Managed Self-Rule: Paradoxes of Everyday Normativity in the Stalinist Era

The article discusses the problem of functioning of norms in the everyday life of the Soviet society during the period from the 1930s to the 1950s. The microanalysis of specific historical situations based on archival data leads to the conclusion that self-rule was an essential feature of the social order during the Stalinist era. This regulation emerged spontaneously from below, and then was either legitimized or criminalized by the authorities depending on situational pragmatics and doctrinal considerations. Thus, alongside written legislation (both state and party), official instructions, and duties, various and heterogeneous conventions operated in daily life. The scope of their application was also defined conventionally. Analysis of social reality leads to the idea that the sphere of conventions went far beyond interpersonal relations and small publicity. Thus, managed arbitrariness was located in the core of power practices, both economic and administrative. Moreover, the arbitrariness allowed was simultaneously appropriated by the party-economic nomenklatura for private consumption. This characteristic of normativity was rooted in the ag-gregate character of Soviet everyday life, which combined both modernist and archaic elements. The conventionality of any and all norms inevitably hindered the activities of party and state institutions, which fundamentally contradict-ed the modernist project. As a result, the Soviet state was becoming a society of risk.