest in any serious sense on efforts to transform consciousness on a mass scale. Campaigns such as collectivisation involved a series of radical transformations implemented by a relatively small group of enthusiasts backed up by threatened or actual terror, to which the subjects of transformation were mostly opposed. By contrast Khrushchev was a reforming leader, in the sense that he sought to transform aspects of the Soviet system through individual reforms which, while not revolutionary or fundamental in character, nevertheless involved quite dramatic changes in the working or living routines of those affected. Terror then gave way to persuasion, not just through the huge propaganda efforts associated with the Virgin Lands or Maize campaigns, or with the elevation of heroic symbols such as Iuri Gagarin, but in the political mobilisation of broad layers of the population. To give one example I have recently happened to come across a letter from the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia to the CC CPSU reporting on levels of mobilisation around the control figures for the seven-year plan published in November 1958, boasted that 235,000 people took part in meetings to discuss the proposals, of whom 16,000 came forward with their own views and proposals, and 2,007 articles and letters were published in the Estonian media.^[3] Even allowing for exaggeration and the fact that attendance at such meetings would have been obligatory for many, in a republic with a population of a little over a million this was an extraordinary level of mobilisation. Simultaneously, a smaller scale mobilisation occurred over Khrushchev’s education reform. Smaller, but equally effective, as it focussed on the group – teachers – whose working practises were most likely to be transformed by the proposed changes. These attempts to affect changes in consciousness through mobilisation were not unknown, of course, under Lenin and Stalin. But whereas they played a certain role along side the strategies of economic improvement, propaganda and terror in the early periods, they seem to have moved into prime place under Khrushchev.

In part this was his undoing, as political elites were also caught up in mobilisation and resented it. The idea of a Social Contract introduced into Eastern Europe after 1956 and extended to the Soviet Union by Brezhnev represents, from one perspective, the abandonment of efforts to truly influence individual subjects in favour of buying them off in the hope that they will keep their thoughts to themselves. This is not entirely true, as enduring fondness for the Brezhnev era among post-soviet Russians seems to go beyond purely material factors.^[4] But the “years of stagnation” at least left Gorbachev in a position where efforts to reinvoke a Khrushchev-style popular mobilisation either broke damply against a wall of cynicism and apathy, or else spawned a series of unwanted mobilisations over economic, environmental and national demands.

I have not attempted here to deal with what went on in the heads of Soviet citizens, which I am sure others will deal with. Rather, I have presented a few thoughts as to how the ideological and political leaders of the Soviet Union might have seen the question. This approach, already suggested by Halfin, is not irrelevant to the question of actual subjectivity: a state as powerful and as committed to ideology as the Soviet Union was at its height bound to exert a considerable influence on the way individuals felt and thought, as well as on how they acted. How far they succeeded is still open to question: Hellbeck’s evidence, like the evidence from the Harvard Interview Project which it in part complements, can not be regarded as coming from a fully representative cross-section of the population, nor does it over-ride the findings of apathy and discontent by scholars such as Sarah Davies and Sheila Fitzpatrick. Nor do I agree with Jochen Hellbeck’s dismissal of Secret Police surveys as a valid source for assessing popular moods. While they always need to be treated with caution and common sense, and may be more problematic for the 1930s than the 1920s, from my own work to date on OGPU reports in the NEP period I can see little sign of any consistent “peculiar agenda and preconceptions”^[5] to suggest that agents may have manufactured or even manipulated the facts (as opposed to the interpretations) on which they are reporting. These sources, much broader and general than those used by Hellbeck and Halfin, can be usefully combined with diaries and trial proceedings to improve our overall knowledge of the attitudes of Soviet citizens.