Boundaries (2): “Comrades” vs. Deviants

Abstract

In this subchapter the formation and evolution of the antithetical identities—marked “comrades” against unmarked “deviants”—is discussed against the backdrop of political and social changes in the 1920s–1930s. Drawing upon public (mass media, official literature, congress reports) and private (personal correspondences, letters, diaries, memoirs, etc.) sources, the chapter traces the evolution of different positive (“old Bolsheviks”, “Leninists”) and negative (Trotskyists) categories and their peculiar (sometimes phantasmagorical) transformations in accordance with the current political objectives. The sweeping but common changes from friend to enemy run counter the leadership’s efforts to portray as absolute, essential, and unbridgeable the differences between good communists and counter-revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the relatively frequent labelling of adversaries as “deviants” of various kinds in petitions, denunciations, and other defamatory genres attests to the relative popularity of the opportunistic and egocentric approach to ideological antinomies among general Soviet audiences.