Individual Advanced Research Opportunities (IARO) Program Research Report

The following opinions, recommendations, and conclusions of the grantee are his/her own and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of IREX or the US Department of State.

David Brandenberger University of Richmond IARO 2007-2008 Russia Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Political Indoctrination and Stalinist Terror in the USSR, 1928-1939

Topic of research The Soviet communist partys failure to promote a popular sense of communist identity under Stalin is one of the greatest paradoxes in modern Russian history. What can account for such a shortcoming in a society organized along Marxist-Leninist lines? This research investigates this question by examining the construction, dissemination and reception of propaganda within Soviet society during the 1930s. Under the auspices of an IREX IARO, I spent 5 months during the spring and summer of 2008 in the St. Petersburg and Moscow archives conducting the archivally-based research necessary to complete a scholarly monograph.

Relevance and contribution to field. Please provide a brief description of the scholarly impact and policy significance of your research.

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This project contributes to the disciplines on-going inquiry into Soviet social identity by investigating the failure of communist-oriented indoctrinational efforts during the interwar period. The importance of the partys inability to promote a sense of identity grounded in materialism and proletarian internationalism is difficult to exaggerate. It was, after all, this ideological

weakness at the core of the Soviet experiment that repeatedly forced the party to resort to other ad-hoc, populist propaganda ploys. Scholars have long been aware of the party hierarchys heretical flirtation with Russian nationalism and the Orthodox church, as well as its encouragement of economic stratification and gender inequality. That said, these practices have often been written-off as examples of Stalinist pragmatism or exigencies linked to the Second World War. Absent in such accounts is an awareness of the fact that it was the failure of attempts to promote a more ideologically-consistent sense of Soviet social identity that forced the party hierarchy to compromise in the first place.

Although this research is ripe with implications for the social, cultural and political history of the years between 1929 and 1939, it is also relevant to the study of the wartime, postwar years and post-Stalin period as well. Among other things, it helps clarify why N. S. Khrushchev proved unable to foster a supra-national sense of identity revolving around membership in the Soviet people (Sovetskii narod) during the post-Stalin Thaw. It also explains why the Brezhnev-era party found it so tempting to rely on the memorialization of the Second World War and the selective use of Russian nationalist appeals in order to bolster its legitimacy. Finally, it explains why communist politicians in post-Soviet Russia have resorted so frequently to Russian nationalist sloganeering since 1991. Detailing the partys failure to promote a sense of

communist identity during the 1930s, this research speaks to one of the core dysfunctions of the Soviet experiment across the span of the twentieth century.

A concise summary of your approach and research methodology including a list of research sites My IARO research was spent in a number of former party and state archives in St. Petersburg and Moscow between April and August 2008. Below, I will supply details on the archival

repositories and research libraries I have used; for more general information on each archive, the best published resource remains Patricia Grimsteds Archives of Russia (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000). An updated version of this book is selectively published on the web at even more useful is the Russian Rosarkhiv site at

<http://www.iisg.nl/~abb/>; <http://www.rusarchives.ru/>.

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St. Petersburg archives & libraries TsGAIPD SPb. (the former party archive) is working under a new administration and is now housed in the citys Rosarkhiv headquarters on ul. Tavricheskaia. Working conditions are better than in the late 1990s, when the archive was virtually closed due to its eviction from its Sovietera accommodations at the nearby Smolnyi monastery complex. That said, the archives

assiduous observance of Russian law requiring biographical details of individual citizens to be protected for 75 years from the creation of archival records is extremely limiting; often, the archivists appear to use this rule as an excuse to deny researchers access to formally declassified material, in effect reclassifying it without government decree. (It bears noting that this archive is the only one in the capitalswith the possible exception of the Moscow city party archivewhere the 75-year rule is enforced to such a degree. Elsewhere, when documents reveal personal data, archivists tend to require researchers to exclude the surnames they encounter from their notes rather than ban access to the documents themselves). It should also be noted that the archives enforcement of this law is irregulardocuments like the intelligence svodki in f. 24 and 25 are virtually off-limits, but the collection of wartime diaries in f. 4000 is almost fully accessible. Ultimately, even when access is granted, delivery of material to the reading room is slowed by the needed review of everything extended to researchers; up to 12 files a day can be ordered.

TsGA SPb (the city state archive) possesses a useful collection of materials from Soviet-era government agencies and organizations. This institution is hampered, however, by a small reading room, limited archival staff and high local demand for usage from local historians and graduate students. As a result, the archive administration has instituted a complicated system of daily passes to work in the archive that must be obtained ahead of time. Delivery of material to the reading room is slow and limited to 5 files a day.

TsGALI SPb (the St. Petersburg archive of arts and literatures) is a terrific storehouse of personal and institutional holdings from the Soviet period, offering the holdings of such major names as M. M. Zoshchenko, Fridrich Ermler and Lenfilm. Although in past years, its been necessary to pay for the delivery of files to the reading room, this practice has now been suspended and working conditions are quite pleasant. Up to ten files a day may be ordered; delivery of the materials is prompt and polite.

RNB (Russian National Library), which is generally associated with the downtown SaltykovShchedrin library building, now consists of three major sites: the pre-1950 book and journal holdings located downtown in the historic building, the newspaper holdings at the neighboring
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Newspaper Division, and the post-1950 book, journal and microfilm holdings in the new building on Moskovskii prospect at metro stop Park Pobedy. All-in-all, this is arguably the second best library in Russia, and perhaps the best place to work on newspapers. It is also the only major library to have most of its holdings cataloged in a digital databasehttp://nlr.ruwhich is hard to use if one is not used to a Russian keyboard layout. It bears mentioning that the RNB is significantly poorer in holdings concerning the 20th century than either the RGB or PIB in Moscow, and its collection of materials from 1941-1945 is spotty. Its manuscript division has extensive holdings on literary personalities from the 19th and 20th centuries, including dozens of elite diaries. Its Estamp Division has a solid collection of posters and artwork, although the staff of the latter section is not particularly knowledgeable. The building on Moskovskii prospekt is very slow in its delivery of materials; it does, however, boast good and cheap internet access (although without the use of flashdrive media).

Moscow archives & libraries RGASPI (the former central party archive) is open to scholars three days a week (MWF) and enforces a general limit on the number of files requested on any given day. Microfilmed

holdings are released in greater quantity than originals; the Stalin material transferred from the APRF several years ago (f. 558, op. 11) is carefully monitored and given out in limited quantities. Originals from f. 558, op. 11 are provided to researchers only with the permission of the archives director, but this is a fairly routine procedure. Working around this rationing of files is difficult and acts as a major inconvenience during short research trips (esp. during the summer). Being exceptionally polite and conciliatory with the reading room staff can result in a bit more flexibility and a few more files a day, but a shortage of cadres makes major improvement in this area an unrealistic expectation. Arrive at the start of the working day if using microfilm or fiche, as there are only a few decent East German microfilm/fiche readers. Permission is needed for computer use, but is routinely granted. Xerox-copying, photography and requests for material undergoing restoration can take over a month due to backlog and staff shortages. The fastest and perhaps most reliable way to copy material is to use ones own digital camera and tripodrates are charged by the hour for such camera work. The buildings formerly-convenient cafeteria has been transformed into a restaurant celebrating Soviet nostalgia called Sluzhebnyi vkhod. In early July 2008, the archives long-standing director K. M. Anderson was forced to retired in a Rosarkhiv shake-up; it is unclear how his replacement will affect this archives generally liberal policy of access.

GARF (the State Archive of the Russian Federation) is open five days a week for long hours and offers a fast turn-around on requests. Structural problems have forced a relocation of the
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reading room to a neighboring building; staffing problems result in a lot of careless errors in the selection of materials. Arrive early if using microfilm or fiche.

RGVA (the state military archive) boasts holdings from 1917-1941 useful for military history and cultural/social history (especially through the holdings of the Red Armys Political Directorate. The reading room is small and microfilm viewers are few in number; arrive early for a productive working day. Up to ten files can be ordered a day. Access to opisi, which in the past were liberally shared with researchers, now requires prior authorization from the director (a courtesy which appears to be pretty routinely extended).

NA RAN (the scholarly archive at the Academy of Sciences) is in the midst of a protracted financial crisis and is as a result a very time-consuming place to work. Xerox-copying is virtually impossible, as is the preparation of photos for publication. Permission can be obtained from the archives director for the use of ones own digital camera and tripod.

RGALI (the central state arts and literature archive) works five days a week with rapid turnaround on requested materials. Microfilmed materials are delivered with particular promptness to a special reading room in a neighboring building. The main (but small) reading room tends to fill-up rapidly. There is a wonderful cross-indexing card catalogue based on surname and

organization in the basement that is under-used. A number of major collections, including those of several editorial boards and the writer K. Simonov, are presently inaccessible. A call should be placed to the reading room ahead of time to establish the accessibility of all materials of interest. The reading room also accepts orders of materials ahead of time by emailcheck the website for details.

RGB (Russian State Library) offers liberal access to most of its holdings, with the exception of some recent journals and some WWII-era material, which are housed in structurally-unstable conditions. The library is beginning to digitize its catalog, but the card catalogues remain key to finding materials published before 2001. Predictably, recent materials (published since 2001) are only cataloged digitally. If materials known to have been published are not to be found in either catalog, appeal to a consultant, who has the power to over-ride the need for a catalog cipher on order forms. Researchers should demonstrate proof of Ph.D. status or doctoral

dissertation work (a letter from a local or foreign sponsor) in order to be placed in the quiet and well-served professors reading room (No. 1). Photocopying is available; there is also a very convenient internet cafe in the basement with reasonable rates for access and printing. The RGBs newspaper and dissertation division, in the suburb of Khimki, is inconveniently far from
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the city center, but boasts fast delivery times in the newspaper division and a for-pay express delivery service in the dissertation division. A rule instituted in January 2008 now restricts photocopying of dissertations to 15% of the total volume of the work.

PIB (Public Historical Library): because this is an overtaxed research library, Ph.D.-level researchers should press for access to the privileged reading rooms on the second floor; even so, they will be restricted in the number of books that can be requested from the main collection. The PIBs collection is remarkably good, however, often containing 20th century books not available in St. Petersburg; and foreign publications on Russian and the USSR not available anywhere else in the FSU. PIB also offers good journal and newspaper holdings in the city center. Xerox-copying and photography is possible to order; an agreement can also be

negotiated to allow for the use of ones own camera and tripod if the researcher has a letter of introduction from an organization or university.

A summary of your research findings and preliminary conclusions addressing the questions and issues raised in your research proposal. (minimum 3 pages)

The partys striking failure to promote a popular sense of loyalty to the Soviet cause has been long overlooked in the on-going debate over Stalin-era social and cultural history. Paradoxical within a society that was ostensibly organized along Marxist-Leninist lines, this shortcoming is all the more curious in light of the fact that at least during the Stalin period, the party allocated virtually unlimited resources to the cause of ideological indoctrination. Yet despite this massive investment, stalinist ideologists were repeatedly frustrated in their attempts to promote a coherent sense of Soviet identity and popularize the philosophical tenets of Marxism-Leninism failures which led to a crisis in Soviet public life during the mid-to-late 1930s. My research explores this heretofore-unacknowledged weakness at the core of the Soviet experiment by examining the construction of Soviet propaganda on high, its dissemination within society, and its reception on the popular level. An expos of the marginal efficacy of Soviet ideology and indoctrinational efforts during the 1930s, it also details the ramifications of this ideological impotence for the society as a whole over the course of the entire Stalin period and after.

During the past decade, many scholars have focused on the subject of individual identity (subjectivity) and popular consciousness under Stalin. Some have contended that ordinary people were surprisingly pragmatic and savvy about the nature of the Soviet system and found

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a myriad of ways to live more-or-less normal lives during these extraordinary times.1 Others have called for new approaches to the study of individual subjectivity and collective identities in the USSR, pointing to crucial differences between the Soviet experience and that of more traditionally liberal societies.2 According to this analysis, the ideologically-charged rhetoric

surrounding industrialization and socialist construction was ubiquitous enough to have a decisive effect on the formation of ordinary Soviet citizens sense of self. Indeed, Soviet citizens during 1920s and 30s literally began to speak Bolshevik, displaying beliefs that were Soviet in form if not in content.3

Still other specialists emphasize that stalinist rule led to the coalescing of ethnic identities. Although class-consciousness ostensibly lay at the philosophical foundation of the Soviet experiment, these authors demonstrate that in practice, Stalin and his entourage actually behaved like nationalists, actively promoting nation-building throughout the USSR.4 According to this line of reasoning, early Soviet nationality policy during the 1920s first celebrated nonRussian ethnic diversity before embracing countervailing russificatory, populist tendencies during the mid-to-late 1930s.5 In my first book, I traced how an ideological current of national Bolshevism matured during this time to survive the war and stretch deep into the 1950s.6

Aside from these two schools of thought, other scholars have linked identity formation under Stalin to a variety of other factors, from generational cohort7 and the party press8 to various

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday StalinismOrdinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Golfo Alexopoulos, Portrait of a Con Artist as a Soviet Man, Slavic Review 57:4 (1998): 774-790; Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalins Russia: Propaganda, Terror and Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 2 Anna Krylova, The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies, Kritika 1:1 (2000): 119-46. 3 There is substantial disagreement over whether Soviets spoke Bolshevik out of personal choice or due to the hegemonic power of official discourse. Compare Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California, 1995); and David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: the Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); to Jochen Hellbeck, Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: the Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, Jahrbcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas 44:4 (1996): 233-73; Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). 4 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Yuri Slezkine, The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism, Slavic Review 53:2 (1994): 414. 5 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Ethnicity and the Soviet State, 1923-1938 (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 2001). 6 David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 7 Anna Krylova, Identity, Agency and the First Soviet Generation, in Generations in Twentieth Century Europe, ed. Stephen Lovell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2007), 101-120; Krylova, Soviet Modernity in Life and Fiction: the New Soviet Person in the 1930s (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2000).
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aspects of everyday life.9 Exceptional experiences like that of the purges10 and the Second World War11 are also described as catalyzing social identity in the USSR. Although the varied nature of these findings may seem inconsistent and confusing at first glance, upon closer examination, it is striking how compatible they actually are. On a fundamental level, Soviet society was remarkably diverse and social identity in the USSR extraordinarily multivalent.

But absent throughout all of these studies is attention paid to the partys failure to promote a more explicitly Soviet sense of social identity, grounded in the tenets of class consciousness, socialist construction, Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism.12 Despite the fact that Workers of the World, Unite! echoed from every Pravda masthead, and despite the fact that books like The Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) made up a significant proportion of the states total publishing output between the late 1920s and 1953, these issues appear to have played a decidedly marginal and inconsistent role in Stalin-era social identity.

The importance of the partys ultimate failure to promote a sense of Soviet identity is difficult to exaggerate. It was, after all, the failure of political indoctrinational efforts that encouraged the proliferation of other sorts of social identity noted above. Moreover, it was this weakness at the core of the Soviet experiment that repeatedly forced the party to resort to ad-hoc, populist mobilizational drives that sapped popular interest from central aspects of the official line. Scholars have long been aware of the party hierarchys encouragement of economic stratification and gender inequality, as well as its heretical flirtation with Russian nationalism and the Orthodox church. That said, these practices have often been written-off as examples of stalinist pragmatism or the exigencies of war. Absent in such accounts is an awareness of the

Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 9 Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Stalinism as a Way of Life, eds. Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); etc. 10 Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalins Russia (New York : Metropolitan Books, 2007); Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead: Stalins Great Terror in the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, c2007). 11 Amir Weiner, The Making of a Dominant Myth: the Second World War and the Construction of Political Identities within the Soviet Polity, Russian Review 55:4 (1996): 638-60; idem, Making Sense of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Elena Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: politika i povsednevnost, 1945-1953 (Moscow: Rosspen, 1999). 12 Recent studies of ideological developments within the Stalin elite appear unaware of the partys failure to popularize its core tenets on the mass level. See Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: the Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity; Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: a History of Socialism in Russia (New York: Free Press, 1994); Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: the Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
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fact that it was the failure of attempts to promote a more ideologically-consistent sense of social identity that forced the party hierarchy to compromise in the first place.

Supplying the missing dimension to scholarship concerning Soviet identity politics during the 1930s, my research combines an archival investigation of the Stalin-era ideological establishment with an interdisciplinary focus on the official line as represented in party study circles, the all-union press, middle-brow literature, theater, film, opera and museum exhibition. It then complements this examination of the construction and dissemination of ideology with an investigation into the popular reception of this rhetoric and imagery. Intent on determining how ordinary Soviet citizens reacted to the wax and wane of the official line, my study surveys an array of letters, diaries and memoirs, as well as denunciations, secret police reports and rare interviews conducted during Stalins lifetime, in an effort to identify authentic voices from the 1930s with which to gauge the popular resonance of ideologically-charged propaganda on the mass level.

My argument begins by investigating the approach that Soviet authorities took to mass mobilization during the 1920s, both within traditional contexts (public rallies, study circles, the press, poster art) and less conventional forums (art, literature, drama, film, museum exhibition, etc.). These venues embrace of abstract materialism and the avant garde produced an inaccessible melang of schematicism and anonymous social forces that functioned poorly as mobilizational propagandasomething visible in the collapse of Soviet morale on the eve of the tenth anniversary of October in 1927. Focusing on the aftermath of this fiasco, I then continue to trace how party authorities began to modulate their representation of the official line in order to enhance its mobilizational power. Journalists increased the hyperbole of central newspaper coverage in order to rally party activists. Party historians redoubled efforts to identify a usable past13 within the annals of the Russian revolutionary movement in order to demonstrate the relevance of the Bolshevik experience to Soviet society at large. Propagandists and other members of the ideological establishment augmented these efforts by launching an ambitious personality cult based on the hagiographic veneration of Lenin that styled Stalin as the living personification of the Soviet experiment.

None of these approaches proved easy to refine or implement, however. Indeed, it appears that veteran propagandists, ideologists and party historians struggled for years between the late

This expression was coined in 1918 but popularized more recentlysee Van Wyk Brooks, On Creating a Usable Past, Dial 64 (1918): 337-341; Henry Steele Commager, The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays in Historiography (New York: Knopf, 1967), 3-27.
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13

1920s and mid-1930s in an attempt to reconcile their long-standing commitment to MarxismLeninism with newer, seemingly bourgeois approaches to mass mobilization. Whats more, it turns out that the first to arrive at a truly accessible version of the Soviet usable past were not members of the partys ideological establishment at all, but journalists and writers from the literary ranks of the creative intelligentsia instead. Their approach, which celebrated

contemporary individual heroism and the long-taboo notion of patriotism, met with resistance on the part of party veterans on account of their use of conventional, non-Marxist appeals. Ultimately, this new mobilizational strategy elicited a surprisingly strong reaction from Soviet society at large, popularizing the regimes values and priorities on the mass level with remarkable effectiveness. Such success earned the new approach to propaganda official

sanction from the party hierarchy.

My findings regarding this new pantheon of everyday patriots, iconic heroes and dynamic role models are, however, complicated by the events of 1936-1938. No sooner had this populist line come into its own than it was blindsided by the most brutal dimensions of the Great Terror. Unmasked as enemies of the people between 1936 and 1938, many of the new heroes of the Soviet Olympus lapsed into disgrace, taking with them an entire generation of bestselling novels and short stories, textbooks, poster art and popular dramas for the stage and silver screen. Worse, I demonstrate that public opinion was profoundly shaken by this slaughter of the societys heroes and role models. As a result, amid the bloodletting, the new lines hard-won emphasis on personal dynamism and individual heroism lapsed back into discussions of sterile schemata and anonymous social forces epitomized by the launch of the notorious Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1938a book which became a veritable symbol of the Stalin regime.14 Ultimately, my research reveals that this destruction of the partys usable past resulted in a broad ossification of the official line in Soviet mass culture.

I conclude the study by arguing that it was precisely this paralysis of the propaganda state during the mid-to-late 1930s that forced the party hierarchs to introduce an array of rather questionably-Marxist mobilizational surrogates. Most controversial among these concessions was their turn to a heavy investment in Russian national imagery, rhetoric and iconography in a desperate bid for hearts and minds. This sea-change in official propagandalong assumed by specialists to stem from a variety of factors including the eroding prospects for world revolution; the rise of Hitler; the triumph of administrative pragmatism; the evolution of Soviet nationality
14

Published continuously between 1938 and 1953 in 67 languages, the Short Course enjoyed a total print-run of over 40 million copiesa record setting feat at mid-century. It was removed from circulation only in 1956 after N. S. Khrushev denounced it during his famous Secret Speech. See T. Zelenov, Bibliografiia, Bolshevik 23 (1949): 89-90.
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policy; nationalist or etatist sympathies within the party hierarchy; and exigencies of war15is thus attributed in the present study to a surprisingly contingent, panicky turnabout in official propaganda and ideology.

Suggestions for future research n/a

Recommendations for the US Policy Community Understanding the Stalinist systems failure to inculcate a sense of orthodox communist identity within Soviet society is relevant to US policymakers inasmuch as it reveals the limitations of even the most hegemonic states. George Orwells 1984 captured the imagination of entire generations of analysts concerned with totalitarian regimes power to shape their societiesnot only in demographic terms, but in terms of popular metalit as well. But as persuasive as this model is, it works much better in theory than in practice. Examining a major Soviet ideological fiasco, this researc argues that indoctrination is more of a negotiative processa dialogthan is often realized. No matter how powerful states may be, they cannot inculcate in society ideas, concepts or values by force or media barrage without generating both resistance and a considerable degree of misunderstanding, distortion and selective assimilation. Even the

paradigmatic propaganda state, the Stalin-era USSR, failed in its efforts to remake Soviet mentalit in materialist, internationalist terms. Instead, Soviet ideologists slowly realized over the course of the 1930s that their revolutionary value systems would have to be packaged within familiar narrative structures, legends and/or myths in order to find resonance on the popular level and avoid marginalization.

The implications of this inherent limit on the power of mobilizational ideology are at least as relevant to US policy makers as the nature of the limitations themselves. Much of the USs Cold War struggle was waged under the assumption that Soviet society subscribed to partys MarxistLeninist ideology in a way analogous to how American citizens supported national political values like individual freedom and subjectivity, representative democracy, private property, rule of law and free market capitalism. This research suggests that popular loyalty in the USSR was not based on the appeal of Marxism-Leninism so much as auxiliary mobilizational campaigns meant to supplement the poorly understood central tenets of the system. Socialism, party rule, a planned economy and state ownership of the means of production were never as compelling for Soviet citizens as the memorialization of the Second World War, the prioritizing of national
15

For a more detailed discussion of this literature, see the introduction to Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity.
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security, the support of ethno-cultural development in the republics and union-wide prospects for upward mobility, continued technological progress and society-wide prosperity.

This explains why N. S. Khrushchev proved unable to revive popular faith in the party despite his support of destalinization; it also explains why he failed to foster a supra-national sense of identity revolving around membership within the Soviet people (Sovetskii narod). It explains why Khrushchevs successors relied so heavily on mobilizational propaganda celebrating the war and Russian nationalist appeals in order to bolster their legitimacy. It explains why M. S. Gorbachev, like Khrushchev, failed to mobilize Soviet society around a refurbished MarxistLeninist party when he tried to break with the ideological compromises of the Brezhnev-era stagnation. Finally, it explains why communist and left-leaning politicians in post-Soviet

Russia and the republics have resorted so frequently to populist and nationalist sloganeering since 1991.

Aside from this studys relevance to understanding the politics in the former republics of the USSR, it would seem instructive for analysts analyzing popular support for state power throughout the world. After all, although many of the least democratic and most hostile states North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, China, Cuba, Myanmar and Russiaclaim a popular mandate on the basis of homegrown patriotic ideologies, policymakers should refrain from assuming that these regimes remain stable merely through indoctrination, censorship and aggressive use of political police forces. Instead, US analysts should explore the possibility that these states gamble on the use of auxiliary mobilizational strategies to generate and maintain popular support. Identifying what these bread-and-butter or mythological appeals are and how to

counter them would seem to be the first step toward challenging their authority, encouraging internal dissent and nurturing a consensus forents.

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