Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia by Lewis H. Siegelbaumn (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS l8l suggest that such policies often emerged inmore piecemeal, unconscious or unintended ways thanVanhuysse allows. A further question is that of comparative scope. The book takes up the Eastern Europe/Latin America parallel tackled by Greskovits in his debunk ing of the alarmist 'democracy breakdown' literature of the early 1990s. However, itdeals essentially with three national cases, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, mainly contrasting the former twowith the latter. It is thus a litde unclear whether we should view the successful deployment of strategic social policy by CEE reformers as contrastingwith the experience of post-Communist reform laggards (as suggested in the conclusion), or whether we should take these cases as broadly representative of patterns in the post-Communist world (as earlier chapters tend to imply). Such questions are, nevertheless, very much a measure of Divide and Pacify''s real achievement. In somewhat over a hundred pages it develops a coherent, wide-ranging and newly persuasive re-interpretation of the politics of post Communist transformation, which integrates work on comparative democra tization, social movements, the sociology of unemployment and the political economy of pension reform. As such, it offers both considerable food for thought and a powerful springboard for future research. UCL SSEES Sean Hanley Siegelbaumn, Lewis H. (ed.). Borders ofSocialism:Private SpheresofSovietRussia. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2006. x + 291 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. ?42.00; $75.00. The aim of this ambitious volume, edited by eminent social historian Lewis Siegelbaum, is to investigate the 'everyday sites, practices, and forms of behaviours that can be identifiedwith the private sphere' (p. ix) and, at the same time, to interrogate the porous and shifting boundaries between the private and public worlds of the Soviet citizen. The editor's focused and cogent introductory discussion of the conceptual and historiographical frame work of the volume stresses not only the analytical significance of foreground ing the 'private' in new histories of the socialist system, traditionally centred on 'public' pronouncements and practice, but equally the importance of recognizing the existence of a plurality of private spheres, often ambiguously differentiated in discourse and experience, and the dynamic, conflictual and creative interactions between private and public realms. Siegelbaum in fact rejects any starkdichotomization of public and private spheres, emphasizing rather their fuzzy and fluid demarcation, and their symbiotic or hybrid nature (p. 5). The book's twelve relatively short chapters are organized into three parts, focusing on economic, spatial and behavioural dimensions of the private/public contrast or continuum. All the contributions are of a high scholarly standard, carefully researched and cogentiy argued; some of the case studies offer sharp and significant new insights into the general character of the Soviet system. l82 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g The firstessay of part one, by Esther Kingston-Mann, presents a study of changes in the legal status of Russian peasants' private agricultural plots during the twentieth century, with a special focus on the crucial role of women in the rural domestic household and wider economy. Andrew Jenks then offers a nuanced examination of the 'tangled nexus of market forces, consumer tastes, informal patronage, and the dictates of ideology' (p. 47) that constituted Soviet culture. His case study of the production, marketing and consumption of Palekh folk art highlights the reciprocal interactions of state and non-state structures and practices and the interpenetration of private and public realms. '[C]reators of Soviet culture,' he suggests, '[...] became accomplices in the project of cultural construction rather thanmere fulfillers of party commands' (p. 49). He terms the state's sanctioning and co-opting of grass roots tastes and techniques ? as ambivalent and controversial as this oftenwas ? a 'publicisation' of private life, which he contrasts with notions of the 'privatisation' of public life already prevalent in the social history literature. Charles Hachten's chapter examines two 'veins' of discourse on property relations that existed during and after theGreat Patriotic War, one emphasizing the significance of autonomous economic agents (e.g. local man agers, self-reliant collectives or households), the other asserting the defining role of central state co-ordination and control, and describes theirdistinctive ness, commonalities and interactions. Siegelbaum's chapter considers the Brezhnev regime's promotion of...