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Bolshevik’ has proved enormously popular. However, his description of what it meant to
     
     
60 Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 15.
61 Ball, Imagining America, 157.
62 Krementsov, Stalinist Science , 39–43; M. David-Fox, ‘From Illusory “Society” to
Intellectual “Public”: VOKS, International Travel and Party: Intelligentsia Relations in the Interwar Period’, Contemporary European History , 11.1 (2002), 7–32.
63 Tatiana Poloz states that ‘Pride in being a Soviet citizen was probably never as all- embracing and intense’ as in the 1930s. Figes, The Whisperers , 221.
64 Avins, Border Crossings, 179.
xxxii Being Soviet
‘speak Bolshevik’ is unclear on the relative roles of performance and belief for ordinary citizens. A more potent concept, that has received far less attention, is his idea of the ‘little tactics of the habitat’. Kotkin argues that Soviet power shaped the arena within which ordinary citizens lived, but that they deployed a number of strategic manoeuvres in order to negotiate their way through Stalin-era society. Unfortunate- ly, the only ‘tactic’ he describes is ‘speaking Bolsehvik’. This book argues that the resistance and discursive paradigms explain the behaviour of a small, but significant, number of Soviet citizens. However, the beha- viour of the majority of ordinary people is better understood via a whole range of different ‘tactics of the habitat’ such as ‘reappropriation’, ‘bricolage’ , and ‘avoidance’. Soviet power established the general para- meters of life but these ‘tactics’ enabled Soviet citizens to get by and get on. I also refer to the ‘tactic’ of ‘performance’, rather than ‘speaking Bolshevik’, to remove any ambiguity over the meaning of Kotkin’s term. Soviet citizens ‘performed’ the rhetoric of the state when they publicly mouthed it in order to ensure personal safety or advancement. ‘Reappropriation’ was the process whereby Soviet citizens subtly rewrote the rhetoric contained within Official Soviet Identity and used it in a manner that was not originally intended by the state. A non-Soviet example of reappropriation might be the behaviour of the indigenous peoples of Central America after their conquest by the Spanish in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Spanish conquista- dores sought to convert their new subjects to Catholicism, and the indigenous peoples engaged enthusiastically with the rituals and struc- tures of the new religion. However, they also reappropriated the sym- bols and rituals of European Catholicism by imbuing them with their own distinctive meanings derived from their pre-Conquest religious practices. 65 Reappropriation in the Soviet context is most obvious in connection with government-sponsored political campaigns to collect money, protest against the action of foreign powers, or celebrate Soviet holidays. Evaluating the public behaviour of Soviet citizens is often very difficult: we cannot be sure who is performing the rhetoric and who is speaking sincerely. 66 However, it is also clear that meetings, marches, and campaigns were often delicately transformed by their participants
     
     
     
65 M. de Certeau, trans., S. Rendall, The Practice of Everyday Life (London, 1988), 30–2.
66 See Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous .
Introduction xxxiii
into an opportunity to socialize, drink, or settle scores with enemies. 67 Soviet scientists and musicians were experts at reappropriation, redir- ecting official campaigns against Western science in the post-war era in order to harm their rivals and secure their professional advancement. Ordinary citizens also deployed the ‘tactic’ of reappropriation when they transformed official calls to ‘Struggle for Peace’ into an opportuni- ty to publicly express their grief connected to the Great Patriotic War. 68 This ‘tactic of the habitat’ was not necessarily deployed consciously, and it also embedded individuals within the mechanisms of