The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies

Illiberal deliberation: Communist regime travel controls as state capacity in everyday world politics

“…In Scott's work, the hubris of Soviet-type high-modernist state planning was met by ubiquitous aversion and stealthy disobedience at the micro level (Scott, 1985(Scott, , 1989(Scott, : 50, 1998). Scott's assumption of pervasive resistance is akin to 1980s revisionist research on communist regimes, which depicted citizens as persevering, tenacious liberal subjects, with the minds of a Westerner, unencumbered by their historical context, who made rational, selfish business deals with the communist regimes for their own individual advantage (Krylova, 2003). In contrast, post-1991 research has shown how many citizens took communist ideology seriously and held a genuine belief in the hostile and dangerous nature of the capitalist West -as propagated by the communist regimes (Kotkin, 1995;Hedin, 2004).…”

Dictatorship revisited: consensus, coercion, and strategies of survival

“…Criticism of the rigid ‘believers or resisters’ formulation has appeared among historians of the Soviet Union (but has not been limited to that history), where the questioning of analyses of popular behaviour, based on what Anna Krylova has termed the ‘tenacious liberal subject’, has sparked debate (heavily influenced by readings of Foucault) about the extent to which the individual can be considered ‘autonomous’ of context and the extent to which individuals are formed instead by the circumstances in which they live (Krylova 2001). Put more straightforwardly, is Stalinist man actor on the scene, in some way separate from social conditions in the Soviet Union, thus choosing conformity for convenience on the basis of an autonomous private consciousness, or is he rather product whose perceptions and self-understandings (and choices) are generated by the regime itself (Fitzpatrick 2009, 21)?…”

A Way Out of the 'Third Resistance' Cul de Sac: Concepts of Resistance and the Study of Socialist Dictatorship in Czechoslovakia

“…Krylovová naopak navrhla perspektivu, která zobrazuje "sovětský subjekt" jako osobnost, jež je neustále v přerodu a mění se v kontextu radikálních sociálních a kulturních transformací, které stalinismus přinášel. 65 Diskuse v revue Kritika ukázala, jak široká je nabídka možných přístupů ke studiu rezistence. Přes značné rozdíly v metodologii i výsledných interpretacích bylo zřejmé, že se všichni zúčastnění shodnou na tom, že rezistenci nelze zkoumat jako osamocený fenomén, nýbrž je třeba ji integrovat do širšího kontextu výzkumů "rozličných, a dokonce protichůdných reakcí na působení autorit".…”