After Lenin's death in 1924, the scope of the role of the state continued to grow under the rule of Joseph Stalin, to include policies related to collective farming and housing; control over official film, the press, radio, music, and visual art; and eventually control of citizens through arrest and deportation to the system of forced labor camps known as “the Gulag”. Scholars like Alexis Peri, whose lecture is highlighted in this resource, ask us to consider what kinds of freedoms of thought, choice, and conscience were preserved, and what kinds of diverse individual experiences were had by Soviet persons even in the midst of such intensive efforts to control and assimilate them by the state. How can we know or gain access to the inner thoughts and lives of individuals who lived in this time and place in order to answer these questions? The oral histories of the HPSSS on which this module focuses are one such resource to consider.
These interviews were conducted in the early 1950s, following the Second World War. Peri highlights this moment of the war and its aftermath as a turning point in the way that Soviet individuals thought about themselves and their relationship to larger Soviet society. The scale of devastation from the war was unimaginable—a massive interruption of the story of success and progress that the Soviet state told about itself. Peri describes several effects of this shock. Because there was no simple or easy way for the state to explain this tremendous loss, there was more room for Soviet individuals to decide on their own what it meant. After the decades led by Lenin and Stalin when Soviet citizens were continually seen as works in progress, always “becoming” the conscious, collective, worker class they were supposed to be, the sacrifices of the war meant that citizens had unquestionably proven themselves. They now were Soviet citizens, no longer “in progress”. And they were citizens who felt entitled to question and contradict the state more outspokenly, both in their public and private voices. Learn more about this period in Alexis Peri’s lecture “Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Times: Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience.” Minutes 45:36–46:40 discuss changes to Soviet state identity during World War II, and minutes 48:15–49:34 talk about changes in personal identity, illustrated with three passport photos of a Soviet woman.
Peri invites us to ask: How do scholars like herself know what citizens know or think in their private lives? Private writing found in diaries and letters are one source. The oral histories focused on in these lessons are another. But even when reading personal writings, is it possible to separate someone’s “true” self, thoughts, or feelings, from the identity, thoughts, and feelings that are shaped by outside forces? Through close exploration of individual Soviet voices, this module invites students both to learn about the diverse individual experiences of Soviet citizens, and to connect these larger questions about personal identity and public forces to their own lives.