Golubev , Aleksey The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 589 if diminished in range after the sizeable exodus of Russians and Armenians following independence, remains today a dazzling mix of populations, while rural areas are dominated by ever-more conservative leaders, anxious to please the political centre so as to ensure their continued access to power. What underscores many of these struggles, in turn, are longstanding languages of host and guest that have long underwritten narratives and practices of belonging and estrangement across the Caucasus. How one ends up a guest in the place of one’s birth, on the land where one’s ancestors have lived for generations, is the story being told. If the aphorism holds that the difference between a language and a dialect is that a language commands an army and a navy, Goff presents the full armature by which ‘titular’ keep the ‘non-titular’ at bay, everywhere asserting hierarchy, while also trying hard to not have it show. New York University Bruce Grant Golubev, Aleksey. The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2020. xviii + 220 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $39.95; $19.99 (e-book). Turning discourse on its head, this book explores how the material world of the late Soviet period affected individual choices, identities and imaginations. In focusing on the mundane details of the ‘fabric of Soviet everyday life’ (p. 2) Alexey Golubev argues that the interaction among things, spaces and bodies exercised a social agency that cannot be understood by looking only at ideology, structures, or even language. In particular, he directs his analysis toward ways in which objects and the material world helped Soviet people make sense of historical time and their place within society. How does the historian choose the particular objects through which to examine the entangled relationship between things, space, bodies and minds? Golubev assembles a bricolage of examples from late Soviet material culture and examines them with the aid of critical theory. His sources include a rich array of periodicals, especially from the scientific-technical sector, official reports, interviews, films and novels. A concise introduction paints the theoretical and conceptual landscape, and each chapter looks at different collections of things and practices. The initial chapter links the ‘techno-utopian’ (p. 19) visions of early Soviet intellectuals with their manifestations in late Soviet society, examining the relationship between the productivist language of machines and ‘technologies of the self’ (p. 21). The latter includes an analysis of Soviet technical do-ityourself magazines, which encouraged young men to imagine the taming of SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 590 space through schemes for home-built cars, boats and planes. Productivist discourse continues in the second chapter, here applied to the popularity (especially for boys) of constructing miniature replicas of historic objects such as naval boats and military planes. Things meet time through collections of these objects, which constructed a historical continuum of military success and Soviet progress. Golubev next looks at the role played by wood, first for architectural preservationists and second for the reproduction of the wooden boats of ancient Karelia. In both examples, advocates of these pastimes link the past and present through the materiality of wood — indigenous, organic and authentic. The second half of the book moves from temporal to spatial considerations of the relationship between selves and things. A chapter explores the apartment building stairwell as the producer of marginal selves, suggesting that historians ofSoviethousinghavedeliberatelyexcisedthestairwellfromtheirviewbecause it resisted control and instead represented all that was unruly and uncivilized: illicit sex, drinking and vandalism. The evidence from marginal selves here is suggestive more than definitive: the argument relies on tangential discussions of juvenile deviance, which official and intelligentsia sources decry but which for Golubev constitutes alternate practices of selfhood. Iron and steel — wellknown as symbols of Soviet prometheanism — are explored in a rich chapter on the place of steel both in distinct orthopedic therapies and in the informal practices of basement body building gyms. Unlike the stairwell gangs, young labouring men who pump iron do not see themselves as marginalized subjects but engage in this body work in order to prepare to be soldiers or to beat up hippies. Rejecting Western models, the late Soviet masculine...