Late Soviet Culture Research Articles

Восприятие духовной семинарии советской интеллигенцией периода позднего СССР

The paper is to study the mythological late Soviet discourse about Orthodox seminaries and academies. The formation of this discourse took place in the conditions of alienation of a significant part of the Soviet intelligentsia from religion, which applies both to the humanitarian and technical intelligentsia. The sources of the formation of the corresponding mythologemes are atheistic propaganda materials, often representing religious relations in a caricatured, vulgarized form, stories of the older generation, often quite ignorant in religious matters, random information obtained from various sources, etc. Along with the Soviet intelligentsia, representatives of the clergy and lower clergy were also exposed to “church mythology”. First of all, this applies to the clergy who began their ministry in the years of perestroika. Many of them came to the church from a secular, sometimes atheistic background, so that they did not have family church traditions and were in many ways bearers of the late Soviet culture of everyday life. The discourse fixes the mythological idealization of spiritual education, with the emphasis on the deep study of classical languages and modern languages, continuity with pre-revolutionary schools, an exceptionally large competition of applicants. Along with the idealization of spiritual education, discourse records another extreme, which is largely a consequence of Soviet atheistic propaganda, portraying the church as a stronghold of ignorance and obscurantism. Negative reviews also demonstrate a significant range both in the harshness of criticism and in its accordance with reality (from fixing real moments in the life of church schools to mythological fantasies). The paper shows that negative reviews differ in the degree of temporal relevance and the desire to globalize the comments. Such reviews demonstrate varying degrees of familiarity with the real state of affairs.

An Empire in Aspic: Popularizing National Cuisines in Late Soviet Russia

Abstract During the Brezhnev era, the USSR’s food world was preoccupied with the “national cuisines” of the Soviet peoples. This represented the culmination of a major postwar trend expressed in cooking advice literature and public dining, notably through the publication of “national” cookbooks and the establishment of flagship ethnic restaurants in Moscow. Food experts promoting national cuisines sought to tidy up the borders of the USSR’s gastronomic landscape, putting each people in their place and elevating selected aspects of their cultures. This encouraged a collision between a longstanding drive for cultural modernization and a growing popular desire for historical “authenticity.” This collision not only laid bare failures of the Soviet food system, but also established an appealing and durable culinary legacy. Examining the national cuisines paradigm, we can identify productive tensions in late Soviet culture and come to better understand how fluidity across time and space helped define socialist modernity.

Who Read, Typed, and Distributed Samizdat in the Soviet Union?

Who Read, Typed, and Distributed Samizdat in the Soviet Union? Cécile Vaissié Josephine von Zitzewitz, The Culture of Samizdat: Literature and Underground Networks in the Late Soviet Union. 248 pp. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. ISBN 978-1788313766. $120.00. Samizdat appeared in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1950s, and Josephine von Zitzewitz defines it very validly as "the production and circulation of texts without the involvement of the state publishing houses and the censor's office" (1). She thus underlines that samizdat is not defined by the genre or the political stances of its texts, but by the ways these texts were produced and circulated. She adds that it was "a mass phenomenon" in the later decades of the Soviet Union, since estimations of the number of people involved range "from hundreds of thousands to several million people" (2). Therefore, samizdat deserves very well to be researched, and studying it has been made much easier by the fact that, as stated by Zitzewitz, samizdat texts are being made more and more accessible to researchers. Book collections are being progressively put online (as is the case, for example, for Viacheslav Igrunov's Antologiia samizdata [Anthology of Samizdat]), and rich collections of samizdat are now available in research centers all over the world: in various branches of Memorial in Russia (officially closed by the authorities since December 2021), in the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa in Bremen (Germany), the Open Society Archives at the Central European University (apparently still in Budapest), the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, the University of Toronto with its program for the Study of Samizdat and Dissidence, and so on. This facilitated access to samizdat texts has helped, especially in the past decade, to develop scientific publications on this topic. The excellent journal Acta Samizdatica/Zapiski o samizdate and its editors, Elena Strukova and [End Page 941] Boris Belenkin, have greatly contributed to encouraging a scientific approach to samizdat. Prepared by Memorial International and the Historical Library in Moscow, Acta Samizdatica, which put out its fifth issue in December 2020, has since 2012 published articles on various aspects of samizdat and tamizdat, encouraged young researchers' publications, and coordinated the works of more senior scholars from the ex-Soviet Union and from "the West."1 Researchers and archivists from Memorial—such as Aleksei Makarov, Olga Rosenblum (who recently started a cycle of Zoom conferences, "The Dissident Library"), Gennadii Kuzovkin, and Aleksandr Daniel´, a samizdat "veteran"—have helped enormously to develop this research on samizdat.2 Scholars such as Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Ann Komaromi have done the same outside of Russia.3 Furthermore, more books on the dissident movement have been published, as well as memoirs written by dissidents and interviews of dissidents.4 Some Internet sites popularize high-quality, accessible resources on samizdat, dissidence, and late Soviet culture, and Arzamas may be the best site on such topics (https://arzamas.academy/courses/40/2). In this context of growing research and publications, Zitzewitz's last book nonetheless stands out, since it explores seriously some very understudied questions. One of her main positions consists in disconnecting samizdat, as a cultural and social practice, from the dissidence movement with which it is often associated. She is indeed right in stating that if "all dissidents were involved in samizdat" (9), not all readers of samizdat were active dissidents (10), even if the latter "made samizdat famous beyond the Soviet Union" (1). Furthermore, Zitzewitz aims [End Page 942] at analyzing samizdat readers and practices, not samizdat texts and authors, as many have already done, including Zitzewitz herself in her previous book.5 Since the samizdat reader was rarely only a reader, she explores the "individuals with personal experience of reading, reproducing, editing and circulating samizdat texts" (3), which has her returning, in her last two chapters, to some of the samizdat actors she analyzed in her first book. Zitzewitz points out the essential notion of "networks": people were reading samizdat mainly because they knew people who were reading/receiving/diffusing samizdat and not so much, or not only, because they had oppositional political positions or were looking for alternative texts. Therefore, she explores more generally the...

“Welcome to the fairytale world…”: Belief, Play, and Semantic Shifts in Contemporary Religious Culture

Researchers of contemporary culture still discuss the significance of the gap between “historical” and “fictional” (or “invented”) religions, “serious” and “playful” emotions felt by their followers, and the very understanding of reality informing respective ontologies. It is important, however, that every newly appeared religious community have to either employ existing models of social and ritual relations or create them anew or borrow them from other — sometimes very distant — contexts. From this perspective, history of post-Soviet religious culture can provide us with certain insights into social and moral expectations and anxieties characteristic to the citizens of the former USSR in the time of collapse of Soviet “symbolic universe.” The article deals with certain concepts of social and moral imagination borrowed from the late Soviet culture and being especially important for the Last Testament Church, a post-Soviet religious movement. Such borrowings imply more or less significant semantic shifts, but at the same time retain partly erased “trains” of previous meanings. This allows reconstructing with certain precision cultural and social needs that inform “invention” of new religions. The analysis presented in the article demonstrates that social utopia of the Last Testament Church proceeds from concepts and images of late Soviet childhood where literary and cinematographic fairy tales and pedagogic ethics were easily connected to the image of nuclear apocalypse and survival in the world burnt and poisoned by radiation.

The Many Shades of Soviet Dissidence

The Many Shades of Soviet Dissidence Benjamin Nathans Barbara Martin, Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika. 312 pp. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. ISBN-13 9781350192447. $39.95. Manuela Putz, Kulturraum Lager: Politische Haft und dissidentische Selbstverständnis in der Sowjetunion nach Stalin (The Camp as Cultural Space: Political Incarceration and Dissident Self-Perception in the Soviet Union after Stalin). 348 pp. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2019. ISBN-13 978-3447111256. €49.00. In the preface to her field-transforming study The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, first published in 1981 and currently in its third edition, Katerina Clark described the embarrassment she felt when revealing to colleagues the subject of her research. Are you delving into Platonov or Bulgakov, they would ask, or perhaps Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn? No? You mean … you're analyzing the Soviet Soviet novel? Those unreadable texts that slavishly follow the conventions of socialist realism? At this point, she wrote, her incredulous interlocutors would either "back out of the conversation or … mutter words of sympathy and amazement." "It is considered far more worthy," Clark noted, "to write on dissidents."1 What a difference 40 years make. To write about Soviet dissidents today is to risk seeming naive or, even worse, in thrall to a version of what the musicologist Richard Taruskin called "the Great Either/Or": in this case, the Cold War view that in the Soviet Union an unbridgeable chasm separated gray, mendacious official culture from the vibrant, autonomous, truth-seeking [End Page 185] world of dissent.2 It is not just that the collapse of the USSR has released us from the unspoken obligation to identify morally with one side of the chasm. Scholars of late Soviet history now tend to see official and dissident culture as part of a single field in which lines of distinction were blurry, shifted over time, and were subject to a variety of criss-crossings. The trend started, precociously, with Dina Spechler's notion of "permitted dissent," continued with Serguei Oushakine's influential analysis of samizdat as a form of "mimicry" of official discourse, and burst into view with Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, which argued that dissidents and party activists, "despite having opposing attitudes to authoritative discourse, shared a general approach to it: they privileged the constative dimension of that discourse, reading it as a description of reality and evaluating that description for truth." In Yurchak's framework, dissenters and the party faithful occupied the extreme poles of a single epistemic literalism, against which the "normal" majority of Soviet citizens, at home with ironic ways of inhabiting the world, defined themselves.3 Another approach to shattering the bipolarity of late Soviet culture can be found in Boris Firsov's Raznomyslie v SSSR, 1940–1960-e gody (Diversity of Thinking in the USSR, 1940s–1960s), which proposed raznomyslie as a pluralist alternative to inakomyslie (thinking differently), the attribute that allegedly distinguished dissidents from everyone else.4 The authors of these innovative works were notably not historians but scholars trained in political science (Spechler), anthropology (Oushakine and Yurchak), and sociology (Firsov). Their insights have substantially shaped the way historians engage the second half of Soviet history. Having achieved postbinary bliss, the study of late Soviet culture—including the dissident phenomenon—is now wide open for fresh approaches and interpretations. The two monographs under review belong to a new generation of scholarship less interested in casting Soviet dissidents as distinctly "worthy" subjects, as Clark wryly put it in 1981, than in exploring their embeddedness in the Soviet system. Both works employ an artful blend of archival investigation and oral history; both bear the traces of having begun as doctoral dissertations. [End Page 186] ________ Like assertions about innate artistic or mathematical genius, the claim that a given individual was born a dissident rarely stands up to scrutiny. How then were dissidents made? Barbara Martin takes up this question by exploring the trajectories of four individuals, authors of critical works on Soviet history that were condemned in one form or another by Soviet authorities in the 1960s and 1970s. Anton Antonov-Ovseenko was the son of the Bolshevik military commander Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, who...

Happiness and heroism, personal and collective as main elements of the ‘bright future’ in the Soviet (non)utopia

The article is a review-reflection on the book by I. Kaspe In Alliance with Utopia. Semantic Frontiers of the Late Soviet Culture (Moscow: New Literary Review; 2018. 432 p.). Despite the fact that the title emphasizes the word ‘utopia’, the author prefers a broad interpretation of the ‘utopian’ concept - as a kind of conceptual context which serves as a framework that makes ‘ultimate’ meanings and values of the Soviet culture (socialism) as if ‘visible’. It may seem strange at first glance, but actually these meanings and values concentrate ‘around’ different interpretations of heroism and happiness. The article reconstructs the author’s narrative logic together with the formal structure of the book, which helps the author to prove to readers (with varying degrees of credibility) the heuristic potential of utopia as an analytical research metaphor. In particular, from the first to the final parts of the book (and the author honestly informs readers in the beginning that the book is a collection of the revised articles that were published previously, but later were adapted for the task of the historical-phenomenological analysis of the perception of utopia and combined into four thematic sections) the author develops her own concept of utopia focusing rather on different attitudes to the utopian thinking than on different interpretations of utopia in different historical periods.

Gothic Nationalism: Iurii Kuznetsov’s Poetic Ideology

The article examines a curious resurgence of the Gothic mode in late Soviet culture. As the author shows, in the 1970s and 1980s the Gothic served an important function in the fast-developing discourse of Russian nationalism. The article identifies this “nationalist Gothic” in the works of the understudied, yet influential late Soviet poet, Iurii Kuznetsov. Gothic discourse was unusual for mainstream Soviet literature and aesthetics, but this very exoticism also made it appealing for the articulation of a non-conformist historical consciousness. Close readings show how Kuznetsov deployed Gothic conceptions of the lingering presence of an irrational, primordial past as an alternative to the increasingly discredited Soviet ideology of modernity and futurity. In this, the poet articulated the crisis in Soviet society. Tracing Kuznetsov’s career and reputation forward into the post-Soviet years, the article demonstrates how, despite the fact that in a conservative context (such as late Soviet culture), the Gothic aesthetic can serve as a powerful form of cultural criticism, it nevertheless harbors dangerous potential for extreme nationalist and even fascist ideological formations.

The National as Progressive?

The article analyses debates on jazz after 1953 through the lens of Soviet national cultures. Within the context of Cultural Cold War and the limited opening of the country, the question of a unique Soviet Jazz quickly gained political relevance. Soviet Estonia, at the multinational empire’s periphery, was often imagined as the “Soviet West” by contemporaries. The republic was home to a small but well-educated jazz scene that already developed during the time of the anti-western campaigns of the late 1940s. In the post-Stalin period, Party and cultural elites in Moscow and Leningrad increasingly struggled with a growing number of young jazz enthusiasts that aimed at establishing jazz as art music based on improvisation and influenced by the American model. In these debates on the establishment of a specifically Soviet Jazz, conservative and reform-minded members of the cultural elites envisioned Estonian jazz as an early role model for a number of reasons: Its members were not only highly qualified, but also willing to make traditional Estonian folklore a key element of jazz. What is more, the musicians kept close ties with the Estonian cultural institutions. The growing number of jazz festivals hosted in the Estonian Soviet Republic provided an important public space for the emerging young Soviet jazz culture. At the same time, many Estonian jazz musicians advocated a more critical approach towards improvisation than musicians from Moscow and Leningrad. Their discussions resembled arguments against American superficiality brought forward by party ideologists in the late 1940s. The article questions narratives of jazz as cultural resistance to political oppression, and argues that a focus on cultural transfer from behind the Iron Curtain is too narrow for explaining the genesis, heterogeneity and durability of late Soviet culture. Greater emphasis on the non-Russian peripheries as cradles of culture can provide us with more nuanced interpretations on the renewal of Soviet culture after Stalin’ death.

Site of Death: The Meanings of the Siege of Leningrad in Late Soviet Culture

The article attempts to discover the place of besieged Leningrad on a “cognitive map” of late Soviet culture from 1960s to the 1980s. The images of the blockaded city which were reproduced during those decades are considered by the author in connection with the issue of spatial perception. The study focuses on the Piskarevskoye cemetery, a peculiar space located outside of the “historic center of Saint Petersburg” and established for a memorial purpose. However, the author refuses to formulate her tasks in terms of “collective memory,” and explores the symbolically-charged and existentially-meaningful practices hidden behind the memorial rhetoric, although not related to the mnemonic processes. The article relies on two types of sources. The first source is Soviet albums and tourist brochures dedicated to the Piskarevskoye cemetery, and the second source is the memories of the respondents of their visits to this memorial in late Soviet times. In the first case, we talk about a normative view of the regimentation of affects, and setting the modes of mourning. The second case is about the possibilities of the reconstruction of the complex personal experience, often involving, as the article shows, a deep emotional shock. In complementing each other, these sources allow us to see the images of the Siege of Leningrad as a kind of projection of the notions about death, and as a symbolic “hell” that is located on the opposite pole from the symbolic “paradise” promised in a utopian Communist future.

((( 195441957 ) (Analysis of Social Networks in the Historical Sociology of Culture (On the Basis of Soviet Children's Literature of 1954-1957))

Russian Abstract: Предлагаемая работа обосновывает применимость метода анализа социальных сетей (social networks analysis) в исторической социологии литературы. В новейших исследованиях по социологии культуры основное внимание обращается не на социальные связи между отдельными авторами, редакторами, переводчиками или читателями (social networks), а на сети коммуникаций в литературных сообществах или сети трансляции текстов (по аналогии с social media в Интернете). С нашей точки зрения, коммуникация – лишь частный случай социального взаимодействия в сетевых структурах, изучение которых позволяет увидеть принципиально новые аспекты создания и рецепции литературных произведений. Предмет исследования в этой работе – резкая трансформация социальных связей между детскими писателями, критиками и литературными институциями в 1954—57 годах, приведшая к появлению «оттепельных» направлений в детской литературе. Изучение этого частного случая помогает увидеть более общие закономерности институционального и «сетевого» развития (networking) позднесоветской культуры и понять специфику советских сетевых структур по сравнению с изученными в англоязычной социологической литературе. English Abstract: This paper is aimed at grounding of applicability of social network analysis to historical sociology of literature. In modern studies in cultural sociology, the scholars’ attention is paid mostly not to social networks that connect authors, editors, translators, and readers, but to the communication channels or the networks for texts’ widespread – in other words, to the phenomena, resembling the social media on the Internet. In our opinion, communication here is only particular case in the wide range of social interactions in literary communities. Study of these communities from the viewpoint of social network analysis allows to discern the new aspects of literary works’ production and reception, and to shed new light on the well-known episodes of literary history. The subject of the case study in this paper is the quick transformation of the social ties between the Soviet children’s writers, critics, and literary institutions in 1954-57. This transformation led to the total reshaping of landscape of the Soviet children’s literature. This case study gives ground for consideration the deeper principles that regulated networking and institutional dynamics of the late-Soviet culture, as well as the specific features of the Soviet cultural networks if comparing them with the samples discussed in English-language sociological scholarship.

Tourism Soviet-Style

Tourism Soviet-Style Ingrid Kleespies Diane P. Koenker, Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream. x + 307 pp., illus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. ISBN-13 978-0801451539. $39.95. “Everyone must visit Sochi, if only once in their lives.” Many readers will surely recognize this famous line from Vladimir Men´shov’s 1980 Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (Moskva slezam ne verit), perhaps less for its importance in the movie than for its cultural resonance in the late Soviet period. The statement was recognized as a truism of Soviet life, as Diane Koenker shows in her engaging new study of Soviet tourism and leisure. How did it come to be the case that, for most Soviet citizens, a trip to Sochi or another such vacation hotspot was both a desired and an expected reward from the state? Club Red sets out to answer this question, among others, in a full-scale study of the phenomenon of the Soviet vacation, from its somewhat chaotic origins in the 1920s to its enshrinement in late Soviet culture as the ultimate marker of the socialist “good life.” In chronological fashion Koenker details the ways in which the early, ideologically driven practices of “proletarian tourism” and medicalized rest cures evolved into full-fledged institutions of leisure similar to their capitalist counterparts. In so doing, her study engages with a number of larger critical issues surrounding the study of Soviet experience: What were the myths and realities of the socialist good life? How did consumerism shape Soviet society, even if its existence was not acknowledged? What paradoxes did the phenomenon of the state-sponsored vacation embody, and what do these reveal about the interaction between the state and its citizens? Koenker draws from several scholarly approaches to consider these questions, including the theorization of tourism, socialist consumerism, and Soviet institution building; and she approaches her topic with a sharp awareness of the often paradoxical nature of Soviet experience, as elucidated by Alexei Yurchak in his recent study of the late Soviet period and the social [End Page 444] experience of glasnost´.1 In a state where official ideology was based on a glorification of work and labor, the realm of leisure was sure to be understood in complex, even ambivalent, terms. As Koenker shows, important conceptual tensions shaped the practices of state-sponsored travel and vacation from the outset. She skillfully reveals how these tensions played out over seven decades to create specific social institutions of late socialism. In this respect, Club Red is both a success story that details the growth of a bona fide socialist consumer enterprise that became a beloved fixture of Soviet life and a telling document of the many ways in which the state never proved able to deliver on that promise of a trip to Sochi for all. Club Red provides a useful historical overview of the importance of vacation and rest to the Soviet project from early on, as evident from the 1922 labor code that established workers’ right to an annual vacation—the first such document in the world to do so. The “right to rest” was enshrined in the 1936 Soviet constitution 12 years before it would become a key provision in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These provisions reflect the fact that the establishment of a good life for all citizens was a central tenet of the Soviet project, albeit one traditionally less studied. Leisure, specifically vacation, was a core component of this good life. As we can see from Club Red, however, the questions of what this leisure should consist of, how it should be delivered to the population, and to whom it should be accessible, were matters of no small importance or controversy, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. The state’s answers to these questions were in part shaped by an early ideological and administrative divide between turizm, or physically active travel, and rest (otdykh). These twin pillars of the Soviet vacation were viewed as separate, even competing, activities well into the 1960s and 1970s, though both had at their core the paradoxical principle of purposeful relaxation. Club Red examines the way in which these phenomena...

Clarifying Positions

In his response to the colleagues' critique, Lipovetsky emphasizes the discursive (as opposed to political and/or ideological) character of the intelligentsia community, shaped by the ITR discourse. Developing ideas generated by the discussion and revisiting the trope of "progressor", he introduces a hypothesis of this discursive formation as a version of "internal colonization" (Alexander Etkind). In this capacity, this discourse has obtained a central position in late Soviet culture and, having undergone the transformation, preserved its significance, now predominantly conservative, for post-Soviet culture. В своем ответе на отзывы коллег Марк Липовецкий подчеркивает дискурсивный (а не политический или идеологический) характер интеллигентского сообщества, образованного ИТР-дискурсом. Отталкиваясь от высказанных в дискуссии суждений и развивая троп "прогрессора", он высказывает гипотезу об ИТР-дискурсе как варианте "внутренней колонизации" (А. Эткинд). Именно в этом качестве ИТР-дискурс приобрел одну из центральных позиций в поздней советской культуре и, трансформировавшись, сохранил теперь все более консервативное значение для постсоветской культуры.

Babushka Writes Back: Grandmothers and Grandchildren in Liudmila Petrushevskaia's Time: Night

Despite the prominence of elderly women in the creative output of Liudmila Petrushevskaia, little scholarship exists on old age in her work. This article examines the dark comic novella Vremia noch' [Time: Night] (1992) and its oppressive, unstable grandmother heroine. It shows how Petrushevskaia challenges conventional Soviet narratives about ageing, particularly the mythical figure of the caring, providing babushka, who had regained an elevated status in late Soviet culture, especially village prose. Petrushevskaia indicates how harsh socio-economic realities place multiple burdens upon the babushka, but more profoundly, her transformation of the caring babushka into a grotesque, self-pitying narrator offers a critique of the dominant modes of writing about women in Russia, particularly the reinscription of women as martyrs.

Socialist in Form, Indeterminate in Content: The Ins and Outs of Late Soviet Culture

SUMMARY: Настоящая статья Бенджамина Натанса и Кевина Платта является реакцией на новые подходы к пониманию позднесоветской культуры, предложенные в широко известной монографии Алексея Юрчака “Все было навечно, пока не кончилось: последнее советское поколение” (2006). В ней Юрчак пересмотрел многие бинарные оппозиции, характерные для предшествующих исследований данного периода, такие как противопоставление официального и неофициального, ложного и истинного в политической культуре, политического насилия и сопротивления. Однако при этом он отказался объяснить на основе своей аналитической модели позднесоветского общества феномен распада советской системы. Бенджамин Натанс и Кевин Платт, отталкиваясь от описанного Юрчаком важнейшего механизма социальной и культурной вненаходимости – сознательного ухода как от политического участия, так и от сопротивления (позиция “вне”), строят свое альтернативное объяснение позднесоветской культуры и ее последствий. В основе их анализа – произведение советской писательницы Натальи Баранской “Неделя как неделя” (1969), а также суммирующее прочтение исследовательских работ последнего времени, посвященных послесталинскому СССР. Натанс и Платт, в свою очередь, проблематизируют оппозиции, введенные Юрчаком, в частности противопоставление “активистов” и “диссидентов”. Они полагают, что нахождение “вне”, равно как и диссидентство, и другие социальные позиции, должны прочитываться в их связи с позднесоветской “воображаемой частной сферой”. Эта сфера была результатом компромисса, который подразумевал, что анклавы идеологически нагруженных социальных практик могли развиваться при условии, что они оставались политически нейтральными и не затрагивали чувствительные элементы советской системы. С приходом горбачевской перестройки именно эти практики неожиданно для многих оказались в центре социальной и политической жизни общества.

Преодоление Или Продолжение?

SUMMARY: Mark Lipovetsky begins his essay by revisiting Serguei Oushakine’s many works and pointing out the strength of his work, which combines attention to meaningful facts of contemporary Russian culture with the ability to employ a range of sophisticated theoretical approaches in contemporary humanities and social sciences. Although the material for Oushakine’s book coming from Barnaul in Siberia, Lipovetsky argues that Oushakine’s study focuses on meaningful current national phenomena, such as, for example, the collapse of Soviet sociocultural semiotics and the lack of new generally acceptable and comprehensible discourses. Lipovetsky suggests that Oushakine’s book raises a number of questions: how did the Soviet past became meaningful not only for millions of former Soviet citizens but also for their children and grandchildren who never experienced it? What new forms of social solidarity have emerged on the ruins of the Soviet world? And, finally, why did the post-Soviet democratic revolution fail so miserably? Addressing Oushakine’s study of symbolic constructions of loss and trauma, Lipovetsky suggests that in many cases these constructions implicitly or explicitly validate violence that was ultimately responsible for the emergence of the communities of loss. Lipovetsky also comments that many ideas and practices described by Oushakine as specifically post-Soviet communities of solidarity organized around notions of trauma, loss, and mourning are descendants of late Soviet practices, whether thanatological cults of the Great Patriotic War or Russian nationalist exercises of the early 1980s. Hence Lipovetsky’s suggestion that these post-Soviet phenomena may be a bricolage of Soviet influences. For Lipovetsky, neo-Communist youths described by Oushakine are heirs to the Slavophile discourse merged with Stalin’s national-bolshevism and late Soviet nationalism. Similarly, some antecedents of post-Soviet constructions of biologically determined collectives united by suffering and loss may be found in notions of exceptional Soviet suffering in World War II or in the intelligentsia’s lament of terror. Discussing the chapters focusing on communities of veterans of Chechen wars and mothers of fallen soldiers, Lipovetsky points out that their commemorative practices and symbolic collectivities valorize loss and ultimately conserve rather than overcome the trauma associated with the Soviet collapse. Lipovetsky concludes that Oushakine’s study proves cultural failures rather than just economic or social dislocations are responsible for the failures of the democratic revolution in Russia. He also suggests that Oushakine’s study may be considered evidence of the fact that the post-Soviet situation was not a negation of the late Soviet period but rather its continuation: market reforms just legalized widespread practices of the late Soviet regime, while late Soviet culture persists in public and private media.

The Liberal Gene: Sociobiology as Emancipatory Discourse in the Late Soviet Union

Sociobiology investigates all manifestations of human nature—including our moral, aesthetic, and intellectual strivings—from the perspective of evolutionary biology. In this article, Yvonne Howell examines V. P. Efroimson's controversial 1971 Novyi mir article, “The Genealogy of Altruism: Ethics from the Perspective of Human Evolutionary Genetics,” in order to point out one of the paradoxes embedded in late Soviet culture: namely, the potentially reductive and reactionary discourse of sociobiology was used instead to make a compelling argument for social pluralism, intellectual freedom, and individual moral responsibility. Howell compares the initial rejection of sociobiology by liberals in the west with the valorization of Efroimson's evolutionary ethics among a broad spectrum of the liberal, educated public in late USSR. She shows how Efroimson updated the “evolutionary humanism” championed by Soviet geneticists in the 1920s to challenge enduring Brezhnev-era dogma about the malleability of human nature. This account indicates a trajectory from earlier tensions between disciplining scripts for selfhood typical of Soviet modernism and alternative narratives (both humanistic and biological) for an ethics based on autonomous individual self-scripting.

“Crucified on the Cross of Mass Culture”: Late Soviet Genre Politics in Alexander Zhurbin's Rock Opera Orpheus and Eurydice

Alexander Zhurbin's Orpheus and Eurydice (Orfei i Evredika) (1975), the first Soviet rock opera, recasts Orpheus as a popular singer corrupted by the excesses of contemporary youth culture: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The history of the creation of Zhurbin's important work—together with its reception by Soviet critics, officials, and listeners—has been little discussed. Interviews with Zhurbin, contemporary Soviet primary and secondary sources, as well as more recent appraisals of late Soviet culture, reveal the changing estimations by Soviet critics of “high” and “low” and “popular” and “art” that Zhurbin's genre-blurring composition helped instigate.

Anatoli Ljadow: Zugänge zu Leben und Werk: Monographien - Schriften - Verzeichnisse by Ernst Kuhn (review)

122 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g simple terms and a transparent conversational tone. Reading Woman with a Movie Camera is much like listening toGoldovskaia telling stories. She includes anecdotes, complete with detailed accounts of conversations. Most amusing are Goldovskaia's political jokes ? the humorous residue of a horrifying Soviet past. Many of the jokes came from Goldovskaia's father, who was among the few survivors of the torturous interrogations at Lubianka. The memoirs include unique visual and reference materials. There are three insertswith stillsfromGoldovskaia's films,as well as photographs from her personal life.These include Louis Lumiere's autographed photograph to her father and her recent pictures with one of the fathers of direct cinema, Richard Leacock. The Appendix, 'Notable Figures in Soviet Filmmaking and Other Arts', introduces the Western reader to many Russo-Soviet cultural producers with whom the author worked over the course of her career. Gold ovskaia's book is an invaluable source of information and insights for anyone trying to understand late Soviet culture and the role of cinema and television in it.The volume would provide a unique gendered perspective on Russian visual culture in a film course, a women's studies seminar or in a class dealing with the issues of history and memory. Department ofSlavic Languages andLiteratures Erin Alpert Universityof Pittsburgh Department of Modern Languages andLiteratures Alexander Prokhorov College of William and Mary Kuhn, Ernst (ed., trans.).AnatoliLjadow: ^ugange zu Leben und Werk:Monographien Schrifien Verzeichnisse . musik konkret:Quellentexte und Abhandlungen zur russichenMusik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Ernst Kuhn, Berlin, 2006. xi + 285 pp. Musical extracts. Illustrations. Notes. List of works. Bibliography. Biography. Index. 49.95 (paperback). If Anatolii Liadov (1855-1914) is at all known as a composer today, it is usually for his brilliant orchestral miniatures, Baba-Iaga, Volshebnoeozero and Kikimora. Like so many members associated with the so-called Beliaev circle, he is often written off as an epigone who illustrates the depths to which Russian national music had sunk at the turn of the century. According to this historiographical interpretation, only with Stravinskii and Prokof'ev was Russian music to re-establish itselfat the forefront of European modernism: thatLiadov had been Diaghilev's firstchoice as composer of^har-ptitsa for the Ballets russesonly compounds the apparent veracity of this observation (to which must be added the composer's reputation for indolence). Ernst Kuhn seeks to revive interest inLiadov by publishing this collection of memoirs and essays. There is, apparently, much unpublished material relating to Liadov's life and work in various archives, and Kuhn will be rewarded ifthis isbrought to light.For the time being, however, we must rely on volumes such as this. Most of the contributions in it are taken from a 1916 volume ? An. K. Liadov: Zfiizn' -portret tvorchesto . Izpisem ? edited by REVIEWS 123 Viktor Val'ter (Walter), and the appearance of a number of essays from this volume in an easily available German translation ought to do much to bring the composer to the attention of a variety of scholars and music lovers. The volume includes Val'ter's own biography of the composer, as well as brief accounts of Liadov's vocal works and folksong arrangements, and further memoirs by Val'ter (ofLiadov as a teacher) and theAcmeist poet turned Soviet opera librettist,Sergei Gorodetskii. There is an account of Liadov's piano music by the Soviet critic,Aleksandr Alekseev, and a newly commis sioned survey of the orchestral music by SigfridNeef. By far themost interest ing and important of the individual sections is a set of extracts fromLiadov's own letters, which record his reactions to contemporary cultural events and illustrate the breadth of his reading, from his enthusiastic response to Chekhov's Tri sestry and various stories, to his distaste for the utilitarianism of Gor'kii and Tolstoi's Chto takoe iskusstvo? His reading also encompassed Dickens, Wilde, d'Annunzio, Huysmans, Hamsun and the Kalevala, as well as Andreev and Merezhkovskii. As a guide to one creative individual's reading at the turnof the century, thispart of the collection will be of interest tomore than justmusicologists. The volume concludes with a list of Liadov's compositions and a biblio graphy...

The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol 'pin and the Idea of Rights under “Developed Socialism”

The Soviet mathematical logician Aleksandr Vol'pin is often credited with introducing the post-Stalin dissident strategy of attempting to hold the Soviet government to its own laws. In this article, Benjamin Nathans asks how Vol'pin himself arrived at the deceptively familiar rhetoric of civil rights and rule of law and how that rhetoric functioned in emerging dissident circles in the 1960s. Rather than approaching rights through classic liberal notions of social contract and self-interest, Vol'pin drew on the strikingly cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary ferment of Soviet intellectual life during the thaw years, putting logic, philosophy of language, and the burgeoning field of cybernetics to unexpected purposes. The result, Nathans suggests, was a counterintuitive blend of idealism and literalism that became an indispensable element of dissident thought and practice within late Soviet culture.

The Unofficial Field of Late Soviet Culture

This article proposes a new interdisciplinary model for investigating unofficial culture and dissident social activity in the post-Stalin period. Although binary oppositions like art versus politics and unofficial versus official are recognized today to be ideologically implicated and critically outmoded, Ann Komaromi argues that they have a certain usefulness when reconceived as structural components of an autonomous unofficial field. This critical model is developed with polemical reference to Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of culture. The late Soviet opposition between art and politics is explored through Andrei Siniavskii's struggle with editors over the 1965 edition of Boris Pasternak's poetry and via the organization of the famous 5 December 1965 “Meeting of Openness” coordinated by Aleksandr Esenin-Vol'pin. The critical model proposed emphasizes the material history of conceptions of autonomy fundamental to the field, profiling dynamic binaries and permeable boundaries as sites of critical interest.