Behavior Befitting a Cultured Person (Kul’turnost’), Soviet Style

Michael David-Fox, “Behavior Befitting a Cultured Person (kul’turnost’), Soviet Style.” David-Fox’s intervention will discuss new approaches to the Russia/Soviet key concept of culturedness (kul’turnost’). It will showcase the fruitful recent development of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) in the Russian context as part of a new cultural history that is able to incorporate striking numbers of newly available ego-documents. In historical literature, this key term (kul’turnost’) has been researched and discussed almost exclusively in terms of the Soviet culturedness campaign begun in 1936, in which norms of proper behavior and lifestyle, higher educational achievement, and political literacy were inculcated at a time of rapid upward social mobility of a new elite. Placed in the context of inclusion and exclusion, the culturedness campaign of the mid-late 1930s can be fruitfully reinterpreted; during the initial “conservative” turn in Stalinist culture it proffered a merger of Bolshevik and intelligentsia values for a greatly expanded, often receptive audience—even as the murderous bloodletting of the Great Terror was unfolding. However, as this presentation will demonstrate, the culturedness concept must be investigated in a far broader chronological frame. For example, it was widely discussed among Bolshevik intellectuals in the 1920s; it continued to evolve in the 1940s and after. The presentation will center on the aftermath of the 1930s culturedness campaign, giving some vivid examples from the World War II era of how the concept was internalized by members of the 1930s generation as they confronted the Nazi occupation of large swathes of the Soviet space. In the violent cross-cultural encounter that was part of the ideological war on occupied German territory, internalized Soviet notions of kul’turnost’ came into jarring conflict with German Kultur as young Russians, in response to German racial colonization, claimed the mantle of civilizational superiority.