Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (52 page)

the official press with their own independent observations.

The difficulty of post-war living and the weakness of the propaganda
machine inform the context within which rumours flourished. How- ever, they do not account for the prominence of specifically war rumours in this period. Dramatic rumours of social inversion may have been an expression of social anxiety in 1945–7 and also to some extent after 1948. Why, however, did they manifest themselves in the form of war rumours? Why, in particular, were they rumours about an Anglo-American invasion of the USSR?

War rumours flourished above all within the context of the Soviet
experience of the wartime Grand Alliance as a betrayal. Rumours that the former Allies might invade the USSR after 1945 were credible because of the popular perception that they had been inconstant and unfaithful during the war itself. Distrust of ‘Perfidious Albion’, in particular, endured after the conflict was over. As the Roman Catholic priest Rikhte from L’vov commented in March 1946, Churchill and the English were ‘worse than the darkest speculators’.
^{178
War rumours were}
at their most prolific in the period when Britain continued to be a major player in international affairs. Once America began to take over British interests after 1947, war rumours and war panics seem to have declined. The Allies’ use of nuclear weaponry at Hiroshima and Nagasaki also added to this climate of mistrust. The Soviet press largely attempted to ignore the nuclear attacks and stressed that Japan’s collapse in August 1945 was due to the Soviet intervention.
^{179
Even when}
Ogon¨ek
bucked

^{177
e.g., Proc. GARF, f. R8131, op. 31a, d. 93216, ll. 1–5; d. 21318, l. 27.}

^{178
Sv. TsDAHOU f. 1, op. 23, d. 2835, l. 97.}

^179
Pravda
, 15.08.45, p. 1; 26.08.45, p. 4.

Panics, Peace, and Pacifism 1945–53
163

the trend with a factual report on the explosive capacities of uranium, it
contained only a brief discussion of the American bombs.
^180
Despite
these attempts to minimize the story, Werth remembered that ‘the bomb was the one thing everybody in Russia had talked about that whole day ... ’
^{181
Many people interpreted the dropping of the bomb as}
an attempt to intimidate the USSR. A former artillery officer revealed his perceptions in answering his own question: ‘Why did the Allies drop the bomb on Hiroshima? . . . They wanted not to defeat the Japanese but to show us their strength.’
¹⁸²

However, Hiroshima does not seem to have spawned a great deal of
anxiety about the threat of nuclear attack. The danger that the Allies would wipe out the USSR with its superior weaponry featured surpris- ingly rarely in the state prosecution files. A small number of individuals pointed to the bomb, and US technology in general, as the means by which the Soviet regime might be overthrown.
^{183
However, nuclear}
destruction does not seem to have featured particularly highly in Soviet citizens’ war anxieties. Even during the campaign for the Stockholm Declaration against nuclear weapons, Soviet citizens spoke very little about atomic disarmament. The official mass media in the late-Stalin years was much more focused on the bacteriological warfare being waged in Korea. The threat of a biological attack or a long and arduous war, such as the one they had just fought against Nazi Germany, seems to have been just as important as nuclear warfare in the minds of many late- Stalinist citizens.
^{184
Reassurances about Soviet might did not stop war}
rumours spreading, but the Soviet press was quite successful at shaping its citizens’ perceptions of what the foreign threat might look like.

War rumours also flourished because Soviet citizens believed that
domestic events inside the USSR were of great interest to other states within the international community. Stories of invasion were a feature of the entire Soviet era from the 1920s to the 1980s.
^{185
By the 1960s}
and 1970s the most likely antagonist was considered to be China.
¹⁸⁶

^180
Ogon¨ek
, 09.1945: 35, p. 14.

^{181
Mem. Werth,}
Russia at War 1941–45
(London, 1964)
,
1037.

^{182
Int. Andrei Ivanovich, Moscow, July 2004.}

^{183
Proc. GARF f. R8131, op. 31a, d. 28460, ll. 8–9.}

^{184
Int. Igor Andreevich, Arkhangel’sk, August 2004.}

^{185
Borisov et al.,}
Rossiia i Zapad: Formirovanie vneshnepoliticheskix stereotipov v
soznanii Rosiiskogo obshchestva pervoi polovini XX veka (Moscow, 1998), 121–44.

^186
Lukin,
The Bear Watches the Dragon,
141–3; A. Werth,
Russia: Hopes and Fears

(London, 1969), 280–1.

164
Being Soviet

One of the threads that runs throughout these rumours was the expec-
tation that foreign states might invade the USSR in response to seem- ingly small shifts in internal Soviet policy. Davies refers to an outbreak of war rumours, sparked by the expulsion of the Zinovievites from Leningrad, in 1935.
^{187
This domestic political event was inter-}
preted—within the oral news network—as a potential catalyst for invasion. Many war rumours in the post-war period also reflected this implicit assumption that internal Soviet political events might precipi- tate an assault against the USSR. In early 1946 the rumour circulated in western Belarus that, by striking through the ballot cards, voters would cause the Anglo-Americans to apply pressure for the restoration of the old borders of Poland.
^{188
An entirely domestic act of protest was}
assumed to have reverberations on an international stage. The claim that the Allies were threatening invasion if the regime did not abolish the
kolkhozes
relied on this same assumption, that governments beyond the USSR were deeply concerned about Soviet domestic issues. At least some Soviet citizens operated under the assumption that their domestic lives were of profound interest to the world outside.

The presumption that other states were deeply concerned about
events within the Soviet Union reflected the assumption that the USSR was the most important state within the world community.
^{189
This idea had been sponsored by the Soviet state itself. During the}
1920s and 1930s the Soviet government had encouraged its population to consider themselves to be builders of a new and unique Socialist civilization. Rumours of allied wartime meddling and war rumours in the post-war period reflected the idea that the internal political life of the USSR was an important concern to the other leading powers. British agricultural workers or miners did not anticipate an external invasion to defend their personal interests or wages in this period. Much of the Soviet population, however, seem to have considered their lives to be part of an international drama, that was being carefully observed by the other leading powers.

^187
Davies,
Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror Propaganda and Dissent,
1934–41 (Cambridge, 1997)
,
94.

^{188
Inf. RGASPI f. 17, op. 88, d. 693, l. 21. Fitzpatrick records a similar rumour}

associated with the 1930 census. Fitzpatrick,
Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in
the Russian Village after Collectivisation (Oxford, 1994), 295.

^{189
It may also reflect the assumption that other states would mimic the Soviet policy}

of interfering in domestic life overseas, as the USSR had via the Comintern in the 1930s.

Panics, Peace, and Pacifism 1945–53
165

Those Soviet citizens who anticipated an attack on these grounds had
well-established historical precedents on which to base their fear. The foreign intervention during the Civil War and Nazi invasion of 1941 affirmed the idea that the outside world might seek to destroy the Bolshevik project. War rumours were most prominent in the USSR at
moments of social tension such as 1945–7. But they thrived throughout the Soviet era because Soviet citizens were convinced that other powers might seek to interfere with, and even destroy, the USSR. The outside world, for Soviet citizens, was a threatening place.

The assumption that the outside world was a threat bolstered the
success of the language of Soviet superpower greatness that emerged in the early Cold War. The USSR had become capable not only of defending itself, but also of extending its protective reach to the op- pressed citizens of the colonial world. Whilst it may have evolved, the self-understanding that made Kira Pavlovna’s son want to run off and fight for Che Guevara, and Viktor Dmitrovich speak of the pleasure he derived from supporting the Cubans and Vietnamese in the 1950s and 1960s emerged largely in the Stalin’s last years.
^{190
That language may}
have begun to run out of credibility in the 1980s following the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan. However, the official rhetoric of the Soviet Union as a mighty patron of the oppressed, and as a moral force for good, continued until the fall of the USSR. Brooks’ claim that the Soviet Union was ‘subsidising an empire that its citizens did not value’ is only half the truth.
^{191
The Soviet posture as a patron state was a potent}
source of identity in the late-Stalin years that endured long after Stalin’s death.

CONCLUSION

The success of war rumours and the Peace Campaigns after 1945
depended on the widespread perception that the outside world pre- sented a threat to the USSR. The responses of the Soviet population to the ‘Struggle for Peace’ also offer a fresh perspective on the late-Stalin years. A number of authors have emphasized the political disengage- ment and ossification of this period. However, Soviet citizens rallied

^{190
Int. Kira Pavlovna, Moscow, August 2005, Viktor Dmitrovich, Moscow, September}
2004.

^191
Brooks,
Thank You,
242–3.

166
Being Soviet

passionately, and often emotionally, around the slogan of peace. For
some, the language of moral authority and patronage provided an inspiring narrative of Soviet self-understanding. Others reappropriated the language and mechanisms of the Peace Campaigns to articulate their fears of war, pacifist sentiments, and traumatic memories of the recent past. The Peace Campaigns enjoyed such success because different individuals were able to reappropriate them to different ends. The late-Stalinist government could mobilize its population to ‘Struggle for Peace’, but it could not guarantee that they shared its definition of what ‘peace’ meant.

5

Subversive Styles? Official Soviet Cultural Identity in the late-Stalin years 1945–1953

In September 1943 G. Lebedenko, the head of the Soviet Red Cross
mission in the United States, wrote an article for publication in the
Journal of the American Soviet Medical Cooperation Society
. Describing the advance of medical research, Lebedenko wrote, ‘There are innumer- able problems and we have not yet solved them all. And these problems should not be solved alone, by each nation in isolation . . . This must be done not by one people not by one nation but by all together, in unity for the betterment of life and for the future of all mankind.’
^1
Lebeden-
ko’s article was written at the high-point of wartime enthusiasm about Western civilization. Anglo-American films, jazz music, science, and even to some extent foreign servicemen were welcome contributors to Soviet life. His unashamedly internationalist comments could not have been made in 1947. As the Cold War emerged out of the wreckage of the Grand Alliance, the Official Soviet Identity of the USSR as a civilization began to assert the distinctiveness and superiority of socialist as opposed to capitalist science, style, and culture.