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Book Review
| Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. 256. $45.00 (ISBN 0-8014-4029-7).
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| Why, one might reasonably ask, would anyone living in Stalin's USSR care about being denied the right to vote? Although carefully staged elections for central and local state bodies took place with much fanfare in the 1920s and 1930s, it seems counter-intuitive to think that most residents of the USSR would brave the potential dangers involved in protecting their right to participate. Yet, as Golfo Alexopoulos shows in this fascinating book about the "disenfranchised" (lishentsy in Russian, literally those "deprived" of voting rights) in the decade 1926–36, Soviet citizens did just that, in massive numbers—complaining, supplicating, or impassively petitioning state officials in order to secure the right to vote and, along with it, the economic and social benefits that came with full membership in the Soviet polity. Alexopoulos's book will become the standard English-language account of Soviet policies toward the disenfranchised, as it exhaustively covers the evolution of this legal and social category from its introduction shortly after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution to its formal abolition by the USSR Constitution of 1936. Yet Alexopoulos's account goes far beyond legal and institutional history, analyzing the practice of disenfranchisement as it related to the formation of Soviet social identities, Soviet social engineering schemes, and modes of interaction between state and individual that characterized the Stalinist dictatorship. She shows that voting rights functioned as a marker for a broader boundary between citizen and alien and hence became the object of vigorous contestation by all involved, from top Party officials down to the disenfranchised themselves. Methodologically sophisticated and firmly grounded in a rich source base, this study—part legal history, part social history, part history of the daily bureaucratic and cultural practices that shaped a specifically Soviet mentality—deserves attention not only from Soviet specialists but also from those interested in the intersections between law, culture, and social identity in the modern world. |
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Alexopoulos begins with the decision by the nascent Bolshevik state to deny voting rights to "bourgeois aliens" and officials of the Tsarist regime, a move that was originally intended to blunt the social and political strength of pre-revolutionary elites. Although official regulations focused on social background, local electoral officials immediately targeted broader categories of non-laboring or "exploitative" elements, equating "bourgeois values" with a wide range of behaviors viewed as amoral, criminal, or socially deviant. These categories expanded drastically after roughly 1926, with the beginning of Stalin's "revolution from above," as numerous new behaviors were deemed "anti-Soviet" and hence grounds for disenfranchisement. Small-scale traders, those who lived on unearned income or hired labor, the poor, and dependent family members of the disenfranchised all became possible "outcasts," losing voting rights and, along with them, what access they had to tightening supplies of consumer goods and state services. |
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Yet "Stalin's outcasts" were hardly passive victims in this process. State officials may have seen the disenfranchised as social aliens, hiding their bourgeois identities behind masks of contrition and loyalty to Soviet power, but the disenfranchised themselves sought rehabilitation on the basis of often sincere personal narratives of suffering, ignorance, achievement, and service to the Soviet state. In making such claims, petitioners helped to define the Soviet polity itself, a process that took place on the margins of society as aliens, citizens, and local officials all sparred over definitions of genuine Soviet identities. In asserting their own "true" Soviet selves, Alexopoulos argues, petitioners reshaped the very set of values that the regime took as the basis of its exclusionary concept of social engineering, recasting notions of social background and class status in terms of honest labor, upright family relations, military service, and other values that became quintessentially "Soviet" in the early Stalin era. |
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Despite its continued centrality to the construction of the Stalinist polity, Alexopoulos shows that disenfranchisement was, by the mid-1930s, largely superfluous to state control of populations deemed "anti-Soviet." Even as disenfranchisement campaigns peaked in the last years of the 1920s, they began to be overtaken by other forms of exclusion: forced deportation of supposedly rich peasants as part of the collectivization of agriculture, transfer of surveillance functions from civil agencies to the secret police, and especially the creation of the notorious Soviet internal passport system in 1932, which limited access to major cities for a massive number of "outcasts." Alexopoulos shows that the 1936 Constitution, which returned voting rights to most residents of the USSR, was not intended to eliminate or even reduce the more onerous social and economic restrictions that disenfranchisement entailed, especially those related to geographic mobility. Many of the disenfranchised, especially those repressed in the collectivization drives of the early 1930s, assumed otherwise and sought to regain both their voting rights and their status as insiders after 1936. They were sorely disappointed. Most remained outside the Soviet body politic, subject to suspicion and to numerous forms of discrimination; many fell victim to the deadly campaigns against "anti-Soviet elements" during the Stalinist terror of 1937–38. By the late 1930s, rehabilitation and redemption were no longer among the most important of "Soviet values." |
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| Paul Hagenloh
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| The University of Alabama |
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