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In this paper I seek to resurrect the bugbear of Soviet history, the question of ideology. Until recently it appeared that the problem of Soviet ideology had died from sheer fatigue and been given a decent burial by the revisionist social historians. With the turn to social history, the focus of historians shifted from the primacy of politics and ideology in the Soviet Union to the social bases of Stalinism, and one rarely came across ideology as an analytical problem. Recently, however, a consideration of ideology has raised its hydra head impelled not only by those who seek to vindicate the totalitarian interpretation of Soviet history, but also by new theoretical approaches that have expanded the definition of ideology of how it shapes identities, informs behaviour, and provides frameworks for interpreting experiences at both the individual and social level.' I will not recapitulate the movement towards cultural history with its new emphasis on the importance of language and narratives, both spoken and written, elite and vernacular, in the construction and apprehension of experience.2 If language prefigures reality then we have no access to the past except through it, and rather than seeing language merely as a medium that conveys value-neutral information, we have to critically interrogate the literary genres, narrative structures, inflections of idiom, the complexities of reference, the self-representations and the anxieties woven into the texture of historical sources. Does this then make the historian a literary critic andlor a scholar of hermeneutics? In this essay I propose to undertake a three-pronged analysis. First, I would like to trace the historical trajectory of the role of ideology in Western literature on the Soviet Union. Since this in itself is a lengthy undertaking I will focus on the works of a few seminal scholars such as Bertram Wolfe, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Stephen Kotkin. Then, I will survey a few key Western texts on the history of Soviet women and show how the authors have analyzed the role that ideology played both in conceptualization and the implementation of Soviet policies towards women. Finally, I will conclude with a few remarks on the gendered nature of Soviet ideology and propaganda.

Ideology, Gender and Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Historical Survey