The Creation of a ‘People’s Hero’: Vasilii Ivanovich Chapaev and the Fate of Soviet Popular History

This dissertation is an analysis of the relationship between grand narratives and individual identity in the Soviet context analyzed through the popular mythology of Vasilii Ivanovich Chapaev. It uses the concept of heroism effectively to bridge the divide between the collective and the discrete historical actor. The category of the hero, long central to historical narratives, has garnered scant attention in recent years. Contemporary history, which tends to emphasize the ‘bottom-up,’ has rightly pushed back against the representation of history as the province of powerful individuals. Yet heroism, too, can be explored from a bottom-up perspective by analyzing individual and popular engagement with, and influence on, heroic ideals. The popular mythology of Vasilii Ivanovich Chapaev is without an equivalent in Soviet History and offers critical insight into the dialectics of popular legitimacy in the world’s first socialist state. In Russia today, the widespread proliferation of images and stories about the peasant partisan leader, who went on to command a Bolshevik division during the Russian Civil War before dying in battle in 1919, is known as the “Chapaev Phenomenon.” Chapaev’s status in Russian memory is second only to that of Lenin, both in prevalence and longevity. Unlike Lenin, however, Chapaev was neither a founder of the state nor even a representative of its political class. On the contrary, his social origins in the peasantry made him politically suspect during his lifetime. And yet Chapaev’s popular appeal not only supported every political regime since the 1920s, it has endured well beyond the collapse of the Soviet state. In five chapters, my dissertation explains why. Centering on the concept of myth, it focuses on representations of Chapaev as a ‘people’s hero’ to explain how an individual became a cultural icon central to the self-representation of the Soviet state, and why a multitude of individuals appropriated this myth, building it into their own lives. Historically significant not only for its longevity, but for the cultural importance of the works it has spawned, Chapaev’s lives and afterlives inspired some of the most influential artistic and literary documents of the Soviet era, in some cases with heavy funding by the state. Nevertheless, beginning in the 1960s, he became a central figure in the irreverent jokes about the regime prominent in late Soviet culture. Paradoxically, these jokes underscored the willingness of Soviet citizens to make an ideological hero their own. Chapaev’s popularity ultimately transcended the collapse of the state that spawned it, enduring to become a condensed metaphor for Soviet History itself