Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity 1917-1941

By David L. Hoffman
Cornell University Press
www.cornellpress.cornell.edu
ISBN 0-8014-8821-4
2003, 264 pages, Paper $18.95 

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher <mosher@svsu.edu>, Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI USA 48710

As the Republican Party in the United States of America campaigns in support of "traditional values" (Christian, militaristic, anti-homosexual), it is instructive to read of values-driven campaigns in other societies.  In Stalinist Values, David L. Hoffman focuses on what some historians have called "The Great Retreat" of the Soviet Union back into conservatism following the optimistic overturn of old values in the October Revolution of 1917.  This optimism largely continued through the reign of the Bolsheveik leader Lenin, and died with him in 1922. 

Under his successor Josef Stalin there were concerted government campaigns for hygienic bodily cleanliness and the regular changing of clothes, and against drunkenness. The state encouraged a turn against sexual license, defining and defending the proper Soviet marriage.  Once again--as before the revolution--Russians were encouraged to stick to conventional norms, patriarchal families, the Russian literary classics and their Tsarist heroes. 

The virtue of hard work, borne with stoicism and a lack of complaint, was promoted.  An over-performing, non-complaining miner named Stakhanov was exalted in the press as a national hero, which inspired campaigns for more Stakhanovites in every workplace.  National groups within the U.S.S.R. (especially in those troublesome republics at the periphery who were quick to declare independence when the Soviet Union dismantled in 1991) were celebrated in an aestheticized, folkloric form.  There was a campaign for literacy that hoped to see more workers spending leisure hours reading rather than drinking.  Hoffman covers these campaigns in readable detail.  Like the curious stylistic similarities in public sculpture of the 1930s in New York, Moscow, Paris and Berlin, the same domestic and social values were apparently being promulgated by the state in all these capitals as well. 

There is renewed interest in the now-departed Soviet Union, and an exhibition of Stalin-era Socialist Realism in Frankfurt in the autumn of 2003 includes the Vasili Efanov painting of a flower-bearing young woman meeting the Supreme Leader Stalin that graces this book's cover.  The book is illustrated with historic Stalin-era posters from the Hoover Institution's collection, exhorting those proper Soviet values in didactic images, and the visually inclined among us would have liked to have seen more of them.  Perhaps Professor Hoffman would assemble an annotated full-color collection of these posters as his next book.