Abstract
Our aim in this chapter is to interrogate the notion of the modern self as a historical category and examine how certain historians working within the American tradition of historiography on the Soviet Union have used it as an entry point to reach a deeper understanding of that society and culture.1 Within the Western philosophical tradition, the concept of the self has a weighty history, and from the age of classical antiquity to present-day postmodernism, philosophers have debated the nature, the form, the structure, and indeed the very existence of the self, which has been used interchangeably with the terms subject, person, and identity. We start with Jerrold Seigel’s overtly Freudian model of the modern self, with its three interconnected layers: first, a biological creature marked by material and bodily needs; second, a self that is deeply implicated in the social discourses and cultural codes of its origin; third, a reflexive self that possesses self-awareness.2 Seigel’s model is useful in reminding us that, although we can privilege one level of selfhood for purposes of analysis, it is unwise to ignore the other layers as sources of affirmation and meaning. Historians have used notions of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality, to name just a few categories, to employ both the production and the location of the self as an entry point into history. Rare, however, is the historian who has simultaneously considered all levels of the self.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For an excellent example of this type of work, see Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler, eds, Self and Story in Russian History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
Jerrold E. Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 3–44.
Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone, ‘Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective’, Slavic Review 67/4 (Winter 2008), 967–986.
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
Andreas Schönle, ed., Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968).
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973).
Eric Naiman, ‘On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them’, Russian Review 60/3 (July 2001), 307–15.
Irina Paperno, ‘What Can Be Done with Diaries’, Russian Review 63/4 (October 2004), 561–73.
Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Wolfson, ‘Escape from Literature: Constructing the Soviet Self in Yuri Olesha’s Diary of the 1930s’, Russian Review 63/4 (October 2004), 609–20.
Thus Paperno, in her nuanced analyses of Soviet memoirs and dreams, is careful to present the idiosyncratic voices of her subjects along with her conclusion that there was ‘a sense of self derived from the experience of fear, repression, and deprivation imposed by the state; a self worthy to be submitted as historical material’. Paperno, ‘Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience’, Kritika 3/4 (Fall 2002), 609.
Irina Paperno, ‘Dreams of Terror: Dreams of Stalinist Russia as a Historical Source’, Kritika 7/4 (Fall 2006), 793–824. Paperno makes a conscious attempt to sustain the multilayered subjectivity of her subjects and the distinctiveness of their inner lives within her larger generalisations about Soviet subjecthood.
Lilya Kaganovsky, ‘How the Soviet Man Was (Un)Made’, Slavic Review 63/3 (Fall 2004), 577–96.
For a historical reading that is particularly sensitive to literary concerns, see Anna Krylova, ‘In Their Own Words? Soviet Women Writers and the Search for Self’, in Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith, eds, A History of Women’s Writing in Russia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 243–63.
David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis, eds, Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
Peter Holquist, Making War and Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Choi Chatterjee, Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910–1939 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002).
Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of Nations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
See also Frederick Cooper’s critical discussion on the overextension of the term modernity by historians in his monograph Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
The most famous example from this corpus of European literature is of course Astolphe, the Marquis de Custine’s classic 1839 text, Empire of the Czar: A Journey through Eternal Russia (New York: Doubleday, 1989).
Irena Grudzinska Gross, “The Tangled Tradition: Custine, Herberstein, Karamzin, and the Critique of Russia,”Slavic Review 50/4 (Winter 1991), 989–98.
Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
Marshall T. Poe, “A People Born to Slavery”: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
John Lewis Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States: An Interpretive History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990).
Christopher Lasch, The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).
Norman Saul, Concord and Conflict: The United States and Russia, 1867–1914 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996).
Frederick F. Travis, George Kennan and the American-Russian Relationship, 1865–1924 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990).
William Appleman Williams, American-Russian Relations, 1781–1947 (New York: Rinehart, 1952).
David Charles Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
See esp. E. H. Carr’s multivolume The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923 (New York: Macmillan, 1950).
Theodore H. Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? A Reappraisal of the Russian Revolution, 1900–1930 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964), p. 206.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966).
Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski’s Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956).
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics (New York: Praeger, 1962).
Bertram Wolfe, An Ideology in Power: Reflections on the Russian Revolution (New York: Stein and Day, 1969).
See also Choi Chatterjee, ‘Ideology, Gender, and Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Historical Survey’, Left History 6/2 (Fall 1999), 11–28.
In addition to Friedrich and Brzezinski, the classics of the totalitarian school of historiography include Merle Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, rev. edn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).
Adam Ulam, Unfinished Revolution (New York: Random House, 1960).
Donald W. Treadgold, Twentieth Century Russia (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1959).
Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
For a recent view based on archival evidence, see Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993).
Vladimir Brovkin, ed., The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and the Civil Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
See Stephen Cohen’s excellent critique of this school in Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (New York: Macmillan, 1968).
Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York: Norton, 1973), and Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: Norton, 1990).
Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, trans. Phyllis B. Carlos (New York: Summit Books, 1986).
Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959).
Moshe Lewin was one of the more vocal proponents of Soviet modernisation and the convergence theory; see his perceptive work The Gorbachev Phenomenon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). See also Mark Edele, ‘Soviet Society, Social Structure, and Everyday Life: Major Frameworks Reconsidered’, Kritika 8/2 (Spring 2007), 349–73.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
William Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963).
Ronald Grigor Suny’s article, ‘Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics’, Russian Review 53/2 (April 1994), 165–82, offers an excellent account of the paradigm shift from social to cultural history.
Sheila Fitzpatrick.Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 8–9.
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959).
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), and ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 14.
Ibid., pp. 147–55; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, trans. Randal Johnson et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
‘Governmentality’, in Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, eds, The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: New Press, 2003), pp. 229–45.
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
James Miller’s biography, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), is an excellent introduction to the life and thought of the philosopher.
Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, eds, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (London: Tavistock, 1988).
Michel Foucault.The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality (New York, 1985), 2, p. 29.
Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Jochen 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), and Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
On Foucault’s applicability to a non-Western context, see Laura Engelstein, ‘Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia’, American Historical Review 98/2 (April 1993), 338–53.
Jan Goldstein, ‘Framing Discipline with Law: Problems and Promises of the Liberal State’, American Historical Review 98/2 (April 1993), 364–75.
Jan Plamper, ‘Foucault’s Gulag’, Kritika 3/2 (Spring 2002), 255–80.
Benda Hofmeyr, ‘The Power Not to Be (What We Are): The Politics and Ethics of Self-Creation in Foucault’, Journal of Moral Philosophy 3/2 (July 2006), 215–30.
T. J. Berard, ‘Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, and the Reformulation of Social Theory’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 29/3 (September 1999), 203–27.
See Svetlana Boym’s interesting comments on Hellbeck’s construction of Soviet subjectivity. ‘Kak sdelana “sovetskaia sub’ektivnost’”’?Ab Imperio 3 (2002), 285–97.
Ibid., p. 114. See also Anna Krylova, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies’, Kritika 1/1 (Winter 2000), 119–46.
Yanni Kotsonis, ‘“No Place to Go”: Taxation and State Transformation in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia’, Journal of Modern History 76/3 (2004), 531–77.
Eric Lohr, ‘The Ideal Citizen and Real Subject in Late Imperial Russia’, Kritika 8/2 (Spring 2006), 173–94.
Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
Barbara Walker, Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture and Survival in Revolutionary Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
The history of domesticity and everyday life is beginning to attract the attention of both Russian and Western scholars. See G. Andreevskii, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ Moskvy v stalinskuiu epokhu, 1920–1930-e gody (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia 2003).
Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, eds, Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
N. B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’: Normy i anomalii, sovetskogo goroda 1920/1930 gody (St Petersburg: Zhurnal “Neva”: Izdatel’sko-torgovyi dom “Letnii sad”, 1999).
N. B. Lebina, Entsiklopediia banalnostei: Sovetskaia povsednevnost’—Kontury, simvoly, znaki (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2006).
N. B. Lebina and A. N. Chistikov, Obyvatel’i reformy: Kartinypovsednevnoi zhizni gorozhan v gody NEPa i khrushchevskogo desiatiletiia (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003).
Stephen Lovell, Alena V. Ledeneva, and Andrei Rogachevskii, eds, Bribery and Blat in Russia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
Timo Vihavainen, Normy i tsennosti povsednevnoi zhizni: Stanovlenie sotsialisticheskogo obraza zhizni v Rossii, 1920–1930-e gody (St Petersburg: Zhurnal “Neva”, 2000).
Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middle-class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
Boym, Common Places, 30. Historians who have investigated the forms and nature of pre-revolutionary private, domestic, and intimate life include Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
Mary W. Cavender, Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate and Local Loyalties in Provincial Russia (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007).
Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds, Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in fin de siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). See Craig Calhoun’s excellent review essay ‘Morality, Identity, and Historical Explanation: Charles Taylor on the Sources of the Self’, Sociological Theory 9/2 (Autumn 1991), 232–63.
Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), raises these possibilities in the post-Stalin era.
Beth Holmgren has also argued about the importance of the gendered domestic sphere in the framing and shaping of Soviet political dissidence. See Holmgren, Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time: On Lidiia Chukhovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, trans. William Tempter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Susan A. Crane, ‘Historical Subjectivity: A Review Essay’, Journal of Modern History 78/2 (June 2006), 434–56.
Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), and Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
Philip Carl Salzman, ‘On Reflexivity’, American Anthropologist 104/3 (September 2002), 805–11.
Nina Turnarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
Copyright information
© 2013 Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chatterjee, C., Petrone, K. (2013). Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective. In: Mass Dictatorship and Modernity. Mass Dictatorship in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304339_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304339_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45446-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30433-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)