Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin

Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies

by Karen Petrone

A lively investigation of the official and unofficial meanings of Stalinist celebrations.

"An impressive and highly readable book that... casts a clear and disturbing light on the relationship of Stalinist mythology, state power, popular participation, and the unending complexities of social and cultural survival mechanisms and daily life." --Richard Stites

In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, public celebrations flourished while Stalinist repression intensified. What explains this coincidence of terror and celebration? Using popular media and drawing extensively on documents from previously inaccessible Soviet archives, Karen Petrone demonstrates that to dismiss Soviet celebrations as mere diversion is to lose a valuable opportunity for understanding how the Soviet system operated. As the state attempted to mobilize citizens to participate in the project to create New Soviet men and women, celebration culture became more than a means to distract a population suffering from poverty and deprivation. The planning and execution of celebrations reflected the Soviet intelligentsia's efforts to bring social and cultural enlightenment to the people. Physical culture demonstrations, celebrations of Arctic and aviation exploits, the Pushkin Centennial of 1937 and the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, and the celebration of New Year's Day were opportunities for the Soviet leadership to fuse traditional prerevolutionary values and practices with socialist ideology in an effort to educate its citizens and build support for the state and its policies. However, official celebrations were often appropriated by citizens for purposes that were unanticipated and unsanctioned by the state. Through celebrations, Soviet citizens created hybrid identities and defined their places in the emerging Stalinist hierarchy, allowing them to uphold the Soviet order while arrests and executions were rampant. This rich look at celebrations reveals the complex dialogues and negotiations between citizens and leaders in the endeavor to create Soviet culture.

Karen Petrone is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Kentucky.

Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies--Alexander Rabinowitch and William G. Rosenberg, editors

Contents
Interpreting Soviet Celebrations
Part 1: Soviet Popular Culture and Mass Mobilization
Parading the Nation: Demonstrations and the Construction of Soviet Identities
Imagining the Motherland: The Celebration of Soviet Aviation and Polar Exploits
Fir Trees and Carnivals: The Celebration of Soviet New Year's Day
Part 2: The Intelligentsia and Soviet Enlightenment
A Double-edged Discourse on Freedom: The Pushkin Centennial of 1937
Anniversary of Turmoil: The Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution
Celebrating Civic Participation: The Stalin Constitution and Elections as Rituals of Democracy
Celebrations and Power

Genres: History

280 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2000

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades, Karen Petrone posits that a study of regime celebrations is key to understanding the state and social dynamic in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s. Her overarching argument is that while such events have been considered by scholars as mere propaganda that had little impact on individuals’ daily lives, the discourse surrounding these festivals could not be controlled and was an important factor in formulating alternative identities, expressing internal struggles, and even engendering resistance. Central to her discussion is the juxtaposition of celebration and terror, the contradictions that such festivals entailed, and the regime’s desire to create an atmosphere of plenty and joy amidst the purges that loomed in the back of everyone’s mind. The author begins with the assertion that celebration was not a mere diversion, but a force that “shaped social realities even as it was shaped by them”. It attempted not only to project the utopian socialist future onto the present, but to provide didactic experiences and political education. She then highlights Aesopian language, subversions, and festival failures as three ways in which official discourse could become an alternative one, and suggests gender, nationality, history, culture, and heroes and relevant categories of such discourse.

Petrone’s analysis begins with ordered marching, a form that the Soviets appropriated from the Russian Empire, and argues that such events promoted hierarchies through the ways in which they were constructed even as they promulgated equality. Both the spectators, who were chosen for optimal viewing positions based on their status within the elite, and the marchers were part of this discourse. The latter expressed the notion of hierarchy in multifarious ways: the military and the proletariat were presented ahead of other classes, men were favored ahead of women, and nationalities were symbolized by their relation to (and dependence on) the Russian center. Her next chapter looks at another odd juxtaposition, the celebration of heroes through the lens of equality. The idea was to create a universal sense of potential, but many citizens could not identify with these champions; for those who were already excluded this behavior reinforced the notion of unattainable positions within the hierarchy. This included women and non-Russian nationalities, both of which were groups that were discriminated against in discourses of heroism.

In the final section of Part 1, Petrone examines the debate over the use of the fir tree for the Soviet New Year, which was introduced after 1935 as a way of connecting a Soviet holiday to a popular one (Christmas) in order to mobilize support. Tied to this were disagreements about holding an event that lacked an expressed ideological purpose and attempted to mobilize through entertainment rather than didacticism. The state was not concerned that children might make “bourgeois” connections with the tree, however, but hoped that the fun engendered by such celebrations would endear them to the state even in times of general hardship. She also notes, however, that individuals seized this opportunity to engage in private celebration and take a rare step back from the private sphere. Acknowledging that some fir tree celebrations did end up being politicized, the author shifts her gaze to adult carnivals that, like the former event, attempted to carve out a space of happiness within societal misery and gave tacit acceptance to the divide between public and private by emphasizing the joy to be found in personal relationships. Furthermore, in all of the celebrations discussed in Part 1, failures within the event gave spectators an opportunity to create meaning for themselves, whether it was the inability to organize a parade, the failure of a heroic undertaking meant to trumpet Soviet power, or the numerous accidents and disasters that befell the allegedly joyous fir tree celebrations.

Part 2 takes a closer look at the role of the intelligentsia in constructing celebrations. Her first case study is the festival in honour of the 100th year of Alexander Pushkin’s death, which in itself emphasized hierarchy by promulgating him as the greatest Russian poet. The objective of this event was twofold: to attract members of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia by championing a pre-revolutionary figure and to mobilize a cultural revival. Pushkin was presented as a contemporary of the Soviets, but much about Pushkin’s personal life was contradictory to the Soviet ideal. In order to transform him into a national hero, the intelligentsia had to rewrite the tale of his aristocratic background, promulgate his writings as accessible to the newly literate (which they were not), and emphasize his revolutionary and public personality. Petrone notes some of the problems with this celebration, such as the fact that the money could have been used to help needy individuals rather than be redistributed among the elites, or that the spread of the celebrations discriminated in favor of Moscow at the cost of peripheral regions and nationalities where the cultural revival was most needed. Moreover, the official discourse produced multiple representations, with some taking Pushkin (or, the regime’s) message of political freedom too far and chastising the regime and others using Aesopian ambiguity to tell his tale in a way that directed Pushkin’s criticisms towards the state.

Preparations for the 20th anniversary of the October Revolution were another realm in which the top-down transmission of culture proved problematic for the regime. Despite trying to highlight 1917 as a turning point, the central government imitated celebrations from the days of the Tsar and decided to focus on individual, rather than mass, projects. It also had to rewrite history to portray Stalin as the only legitimate successor to Lenin, while at the same time managing Lenin’s popular image so that it could not be appropriated for alternative discourse. The juxtaposition between the terror and festivals is most pointed here, as the looming threat of purges made it difficult for artists to work on these productions because they feared the capriciousness of the regime’s favoritism. Not only did they restrict themselves in their work, but they also delayed so that they could align as closely as possible with the regime’s shifting attitudes. This problem was compounded by the toll that the purges took on the administrators and led to issues surrounding the quality and organization of the festivals. This catalyzed more purges as officials sought scapegoats for the failures and the final result was a weak and unmemorable celebration.

Petrone’s final topic is the Stalinist constitution, whose concomitant festivities were designed to expand political literacy to a new audience that included every adult Soviet. Many of its promised rights, however, led to dissonance within the population. The promise of freedom of religion, for example, was interpreted as an opportunity for religious expansion, the central government taking control away from local religious authorities, and a marginalization of atheists who had been loyal to the regime’s previous dictums. Freedom of speech, meanwhile, caused clashes between critics and local officials, the former of whom believed that they would be protected by the regime if they lashed out against the latter (expectations that were never met). Similarly, the promise of economic and social benefits, from which the peasants were excluded, and the ambiguity of creating farms outside of the collective created conflicts and revealed inequalities. The central government even ran into trouble with its own cadres, many of whom were unable or unwilling to promulgate the new constitution and resented the fact that their loyalty to earlier iterations of regime ideology had been for naught.

Petrone brings all of her arguments together in her final chapter and concludes that the 1930s celebrations had a long legacy and that the regime’s objective of broader appeal disenchanted those who had been committed to previous visions. By evaluating official discourse through a fresh perspective, she restores agency to the society even as it faced the regime’s harshest and most repressive years and demonstrates the multifarious ways in which individuals engaged regime discourse that extended beyond mere obsequiousness or dismissal. Overall, although it sometimes encounters difficulty in summarizing and tying together its many arguments, questions, and conclusions, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades is an important text that challenges traditional notions of Soviet celebrations as carefully controlled products of totalitarianism and is a valuable read for anyone with a scholarly interest in the regime’s state-society dynamic.