Tropology of Brotherhood: Poetics of Stalinist Imperial Imagination and Homogenization of Soviet Space

• In Event: Soviet Multinational Literature: Between Identity Politics and the Discourse of Empire

Abstract

The rhetoric of brotherhood and friendship of peoples played a vital role in the "ideological arsenal" of Stalinism. Its heyday is associated with the collapse of the declared Trotskyist Marxist project of world revolution at the end of the 1920s. The international rhetoric of the "proletarian brotherhood" was internalized, i.e., turned on the peoples of the USSR and ideologically repackaged for internal political and ideological consumption. On the one hand, such a turn fully corresponded to the tasks of forming a new – truncated – identity of the Soviet people. On the other hand, this rhetoric played an essential role in the formation of all-Soviet identity and formed the basis of Soviet patriotism, dividing the world into a nationless-homogeneous one within Soviet borders (later, these borders began to cover "fraternal" countries of the Eastern bloc), and a hostile and internally "torn apart by national enmity" the world outside the Soviet empire. The paper examines the metaphors of brotherhood, family of nations, friendship, and other tropes.

Author

• Evgeny A. Dobrenko, U of Venice (Italy)