Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside Barbara Walker Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside. Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, eds. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. Pp. vii + 310. $75.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). This collection has many excellent and useful articles on early Soviet history and culture, yet there is a contradiction between the title which proposes to examine historical everyday life in the early Soviet Union, and the introduction to the collection, which focuses on analyzing early Soviet discourses that were created with the intention of shaping everyday life. This contradiction plays itself out in the articles that follow, as does a certain haziness about what is meant by everyday life. According to the well-written introduction by Christina Kaier and Eric Naiman, the goal of this collection is to "take the Revolution inside," that is to explore "the impact of ideology on the interior spaces of the home, the family, the body and the self" (1). These are pretty variable topics, which Kiaer and Naiman seek to integrate by citing Foucault's project of exploring the formation of the modern subject. They see a theoretical contradiction in this proposal, in that Foucault was dismissive of the importance of ideology, yet they argue that in this case it can nevertheless serve the purpose of such a Foucauldian project. The historical novelty of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevik victory, they argue, lay in the way that the Bolsheviks brought a modern political ideology to consciousness in the context of daily life, though it should be noted that state efforts to bring ideologies of modernity to consciousness have been an important theme in Russian history for centuries (consider for example Marc Raeff's The Well-Ordered Police State [1983]). In any case, given its attention to the shaping of the modern subject, this introductory essay focuses less on the contextual historical consequences of "taking the Revolution inside"—the actual interior spaces that seem to be promised in the title—and more on the discourses that reflect that effort. The collection begins with a brief article by Sheila Fitzpatrick on the multiple identities of Soviet citizen Anastasia Plotnikova, whose Party autobiography represented her as being of [End Page 832] humble landless peasant background, but whose identity was challenged by the NKVD who described her as the adopted child of a kulak. Fitzpatrick concludes her analysis of this conflict with the comment that she as author must cease her tale with the cessation of the NKVD files in 1936, and that the reader must imagine the rest. In the introduction, Naiman and Kiaer interpret this to mean that history itself is much like fiction but perhaps it also says something about the dependence of the historian on documents or other artifacts of the past, which do not always offer conclusive evidence of the nature of that past. In the following article Lilya Kaganovsky examines the implications for the Bolshevization of identity in the film The Party Card (1936), in which a female party member loses that central document of Bolshevik identity to a deceitful husband. Cynthia Hooper's thoughtful essay on the role of family and intimacy in the 1930s argues that the state approach to those spheres was not the conservative "Great Retreat" from the radical engagement of the 1920s that has been a truism of Soviet historiography for decades. Rather, she argues, it represented an intensification of state engagement with family and private life, above all through pressure on family members to denounce one another. She contrasts this Soviet state form of engagement with private life with that of Nazi engagement, which she describes as distinctly more conservative in its belief in the relative independence, integrity, and organicity of the family. Yet the Nazis too sought to intervene in family life, through means other than encouragement of denunciation, such as state control over reproduction and family structure. But her point that the Great Terror intensified family allegiance while seeking to repress it is well-taken. Boris Wolfson's sensitive examination of two theatrical productions of Aleksandr Afinogenov's play Fear (Strakh, 1931), and the ways in which those...