In this volume the editors – social scientists from the universities of Paris (EHESS), Essex and Helsinki – present a collection of interview-based articles about life in the Soviet Union. Drawing on a stock of impressive interview material focusing mainly on the experience of Stalinism, the volume contains contributions from ten scholars from France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the US, Finland, and Russia. The most important of the interview projects, which gathered both individual in-depth life-story interviews and family case-history interviews, were carried out from the beginning of the 1990s, i.e. at a time when Soviet society began to open up and re-examine the previously orthodox official views about history, in the process lifting long-kept family secrets and reconsidering their meanings. A list and description of these projects is given in the epilogue, along with the data they contain and their places of storage.
All of the chapters are fairly well structured and of high analytical quality, and each of them highlights a particular aspect of everyday life under Soviet socialism. The topics explored comprise family relations, living and working conditions, experiences of freedom and repression, and the role of religion in everyday life, as well as sex and gender issues. These are investigated by the authors mainly through qualitative case studies of one or several individual or family cases. By shifting their focus toward the perspective of the individual, they aim at portraying the complex relations between the Soviet regime and its citizens and thereby at elaborating a “more qualified” and differentiated view of totalitarianism and the Soviet experience (P. 71), as well as at uncovering the “actual hidden rules of Soviet society – hidden not only to foreigners, but to Soviet citizens too” (P. 5).
Without claiming to deliver a complete or fully representative picture, the pieces nevertheless provide interesting insights into such problems as changing social structures, the strategies of adaptation of various social groups to the totalitarian regime, the credibility of the Soviet leadership, and the internalization of Soviet values. In this respect, one of the central claims of several of the volume’s chapters is that Soviet society was characterized by a “dual structure” – in the sense that the official ideology had a rather limited grasp on people’s minds. This is shown by Victoria Semenova and Paul Thompson in their discussion of the widespread practice of creating double identities and concealing certain secrets about one’s identity even from own family members, by Irina Korovushkina Paert with regard to the religious practices of the Old Believers, and by Ekaterina Foteeva with respect to the value systems of formerly well-to-do Russian families. Korovushkina Paert, who introduces herself as a grandchild of Old Believers, analyzes their religious coping strategies in the Urals during the 1930-50s with respect to the atheist policies of the regime. She portrays the Old Believers as faithful and loyal practitioners of their beliefs who managed to find ways to bypass official restrictions and evade sanctions by elaborating skilled “spiritual survival techniques” for their communities. Moreover, the author claims that “the use of violence by the authorities undermined the moral basis of their power” (P. 200) while giving the believers themselves a feeling of moral superiority.
In her article about the experiences of well-to-do Russian families in coping with the revolution, Foteeva presents the members of the pre-revolutionary social and intellectual elite not primarily as victims of repression, but looks at them as active agents of their own destinies. Even though they were forced to behave like everybody else, to “become invisible in a crowd and thus remain unnoticed by the regime” (P. 78), they tried everything to obtain higher education and to preserve and transmit their cultural capital to their children. An analogous claim is made by Daniel Bertaux and Marina Malysheva concerning what they call the “moral economy” of the Russian popular classes. They argue that not only their poor living and housing conditions – where you could always “feel somebody’s elbow” and where the paternalism of the collective discouraged or prevented a spirit of individual initiative (P. 42) – were in accordance with the historically and anthropologically rooted “socialist communal cultural model” dominating in Russia, but that the Communist Party unknowingly put into practice the program of the Orthodox Church: “isolation from the West…, the requirement of faith, obedience, trust, respect for authority, the rejection of a critical spirit... and community spirit” (P. 41), replacing the role of the “father-patriarch by that of Stalin” (P. 44). However, even though they find that communal values have not been abandoned, i.e. the communal ethical code embracing values such as equality, justice, solidarity and mutual support lived on, they also observe a certain skepticism toward the Soviet model (P. 48).
All of these examples intend to show that the regime did have enough power to govern people’s outer behavior, largely determined by the need to make a living under harsh conditions (Bertaux and Malysheva speak of an often “entirely predetermined daily life,” P. 32), to cope with manifold forms of discrimination and to escape repression, but that this was to a much lesser extent true for people’s value systems – and certain other aspects of everyday interaction, where various forms of manipulation of the system seemed to have been the rule rather than the exception. Foteeva, for example, judges that “the totalitarian regime was not very successful in controlling individual consciousness” (P. 71). Semenova comes to the conclusion that “loyalty and submissiveness remained superficial” and that personal and family agendas largely contradicted regime aims (P. 78), and Bertaux/Malysheva insist: “You cannot change values like you change your socks,” (P. 51). However, the question of which effects this actually had on the overall functioning and stability of the regime remains open. To what extent does this mean that the system was somehow undermined from below?
In this respect, the rather descriptive passages about individual biographies and living conditions in many of the articles are instructive less for the (not always new) information they contain about constant poverty, hunger and lack of living space, but for the fact that these conditions were not experienced as such by people. On the contrary, they were accepted due to the fact that “everybody was in the same boat” and living in about the same way (P. 66). Thus, Paert’s claim that the violent methods of the Bolsheviks undermined the legitimacy of their rule in the eyes of people have to be treated with caution. This is partly due to the methodological problem that the qualitative accounts presented here cannot and do not claim representativity. The composition of interview data from post-Soviet Russia largely depends on random factors such as availability of interviewees. This is why many of the intelligent and sensible questions posed by the authors and their material have to remain unanswered due to a lack of more wide-scale, comparative data.
As we all know, despite the impressive double lives and identities of many Soviet citizens, as well as the fact that paying lipservice to communist ideals became a common practice at some point of Soviet history, it was the regime and its ideology that dominated public space until it started to abandon this position by its own initiative, i.e. from above, when Gorbachev came to power. So what meaning can we attribute to the findings of the book on a more general level?
The examples cited as well as other contributions from the volume do indeed provide the reader with highly valuable insights into the complexity of the relations between “ordinary Soviet people” and the regime, and thus with a fuller and more comprehensive picture of Soviet totalitarianism. While contributing to a deeper understanding of people’s inner conflicts and outer coping strategies and survival techniques, they also help to understand what “living through Soviet Russia” was really like. Besides, it seems probable that the complexity of power relations (in a Foucauldian sense), in combination with the existence of small “islands of freedom” within totalitarianism, as described in the volume, was its very operating principle.
In this perspective, the functioning of the regime depended to some extent on people’s subjective feeling of “necessity,” their extensive use of the existing small freedoms and chances, and last but not least on their development of practical arrangements with the system. Among the manifold ways of manipulating it, breaking official rules was an important strategy. Moreover, the feeling of “being in the same boat” had indeed several aspects. The misery and suffering experienced by almost all was to some extent compensated by the “cozy” feeling of belonging and of equality of conditions. The widespread deception and nostalgia, especially of the older generations (representing a large number of the interviewees), for the Brezhnev years validates this idea.
In that sense, the authors not only investigate the formation of particular forms of social capital and examine the making and working of social networks, but do also quite successfully meet their claim to uncover the power structures operating within Soviet society, i.e. the nature and functioning of its “actual rules hidden from view.” Knowing more about the price of the Soviet experiment is certainly one of the most important gains provided by the shifting of perspectives and the unveiling of the individual, inner dimensions of life in Soviet Russia.
This new way of looking at history and social problems in post-Soviet Russia is to be welcomed, especially insofar as it does not only remain a social scientific, academic undertaking but enters public discourse as well. An indicator of such a tendency seems to be the case of Aleksandra Chistiakova’s autobiography, portrayed here by Anna Rotkirch. The life history of a Siberian working mother, verbalizing the experiences of the first generation of Soviet women without serving the common clichйs of female heroism, was awarded the Russian Booker literary award in 1998 (P. 146).
Apart from that, much remains to be done to inquire in more detail about the political, social, and psychological consequences of the experiences presented here. The fact that several of the interviewees have not even rudimentarily overcome their traumas and still live in angst and fear poses serious questions about the destiny of the history and memory of the Soviet Union in Putin’s Russia.