“A RUNO SONG ABOUT DETENTION OF A SPY”: THE STATE BORDER IN THE 1930s SOVIET FOLKLORE AND PROPAGANDA DISCOURSE

The Soviet folklore, as a project implemented in the 1930s–1950s by the authorities implying the active involvement of folklorists to induce the corresponding response from narrators, is classified by researchers (often ironically) as a type of the pro-Soviet pseudofolklore, falsified folklore, fakelore etc. A promising approach for studying this phenomenon is the analysis of the relationship between the ‘power’ and the ‘folk’ discourses, between the Soviet propagandist context and a folklore text. This article studies how journalistic texts about the Soviet state border were perceived by the carriers of the folklore tradition, how the ‘folklore’ images of the Soviet border were constructed, and how the folk art influenced the style of the Soviet propaganda discourse. It is demonstrated that the border topic reached its full accomplishment in the Soviet folklore’s songs, laments, tales (skazy), fairytales, byliny, ‘noviny’, and ditties. In the works of that kind the border of the country was presented as a part of the Soviet universe, an epic image of the Soviet cosmos. All around the country folk narrators, responding to the ideological demand, integrated the new reality of the Soviet border into the traditional world view. The results were the figures of the ‘bogatyri’ patrolling the border and confronting external enemies who were metaphorically described as “hissing serpents and creeping reptiles” or as werewolves spies. On the one hand, these folklorised texts about the Soviet border fit well into the overall Soviet power discourse of the Homeland’s frontiers, but on the other hand, they deviate from it in some ways. For example, the famous locution “the border under lock and key” does not occur in them (unlike the idea of the closedness of the border as such). At the same time, the image of Saint George the Conqueror, cherished by the people, was integrated into the Soviet border folklore and the Soviet border guards were likened to this saint, as well as to Ilya of Murom. Thus, a kind of a dialog between the ‘people’ and the ‘authorities’ took place in the sphere of folk literary art. The creation of the national myth was not fully manageable, no matter how hard the authorities tried to gain total control of the process. Ключевые слова /