New Book Details Often Depressing but Sometimes Amusing Soviet Urban Legends

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 2 – “The study of urban legends is now a major trend in folklore studies around the world,” Irina Bogatyryova writes in a Novy mir review of a new book by Aleksandra Arkhipova and Anna Kirzyuk on Dangerous Soviet Things. Urban Legends and Fears in the USSR (in Russian, Moscow, 2020, 536 pp.).

            Given the distrust of Soviet citizens in officials and the government’s propaganda efforts, “belief in rumors was enormous” because “in essence, [they were] an alternative source of information which everyone made use of” and could to one degree or another rely (nm1925.ru/Archive/Journal6_2020_3/Content/Publication6_7422/Default.aspx).

            This form of communication can exist both “in the form of short communications – such as rumors – and also in the form of more elaborate narratives – legends, anecdotes, children’s boogeymen, and so on,” the authors of the book argue, according to Bogatyrova. And sometimes even the authorities used this channel to ensure that its messages spread without attribution.

            For example, the authors say, Soviet propagandists piggybacked on widespread rumors about the negative qualities of foreigners in order to discourage Soviet citizens from having contact with them. 

            At the same time, Bogatyryov says, “not all legends which existed in the USSR were specifically Soviet.” Many rumors and urban legends in the Soviet Union were exact copies of those in other countries.  Some were very old, like “the blood libel” inventions, while others were as current as the headlines.

            The new book confirms that “the life of the Soviet citizen was full of phobias. They can seem paranoid as for example the fear of an ‘alien’ trace in Soviet things,” of they can be “funny” as were the widespread rumors that jeans made abroad and imported into the USSR had lice in their seams.

            Many fears helped Soviet citizens to navigate their environment and even can be said to have played a positive role, the two authors say.   The problem for folklorists is to interpret these stories rather than simply chronicling them. That requires both skills in understanding the past and also a willingness to acknowledge the limits of such understanding, Bogatyryova says.

            For the last few decades of the Soviet period, the authors’ sources are people who lived through them. For the time before that, they relied on the files of the Soviet secret police which kept the closest possible track of what people were talking about. The former are more lively, but the latter say a lot not only about the people but about the powers too.

            In reality, the reviewer writes, “the world which is represented in Soviet legends is a depressed one.” But in considering it, Bogatyryova says, one needs to keep in mind that folklore is “above all a metaphor. It speaks about the psychological state of the society, about tensions and problems in it.”

            “And in this sense, it is a clear historical record of an era,” one that provides amazing insights into it, “if of course one is able to interpret it.”