Response#3: Everyday Stalinism by Fitzpatrick

Part 1: Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s is focused on the urban life of Soviet citizens. Rather than making theories about Soviet culture, she goes for a general explanation of Soviet life describing in great detail how the new Soviet specie, Homo sovieticus, learn to adapt to its new habitat. Critical to this new evolutionary adaption was the ability to scavenge for scarce goods in an urban environment. The scarcity of goods was due to the state run economy that was plagued with chronic shortages. While taking note of the importance of stories on Soviet citizens, she outright ignores class due to blurring lines caused by pretenders and State pressure.

Part 2: Sheila Fritzpatrick’s focus on the power of the state in relation to the everyday life of Soviet citizens disperses apocalyptic visions of “Big Brother” and secret police behind every door. Unlike our Western liberalistic view of the world, Soviet citizens viewed their conditions as “normal everyday events.” The significant lack of “freedoms” in Soviet Russia, something always harped on about in 20^th century fiction, was not really noticed by the average Soviet citizen. In fact, the primary noticeable difference for the general proletariat was the disappearance of goods from stores. No it was not the Great Purges that persecuted the bureaucratic elite or the heavy censorship of the press, but material goods that were the main source of complaints towards the government. Soviet society, like other societies, has proven true to the bread and circus theme.

Continuing this theme of bread and circus, we can see that the main body of complaints comes from the interference with the bread and circus of everyday life. The primary interference is the state bureaucracy stocked with incompetent administrators at every level of service. While in the Western democracies, bureaucratic establishments have always contained some level of cronyism, in the Soviet Union cronyism was painfully felt in just about every aspect of day-to-day life. From long lines just to buy bread to getting papers check out for train ticket, Soviet citizens had to deal with bureaucratic inefficiency everyday. Thus, the strong presence of government jokes in everyday life and in literature.

While Fitzpatrick’s work is well written and insightful of the social conditions of the soviet urbanite, one phrase continues to bother me, Homo Sovieticus. The phrase is an obvious ploy to plug science into a historical work. Since the introduction of the monograph, her use of term Homo Sovieticus has bothered me for two reasons: the failed ploy to develop the idea of the Soviet citizen as separate specie and the incorrect scientific taxonomy. Fitzpatrick throws in the phrase in her introduction and does not return to it until her conclusion. Worse, her use of the term is incorrect scientifically. The phrase should be Homo sovieticus with the entire name in italics and the second word (the specie specification) in all lowercase. While this may appear like nitpicking, the sciences of specie differentiation should not be introduced as an attention grabber if the author has no knowledge of binomial nomenclature. If grammar Nazis can point out the irksomeness of good versus well, a scientist should have the same authority.