csillagkohó’s Reviews > Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s > Status Update

"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."

[1/2] "The regime was furtively and somewhat tentatively practicing a kind of social cleansing, involving the removal of marginal urban residents, “degenerates” whose presence was regarded as corrupting and disruptive, and their forcible relocation in labor camps or provincial exile. The process of their removal from society started at the end of the 1920s and reached its peak during the Great Purges."

"A manager described how he coped with his demanding job. He started the day with gymnastics at 6.15. After an eleven-hour workday, he arrived home in the evening early enough for cultural recreation: visits to the theater and cinema, drives in the car. He made a point of keeping up with literature ... The secret was his ability to stick to a routine." 30s Sovjetcultuur zat zo dicht bij Steve Jobs grindsetcultuur

"Because of the acute shortage of goods, the second, informal economy was probably more important in ordinary people's lives in the 1930s than the private sector had ever been during NEP, paradoxical as this may seem."

🥷 "In Leningrad there were sightings of 'wild streetcars' (i.e. unscheduled cars with unauthorized drivers), cruising along the tracks and illegally collecting passengers and pocketing fares. (...) At the Novosibirsk railway station, the only way to get a ticket was to buy it on the black market from a gang headed by 'the professor': 'nickname "Ivan Ivanovich", in a white straw hat with a pipe in his mouth.'"