Status Updates From Everyday Stalinism: Ordinar...

Interessant, was Leben und Erziehung da geheißen hat. An erster Stelle kam Hygiene, Zähne putzen, nicht auf den Boden spucken, Seife und Handtücher benutzen, dann Lesen und Schreiben lernen. Frauen und Kinder nicht schlagen. Nicht so viel saufen, dass man nicht zur Arbeit erscheinen kann.
Erst dann kam die politische Ebene. Tolles Buch. Alltags- Forschung.

"It has been argued that it makes no more sense to ask whether Soviet citizens did or did not accept the Soviet worldview than to ask whether medieval people accepted the Christian worldview: there was simply no other available. ... The argument is useful in reminding us that most people most of the time do accept their governments, and the chances are that the Russian urban population in the 1930s was no exception."

"The striking thing was that Pravda had appropriated some themes of popular complaint [about Communist officials living in luxury] that, if uttered by a citizen in normal times, would have risked being labeled “anti-Soviet” or “hostile.” The behaviors it described were characteristic of the whole cohort of Communist cadres, even though they were being attributed only to certain scapegoated “enemies of the people.”"

⚽️ "A Leningrader wrote to a Leningrad party secretary bemoaning the defeats of Leningrad's two football teams and asking him to do something about it."

👮‍♂️ "One case that alarmed the authorities was a game organized among local children in Leningrad by a twelve-year-old troublemaker, Aleksei Dudkin. ... He called the game 'counterrevolutionary Trotskyite-Zinovievite band'. This was a kind of cops and robbers game in which Dudkin himself played the part of Zinoviev, while other children took the roles of Trotsky, Kirov, Kamenev, and an NKVD official."

After the 1936 ban on abortion, "women were to be 'exposed to public contempt' – that is, shamed by having to suffer public criticism of their conduct, usually at the workplace – and fined for repeat offenses. (...) After a month of discussion, the decree became law. It was substantially the same as the draft, meaning that the evident public uneasiness, especially among women, about the prohibition was disregarded."

[2/2] These included prostitutes, beggars and thieves. A subsequent episode "suggests that the Soviet regime had come closer to a Nazi approach to “social cleansing” than had hitherto been thought. On July 2, 1937, a secret order from the Politburo called for the rounding up of habitual criminals and troublemakers, 70,000 of whom were to be executed immediately without trial, others sent to Gulag."