"Nothing Could Happen to a Grandmother": Religious Veneration in Discourses of Subjective Dissent during High Stalinism

This thesis began with a pair of testimonies collected by the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System in its effort to interview Soviet refugees in the United States and Western Europe during the decades immediately following the Second World War. During the Stalinist 1930s a combination of economic, educational and cultural reforms reshaped the Soviet Union. They came with a shocking human price. Some of the most seminal anti-Soviet thinkers matured under the rule of Iosif Vissarioniovich Stalin, yet this paper's focus is on the social milieu in which authors like Vassily Grossman and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn developed. To better understand the ideological and cultural environment within which the most vehement defenders of Stalin's victims developed their thinking, this thesis seeks to clarify a single, small cultural foothold through which ordinary citizens were able to repurpose elements of Stalin's Bolshevism. By engaging with this particular cultural phenomenon as it was expressed by refugees of Stalinism abroad, I will illuminate some of the ideological richness of that regime's discontents often reduced merely to nostalgia or bitterness and offer readers a tool with which to better understand the mentalité of High Stalinism.