THE MODERNITY OF MANUAL REPRODUCTION: Soviet Propaganda and the Creative Life of Ideology

Abstract

In supposedly postideological times, late Soviet propaganda seems to epitomize the futile practices of a moribund regime. Instead, the material practices of ideological transmission in the 1960s and 1970s Soviet Union urge us to reconsider how ideas gain mobilizing force in a variety of political settings. This article looks at the use of handmade artifacts and personalized performances in Soviet cultural work to argue that personal reproduction is a crucial mediating factor between counterintuitive, utopian ideas and lived experience. As comparisons between the Soviet case and post‐Soviet movements show, semiotic slippages that take documented activity as evidence of broader social dynamism remain key to the sense of agency of mobilizing networks.

Anthropological Fieldwork and “Having an Ideology”

“…The article goes on to discuss examples, such as inventive local usage of the adjective material'nyi ("having material substance") to describe thoughts and words. As one interlocutor said, thoughts affect objective reality just like any physical matter would -for example, they can cause magical harm (Kruglova 2017, 769) -an elaboration of Marxist materialism that was clearly foreign to Kruglova herself, for all her upbringing in the household of a Soviet culture worker of the creative kind described by Sonja Luehrmann (2011).…”

Beyond ‘Propaganda’: Images and the moral citizen in late-socialist Vietnam

“…That is not how the producers see their work. Those I know regard themselves as moral agents too, motivated and creative, like the ‘cultural professionals’ discussed in Luehrmann's (2011) account of Soviet ideology work. They are distressed that there are Hanoians who think it demeaning to be the intended recipients of their works.…”

“…On the use of planned urban space as a subject-making tool, see Kligman 1990, Clark 2003, Pang 2007, and Schwenkel's account (2015: 521) of the importance of urban infrastructure projects to Vietnam's ‘technopolitics of visibility’. The surprising extent to which the actual producers of socialist Party-state propaganda could experience their work as agentive and even ‘creative’ is noted in Humphrey 2008, Luehrmann 2011, and Landsberger 2013. On the ‘vernacularizing’ of socialism's discursive outputs in everyday life and how their meanings subsequently lost their ‘hegemony of form’, see Yurchak 2003 and 2006; Kruglova 2017; Ssorin-Chaikov 2017.…”

Presidents at Work: Shop Displays of Political Portraiture in Prewar Damascus

“…In their creative and material vibrancy, these examples resonate with local productions of “handmade” Soviet propaganda from the 1960s and 1970s. In her fascinating article, Sonja Luehrmann () describes how everyday citizens in the Soviet Union created posters, albums, and wall newspapers to tailor national messages to local issues. The homemade nature of these propagandistic materials was not frowned upon by those in power, in part because the sentiments and designs of the pieces closely followed ideological and aesthetic protocols; rather, they were encouraged as a way to inscribe locals into the imaginative and even corporeal processes of propaganda‐making.…”