Régine Robin

Stalinism and Popular Culture

The social history of the Soviet Union is increasingly concerned with the relevance of a cultural approach to the study of Soviet society in the 1930s. Scholars such as M. Lewin,1 R.C. Tucker2 and Sh. Fitzpatrick3 have recently stressed the necessity of a cultural approach to the social sphere. In their eyes, we are victims of conceptual categories with which the Bolsheviks tried, without great success, to examine their economy, their social relationships, the dynamics of their society and its contradictions. Or, on the contrary, we are victims of ad hoc categories, such as the notion of totalitarianism, imposed on the entire field of Soviet studies in the West at the time of the Cold War. We must abandon this double trap and attempt to examine the enigma of Stalinism in its true complexity. In this chapter I want to deal with the question of Stalinism by focussing upon a thorny issue, its relation to popular culture.