ETIQUETA DEL FRASCO
2. Qué necesita saber antes de empezar a usar CellCept ADVERTENCIA
The emergence of independent groups and organizations involved a rebirth of autonomous voluntary associations in Russia. While voluntary and service organizations thrived throughout pre-revolutionary Russia and have a rich history, tsarist autocracy tended to control voluntary associations (see Clowes et al. 1991; Hosking 2001; Bradley 2002; Pipes 1995), which continued and tightened further in Soviet Russia.
The concept of civil society developed historically in the West assumes a clear distinction, and sometimes opposition, between state and society (Seligman 1992). But in the Soviet Union, by 1930, social organizations such as the trade union, the Komsomol and others were either created by the state or closely integrated with it. Resources to the organizations came from the state and the organizations had equal opportunity to influence decision-making as a governmental ministry. These organizations contributed to reproducing the centralized state (Evans, Jr. et al. 2006).
The scholarly understanding of Soviet social organizations as mere “transmission belts” between the Communist Party and the masses, lacking any autonomous life, however, has been criticized lately. Based on new work of Russian historians produced since the beginning of the 1990s and new empirical studies, researchers highlight the
dualistic legacy of the Soviet organizations which were both subordinated to the state
while providing services for their members (Evans, Jr. et al. 2006; Yurchak 2006).
The party’s control of social organizations intensified from the early 1920s and throughout the 1930s (Yanitsky 1991). The main tendency was to suppress spontaneous social initiatives and to direct all the organizations to achieving the goals of the state. The party leadership created the concept of a “new public” (novaia obshchestvennost’) in which social organizations were to be created at the initiative of the political regime (Evans, Jr. et al. 2006: 32). Many independent organizations were closed throughout the
1920s and the development of the nomenklatura7system guaranteed that the top officials in social associations were approved by the party. As a result, the leaders of the organizations were appointed from above and owed their loyalty first to their superiors rather than to the rank and file (ibid.: 32, 33; see also Nichols 1996). By the end of the 1930s, citizens were organized in mass organizations sponsored by the party and state, which aimed to embrace, to reform, and to support them from cradle to grave. In addition, individuals often viewed membership in these organizations as a necessary step in their professional or political careers.
The social organizations were given a dualistic orientation. For example, the trade unions were given a double role: they were supposed both to realize the party’s objectives and serve the workers’ interests by protecting them against administrators. In the post- Stalin period, union officials in factories cooperated with management and when the workers’ interests came into conflict with the goals of plan fulfillment, the leaders tended to prioritize production tasks. Factory union committees, however, also tried to protect workers from abuses by managers (Evans, Jr. et al. 2006: 33, 40).
The new citizens, Homo Sovieticus were constructed based on a combination of old and new symbols of being a member of the state (gosudarstvo) in Russia. In the Soviet regime created during Stalinism, the relationship between institutions, public involvement, and personal life/subjectivity was constructed based on ‘dissimulation:’
The Bolshevik revolution did not erase the distinction between public and private and then re-establish it in a different form. Rather, it swept it away and replaced it, in the long run, with a division between the ‘social,’ which consists of transparent ‘public’ and ‘personal’ [lichnyi] lives, and an unseen, unrecognized private [chastnyi] which does not exceed the most intimate. The dissimulation covering this intimate sphere became the most profound practice of Soviet society. (Kharkhordin 1997: 360)
Learning to command the language of the communist ideology was crucial for a successful dissimulation. Applying Anthony Giddens’ (1990) concept of a disembedding mechanism of the modern expert systems, the communist ideology may be seen as such a system operating within “Soviet modernity without civil society” in the 1930s (Kozlova
7Nomenklatura, members of the privileged social-political elite, were the holders of higher-level positions which only could be filled on the party’s recommendation or approval. Lists of leading positions were kept in the CPSU Central Committee apparatus which held a monopoly on the power to fill the top positions of officials in the party itself, in government, army, security services, judicial organs, factories and enterprises, in the spheres of science, propaganda, and culture (Remington 1999: 34). The nomenklatura were served by a system of various privileges or indirect payments.
1996: 214). The formation of the Soviet middle class was interrelated with political participation and learning the language of communist ideology. In this type of modernity, “adherence to the communist ideology” was a way to combine “progressive values” with the old types of collective community. How did different groups reproduce the ideological language? For example, young peasants, whose parents-farmers had been denounced as enemies of the communist regime during the enforced collectivization in the 1930s, often moved to cities. In their diaries, participation in social activism is described as crucial for personal survival: “Recently I started to view social activism not as a way to make a career but as part of my body, of my existence, as bread necessary for my survival” (June
8, 1933, quoted in Kozlova 1996: 1648). While trying to survive, they learned to
reproduce the ideological language by studying the texts of political leaders. They thus not only reproduced the discourse of state power, but also created certain social relations. A system of statements about society and self, a system of names and meanings constituted a foundation for mutual interpersonal understanding.
Their personal voice is barely heard in their diary texts which is a rather normative language filled with clichés from political brochures. The Brief History of the CPSU became a mask which was “impossible to take off from the face” (ibid.: 168, 170). For this category of people, the turning points of their personal life could be directly linked with official events such as the decree adopted in 1934. It stated that the right to vote would be returned to those denounced individuals who worked honestly for the state for five years. They were ready to forgive the state for the past injustices and to start to serve it: “I felt respect for the people who did that and this feeling may develop over time into love towards the state which does not despise me. Perhaps, it is a start of my new world view. The thought that I am accepted as a citizen in the common family of the USSR like anybody else obliges me to feel love to people who have done that for me. I find myself no longer among enemies, of whom I have to be afraid every moment and second.” The former peasants thus become persons with a “communist world view.” The Soviet citizen was, however, not a “political person and economic person” and would not be able to live in civil society (ibid.: 213, 214).
This example illustrates how ‘dissimulation’ via ideological language, and fear for the regime could be paradoxically interrelated with experiencing citizenship in terms of
kinship and readiness to love and to serve the state (see also Månson 1997: 40). While a new socialist sociality was shaped by transforming personal ties into formal-bureaucratic relations, it was not the same as that which was described by Max Weber. For example, Stalin was perceived not only as the “father of people” but also as someone who expressed “the right line of the party” and helped people to implement general laws of social development. The non-personal dimension thus became more salient than personal ties. At the same time, forms of sociality with roots in more traditional societies were replayed (Kozlova 1996: 198).
Another paradox of the Soviet socialist modernity and the voluntary organizations is that the objective of building communism and creating the New Man is supposed to be achieved by subsuming society and individuals to party control. The Soviet citizen was supposed simultaneously to submit to party leadership, nurture collectivist ethic and become an independent-minded and creative person (Yurchak 2006: 11). In the 1970s and the early 1980s, this paradox permeated the sociality within the Komsomol which was supposed to organize youth activities. The leaders were frequently trained to acquire the skills of reproducing ideological texts and conducting formal ritualized events. While the pure formal rituals and authoritative ideological discourse had to be reproduced, the leaders frequently also identified with the human and good aspects of the socialist state (ibid.: 96). The interaction between heads of the local organizations and the rank-and-file members was built on the friendly consensus of the need to follow the rules, although breaking them would result in official sanctions. The local heads of the organizations were often perceived simultaneously as the authoritative representatives of the state institution and as “one of us” (svoi) or ‘normal people.’ ‘Normal people’ signified a relatively free, creative life, not reduced to ideological automatism or idealist resistance (ibid.: 114, 118).