Review Article

Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times:

Chronicles of the Quotidian in Russia and the Soviet Union

Catriona Kelly

Vladimir Ivanovich Bedin, Meri Moiseevna Kushnikova, and Viacheslav Venia-

minovich Togulev, eds., Kemerovo i Stalinsk: Panorama provintsial′nogo byta v ar-
khivnykh khronikakh 1920–1930-kh godov. Kemerovo: Kuzbassvuzizdat, 1999.
631 pp. ISBN 5-202-01653-0.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times.

Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999. xi + 288 pp. ISBN 0-19-505000-2 (cloth); 0-19-505001-0 (paper).
$14.95 (paper).

Nataliia Borisovna Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn′ sovetskogo goroda: Normy i ano-

malii. 1920-e–1930-e gody. St. Petersburg: Zhurnal “Neva” and “Letnii sad,”
1999. 317 pp. ISBN 5-87516-133-7 and 5-87940-004-0.

Timo Vikhavainen [Vihavainen], ed., Normy i tsennosti povsednevnoi zhizni:

Stanovlenie sotsialisticheskogo obraza zhizni v Rossii, 1920–1930-e gody. St. Peters-
burg: Zhurnal “Neva,” 2000. 479 pp. ISBN 5-87516-185-X.

The historiography of everyday life is inextricably intertwined with the history of

classic literary realism. Chroniclers of the quotidian share many of realist novel-
ists’ narrative strategies and their sense of time: both are employed in a “prosaics”
of small details, tolerant inclusivity, mistrust of the extraordinary as of the meta-
physical, and sense of the infinitesimal slowness of change.1 As Peter Ackroyd
rather beautifully puts it, the time-span of such writings is “not the eternity
vouchsafed to the mystic, who ascends from the body to glimpse the soul of
things, but one immured in sand and stone so that the actual texture or process
of life is afforded a kind of grace.”2 In contradistinction to mythic histories of
city life, such as Nikolai Pavlovich Antsiferov’s Soul of St. Petersburg, which

1 See further on this subject, Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a
Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 36.
2 Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000).

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3(4): 631–51, Fall 2002.
632 CATRIONA KELLY

shows a place trapped in a fateful, abstract, destiny, chronicles of the everyday

such as Ackroyd’s are concerned with small continuities and microscopic reor-
derings: an East End Huguenot church that becomes a synagogue and then a
mosque, or a medieval stew that becomes an 18th-century whorehouse and sub-
sequently a studio turning out movies for “adult viewers only.” It follows that
aesthetic and ethical systems driven by mythic concerns have had little tolerance
for the myopic preoccupations of everyday history, and that the era of Socialist
Realism (an aesthetic system whose relationship with classic realism was at best
tangential) also saw a suppression of the history of everyday life that had begun
flourishing in Russia during the late 19th century, as manifested, say, in Ivan
Egorovich Zabelin’s studies of medieval byt, in Mikhail Ivanovich Pyliaev’s books
on St. Petersburg and Moscow,3 or the opulent civic-patriotic journal, Moskva v
ee proshlom i nastoiashchem, published in the 1910s. The fashion for commemo-
rating the small material signs of the past, one of many phenomena giving the lie
to the cliché that Russian intellectuals are constitutionally uninterested in byt,
had enough popular resonance to inspire contemporary memoirists. The civil
servant Sergei Fedorovich Svetlov specifically intended his reminiscences of St.
Petersburg realia, from pissoirs to policemen’s uniforms, to act as a future his-
torical source: “Being an amateur of the history of everyday life [liubitel′ bytovoi
istorii], I wish to carry out a small service to it and to give aid to some person
who may, in the future, decide to describe the daily life [byt] of our times, that is,
the last decade of the 19th century.”4
Literary realism, autobiography, and narrative history are not, to be sure, the
only genres wherein the history of everyday life has been represented. Indeed, in
many ways a more important driving force for interest in quotidian details was
Slavophile ethnographers’ concern with “customs” (obychai) as a distinguishing
trait of national identity. Writers such as Aleksandra Iakovlevna Efimenko and
Ol′ga Semenova Tian-Shanskaia meticulously recorded the details of a traditional
peasant culture held by many observers to be under threat from urbanization and
the “bestialization of the people” (ozverenie naroda) inherent in the spread of
consumer goods, new forms of popular culture, and “vulgar” turns of phrase. 5 By

3 For example, Mikhail Ivanovich Pyliaev, Staryi Peterburg: Rasskazy iz byloi zhizni stolitsy (St.
Petersburg: A. S. Suvorin, 1889); idem, Staraia Moskva: Rasskazy iz byloi zhizni pervoprestol′noi sto-
litsy (St. Petersburg: A. S. Suvorin, 1891).
4 Sergei Fedorovich Svetlov, Peterburgskaia zhizn′ v kontse XIX stoletiia (v 1892 godu), ed. Al′bin
M. Konechnyi (St. Petersburg: Giperion, 1998), 11. Konechnyi’s bibliography, Byt i zrelishchnaia
kul ′tura Sankt-Peterburga-Petrograda XVIII–nachalo XX veka: Materialy k bibliografii (St. Peters-
burg: Rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv, 1997), is an invaluable guide to published commentaries on
byt from the prerevolutionary era.
5 See Aleksandra Iakovlevna Efimenko, Issledovaniia narodnoi zhizni (Moscow: Kasparov, 1884);
Ol′ga Semenova Tian-Shanskaia, Zhizn′ “Ivana”: Ocherki iz byta krest′ian odnoi iz chernozemnykh
 ORDINARY LIFE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES 633

extension, far more effort was made to collect and preserve the folklore and ma-
terial culture of rural areas than the folklore and material culture of cities: the
more prestigious “ethnographical” museums specialized in this area, while urban
material was left to the separate area of “local history” (kraevedenie), an area not
much developed before 1917. The 1920s witnessed considerable development of
kraevedenie, but the urban/rural divide was left in place, and with the disappear-
ance during the 1930s of city “everyday life museums” (muzei byta), the quotid-
ian existence of cities faded from view once more. The ethnographic study of
everyday life, then, might eschew literary realism’s concentration on the psychol-
ogy of individuals, and its employment of plot, but it subscribed to a kind of
narrative closure of its own, being concerned with the elegiac portrayal of a world
about to vanish. The response, on the part of local historians, could often be an
eschewal of interpretation in favor of determinedly non-ideological and
relentlessly energetic accumulation of objects and printed ephemera, however
trivial and “petit-bourgeois” (meshchanskie) these seemed; museums might close,
but these “silent witnesses” were carefully preserved by attendants, as in the case
of the Circus Museum in Leningrad, where staff took pains to hide the prize ex-
hibits in the attics of the building where the museum had been housed.
Central to the process of repressing byt was, of course, the hegemony of So-
cialist Realism, not only as an aesthetic code, but as a model for life. Indeed, it
could be argued that its effects were further-reaching at the second level than at
the first: writers and artists resistant to sotsrealizm’s tenets had the option of pro-
ducing material “for the desk drawer” (or the studio cupboard), while, after the
wholesale purging of libraries and catalogs that took place during the 1920s and
1930s, readers without extensive private book collections (the majority) were
likely to have a diet consisting pretty well entirely of selected 19th-century clas-
sics, factual materials and advice pamphlets, and Socialist Realist novels and
poetry.6 Socialist Realist texts created a sort of materialist paradise in which girls

gubernii (St. Petersburg: Tip. M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1914). See also the translation of the latter work
by David L. Ransel and Michael Levine as Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1993). This area of Slavophile interest in byt is rather different from an-
other key area: the investigation, for prescriptive purposes, of landowner life (defined in a celebra-
tory way as byt or samobytnost ′). For a discussion of this, see my Refining Russia: Advice Literature,
Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chap.
2. On the “bestialization of the city” see, for instance, Stephen P. Frank, “Confronting the Domes-
tic Other: Rural Popular Culture and its Enemies in Fin-de-Siècle Russia,” in Cultures in Flux:
Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Stephen P. Frank and Mark
D. Steinberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 74–107.
6 On this, see Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the
Reception of Soviet Literature, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997);
Stephen Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Stories,” in Everyday Stalinism, 8–11. Still
634 CATRIONA KELLY

in crepe de Chine dresses playing grand pianos performed much the same func-
tion as the angels strumming harps in popular Western views of heaven. Such
was the sterility of this vision that the rehabilitation of detail in post-1954 art –
girls unwrapping their best shoes from a protective jacket of newspaper in Vera
Panova’s novel The Seasons (1954), for instance – created a critical furor.7 Shift-
ing aesthetic values both prompted and responded to a new recognition of the
importance of obespechennost′ (adequate provision) in official policy – a term that
was semantically quite distinct from the Stalinist catchword, izobilie (plenty),
suggesting more humble, more realizable, if, in the end, more politically erosive,
ambitions.8
All of this formed the background to a resurgence, from the late 1960s, of
“everyday life” (variously named in Russian as ezhednevnaia zhizn′, byt, or oby-
dennost ′) as an area of historiographical investigation, both in terms of analytical
treatments, and, more particularly – where the Soviet era was concerned – in
terms of documentary publications (anthologies of archival materials, collections
of oral histories, and selections of memoirs).9As Marxism-Leninism loosened its
hold, there was a resurgence of the positivistic, document-agglutinating approach
to be found in, say, Solov′ ev’s History of Russia from the Earliest Times
(1854–58).10 As it turned out, the new accessibility of archives provided re-
searchers in everyday life with primary material that was often of a decidedly
problematic kind, reflecting, in the main, the relations between the “Soviet

valuable, despite a certain ahistoricism, and tendency to identify ideological content with practical
effect, is Vera Dunham’s classic study, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, 2nd ed.
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990).
7 For a short discussion of this novel and its reception, see my History of Russian Women’s Writing,
1820–1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), chap. 13.
8 For a longer exposition of this argument, see chap. 5 of my Refining Russia.
9 Notable is, for instance, the “Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii” series of ROSSPEN publishers in
Moscow, where alongside material from the Soviet verkhushka (e.g. Bol′shevitskoe rukovodstvo:
Perepiska 1912–1927 [Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996], or Sovetskoe rukovodstvo: Perepiska 1928–1941
[Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998]) also appeared the important anthology Pis′ma vo vlast′, 1917–1927:
Zaiavleniia, zhaloby, donosy, pis′ma v gosudarstvennye struktury i bol ′shevitskim vozhdiam (Moscow:
ROSSPEN, 1998). See also Andrei Sokolov, ed., Golos naroda: Pis′ma i otkliki riadovykh sovetskikh
grazhdan o sobytiiakh 1918–1932 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997), and idem, ed., Obshchestvo i
vlast′, 1930-e gody: Povestvovanie v dokumentakh (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998), and the impressive
recent collection of documents, Moskva poslevoennaia, 1945–1947 gg.: Arkhivnye dokumenty i mate-
rialy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000). Material of this kind in English includes Véronique Garros,
Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s
(New York: New Press, 1995), and Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov, eds., Stalinism as a Way
of Life: A Narrative in Documents (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
10 Sergei Mikhailovich Solov′ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, reprinted in 15 vols. (Mos-
cow: Mysl ′, 1959–65).
 ORDINARY LIFE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES 635

masses” and the representatives of Soviet officialdom at its various levels. 11 Yet
publications of archival material, for all that, tended to have a triumphant and
crusading ring. For example, the compilers of a spread of 1920s schoolchildren’s
essays from the archive of the Russian Academy of Education argued in their in-
troduction that ordinary people had generally figured in Russian history only as
victims or “as the usually incompetent executives of the grand plans of run-of-
the-mill bosses.” The recovery of actual texts composed by such ordinary people
was an important corrective to the standard intelligentsia image of the narod,
which bore the same relation to living reality as a corpse to a real person.12 Na-
taliia Borisovna Lebina, writing in the lead essay of one of the books reviewed
here, Timo Vihavainen’s Normy i tsennosti povsednevnoi zhizni, is just as sweep-
ing. “The hegemony of Marxist methodology put an end to historical variety and
resulted in the construction of what is known as monumental history … charac-
terized by mythologization of the past and the suppression of details and phe-
nomena that do not fit the governing ideological schema” (Vihavainen, ed., 7).
Lebina’s mistrust of such “ideological schemas” extended here to a belittling of
their value even as the subject of history: after mounting a small-scale survey of
housing policy in Petrograd/Leningrad during the 1920s and 1930s, based on
the living-space and furniture transaction books (domovye knigi, mebel′nye dela)
of the local housing authorities, she concludes that there was an absolute hiatus
between ideology and practice. The readiness of Bolshevik officials to move into
individual apartments as fast as they were able during the NEP period “raises
doubts not only about whether the mentality of the Soviet nomenklatura was at
any level characterized by early Bolshevik values in the late 1920s and late 1930s,
but even whether such values at any level existed. One has the strong impression
that they had a purely discursive function.”13
There is something of a logical contradiction at work here, as though a histo-
rian of Britain in the 1950s were to base his or her comments on middle-class
housing exclusively on archival records of applications to local planning authori-
ties for permission to build garden sheds and porches, and were to use these
(purely official) chronicles of negotiations in order to deny that official concepts
of appropriate domestic space had had any impact on lived reality. In fact,
Lebina herself had to acknowledge that “Bolshevik values” often had a consider-
able impact upon – at the very least – the rhetoric of the documents that she was

11 See the special issue of Cahiers du monde russe 40: 1–2 (1999), esp. Andrea Graziosi, “The New
Soviet Archive Sources: Hypotheses for a Critical Assessment,” 13–64.
12 See V. Kozlov and E. Semenova, “Obydennyi NEP: Sochineniia i pis′ma shkol′nikov 20-kh
godov,” Neizvestnaia Rossiia: XX vek, no. 3 (1993), 259, 260.
13 See Lebina, “O pol′ze igry v biser: Mikroistoriia kak metod izucheniia norm i anomalii sovetskoi
povsednevnosti 20–30-kh godov” in Normy i tsennosti povsednevnoi zhizni, ed. Vihavainen, 19.
636 CATRIONA KELLY

citing. She alludes to a tussle in February 1919 over expropriation of movable

property from a Prince A. G. Gagarin, who, though he had high-level support
from Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich, could not succeed in persuading
the Petrograd District Soviet to take his side. “We are indignant right to the bot-
tom of our proletarian souls over the tone of command that citizen Bonch-
Bruevich has chosen to adopt” (14). It is clear that the egalitarianism of posters,
brochures, and political speeches of the time did not always fall on deaf ears, and
that it made its way into everyday (bytovye) decisions as well as into the language
of political meetings and wall newspapers.
The reason for citing passages such as these is not to make straw figures of
the scholars concerned. Certainly, the distinction between real life and ideology,
myth and reality that underpins them is categorical: Lebina, for instance, ignores
the attested history of grassroots domestic radicalism during the early 20th cen-
tury, as discussed, say, in Richard Stites’s Revolutionary Dreams, or the religious
utopianism of groups like the skoptsy, recently portrayed in Laura Engelstein’s
Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom.14 For all that, though, Lebina’s account of
the decidedly conservative day-to-day practices of tenants and administrators in
party apartment blocks during the 1920s works as an important corrective to the
tendency, in some accounts of the 1920s, to take the utopian schemes of the
metropolitan artistic elite as indicators of social tendencies more broadly.15 Be-
sides, the attempt to retrieve a “real life” beyond ideology is understandable and
laudable in a country where discussion of everyday practices and pre-Soviet tradi-
tions was for many decades constricted by a progressive teleology emphasizing
hygiene, efficiency, productive labor, and rational atheism, and dismissing, or at
best invoking with a mixture of contempt and embarrassment, any phenomena
from the “life of the Soviet masses” indicating that penetration of such values
might have been less than universal. This view was in turn projected back onto
the prerevolutionary era, permeating studies of worker life such as Irina Kudrian-
skaia and Ninel′ Savvishina Polishchuk’s Kul′tura i byt rabochikh gornozavodskogo
Urala, whose authors contorted themselves with embarrassment when recording
the “petit-bourgeois” tastes of some (one suspects, a substantial proportion) of
Urals workers.16 That such attitudes persist – in particular, the sense that
14 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revo-
lution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly
Kingdom: A Russian Folktale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
15 See, for example, Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 1; Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation
of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); or Victor Buchli, An Archae-
ology of Socialism (Oxford: Berg, 1999).
16 Irina Kudrianskaia and Ninel′ Savvishina Polishchuk, Kul′tura i byt rabochikh gornozavodskogo
Urala (konets XIX – nachalo XX v.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1972).
 ORDINARY LIFE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES 637

“shameful” material, where not suppressed, should be the subject of moralizing

apologetics – is indicated by a review received by Vladimir Bedin, Meri
Kushnikova, and Viacheslav Togulev after the publication of their Stranitsy istorii
goroda Kemerova, a sister volume to one of the books reviewed here.17
Not all areas of everyday life, to be sure, have inspired critical commentary.
The revival of interest in daily life that began to be evident in Russia during the
late 1970s often had an elegiac and eulogistic flavor when the more distant past
was the subject of investigation – for example, the so-called “Golden Age” of
Pushkin and his contemporaries (as explored, most famously, in the work of Iurii
Mikhailovich Lotman), or the daily life of traditional peasant communities be-
fore the Revolution (as chronicled, for instance, in the work of Mariia Mi-
khailovna Gromyko).18 This celebratory tone was also evident beyond the world
of scholarship in a strict sense – for instance, in material published in the attrac-
tive illustrated journal Dekorativnoe iskusstvo during the 1970s and 1980s, and in
the organization of museum exhibits that gave the long-shelved possessions of
muzei byta, and the contents of cherished private collections, a chance to emerge
into the limelight. Already by the mid-1980s, the section of the Museum of the
History of Leningrad based at SS. Peter and Paul Fortress had begun to hold
notably lively and imaginative shows based on different themes from everyday
life, such as pre-revolutionary funfairs and entertainments, shop signs and other
forms of advertising, furniture, and costume, which were particularly well at-
tended, as well as punctiliously researched.
Everyday life, then, and most particularly everyday life under Soviet power,
has tended to inspire responses of a moralistic kind from historians working in
Russia. The question of what life should have been has constantly interfered with
the question of what it was like. But if historians working in Russia itself have
had obvious reasons of political force majeure causing them to keep their distance
from the subject, or conversely, to approach areas of it with somewhat uncritical
enthusiasm, it is slightly more difficult to explain why everyday life was so long
neglected by historians of Russia working in the West. The reasons no doubt lie
partly in the centuries-old tradition of commentaries on “Russian customs”

17 G. E. Iurov, “Ballada o zamestitele,” Kuzbass, 15 April 1998, reprinted in the appendix to

Kemerovo i Stalinsk, 617. Iurov not only accused the compilers of the book of carefully selecting
documents to support a propaganda campaign in favor of the “present” (i.e., post-communist)
political system, but lamented: “The book from which I wish to defend my city, my comrades, my
youth, represents the history of the newspaper Kuzbass as a revolting heap of editorial squabbles,
petty intrigues, backbiting, denunciations, personal files.… And that is all.”
18 See, for example, the essays, lectures, and ruminations by Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman collected
in Besedy o russkoi kul′ture (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPb., 1994), and Mariia Mikhailovna Gro-
myko,Traditsionnye normy povedeniia i formy obshcheniia russkikh krest ′ian XIX veka (Moscow:
Nauka, 1986).
638 CATRIONA KELLY

maintained by amateur observers of Russia, from early modern merchants to late-

20th-century journalists, which has made professional academics eager to eschew
a subject that seemed tainted by facile ethnic stereotyping and naive trivia-
gathering. Moreover, the rise of Alltagsgeschichte and histoire de la vie privée in the
West came at a point (the mid-1970s and early 1980s) when the geopolitical
resonance of Russian studies was especially strong: during the last phase of the
Cold War, there were obvious reasons why a “Kremlinological” approach to
Soviet history should have exercised hegemony.19
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, on the other hand, “everyday life”
came under suspicion from a different point of view, brought by the new interest
of Russian historians in cultural theory. For theorists of discourse, such as Michel
Foucault, material culture and practices are marginal to the study of ideology;
here, the old idea of intellectual history as “the thoughts of disembodied minds”
has been replaced by a notion of “thoughts” generated by bodies that were “dis-
ciplined” and “punished” (in the symbolic sense) by the practices and languages
of political elites, or that functioned as engines and objects of sexualized desire.20
From the perspective of a historiography concerned above all with the imple-
mentation of power through language, the history of everyday life seems naive in
its avoidance of the question of what historical subjects themselves believe to be
the “everyday,” sentimental in its conviction that the material world might be the
touchstone of accurate perception, and oozy in terms of its methodology.21 Up
to a point, this is fair enough, though it ignores the capacity among the more
sophisticated proponents of everyday history to note the oblique political reso-
nance of small actions: as Alf Lüdtke has put it, even “a coffee break in a factory
or in the relaxing comfort of a café always contains a referential component: it is
inseparable from the conditions of production and experience of the coffee
planters in Colombia or in East Africa.” 22 The significant point here does not lie
in the implication of a connection between consumption patterns and post-
colonial economic exploitation, but in the way that Alltagsgeschichte’s emphasis
on subjectivity and mediation would allow questions to be asked about precisely

19 For a useful short outline of the rise of Alltagsgeschichte, see Geoff Eley, “Foreword,” in The His-
tory of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed. Alf Lüdtke, trans.
William Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), vii–xi.
20 See especially Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), trans. Alan Sheridan
as Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977); idem, L’Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1, Le
souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), trans. Robert Hurley as The Care of the Self (New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1986).
21 See particularly Igal Halfin, From Darkness into Light: Class, Consciousness and Politics in Revolu-
tionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
22 Alf Lüdtke, “Introduction: What is the History of Everyday Life and Who Are Its Practitio-
ners?” in The History of Everyday Life, ed. Lüdtke, 18.
 ORDINARY LIFE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES 639

how the connection had been “read” by those consuming the coffee. Significant,
too, is the emphasis here upon the political resonance of marginal issues, which
allows analysis to extend beyond gross questions of “resistance” versus “assent” in
a broad sense. This might, potentially, prove a corrective to the obsession with
“power” in the capacity of struggles for domination and authority that studies of
Soviet “everyday life” have inherited from the history of labor. One of the most
impressive post-Foucauldian studies of Soviet Russia, Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic
Mountain, for instance, represents historical subjects’ experience of everyday life
entirely through the prism of “participation” versus “resistance”:
As we shall see, the kinds of lives that the urban inhabitants came to lead
and the identities they formed involved eager participation in, frequent
circumvention of, and resourceful, albeit localized, resistance to the
terms of daily life that developed within building socialism. One resists,
without necessarily rejecting, by assessing, making tolerable, and, in
some cases, even turning to one’s advantage the situation one is con-
fronted with. An appropriate analogy is to the Japanese martial art of
judo. Even when the weight of the force against one is seemingly over-
whelming, as was the case with the Soviet state, the possibility remains
to sidestep and thereby use that heavy force against itself.23
Elsewhere in the book, Kotkin emphasizes the “popular will to believe” that ex-
isted alongside and indeed transcended the dissatisfaction provoked by the re-
gime’s multiple failures; an extremely influential chapter on “Speaking Bolshe-
vik” asserts the extraordinary success of one particular “mechanism of power”
under Stalin, the dissemination of a specific ideolect for the expression of social
identity. “Most of all, life in Magnitogorsk taught one how to identify oneself
and speak in the acceptable terms.”24 Fascinating and innovative as Kotkin’s
study was, its result was, in the end, to present a somewhat reductive version of
popular life, without work rituals such as the magarych (initiatory drinking bout),
without jokes, without sexual relationships or even much sense of family
existence. 25 Emphasis on “the terms of daily life that developed within building

23 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press, 1995), 20–21.
24 Ibid., 230, 237.
25 A considerably richer picture of worker life emerges from labor history devoted to the late impe-
rial era and the 1920s: see, for example, Stephen A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories
1917–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and
the 1917 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); and Chris Ward, Russia’s Cotton
Workers and the New Economic Policy: Shop-Floor Culture and State Policy, 1921–1929 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990). Notable in these studies also is a good deal more sensitivity to
640 CATRIONA KELLY

socialism” elided from view long-term continuities in daily life, such as one sus-
pects may have survived even in a completely new city such as Magnitogorsk –
traditional pastimes such as hunting, for example, or persisting contact with the
world of the Russian village via visits to and from relatives. In some curious way,
the historical subjects in Kotkin’s study were reduced to the “undifferentiated
forces” held by classical Marxism to be the instruments of capitalist (here, state
capitalist) exploitation, their behavior suspended between theatrical enactments
of conformity and unpredictable bouts of “resistance” of a largely politically im-
potent and self-destructive kind (drunkenness, hooliganism, violence).
All in all, then, it is possible to identify an important divide running through
the middle of historical analysis and, more broadly, the representation of history:
if the history of the workers’ movement emphasized transformation of traditional
mentalities, political engagement, and the fluctuations of conformity versus resis-
tance, the history of pre-revolutionary everyday life placed an equally overt stress
on continuity, stasis, and resistance to change. (This divide also extended to one
specialist area which saw some very distinguished work during the 1980s and
1990s, mostly from Western scholars – gender history. For historians who fo-
cused on the peasantry and working classes, it was the same model of “accom-
modation, resistance, transformation” – to evoke the phrasing of a pioneering
anthology of essays – that was of concern, while a more celebratory, indeed at
times studiedly apolitical and even frivolous tone, was adopted in representations
of the world of the cultural elite.) 26
This conceptual divide might seem to present historians of the Stalin era
with an especially delicate problem: would not a search for long-term continui-
ties, and for aspects of everyday life beyond political confrontation, risk bringing
with it a tumble into a sentimental, short-sighted, and fundamentally unhistor-
ical view of Soviet society in the 1930s and 1940s? Certainly, the existence of a
popular vein of nostalgia for the Soviet past is not in question. It has been ex-
pressed not only in “totalitarian kitsch” restaurants and fashion, but by Nikita
Sergeevich Mikhalkov’s sentimental film Burnt by the Sun (1996), by the televi-
sion series Staraia kvartira, running in late 1998, or by the warm response to an
exhibit of Soviet underwear – another enterprising venture by the Museum of
the History of St. Petersburg – which was attracting big crowds at the end of

the different facets of worker identity: settled urban versus recent migrant, male versus female,
young versus middle-aged, etc.
26 Contrast the very different approaches taken by contributors to Barbara Evans Clements, Bar-
bara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, eds., Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance,
Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), and Helena Goscilo and Beth
Holmgren, eds., Russia – Women – Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997).
 ORDINARY LIFE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES 641

2000.27 But the Stalinist era does not inspire nostalgia or a turn to the elegaic
among academic historians: the celebrations during the Stalin era may now be a
subject of study,28 but celebrations of it would require a near-impossible suspen-
sion of imagination, taste, and intelligence. The idea of continuity, let alone sta-
sis, is simply untenable in the context of an era that saw war, revolution, and po-
litical purges. As the subtitle of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism puts it,
these were “extraordinary times,” and in them, as she shows, it often took a fan-
tastic effort of will and imagination to maintain a humdrum existence.
At the same time, the general tone of Fitzpatrick’s book (and of all the pub-
lications under review) is bravely free of melodrama and hyperbole. In many
ways, these books do represent a genuine attempt to go beyond repetitive debates
about resistance, and to try to capture deep-lying patterns in everyday life. Catas-
trophe, struggle, and suffering are given their due place, but not at the expense of
everything else. This is in contradistinction to some other recent work on the
period, such as Catherine Merridale’s Night of Stone, a lurid and self-indulgent
account of state genocide and mass death that gives far more space to violent
demise than to the customary processes of death and burial in the same period, as
though “abnormal” death had not at some level been interpreted according to
prevailing standards of “normal” demise.29 The assumption that there could, by
definition, be nothing “normal” about Soviet life in any terms is still a cherished
one not only with the general public, but among some professional historians
too. For example, a distinguished expert on 19th-century Russian intellectual life
recently criticized Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism for making the 1930s Soviet
Union seem too “ordinary,” much like Britain during World War II. 30 In fact,
though, there was a very fair resemblance between wartime Britain and Soviet
Russia in some respects: food shortages, spy mania, relentless propaganda about
participation in the patriotic struggle, an exceptional level of social egalitarianism
(seen in terms of the country’s previous history) offset by the hidden persistence
of class privilege. 31 Less specifically, the expansion of bureaucratic control over

27 For a report of the exhibition and of reactions to it, see Il ′mira Stepanova, “Istoriia potaennogo
predmeta,” Russkaia mysl ′, no. 4342 (23–29 November 2000), 19.
28 As in Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000).
29 See Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (Lon-
don: Granta, 2000).
30 “‘Mostly it was a hard grind, full of shortages and discomfort. Homo sovieticus was … above all
… a survivor.’ This would seem a more fitting description of the British home front during World
War II than of Russia under Stalin, whose savagery claimed millions of lives in the 1930s.” Aileen
Kelly, “The Secret Sharer,” New York Review of Books, 9 March 2000, 33–34.
31 On a frivolous note: the British Channel 4 television program, The 1940s House, shown in
2001, offered a kind of televised experiment in everyday life in which a family (selected from doz-
642 CATRIONA KELLY

private life (for example, family relationships) was matched in other European
states of the early to mid-20th century, including the parliamentary democracies.
(Indeed, the Soviet authorities were rather less interventionist in some areas – for
example, the identification, registration, and institutionalization of “at risk” chil-
dren – than governments elsewhere, though to be sure this was partly because
practical efforts fell short of the ambitious aims articulated in policy.)32 For all
that, though, as Fitzpatrick’s book makes clear, the pervasiveness of state inter-
ference in the daily lives of ordinary citizens in terms of the sheer number of ar-
eas legislated for, as well as the severity with which transgression was punished,
were distinctive features in the context of European states in peacetime. There
was scarcely an area of existence not legislated for in one way or another. (Al-
though Fitzpatrick herself argues that love and friendship were two areas more or
less ignored by the state, one could argue that there were areas of Soviet propa-
ganda – for example, Socialist Realist novels – that attempted to regulate these
manifestations as well, not least through representations of excessive emotional
involvement as potentially dangerous, and rational, cool tovarishchestvo [com-
radeship] as preferable to romantic entanglements.)33
Fitzpatrick’s determination to work inward from official efforts to control
public and private behavior is the great strength of her book, giving it a degree of
precision and focus missing from some of the other studies under review. She
begins by addressing the mechanisms of party control over rank-and-file mem-
bers (chapter 1), and continues with material on behavior ideals (chapter 3), fan-
tasies of abundance and opportunities for consumption (chapter 4), the mar-
ginalization of class and other outsiders (chapter 5), the propaganda and lived
reality of the Soviet family (chapter 7), and political surveillance (chapters 7 and
8). The book gives a sense of the mediating sources by which official policy was
translated into popular expression (as in the discussion of the relationship be-

ens of applicants) was filmed spending several months living in a suburban house that had been
transformed to an “authentic” wartime one in every last detail. The participants were made to
purchase food according to rations available at given stages of the war, and subjected to almost
nightly air raids. The rapidity with which the family, formerly totally technology- and junk-food-
dependent, became “Sovietized” (i.e., learned to cope with food shortages, power failures, etc.) was
extremely striking.
32 This subject is to be explored in my current project, a history of children’s daily life in 20th-
century Russia, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (to be published by Yale
University Press).
33 Friendship was a common theme in children’s literature, for instance. Texts such as Samuil
Iakovlevich Marshak’s “Druz ′ia-tovarishchi” (1935) instructed readers in the right tone of detached
warmth that was supposed to go with personal relations: “We went for a merry walk / You and I; /
Merrily we returned / Homewards in the evening. / Merrily we parted: / Why should we be sad? /
Merrily the two of us / Will meet again soon!” in Stikhi (Moscow and Leningrad: Detgiz, 1952),
16.
 ORDINARY LIFE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES 643

tween official denunciations in newspapers and denunciations by private citizens

in chapter 5, or the discussion of advertisements as a vehicle for official guidance
about appropriate consumption in chapter 4). The only chapter where the pat-
tern of beginning with official ideals is not adhered to is chapter 2, “Hard
Times,” a study of shortages and strategies for coping with them. This is perhaps
a pity, given that the involvement of the state was fundamental not only at the
level of responsibility for the shortages in the first place, but also because the
early Soviet emphasis on self-sacrifice and ascetism as a characteristic of the ideal
Soviet person was a factor helping to displace, at least in true ideological believ-
ers, the frustration that might otherwise have been caused by scarcity. A 4 June
1935 propaganda article in Pravda where a Pioneer announced that she was do-
nating her toy money to the fund for building the Iosif Stalin fighter plane not
only glossed over the fact that there was precious little to buy in the way of toys
in the first place (as a series of other articles published in Pravda over 1935–36
made clear), but also provided a rationale for want that made this easier to bear.
Obviously, with so many subjects covered in quite a short book (not much
more than 200 pages, excluding notes), discussion of any one issue has to be
compressed. For instance, the detailed analyses of textual strategies in denuncia-
tions and petitions to be found in Fitzpatrick’s article, “Supplicants and Citi-
zens,”34 is boiled down here into a couple of pages. Some themes, too, get mar-
ginalized in discussion: for instance, the everyday life of the workplace, even as
lived by the middle-class workers and professionals with whom the book is
mostly concerned. The characters in Fitzpatrick’s book are shown trying to get
work, or trying to avoid doing it (in the case of Soviet officials) but not engaging
in work tasks or in negotiations with colleagues. We do not see them humanizing
their offices with small tokens of gentility such as cactuses or frilly blinds, or
flourishing status-symbols such as red telephones, secretaries with lipstick and
permed hair, or mahogany desks. (For this side of Soviet life, and the multiple
ways in which the Soviet workplace was – to talk in more abstract terms – ren-
dered “impregnable,” “irregular,” and “domestic,” one must turn to Richard
Stites’s fascinating article on Russian “space and place.”) 35 Apart from the
working day, other parts of everyday life that get little if any treatment in Fitz-
patrick’s book include private correspondence, or what life was like for profes-
sionals and white-collar workers outside the big cities. But as a lucid and com-
pressed articulation of the issues involved in studying the daily lives of middle-

34 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the
1930s,” Slavic Review 55: 1 (January 1996), 78–105.
35 Richard Stites, “Crowded on the Edge of Vastness: Observations on Russian Space and Place,”
in Beyond the Limits: The Concept of Space in Russian History and Culture, ed. Jeremy Smith (Hel-
sinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1999), 259–69.
644 CATRIONA KELLY

class Soviet citizens, as well as a moving depiction of the exhausting struggles that
most of these people (the party elite aside) lived through in order to perform the
most mundane activities – traveling from place to place, doing the daily shop-
ping, securing employment, avoiding direct confrontation with the security
services – this is an immensely valuable book.
It is precisely this detailed sense of the Soviet state’s engagement with every-
day processes, and citizens’ everyday engagement with the state, that is largely
missing from Lebina’s Povsednevnaia zhizn′ sovetskogo goroda. Certainly, her in-
troduction announces her intention to focus on “the normative utterances of the
Soviet government” (normativnye suzhdeniia vlasti, 11), but in the event consid-
eration of these turns out to be inconsistent. Most rewarding, in terms of an
evolved discussion of official norms and their resonance in everyday behavior, is
chapter 2 of the book, “The Inversion of Norms,” which deals with the rational-
izing campaigns for “new byt,” and in particular the drive to introduce new
atheist festivals and popular beliefs. Here, Lebina’s relentlessly binary approach
(the “myth” of state commands versus the “reality” of everyday behavior), and
her emphasis on the aberrant nature of Soviet society, both in national and in-
ternational terms, work rather better than in most other sections of the book.
Elsewhere, the representation of the ambitions and failures of Soviet social
control sometimes seems a little sketchy and one-sided. For instance, the chapter
on drinking has material about temperance and narcotics legislation, about disci-
plinary actions against tippling Communists and Komsomols, and about outlets
for alcohol consumption and their status in the ideological hierarchy (if restau-
rants were considered bourgeois haunts of loose women in the 1920s, she argues,
beer bars had the reputation of sites for political discussion and healthy refresh-
ment of the part of [male] workers).36 However, important areas of the state’s
attempted control – the functioning of the licensing system once alcohol was
decriminalized, the production of propaganda pamphlets attacking alcoholism,
the medical treatment of problem drinkers (in other words, the areas where expe-
rience in other societies is most comparable) – are left unconsidered. The conclu-
sion of the essay – that both drunkenness and abstinence were anomalous from

36 This attitude on the part of the authorities was of course self-deluding, at any rate going by
documents in the Moscow local party archive suggesting that attempts in the early 1920s to use
refreshment places for political agitation proved a dismal failure. “So far as methods of cultural
work are concerned, Narpit tried introducing bands with a repertoire of revolutionary songs to its
canteens, but the numbers of patrons did not increase at all as a result, while the neighbouring
beer-bars were crammed to the doors.” Moreover, a beer-bar run by Narpit that was supposed to be
salubrious had become “a low dive for sexual contacts” (priton razvrata: this term was often used
for homosexual cruising spots). “Protokol shirokogo soveshchaniia po voprosu o politpro-
svetitel′skoi rabote v chainykh, stolovykh, pivnykh i t. d.,” 30 November 1923, TsAODM f. 3, op.
11, d. 131, l. 92.
 ORDINARY LIFE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES 645

the point of view of the Soviet authorities, while reasonable enough at one level,
does not really account much for nuance (e.g., the question of attitudes to differ-
ent categories of alcohol, wine versus spirits versus beer, or indeed to the social
position of the drinker – as manifested, say, in the relative tolerance of binges
among the highly placed as opposed to the rank and file). Similarly, the article
about leisure is relegated to a section of the book called “Oblique Normalization
of Behavior,” and described as being one of the areas of daily life “not immedi-
ately regulated by the authorities,” though in fact leisure practices were one of
the areas where early Soviet leaders intervened most enthusiastically in their sub-
jects’ lives, not only in the negative sense of prohibition (campaigns against gam-
bling in courtyards, etc.), but also in positive ways: the creation of new institu-
tions, such as “culture clubs” and “culture parks,” the staging of “cultured” enter-
tainments, the provision of educative pastimes and directed leisure for children
and young people. Moreover, there is a decidedly sensationalist color to some of
the discussion – for instance, the scandalous history of the prostitute reformatory
run by Kirov’s wife Mariia L′vovna Markus (94–95), or the details of the store of
clothes confiscated from “former people” and lodged at the Petrograd Soviet,
accessible by special pass only (207–8). Lebina’s concentration on material of this
kind sometimes makes her a little uncritical with regard to her source material –
as in the citation of Georgii Vladimirovich Ivanov’s fictionalized memoir Peter-
burgskie zimy, or the rabidly anti-Bolshevik diaries of Zinaida Nikolaevna Gip-
pius, as though these were objective guides to early Soviet reality. (Gippius,
whose material was often based on servants’ gossip or on other hearsay, is not
necessarily any more reliable as an informant than Ivanov, who self-consciously
made things up.) Equally, while properly ironic about the ‘phantasmagoric’ char-
acter of the Chubarov Alley gang-rape case, turned into a cause célèbre by the
Soviet press in 1926 (“a girl gang-raped by 30 men was supposed to have not
only recovered consciousness in short order, after only half an hour, but to have
got to a police station under her own steam, and identified her attackers calmly
and rationally, with full details of their names and nicknames” [64]), Lebina
takes archival accounts of child abuse (dating from 1935, 1936, and 1937) on
trust. “By the late 1930s, Leningrad had turned into a megalopolis, and in many
ways functioned according to the general laws of big cities across the world” (73).
Leaving aside the fact that Leningrad was, in international terms, considerably
less significant as a “megalopolis” in the 1930s than St. Petersburg had been in
the 1900s, there are significant dangers in accepting 1930s Soviet police records
at face value where they concern a subject as politically explosive as this. This
was, after all, a society obsessed with the corruption of minors (seen as easy prey
for “enemies of the people”), and the 8 April 1935 decree on juvenile criminals
had imposed harsh penalties on those guilty of drawing children into crime.
646 CATRIONA KELLY

Bearing in mind also the criminalization of homosexuality in 1933–34, there was

every prerequisite for moral panic about underage victims of sex crimes.37 This
does not mean that cases of the sexual abuse of children never happened (any
more than the Chubarov rape case signifies that cases of gang rape were always
invented), but what it does mean is that statistics in police reports themselves
should be taken primarily as indicating a concern with child molestation, rather
than as an index of its actual prevalence.
In sum, then, this is neither a particularly self-conscious nor an especially
deep (as opposed to wide) discussion, more a set of entertaining essays for the
general reader of the kind in which Neva magazine has specialized for several
decades.38 Essentially, Povsednevnaia zhizn′ is best read as a compilatory com-
pendium of interesting small details, rather than a reflection upon the signifi-
cance of these. It is characteristic that the fascinating black and white photo-
graphs included in a spread in the middle of the book are not glossed or analyzed
in any way, so that documentary images of Leningrad street life acquire the same
weight as staged propaganda photographs of improbably neat and clean worker
hostels. Though Lebina describes her approach as “cultural anthropology” (8),
she goes on, confusingly, to cite a Russian-language discussion of classic socio-
logical theory (Durkheim, Merton, etc.) as her putative methodological starting
point, and there are few traces even of this type of conceptualization in the body
of the text. While Lebina’s sense of the culture that she surveys as a tiny autono-
mous world is characteristic of classical anthropology (if not sociology), her lack
of critical distance is not. An attempt to adopt the standpoint of a historical par-
ticipant observer, not to speak of a deeper immersion in the historiography of
other cultures, might have saved Lebina from her persistent tendency to blame
every repressive element in Soviet society on the architects of the Bolshevik re-
gime. 39 To argue, for instance, that “the Soviet leaders and ideological structures
succeeded in driving into Russians’ heads, during the 1920s and 1930s, a con-
cept of suicide as betrayal of the socialist cause, as spiritual cowardice, almost as a
crime,” ignores the fact that suicide was officially considered a criminal act, and
widely held a shameful one, in prerevolutionary Russia, as, indeed, in many other

37 For the first in-depth account of this law and its aftermath, as well as the legal and medical
regulation of homosexuality, see Daniel Healey’s excellent new study, Homosexual Desire in Revo-
lutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001). This book also contains valuable information about the daily life of homosexual men and
women in Russia from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries.
38 Compare, for instance, Vladimir Iosifovich Pyzin and Dmitrii Andreevich Zasosov, Iz zhizni
Peterburga 1890–1910-kh godov: Zapiski ochevidtsev (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1991).
39 For a different approach, see, for example, Peter Holquist, “Information is the Alpha and
Omega of Our Work: Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Modern His-
tory 69 (September 1997), 415–50.
 ORDINARY LIFE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES 647

European countries as well. In the circumstances, the amount of “driving”

needing to be done was not very large.40
Although the similarly titled Normy i tsennosti povsednevnoi zhizni is an aca-
demic, rather than a journalistic, publication, a certain methodological vacuum is
also evident here, partly because there is no general introduction (though Timo
Vihavainen contributes an English-language afterword) to explain the choice of
topics, or to pull together themes, and partly because there is little cross-reference
between contributions (although some overlap is present). The many topics cov-
ered include the regulation of living space; the use of public facilities by city-
dwellers; migrancy and the labor market; drinking and gambling; official enter-
tainments in the early Soviet army and navy; youth culture (games); and surveil-
lance, village life, and literary censorship in Soviet Karelia. Varied in their choice
of subject matter, the essays achieve homogeneity, as much as anything else, be-
cause of their lack of theoretical input. To say this is not to deny the value of the
contributions in themselves, almost all of which are well-researched, thoroughly
documented, and interesting. Particularly welcome is the inclusion of material by
younger scholars, such as Julia Obertreis’s essay on apartment allocations,
“‘Byvshee’ i ‘izlishnee’ – izmenenie sotsial′nykh norm v zhilishchnoi sfere v
1920–1930-e gody: Na materialakh Leningrada,” an account that makes the
1920s writings of Maiakovskii, Zoshchenko, or Bulgakov look barely “fictional”
at all. Here we find officials from the domoupravlenie so busy with administrative
matters such as checking residents’ documentation, processing petitions for
change of rent payment category or for extension of living space, and making
subtle distinctions between appropriate and inappropriate possessions (“a bath-
tub is hygiene, not a luxury” [94]), that, not surprisingly, they could hardly find
time to deal with such trivial matters as organizing major repairs. There is good
work by established scholars as well. Elena Osokina contributes a characteristi-
cally incisive and thorough piece on the shadow economy of the 1930s, “Chast-
noe predprinimatel ′stvo v period nastupleniia ekonomiki defitsita” (218–43),
which deals with the work of piecework “factories” producing scarce goods for
the black market, the value of their wares running into millions of rubles, and
also with the wide-ranging involvement of ordinary Soviet citizens (e.g., workers
and housewives) in illegal trade. Marina Vitnukhovskaia gives a fascinating ac-
count of the daily life of migrant workers in Leningrad during the 1930s
(“‘Starye’ i ‘novye’ gorozhane: Migranty v Leningrade 1930-kh godov”
[99–150]). Gábor Rittersporn provides an innovative and interesting essay on
official anxieties about youth culture in the 1930s (“Formy obshchestvennogo

40 See Irina Paperno’s pioneering study, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevskii’s Russia
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), and also Susan Morrissey, “Patriarchy on Trial: The
Crime of ‘Instigating’ Suicide in Imperial Russia,” forthcoming in Journal of Modern History.
648 CATRIONA KELLY

obikhoda molodezhi i ustanovki sovetskogo rezhima v predvoennom desiatiletii”

[347–68]). Yet the only essay with even a cursory nod in the direction of cultural
theory is a piece by Katerina Gerasimova and Sof′ia Chuikina on public spaces in
Leningrad, “Ot kapitalisticheskogo Peterburga k sotsialisticheskomu Leningradu:
Izmenenie sotsial′no-prostranstvennoi struktury goroda v 30-e gody” (45–74).
This piece begins with a survey of social institutions (particularly workers’ clubs)
set up during the Soviet period, and then draws on Michel de Certeau, Pierre
Bourdieu, and Elisabeth Bott to consider the question of “consumption of the
city,” working from oral history to establish the role played by visits to clubs,
promenades in the city center, public concerts, and private sing-songs. Not sur-
prisingly, it emerges that the audience for concerts at the Philharmonia tended to
be made up of established middle-class Leningraders and socially ambitious mi-
grants, while the average Leningrad worker’s idea of a fun evening was a few
hours at home with friends, a guitar, and several bottles.
The discussions of everyday life in these books, then, in a sense do confirm
the philosophical instability and conceptual ooziness of “everyday life” as a con-
cept. Where discussion solidifies, it tends to be around themes rather than ideas:
living space and the “housing question”; entertainments and leisure; consump-
tion and consumer culture; official and popular surveillance. The focus is almost
exclusively urban, which is fair enough (rural life has, of course, received separate
and extensive treatment in works such as David Ransel’s recent study of rural
life, Village Mothers, a treatment of traditional and modern child-rearing prac-
tices, or Sheila Fitzpatrick’s own Stalin’s Peasants).41 Perhaps more difficult to
justify is the strong metropolitan bias (excluding the three essays dealing with
Karelia in Vihavainen’s Normy i tsennosti). In most of the works, too, there is
more concentration on the effects of official policy on subordinate human mate-
rial than there is effort to humanize the officials making the decisions, or indeed
the other human subjects considered. Though the approach in some of the work
is self-declaredly “microhistorical” (for example, Lebina’s essay “O pol′ze igry v
biser” in the Vihavainen volume), it is rather impersonally so (it is instructive to
contrast Lebina’s essay, where the tenants of buildings appear only in paraphrases
from the case records in their files, with the very different “microhistorical”
approach in David Ransel’s in-depth study of an 18th-century provincial mer-
chant, Ivan Tolchenov of Dmitrov).42

41 David Ransel, Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tatarstan (Blooming-
ton, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and
Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
42 David Ransel, “An Eighteenth-Century Merchant Family in Prosperity and Decline,” in Impe-
rial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and Ransel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1998), 256–80.
 ORDINARY LIFE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES 649

From this perspective, the anthology of materials from the Kemerovo archive
put together by Bedin, Kushnikova, and Togulev, Kemerovo i Stalinsk: Panorama
provintsial′nogo byta v arkhivnykh khronikakh 1920–1930-kh godov, is particularly
welcome, providing as it does what could be the primary material of a more
“psychologized” study of everyday life.43 The book, mostly composed of proto-
cols from local party conferences and plenary sessions, as well as items from the
personal records of individual local Communists, gives a vivid picture of what
the authors themselves call the “tectonic shifts” (5) affecting the mentality of of-
ficials in this region, which was at once typically provincial in its remoteness, and
peculiar because of the large number of Gulag operations in the vicinity. The
documents cited here indicate that the main prompting for internal party disci-
plinary action against local members in 1937–38 seems to have been class affilia-
tion: party officials were much more fluent with terms such as “class vigilance”
(klassovaia bditel′nost′) than they were with other phrases of accusation, and only
very occasionally is there a sense of direct connection between elite rhetoric (as
employed in Pravda editorials, for example) and local practices (and in these
cases, quite possibly because the person concerned was reciting directly from a
newspaper source). On the other hand, the collection gives very little sense of
how Stalinsk and Kemerovo functioned as cities beyond the city committees of
the Communist Party, despite occasional quotations from svodki on subjects such
as the conditions in local orphanages (predictably appalling), the discipline
problems in local schools, or the founding of clubs and facilities for Pioneers.
The officials concerned, moreover, appear mostly as voices at meetings, and as
names on official files. It is a pity that the authors did not put their hard-won
knowledge of the archival documents published here to use in a biographical in-
dex, which might have allowed less well-informed readers to form a better grasp
of local power relations and political infighting, and put in context the material
from the laborious and intricate discussions included in the book.44
In sum, then, the publications here allow one to formulate some conclusions
about possible further areas of investigation, and equally importantly, about de-
sirable lines of approach. Apart from in-depth studies of the individuals from
social layers below the Soviet middle class,45 these might include the day-to-day

43 An exemplary indication of where such work might go is Thomas Lahusen’s fascinating and
sophisticated study, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
44 More successful in humanizing Soviet officials is the collection Moskva poslevoennaia, which
contains an informative biography of the president of Mossovet as an afterword.
45 Such work would complement pioneering studies such as those of Jochen Hellbeck: see, for
example, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931–1939,” Jahrbücher
für Geschichte Osteuropas 44: 3 (1996), 344–73.
650 CATRIONA KELLY

life of workplaces and institutions (for instance, education seen in terms of class-
room practices and school curricula, rather than of top-level educational policy,
or the everyday regulation of research planning in academic institutions, or the
conventions for presenting lectures and conducting seminars in universities).46
They might include the quotidian consumption of artistic forms (even if an inac-
curately whistled rendition of the Habañera from Carmen sung by a workman
using a lathe may be beyond recapturing, an individual performance of a Vysot-
skii song, or a misquotation from Lermontov in a private letter, is not).47
Private celebrations and rites of passage – births, marriages, funerals, provody
or farewell parties, the celebration of public holidays – are another possible area.
But most importantly, a sense of context and process is needed. To be sure, nar-
rative lines such as “the growth of privacy,” “the modernization of everyday life,”
or “the rise of the nuclear family” can be inert and fettering clichés if used with-
out a sense of actual historical circumstance, but they do give a sense of ideas to
work against, at the very least.48 (While the “nuclear family” existed more as an
ideal state norm than a lived reality at many stages of Soviet power, the phe-
nomenon of declining family size, with concomitant growing attention for the
individual child or individual children, accompanied by anxieties about “spoil-
ing,” is a subject that would definitely reward investigation.) In the end, then,
grasping theoretical issues (what do we mean by everyday life?) is essential if
writing about the subject is to get beyond the level of theme-park-style replica-
tion, or the platitudinous reiteration of comments about the “infinite variety”
and elusiveness of the subject.49 Does writing about “everyday life” mean letting

46 A pioneering case study of the day-to-day life of the Soviet schoolroom is Larry E. Holmes,
Stalin’s School: Moscow’s Model School No. 25, 1931–1937 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1999); see particularly 47–69. For an interesting recent publication on academic institutions,
see Michael David-Fox and György Péteri, eds., Academia in Upheaval: Origins, Transfers, and
Transformations of the Communist Academic Regime in Russia and East Central Europe (Westport,
CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2000).
47 On the latter, cf. Letter 220 in Vstrecha s Rossiei: Kak i chem zhivut v Sovetskom Soiuze. Pis ′ma v
Krasnuiu Armiiu, ed. Vladimir Mikhailovich Zenzinov (New York: L. Rausen, 1944).
48 For a thought-provoking if ultimately rather facile critique of such governing ideas, see Mark
Poster, “Lawrence Stone’s Family History,” in Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary
Readings and Challenges (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). For a recent contribution
to the “modernization” debate in the context of Soviet history, see Terry Martin, “Modernization
or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism,” in Stalinism: New Direc-
tions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000), 348–64.
49 This is not meant as an expression of snobbish disdain for “theme-park-style replication” in it-
self. As Raphael Samuel’s fascinating book Theatres of Memory, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 1994) has
argued, this kind of representation of history is an important subject of analytical investigation in
its own right. Like popular narrative history (especially when this is presented in televised form), it
builds a route from “the history of everyday life” to “history as everyday life.”
 ORDINARY LIFE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES 651

in the voice of subjects themselves, as has been the strategy in some recent studies
in post-colonial history, or is it essentially a way of bringing into language a van-
ished material world?50 Is there an “everyday life” beyond the eye of the beholder
in any case? Whichever way one answers these questions, in no sense should the
contemplation of everyday life be seen as a way of escaping from the linguistic
hall of mirrors of so-called “postmodernism” (by which is usually meant textual
analysis). Whether or not one chooses to imitate Tolstoi’s provision of didactic
interludes on the philosophy of history, the chronicling of everyday life demands
the self-consciousness that one finds in his work, and in that of the most innova-
tive and brilliant literary realists.51 I would also like to come back, at the end, to
Lüdtke’s idea about referentiality: the notion of the deep and subtle political
resonance of small gestures, and the sense that social connections and patterns
may be linked by far more than confrontation with governing ideas, and may
express social and national identities in more wide-ranging ways than the stan-
dard tropes of struggle or indeed martial arts contests might suggest, yet still be
more than simply phenomena whose coexistence is fortuitous and incidental.

University of Oxford
New College
Oxford OX1 3BN
Great Britain
catriona.kelly@new.oxford.ac.uk

50 For an interesting study of multiple-perspective work, such as James E. Goodman’s Stories of

Scottsboro (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), see Karen Halttunen, “Cultural History and the
Challenge of Narrativity,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and
Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999),
165–81. More recent work in this vein includes Caryl Phillips’s brilliant study of the Waring case
in Charleston, South Carolina (see The Atlantic Sound [London: Faber and Faber, 2000],
179–213).
51 Such as Flaubert, whose novel L’Education sentimentale (1869), contemporaneous with War and
Peace, raises equally pressing questions about the extent to which “events” impact upon the private
life of individuals. Both novels also suggest uncomfortable issues about the extent to which “nor-
mal” historical narrative, with its assumptions of completeness and closure, might travesty the ina-
bility or reluctance of historical subjects to recognize fundamental moments of change in their own
lives and those of the wider world.