Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s

Everyday Stalinism—certainly a tide to conjure with—by Sheila Fitz-Patrick (Oxford) is subtitled Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, and is proof that under certain circumstances the everyday is never normal. This is a harrowing account (taken from personal diaries and correspondence, and official reports) of Stalinism, which Fitzpatrick defines as a complex of institutions and rituals that made up the habitat of Homo Sovieticus in the era of Stalin: party rule, Marxist-Leninist ideology, rampant bureaucracy, leader cults, social engineering, stigmatization of class enemies, surveillance, terror and arbitrary execution, and the endless struggle to survive. Here is Orwell come true, and Kafka fully realized: a virtual world consisting almost entirely of lies: advertisements for consumer goods available nowhere in the country fill the newspapers in order to "educate" and to chastise the citizenry; government instructions for the enjoyment of ketchup are promulgated as part of a "modernization" campaign; everywhere illegality is the "normal" mode of living and doing business. This is the shadow world of capitalism, of course, and thereby serves as a warning as well as an expose.