Under Putin, Russian Mass Political Culture Once Again Culture of Stalinism, Velikanova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 12 – In a new book, The 1936 Constitution and the Mass Political Culture of Stalinism (in Russian; Moscow, 2021), Olga Velikanova argues that the mass political culture Stalin promoted, one that built on the Russian tradition of “a good tsar and bad boyars,” has proved remarkably stable and continues to this day.

            As summarized by Andrey Kolesnikov of the Moscow Carnegie Center, the Texas-based Russian scholar argues that “today’s mass political culture is the culture of Stalinism,” a phenomenon that reproduces itself whenever the state “especially intensively is involved with politics, interferes in the economy and devotes its attention to the propaganda of ultra-conservative ideological ideas” (carnegie.ru/commentary/86176).

            And while one may disagree with those who say that the Putin system is reproducing “the Soviet man,” there can be little doubt that it is now promoting “the Stalinist man,” she suggests, a kind that reflects both the imposition of authoritarianism from above and a corresponding demand from the population below.

            The formal freedoms that the 1936 Constitution established led some Soviet citizens in the 1930s to express themselves more freely, Velikanova says; and that in turn made it easier for the regime to identify and repress those who were dissatisfied. Something similar occurred later under Khrushchev and now under Putin.

            In Kolesnikov’s words, the Stalinist regime then and the Putin regime now created a situation in which people trusted the leader but distrusted the specific actions of his regime, allowing the supreme leader to retain legitimacy even as his agents violated the norms that he was nominally in support of.

            For this to work, there needed to be enemies seeking to destroy the population and the country; and again, today’s Russia resembles Stalin’s of the 1930s and 1940s. But what makes these parallels so disturbing Kolesnikov suggests is that Stalin’s 1936 Constitutional changes served as “an overture to the Great Terror.”

            It remains to be seen whether Putin will use the Stalinist culture he has restored to move in a similar direction.