The Civic Duty to Hate: Stalinist Citizenship As Political Practice and Civic Emotion (Kiev, 1943-53)‪.‬

In contrast to traditional scholarship that views citizenship as a status of a certain category of persons, present-day scholars understand it as a set of institutionally embedded political, social, and cultural practices that define a person as a member of a polity. (1) It seems that Stalinist ideologues shared this postmodernist understanding. While the issue of disenfranchisement remained of some importance until 1936, concern with a person's civic status was not among mature Stalinism's main worries. (2) In this article, I argue that the Stalinist state understood citizenship as practice, with participation in a set of political rituals and public display of certain "civic emotions" being the marker of a person's inclusion in the political world. What role did political rituals and civic emotions--such as love for the Motherland and the Great Leader--play in the relationship between the Soviet state and its citizens? In his influential work on Stalinism, Stephen Kotkin attempts to overcome the simplistic state-society dichotomy by arguing that power operated through language. Ordinary people assumed state-prescribed identity primarily by "speaking Bolshevik," and learning the art of this "identity game" was essential for social advancement or mere survival. Kotkin goes as far as to claim that it is irrelevant whether those speaking Bolshevik believed in what they were saying--the important point is that they knew what language they were supposed to speak. (3) A group of talented young scholars has taken Kotkin's analysis a step further. They argue that while the rules of "speaking Bolshevik" were determined and enforced by the state, Soviet people appropriated them and conceptualized the Stalinist political order in terms of official ideology. (4) These contributions address the issue of individual belief and agency under Stalin, but they move away from Kotkin's fascinating conundrum of why the issue of belief seems irrelevant.