Speed in the Era of Stagnation: Late Soviet Drug Literature

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Cultures of Decline IV: Economic Downturn and Second World Cultural Production II

Abstract

From 1934, when Joseph Stalin declared the achievement of socialism, until 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev announced the era of perestroika, drug use officially did not exist in the Soviet Union. During this time, the Soviet interpretation of Marxism held that drug use ( as well as a host of other “social ills,” such as alcoholism, prostitution, and homelessness), was a symptom of capitalist class domination. The persistence of the phenomenon would therefore indicate either a flaw in the hegemonic social theory or in the class structure of Soviet socialism itself. As a result, drug use within the country was generally denied, except in highly classified police reports. While there is at least some truth to the official Soviet position – drug use was certainly more widespread in the “West” than in the Eastern bloc – late socialist literary sources describe a notable (but largely unacknowledged) drug user subculture. Near the end of the so-called “Era of Stagnation,” working-class Soviet youth began injecting home-cooked vint, a powerful stimulant very similar to methamphetamine. This paper turns to works by two vint-user authors – Bayan Shiryanov and Aleksey Rafiev – in order to examine the affective dimensions of this understudied response to economic downturn and its relationship to late Soviet class consciousness.

Author

• Ryan Hoaglund, U of Michigan