Soviet Women – Everyday Lives

Melanie Ilic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032174570
• eBook ISBN: 9781000033908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: History

Based on an extensive reading of a broad range of women's accounts of their lives in the Soviet Union, this book focuses on many hidden aspects of Soviet women's everyday lives, thereby revealing a great deal about how the Soviet Union operated on a day-to-day basis and about the place of the individual within it.

Including testimony from both celebrated literary and cultural figures

and from many ordinary people, and from both enthusiastic supporters of the

regime and dissidents, the book considers women's daily routines, attitudes and

behaviours. It highlights some of the hidden inequalities of an ostensibly egalitarian

society, and considers many wider questions, including how extensive was

the 'reach' of the Soviet regime; how 'modern' was it; how far were there continuities

after 1917 between the new Bolshevik regime and Russia's imperial

past; and how homogenous and how mobile was Soviet society?

1 Introduction

Experience as history

As academic Historians, we are often advised in our publications to provide an anecdote or two both to illustrate how the topic of our research played out in practice and to underpin the validity of our conclusions. My methodological task in this book has been to work the other way around: how can researchers make what appear on the surface to be a series of experiential anecdotes arising from the exploration of everyday lives into ‘history’? We are brought up to ‘learn from experience’; we turn that experience into knowledge and meaning that helps us to understand, interpret and navigate the world around us. In this respect, our real life experiences form a critical part of our personal histories, and these are also inextricably intertwined as part of grander historical narratives. Our experiences are shaped by the relationships we have with the many people around us and with the varied structures of influence and power in which we operate on a daily basis. We are, both and at the same time, individuals and part of bigger collectives and communities that shape our everyday lives. We can see ourselves as individuals, forged by the world around us, and as active makers of our own history.

This study is further complicated by the fact that it focuses on the everyday and the mundane, the small things; those aspects of life that are often ignored and overlooked in the more standard and mainstream histories, even those that focus mainly on social and cultural topics. Aspects of the ‘ordinary’ and everyday experience are now deemed worthy of historical investigation, even though they may remain elusive to define.¹ Indeed, for many years in my own reading of the range of sources used for this book I simply skipped over the types of comments I have now learned to value as a rich source of Soviet social and cultural history. As Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel prize-winning laureate, noted in her study of Soviet women’s experiences of the Second World War, this is ‘History through the story told by an unnoticed witness and participant. Yes, that interests me …’² Likewise, Lilianna Lungina draws the attention of her readers to the fact that ‘the more people who bear witness to their own experience, the easier it will be to preserve it’; if enough people do so, it will be possible for a coherent picture to emerge from ‘a composite of voices’.³ In developing such an approach, the investigation of everyday lives through women’s narrative literatures can be closely connected also to studies of political power and social relationships, the dichotomies of public and private, and to gender positionality particularly in terms of how women viewed their own role and status in Soviet society.⁴

As Historians of the Soviet Union in particular, we are cautioned to be aware of the fact that what appeared to be the case on the surface (in ideological pronouncements, official documentation and in visual representations, for example) may not have been what took place in everyday practice. Yet where should be look, then, to find evidence of what Soviet life was really like? One of the sources used for this study argues that it was easier for her to write about her experiences than to live through them.⁵ In attempting to address the problem of validating experience, this book uses Soviet women’s documentation of their everyday lives, the personal accounts of their lived experience as a foundation for historical enquiry. In her own account of her personal and everyday experiences as a film-maker, Marina Goldovskaya draws on Zinaida Gippius’s revolutionary-era St Petersburg diaries in which the poet expressed the sentiment that there are many daily occurrences that remain outside of the historical record and are eventually forgotten: ‘I will tell about the little things. The big things will be told by History’.⁶ Oral historian Anna Shternshis has also recently drawn attention to the ‘mosaic of living Jewish subjectivity’ that can emerge from the close study of the fragments of personal testimonies that relate to the everyday.⁷

Not only have women generally been placed on the margins and side-lines of Soviet history, but their everyday experiences have also been largely ignored, and this can be seen to run in parallel with official Soviet discourse that acknowledged women’s contributions and activities predominantly only in the public sphere. The approach adopted for this study, therefore, aims to give voice to an otherwise untold story, and one that is rapidly disappearing from living memory. Part of the intention here is to shine a light on some of the broader but somewhat hidden aspects of Soviet society, such as its commonplace routines and hidden hierarchies. How did Soviet women experience their everyday lives in such extraordinary, and often shifting, political contexts? There is a surprisingly great deal of continuity as well as change in Soviet women’s everyday lives.

This book examines a variety of aspects of Soviet everyday life as recorded in a broad selection of women’s narratives and reflective writings. The narrative texts and scripts that constitute the source base for this study are largely first-hand accounts, and these original writings and reflections are mainly not in the least bit concerned in themselves with engaging in deep theoretical analysis of the Soviet system. Some of the sources cited here arise from a desire to set out experiences of life in labour camps or during wartime, but I have not included detail of these particular observations unless they overlap with the more commonly experienced ‘everyday’. The topics to which the careful reading of these various women’s narratives give rise have been used by both contemporary Soviet observers and in subsequent historiographical and sociological analyses to examine the directions of Soviet policy formulation and to explore and explain Soviet social and cultural norms. Some of these debates have been integrated into this study to provide background context to the topics under review.

The aim of this study is to focus and reflect primarily on what these various women’s narrative sources themselves reveal about Soviet women’s everyday lives: their daily routines and activities; their life ambitions; and their attitudes and behaviours in relation to the topics under review. What is taken as important here is what the narrators (as authors, diarists and interview respondents, for example) themselves reveal rather than what contemporary analysis and subsequent academic research may suggest as alternative readings of these sources as historical documents or the supposed reasons that lay behind the identified attitudes and behaviours. As such, it is worth pointing out that very often the comments referred to and cited here were made only in passing in the texts and were part of a much broader discussion rather than providing the central focus of the narrative. Indeed, these are often just those very types of comments that I may have unintentionally ignored in my initial reading of the source.

It is also important to point out that the intention of this study is to highlight and bring together a composite of first-hand commentaries rather than to focus on what is not discussed (the silences in personal testimonies, which themselves can be telling) or on subsequent explanations for the topic under review. This is, then, by its very nature, a fragmentary, somewhat disjointed and undoubtedly incomplete history of Soviet women’s everyday experience. How could it be otherwise? It should also be acknowledged, of course, that no two lives are ever the same, but the aim here is to identify some of the generalities and commonalities in everyday existence, regular practices and aspects of life and attitudes that would have been easily recognisable to those women living in Soviet society.

In focusing on what is revealed in the writings, interviews and life stories, rather than on what is left untold, this study also offers an insight into the broader workings of the Soviet system, and highlights details that may not normally be subject to historical investigation or brought into the open for discussion and review. The historical reliability and authorial objectivity of Soviet memoir literatures have often been called into question, influenced as some of it almost certainly was not only by rumour and gossip rather than presenting first-hand testimony, but also by the much politicised context in which a good deal of it was originally produced.⁸ My approach here has predominantly been to take the primary source materials – the various testimonies of living witnesses, those who participated directly in Soviet everyday life and with first-hand observations of it – at face value, not seeking to question their content or to verify every detail, but this is not to say that the research and selection has not been conducted with caution and, sometimes, with considerable scepticism.

The study includes accounts provided by war brides and Soviet wives, defectors, emigres and immigrants, Intourist guides,⁹ well-known and much-celebrated literary and cultural figures, Foreign Office officials and diplomats, those suspected of being spies and informers, ‘former’ people and the well-connected, exiles, deportees and refugees, schoolgirls and teachers, the wives and daughters of secret police operatives, enthusiastic supporters, initially at least, of the Soviet project, and the disillusioned, Communist Party members and those who came to take more dissident positions. Included here also are some of the observations of overseas visitors to the Soviet Union and of foreign-born long-term residents, who had significant experience of the internal workings of Soviet society and its system of organisation, including accounts provided by the wives and daughters of Moscow-based embassy staff, and of visiting journalists, researchers and students.

I have drawn extensively on these writings to provide first-hand information about Soviet everyday life in the hope of giving these women’s experiences a ‘voice’ and allowing them to speak for themselves. These individual fragments of past lives have been pieced together with the aim of producing a more comprehensive and bigger picture of Soviet everyday life as women experienced it, shedding light on issues and subjective responses that are rarely written about, even in social and cultural histories, and that are in danger of being lost as new generations move further away from the Soviet past.

It is important to point out that a reliance on the particular set of women’s narratives employed here to some extent also prescribes the research findings. For example, most, though not all, of the first-hand narratives used in this study were produced by specifically Russian women who spent their formative years living in the Soviet Union. Although many of them may have had extensive experience and knowledge of life outside of the Russian Republic itself, their outlook and behaviours were undoubtedly shaped by their more privileged status within Soviet society and by the legacy of the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. Women’s everyday lives and attitudes were undoubtedly different in Soviet Central Asia, the central Volga region and the Caucasus, where Islamic teachings and what would commonly be regarded as more patriarchal practices remained prevalent.¹⁰ Life was also different in the Ukraine or in the Baltic States, incorporated into the Soviet Union after 1940, where Roman Catholic, Jewish, Lutheran and Baptist influences were more in evidence.

Likewise, it should be remembered that these are largely sources, by their very nature, mostly produced by the Soviet Union’s more educated and articulate citizens, and its diverse intellectual and cultural elites. These were women who were able and willing to express themselves in written form and orally in interviews. Some had a particular axe to grind when living in emigration and reflecting in later life on their formative years growing up in the Soviet Union. Others looked back with a rather more humorous slant in their memoirs. The source base is similarly reflective of experiences in the metropolitan and urban Soviet Union rather than of its smaller towns and many villages, though it is possible to pick up from these readings glimpses of what everyday life was like also in the more outlying areas of the country from those women who travelled through its vast expanses and directly from rural women themselves as interview respondents.

This study has benefitted enormously from the fact that much of the relevant narrative literature in which it is possible to glean evidence of Soviet women’s everyday lives (rather than their record of public service, as required by the style of the ‘official’ Soviet biography) has been translated into English. Indeed, some of the works used here may never have been published in the Soviet Union or in post-Soviet Russia. The process of translation, as pointed out by Elena Ivanoff in her work with Natalya Reshetovskaya, allows the author to make substantive changes to the original text, to delete material and to add new detail. Ivanoff concludes that the end result provides a more authentic account at the time it goes to publication.¹¹ Subsequent translation may also allow for the inclusion of material that was originally not permitted to appear in print because it was subject to censorship.¹² It should also be borne in mind, however, that the introduction of revisions through the process of translation may also permit authors to obscure aspects of their past that they may not want to be publicly known. The process of translation also provides the opportunity for authors to respond to criticisms of the first-language manuscript. It is worth pointing out also that a good number of the sources cited here only appeared in print after I had already started work on this now seemingly timely book, and that sadly a number of the authors cited here died during the writing-up process.

A close reading of these women’s narratives reveals that eviden...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Born in the USSR: Soviet identities
• 3 A happy childhood
• 4 Looking for love
• 5 Emancipation and equality
• 6 Health and welfare
• 7 Reproductive health and maternity
• 8 Consumption, Soviet style
• 9 Custom, ritual and superstition before and after 1917
• 10 Go West
• Appendix 1: Foreign films in the Soviet Union
• Appendix 2: Russian idioms and sayings
• Bibliography
• Index