Homo Sovieticus

Sheila Fitzpatrick is a revisionist Australian historian.   In 1999, she published her book Everyday Stalinism – about the 'ordinary life in the extraordinary times' of an ordinary person – a 'Homo Sovieticus' –  in Stalin's Russia

In Stalin's Russia, millions of people were sent to the Gulag where millions of them died.  Millions died in famines caused by collectivisation.  Multitudes were worked to death to meet the targets of the 5-Year Plans.  Millions more died in the Red Army, fighting the Nazi invaders.   Estimates of deaths caused start at 20 million and go up to 40 million ...more than the entire population of England at that time.  Stalin's citizens lived in a country so repressive that you could be arrested just for telling a joke about Stalin. 

What was it like for people living in such a repressive state?   The following passages from Fitzpatrick's book help us to understand; they 'just got on with it':

"For Homo Sovieticus, the state was a central and ubiquitous presence.

In the first place, it was the formal distributor of goods and the near-monopolistic producer of them, so that even the black market dealt largely in state products and relied heavily on state connections.

In the second place, all urban citizens worked for the state, whether they were workers or typists or teachers or shop assistants: there were virtually no alternative employers.

In the third place, the state was a tireless regulator of life, issuing and demanding an endless stream of documents and permits without which the simplest operations of daily life were impossible.

As everybody including the leaders admitted, the Soviet bureaucracy, recently greatly expanded to cope with its new range of tasks and thus full of inexperienced and unqualified officials, was slow, cumbersome, inefficient, and often corrupt.

Law and legal process were held in low regard, and the actions of officialdom, from top to bottom, were marked by arbitrariness and favoritism.  Citizens felt themselves at the mercy of officials and the regime; they speculated endlessly about the people ‘up there’ and what new surprises they might have in store for the population, but felt powerless to influence them.

Even the jokes that Soviet citizens loved to tell, despite the danger of being caught in ‘anti-Soviet conversation,’ were typically not about sex or mothers-in-law or even ethnicity but about bureaucrats, the Communist Party, and the secret police.

The term ‘Stalinism’ in the title needs some explanation.

Stalinism often connotes an ideology and/or a political system.  I use it here as a shorthand for the complex of institutions, structures, and rituals that made up the habitat of Homo Sovieticus in the Stalin era.

Communist Party rule, Marxist-Leninist ideology, rampant bureaucracy, leader cults, state control over production and distribution, social engineering, affirmative action on behalf of workers, stigmatization of ‘class enemies,’ police surveillance, terror, and the various informal, personalistic arrangements whereby people at every level sought to protect themselves and obtain scarce goods, were all part of the Stalinist habitat.

Finally, there is another less exalted model of the Soviet state that may help illuminate Soviet everyday practices: the soup kitchen or the relief agency.

Soviet citizens were masters of self-representation as the deserving poor; they regarded it as the state's obligation to provide them with food, clothing, and shelter.

Very likely, being deserving poor, they also feel an obligation to work, but the relationship of work to welfare is not seen as reciprocal.

The whole range of supplicatory and dependent behaviors characteristic of Soviet citizens outlined above fits the soup kitchen model better than any of the others.

The client of a soup kitchen does not feel that he or she is involved in a self-improvement project, in contrast to the school pupil, nor has he the strong fear of punishment and sense of loss of freedom characteristic of prisoners and army recruits.

He may or may not feel grateful to the organizers of the soup kitchen, although periodically he is likely to reproach them for not providing enough soup or saving the best meals for favorite clients.  But basically he sees the soup kitchen just as a source of goods he needs, and judges it primarily by the quantity and quality of the goods and the convenience of obtaining them.

This book has described a wide range of practices of everyday life in Stalin's Russia: ‘getting’ goods legally and illegally, using patrons and connections, counting living space in square meters, quarreling in communal apartments, ‘free’ marriage, petitioning, denouncing, informing, complaining about officials, complaining about privilege, enjoying privilege, studying, volunteering, moving up, tumbling down, confusing the future and the present, mutual protection, self-criticism, scapegoating, purging, bullying subordinates, deferring to officials, lying about social origin, unmasking enemies, hunting spies, and many others.

It was a life in which outward conformity to ideology and ritual mattered, but personal ties mattered even more.

It was a life of random disasters and of manifold daily irritations and inconveniences, from the hours wasted in queues and lack of privacy in communal apartments to the endless bureaucratic rudeness and red tape and the abolition, in the cause of productivity and atheism, of a common day of rest.

There were fearful things that affected Soviet life and visions that uplifted it, but mostly it was a hard grind, full of shortages and discomfort.

Homo Sovieticus was a string-puller, an operator, a time-server, a freeloader, a mouther of slogans, and much more.

But above all, they were a survivor."