Introduction: the paradoxically familiar face of Stephen Kotkin's socialist modernity
‘Modernity’ has long been a working category of historical analysis in Russian and Soviet studies. Like any established category, it bears a history of its own characterised by founding assumptions, conceptual possibilities and lasting interpretive habits. Stephen Kotkin's work has played a special role in framing the kind of scholarship this category has enabled and the kind of modernity it has assigned to twentieth-century Russia. Kotkin's 1995 Magnetic Mountain introduced the concept of ‘socialist modernity’. His continued work with the concept in his 2001 Kritika article ‘Modern Times’ and his 2001 Armageddon Averted marked crucial moments in the history of the discipline and have positioned the author as a pioneering and dominant voice on the subject for nearly two decades.Footnote 1 Given the defining nature of Kotkin's work, a critical discussion of its impact on the way the discipline conceives of Soviet modernisation and presents it to non-Russian fields is perhaps overdue.Footnote 2 Here, I approach Kotkin's work on modernity as the field's collective property in need of a critical, deconstructive reading for its underlying assumptions, prescribed master narratives, and resultant paradoxes.Footnote 3
The main paradox that I examine is how the pioneering comparative approach to the study of the Soviet Union that Kotkin called for – that is the approach that aimed at integrating the Soviet experience into transnational history and argued for the indispensability of this intellectual move for a better understanding of both Soviet and Western trajectories – ended up with a vision of Soviet modernity as the familiar radical other of the West: anti-capitalist and anti-individualist. This tenacious vision is traceable to the founding decades of American Soviet studies. At its core, I argue, is the unquestioned status of this stubborn and seemingly indivisible constellation of anti-capitalist and anti-individualist characteristics of Soviet socialism.Footnote 4 Starting with Magnetic Mountain, Kotkin has defined these co-dependent anti-aspirations of the Soviet non-market industrial experiment as ‘fixed ideas’ or ‘basic tenets’.
These ‘tenets’, as scholars know too well, resonate throughout the field of modern Russian history. They are summarised in the Bolshevik infatuation with the making of the collectivist man, this ultimate goal behind the socialist agenda to build an economic alternative to capitalism and, in the process, liberate human nature from its individualistic degradation. The Soviet experiment in non-market industrial modernity, as a result, is held to be a priori antithetical to individualising discourses of modernity. Consequently, the very discourse on the individual as a non-subversive cultural practice is de facto reserved to market, that is, capitalist experiences with the modern.Footnote 5
In what follows I will demonstrate how, in applying the notion of fixed fundamentals as categories of analysis to Soviet realities regardless of the decade, Kotkin and scholars who draw on his work, equate the longue durée of the Soviet modern project with Bolshevism and its system of anti-individualist values. As a result, Kotkin in particular inscribes the complexity of Russia's development in the twentieth century into what I will call here a master narrative of stagnation. According to this narrative, the Bolshevik political-cultural formation arrives on the Russian revolutionary scene between the 1900s and the 1920s, is put into practice in the 1930s, and continues to define the economic and cultural parameters of the Soviet modernity project after the war, eventually causing its collapse. The most troubling aspect of this master narrative is not only Kotkin's assertion that the Soviet Union's post-war economy, culture and ideology were fatally set into pre-war Bolshevik patterns but that they stagnated in tandem. In striking contrast with the prevalent academic understanding of capitalist modernity as the antithesis of stability, Kotkin's socialist modernity ends up being consumed and eroded by inertia.Footnote 6 As a result, the only cultural language that Kotkin could possibly make available to his modern Soviet subject is, of course, ‘Bolshevik’. Since the early 2000s Kotkin's characterisation of Soviet culture as a whole as the culture that ‘speaks Bolshevik’ has become an academic interpretive trope of enviable popularity.
My goal here is to begin to disassemble the paradigm of ‘fixed ideas’ that informed Kotkin's work and to question the stubborn disjunction within and outside academia between non-market industrial societies and individualising discourses of modernity. Thus, this essay questions: first, whether the ‘fixed [anti]ideas’ of Bolshevism constitute a comprehensive analytics applicable to the Soviet Union's cultural development in the long term; and, second, whether the Soviet cultural formation is adequately captured by academic explications which treat modern individualising discourses as outside formal socialist culture.Footnote 7
To begin this critical conversation about Kotkin's script for Soviet socialist modernity I invite scholars to reflect whether the Bolshevik ‘basic tenets’, which undoubtedly informed the imagination of a new type of modern industrial society in the 1920s and the early 1930s, could indeed become the actual language of the industrial (even if non-market) society once it came into being. How was this anti-individualist cultural paradigm of Bolshevism to address the profound social transformation brought about by the 1930s industrialisation, namely, the appearance of an urban and professionally differentiated middle class defined by the alienating and self-centred character of intellectual labour and the expectations of urban privacy? How historically viable is the notion of ‘fixed ideas’ that implies that such profound structural changes in the lives of millions of Soviet people had no effect on Soviet official culture?
This essay consists of three parts. Part one offers a critical reading of Kotkin's work on Soviet socialist modernity as well as his defining impact on the constitution of the subfields of cultural history and subjectivity studies. Part two explores the methodological ramifications of Kotkin's study through the recent scholarship on post-war Soviet society where the limitations of his analytics of ‘fixed ideas’ and ‘speaking Bolshevik’ are particularly revealing. In part three, I complete my critical reading of Kotkin's work from the angle of the socio-demographic transformation of everyday Soviet routines of work, leisure and private life.
My agenda here is twofold. First, I want to disrupt the assumption of incompatibility between non-market industrial societies such as the Soviet Union's and individualising discourses of modernity that foreground personal and private aspects of the self and presuppose a differentiation between the self and its social milieu. Second, I propose an alternative account of Soviet socialist modernity by rethinking the dynamics of social and cultural change in twentieth-century Russia. I argue that, as early as the mid 1930s, Soviet industrial society began speaking more than one—still socialist—language of modernity right at the centre of its political and popular culture. I also contend that the Soviet cultural formation is larger than the Bolshevik tradition. In fact, as long as we continue to assume that Soviet modernity had only one formal language – Bolshevik – we choose to disregard in advance the rise of new socialist cultural forms.Footnote 8 I call these new cultural forms of Soviet socialism post-Bolshevik.Footnote 9
What set post-Bolshevik cultural developments apart from their Bolshevik predecessor was not only the emerging language, which operated with formerly castigated and under-articulated categories of identity such as ‘individuality’ and the ‘personal’. This new language enabled a public conversation that carried meanings of the ‘individual’ and its relationship to the ‘social’ away from the Bolshevik collectivist agenda which aimed at eliminating the very difference between the two. In accordance with the Bolshevik vision of alternative modernity, the new humanity was to ‘merge’ (that is, see no difference in) its personal and collective interests—in contrast, the post-Bolshevik Soviet discourse on the modern socialist individual posited a new task of learning how to ‘connect’ (that is, relate) individual predispositions and goals with the social good. I treat these new developments which provided Soviet citizens with a formal language to present individual and social dimensions of their lives as distinct entities, in need of relation but not identification, as the epistemic beginning of a new socialist discourse on the individual and his or her non-market industrial society.
The two notions – the individualising discourse and the discourse on the individual – that are rarely well articulated in academic literature are in need of an explication here. I do not use the two concepts interchangeably. In fact, the focus of this article is not a discourse on the individual, individuality or individualism per se which, in academic literature, tends to mean a cultural conversation that focuses on personal and private aspects of the self. Instead, I explore individualising discourses which, in my definition, encompass the individual and the social (be it community, collective, society, or common good) and articulate a relationship between the two. As a result, I privilege neither the individual nor the social but rather focus on the way a relationship between the individual and the social is conceived in different historical settings. I hold that an individualising discourse enables its users to draw, in a constructive manner, on notions of differentiation and distinction between the self and society.Footnote 10
Given these parameters of my analysis, I intentionally avoid equating modern individualising discourses exclusively with the liberal Western tradition. I hold instead that debate about the individual and his or her relationship with society is an ongoing historical conversation and the liberal tradition (far from being a uniform tradition itself) provides only one commentary on the problem, however privileged.
In conclusion, I ponder whether, having disrupted Kotkin's vision of Soviet modernity as a totality of synchronised economic, cultural, ideological stagnation we are positioned to pose a question about Soviet modernity as no longer reducible to one historical form and to reconsider its status as a radical alternative to post-1945 European experience. To answer these questions one needs to approach the post-Bolshevik moment in modern Russian history on its own terms. The amount of work in store for scholars working on the Soviet Union from the mid 1930s onwards, I contend, is comparable with the decades of work that have been devoted to the Bolshevik formation. The task before historians today is nothing less than mapping out a new set of analytical categories, discursive logics, and historical problematics—an undiscovered country of post-Bolshevik Soviet socialist modernity.
New directions and ‘fixed ideas’ of Kotkin's Soviet modernity
The anti-capitalist and anti-individualist socialist concept of Soviet modernity that Kotkin developed in Magnetic Mountain was complex and multi-layered. It was intricately contextualised across Russia's century-long historical predicaments and resolutely tied to transnational destinies of the capitalist world. For Kotkin, ‘Russia's obsession with socialism’ was hardly an accident of history. It was rather a historically over-determined choice that promised a resolution to a complex amalgam of long-standing problems that revolved around Russia's social and economic backwardness. It also addressed a cherished national fantasy about Russia's historical and national distinctiveness and moral superiority. The post-1917 pursuit of a socialist future, Kotkin observed, allowed Russia simultaneously to ally with the Western tradition and to differentiate from it. The socialist choice firmly situated Russia aboard the Enlightenment project with its promise of a scientifically planned, developed and ordered society. At the same time, it allowed Russian intellectuals to indulge themselves in imagining a distinctively Russian modernity without the evils of capitalism. In Kotkin's words, socialism in its Bolshevised version enabled a ‘historically conditioned merger of long-held geopolitical objectives and potent social concerns’ and thus made perfect sense in the Russian historical context.Footnote 11
Conceptualised this way, Kotkin's study of Soviet socialism was predicated on serious rethinking of some resilient academic presuppositions, most immediately about Soviet Russia's relationship with the West. The proposition that Soviet socialism could be thought of as a modern ‘antiworld of capitalism’ exploded the singularity of the conventional understanding of modernity. Four years later, in ‘Modern Times’, Kotkin reformulated this intervention with a concept of ‘multiple modernities’. ‘Modernity’ became a plural and inherently comparative category, the discipline's ticket into transnational and global history.Footnote 12
No less momentous for the field was Kotkin's undertaking to vindicate the ‘cultural dimension’ of Soviet modernity, that ‘powerful cluster’ of Marxist-Bolshevik symbols, concepts, attitudes, languages, even forms of speech that irrupted into political culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Kotkin's approach differed from the preceding schools that had studied Marxist-Bolshevik ideology as a cultural layer largely estranged from the Soviet people. In Magnetic Mountain, the ‘cultural dimension’ constitutes a ‘crucial’ venue of exploration when the analysis moves from macro-levels of global and geopolitical dynamics to micro-worlds of lived socialism at the construction site of Magnitogorsk.Footnote 13 Having presented his Soviet subjects as having historically conditioned stakes in the socialist project, Kotkin made it difficult for himself and the field to dismiss Soviet people's participation in the socialist project as the coercion of personally and emotionally uninvolved individuals. The vindication of the cultural dimension of this socialist project was thus tantamount to putting yet another urgent item on the agenda of the field: a need to conceptualise the relationship between the Bolshevik modernity and the individual. Thus, the beginning of cultural history and subjectivity studies was summoned by the refusal to view the cultural realm as an alienated façade of representations.
The de facto ‘cultural turn’ that Magnetic Mountain called for without using these exact words did not originate with the book, of course. It belonged to the much larger general turn within the historical profession of the 1980s and 1990s toward cultural theory and critical reconceptualisations of the viable subject matters of historical analysis.Footnote 14 In the mid 1990s, Magnetic Mountain was among the first monographs in which the dominant intellectual and methodological trends of the period were applied to the study of Stalinism. For this reason the book ended up redefining much more than the study of Stalinism.
New analytics were especially badly needed to study mutually constitutive interactions between individuals and the socialist project in what Kotkin referred to as micro-worlds of lived socialism. Drawing on Foucault and other critical and cultural theorists, Kotkin introduced into the field of modern Russian history a new analytical language of socialist ‘habitat’, ‘identification games’, and ‘subject formation’. This allowed him to study Bolshevism as an ‘ongoing experience’ of everyday speech, behaviour, dress, thought – the activities that exemplified the practice of ‘speaking Bolshevik’. The very ‘problem of subjectivity’, its formation and expression, under socialism was redefined as a ‘productive process’ – at once demanding, empowering and dangerous – which included ‘[a study of] not only what was repressed or prohibited but what was made possible and produced’.Footnote 15 As a result, Kotkin helped to reorient a whole cohort of scholars toward a culturally and theoretically informed study of Soviet modernity and laid the conceptual ground work for the subjectivity studies.
Given such an ambitious intellectual agenda, one needs to pay special attention to the layer of Kotkin's analysis that the author himself characterises as ‘fixed’ or ‘basic’ and which, by definition, proves to be not open for questioning in his otherwise critical conversation with the field. It is the notion of ‘fixed ideas of the Soviet regime's official ideology’ and the role it plays in Kotkin's discussion of socialist modernity, to which I now turn.Footnote 16 A critical examination of this ‘fixed’ layer of supposedly underlying fundamental principles of Bolshevik thought and political culture is crucial for several reasons. The fundamentals of Kotkin's analysis form the field's conceptual property the roots of which lie in the pre-1990s scholarship. They guide not only Kotkin's but also our own scholarly encounters with Soviet materials, influencing the questions we ask and the interpretations we produce. Shared fundamentals must not remain unexamined, however much they may appear simply given.
What follows is thus not another contribution to the prolonged debate on Soviet subjectivity which began in reaction to the publication of Magnetic Mountain and in which the author of this article herself participated.Footnote 17 Here I propose to take a step back to look at the larger picture. Having debated Kotkin's stand on the Soviet subject since the mid 1990s, cultural historians, I argue, together with the rest of the discipline, forgot to examine the synthesis of underlying fundamental principles of Bolshevik thought that Kotkin assigned to his concept of alternative socialist modernity. It is this basic cultural layer that served Kotkin as the basis for thinking about the Soviet subject and that, as I now understand it, should have been examined first.
In striking contrast with the call for conceptual and theoretical innovation which defined Magnetic Mountain's modus operandi, Kotkin presents his discussion of tenets of Soviet socialism as neither original nor controversial. Rather, it is a non-contentious summing-up of core ideas that the author borrows from the decades of focused scholarly work on Marxist-Bolshevik ideology. We might guess that Magnetic Mountain registers for us the state of the general consensus about the fundamentals of Soviet ideology because core ideas of socialism in this otherwise meticulously footnoted manuscript are explicated without extensive footnoting.
The author whose work on Bolshevik ideology Kotkin does reference is Leszek Kolakowski whose 1978 monumental three-volume Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution was a crowning conclusion to the three decades of the totalitarian school's effort to grasp the nature of Soviet Communism and German Nazism.Footnote 18 Kolakowski's volumes along with his preceding work thus belonged to an outstanding scholarly community that included the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the intellectual historian Alfred G. Meyer, the social scientist Raymond A. Bauer, the writer Arthur Koestler, the political theorist Carl J. Friedrich, the political scientist Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, to name just a few. For Kolakowski and the totalitarian school in general, the concept of the ‘communist idea’, that is ideology as a logical conceptual system with ‘basic values’ and ‘permanent components’ (to use Kolakowski's terminology), played the principal role in explaining the phenomenon of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes and the psychological power they exerted over their populations. The Soviet regime, for example, was understood as a resolute ideology carrier, consumed by its own ideological content while imposing it on the Soviet society. Continuously undergoing multiple revisions in the course of its history, the Marxian-Bolshevik-Soviet ideological project never gave up its fundamental concepts.
The making of this intellectual credo which used ideology as its privileged category of analysis can be traced through several foundational works. Hannah Arendt's 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism was, of course, one of the most influential books of the post-war period. Explaining the phenomenon of totalitarianism, Arendt relied on the concept of ‘inherent logicality’ of totalitarian doctrines. The reason why totalitarian regimes managed to exercise such an overwhelming power over individuals’ minds and to impose ideology into social reality, she argued, lay in logical and consistent structures of their belief systems. Once such an ideological system happened to overtake the mind of an individual, it ruled it by means of a ‘self-coercive force of logical deduction’. What preoccupied Arendt however was less the permanency of specific Bolshevik ideas than the role of ideas in an environment of total terror.Footnote 19
To identify an essential core of Marxist ideas, and then trace their multiform-yet-inevitable unfolding into Stalinism, was a common strategy. One monumental work of the 1950s, Alfred Meyer's Marxism: The Unity of Theory and Practice, published in 1954, supplied the ‘communist idea’ with such a genealogy. Meyer, too, attributed the lasting capacity of Marxism and Bolshevism to captivate people's minds to their ‘over-all synthesis’ and to the coherence of its thought structure. He traced this feature back to Marx and then back to Lenin across Marxist controversies and disagreements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The story that Meyer retrieved from his sources was one of repeated disintegrations and re-integrations of the Marxist and Bolshevik tradition. What was immutable, Meyer's work demonstrated, was the meaning of core Marxist notions and the persistent striving among Marxists towards setting them into logical conceptual systems.Footnote 20 Another classic, The New Man in Soviet Psychology by Raymond Bauer, published in 1952, extended the applicability of Bolshevik basic ‘postulates’ into the post-war period. In his detailed analysis of ‘shifting’ debates that took place around definitions of human nature and society in official ideology, science, philosophy and literature, Bauer, like Meyer, demonstrated that the essential content of Marxism as well as its imperative to produce a logical whole out of its ideas were preserved at every new shift.Footnote 21
More than two decades later—during which an avalanche of publications appeared devoted to Soviet ideology and the Soviet state's unwavering dependence on it – Kolakowski offered one of the most extended analyses of ‘basic values of Marxian socialism’ which underlay ‘general tendencies of Bolshevism’.Footnote 22 His intricate articulation of the Bolshevik project stressed the intention to model a new anti-individualist human nature after the ‘historically privileged proletarian consciousness’ under the conditions of a non-market and collectivist society that strove to ‘nationalise’ the individual itself (that is to erase the difference between the individual, the collective and the state). Like scholars before him, he treated central aspects of communist ideology as immutable and traceable to (though not identical with) Marx's thought.Footnote 23
In the late 1970s, the author considered his work as part of the totalitarian school's tradition. Despite all the criticisms that had by that time been directed at the totalitarian school, according to Kolakowski, the conceptual foundations it had provided for thinking about the ideological premises of the Soviet project had not been surpassed. Footnote 24Kolakowski was right in the sense that the school's idea of Bolshevism's ‘permanent components’ proved to be one of the most influential contributions to the field of modern Russian history. Numerous challengers did criticise the totalitarian approach for either overemphasising the significance of ideology at the expense of society or reducing its role in ordinary people's lives to an intrusive and yet estranged force. Despite their different generations and different methodological traditions, critics did not question the totalitarian account of the ‘communist idea’s’ underlying fundamentals.Footnote 25
In Kotkin we find a cluster of characteristics of Bolshevik thought, familiar from Kolakowski and authors before him, functioning as the established knowledge of the field of modern Russian history. Why should one footnote the established? Soviet anti-capitalist modernity – the world without markets and private property – promised ‘transcendence of selfish individualism’ in the everyday life of Soviet citizens, did it not? The constitution of the new unselfish socialist person was guided by an imperative to re-centre personal identities around labour and the much admired working-class collectivist world-view, not so? This alternative way of being which Kotkin so concisely summarises in his conclusion as ‘a rejection of individualism and a commitment to collectivism’ rested on ‘Marxist class analysis’ which divided the world into antagonistic classes and treated the proletariat as the ‘universal class’ – the living prototype of new humanity. To complete Kotkin's sketch of the essential features of socialism, one needs to add that the mode of operation of the socialist system under construction in Magnitagorsk is defined as ‘mobilisational’ and ‘heroic’ and the temporal perception of the Soviet society as ‘revolutionary’ and future-oriented.Footnote 26 As such, the Soviet doctrine of modernity is derived from and identified with the Bolshevised version of Marxism which, in the 1930s, materialises into ‘Stalinist civilization’. ‘Speaking Bolshevik’ in Magnetic Mountain is much more than a helpful metaphor. It functions as an analytical trope capturing the essence of the Bolshevik project – the process of ‘Bolshevization’ of individuals’ lives.Footnote 27
Kotkin addresses directly the question of how the political cultural credo of socialism that he works out for the 1930s happens to constitute a permanent package for the rest of the Soviet period. The retention and adoptability of core principles was, according to Kotkin, a result of purposeful and tireless ‘management’ of official ideology and culture. In Kotkin's scenario, socialist ideology is continuously adaptable and at the same time recyclable. ‘The Soviet regime's official ideology’, states Kotkin, ‘adaptable as it was, did in fact contain certain fixed ideas that shaped both the course of state action and popular interpretations of state action.’Footnote 28
The Bolshevik socialist ideology predicated on certain fundamental tenets ended up playing a central and lasting explanatory role in Kotkin's scholarship; and yet he never made that ideology the subject of critical examination in and of itself. In Magnetic Mountain Kotkin was already treating his view of Bolshevik-speaking, anti-individualist and anti-capitalist modernity as a comprehensive script of relevance for the Soviet twentieth century as a whole. Having made a ‘quick leap’ into modernity under Stalin, Kotkin argued, the Soviet Union acquired economic and cultural principles that proved eventually to be frozen in their particular 1930s form.Footnote 29 In ‘Modern Times’ and Armageddon Averted, this vision of a stagnating Soviet modernity stuck in the 1930s, struggling to reform itself, failing to do so, and finally collapsing, was sharply contrasted with the dynamic twentieth century of the West. Unlike the Soviet Union that, after the Second World War fell back on its pre-war economic and cultural patterns, the West went through at least two cycles of economic, political, and cultural remaking: from Depression-era capitalism to welfare capitalism, and from the welfare stage of capitalism to post-Fordist capitalism.Footnote 30 The notions of the ‘basic tenets of the system’ and ‘the [stable] official socialist ideology’ of Soviet socialism, established in Magnetic Mountain, were indispensable for making this argument.Footnote 31
‘Modern Times’ also added a new term to describe the Soviet Union's stagnating modernity which was always implicit – the ‘anti-liberal’. Devoted to a study of the ‘interwar conjuncture’, the article situated the Soviet Union with its Bolshevik-speaking modernity within the transnational context of mass production, mass culture, mass consumption and aspirations for a social welfare mode of governance. The Soviet Union and the West, argued Kotkin, travelled essentially the same path of development while retaining an ‘enormous’ liberal versus anti-liberal ‘divide’.Footnote 32 What this argument means is that a rapid expansion of mass entertainment, consumption and education in the Soviet Union did not fundamentally change the basic values of Soviet Bolshevism. Or in other words, no matter what forms Soviet modernity replicated or appropriated from the West, its core content remained the same. Thus, for example, socialist mass culture did not shy away from ‘light entertainment’ but continued to be framed by mobilisational, heroic and revolutionary values, which Bolshevik content was best illustrated by the familiar imperative of the collective's supremacy.Footnote 33
An unsettling conclusion one might derive from Kotkin's treatment of Soviet modernity is that, at the epistemic level, the Soviet Union did not have a post-war period as a historically distinct cultural formation. The perpetuation of Bolshevik-speaking modernity in the Soviet Union is perhaps best captured in Kotkin's interchangeable use of the notions ‘Soviet’, ‘Bolshevik’, ‘Marxist’ either in relation to the 1930s or the 1970s.Footnote 34 This stylistic convention embodies the presumption of a fundamentally static system of Soviet socialist values.
Several paradoxes accompanied the turn to cultural and transnational history in Kotkin's conceptualisation of the Soviet Union's alternative journey to modernity. Having vindicated the cultural dimension of the socialist project, Kotkin, I suggest, simultaneously contributed to fixing its terms and the terms of the new cultural history of the Soviet Union. In the field of Soviet history, the methodological innovation, the opening up of new venues of research, and the influx of new categories of analysis, stopped short of a critical examination of core characteristics of Bolshevik-identified Soviet modernity and their applicability across the century. Using a single cultural key to the whole Soviet history, Kotkin merged the pre-war period into the post-war period. He also ended up reproducing a new version of the old antithesis of ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘the West’. This time, the binary was located inside (rather than outside) the master category of the modern under the rubric of an alternative modernity.
Methodological ramifications
Over the last decade and a half, Kotkin's interpretation of Soviet alternative modernity has had a deep impact on the field of modern Russian history in the US and British academies. It has contributed to the solidification of a general academic presumption that the nearly century-long Soviet experiment, no matter how dynamic, ambiguous, contradictory and changing, operated nevertheless with static underlying basic principles. ‘Fixed ideas’ or ‘cherished ideals’ or ‘fundamental tenets’ have become stable tropes and casual invocations in scholarly work on modern Russia. The perpetuation of the disciplinary belief in basic principles of Soviet modernity thus has a history of its own. The constitution of the discipline's subfield of post-war studies and its reliance on Kotkin's work and several other seminal texts in cultural history is a case in point. My intention here is not to offer a comprehensive review of the growing scholarship on the post-war Soviet Union. Rather, the goal is to pose methodological questions that have not been raised so far about scholarly approaches to the study of Soviet society after the Second World War. Footnote 35
For example, the two field-shaping cultural studies of Bolshevik-Soviet modernity that followed the publication of Magnetic Mountain – Igal Halfin's From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (1999) and Oleg Kharkhordin's The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (1999) did not treat the terms, that is the content, of the Bolshevik creed and subsequent Soviet ideology as a problematic question of analysis.Footnote 36 Instead, what the two contributions had in common with Kotkin's methodological approach was their agenda to study Bolshevik ideology as practice. Or in other words, the known fundamentals of Bolshevik modernity were not questioned but applied. The parallel exploration of fundamental affinities between Bolshevik politics and western and eastern religious and philosophical traditions that the two books undertook as well also did not offer a reinterpretation of the familiar terms of the Bolshevik-Soviet cultural project.Footnote 37
Kharkhordin's approach to Bolshevism, in particular, featured the proletarian collectivist imperative as the governing constant of the Soviet non-capitalist modernising mission from the Russian Revolution to Gorbachev's perestroika. Analysing the processes through which the Bolshevik agenda became the Soviet people's spoken and lived reality, he offered a close reading of ‘practices of collective formation and collective self-examination’. His interpretation invariably equated the official realm of Soviet cultural production with the rule of the collectivist ideal. Especially during the post-war years, argued Kharkhordin, the ‘collectivization-of-life campaign’ aimed at ‘spotting and forcing into a kollectiv those rare individuals who still somehow existed on their own in the interstices of the system’. Those individualising practices that Kharkhordin's study did discover were explained as unintentional and ironic by-products of the collectivist agenda. In The Collective and the Individual, they existed in ‘informal’, that is not Soviet, spaces and subcultures of the Soviet society.Footnote 38
The controversial birth of the subfield of subjectivity studies in the late 1990s and early 2000s also happened to skip a critical step of pointed examination of the core terms of the Bolshevik Marxist creed and its applicability to the Soviet period as a whole. Its pioneers did not question Kotkin's longue durée narrativisation of Soviet history or his implicit presumptions. As a result, pioneers of the subfield were preoccupied not so much with questioning the accepted anti-individualist, that is ‘illiberal’, to use Jochen Hellbeck's term, core of the Soviet Bolshevik agenda but with exploring how deeply the Bolshevik world-view was internalised by Soviet subjects. Hellbeck's seminal contribution was devoted to a thorough analysis of existent continuities between official languages of Soviet illiberal modernity and intimate conversations and self-interrogations that Soviet people conducted on the pages of their diaries. The modern subject that Hellbeck retrieved from 1930s diaries displays a great deal of apprehension about traces of what might be construed as individualist inclinations and spends much time policing himself or herself against them.Footnote 39
Perhaps the most problematic appearance of Kotkin's Bolshevik-identified script of Soviet modernity has occurred in the scholarship on post-war Soviet society. During the last fifteen years, this subfield has undergone an exciting boom that manifested itself in a steady stream of publications, conferences and talks—particularly edited volumes bringing together scholars of different generations united by the goal of rethinking the post-war period.Footnote 40 The most striking feature of this new scholarly effort is not even the fact that the scholarly narratives and analytical categories developed for the period from 1900 to the 1930s were applied to the post-war period but that this transfer took place without a critical discussion. How much explanatory currency should the academic language developed to analyse the Bolshevik dream about Russian modernity be given in research on a society that actually became modern? This question has not been posed.
Instead, scholars of the post-war Soviet Union took it for granted that there existed a fundamental affinity between the Bolshevik vision of alternative ‘modern times’ and what they referred to as post-war ‘key Soviet values’, ‘official values’, ‘Soviet ideology’, ‘official Soviet normative code’, and ‘normative statements’.Footnote 41 The presumption of stable ‘key values’ of Soviet modernity has become the subfield's shared starting point. As a result, ‘key values’ /or ‘Soviet ideology’ /or ‘Bolshevik ideology’ are routinely used interchangeably and do not always enjoy an explicit articulation of the meanings they contain. Indeed it has become an accepted practice in academic literature on the Soviet post-war period to provide, where necessary, a formulaic summing-up of the ‘key values’ of Soviet socialism and then to direct interested readers to texts by Kotkin, Kharkhordin, and Hellbeck.
In the mid 2000s, a new book was added to this list of citable works – Alexei Yurchak's 2005 Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. Undertaking an innovative anthropological study of the last Soviet generation, the book heavily relied on what the author called an ‘authoritarian discourse’ to situate his historical subjects in the last three decades of Soviet socialism. Reminiscent of Kotkin's work but not influenced by it, Yurchak presented his readers with a historical narrative about how a multivalent, dynamic, and contradictory revolutionary language(s) of the 1910s–1920s got reduced to a highly ‘formulaic,’ ‘standardized’, ‘predictable,’ and ‘fixed’ language of Marxism–Leninism in the 1960s–1980s. What was left of the revolutionary discourse was a fixed repertoire of ‘predictable ideas’ traceable to original Bolshevik articulations which the author briefly (and without references) discussed in the introductory chapter. He invoked familiar ‘fundamentals’ of the Bolshevik socialist creed ‘such as equality, community, selflessness, altruism, friendship, ethical relations, safety, education, work, creativity, and concern for the future’. A few pages later, the author pointed to the Bolshevik ideal of the New Man to clarify tenacious meanings of aspired socialist subjectivity in the Soviet Union. In accordance with this ideal, the Soviet citizen, Yurchak sooner reminded than informed his readers, was ‘called upon to submit completely to party leadership’, to ‘cultivate a collectivist ethic’, to ‘repress individualism’ as well as to ‘become an enlightened and independent-minded’ member of socialist society. A presence of individualising currents or undercurrents within Soviet mainstream culture that would allow a person to reflect on his/her individuality and his/her relationship with socialist society was consistently missing from Yurchak's concise definitions. In Everything Was Forever, the ‘authoritarian discourse’ is found in formal celebratory speeches, party and komsomol official documents, routine bureaucratic reporting, public rituals, posters, and slogans. Attached to core Bolshevik fundamentals and occupying a rather narrow place within the giant of Soviet post-war cultural production, the ‘authoritarian discourse’ nevertheless served the author as the privileged background through which he analysed the making of the last Soviet generation.Footnote 42
As a result, the reader of Everything Was Forever does find out how the last Soviet generation positioned itself in relation to the ‘fixed and normalized discursive system’ of Marxism–Leninism. What is left unexplored is the question of how Yurchak's historical subjects related to those vast terrains of post-war Soviet culture that did not make it into the book. The varied worlds of Soviet journalism, literature, film, popularised social sciences did not speak the language of the ‘authoritative discourse’ while they did inform the way Soviet citizens got to know themselves and their socialist contemporaneity.
Not by accident then, the subfield of post-war Soviet history shares its analytical language with scholarship on the preceding period and with scholars who invoke characteristics of Bolshevik modernity. These characteristics include (1) the ambition to ‘merge’ individual and collective interests and/or to ‘transcend’ the private–public distinction and/or to ‘subordinate’ the former to the letter; (2) perpetual anxiety over private and personal aspects of individuals’ lives and continuous failure to treat the realm of privacy as private; (3) the general goal of raising a ‘community-minded and mobilised’, ‘revolutionary’ and ‘heroic’ population, even though scholars acknowledge that this goal increasingly lost momentum after the war.Footnote 43
Since it was assumed that what the Soviet ideological-cultural project had in store for the Soviet population did not change at the fundamental level after the war, the emergent subfield concentrated its research efforts on Soviet society and its interactions with that seemingly known ideological project. One aspect of this research was devoted to the study of Soviet everyday life which produced many novel research agendas such as citizens’ interactions with Soviet local and central authorities, popular reactions to de-Stalinisation reforms, readers’ response to Thaw publications, manifestations of rudimentary civil society, the rise of professional subcultures, socialist consumption, individual single-family housing. Explicating the conceptual grounding of this research in her 2011 historiographical essay ‘The Post-Stalin Era’ in Kritika, Miriam Dobson, for example, explained that one of the subfield's guiding questions was to find out ‘how citizens who had, in Stephen Kotkin's terms, started to “speak Bolshevik” negotiated the sudden shift in rhetoric introduced when Khrushchev attacked the “cult of personality”’. This question asked on behalf of the subfield and by one of the subfield's leading scholars captured precisely what pioneering scholars of the post-war Soviet Union considered to be already known and what they intended to find out. What was known was that the language of post-war Soviet society via which Soviet citizens made sense of things was ‘Bolshevik’. What was not known was how it was applied onto new political developments that did not undermine the core continuities of the Bolshevik project. Such self-positioning of the subfield assumed direct relevance of Kotkin's research to Russia after the Second World War.Footnote 44
This choice of turning the Bolshevik-identified framework into an a priori working paradigm of post-war Russia has had serious methodological ramifications for the kind of interpretive work the subfield has engaged in. My contention is that, having become the subfield's principal language of analysis, Kotkin's anti-individualist and collectivist categories do not match the riches of materials that scholars working on the post-war Soviet Union have presented for analysis. What remains outside scholarly attention, under-interpreted and insufficiently attended to, is the proliferation of concepts and notions in post-war political and popular culture the relationship of which to the Bolshevik project is yet to be established. The concepts and notions that I have in mind are the ones that scholars come across in their research, even incorporate into their writings, but whose meanings they do not explore. They are multiple derivatives of the ‘individual’ (individualnost, individuum, individualnyi), of the ‘person/personal’ (lichnost, lichnyi), of the ‘intimate’ (intimnyi). The sheer prominence and variation of this apparent public preoccupation with the individual, unprecedented in the Bolshevik tradition, deserve close scholarly attention. Moreover, post-war public discourse on the individual needs to be explored not only in relation to the Bolshevik project but also in relation to an arguably novel social language that discussed the individual in terms of the ‘social good’ or the ‘social’ (obshchestvenno poleznyi, obshchestvennyi, not necessarily identical with the ‘collective’) and, in the context of ‘contemporary Soviet society’ (Sovetskoe sovremennoe obshchestvo), not necessarily identical with the Bolshevik-derived academic concept of ‘modern Soviet society’.
An example is in order here to explicate the limiting impact that the Bolshevik-identified socialist framework had on the interpretive practice of the subfield. One of the most thought-provoking pieces published about Soviet conceptualisations of the individual and the public after the war is Juliane Fürst's ‘Friends in Private, Friends in Public: The Phenomenon of the Kompaniia Among Soviet Youth in the 1950s and 1960s’. Fürst engages her subject matter through a study of new forms of post-war socialisation among young people, in particular the thriving culture of semi-private gatherings of friends. Her analysis reveals a complexly structured mindset in the post-war generation. In her words, post-war youth consciousness encompasses a ‘desire to contribute to the collective good’ and simultaneous belief ‘in the existence of individual and societal perfection’. To explain the rationale behind the first part of this consciousness does not present Fürst with a difficulty. In fact, one of the article's goals is to demonstrate that the youth's consciousness was far from a complete escape from the Bolshevik paradigm but, on the contrary, was inflected by its values of ‘communality’ and ‘equality’. What presents a problem is the youth's belief ‘in the existence of individual and societal perfection’, the belief which features the ‘individual’ and the ‘societal’ as distinct (not a priori identified or merged) entities and creditable experiences. However, the possibility of treating ‘individual’ perfection as a distinguishable and credible dimension in the life of an individual remains unexplored and unexplained by Fürst. If the author can tell us exactly where the young people's communal aspirations come from, she cannot explicate where the idea of the self-righteous individual perfection comes from. The author however assumes that it exists outside the conventional paradigm of Soviet overtly collectivist modernity, that is outside the ‘official Soviet normative code’.Footnote 45 In the following section I will explore the following possibility: what if the centring of public attention on the individual in the context of ‘Soviet contemporary society’ constituted a post-Bolshevik, but nonetheless Soviet, and not necessarily subversive cultural project in the Soviet Union?
A post-Bolshevik agenda for a non-market industrial society
Contrary to the persistent academic reliance on the notion of Bolshevik fundamentals, I argue that, over the course of the twentieth century, the Bolshevik discourse on alternative anti-individualist modernity gradually lost its central position in what scholars call the ‘formal’ or ‘official’ realm of Soviet culture. It could hardly have been otherwise as ever accelerating processes of urbanisation and social and professional differentiation that came out of the jump-started industrialisation of the 1930s continued to produce new structures of work, study, leisure and private life that did not fit the Bolshevik dream. It is my contention in this section that the arrival of modern industrial society to Soviet Russia announced itself with a novel public conversation in the centre of mainstream culture about the modern individual and society on terms formerly unavailable in Bolshevik discourse constrained, according to academic literature, to anti-individualism and collectivism. As I will show below, the discourse on modern individuals and ‘contemporary society’ was constituted by a new language that operated out of synch with Kotkin's account of Bolshevism. It calls for a re-conceptualisation of Soviet modernity in its post-Bolshevik stage and questioning of a seemingly unproblematic association between the ‘Bolshevik’ and the ‘Soviet’, the socialist and the anti-individualist. One way to begin the process is to question Kotkin's master narrative of stagnation.
Just a quick glance at available socio-demographic analyses of Soviet society before and after the war should immediately raise questions over whether or not this stagnation-narrative can serve the discipline as a comprehensive account for all aspects of Soviet modernity. If one assesses the post-war development of the Soviet Union from a sociological and social demographic point of view, one can hardly characterise it as falling back on its 1930s patterns, as Kotkin proposes. Rather, according to this other account, the post-war years that figure in Kotkin's study as years of unrealised opportunities for change experience nothing less than a profound social transformation.
In striking contrast to the tale of stagnation that Kotkin derives from Soviet economic development, the socio-demographic account assigns watershed events to the post-war period in the social history of the Soviet Union. It is, for example, only by the 1970s that the pre-war and post-war urbanisation booms produce a dominantly urban society with 58% of the population living in new urban spaces and entertaining specifically urban expectations of quality and style of living. The post-war years also see the expansion of the professional middle class into a mass class, growing at a rate surpassing that of workers – increasing from 11 million in 1941 to 35 million in 1983.Footnote 46 Instead of a stagnating modernity stuck in the pre-war decade, one encounters a modernity the history of which only begins in the 1930s.
The arrival of this urban and middle-class-inflected socialist modernity naturally came with individualising routines of urban living, and the alienating and the allegedly individualist self-centredness of intellectual labour that the Bolsheviks had sworn to overcome. On the contrary, as many scholars have demonstrated, individualising habits were inherent to socialist modernity, regardless of its non-market orientation. Scholars, however, tend to assume that in the case of the Soviet Union individualising practices of modernity were not accompanied by individualising culture. In the midst of socialist industrialisation in the 1930s subtly differentiated groups (and later an army) of workers had already begun to appear, workers engaged in so-called intellectual labour – the technical, scientific, managerial and artistic middle class. Their career choices and the very principle of professional preparation relied on the presupposition of individual aptitude and innate predispositions. Their professional modus operandi at school, university, office and lab desks relied on numerous individualising routines of studying and problem solving, that is activities requiring solitude and time with oneself. The full package of Soviet modernity, as is also well known, encompassed expectations of different forms of privacy inside a single family apartment, this eagerly sought-after space for private leisure time and romantic intimacy.Footnote 47
According to the standard way of understanding this story of a dramatic social transformation, the familiar modern individual – torn away from tangible experience of labour and inserted into a myriad self-focused routines of work and leisure – turns out to be no less structurally necessitated by the demands of a socialist non-market industrial society than by its capitalist counterpart. Or in other words, the Bolshevik dream of collectivist proletariat-like non-alienated modernity appears to be doomed the moment the Bolshevik leadership decided to go ahead with its industrialisation plan in the late 1920s.
The point of this very brief socio-demographic detour is not however to point out, one more time, the striking structural affinities between socialist and capitalist patterns of industrialisation and modernisation. It is to ask what happens to the discursive cultural realm of Soviet modernity when the modern alienated and self-focused individual becomes a mass social phenomenon? According to the master narrative of stagnation which Kotkin models after the stagnating logic of Soviet economy, nothing reminiscent of a qualitative change happens. In Kotkin's key publications, Soviet ideology and culture replicate de facto the historical fate of Soviet economy.
Another possible plot, one drawing on the dramatic transformation of Soviet society's routines of socialisation and individualisation, has, so far, enjoyed at best a subsidiary role in the subfield of cultural history. Neither Kotkin nor cultural historians who rely on his work treat the social dimension of Soviet modernity as a consequential context for rethinking core cultural parameters of the Soviet socialist imagination. Instead, they use it as a background which challenges the Bolshevik systems of values but does not change it. In the case of Kotkin, as we have seen, his attention to the rise of a Soviet mass society does not disturb the story of the fixity of Bolshevik-Soviet ideology.
The main problem with this scholarly account of synchronic stagnation of the economic and the cultural realm is that it asserts that the dramatic transformation of Soviet routines of work, leisure and private life somehow managed to unfold without affecting the key values of Soviet socialist imagination. It is thus assumed that the strikingly non-Bolshevik face of modern Soviet society was stubbornly discussed and criticised through the Bolshevik cultural mantra of anti-individualism and collectivism.
To begin to challenge the academic convention, I turn to a historical example which I have explored elsewhere and which falls outside the scholarly explication of the modern Bolshevik credo of anti-individualism and collectivism. This is the crisis of the Bolshevik world-view that began to unfold as early as the mid 1930s in the Soviet press and the initially modest appearance of what I propose to consider as a new post-Bolshevik Soviet language and system of values. The crisis ensued when Komsomol and Party activists of the revolutionary generation together with Soviet journalists encountered the novel social reality of industrial modernity, that is the first post-revolutionary generation of Soviet high school and university graduates who began joining the thin but growing ranks of the Soviet middle class in the mid 1930s. In the 1930s press, public discourse made sense of these young people heading for white-collar jobs and white-collar life styles in at least two distinct ways.Footnote 48
One mode in which this phenomenon was addressed is familiar to scholars of modern Russia. Using it, actual historical subjects addressed the new face of Soviet industrial modernity by drawing on the Marxist-Bolshevik accusatory narrative of embourgeoisement, providing de facto a Marxist-Bolshevik critique of emerging non-Bolshevik modernity. In Pravda, such a critique was, for example, personified by a stunned Komsomol worker-activist writing to the newspaper about the uncanny resemblance of the young post-revolutionary generation – supposed to be a collectivist ‘New Man’ generation – to ‘bourgeois’ classes of the former regime. Such a Komsomol activist was certainly ‘speaking Bolshevik’ when complaining about educated professional youth. To him, instead of being ‘new’, young people appeared to lack proletarian class consciousness and to exhibit alarming individualist habits such as a need of privacy and seeming inconsistency between their public and private personas. As a result, in the eyes of the older revolutionary generation, they looked bourgeois, non-collectivist, individualist.Footnote 49
Since the 1940s, a similar critique of the Soviet Bolshevik project has been deployed by scholars examining the changing socio-political terrains of Stalinist Russia. In her 1976 landmark study, Vera Dunham, for example, interpreted changes in popular representation of Soviet society under Stalin, including a new attention to the individual and his or her private needs, in terms of the system's retreat from Bolshevik socialist values and subsequent embrace of the pre-revolutionary ‘bourgeois’ sensibilities of the middle classes that had miraculously survived the Bolshevik rule. What Dunham and Kotkin, who otherwise is an ardent critic of the Retreat paradigm share, is an assumption that there was nothing more to the Soviet socialist project than Bolshevism. Or in other words, that Soviet socialism was identical with Bolshevism. Following this rationale, Dunham equated disruptions and marginalisation of the Bolshevik master language in Soviet popular literature with the end of the socialist project itself. For her, the new attention to the individual and his or her small world in Soviet literature was not socialist. Kotkin, on the other hand, insisted that core Bolshevik values continued to inform Soviet politics, economy and culture both before and after the war. The underlying consensus of these two approaches is that Soviet society did not generate any other socialist cultural forms besides Bolshevik ones. Caught in between these two dominant academic traditions, Soviet modernity de facto has but two options: to betray—necessarily Bolshevik—socialist values or to stay within their parameters.Footnote 50
Although scholars investigating official culture in the 1930s tend to look through the lens of a Bolshevik critic, the press coverage of disturbing features of emerging socialist industrial modernity was carried well beyond the limits of Bolshevik sensibilities. In fact, as my current research shows, it was around the mid 1930s that a novel language (formerly missing from the official realm) had to be invented by Soviet journalists to overcome the poverty of the Bolshevik collectivist vision of the proletariat-styled ‘New Man’. The Bolshevik project simply did not have a language to address a modern society that was more and more defined by complexly differentiated social and professional groups, and structurally dependent on societal attention to individual aptitude and the inclinations of its citizens. Using the Bolshevik canon journalists could only critique the resultant Soviet modernity. Gradually constructing what I call the post-Bolshevik and nevertheless Soviet language, they began to cover cultural phenomena of socialist non-market modernity that did not fit the collectivist paradigm.
In the Soviet press in the 1930s, journalists covered schoolchildren and university students who investigated their individual predispositions and talents, explored the growing maze of modern professions in relation to themselves, and feared to discover that they were talentless and mediocre individuals. They personified, I argue, the post-Bolshevik person of Soviet modernity. Contrary to the Bolshevik discourse on the New Man who was to merge with the collective and to derive himself from it, the post-Bolshevik discourse posited a modern socialist individual as consisting of distinct personal (lichnoe) and social (obshchestvennoe) dimensions.Footnote 51
Far from being synonymous with the ‘Bolshevik’, the post-Bolshevik discourse, I contend, was used to resolve the conceptual crisis of how to address the generation which modern professionalisation had clearly removed from the idealised collectivist practices of the working class. Already in the mid 1930s, the influx of new terms, which persevered and flourished after the war and await a researcher, is clearly visible. Opening a conversation over such new issues as the actual face of Soviet industrial modernity, Soviet journalists steered away from the militant 1920s critique of ‘bourgeois individualism’ by introducing elements of a new post-Bolshevik cultural language. There appeared a positive notion of the Soviet word for ‘personal’ (lichnyi) and many derivatives of the ‘individual’ (individualnyi) next to 1920s ‘individualism’ (individualism); the ‘social’ (obshchestvennyi) gained cultural currency next to the 1920s ‘collective’; the ‘intimate’ (intimnyi mir) came back into Soviet reporting as a necessary part of the ‘personal’.Footnote 52
New official clichés of ‘connecting’ and ‘combining’ the personal with the social began to compete with Bolshevik ideals of ‘merging’ oneself or deriving oneself from the collective. The social imperative to ‘connect’ one's personal life with the life of Soviet modern society implies a differentiation and a relationality between the two realms. It is a conceptual break from the Bolshevik ideal which, in accordance with the academic analysis explicated here, explicitly rejects a differentiation between the individual and the collective. This new language, I believe, captures for us a new face of Soviet modernity and opens a new research agenda.
Conclusion: a post-Bolshevik modernity and the fate of the multiple modernities thesis
My contention here is that what was under way in the cultural realm of 1930s Soviet society was the making of a new post-Bolshevik language of Soviet modernity. Having begun in the centre of Soviet national press in the mid 1930s, this development constitutes a precursor to the post-war preoccupation with the modern socialist individuals and their new social surroundings in press, literature, film and social sciences.Footnote 53 Accommodating individualising discourses, this emerging language signalled the beginning a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between individual and society away from the Bolshevik collectivist imperative.
Two aspects of my argument should be emphasised. First, I do not see the mid 1930s as a Bolshevik/post-Bolshevik divide. Rather, it was a launching point in a long and uneven process of cultural change that took half a century to unfold and expanded the boundaries of Soviet culture and modernity. The post-Bolshevik language and new system of values that accompanied it did not wipe out Bolshevik sensibilities overnight. Rather than evoke the historical metaphor of a ‘divide’, I suggest that of a gradual and never complete ‘de-centring’ of the Bolshevik cultural formation with the post-Bolshevik one. Second, my argument about the expanding boundaries of Soviet culture is not about the rise of the individual in place of the collective but about a shift in conceptualisations of the relationship between the socialist self and society (or collective) away from the Bolshevik refusal to differentiate between the two. What I posit here is a modern socialist discourse that encompasses the individual and the social. I also propose the ‘post-Bolshevik’ as a new periodisation marker.
The larger agenda of this essay is to invite an epistemic interpretive shift in our approaches to Soviet non-market industrial modernity. I contend that Kotkin's stagnation model of Soviet modern society as a totality synchronised in its post-war non-development of economic, cultural, ideological and political spheres is insufficient to capture the complexity of historical change in the Soviet Union. The account of Soviet modernity proposed here is that of uneven development, which in fact encompasses several visions and practices of modernity. It puts a new approach to the study of Soviet modernity on the field's agenda, one which suggests that social, cultural, economic, ideological and political dimensions develop along trajectories that are not automatically synchronised and offer different narratives of change and continuity.Footnote 54
Before we revisit the thesis of multiple modernities that Kotkin uses to present Soviet industrial modernity as a solid (though failed) twentieth-century alternative to capitalism, new venues of research into the uneven Soviet socialist experiment need to be pursued.Footnote 55 The historically specific terms of post-Bolshevik socialist culture – its discourses on the individual and this individual's relationship with the ‘social’ (obshchestvennyi), not necessarily identical with the ‘collective’, in the context of the ‘contemporary Soviet society’ (Sovetskoe sovremennoe obshchestvo) not necessarily identical with the academic concept of ‘modern Soviet society’ – are among the urgent issues to be explored by intellectual and cultural historians.
Moreover, the ‘fixed ideas’ of the Soviet project cannot be successfully questioned without an engaged conversation with current scholarship on Eastern Europe.Footnote 56 Nor can it be done without a parallel questioning of the assumed formulaic parameters of the Soviet Union's conceptual other – twentieth-century liberalism and market capitalism. An integration of the complex and variegated history of the twentieth-century liberal and economic thought that was preoccupied with the question of the individual and the social, and with encompassed positions varying between welfare liberalism and neo-liberalism seems to be paramount for producing a rethinking of Soviet socialism.Footnote 57
To conclude, the alternative modernity claimed on behalf of the Soviet Union needs to be opened up to new and counter-intuitive questions about dynamically and unevenly developing Soviet society and its participation in (rather than rejection of) the twentieth century's conversation about modern individuals’ complex relationship to their industrial society. Regardless of our conclusions at the end of this questioning, the history of socialism in twentieth century will acquire a new chapter.
