Search Results

Chapter 5 moves from the macro-level of governmental rationality to the micro-level of subjectivation, addressing the mode of subjectivity produced in Stalinist biopolitics. The Soviet regime famously laid a claim to constructing a ‘New Soviet Person’ as a new kind of political subject, though its actual productivity in this respect remains disputed among the scholars of Stalinism. While theorists of totalitarianism viewed Stalinism as crushing and dominating every aspect of subjectivity, more recent accounts of Soviet subjectivation tend to view the Soviet ideological discourse as positively productive in the Foucauldian sense. Our reading of High Stalinism permits us to combine the insights of both approaches: Soviet biopolitics was indeed productive, yet the subjectivity produced was purely negative, almost wholly contained in the destruction of the anterior subject. We interpret this mode of subjectivity with the help of Catherine Malabou’s theory of destructive plasticity.

This chapter addresses the restoration of a comprehensive Soviet system of political education after the liberation of Kyiv. At first, the population of the recently liberated city responded enthusiastically, because political information was essential for orientation in the Soviet political world and participation in study sessions served as an expression of loyalty. However, popular interest soon waned, and a tug of war ensued over attendance of what had ossified into yet another ritual of participation, and one of the least popular ones at that, because it required a regular time commitment. Nearly universal passive (and, at times, active) resistance to required attendance casts doubt on recent theories about the mass internalization of communist ideology and the development of “Soviet subjectivities.”

This chapter explores the Brezhnev-era ‘biography boom’, when biography was collected, consumed, and critiqued with extraordinary interest, thanks in part to ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ as one of the most prominent and prolific biographical series. This biography boom grew out of the post-Stalinist shift to more private forms of reading and more psychologically sophisticated literature, and was supported by developed socialism’s unprecedented ideological focus on the individual personality (lichnost′) as multi-faceted. The series served as a laboratory of different models of ‘revolutionary’ selfhood, and as a forum for novelistic experimentation with biographical narrative that often exceeded contemporary developments in the genre in the West (as well as in other types of Soviet biography). However, this experimentation endured onerous suspicion and interference. The series’ texts were caught between traditional views of revolutionary identity and more innovative, even subversive, explorations of psychology and ethics. This helps to explain why the series consistently produced a significant quotient of much more conventional biographies, especially of Bolsheviks, complicating its identity for writers, critics, and readers.

The chapter analyzes language-oriented poets and movements, showing how different conceptions of the poetic word emerged and influenced writing and performance throughout the period. The chapter follows the ramifications of avant-garde experiment, expressed in manifestos, public gestures, and performances. These innovations continued to influence the artistic practices of the 1920s and were revived later in the 1960s–80s. They comprised a legacy for concrete and Conceptualist poetry and, later, Metarealism. The chapter discusses the connection of these groups to underground culture, and shows how the inherited tropes of the avant-garde join up with postmodernist poetics and narratives in the post-Soviet period.