The State as a Family: Speaking Kinship, Being Soviet and Reinventing Tradition in the USSR

Abstract

Only by striving to understand the alien behavior of a remote time and place can one hope to understand whence we have come and how much of the past still lives unrecognized within us. Edward Muir ²

Abstract

The State as a Family: Speaking Kinship, Being Soviet and Reinventing Tradition in the USSR

The dominance of classic political history for many years led to the disregarding of «relatives’ letters» as a crucial source for understanding the formation of the Soviet state and society. These were letters to Soviet officials from ordinary people who perceived the state as family, and who imagined the state leaders as their close relatives. Broadening a dominant concept in recent Soviet studies (that of speaking Bolshevik), I explore «relatives’ letters» by analysing the fact that their authors were speaking kinship as evidence that reveals the premodern foundations of modern states and uncovers a social practice for generating power in everyday routines. Without being limited by the constraints of Weberian-modernisationist and Burkhardtian paradigms, I reflect on the ways in which seemingly opposed ideas about tradition and modernity, power and kinship, status and marginality, the licit and the illicit have infused representations of «Soviet citizenship», and analyse how letter writers justified their connections with the abstract concept of «the state». «Relatives’ letters» show that the state lived in and through its subjects: Imagining a state as a political family and leaders as close relatives not only provided a source of identity and contributed to social cohesion in the Soviet empire; it also explains the very nature of contemporary informal relationships. Consequently, speaking kinship became a universal political language of governance and the language of ordinary people's emotional attachment to the paternalistic state.