Living through the Soviet System by Daniel Bertaux , Paul Thompson , Anna Rotkirch (review)

Abstract

reviews 743 Bertaux, Daniel, Thompson, Paul and Rotkirch, Anna (eds). LivingThrough the SovietSystem. Memory and Narrative Series. Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ and London, 2005. x + 277 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 (paperback). Beginning in the heady days of perestroika and continuing throughmost of the 1990s, Russia was awash with a flood of first-person narratives. These came in a variety of forms, including journalistic interviews, life histories, written autobiographies and memoirs. The content of these materials ranged from storiesof repression and victimhood to accounts of everyday life.Perhaps most interestingly, the authors or subjects of the life histories were often ordinary people ? (present and former) peasants, workers, pensioners and professionals, as well as the generally more well-represented intellectuals. The end of the Soviet Union generated an amazing new category of sources. Most scholars, Russian and foreign alike, have yet to take advantage of these new sources. LivingThrough the SovietSystemis therefore an especially valuable work. This book isan anthology of articles by an international collective of authors, many of whom have participated in generating the new sources. In the firsthalf of the 1990s, Daniel Bertaux, of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales inParis, and a team ofRussian scholars, collected fiftytransgenera tional case histories of families living inMoscow. Paul Thompson and his associates at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at theUniver sity of London gathered forty-seven life-story interviews inMoscow and St Petersburg in the early 1990s. Anna Rotkirch of theUniversity of Helsinki was instrumental in conducting some sixty-eight interviews on sexuality with Russian teachers and psychologists. The interview work of the book's three editors, in combination with a series of other large interview projects surveyed in the book's epilogue and in combination with a massive amount of pub lished, first-person narratives, provides the basis for a huge new source of documentation on modern Russian history. The authors represented in this anthology showcase some of these new sources. If there is a general thesis argued here, it is that which is presented by Bertaux. He suggests the existence of a 'transgenerational moral economy' based on egalitarian values reinforced by the Communist system but originat ing in theOrthodox Church and the village commune. Although this is not necessarily a new argument (nor does Bertaux make that claim), what is fascinating about thisvariation of the thesis is theway inwhich the Stalinist system worked both to reinforce and recreate this particular ethos, especially among urban working-class barracks communities. Victoria Semenova dem onstrates this thesis as well in her discussion of the communal apartment and what she describes as 'equality in poverty'. In an exceptional essay, Ekaterina Foteeva makes use of interviews to examine the experiences of members of the former privileged classes who remained inRussia after theRevolution of 1917. She shows that representa tivesof these groups were not simply 'victims',but insteadmade use of various adaptation strategies to cope with the new system and to achieve what she labels 'social status restoration'. Irina Korovushkina Paert also uses oral 744 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 2008 history to explore the adaptive strategies of marginalized groups, in this case Old Believers in theUrals. Paert's essay is an extremelywell-researched and well-argued analysis of the coping mechanisms of Old Believers. She documents the survival of theOld Belief through combinations of resistance and adaptation. She argues that accommodation to the Soviet system did not necessarily mean compliance. Instead, Old Believers coped with the new government inmuch the same way as they had with the old government, viewing state repression as inevitable and often comparing theworst of the Soviet repression with the early days ofmartyrdom of theOld Belief. Essays by Anna Rotkirch, Victoria Semenova and Paul Thompson, and Marianne Liljestrom discuss women's experience in the Soviet Union, empha sizing agency and subjecthood in a departure from the traditional stress on victimhood and passivity. Nanci Adler presents a series of interviews with returnees from the Gulag, analysing the difficulties of return and the tendency of Soviet society toward a kind of double repression (political repres sion followed by a more Freudian type of repression of the very fact of the experience). Naomi Roslyn Galtz offers a...