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This chapter assesses how much the societal discourse of Soviet identity informed Soviet foreign relations with China, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, Eastern Europe, the developing world, and the West. There was a revolution in Soviet foreign policy after Stalin’s death. It was made possible by the empowerment of a new Soviet identity, the central feature of which was an understanding of socialism that permitted variety and did not demand the strictest adherence to the Soviet model. This alternative discourse of difference had been maintained in society during the postwar Stalin years, often in official Soviet institutions. This change in Soviet identity had profound effects in Eastern Europe, where Stalinist regimes had been in power for years and had adopted Stalinist policies and practices, most often at the behest of Moscow.

This chapter assesses the ability of societal constructivism to explain a host of Soviet relationships with the external world, which includes China, Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, and the West. It is divided into two parts. The first deals with the period of relative Soviet tolerance of difference at home, reflected in a more tolerant foreign policy abroad. The second part reflects the triumph of the discourse of danger at home, and its projection onto Soviet relations with Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, East Germany, China, the Third World, and the United States. Besides telling the story of these events based on the latest primary documentation available, it points out both the limits and rewards of paying attention to the elements of Soviet identity elaborated in Chapter 2.

This chapter describes and analyzes the predominant discourse of Soviet identity and its relationships to various challengers. The predominant discourse was one of danger, binarization, dichotomization, infallibility, typicality, paternalism, and hierarchy. Its substantive core was defined by modernity, the Russian nation, and fear of its external Western Other. The chapter offers some ideas about how these discourses were institutionalized and how they worked in the Soviet context, both as instruments wielded by actors in struggles with each other, and as social structures constraining these very actors. It concludes with some implications for Soviet identity relations with other states in the world.

This chapter describes the immediate de-Stalinization that occurred upon Stalin’s death. It then devotes separate sections to each of the primary elements of the new discourse of difference, and how they were articulated in different domains of Soviet society at the time.

Official Soviet Identity evolved in relation to the dramatic events of this period. By 1953 a successful and resilient version of Sovietness had emerged that stressed the peace-loving diplomatic identity of the USSR. The cultural aspect of Official Soviet Identity was less compelling, particularly when faced with a dynamic opponent such as the USA. The USSR collapsed when enough people decided they no longer wanted to be Soviet. The supra-national narrative of Sovietness was swept away by a tide of nationalist rhetoric, but nationalism was the beneficiary not the cause of the fall

This chapter addresses the first Soviet occupation of Lviv between the fall of 1939 and the summer of 1941. During the first Soviet occupation of Lviv, the conquering party-state was dealing with three main ethno-religious or national groups: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians. Soviet policies demoted Poles but did not destroy or remove them; they offered the local Ukrainians ascendancy in return for adopting Soviet Ukrainian identity; and they imposed a Soviet Jewish “emancipated” identity on Jews. Lviv was, in fact, becoming a microcosm of the recently developed Soviet concept of the “Friendship of the Peoples,” which accorded an essential—if subordinate and historically transitory—role to a primordially understood national identity.

This introductory chapter discusses the Russian Northwest and its role in imagining Soviet-Russian nationhood. Novgorod, Pskov, and Vologda here served as symbolic homelands for the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian nations, mediating between the local, national, and transnational. Following the war, the state marketed the region's cultural heritage to the nation as the symbols of Russified Soviet identity linked to myths of sacredness, sacrifice, and patriotism. The idea of the Northwest was placed at the center of everyday life, emerging as a center of tourism and cultural activity in the 1960s to 1980s. The region thus formed a vehicle for internalizing the impersonal nation by placing it within the familiar local world, or a site where local and national memory could be fused.

This chapter advances a conceptualization of collective identity as a set of shared cognitive structures (or mental models) about the collective self. Below I argue that the Soviet Union was successful in instilling a Soviet collective identity and that the two main mental models that constituted this identity were a sense of Soviet exceptionalism and a sense of the Soviet state being surrounded by the enemy. These shared mental models represented important pillars supporting individual-level dignity and self-esteem for many Soviet citizens as well as a source of their perceptions of in-group and out-group members. Empirical findings from Yuri Levada’s “simple Soviet person” project and a variety of secondary data are used to support the central claims of this chapter.

This chapter explains that Sovietness is a cultural construct that owed its form and influence to an extraordinary project of mass media representation. During the years after the revolution, processed images of the new Soviet identity were in conflict with the older imperial Russia identities; the imaginary map of the new world met with the lived space of the old. Thus, the imaginary imagined space of the old imperial Russia was changed and was redefined to meet with the demands of the revolutionary age.

This chapter addresses Lviv's postwar industrialization and the creation of a large population of workers from two kinds of immigrants: locals from the western Ukrainian countryside and easterners. These new workers were crucial to Lviv's Sovietization not only as labor power but also as an essential element of the city's Soviet identity. Indeed, Lviv's postwar industrialization shaped its reality and image for decades. Ultimately, it produced some of the key stories and symbols of Sovietization. In 1950, the Lviv obkom noted the three “fundamental issues” of the postwar years: the industrialization of Lviv, the collectivization of its countryside, and “ideological work”—meaning the battle against Ukrainian nationalism and the education of toilers (trudiashchie) to follow the “party of Lenin-Stalin.”

This chapter begins a discussion of post-Soviet Russian identity and its self-definition through imagined geographies by introducing the neo-Eurasianist ideas espoused by Aleksandr Dugin. Stung by Russia's post-Soviet regression into the background of world events, Dugin has vociferously asserted outrageous ideas about Russian identity, using neo-imperial metaphors of Eurasian geography and territory. His chief concern is the revival of Russian identity based on an all-powerful Russian state and its reconstructed Eurasian empire. In addition, the chapter elaborates on Dugin's neo-Eurasianist movement, which was founded in 2001 on an idea of Russianness that combines a strange mix of Slavophile values, Eurasianist thought from the 1920s, neo-fascism, and, finally, a wildly different orientation toward what he calls postmodernism.

This concluding chapter reflects on the findings provided by the previous chapters. It considers how the Russian Northwest has so often been seen as a “center” or “capital” of cultural production. Since the end of the war, the region has been imagined variously as a heartland of authentic Russian traditions, a preserve of “Old Russian” architecture, a hub of Russian folk culture, and even a chalice containing the sacred soils of Russian history. The exceptional status of the Northwest in the national imaginary is due in part to its celebration by Russian patriots and nationalists, who seized upon the region's associations with ideas of Russian cultural authenticity to promote their own cultural agendas. Yet, as this chapter shows, it is also a consequence of the Soviet nation-building politics of the postwar era. The strategic endorsement of northwestern heritage at moments of political crisis in the second half of the twentieth century resulted in the region becoming not only a showcase of Russian traditions, but also a focus of Soviet identity politics.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on Vlamidir Lenin's genealogical and political connections to the East European Jews. It explains the Lenin hardly cared about Jews at all and he treated and mistreated the Jews according to his immediate pragmatic needs. It also discusses the efforts of the Bolsheviks to dismiss the issue about the discovery of Lenin's Jewish roots because they needed him to be Russian for the Russianness of the leader of the party and founder of the state helped them to create state-based and Russian-centered Soviet identity.

This concluding chapter continues the discussion on imagined geographies and the separation of the center from its western and southern peripheries, pointing toward more recent developments in constructing a Russian identity. Since 2000 this identity debate appears to have been increasingly co-opted by various ultraconservative dreams, among them Dugin's dream of an authoritarian state ruled by the White Tsar and the secret police. Hence, the chapter looks at various recent satires of Eurasianist thinking, as well as the positive impacts generated by Eurasianism. More recent developments occur in Putin's regime as the government likewise participates in the game of imagined geographies that has framed the post-Soviet identity debate. Such efforts show how the southern and western peripheries are by far the most challenging for the center, and that these peripheries have functioned imaginatively as the sites of vital debate of issues surrounding Russian identity and cultural difference.

This chapter opens with a scene from Pogodin’s Daring (1930)—a play set in an urban commune. This acts as a Mise en abyme (a story within the story) to recap the aims, challenges, and evolution of the urban commune phenomenon. The reader is also reminded of the contemporary importance of the urban communes. The leadership’s subsequent desire to avoid the appearance of ‘alternative pathways to socialism’ is presented as the main reason for the urban commune being written out of Soviet history—until now. It is also revealed that some of the activists discussed in the book went on to have successful careers in the Soviet Union. To the end, the urban communards are shown to embrace and engage the ideological concerns of their day. Through the construction, outlook, and demise of the urban communes, the reader can see the everyday formation of Soviet socialism and Soviet identity.