UC Berkeley

Taking as its theme the unsayable and the unsaid in post-Stalin Russia, this interdisciplinary dissertation pushes scholars to see more of the Soviet experience than the usual `totalitarianism' lens would allow. Its six chapters apply pressure to the cold war repressive hypothesis that casts the whispering citizens of Stalin's Russia as restored to speech during Khrushchev's cultural thaw only to be muted once more in the late sixties by political stagnation. The prevalence of this view in Russian cultural studies and national collective memory has rendered it rather difficult to write about late socialism until recently, when scholars started to take a multisensory approach to the Soviet past--not only listening to the verbal narratives of the era (whether official or dissenting), but also looking at the dynamic tensions between socialist speech and the socialist body. To counter the commonplace of Soviet history that makes quiet consonant with submission or complicity, this study attends instead to the manners in which Soviet subjects opted for silence to speak truth to power, as with the Aesopian gestural language of avant-garde pantomimists. It also pursues the wily ways that subjects presumed or produced as unspeaking or unspeakable--including the deaf-mute, the racial primitive, the sexual deviant, and the illiterate criminal--performed the silences imputed to them to say something else and, so doing, improvised interesting and unexpected scripts for late socialism.