Free Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 by Timothy Johnston

interviewing former Soviet citizens, see:
C. Merridale, Ivan’s War : The Red Army 1939–1945 (London, 2005), 341–2.
135 The term ‘triangulation’ is widely used within the social sciences when data is compared from multiple sources or research methods. See C. Trosset and D. Caulkins, ‘Triangulation and Confirmation in the Study of Welsh Concepts of Personhood’, Journal of Anthropological Research , 57.1 (2001), 62.
136 Where the information contained is purely factual, the abbreviation system is not
employed.
xlviii Being Soviet
tions of Official Soviet Identity. Chapter 4 also offers some provisional observations that extend beyond Stalin’s death.
     
     
1939–41: the pre-war years
Chapter 1 deals with the relatively underexamined period 1939–41. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 that committed the Soviet Union to an alliance with Nazi Germany, marked a rupture in Soviet relations with the outside world. Over the following two years the USSR annexed a series of small states and territories along the Soviet border in Poland, Finland, the Baltic, and Romania. The digestion of these ex-capitalist states dramatically redefined both the diplomatic and civilizational aspects of Official Soviet Identity. The Pact Period, until the German invasion in 1941, was also a moment of transition in terms of how Soviet citizens engaged with the official mass media. Rumours of untold luxury in the newly conquered capitalist territories poured back into the USSR, providing a fresh body of information to contrast with the official press. Despite the fact they are so rarely studied, the last two pre-war years were an important turning point in terms of the relation- ship between Soviet power and Soviet citizens.
     
     
1941–45: the war
Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the war. They challenge the idea that wartime Soviet patriotism was simply a ‘decked out’ version of Russian nationalism. 137 Both ethnicity and Sovietness mattered in this period. Indeed there was a limit to how hard the Russian ‘nationalist drum’ could be beaten, because of the risk of offending the other peoples of the USSR. 138 Chapter 2 addresses Official Soviet Identity in diplomatic
     
     
137 S. K. Carter, Russian Nationalism: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (London, 1991) , 52; E. Iarskaia-Smirnova and P. Romanov, ‘ At the Margins of Memory: Provincial Identity and Soviet Power in Oral Histories, 1940–53’, in D. Raleigh, ed., Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917–1953 (Pittsburgh, 2001), 309–14; Hosking, Russia and the Russians , 475. Lieven, and to some extent Weiner, take a slightly different view—that they were unconsciously overlapping identities: D. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (London, 2000) 318; A. Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001) , 337.
138 J. L. H. Keep, A History of the Soviet Union 1945–1991: Last of the Empires
(Oxford, 1995), 26.
Introduction xlix
terms between the German invasion in June 1941 and the German capitulation in May 1945. Rather than examine the widely discussed image of Nazi Germany during the war, it fills a gap within the current historiography by focusing on the Soviet relationship with Britain and America. 139 Relations with America and Britain did not conform to the simple binary of good and evil that shaped Soviet interaction with the hated Germans. 140 The central argument of Chapter 2 is that many Soviet citizens experienced the Alliance relationship as an ongoing act of betrayal. In particular, the Allied failure to open the Second Front spawned a large number of rumours about Anglo-American perfidy in other areas.
Chapter 3 examines Official Soviet Identity and the behaviour of Soviet citizens in relation to Anglo-American civilization during the war. The popular experience of Lend Lease and the interactions of Soviet citizens with allied servicemen in wartime Arkhangel’sk