Canadian Slavonic Papers

Uprooting Otherness: The Literacy Campaign in NEP-Era Russia by Charles E. ClarkReview by: Michael SmithCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 42, No. 4 (DECEMBER 2000),pp. 590-591Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40870255 .

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590 Book Reviews

language as where an American college student first encounters English grammar; Modernism as better than realism, but worse than Postmodernism.

Altogether the book is a great deal of fun, if perhaps unnecessarily wordy in places.

A. Colin Wright, Queen's University

Charles E. Clark. Uprooting Otherness: The Literacy Campaign in NEP-Era Russia. Cranbury, NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 2000. 235 pp. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. $41.00, cloth.

This monograph on the adult literacy campaign in Soviet Russia during the 1920s is a study in contrasts. Although grounded in an institutional history of the state- sponsored campaign, the study also weighs how bureaucrats high and low, how workers and peasants, and how women and students - all exploited or ignored the literacy movement for their own purposes. The very term, "literacy," tends to carry the positive values of enlightenment and equality, values expressed in Soviet initiatives to reach illiterate women and peasants and improve their lives through special clubs and reading rooms. They were two of the social groups, the "others" suggested by the title, that the Soviet regime sought to integrate into its new community of discourse. Yet Charles Clark shows how in its early stages, the campaign was also a "school for socialism," a means whereby members of the "Society for the Liquidation of Illiteracy" (ODN) were to be "educated in the machinery of a centralized bureaucracy" (p. 42). This organizational priority helps explain why the Soviet regime placed such a high value on adult literacy, reaching the workers, soldiers and peasants of the country with the militant language and political messages of Soviet power. This also explains why an administration intent on teaching literacy also invented a small universe of acronyms and abbreviations that were at first more confusing than clarifying. Literacy students had to learn some rather bizarre words - kul'totdel, Cheka likbez, Rabzemles, likpunkty, Gubgramcheka -

along with their simple ABC's. Exciting literacy texts, like Our Strength is Our Corn Field, sought to promote better economic production and political indoctrination. These efforts may have made adults more conversant citizens of the new regime, but hardly any more truly literate as readers and writers.

Clark is deliberate in recounting the administrative realities of the campaign. By the end of the NEP era, the literacy movement was caught in a damning web of institutional rivalries, contradictions and inefficiencies. The ODN and its reading rooms competed for funds and influence with the Communist Youth League, the Chief Committee of Political Enlightenment, the League of the Militant Godless, and the Commissariat for Enlightenment. Literacy training was undermined by a host of cultural entertainment, seasonal work patterns, labour imperatives, and the traditional values that governed people's lives. It was delayed and undercut by the

misguided tactics of administrators, by poor state funding, by overworked and

underpaid teachers, and by the campaign's conscious neglect of children. Clark leaves little surprise or doubt that "the campaign to create a universally literate adult

population in the Russian Republic by the end of 1927 had failed" (p. 115). The

literacy campaign was a mirror for NEP's chaos and contradictions, its high expectations and meager results, rather than a base for social and civic advancement.

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Book Reviews 591

The book's strengths are in its institutional approach and its precise attention to the archival sources. Chapter 5, "Fighting Recidivism and Spreading Bolshevik Culture in the Village Reading Rooms," is especially convincing as to the author's claim of alien "otherness." I sometimes found myself wishing Clark had investigated some of his own insights in greater depth. What might comparisons with the pre- revolutionary literacy campaigns, and the battles for universal literacy in the 1930s, tell us about the history of the literacy drives as a whole? How was the "otherness" of the illiterate and semi-literate expressed more directly and broadly through their own voices and behaviours, as well as in the opinions and dictates of party and state politicians arrayed against them? Still, Clark's conclusions concerning the "incrementalism" (p. 71), public apathy, and mediocre success of the NEP-era literacy drives remain a solid bridge to further exploration.

Michael Smith, Purdue University

Ger Duijzings. Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. xv, 238 pp. Maps. Illustrations. References. Index. $27.00, cloth.

In the aftermath of the televised horrors of 1999, it may be almost impossible for Westerners to think of Kosovo as anything other than a land occupied by rival, deeply segregated societies, each of which is prepared to enforce its exclusive claims

by violence. Duijzings' study makes the too often forgotten points that, while Kosovo has been the home of antagonistic "parallel" societies, relations among ethnic groups in Kosovo have never been based solely or even predominantly on conflict, and that group boundaries have often been fluid and permeable.

Duijzings' work on Kosovo began in 1991 as an ethnographic study of ethnically mixed pilgrimages - religious events where Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims came together at one another's sanctuaries and shrines and where both religious rituals were shared and group identities blurred. As the wars of Yugoslav dissolution highlighted group divisions throughout the region, Duijzings was able to draw on village practices as well as on Milan Sufflay's 1925 Srbi i Albanasi with its

depiction of "osmosis" between Serb and Albanian clans in Kosovo and on Noel Malcolm's studies of family and political links between Albanian and Montenegrin Serb clans to show that local définitions of identity have rarely corresponded to the ideals of nationalist ideologues or the "official" categories imposed by central governments.

Duijzings is well aware that by the early 1990s Kosovo had indeed become a land of parallel societies, each with its own exclusionary nationalist myth. But he argues that such myths and the ethnic violence they legitimate have not been generated at the village level but are responses - indeed, "rational" responses - by central governments to the ambiguity and flexibility of local ethnic identity. The "Western" idea of the nation, the unitary "imagined community" of Benedict Anderson, is at odds with the world of ethnic shatter zones such as Kosovo, where religious practices (shrines, saints, taboos) can pass between communities and where clan and village alliances cut across conventional, "official" ethnic demarcations. Central authority - national authority - cannot, Duijzings argues, accept multiple ethnic and

Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. XLII, No. 4, December 2000

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