The ‘Stalinist Self’

• How did Stalinist propaganda and ideology affect the individual?
• Is it possible to speak of a “self-stalinisation” of individuals?
• Did the Bolsheviks succeed in making a new 'Soviet man' or 'Soviet woman'? (debate)

Source

Diary of Stepan Filippovich Podlubny, in Garros, Veronique, Natalia Korenevskaya and Thomas Lahusen (eds), Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York, 1997), pp. 293-331.

Essential Reading

Hellbeck, Jochen, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi’, in Fitzpatrick, Stalinism: New Directions, pp. 77-116.

Kotkin, Steven, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 198-237 (ebook, check library) (OR: Kotkin, Steven, ‘Stalinism as a Civilization’, in Read, The Stalin Years, pp. 213-230)

Davies, Sarah, ‘”Us against them”: Social Identity in Soviet Russia, 1934-41’, in Russian Review 56 (1997), pp. 70-89 (also in: Fitzpatrick, Stalinism: New Directions, pp. 47-70).

Recommended Reading

Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone, 'Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective', in Mass Dictatorship and Modernity, ed. by Michael Kim, Michael Schoenhals, and Yong-Woo Kim (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 205-229.

Additional Reading

Halfin, Igal and J. Hellbeck, ‘Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s ‘Magnetic Mountain’ and the State of Soviet Historical Studies,’ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 44 (1996), pp. 456-463.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ‘Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Rusia’, in: Fitzpatrick, Sheila (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (London, 2000), pp. 20-46.

Halfin, Igal, Terror in my Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003)

Hellbeck, Jochen, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

Garros, Veronique, Natalia Korenevskaya and Thomas Lahusen (eds), Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York, 1997)

Lugovskaya, Nina, I Want to Live: The Diary of a Young Girl in Stalin’s Russia (New York, 2006)

Kelly, Catriona, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London, 2005)