Ordinary legal consciousness in Soviet Russia of 1920s – 1930s: on possibility of reconstruction by historical narratives

Falaleeva Irina Nikolaevna PhD in Law Docent, the department of Theory and History of State and Law, Volgograd State University 400062, Russia, Volgograd, Universitetskiy Prospekt 100 falal@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Legal awareness, as one of the elements of social consciousness, has various forms and levels of manifestation, can be characterized both by quantitative criteria (individual, group, mass) and by the level of reflection (doctrinal, professional, everyday). The relevance of studying the features of everyday legal consciousness in crisis, transitional periods of state and legal development is determined by the fact that in transitive periods its "specific weight" and value increases sharply. This fully applies to the first decades of Soviet power.

The aim of this work is to develop the possibility of identifying and interpreting legal discourse in historical narratives of personal origin (letters, memoirs) and so-called uncensored (folklore) texts. The choice of sources is based on their mass character and direct connection with the ordinary level of legal awareness as an integral element of public consciousness. In the context of legal anthropology, everyday (horizontal and vertical) communication in the socio-cultural field during the formation of the Soviet legal system actively generated new meanings of law, transforming the old ones,which is reflected in the texts of the selected corpus of sources.

To solve this problem, it is proposed to use semiotic and linguistic discourse analysis of texts. These methods, in our opinion, are not opposed to each other, as some researchers believe, but are complementary ^[12].

We should note the significant success of historians in developing non-traditional historical narratives. This is reflected in numerous publications of archival materials, as well as in the typification of this array of historical sources. ^{[8; 9; 13]}. Studies of the issues raised often intersect in the works of social historians and legal historians. These related professional communities today equally recognize the effectiveness of postclassical research methodology ^{[17; 14; 7; 1; 11]}.

To understand exactly how the reproduction of the legal institution in practice occurs, legal scholars began to turn to the methods of historians who study everyday life, recognized that "legal reality is constructed by discursive practices of signification", that one should focus on the actions of people, and not on impersonal norms that "themselves" regulate social relations " ^{[7; p. 10-11]}.

Since the task is to detect the characteristics of everyday legal consciousness in historical sources, it is important to note that it is the result and process of reflecting legal reality at the everyday level. Ordinary legal awareness is closer to normal, not extreme. This is mostly a non-reflexive, everyday phenomenon. Despite all the one-sidedness and fragmentary sources of personal origin, they, due to the mass nature of the material, allow us to recreate the typological contours of the studied type of legal consciousness. It is characterized by reliance on feelings and mental habits of behavior, as well as framework archetypes that can be represented as basic legal discourses.

In particular, A. I. Klimenko identifies two as such: the discourse of order and justice and the discourse of freedom and responsibility ^{[4; p. 111]}. According to the researcher, there is a tension inside each pair, which gives an impulse to the birth of alternative images of law. This tension provokes the dialogue between actors located in different positions: in the first pair of discourses of representation of the society is focused on the idea of justice, and the state – the value of the order. In the second dichotomy, the state focuses on responsibility, while citizens are free ^{[4; p. 112]}. In this dialogical, communicative space, a voluminous image of law is formed, the fabric of legal life is woven from the dialogue of managers and managed.

Thus, the methods used allow us to trace the influence of archetypes on the socio-cultural, including legal behavior and consciousness of all participants in legal communication. At the same time, a semiotic problem can be solved: the focus of attention includes those everyday practices that the participants themselves attach a quality of significance to. They are studied from the point of view of the sign function: which of the subjects of legal communication has the right of interpretation or whose interpretation is recognized as legitimate; what are the roles of subjects in communication and in the construction of a prototype of a legal norm ^[5].

We will consider successively how the sources of personal origin – «letters to the authorities» - reflect the transformation of everyday legal consciousness. First, the researchers of this corpus of sources paid attention to such a characteristic as a personalized perception of the state. Indeed, it is an inherent tendency of everyday consciousness to give anthropomorphism to natural and social phenomena. Since the mythologization and demythologization of reality takes place permanently during the transitional periods of society's development ^{[18; p. 45 – 48]}, the mechanism of personification of power is also activated.

For example, according to V. A. Tikhomirov, “the images of elders and the priest were used, on the one hand, the representations of the Bolshevik leaders, created a sense of intimacy leaders to the people, and on the other – have begun looking for sources of trust by the population in extreme post-revolutionary conditions. Mikhail Kalinin as the headman of the all-Union scale– one of the projections of the community organization of everyday trust structures ». ^{[16; p. 105]}. Here is a typical appeal: "We, the Peasants, believe and hope that the Central government will make that spike, will make love to the local government, will eradicate those sharp shortcomings"and so we fervently ask our esteemed comrade Kalinin chosen by us "heartily" ^{[13; No. 97, p. 155]}.

Secondly, researchers also record such a typological feature as distrust of the management mechanism, especially of the middle and lower levels ^{[15; p.134]}. It seems that this was the effect of an ingrained political and legal myth, the concentrated meaning of which can be expressed by the parody " the king Favours, but the dogman does not." ^{[10; p. 33]}. Examples of the specific content of the proverb are more than numerous: "We hope for the Central Soviet Government, believe it and know that it leads us to a bright future, but we do not hope for our local authorities" ^{[13; No. 102, p.169]}. «the Inhabitant of the village is in a terrible situation and lives under the arbitrariness of modern «holdimords», covered with a red flag and shielded as a shield by the party «label » ^{[13; # 105, p. 173]}, etc.

Paternalistic expectations were quite strong, and the common sense of justice was characterized by an idealistic image of the promised just structure of society, which is inevitable and soon to come. This myth was combined with the heroization of the leaders of the revolution. Due to the inversion, dichotomous elements of everyday legal consciousness, the discrepancy between the proper and the real found a simple explanation. It was assumed that there were specific culprits who prevented the implementation of justice. It seemed quite obvious to the utilitarian mind that these were incompetent mediators-regional and local officials.

Studying the mechanism of functioning of regional power, it should be borne in mind that the scale of state management, following the size of the country, was actually inherited from the Russian Empire. That is, the vertical structure has been preserved: the center – regions– « grassroots » territories. This means that the position of the regional subject of government has not changed either in the eyes of the center or in the eyes of the local population, as evidenced by the vitality of the mentioned proverb. During the period of Soviet modernization, a regional administrative entity, like any official sent from above, is an interpreter from the language of the center to the local languages, both literally and symbolically. Being between the "hammer and anvil", the regional power was stigmatized on both sides due to the "incorrect" translation.

Let's consider in more detail the second typological feature of "letters to power", which reflects the characteristic features of everyday legal consciousness. According to V. A. Tikhomirov's observations, «letters to the authorities » in the first decade of Soviet power signaled that«there is a strengthening of trust in the Central government with an escalation of distrust of local government » ^{[16; p.104]}. The center actively used the trust of the population and transferred responsibility for "excesses" to the regional and local levels of government.

In General, the phenomenon of "kinks" occupies a separate place in the system of political and legal management methods. It is successfully used in the context of reproducing the myth "the king Favours, but the hound does not favor". This is an empirical tool for the formation of a legal norm: the government gropes to determine the limits of what is permissible from the position of the population, releases steam of social outrage with the help of this deep installation of ordinary legal consciousness. The method of such redirection of responsibility has been widely known since ancient times and is even normalized in some systems of customary law, which may indicate both its archetypal character and the universality of the psychoemotional component of everyday legal consciousness. Moreover, the managers on the ground were really incompetent, deservedly becoming a target for criticism. In this case, the semiotic mechanism of metonymy worked in the ordinary legal consciousness .the negative qualities of part of the bureaucracy were transferred to the whole: all the local apparatchiks were obviously bad

Describes the process of modulating new rules and such a frequently mentioned word in the sources as "abnormalities" ^[2]. In this case, the context does not imply a deviation from the norm, but the "old", pre-revolutionary norm, while the " new " is not yet articulated, only implied, and must be independently guessed by the parties to the dialogue through euphemisms, metonymic transfers, cliched metaphors. The abundance of war metaphors attracts attention: in the texts everywhere appear «front » and «mobilization », «wrestlers » and « struggle » - from fighting the enemies of the revolution to fighting for the harvest. Interestingly, a decade after the civil war, the frequency of using these metaphors in the language of power is increasing. So the center outlined a normative corridor of possible behavior of the population, discursively ordered to think properly.

"Normalizing judgments of the authorities" were expressed not only in the text of documents, but also non-verbally, through the encouragement of certain behavior, ways of responding to the questions and complaints of the population by the ruling subject ^[8]. We should agree with M. I. Pantykina, who believes that it is the intentions of individual legal consciousness that determine the content and form of discourse, the positions of its participants. They transform old and generate new meanings of law, which then form a common understanding of legal realities and form the space of social practices ^{[12; p. 28]}.

Researchers from different positions approach the analysis of the sources we are considering. So, sh. Fitzpatrick identifies several roles for the authors of letters. From the point of view of legal awareness, the roles of "citizen" and "petitioner" are of interest. If the first type in the dialogue with the authorities appealed to law and justice, the second type chose the tactic of appealing to the mercy and pity of the authorities. ^{[17; pp. 207-208]}. It is obvious that the role of the petitioner was rooted at the institutional and legal level, since it was statistically predominant in "letters to the authorities".

In turn, well-known historians A. ya. Livshin and I. B. Orlov note that the population combines several strategies in interaction with the government: "acceptance (submission), resistance and indifference" ^[9;p.42]. Further, the authors write: "the Analysis of peasant letters to the authorities" shows that in the Russian tradition of the 1920s, the main reaction to pressure from above among a part of the population was "indirect participation and escape" (ibid.). And this, in our opinion, have some kind of strategy, clarifying completely different setup of the political and legal common sense: an imitation-a simulacrum – passive obedience through understanding the legal benefits either under direct threat of physical pain – can be in “the game of Bolshevism" through the rituals of meetings and greetings “friend”, i.e., producing patterns of behaviour, the approving authorities. This strategy is opposed to imitation-imitation – active, sincere acceptance of the norm through self-identification ^{[6; p.98]}, which could also be a mass phenomenon and had the same attributes. Describing the simulation strategy, S. Kotkin writes: "there was no Need to believe. But it was necessary, however, to demonstrate that you believe” ^{[3; p. 276]}. That is, to communicate with the authorities, the authors of letters intuitively chose the "Bolshevik language", even if for them it was an "empty sign", only formally indicating the acceptance of the idea. As we can see, ordinary legal awareness at the semiotic level increases its communicative competence, organically applying the "people's sharpness", following the commanding form of "Newspeak", forcing to take an insincere position in the dialogue. But the very fact that the population (the addressee of legal signs) copies these patterns of behavior is perceived by the center (in this case, the addressee of semiotic interaction) as a manifestation of loyalty, and most importantly, the legitimization of the regime. Thus, even a dialogue of non-equals should be recognized as semiotic.

However, according to I. D. Newaza, from the point of view of the communicative approach "on the right, you can only talk when there is a claim to status, which you do not possess, or possessed, but may lose by the fault of another” ^{[11; p. 21]} the sources of personal origin is reflected and this component of ordinary consciousness – attempt legal identity in the new social conditions. Thus, the interpretation in «letters to the authorities » of the unfair position of the peasants in comparison with the working class sounds like a refrain in phrases like this:«the Peasants become like the workers ». Farmers often emphasize their professional responsibility in their letters, i.e. they assume the obligation to "feed" everyone, but at the same time they claim to recognize the equality of their rights with the "hegemon"; - the working class ^{[19; p. 120]}.

Thus, all this allows us to conclude that historical narratives, in particular, memoirs, letters, folklore texts, are an important additional source of information about the formation of "living law", if their research is applied to the communicative concept and within its framework - semiotic and discourse analysis. Even being the least objective, these sources are good at recording such typological characteristics of everyday legal consciousness, which are the basic archetypes, such as: paternalism, personification of images of state power, redirection of responsibility, linking legal status to social belonging, and many others, the analysis of which is the subject of a separate article.