The Soviet Past in the Post-Socialist Present

Methodology and Ethics in Russian, Baltic and Central European Oral History and Memory Studies

Melanie Ilic, Dalia Leinarte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317390442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This collection examines practical and ethical issues inherent in the application of oral history and memory studies to research about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Case studies highlight the importance of ethical good practice, including the reflexive interrogation of the interviewer and researcher, and aspects of gender and national identity.

Researchers use oral history to analyze present-day recollections of the Soviet past, thereby extending our understanding beyond archival records, official rhetoric and popular mythology. Oral history explores individual life stories, but this has sometimes resulted in rather incomplete, incoherent, inconsistent or illogical narratives. Oral history, therefore, presents the researcher with a number of methodological and ethical dilemmas, including the interpretation of "silence" in biographical accounts.

This collection links the discussion of oral history ethics with that of memory studies. Memories are shaped by factors that may be, simultaneously, both consecutive and disrupted. In written accounts and responses to interview questions, respondents sometimes display nostalgia for the Soviet past, or, conversely, may seek to de-mythologize the realities of Soviet rule. Case studies explore what to do when interview subjects and memoirists consciously, sub-consciously or unconsciously "forget" aspects of their own past, or themselves seek to take control of the research process.

Part I

Russia

1Interview with Anastasia Posadskaya

May 1995¹

Barbara Engel

This transcript, published here for the first time, is of the reflexive interview conducted between Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck after the completion of the fieldwork and preparatory discussions for their oral history project that was to result in the publication of A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History (1998). The book is a pioneering study in the field of post-Soviet historical research. It was one of the earliest texts to make extensive use of interviews with ‘ordinary’ former Soviet citizens to explore aspects of everyday life under the Soviet regime. The book is interesting also for the processes it went through in its production. Engel and Posadskaya-Vanderbeck first met at a Russian women’s history conference in Helsinki in 1992 (which I helped to co-organise and attended). At that time, Engel was an eminent academic, based in the United States, with an internationally recognised profile of research and publication in the area of pre-revolutionary Russian women’s history. Posadskaya-Vanderbeck was also building an international reputation for herself as a Moscow-based, leading activist in the post-Soviet women’s movement. Engel raised the finance for their project in the United States, in the form of a collaborative research grant from the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, and organised the publication side. Posadskaya-Vanderbeck was responsible for identifying potential respondents and conducting the fieldwork in Russia.

The decision to conduct, record and analyse the interview is in itself an example of ‘good practice’ in oral history and feminist collaborative research, and the transcript reveals a number of methodological and ethical issues arising during the various stages of the project: in its design and implementation, in the course of the fieldwork, and in the final selection and editing of the testimonies to be included in their published volume. These are discussed in more detail in my overall introduction to the current book. Engel and Posadskaya-Vanderbeck also note some surprising outcomes to their study in terms of Soviet women’s attitudes to education, work and their family lives, as well as the shock, after the deeply unsettling periods of collectivisation and famine under Stalin in the 1930s, of contemporary rural Russian women’s continuing post-Soviet poverty.²

B:Anastasia, we’ve almost come to the end of our work on this book.³ Let’s talk about how we got to this point. Why did you undertake this project?

A:I wanted to take advantage of the possibilities that were opened in the late 1980s by the period of perestroika. The lives of the women in this book are my life, too. I was brought up and lived for thirty years as a Soviet citizen. I was educated in the Soviet system, worked in that system, married, gave birth to a daughter and had a divorce in that system. And yet I knew so little. My mother’s mother, with whom I lived as a child, always resisted the questions I asked about her past. Not all the questions, but those that touched on her family’s Jewish background. She’d be quite eager to talk about her studies, or her work, and would even tell stories from her childhood, but something very important was missing. Names, for example! She ‘didn’t remember’ the names of her brothers, her grandfather, even of her mother. Later and quite by chance I learned that one of the reasons for her silence was that she was Jewish. I wanted to know about her experience as a Jewish woman in the Soviet system. Unfortunately, she died in 1982, so I never had the chance to learn about it from her. I had so many questions that I was unable to ask before 1985, questions not only about society but about my family, too. In Russia today, we make so many assumptions about people from previous generations, and we know so little about their lives. In this project I wanted to do justice to my ancestors, and to others.

I wanted to learn the truth about women’s experience in women’s own words. Nowadays, people who belong to the generation of our narrators, especially the women, are ‘on trial’. They’re blamed for everything that went wrong in the past, for not having resisted Stalin’s crimes, for not having spoken out against them. I think this is unjust. Also, nowadays, there’s a very strong backlash in Russia against the supposed ‘emancipation’ of Soviet women. Women are blamed for family problems, for social disorder, for low economic productivity. People now say it was the state that was responsible for sending women to school and out to work, that it wasn’t women’s own choice. Now people say ‘women belong in the home’ and women must return to ‘their natural role’. I wanted to give women a chance to present their own views and to talk about their own experience. These interviews add a personal dimension to the picture we have of Soviet society, and this perspective is very rare.

I had this idea to interview old women, women born before the Revolution, whose lives spanned the entire Soviet period. The possibilities for international cooperation helped me to make this idea a reality. More and more women in Russia had the opportunity to visit Western women’s institutions; we learned about funding sources abroad. All of a sudden we realized we were part of a global women’s community.

That’s the way I got to meet you, Barbara, at an international conference on Gender Studies in Russia, which took place in Finland in the summer of 1992.⁴ I spoke about my idea of interviewing old, Russian women, and you suggested that we work on the project together and offered to develop grant proposals to help fund it. I was delighted, but I also couldn’t imagine how we’d proceed. I didn’t even know what a grant was. I’d no idea how we’d organize our work: you live in Colorado, I live in Moscow. It wasn’t clear how we’d work together, with our different backgrounds and experiences. For me, this was an absolutely new way to do research. The MacArthur Foundation generously funded our collaboration.

B:Was a project like this possible before the late 1980s?

A:Absolutely not. For one thing, it’s a Women’s Studies project. Before 1988, I tried many times to conduct research on women’s issues, as a continuation of my dissertation research, but no one was interested in this theme in the Academy of Sciences. Every institution or individual I approached would say, ‘Everything’s already known in this field’, or ‘This question has been decided long ago’, or ‘This isn’t a relevant area of research’ or ‘What a boring subject … why women?’

B:What I really wanted to know is whether the narrators you found would have spoken so freely before 1985–6.

A:I myself wouldn’t have spoken so easily before then! I wouldn’t even have been able to ask the questions I asked. For example, under the Soviet system, to ask, ‘Did your family support the revolution?’ would’ve been considered either pure political provocation or evidence of madness.

B:What about personal questions? For example, you asked about abortion, about the division of labour in the home, about the relations between men and women, about experiences of childbirth. Would such questions have been possible earlier? And, if so, would the answers have been the same?

A:To tell you the truth, I don’t really know. I think that because personal life and public life were so connected in the Soviet system, whatever personal question you asked, the person would be aware of the possible political implications of her or his answer. We’re talking here about an interview, and not a private conversation. For example, if you said your husband didn’t share in the housework, or he beat you; if you described how awful it was to give birth, or how horrible to have an illegal abortion, you’d seem to question the ‘achievements of socialism’. Someone would immediately say that it was all your fault, or if what you said were true, it was just your ‘untypical subjective experience’, which revealed nothing about society … I think it would’ve been absolutely impossible to conduct this project in the past. This moment in time is unique. The women of this first generation are still alive, and some of them are willing to share their experiences. The timing is also important because of me: I’m still very much a socialist person, so I can help to translate the meanings of what the women say.

B:What do you mean? Do you mean that you’re still very much a product of the socialist system? That you still embrace its values?

A:I mean that my own experience of living for thirty years under that system is still quite fresh, so I’m not such a stranger to these women. I know what to ask and how to ask it in a way that doesn’t alienate or hurt them. We speak the same language. I also think it’s extremely important that you, Barbara, are part of this project, because you bring a very different perspective.

B:As someone not from the system, an outsider?

A:Yes. Your participation made it possible to overcome the limitations of my own perspective, to go beyond the limitations of my background. The result is a much richer interpretation of the interviews.

The questions I wanted to ask were about my life as well as theirs. It seemed important to complete the interviews as soon as possible, because the further we get from the Soviet period, the more current changes affect how people see the past and the more alienated from the past we become. Only now do I really understand how timely this project is.

Barbara, I want to ask you a question: why did you do this project?

B:I’ve spent most of my academic life thinking and writing about Russian women. I’ve written a number of books on my own and a couple with other people.⁵ I’ve made a very successful career as an academic who specializes in the history of Russian and Soviet women. It’s been my life’s work. It’s given me a lot, and I wanted to give something back.

In some ways, of course, my work has already given something. Women’s history has now become possible in the former Soviet Union, and perhaps the scholarly work I’ve done will be of use to people who are looking for a place to begin their own work, who are looking for references. But this project is more direct. This is a way of giving people back themselves, pieces of their own past and in their own voice and not in mine. One of the things that you and I have agreed is that whatever money this book earns in the US and Western Europe, all the money from royalties and advances, will go back to Russia to help women there. In that sense, too, this book is a way of giving something back. For me this was terribly important.

On a different level, and really on a more academic level, most of the research I’ve done has been in archives and with documents. It’s been very painstaking and meticulous work, and very difficult. It’s taken a very long time. My last project took ten years. Much of it was like looking for needles in dozens of different haystacks. I wanted to do something different, something that would be more fun. I wanted to deal with living people, and to do something that would be accessible to a wider public. Both personally and academically this project was very attractive to me; it’s been enormously satisfying.

A:It’s been great working with you. I’ve been so impressed by your ability to ‘read’ our interviews, and to understand what women meant when they remembered their childhood as peasants, because of the work you’ve done on the history of peasant women. Because of your expertise, you can see what changes happened in the villages and cities, in families. You’ve been able to recognize what was new, what was introduced by revolutionary change and what was a continuation of life before the revolution.

Barbara, it’s unfair that we’re spending so much time on the reasons this project was important to me. I think this underestimates your perspective. Your contribution was crucial. Our interaction was crucial to this project. Much of what we learned we learned only as a result of our interaction: our different backgrounds, our different cultures, experiences, etc., were not an obstacle, but just the opposite. They somehow became part of the process and contributed to it in a way that was just fascinating. I didn’t expect it to be such an exciting process.

B:What did you know about Soviet history before you began this project? How did you learn about Soviet history?

A:My knowledge must be divided into what I knew before 1986–7 and what I learned after that. Before 1986–7 I learned the history of the country from authorized textbooks at school and university, from movies and books and from my conversations with relatives. Quite commonly, these oral accounts would give quite a different version of the story from the authorized one. As a child and as a teenager, I mostly accepted the official version of history and sincerely believed in it. I believed that Soviet people were equal, and that fairness was always the main feature of our life. When I heard other versions, I often became very upset. I cried, and refused to believe in the painful path my country had travelled.

B:What did you learn from the official history?

A:In school, we were presented mostly with the history of ‘big events’. There was the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, primarily its congresses and conferences. I had to take examinations on the history of the Communist Party perhaps ten times, starting in secondary school and continuing through university and graduate school. To this day I remember the dates of most of the Congresses, the main decisions taken and so forth. It wasn’t a very personalized version of history, to say the least. The human side was missing. We never learned the human cost of achievements; we never learned what people thought about changes … I mean really thought about them. There was always a sort of ‘iron logic’ in everything the party did: history was presented as if the party fulfilled the logic of social and economic development in the best possible way. When mistakes were acknowledged in the party’s work, reasons were always found for them: too many enemies inside and outside the Soviet Union; mistakes are unavoidable when one undertakes a unique attempt to create a new world, etc.

I can still remember my shock in l975, when I entered Moscow State University and a professor lecturing on the economics of agriculture told us that millions of people died during collectivization and the famine that followed. I went home and cried so hard I almost became hysterical. I simply refused to believe what I’d heard, because if it were true, everything I believed about my country would have to change. It w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Introductions
• Part I Russia
• Part II Baltic States
• Part III East-Central Europe
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index