On Living Through Soviet Russia

286 Pages·2003·2.01 MB·English

by  Daniel Bertaux, Anna Rotkirch, Mr Paul R Thompson, Paul Thompson

ON LIVING THROUGH SOVIET RUSSIA
For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 Revolutions in Russia, talking
about the past, either political or personal, was dangerous. The situation changed
dramatically with the new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s. The result was
a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television, and more formally collected
by new Russian oral-history groups and also by Western researchers. Daniel
Bertaux and Paul Thompson both began collecting life-story and family-history
interview material in the early 1990s, and this book is the outcome of their
initiative.
On Living through Soviet Russia analyses, through personal accounts, how Russian
society operated at a day-to-day level. It contrasts the integration of different social
groups: the descendants of the pre-revolutionary upper classes, the new industrial
working class or religious minorities. It examines in turn the implications of family
relationships, working mothers, absent fathers and caretaking grandmothers;
patterns of eating together and of housing; the secrecy of sexuality; the suppression
of religion; and the small freedoms such as growing vegetables at weekends on a
dacha plot. Because of its basis in direct testimonies, the book reveals in a highly
readable and direct style the meaning for ordinary men and women of living
through those seven decades of a state socialism.
Because of the centrality of Soviet Russia to the history of the twentiethcentury
world, this book will be of interest to a wide range of readers. It will be of
importance to students, researchers and teachers of history and sociology, as well as
to specialists in Eastern European and other Communist societies.
Daniel Bertaux is Directeur de Recherches at the Centre d’Etudes des
Mouvements Sociaux, Paris. For several years after 1991 he organised the
collection of case histories of families in Russia in order to document what
ordinary Russians had been through during seventy years of state ‘socialism’. Paul
Thompson is Research Professor in Sociology at the University of Essex, and a
Research Fellow at the Institute of Community Studies, London. He is
FounderEditor of Oral History and Founder of the National Life Story Collection
at the British Library, London. Anna Rotkirch is a sociologist at the University
of Helsinki, Finland. She has specialised in comparative research on families and
sexuality, autobiographical research and Russian studies.
ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN MEMORY AND
NARRATIVE
Series editors: Mary Chamberlain, Paul Thompson,
Timothy Ashplant, Richard Candida-Smith and Selma Leydesdorff
1. NARRATIVE AND GENRE
Edited by Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson
2. TRAUMA AND LIFE STORIES
International Perspectives
Edited by Kim Lacy Rogers and Selma Leydesdorff with Graham Dawson
3. NARRATIVES OF GUILT AND COMPLIANCE IN UNIFIED
GERMANY
Stasi Informers and their Impact on Society
Barbara Miller
4. JAPANESE BANKERS IN THE CITY OF LONDON
Junko Sakai
5. MEMORY AND MEMORIALS, 1789–1914
Literary and Cultural Perspectives
Edited by Matthew Campbell, Jacqueline M Labbe and Sally Shuttleworth
6. THE ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Popular Tradition and Personal Experience
Edited by Stephen Hussey and Paul Thompson
7. THE POLITICS OF WAR MEMORY AND COMMEMORATION
Edited by T G Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper
8. LINES OF NARRATIVE
Psychosocial Perspectives
Edited by Molly Andrews, Shelley Day Sclater, Corinne Squire and Amal Treacher
9. THE ETHIOPIAN JEWISH EXODUS
Narratives of the Migration Journey to Israel 1977–1985
Gadi BenEzer
10. ART AND THE PERFORMANCE OF MEMORY
Sounds and Gestures of Recollection
Edited by Richard Candida-Smith
11. CONTESTED PASTS
The Politics of Memory
Edited by Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone
12. REGIMES OF MEMORY
Edited by Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin
13. ON LIVING THROUGH SOVIET RUSSIA
Edited by Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson and Anna Rotkirch
COVER IMAGE:
GEORGII PETRUSOV, LUNCH IN THE FIELDS
(1934),
COURTESY OF GALERIE ALEX LACHMANN,
COLOGNE
‘The idealization of Russian family and collective life in
this photograph stands in sharp contrast to most of the
autobiographical memories on which we draw on this
book.’
ON LIVING THROUGH
SOVIET RUSSIA
Edited by Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson and Anna
Rotkirch
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2004
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection
of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2004 Editorial matter and selection, Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson
and Anna Rotkirch; individual chapters, the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN 0-203-41079-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-34077-9 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-30966-2 (Print Edition)
CONTENTS
Notes on contributors viii
1 Introduction 1
DANIEL BERTAUX, ANNA ROTKIRCH AND
PAUL THOMPSON
PART I Creating Soviet Society
2 The cultural model of the Russian popular classes 24
and the transition to a market economy
DANIEL BERTAUX, IN COLLABORATION WITH
MARINA MALYSHEVA
3 Equality in poverty: the symbolic meaning of 53
kommunalki in the 1930s–50s
VICTORIA SEMENOVA
4 Coping with revolution: the experiences of well-to- 67
do Russian families
EKATERINA FOTEEVA
PART II Personal and Family Life
5 ‘What kind of sex can you talk about?’: acquiring 91
sexual knowledge in three Soviet generations
ANNA ROTKIRCH
6 Family models and transgenerational influences: 118
grandparents, parents and children in Moscow and
Leningrad from the Soviet to the market era
VICTORIA SEMENOVA AND PAUL THOMPSON
7 ‘Coming to stand on firm ground’: the making of 144
a Soviet working mother
ANNA ROTKIRCH
8 The strength of small freedoms: a response to 174
Ionin, by way of stories told at the dacha
NAOMI ROSLYN GALTZ
vii
PART III The Marginal and the Successful
9 Memory and survival in Stalin’s Russia: old 192
believers in the Urals during the 1930s–50s
IRINA KOROVUSHKINA PAERT
10 The returned of the repressed: survival after the 212
Gulag
NANCI ADLER
11 Success stories from the margins: Soviet women’s 233
autobiographical sketches from the late Soviet
period
MARIANNE LILJESTRÖM
12 Epilogue: researching with interview sources on 250
Soviet Russia
DANIEL BERTAUX, PAUL THOMPSON AND
ANNA ROTKIRCH
Bibliography 256
Index 269
CONTRIBUTORS
Nanci Adler is Associate Professor at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide
Studies of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is author
of two books, The Gulag Survivor and Victims of Soviet Terror, and of many
articles on the consequences of Stalinism.
Daniel Bertaux is Directeur de Recherches at the Centre d’Etudes des
Mouvements Sociaux, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He
has been a researcher for the CNRS since 1968, and his originally quantitative
research on social mobility led him to discover the value of qualitative life
stories. His researches have included studies of bakers, of families and social
mobility in France and in Russia, and of absent fathers. He is founder of the
Biography and Society Research Committee of the International Sociological
Association, and first President of the Sociological Association of France. His
books include Destins personnels et structure de classe, Biography and Society, La
mobilité sociale, Les récits de vie, and (with Paul Thompson) Pathways to Social
Class.
Ekaterina Foteeva was a researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Russian
Academy of Sciences, Moscow, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. She
participated in various projects on family sociology and social policy, and oral-
history studies of family social mobility. In 1996 she moved to Canada to work
on a project on migration, and she now lives in Toronto.
Naomi Roslyn Galtz is an Assistant Professor in the School of
Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University. Her work focuses on everyday
life, play/space, material culture and sustainable consumption. Presently she is
pursuing a new US-based project on discourses of simplicity in consumption.
Marianne Liljeström is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of
Turku, Finland. She has published articles on Nordic and Soviet women’s
history, and a book (in Swedish) on the Soviet gender system, and she is currently
writing a book on Soviet women’s autobiographies.
Marina Malysheva was an interviewer with the Bertaux Russian families
project, and is a researcher at the Institute for Socio-Economic Studies on
Population, Moscow.
ix
Irina Korovushkina Paert is a Lecturer in History at the University of
Wales, Bangor. She began researching on the Old Believers as a student at the
Urals State University, Yekaterinburg. Her book on this, Old Believers, Religious
Dissent and Gender in Russia, is forthcoming with Manchester University Press.
Anna Rotkirch researches in Sociology at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
She has specialised in comparative research on families and sexuality, autobio
graphical research and Russian studies. She is author of The Man Question:
Loves and Lives in Late Twentieth Century Russia and co-editor of Women’s Voices
in Russia Today.
Victoria Semenova is a Lead Researcher at the Institute of Sociology,
Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and she teaches sociological
methods at the Russian State Humanities University in Moscow. She is author
of a book on qualitative methods in Russian and of articles in Family and
History and BIOS. She is especially interested in narrative analysis and in
intergenerational issues.
Paul Thompson is Research Professor in Sociology at the University of Essex,
and a Fellow at the Institute of Community Studies in London. He is Founder-
Editor of Oral History and Founder of the National Life Story Collection at the
British Library National Sound Archive, London. His books include The Voice
of the Past, The Edwardians, and The Work of William Morris. He is co-author of
Growing up in Stepfamilies, of The Myths We Live by (with Raphael Samuel), and
(with Daniel Bertaux) of Pathways to Social Class.