Hearing Voices: An Accountant, Blokadniki, and Uzbek Kolkhozniki

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel presents three case studies of the intersection of state power and lived experience under Stalinism. Margaret Borozan examines the diary of a newly literate kolkhoz accountant in which bread is a central figure and Stalinist tropes are creatively reimagined. Jeff Hass discusses letters to Soviet leadership in besieged Leningrad – uncovering both the strategies employed by letter writers and how party leadership integrated information from below into governance. Charles Shaw will present on an unusual foray by the Academy of Sciences to collect autobiographical information form the largely illiterate world of Uzbek kolkhozniki in the 1940s and how this spread self-fashioning practices that had been common in the Soviet center to this periphery. Each presents on an individual or group that was marginalized in their own way and engaged in dialogue with the state, either literally or figuratively, adding to our knowledge both of how propaganda and state power impacted self-presentation and understanding and how feedback from below impacts governance in an authoritarian dictatorship.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Brandon Schechter, Blavatnik Archive / Sarah Lawrence College

Papers

• Chernaia Rabota i Chernyi Khleb: Bread as Material and Metaphor in Konstantin Izmailov’s Diary - Margaret Borozan, Stanford U

• Speaking Blockade Bolshevik: Civilian Letters to Smolny in the Blockade of Leningrad - Jeffrey Kenneth Hass, U of Richmond

• Making Kolkhoz Patriots: The Biographical Practices of Uzbekistan’s Department of History of the Great Patriotic War - Charles David Shaw, Central European U (Austria)

Discussant

• Brandon Schechter, Blavatnik Archive / Sarah Lawrence College