PERCEPTION OF THE IMAGE OF STAKHANOVKA: FAN LETTERS TO DUSYA VINOGRADOVA, 1935–1936

Abstract

The main question of the article is why Soviet citizens of different professions and ages wrote letters to Stakhanovka, who was the first Soviet celebrity. To answer it, the author relies on "celebrity studies", a new direction in the social sciences and humanities, in which historians turn to the study of "celebrity culture". In the article, a celebrity is seen not as a status assigned to an individual and providing prestige and other social dividends, but as an analytical tool for analyzing the culture of society. Therefore, to study the mechanisms of the emergence and spread of celebrities, it is important to shift the research focus from studying the personality of a public figure to fame in general. In other words, it is important to pay attention to the cultural practices of consuming the image of a public figure, as well as to the political and social mechanisms by which these practices were constructed. Referring to "celebrity culture" as a tool for analysis, the author demonstrates that in the 1930s, the Soviet Union was not an anomaly in comparison to the Western societies. The Soviet culture of celebrity was the basis of the planned economy and the authoritarian regime, but this did not exclude the presence of non-repressive, democratic phenomena among the audience of the central Soviet press.