![]() ![]() 6 The humanist theme is strongly expressed in Maxim Gorky’s serialized commentary (Gorky 1968).5 The Civil War accounts by Isaak Babel and Andrej Platonov indulge in recording the awkward, earnest, and intense attempts by barely literate peasant-soldiers to cast themselves as revolutionary subjects (Babel 1929 Platonov 1972). It was not just that many more individuals became engaged in writing and talking about themselves but that the autobiographical domain reached entirely new layers of the population, thereby creating a new, specifically Soviet, subgenre of sorts: of authors groping for a language of self-expression at the same time as they learned to read and write. Following the Revolution of 1917, the autobiographical domain expanded dramatically, both in absolute numbers and in sociological terms. In prerevolutionary times, writing an account of one’s life or keeping a journal was limited to a relatively small segment of educated Russian society. ![]() 5 Bibliographic evidence as well as what is known on state-sponsored efforts at autobiographical writ (.)Ĥ As a textual genre, the diary, along with other autobiographical narratives, was markedly shaped by the Soviet Revolution.The intense politicization of acts of talking and writing about oneself also influenced the writing of diaries in the 1930s – the actual source body investigated in this essay. Most important, they were forced to acknowledge the political weight of their biography. Soviet citizens living through the first decades of Soviet power were intensely aware of their duty to possess a distinct individual biography, to present it publicly, and to work on themselves in search of self-perfection. 4 The activities of autobiographical reflection, writing, and speech formed an important medium through which revolutionary subjectivities were to be attained. To a large extent, revolutionary politics centered on creating revolutionary selves, on making Soviet citizens think of themselves and act as conscious historical subjects. My article highlights an opposite dynamic: it argues that the primary effect on individuals’ sense of self of the Revolution of 1917 and of Soviet revolutionary practice was not repressive, but productive. 4 When talking about the self-creating effects of the Russian Revolution, I certainly do not want to (.)ģ What links these two interpretations is the notion that the Soviet regime sought to subjugate individuals’ sense of selfhood, forcing them to conceal their subjectivities or obliterating them altogether.In the Stalinist context, subjectivity, which I define as a capacity for thought and action derived from a coherent sense of self, is thus regarded as a quality that manifests itself against, and in spite of, the policies of the Soviet state. It is in this body of unofficial or secret sources that the authentic scripts of individual selfhood, the essence of their subjectivity, is expected to be uncovered. ![]() In search of Soviet citizens’ concealed or repressed selves, scholars have placed high hopes on the newly available “hidden transcripts” (James Scott) of Soviet society: secret NKVD reports and interrogations, unpublished correspondence, diaries. Though the “system” was successful, through a combination of propaganda and coercion, in enforcing a degree of outward popular conformity, individuals were able to mitigate these pressures by retreating into private spheres unaffected by “official” ideology. The latest to invoke James Scott’s dichotomy of official and hidden trans (.)ġ One of the assumptions most deeply ingrained in the Western imagination of the Stalinist regime is that at their core, members of Soviet society resided externally to state policies and Bolshevik ideology.
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