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Soviet power; in order to reappropriate a public campaign, they had to participate in it. However, their behaviour was ‘tactical’ rather than ‘resisting’ or ‘sup- porting’ the Bolshevik state.
‘ Bricolage ’ was the tactic employed by Soviet citizens when they fused material from both official and unofficial sources to create a composite product. Levi-Strauss popularized the term bricolage to describe how story tellers draw upon a pre-existing repertoire of images in order to construct a narrative. 69 De Certeau has extended the term in his description of the creativity of everyday life: bricoleurs ‘make do’ with the materials before them in order to create an innovative and novel product. 70 Bricolage is not a ‘tactic’ that was unique to Soviet society. However, a discussion of bricolage in the USSR is particularly important in the light of the current Foucauldian emphasis on the incapacity of Soviet citizens to interact creatively with the language of the state that ruled them.
Osokina’s description of the illegal food trade reflects many of these characteristics of Soviet bricolage . Private speculation supplemented, rather than replaced, the official food supply. Almost all individuals relied on goods obtained via both sources. 71 Bricolage differed from
     
67 A number of authors have described how ordinary people used the Purges to obtain revenge in this manner: Y. Kang-Bohr, ‘Appeals and Complaints: Popular Reactions to the Party Purges and the Great Terror in the Voronezh Region, 1935–1939’, Europe-Asia Studies, 57.1 (2005), 135–54; S. Fitzpatrick, ‘ How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces’, Russian Review, 52.3 (1993), 299–320. See also: J. T. Gross, Revolution From Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, 2002), 232–5.
68 See Chapters 5 and 4 respectively.
69 C. Le ´ vi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1968), 15–25.
70 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life , xv–xvi. See also the work of Harel and Papert on bricolage within education: I. Harel and S. Papert, eds., Constructionism: Research Reports and Essays, 1985–1990 (Norwood, 1991), 168–73.
71 E. Osokina trans., K. Transchel and G. Bucher, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distri-
bution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–41 (Armonk, NY, 1999).
xxxiv Being Soviet
performance in that it was largely undertaken in relation to other Soviet citizens, rather than Soviet power. Performance often had a prescribed end: to obtain certain material or social ends that were dispensed by the government. When post-war Soviet musicians performed their sets in accordance with the dictates of government policy, they were ‘performing’ for the state. When they spiced up their repertoires with risque ´ jazz numbers, however, they were also employing bricolage and
humouring their listeners. 72 They carefully melded sounds that would
be acceptable to both audiences to create a composite product. Bricolage lacked the strategic nature of ‘performance’: there was no official reward to be obtained. If there was a benefit, it was the admiration and trust of fellow citizens. Bricolage also lacked the coherence of performance. Its products were more complex because they relied on a diversity of sources. Nonetheless, it also embedded Soviet citizens within the ‘habi- tat’ of Soviet life, rather than removing them from it. Soviet citizens deployed bricolage to supplement the official supply of information, food, and clothing, rather than stepping outside of the mechanisms of Soviet power and living independently of them.
The most important expression of the ‘tactic’ of bricoalge discussed in this book will be rumour. Historians rarely take rumours seriously as an object of study: this is the first book length study of rumouring in the USSR since the 1950s. 73 However, rumouring was an extremely wide- spread practice