Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941.

David Hoffmann's title captures one of the paradoxes of the Soviet 1930s: most workers in this capital city of the world's first proletarian dictatorship were fresh from the provinces. Both the Soviet regime and subsequent historians have found it difficult to apply social classifications to the hundreds of thousands of peasants who migrated to Moscow during collectivization and crash industrialization in the 1930s, comprising over half of the workforce in industry and virtually all of the construction workers. (p. 74) Hoffmann argues that these in-migrants, isolated in workers' slums on the edge of the metropolis, were minimally affected by Soviet campaigns to transform them into reliable proletarian cadres. Rather, they retained customs and social networks brought from the villages; in fact, they transformed Moscow and other urban centers and thus helped to shape Soviet society.

New migrants gravitated toward relatives and fellow villagers who helped them to find jobs and housing and to adjust to urban life. These networks allowed them to preserve village customs such as evening "strolls" (gulian'e) with peasant songs and dances. (p. 176) On the shop-floor, because managers lacked the staff to teach them proletarian work skills and tempos, migrants learned from experienced fellow villagers. These informal instructors operated within the "permissive task-oriented habits of their preindustrial work culture," teaching new migrants "not only to operate machinery but also to avert managerial discipline and circumvent norms." (p.82) Another peasant institution also helped the new migrants: artels, or working cooperatives headed by an elder. "Elders retained complete command over their artel members, routinely overruling the orders of supervisory personnel." (p. 86) By threatening to walk away en masse from the labor-hungry factories, they could force managers to bend the rules for them, "awarding them unearned bonuses and allowing them time off from work." (p. 90) This informal labor organization was more effective than the quiescent trade unions. These and other actions - such as norm-busting and violation of shop-floor hierarchies - provoked conflicts between new arrivals and older workers. (p. 109)

Hoffmann's book confirms other scholars' findings that previous generations of peasant in-migrants in Moscow had tackled similar problems of adjustment with similar tactics of mutual aid. Works by Victoria Bonnell, Robert E. Johnson, Diane Koenker and others on the late tsarist period also show that peasant-workers influenced urban culture, came into conflict with older workers and did not easily acquire proletarian discipline or consciousness. Joseph Bradley shows how urban reformers blamed the migrants for crime, disease and other urban ills.(1) Though 1917 ushered in an ostensibly proletarian dictatorship, these waves of urbanization continued, and the Bolsheviks continued to blame many of their problems on the "backward" culture represented by peasant migrants. William Chase echoes Bolshevik diagnoses of the "negative" impact the migrants had on established Moscow workers in the 1920s, not only by competing with them for jobs and housing, but also by bringing in old-fashioned values and habits.(2) In contrast, Hiroaki Kuromiya's Union-wide study of workers in the First Five-Year-Plan critiques Bolshevik perceptions of class identities, but also finds similar conflicts between old and new workers.(3) Hoffmann shares Kuromiya's caution about Soviet sources; but while Kuromiya focuses on state officials and established workers, Hoffmann takes the viewpoint of the migrants themselves, depicting them as fully human and enterprising agents who lived rich social lives despite their bleak material conditions.

Like the other students of the Moscow working-class, Hoffmann asks whether his subjects ever had a cohesive proletarian identity. Koenker argued that the heterogenous Moscow workers developed such a consciousness only during the struggles of 1917. Chase found that by the late 1920s, old and new workers had overcome their differences to struggle against the employers and specialists who thrived in the mixed economy of the NEP. For his part, Hoffmann critiques Bolshevik perceptions of worker identity. First, "the new workers assumed the roles required of them when they dealt with Soviet officials, but they had no trouble adopting other roles with other people." (p. 214) Second, the very term "working-class" had ceased to have its oppositional connotations after the Revolution and had instead come to mean a group of people with particular privileges and obligations vis-a-vis the state. (pp. 211-212) In this context, as Hoffmann proves, peasant migrants resisted being molded into the disciplined and "cultured" proletarians the regime wanted.

Just as the subjects of his study span the village and the city, Hoffmann has bridged the chasm between the literatures on workers and on peasants. He also places his study in the context of literature on migration, class, and identity formation. He uses a variety of sources from both government and newly opened Party archives. Most interesting are the vivid anecdotes from interviews Hoffmann conducted in the late 1980s - some in Moscow's Izmailovskii park, others in the Hammer and Sickle factory - with retirees who had gone through the migration process in the 1930s. Their stories naturally reflect the vagaries of memory, the official de-stalinization and revival of religion acceptable in the glasnost years, and possibly the self-selection of interviewees. Nevertheless, this oral history, including satirical folk verses about peasant and worker life, puts a human face on the processes Hoffmann describes.

Several aspects of this fascinating book are problematic. For example, Hoffmann may overestimate the impact this generation of migrants had on the Soviet order. He attributes partly to their influence the so-called "Thermidor" or retreat from revolutionary values in Soviet cultural policy in the mid-1930s. "The failure of Soviet leaders to instill new ways of thinking, new allegiances, and new values in the mass of the population ultimately impelled them to retreat from revolutionary culture ... Soviet leaders began to invoke traditional values and symbols in an attempt to create cultural unity between government and people." (p. 177) However, his evidence does not support his periodization of the Thermidor as beginning in the middle of the decade. Rather, he gives examples of apparent official concessions to "peasant" culture even earlier, such as an accordion-playing contest held in 1930 and the adulation of Stalin on his fiftieth birthday in 1929. (p. 180) These were the same years that have been identified as a super-proletarian "Cultural Revolution": following "anti-rightist" signals from the Party, students were tossing out professors, Young Communists were taking down church bells, and writers were presenting their works to factory audiences.(4) Further evaluation of these contradictory phenomena may help refine our understandings of "Cultural Revolution" and "Thermidor." Nevertheless, the general point is clear: the regime had to appeal to various constituencies in pursuit of legitimacy and popular cooperation.

In the conclusion, Hoffmann acknowledges that "The village-based subculture of peasant in-migrants could subvert official discourse but could not erase it." Given that exploited workers could not draw on the oppositional images associated with the working class before the revolution, "new workers fell back on the nonconfrontational forms of resistance characteristic of peasant culture. The result was falling worker productivity and enormous turnover, but little overt labor protest." (p. 219) Because these newly arrived workers failed to live up to the expectations of Soviet Party leaders that they would turn into a "politically supportive proletariat," argues Hoffmann, "Party leaders consequently remained distrustful of societal initiative, retained authoritarian control over political and economic institutions, continued their extensive use of coercion, and mixed authoritarianism with paternalism." (p. 219) He seems to be arguing that these dictatorial impulses, evident in "What is to be Done" and other early writings of Lenin, were not endemic to Bolshevism, and that if the Bolsheviks had succeeded in molding a cooperative working class, authoritarianism could indeed have withered away. David Hoffmann's assertions about the centrality of the peasant-turned-worker in the workers' state deserve thoughtful reading, add a colorful piece to the puzzle of social identities, and will undoubtedly inspire further discussion and research.

Nellie Hauke Ohr Vassar College 

ENDNOTES

1. Victoria Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers' Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900-1914 (Berkeley, 1983); Robert E. Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979); Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, 1981); Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 1985).

2. William Chase, Workers, Society and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow, 1918-1929 (Urbana, Ill, 1987).

3. Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 88-102, 209-247.

4. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington, 1978), esp. pp. 21-32.