The competition with the West, therefore, clearly dominated the thinking of Soviet leaders, even if they advocated different ways of mobilising Soviet
Society. So how effective was this mobilisation, and how far did the population internalise the leadership’s insistence on the primacy of the Cold War? Research on popular attitudes suggests that in crucial respects they accorded with official attitudes. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, fear of war with the West was high, and frequent incidents of panic buying were reported as rumours of war spread. Winston Churchill’s Fulton speech and the outbreak of the Korean War, for example, were especially worrying to Soviet citizens. The evidence of discussions at electoral and party meetings also suggests that questions of foreign policy were of particular interest.
There is also some evidence that the experience of the war had given many people a highly critical attitude towards the West, and led many to sympathise with official Soviet patriotism. In particular, Soviet citizens expressed anger at the failure of the Allies to open a second front. They were dismayed by the high living standards in the West and poverty in the Soviet Union, despite the heavy losses sustained on the Eastern front. As Zdenek Mlynaf, the Czech Communist who spent some time in the USSR in the 1940s and early 1950s, reminisced, it was common at the time to believe that the Soviet people had made unique sacrifices in the war, and therefore deserved special respect. These sentiments accorded with the official view that the Soviet Union was a particularly moral nation, both because it had a collectivist political system and because it had fTeed the world of Nazism. But these views combined with a desire to avoid war at all costs, and with a reluctance to make any more sacrifices than were absolutely necessary. People complained about fraternal aid to East European countries and expressed scepticism about the rejection of the Marshall Plan.731
Notwithstanding broad sympathy for official views on foreign policy, Soviet citizens did not like the rigid internal controls established during the early Cold War period. Elena Zubkova and others have argued that the experience of war created a generation that was more confident and less willing to accept control from above. People, who had experienced more mobility during the war and who had been permitted to communicate outside official channels, believed their wartime sacrifices now entitled them to
37. New housing in Novosibirsk, 1958.
More dignity and autonomy than they had previously received.732 This interpretation, based on a range of archival sources, is confirmed by the Harvard Project’s interviews after the war, which found that while most citizens accepted the system, they did want an end to arbitrary and harsh government, and felt that they were given too few rewards for their contributions to society.733 However, Soviet citizens’ opinions varied enormously. Some did make more fundamental criticisms of the Soviet system as a whole, and contact with the West convinced some veterans that there was an alternative. Meanwhile, others condemned the Soviet system from the opposite point of view, in the name of an idealistic and moralistic neo-Leninism.734 Yet it is clear that many Soviet citizens had internalised the regime’s patriotic message and saw the world as it was presented to them by the party - as made up of 'two camps’, 'ours’ (svoi) and the 'alien’ (chuzhoi).
Yet official attempts to extend these nationalistic attitudes to the broader sphere of popular culture, and to create a moralistic and puritanical society immune from Western influence were less successful, partly because official policy was highly inconsistent. During the war, there had been some relaxation in popular culture more generally, and front-line soldiers were exposed to big-band jazz, for example. Likewise, American films were shown during and
After the war, as were German 'trophy’ films, taken as part of reparations. With the new cultural policies of the postwar era, jazz was condemned as both Western and frivolous, and at times foreign films were criticised and banned. However, official policy was ambivalent in the late Stalinist period. Jazz tunes were sometimes rearranged as Soviet 'light music’ and played in restaurants. Jazz could also be seen in trophy films, which were shown for much of the period, despite the concerns of local party and party youth (Komsomol) officials.
Western cinema and jazz were extremely influential in youth culture, and many youths imitated the dress and acting styles they saw in the trophy films. Listening to jazz and rock and roll on Western stations was also widespread. This Western culture was at the centre of stiliachestvo (literally 'stylishness’), a term coined by the authorities to describe a youth sub-culture devoted to stylish clothes, dancing, and music. The Komsomol was extremely worried about the stiliagi, but as in the case of trophy films, there was no coherent effort under Stalin to eliminate these potentially dangerous cultural phenomena. Policy changed dramatically under Khrushchev, who, as part of his attempts at ideological revival, sought to eliminate all signs of Western, bourgeois decadence from youth culture. Predictably, these campaigns met with little success.
The Komsomol certainly had something to worry about. The so-called stiliagi did, implicitly, challenge official norms by neglecting politics, while establishing their own collective life, separate from official organisations. Interest in Western culture did not necessarily imply political or even cultural opposition to the regime. But, even so, aspects of postwar Western culture, and in particular its emphasis on consumption, did help to undermine the collectivism and quasi-military ethos of sacrifice which was such an important element of Bolshevik culture. It would be wrong to exaggerate the novelty of the emphasis on consumption, but Khrushchev’s attempts to transfer competition from the military sphere to that of the production of consumer goods, legitimised consumerism ideologically to a greater extent than before. 'Communism’, as described by Karl Marx and the Bolsheviks, was a society of extraordinary plenty and so, in theory, there was no contradiction between ideology and high living standards. However, it was likely that Marxism-Leninism’s emphasis on collective, as opposed to individual, interests would be threatened by the officially endorsed culture of consumption. By the 1970s, it was becoming increasingly clear that this was indeed happening.
Throughout the early Cold War period, therefore, popular opinion was particularly difficult for the regime to manage. If most people were probably
Willing to accept the official line on foreign policy, there was clear evidence of dissatisfaction with the late Stalinist regime of austerity and discipline. It is not surprising, therefore, that Stalin’s successors decided the balance between guns and butter had to be altered. Yet the question ofpolitika and tekhnika was more difficult to resolve. The Communist Party’s legitimacy depended on its claim that it was following a special path to modernity, one that relied on 'socialist’ economic methods, such as mass mobilisation, rather than conventional technocratic ones. Some Soviet citizens were also committed to this idea, and Khrushchev’s revivalist initiatives initially had some popular support. But their failure discredited them, and Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev, presided over a more technocratic regime.
World History
