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Iren Andreeva, Chastnaia zhizn' pri sozializme: Otchet sovetskogo obyvatelia (Private Life under Socialism: The Account of an Ordinary Soviet Person). 344 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009. ISBN-13 978-5867937386. Oleg Leibovich, V gorode M: Ocherki politicheskoi povsednevnosti sovetskoi provintsii v 40-50-khgg. (In the Town of M: Essays on Everyday Political Life in the Soviet Provinces in the 1940s and 1950s). 440 pp. Perm': Iiul'-media, 2009. ISBN-13 978-5881874087. The recent Soviet past is an attractive but also a difficult object of enquiry. On the one hand, it has clear historical boundaries and offers us plenty of material to work with. On the other hand, more than one living generation in Russia has a personal relationship to late Soviet history, which means that this period often becomes a function of collective memory and remains fluid and elusive. (1) Both of the works under review reflect this ambivalence of memory, even though at first glance they have little in common: one is a memoir of life in the capital, the other a scholarly monograph on the provinces. Nevertheless, even if their approaches and perspectives differ, both authors attempt to describe everyday life, its official and private niches, its behaviors and practices, the functioning of its political and economic institutions, and the world of the provincial and metropolitan nomenklatura. Oleg Leibovich's study of the late Stalin and early Thaw eras makes an important contribution to what has been called "one of the most significant historiographical achievements of recent years--the investigation of late Stalinism in its provincial dimension." (2) Iren Andreeva seeks to make a contribution to the wave of memoirs published in recent years on the Thaw and "stagnation" eras. (3) As a qualified art historian, a theoretician of Soviet fashion, and a former people's deputy of the USSR, Andreeva took up the pen, as she put it herself, to "protect [her]self from the onset of irrelevance" (15). She constructs her narrative around various cornerstones in the life of a Soviet person--car, apartment, dacha, clothes, and work--adding at the same time some dimensions of foreign travel and political career that were not typical for Soviet people. Her professional involvement in Soviet haute couture, which placed her at some remove from the ordinary consumer, as well as various aspects of her personal life, mean that she cannot really justify her claim to the status of "Soviet everyman." She spent time with her family in the zone of Soviet occupation in East Germany and consequently had unusual access to "trophy" items; she was related to a member of the Politburo and to the woman who founded the institute in which she began her career; and she traveled abroad regularly. Andreeva makes frequent and somehow over-emphatic references to her irreverent reaction to the "ignoramuses and boors" among the bosses and the "contempt for political blather" that she felt from early on (220), but she has evidently never been in open conflict with the system and enjoyed all the benefits it offered. Many episodes from the book, as well as its very style, allow us to classify Andreeva as one of the types of ex-Soviet "remembering subject" identified by Catriona Kelly and Il'ia Kalinin: as one of those people who "make fun of familiar details of the Soviet past in order to show that they are not a sovok." (4) After her vivid account of the paradoxes of the Soviet fashion world and of (female) strategies of obtaining goods under conditions of chronic shortage, Andreeva's recollections of her time as a people's deputy seem rather schematic. Leibovich's subject is Molotov (previously and subsequently Perm') oblast, which existed on the map of the USSR for a mere 19 years (1938-57). Put together hastily from a variety of territories, it was seen by officials in Moscow as a "place to collect undesirable elements, a kind of large camp without barbed wire" (31). … |
