"Stored in Warehouses for the Duration"

A Pocket Guide to the USSR, aka how to euphemistically present an authoritarian regime

I like reading old guidebooks as a way to understand past eras. Recently, I reviewed one that purported to help US soldiers understand wartime Britain. Today, I’m doing the same with a guidebook about the USSR.

The official goal of the document, titled A Pocket Guide to the USSR, was to provide useful and actionable information to US soldiers stationed in the USSR during WWII. Unofficially, its writers couldn’t produce just any pocketbook that fulfilled this objective. They were constrained by political realities. In 1944, when the pocketbook was issued, the USSR was a US ally. As the previously mentioned British guidebook observed,

It is always impolite to criticize your hosts. It is militarily stupid to insult your allies.

The pocketbook writers took this advice to heart. When the truth was ugly, they used euphemisms. When it was neutral or positive, they just stated it plainly. As a result, the pocketbook bounces back and forth between these two styles. In this post, I follow a similar approach. I write both about the euphemisms and the more politically neutral topics that reflect the realities of life in the USSR at the time.

Euphemisms

Soviet economy and industrialization

You will find the Russian people very proud of their country and of their efforts to industrialize it during the past quarter of a century.

Imagine a US soldier trying to verify the truthfulness of this claim. To do so, he would need to estimate the level of popular support for industrialization. In his home country, he could consult polls. In the USSR, however, there were no reliable polls. Moreover, conducting one privately (i.e., stopping people on the street to ask their views on industrialization) was not feasible for the same reasons public polls didn’t exist. Opponents of industrialization, one of the system’s central tenets, were dead, in prison, or (rightly) afraid to speak out.

Soviet citizens understood the nature of the regime and the consequences of deviating from state-approved responses. In contrast, US soldiers were left in the dark about the true nature of the Soviet system by the pocketbook.

Soviet government

The opening salvo of the section on the Soviet government reads as follows:

The basic law of the Soviet Union is the Constitution of 1936. The chief law-making body or legislature is called the Supreme Soviet (Supreme Council). Two chambers with equal legislative rights make up the Supreme Soviet. These two chambers are the Soviet of the Union, and the Soviet of Nationalities. The Soviet of the Union is elected by the citizens of the U.S.S.R. on the basis of one deputy for every 300,000 of the population.

The pocketbook then goes on to discuss different administrative bodies and other irrelevant minutiae—details teenagers are routinely quizzed on in school. Someone unfamiliar with the USSR would read the above passage and conclude that the country’s political system seems just fine. It has written laws, checks and balances, elected representatives, and other features we typically associate with well-functioning countries.

It’s only in the last paragraph that the horizon begins to darken.

 The only legal political party in the Soviet Union is the Communist Party.

But there is no need for concern, dear naïve US soldier, as normalcy is quick to return after this ominous sentence.

This party guides all important action through instructions from the central organs of the party to the party members who occupy most of the important positions in the government.

Just like in a regular country, some people hold more power than others. In this particular country, one of the people holding important positions in government is a certain “Marshal J. V. Stalin”. The only thing the pocketbook tells us about this fellow is that he is both the “Secretary-General of the Communist Party” and the “Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars”. People having two lengthy titles tend to be important.

Elsewhere in the pocketbook, we learn that “Soviet citizens have great respect, almost reverence for them [Soviet leaders] and will be offended if they are treated lightly.” In line with this, US soldiers are advised not to joke about Soviet leaders. Of course, the great respect and reverence shown by Soviet subjects toward their overlords was not entirely voluntary.

A US soldier diligently reading the 1936 Soviet Constitution might have found it surprising that Soviet citizens were reluctant to criticize their leaders. After all, Article 125 of the Soviet Constitution, like its US counterpart, guaranteed citizens the right to free speech. But the Soviet Constitution had few literal readers. Those who could afford to be literal readers were naïve foreigners. Soviet citizens quickly learned that reading between the lines was a strategy with better survival odds than insisting on a textualist interpretation.

It's one thing to avoid criticizing your leaders, and quite another to be offended when others commit such blasphemy. What appeared to be righteous indignation by Soviet citizens was often just another survival strategy.

Here’s a joke from 1950s Hungary, which followed the same authoritarian ideology:

What is a “5+2” joke?

Five years in prison for the person telling the joke, and two years for the person listening to it.

Soviet citizens understood this well. The safest option was to avoid being present when a clueless foreigner criticized their government. If they found themselves trapped in such a situation, their best bet was to try to leave quickly. If that failed, vigorous opposition to the blasphemer, feigned outrage, and praise of the infallible leader were some of the damage-control strategies available to Soviet citizens.

Soviet private radios—or lack thereof

Finally, a less consequential but equally telling example of how euphemisms permeate the pocketbook.

In pre-war times, Russians owned their own private radio sets, but with the German invasion in 1941, all private sets were stored in warehouses for the duration.

This sounds like the kind of thing a lawyer defending his kleptomaniac client would say. Your Honor, you mean the jewelry and other valuables? A thief? Not at all, my client just unilaterally volunteered his removal and temporary storage services to safeguard those valuables.

The Soviet regime likely offered a similarly convincing reason why people’s radios had to be confiscated. The real reason, of course, was that people listening to potentially uncensored ideas on their radios was an intolerable risk for a censorious regime. As a radio substitute, the regime installed wired loudspeakers in many establishments. This way, people had no choice but to listen to the (censored) content of the central radio station.  

Entertainment à la Soviet

According to the pocketbook, Soviet radio broadcast similar types of programs as its US counterpart. With two differences, that is. The first was the absence of comedy.

Entertainment in Soviet Russia was serious business, with no room for lighthearted things like comedy. Comedy is an especially dangerous genre. It might even take aim and ridicule the revered, infallible leaders of the country.

Advertising was also banned. A largely unneeded move perhaps, as there were no private companies producing consumer goods that people actually wanted to buy. The lack of consumer goods, of course, was framed not as a failure of the socialist system of production, but as the result of an unpleasant yet necessary trade-off:

Luxury goods were low on the priority list. Russians had to manage without silk-stockings so that factories might be established which could produce more necessary things.

Physical factories were important in an industrializing society. Factories of a different sort—those that could churn out propaganda—were at least as important. In other words, there was advertising on Soviet radio; it’s just that the object of advertising was different. Instead of promoting trendy new fridges, the regime promoted certain lifestyles, like how to be a model (read: docile, submissive, and self-censoring) citizen.

No aspect of life was free from politics. Watching a movie to have a great time? Good luck. Even movies had a (non-entertainment) purpose. According to a quote in the pocketbook attributed to Lenin, their purpose was to … propagandize the masses.

Entertainment à la Global

If someone found the state-censored entertainment options wanting, they could turn to some other, arguably more global activities. The ones relevant not just to Soviet citizens but US soldiers as well included alcohol, smoking, and women.

Alcohol

Soviet frontline troops were issued 100 grams [sic] of vodka every day. Measuring alcohol by weight rather than volume was a long-established custom in Soviet Russia. A hundred grams amounted to about 3 standard US shots. Although mixing drinks wasn’t common, drinking vodka typically involved appetizers like “fish, black bread, caviar and spiced meat”. Among these, I found the presence of caviar somewhat surprising. It was a luxury product even then, and as such, it would have been unlikely to be a regular feature on a typical person’s plate.

Smoking

Unlike eating caviar, smoking was an equal-opportunity activity. The pocketbook mentions two interesting things about smoking in Soviet Russia. The first one is that people smoked a kind of tobacco called mahorka, which was “very harsh to throats unaccustomed to it.” It was rolled in pieces of newspaper. I wonder how many people took secret delight in setting photos of high-ranking party members alight under the guise of smoking.

The Russians seldom smoke cigarettes as we know them.

Instead, a thing called papirosa was used to smoke tobacco. To my non-smoker's eyes, papirosa looks just like a cigarette. It was a hollow tube with some tobacco stuffed into its tip. It didn’t have a filter.

Smoking cigarettes is one of the established ways to damage one’s health. Smoking this harsh tobacco through a filter-free cigarette imitator was even worse. It’s easy to forget that, at some point, smoking cigarettes was less harmful than other alternatives.

Women

The pocketbook had something to say about romance as well.

Don’t get too romantic with Russian women. If you should get any ideas of marriage, you would have to get a “yes” from your commanding officer as well as from the girl herself. In any case, treat Russian women with utmost respect.

I leave it to the reader to interpret what “too romantic” might have meant in this context. In any case, getting permission from a supervisor was a not-so-implicit way of saying that marriage proposals should be best reserved for other times and places.

Conclusion

Some things never change. There is always demand for euphemisms, and the desire to control semantic space is ever-present. A dictatorship is called a people’s democracy; censorship and mass propaganda are described as freedom of speech; confiscated radios are “stored in warehouses for the duration”; and a death sentence is “ten years without the right of correspondence”.

But some things do change. For instance, we have less carcinogenic smoking habits. We can buy consumer goods we heard about through advertising. We can even watch comedy and marry Russian women. The USSR is gone, along with one of the most oppressive political regimes in history. We should make sure this progress continues—until no guidebook needs to hide the truth behind euphemisms.