Russian Women and the End of Soviet Socialism: Everyday Experiences of Economic Change by McKinney Judith (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 376 negative view of the socialist version of informal housing (Schwarzwohnen) which he considers as ‘perhaps the ultimate form of theft’ (p. 47). I might be overly sensitive here due to my own research on that topic but I wonder why someone who occupies an empty, derelict flat and makes it habitable at her/his own expense can’t be considered a grassroots version of ‘urban ingenuity’? Another consequence of Demshuk’s laudatory view of local authorities is that he downplays the involvement of his ‘heroes’ in the state apparatus. The ‘Bowlingtreff’ was a local prestige project which emulated, and perhaps even surpassed, comparable prestige projects of the SED in the capital. Its realization was a participatory dictatorship en miniature, with a governing body ‘Aufbaustab’ and practices of volunteer mobilization which were common in the GDR. After its completion, the SED used the ‘Bowlingtreff’ to gain legitimacy for the party dictatorship with a similar incorporating gesture to the people as its big brother, the ‘Palast der Republik’ in Berlin. Therefore, I consider the modification of Fulbrook’s notion of participatory dictatorship into ‘participation without dictatorship’ (p. 5) unconvincing. Applying the concept of ‘contested dictatorship’ would probably have been better suited. Moreover, the focus on the binary of ‘good’ local vs. ‘bad’ central officials leads to a slight neglect of the deeper problem of scarcity of resources. Overall, this a fascinating multifaceted book which explores an often overlooked aspect of urban informality in late Communism. It successfully uses urban microhistory in order to reveal characteristics of disintegrating late Communism. After the university church and the ‘Bowlingtreff’, I wonder what building comes next. My suggestion would be to focus on the demolished building of Karl-Heine-Str. 30. The subsidized demolition of that beautiful historical building in 2004 was one out of 446 historical buildings taken down in Leipzig between 1990 and 2006. After Communist barbarism and urban ingenuity, a third book on capitalist destruction in post-socialist Leipzig would bring the topic to full circle. Universität Leipzig Udo Grashoff McKinney, Judith. Russian Women and the End of Soviet Socialism: Everyday Experiences of Economic Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2020. xii + 285 pp. Illustrations. Notes. References. Index. £59.99; £44.99 (paperback & e-book). This volume makes a welcome and valuable addition to the literature on the everyday experiences of women during the tumultuous period of Gorbachev’s reforms during the late 1980s in the Soviet Union and in the years following REVIEWS 377 the country’s collapse in 1991. Judith McKinney has been a long-term visitor to the Soviet Union, having first gone to the country in 1968 and then returning as an undergraduate spending a semester in Leningrad in 1971. She went back again in the mid-1990s to a much different city and to a vastly changed postSoviet Russia. A decade later, she made the first of a series of visits that allowed her to see the now newly stabilized Russia at first hand. This book emerges from a series of interviews she conducted with thirty women in Iaroslavl´ in 2012 and these are supplemented by a smaller number of interviews conducted in the more ethnically diverse Astrakhan´ in 2010. As with many interview projects (my own included), McKinney draws attention to the fact that her respondents are drawn overwhelmingly from middle-class, educated women, many of whom were mothers of young children and adolescents at the height of the crisis period. Their experiences and testimonies provide individual detail to the findings of related studies. Based on these oral testimonies and with reference to related academic studies, the book provides a fascinating insight into a range of women’s life trajectories resulting from the dramatic economic changes of the lateSoviet and post-Soviet period. The material emerging from the interviews is investigated thematically with some focus on the respondents’ changing domestic circumstances and familial relationships, but mostly, as the sub-title indicates, it looks at women’s working lives in the rapidly and vastly changing economic landscape of the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century — the impact of perestroika in the late 1980s, of ‘wild capitalism’ of the 1990s and...