Abstract
This is a weighty tome: weighty in knowledge, information, learning and avoirdupois (approx. 4lb. (1.750 kg.) heavy, 3 in. thick and over 900 pages long). Apart from its sheer mass, it is also unusual in its arrangement, methodology and eclectic choice of topics covered. As the author – a distinguished German Professor of Russian history – clearly points out, this is not a straightforward, chronologically sequential history of the USSR from the 1917 Revolution to its collapse in 1991. (There are, after all, plenty of those around, from the very erudite to the merely ephemeral).
What Karl Schlögel offers here is impossible to assign to any literary or academic genre. Its 18 chapters and 59 subchapters comprise a gallimaufry of heterogeneous essays describing and commenting on seemingly random aspects of economic, social, cultural and domestic life in the Soviet period of Russian history without any obvious unifying structure of coherence. It is largely based on Schlögel’s own frequent peregrinations, personal experiences and observations of quotidian, routine practices in the normal (or sometimes abnormal) life of millions of Soviet citizens during just 70 years of the USSR’s existence.
This period covered such momentous historical events as the Russian Revolution itself, the Civil War, the establishment of the USSR, Lenin’s New Economic Policy, the political struggle within the Kremlin for the post-Lenin leadership, the ascendancy of Joseph Stalin and the first and second 5-year plans for the rapid industrialisation of the Soviet economy and the collectivisation of agriculture, the ‘Great Terror’ of the late 1930s, the Second World War, the Cold War, de-Stalinization, the era of Collective Leadership, the Khrushchev and Brezhnev decades, Gorbachev, perestroika, and the ultimate implosion of the USSR and the end of ‘The Soviet Century’. This is the political, economic, and military background and framework for Schlögel’s idiosyncratic depiction of how this impacted on Soviet society.
His choice of topics is reflected in the eccentric titles of some of his chapters: for example, ‘The Philosophy Steamer and the Splitting of Russian Culture’, ‘Names Are Not Just Hot Air’, ‘The China Elephant on the Shelf’, ‘The Soviet Staircase: Towards an Analysis of Anonymous and Anomic Spaces’, ‘The Noise of Time’ and more. After a set of musings that seek to explain his chosen methodology, the author launches on his bewildering survey of such crucial aids to an understanding of life in the Soviet Union as the following: flea-markets, local museums, squalid staircases, public toilets, palm trees (really), factory barracks, the construction of huge dams and hydro-electric stations, the digging of canals (with convict labour), photo magazines, doorbells, perfumes, encyclopaedias, cookery books, lapel badges, pianos, body tattoos, shop-signs and the kommunalka (communal apartment). What the author fails to do, however, is to demonstrate satisfactorily is how any of these phenomena is uniquely or quintessentially ‘Soviet’.
Almost every town or city in the world has its own regular street market; local history museums are to be found worldwide, as are foetid tenement-block staircases; posh hotels in any major city will boast its own ‘Palm Court’; great dams and hydro-electric stations are built on every continent, and canal digging (with or without convict manpower, including the Suez and the Panama) has a long history in most countries; body tattoos, badges and public signage are ubiquitous. Only the kommunalka, where, according to Schlögel, ‘The Soviet People Were Tempered’ (Chapter 27), may conceivably be thought to be a product of Soviet social policy. It is not. Ever since the dawn of Russian civilisation, collective institutions, communal living customs, shared values and social practices have been a perpetual feature of the Russian social landscape – almost, one might say, part of the Russian psyche. In 1990, there was published a collection of essays, edited by Roger Bartlett, entitled Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia: Communal Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society, in which are examined the various forms and regional variety of common examples of innately Russian collective organisations and social organisms. Of these, the most widespread was the Russian peasant commune (obshchina or mir) in which land, livestock, farming implements were held in common ownership, periodically redistributed among the individual households (dvory) which constituted the obshchina. It was not uncommon even for marriages between young men and women to be publicly consummated, and in some localities, it was accepted practice for fathers-in-law to have sexual relations with their daughter-in-law in the son’s/husband’s absence (a custom called snokhachestvo, from snokha, daughter-in-law). There were also artisans’ collectives, known as the ‘artel’, soldiers’ communes, troupes of travelling entertainers, and even convicted prisoners’ and criminal exiles’ obshchiny throughout Siberia, which wielded as much, if not more, power and protection over its members as did the exile authorities. It is quite clear, therefore, that the kommunalka was not a product of the Soviet system; it was an ingrained feature of centuries of peculiarly Russian ‘collectiveness’ (or sobornost – an untranslatable term meaning something like ‘national, spiritual togetherness’). Living in common, sharing facilities and commodities was simply part of being Russian. While making much of other trivial issues, Schlögel seems to have missed the centrality of this phenomenon.
The second half of this book is concerned with more serious matters than the lightweight stuff described above. But simply because the topics treated are more heavyweight, most of them have already been covered in other publications. For example, Chapter 11, ‘Kolyma: The Pole of Cold’, discusses the harsh reality of life in the Far Northern penal colonies and corrective forced labour camps located in the almost permanently sub-zero freezing temperature of north-east Siberia. Here hundreds of thousands of convict labourers, including common criminals and political dissidents, were literally worked to death extracting the rich mineral wealth – gold, cobalt, uranium and so on – from under the ice-locked ground. All the horrors of this frozen hell have already been well documented by such writers as Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, Conquest, Applebaum et al., but despite his dependency on these and similar sources, Schlögel is right to emphasise this grim aspect of the ‘Soviet Century’. The Russian labour settlements were, however, different from the Nazi death camps where people were sent in their millions with sole purpose of exterminating them en masse. The results, if not the methods employed, were poignantly summed up by a dissident Soviet ex-army officer, former Major General Pyotr Grigorenko, who once described the Gulag camps as ‘Auschwitz without the ovens’.
There are other well-written and informative chapters on public holidays and parades, calendar reform, Russian queues, Lenin’s mausoleum and other well-known symbols of the Soviet era. Schlögel’s fat volume contains a good deal of entertaining and interesting material, though marred by the curious mixture of the basic and the banal, the fundamental and the frivolous, exemplified by the often-arcane chapter titles and their subject matter. It would not be surprising to find one entitled: ‘Red Letters: Secrets of the Soviet Condom’.