Did the Soviet People Support the Communist Party? The View from Soviet Literature

Title VIII Research Scholar Anatoly Pinsky’s paper examines the relationship between the Soviet citizen and political authority in the early Stalinist mid- and late 1920s. Based on Pinsky’s book project, “The Origins of the Thaw: Thought and Literature under Stalin and Khrushchev,” the paper explores the people-power nexus by taking the unusual approach of focusing on lyric poetry. Pinsky shows how this key genre of Soviet literature modeled the way in which Soviet citizens were expected to relate to the Communist Party. The desired relationship made demands on individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and bodies, too; when viewed from the present-day, it provides us with a picture of political personhood that should challenge our assumptions about modern citizenship, whether in contemporary Russia or elsewhere.