Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades. Celebrations in the Time of Stalin. .

Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades. Celebrations in the Time of Stalin. By Karen Petrone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. x plus 266 Pp. $39.95).

Karen's Petrone's book is a fine addition to the growing number of volumes on the cultural history of the early Stalinist period. Historians such as Stephen Kotkin, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Lynne Viola, Robert Thurston, David Hoffman and Sarah Davies, have long argued that the Western image of this era as a period of uninterrupted repression represents only part of the historical record. Instead, complicating the picture of a savage regime and a passive and martyred people, these historians have shown us how Soviet citizens resisted the state's attempts to collectivize the land, ration food, implement labor discipline, and implant informers among the population. Likewise they struggled against attempts to categorize population groups, and impose "civilized" and urbanized identities. While Petrone's study falls within the general arguments of this revisionist trajectory, her work is a serious attempt to analyze the ways and means through which Soviet discourse and practices themselves violated socialist values that they promoted and created conditions in which citizens were forced into acts of inefficiency, non-compliance, and outright resistance. Unlike other historians, Petrone does not underestimate the totalitarian intent of the Stalinist state and its will to absolute control, but instead, she argues provocatively that the state could not anticipate the unintended consequences of planned policies, or control unorthodox interpretation of state discourses.

Festivals, parades and demonstration, had from the inception of the October Revolution, formed an integral part of Soviet public culture. As demonstrated by James von Geldern, Soviet holidays were a means of publicly communicating socialist values to an illiterate population and legitimizing the new regime. But while Geldern's work emphasized the problematics of Bolshevik self-representation, and the transformation of eclectic revolutionary discourses into a legitimizing state ideology, Petrone examines the way in which planners of national holidays tried to inscribe Stalinist ideology onto various festive occasions. Her focus therefore is more on the holiday practices that encapsulated Soviet ideals, and popular responses to them, rather than on the evolution of Stalinist ideology and its selection of particular norms and values.

The monograph, which is based on a wealth of archival research, focuses on the key celebrations that the state organized during the late 1930s. Petrone argues that the coincidence of terror and festivity during this period was not mere happenstance, nor were celebrations an attempt to distract the population from the depredations of terror. Instead, the coexistence of terror and celebration constituted an important element of Stalinist culture. And the multiplicity of celebration discourses, instead of extending state control, created uncharted arenas where oppositional ideas could be voiced. In the first part of the book Petrone examines the major Stalinist holidays that included physical culture parades, celebration of Soviet aviation and Polar expeditions, and New Year festivities. While parades from the 1930s conjure up images of disciplined displays of modern nationhood, in the Soviet Union, long delays and poor planning encouraged acts of unofficial spontaneity on the part of the marchers that disrupted the order. Though ostensibly dedicated to creating an equal society, parades rendered transparent the various geo-political, ethnic and gender hierarchies that structured the union.

Aviation exploits and narratives about Arctic explorations fired the imaginations of millions of Soviet citizens, as they vicariously participated in the superhuman exploits of New Soviet Men. While these adventure stories created a pantheon of legitimate Stalinist heroes and broadcast Soviet technological prowess, they also marked the inferiority of the native inhabitants of the Far North. The contributions of these lesser citizens were usually edited out of the texts, as were instances of reckless official mismanagement that endangered the lives of the very heroes that the state tried to promote.

The third chapter of this section constitutes a delightful essay on the trials and tribulations that beset the state's attempts to reintroduce fir trees to New Year holidays in the late 1930s. People argued in earnest over the political implications of various Christmas decorations. While this practice marked the end of the joyless political austerity of the years of the Cultural Revolution, to a certain extent it also reflected the desire of citizens for apolitical and private celebrations. Soviet elites took this opportunity to engage in conspicuous consumption, and carnival organizers re-introduced fortune telling, masquerades, and dating games into Soviet leisure practices.

In the second part of the text, Petrone examines the intelligentsia responses to the Pushkin Centennial of 1937, the Twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution and celebrations of the Stalinist Constitution. While I lack the space to critically examine all three chapters, Petrone's analysis of the Pushkin Centennial is a subtle and nuanced discussion of the triangulated web of discourses that enmeshed, the state, the soviet elite and the masses. Petrone interrogates the state's bumbling attempts to create a coherent set of images of Pushkin for consumption at home and abroad. Could the elitist Pushkin be turned into a popular revolutionary hero, who spoke for and to the masses, without doing considerable violence to his personal record? And how could a state that repeatedly crushed intellectual freedom, lament Nicholas I's victimization of Pushkin? Petrone shows that while the Soviet intelligentsia consumed bulk of the Pushkin Centennial resources allocated by the state, some members chose this occasion to address the plight of the artist trapped in an oppressive system, a theme that the state itself foregrounded in its representation of Pushkin.

If a totalitarian state desires that its intellectuals address the issue of free speech and censorship, and if the intellectuals comply with this demand, does this qualify as an act of resistance? A similar question comes to mind when reading the chapter on Stalin's Constitution. While Petrone shows how the talk about elections, civil rights and welfare empowered citizens to use the document to fight local battles against state officials, why did an authoritarian state highlight the theme of civic participation? Did the contradictory and simultaneous experience of modern discourses and pre-modern state practices constitute a central element of Stalinist "reality"? Does the ironical or tragic mode of narration adequately represent Stalinism? Petrone's complex and thought provoking reading of Stalinist culture will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and those engaged in cultural studies.