Everyday Life in Russia

Past and Present

Choi Chatterjee, David L. Ransel, Mary Cavender, Karen Petrone, Choi Chatterjee, David L. Ransel, Mary Cavender, Karen Petrone

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780253012548
• eBook ISBN: 9780253012609
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

A panoramic, interdisciplinary survey of Russian lives and "a must-read for any scholar engaging with Russian culture" ( The Russian Review).
 
In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, distinguished scholars survey the cultural practices, power relations, and behaviors that characterized Russian daily life from pre-revolutionary times through the post-Soviet present. Microanalyses and transnational perspectives shed new light on the formation and elaboration of gender, ethnicity, class, nationalism, and subjectivity. Changes in consumption and communication patterns, the restructuring of familial and social relations, systems of cultural meanings, and evolving practices in the home, at the workplace, and at sites of leisure are among the topics explored.
 
"Offers readers a richly theoretical and empirical consideration of the 'state of play' of everyday life as it applies to the interdisciplinary study of Russia." — Slavic Review
 
"An engaging look at a vibrant area of research . . . Highly recommended." — Choice
 
"Volumes of such diversity frequently miss the mark, but this one represents a welcomed introduction to and a 'must' read for anyone seriously interested in the subject." — Cahiers du Monde russe

PART I.

APPROACHES TO EVERYDAY LIFE

1

The Scholarship of Everyday Life

DAVID L. RANSEL

Since the fall of the Soviet Union historians in Russia and in the West have enthusiastically taken up the study of everyday life in Russian history and related fields. This trend in the two scholarly communities is not so much a convergence, although that too is gradually occurring, as a case of both communities drawing on a powerful movement in European historical studies and adding to it on the basis of past Russian writing and new researches in archives and memoirs.¹

In our own community, Svetlana Boym and Sheila Fitzpatrick offered early examples of this approach, and they have found many followers.² A collection of essays by historians and literary scholars of the early Soviet period appeared in 2006, showing the wide array of topics of everyday life that were then being researched.³ The current volume brings to readers another group of practitioners of this art from a variety of fields, including history, anthropology, literature, and film studies. A number of monographs have also appeared in recent years, including Jeffrey Jones’s study of daily life in Rostov-on-Don after the devastation of World War II, Catriona Kelly’s detailed investigation of the daily life of children from the late tsarist era to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Donald Raleigh’s oral history of the Soviet “baby boomers” in Saratov and Moscow, to name just a few.⁴ We could add to this list an extraordinarily well-conceived documentary film by Robin Hessman, My Perestroika, which records the impressions of middle-aged Russians as they looked back on their early lives and schooling in Soviet times.⁵

In Russia much of what is appearing under the rubric of everyday life history is aimed at a broad readership of ordinary citizens and constitutes a reworking of earlier ethnographic studies and literary productions. In a large number of cases the publications are simply standard historical accounts with the “everyday life” label tacked on to attract readers. A striking example of this fashion is the series published by Molodaia Gvardiia Press under the rubric Zhivaia istoriia: Povsednevnaia zhizn′ chelovechestva (Living history: The everyday life of humankind), which includes eighty-five titles, all beginning The Everyday Life of … and featuring topics in history and recent public affairs throughout the world. A substantial number focus on Russia, for example, Povsednevnaia zhizn′ ballerin russkogo imperatorskogo teatra (The everyday life of ballerinas of the Imperial Theater), by O. G. Kovalik; Povsednevnaia zhizn′ blagorodnogo sosloviia v zolotoi vek Ekateriny (The everyday life of the nobility during the Golden Age of Catherine II), by O. I. Eliseeva; and Povsednevnaia zhizn′ Moskvy v XIX veke (The everyday life of Moscow in the nineteenth century), by V. M. Bokova, to name just a few.⁶ Although books in this series are done by both amateurs and professionals and vary in quality, solid works of historical scholarship based on thorough excavation of archival sources are appearing in this series and elsewhere. Among these are Ol′ga Kosheleva’s microhistorical examination of one section of Petersburg as it became settled in the early eighteenth century and Aleksandr Kupriianov’s study of the urban culture of provincial Russia in the era of the Enlightenment, which explores the formation of a Russian national culture in the institutions that connected the capital cities and provincial towns such as schools, libraries, theaters, noble assemblies, and clubs. He follows the emergence of urban identities in letters, petitions, clothing, and attitudes to events.⁷ A close study of a provincial town that examines the interactions of the various social groups in fascinating detail can be found in Aleksandr Kamenskii’s study of the city of Bezhetsk in the eighteenth century.⁸ Another book set in the same era is Evgenii Akel′ev’s portrayal of the criminal world of Moscow based on case records from the police archives.⁹ Everyday life in the cities of the Volga during the entire tsarist era is explored by Andrei Zorin in what he calls a historical-ethnographic study.¹⁰ The popularity of everyday life history reached a point a few years ago that it influenced university curriculum. Faculty at Moscow University published a two-volume primer composed of narrative and documentary readings. At Kazan University instructors produced a textbook on everyday life focused on the history of the city of Kazan.¹¹

This upsurge of interest should not surprise us. The roots of everyday life studies run deep in Russia, and what we are seeing today is in some measure a revival of an art that flourished in imperial Russia. As far back as the late eighteenth century Russian scholars and writers, following the fashion of Europeans, began to explore their own past and define a national identity grounded in fanciful notions of popular culture.¹² Serious studies of daily life followed in the middle of the next century under the influence of Slavophile and populist thought. Every historian of Russia is familiar, for example, with the works first published 150 years ago by Ivan Zabelin on the “home life” of the tsars and tsaritsas of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the second of these studies Zabelin treated the position of women in Russian society more generally, for which he probably deserves the title of the first historian of Russian women.¹³ Zabelin also sketched the domestic life of boyars and their landed estates and the daily life of the people more generally.¹⁴ At about the same time, Nikolai (or Mikola in Ukrainian) Kostomarov produced a detailed study of the everyday life of Russians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Kostomarov surveyed town life and morals, housing, furniture and tools, clothing, food, health, customs, beliefs and rituals, entertainment, and drunkenness.¹⁵ The Decembrist officer and historian Aleksandr Kornilovich wrote about daily life during Peter the Great’s time.¹⁶ Another revolutionary, this time from the period after the Great Reforms, Ivan Pryzhov, wrote a history of Russian taverns and produced a collection of materials on the history of beggars in Russia.¹⁷

The everyday in provincial life also found its writers. Best known is perhaps Nikolai Chechulin’s broad survey of provincial life in the late eighteenth century, but large numbers of less well-known local historians and boosters, known as kraevedy, were actively researching the past of their provinces.¹⁸ These early studies of the everyday, though set in the past, were not strictly chronological accounts but mingled history, folklore, and ethnography. More purely ethnographic works also appeared describing the everyday life of rural dwellers. These usually static representations provided later historians with insights into the daily life of villagers. They included the detailed descriptions of village life left by Aleksandr Tereshchenko, Aleksandra Efimenko, and Sergei Maksimov. Although works of this type make fascinating reading, they are not historical.¹⁹ One partial exception may be the short, unfinished survey of Riazan village life in the late imperial period by Ol′ga Petrovna Semenova Tian-Shanskaia, who offered comments on the dynamic changes occurring in village life.²⁰

Folkloric works that sought to serve as histories can also be found. Best known are perhaps the huge compendiums of material produced by the poet Apollon Korinfskii and by the collector of Slavic antiquities Mikhail Zabylin.²¹ A rich source of everyday life observations in the Russian past can likewise be found in literary works and sketches of city life, such as Mikhail Pyliaev’s Staryi Peterburg, Pavel Buryshkin’s Moskva kupecheskaia, and the delightfully intimate portrayal of Moscow cultural life by Mikhail Gershenzon, Griboedovskaia Moskva, in which the author described the interests, manners, morals, and daily behavior of Moscow society on the basis of the Rimskii-Korsakov family’s personal correspondence, plus memoirs and letters by others.²²

The advent of Soviet power brought an end to this development. Historians and those in related disciplines had to abandon efforts to examine everyday life and turn to questions of economic development, class struggle, and other problems defined by Marx, Engels, and Lenin as keys to understanding the stages of history leading to the emergence of a socialist state. With a few exceptions, studies of everyday life in the past became the province of ethnographers, and, even then, major studies did not appear until after World War II. Some of these works were welcomed by historians, for example, Vera Kruprianskaia and N. S. Polishchuk’s Kul′tura i byt rabochikh gornozavodskogo urala: Konets XIX–nachalo XX v. (1971) and Mikhail Rabinovich’s Ocherki etnografii russkogo feodal′nogo goroda (1978). For their part, historians were able to publish only a handful of studies of this character, and the few who tried it wisely confined their writing to early periods that were slightly less sensitive to ideological dictates than was recent history. Among such works were Boris Romanov’s Liudi i nravy drevnei Rusi (1947, reprinted in 1966) and Lidiia Semenova’s Ocherki istorii byta i kul′turnoi zhizni Rossii: Pervaia polovina XVIII v. (1982). Though not ignored by historians, these works remained outside the mainstream.²³

In a different sphere, studies of provincial life occasionally appeared from the pen of dedicated local patriots such as the Nizhnii Novgorod historian Dmitrii Smirnov.²⁴ The one place during the Soviet era that the study of daily life in history became an explicit focus of theoretical and descriptive analysis was in the work of Iurii Lotman and the Tartu school of semiotics.²⁵ The thanks Lotman got from Soviet authorities for his brilliant contributions in this field was a near total ban on his contacts with the West.²⁶ I will have more to say about Lotman’s theories later in this chapter.

It is also worth noting here that the few studies of daily life that appeared in Soviet times treated urban, factory, or, in Lotman’s work, upper-class life before the Soviet era. Studies of village life in Soviet times, in particular, were discouraged. Ethnographers and folklorists were severely constrained in their ability to report honestly about the living conditions of the communities they studied, as they would have had to report on the destruction of the countryside by the forced collectivization of agriculture and mass deportation of those who resisted. Even historical works by folklorists were gutted by Soviet censorship, as I learned in the 1970s from the Leningrad scholar Antonina Martynova, whose studies of lullabies could not include disapproved forms and whose anthology of works by S. V. Maksimov was stripped of any references to Jews, as if Jews had not lived in Russia and been studied by Maksimov.²⁷ Only toward the end of the Soviet period did Russian specialists begin cautiously to conduct studies of the countryside.

As for foreign researchers in cultural anthropology and sociology, they were unable to carry out long-term participant observation studies in Russia until after the collapse of Communist power.²⁸ Once the barriers came down, however, researchers quickly entered the field and began producing a wealth of new studies of Russian everyday life, including works by Bruce Grant on a fishing community in Sakhalin, Nancy Ries on the languages of perestroika, Margaret Paxton on village life in the north, Alexei Yurchak on the double life and language of late Soviet times, Tova Höjdestrand on homeless people in Petersburg, Olga Shevchenko on accommodation to the crisis of the 1990s, Douglas Rogers on the Old Believers of the Urals, and others.²⁹ Russians were, of course, making their own fresh contributions to the ethnographic study of daily life.³⁰

For Western historians of Russia and increasingly for Russian specialists as well, the focus on quotidian life since the fall of the Soviet Union found its inspiration in Western works referred to under several different labels, including history from below, the Annales school, microhistory, Alltagsgeschichte, and everyday life history. While we can cite extraordinarily incisive and influential works appearing under these rubrics, questions remain about the general applicability of such a research orientation. Scholars have, for example, expressed doubts about the intellectual coherence of an everyday life approach to historical studies.³¹ To mention the most obvious, it is difficult to know what could be excluded from the scope of daily life study, for it can embrace any subject of a repetitive character, including material culture, technology, social life, political life, emotional life, ritual and religious practice, domestic life, forms of social, economic, and political organization, and others. It can likewise occupy any temporal or geographic space. One might also ask why, if the study of daily life represents a coherent approach, it appears under so many methodological labels.

The general approach of history from below owes much to a few highly influential individual works that cannot be assigned to particular schools of historiography. These include the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Dawn of the Renaissance, which appeared in English as early as 1924, Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process, published in German in 1939 in two volumes, and E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, which came out in 1963.³² Studies drawing inspiration from these now classic texts and also from the growing influence of the Annales school first emerged on a broad front in the 1970s under the rubric of social history. Soon after, we learned about the approach as microhistory, Alltagsgeschichte, and historically oriented cultural anthropology.³³ Russians used the label byt i nravy (roughly, “manners and morals”) until adopting almost universally the more fashionable tag povsednevnaia zhizn′ (literally, “everyday life”). Indeed, each major intellectual community in Europe seems to have spun off such an orientation. Do the different names represent distinctive approaches, or do they merely reflect a desire of particular communities to claim originality?

Some scholars believe that the turn to everyday life history started with the Annales school in France in the pre–World War II era, when Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch advocated replacing the dominant mode of historical study centered on political and diplomatic events with research into long-term social, economic, and cultural structures that shaped the general mental outlook of a people. Others would contend that, on t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Genesis and Themes of Everyday Life in Russia Past and Present
• Part I. Approaches to Everyday Life
• Part II. Public Identities and Public Space
• Part III. Living Space and Personal Choice
• Part IV. Myth, Memory, and the History of Everyday Life
• Part V. Coming Home: Transnational Connections
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index