Soviet Life Research Articles

Emancipation and Domesticity: Decoding Personal Manuscript Cookbooks from the Soviet Union

A product of their time and of the internalized Soviet ideology that to a great extent shaped women's gendered self-fashioning as women and mothers, Soviet manuscript cookbooks became popular among Soviet women in the late 1960s. Based on the semiotic reading of two personal manuscript cookbooks in the author's family, this article explores what these cookbooks, in combination with the author's family history, tell about how Soviet women used and reshaped the gender roles available to them in late Soviet everyday life. The author also asks questions about the cost of emancipation in a society that could not truly support such progress socially or economically.

The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde by Owen Hatherley (review)

REVIEWS 755 significance of colour — one of which comes from a film entitled A Carnival of Colours — fail to support his arguments, simply because they are reproduced in black and white. The high price tag attached to the Companion makes this shortcut all the more disappointing. These comments are not, of course, intended to detract from the considerable achievements of this ambitious volume. The Companion makes a significant contribution to the scholarly field, containing much that will interest, inform and inspire academics working in Russian cinema studies and in cinema studies more broadly. Scholars of the cultural history of Russia and the Soviet Unionwillalsodiscovermuchofvaluehere,aswillthegeneralreader.Likewise, undergraduate, taught postgraduate and postgraduate research students will find the Companion an extremely useful addition to their university library, and many of its chapters — and, indeed, the volume as a whole — are sure to feature on their reading lists. UCL SSEES Rachel Morley Hatherley, Owen. The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde. Pluto Press, London, 2016. vii + 232 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £16.99. Discussing the legacy of Charlie Chaplin — and his comic coevals Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd — in 1958, James Agee remarked that Chaplin’s character of the Tramp ‘is as centrally representative of humanity, as manysided and as mysterious, as Hamlet, and it seems unlikely that any dancer or actor can ever have excelled him in eloquence, variety or poignancy of motion’. It is Chaplin’s far-reaching humanistic appeal to early Soviet artists and his poignant motion, along with other less jubilant facets of 1920s Americanism, that constitutes the focus of Owen Hatherley’s The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, FordismandtheCommunistAvant-Garde.AsHatherleycontends,thesynthesis of Chaplinism, Taylorism and Fordism that took shape in Soviet avant-garde art of the 1920s reflected a pressing desire to supersede the attractive, yet ideologically insufficient American model. Soviet left artists ‘knew full well that they could better it’ (p. 33), and thus they aggressively adapted facets of America to their vision for Soviet society. While many have explored ‘Americanism’ in early Soviet culture, Hatherley aims to counterbalance what he perceives as excessive scholarly emphasis on aesthetics over politics. Discussing America’s unique blend of comedy and industry, Hatherley highlights ways the slapstick antics of silent comedy, along with skyscrapers and the industrial efficiency championed by F. W. Taylor and Henry Ford, emerged as an enticing paradigm for early Soviet culture SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 756 and Communist ideology. To bolster his perspective on Soviet Americanism, Hatherley draws on evocative accounts of Soviet life by Western visitors, from Harpo Marx to René Fülöp-Miller. Delving into early Soviet cinema, architecture and a widespread embrace of the circus, Hatherley produces a vivid portrait of the era’s Americanism. As Hatherley himself admits, the focus of The Chaplin Machine may be ‘disjointed’ (p. 34), but like any film by Chaplin or Keaton, its intellectual play dazzles and rarely disappoints. Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd all feature in Hatherley’s study, which first probes the impact of the silent greats on post-1917 constructivism. Hatherley focuses not on the Chaplin of Modern Times fame who satirized Fordism in the 1930s, but rather on the Chaplin of early silent shorts who captivated audiences worldwide with his comic ability to humanize mechanized movement. Chaplin ‘is the machine that cries’ (p. 42), serving as a prototype for the ‘new [Soviet] man’. In the constructivist film journal, Kino-Fot, the author encounters a celebration of the silent film star as ‘a fellow traveler with the leftist avantgarde ’ (p. 49). Also explored are Meierkhol´dian biomechanics on the Soviet stage and the circus-inspired ‘eccentrism’ of FEKS films that defamiliarized the everyday while promoting Bolshevism. In subsequent chapters, Hatherley turns his attention to the built, urban environment. Keaton’s One Week, a 1920 short showcasing the potential pitfalls of prefabricated housing in the US, provides a comic backdrop — and basis — for the utopianism of early Soviet architecture, be it buildings featured in film posters, the sets of innovative films by Eizenshtein and others, or the creative advertising designs displayed on modern structures in Moscow. The transformation of America’s alleged dystopia into the Soviet state’s utopian ‘new everyday life...

Tsipursky, Gleb Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union 1945–1970 (review)

REVIEWS 583 Tsipursky, Gleb. Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union 1945–1970. Pitt Series in Russian and EastEuropeanStudies.UniversityofPittsburghPress,Pittsburgh,PA,2016. x + 366 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $26.95 (paperback). Gleb Tsipursky’s Socialist Fun examines the changing face of Soviet youth mass culture after World War Two and shows how, in response to changing political and social norms and a cultural onslaught from the West, the Soviet authorities attempted to create new popular cultural forms that would promote socialist values while keeping at bay the capitalist threat. Focusing on the period from the end of World War Two to the aftermath of the Prague Spring, Tsipursky shows how official youth culture changed over a quarter of a century that saw the Stalinist obsession with vigilance and ideological conformity give way to more heterogeneous mass cultural forms under Khrushchev. However, as Tsipursky shows, in a period of often violent ideological swings, the creation of a coherent and mobilizing policy proved to be a challenging task. Following an introductory chapter which discusses the state’s role in youth culture from the revolution until 1946, the following seven chapters take us from the aftermath of World War Two up to 1970. Recurring themes are the contested role of Western culture in Soviet life (those interested in Soviet jazz will find plenty of interest in this volume), and the Komsomol’s role in creating forms of mass culture which would provide outlets for young people’s creative energies while channelling them in socially useful directions. To this end, Tsipursky analyses the development of a number of ‘clubs’ that aimed to ignite citizen energies from below, as well as the ‘youth café’ initiative of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which sought to create spaces for sociability. Within these chapters, the many twists and turns of Party and Komsomol policy are placed at the fore, and they illustrate the difficulties encountered by the authorities in attempting to loosen cultural restrictions while maintaining Soviet culture’s activist direction. Based on extensive archival research, from the Komsomol Committee of the Saratov Third State Ball-Bearing Factory to the Central Committee of the Communist party, and several dozen interviews, Socialist Fun’s originality lies in its focus on the cultural mainstream of lectures and debates, Komsomolsponsored dances, and civic activities, rather than the ‘alternative’ youth practices on which recent scholarship has predominantly focused. Tsipursky does a sterling job of assessing the Komsomol’s changing priorities, placing these within the broader context of young people’s concrete practices and the changing goals of central government. Of particular interest is Tsipursky’s discussion of schemes for promoting grassroots agency through Komsomol clubs, a subject which broadens scholarly understanding of the state’s attempts to create new forms of civic life after Stalin’s death. SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 584 Tsipursky coins the term ‘socialist time’ to describe the Komsomol’s goal of having its members spend as much time as possible participating in the organization’s own activities, but his primary interest is the nexus of socialist time and socialist space. In other words, Tsipursky’s interest is in those activities — whether lectures, theatre performances, or dances — that saw individuals having ‘socialist fun’ within public spaces. However — and perhaps my own scholarly interests are coming to the fore here — in a period where broadcast media was emerging as a powerful cultural force and the popular press was rapidly expanding its readership, it is a shame that the study does not consider the role of mass media in embodying and promoting new forms of state-sponsored leisure and allowing individuals to spend ‘socialist time’ in other spaces. Doing so would have allowed for a more nuanced understanding of ‘state-sponsored leisure’ and of the ideological mechanisms that governed individual behaviours within socialist space. Beyond the story of state policies, Socialist Fun seeks to describe the changing ‘emotional regimes’ of the post-Stalin period. However, emotion appears to be rather peripheral to the book’s concerns, and is referred to fitfully across the book’s eight chapters. While Tsipursky is able to draw on an extensive range of interviews, he elicits...

Christine Varga-Harris. Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years.

From 1917 to 1991, one constant in Soviet life was the shortage of adequate housing. Immediately after the revolution, the Bolsheviks tried to solve the housing problem by expropriating and subdividing bourgeois apartments, thus creating the quintessentially Soviet institution of the communal apartment (kommunalka), in which perhaps twenty or thirty tenants shared a single kitchen, bathroom, and toilet. The problem only got worse in the 1930s, as Stalinist industrialization brought millions of new workers into already overcrowded cities. Wartime damage to housing stock exacerbated already acute shortages in cities such as Leningrad, the focus of Christine Varga-Harris’s Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years. Residents returning from evacuation or service in the Red Army whose former homes had been destroyed or were occupied by others sheltered in basements, hallways, and dugouts. Ten years after the end of World War II, housing remained a pressing practical problem. In the context of the Cold War and de-Stalinization, Varga-Harris argues, housing also constituted an ideological opportunity. When, in 1957, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, launched the drive to house every Soviet family in a “separate” (single-family) apartment, he aimed “not only to provide living space, but also to regenerate society and create model individuals” (9). With so many waiting for housing, new construction often fell short of state and popular expectations. Nonetheless, Varga-Harris concludes that the regime’s efforts to rejuvenate the revolutionary project often succeeded because, at least in the realm of housing, “individual interests in many ways corresponded with state objectives” (213).

When the Guest becomes the Host: Review ofFamiliar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of the Soviet Empire

Erik Scott’s book Familiar Strangers begins with a tantalizing paradox: How did Georgians, a small people numerically, come to play a role as internal diaspora out of all proportion to their numbers in the Soviet Union from start to finish? I argue that in the thread that ties together the many examples of Georgian ethnic strategies (including the changing, but continuous, presence of Georgians in political and cultural life of the Soviet Union), Scott rightly focuses on the varied affordances of the Georgian table, both the “edible ethnicity” of Georgian food and wine but also the traditions of hospitality centered on this commensality and the forms of networking arising from it, which took hold in Soviet Culture beginning with Stalin. When Soviet citizens became guests at the Georgian table, a paradoxical inversion of guest-host relations occurred, so that the whole Soviet Union became, in effect, the guests of Georgian hosts. As Scott argues, it was precisely through making their own food, drink, and attendant rituals of hospitality central to Soviet rule and Soviet life that Georgians moved from being metaphoric ethnic guests in a host society to hosts within the imperial capital itself.

“I Still Exist!”: Late Soviet Cinema Through the Prism of the Relational Sociology of Harrison White (Et Vice Versa)

The article is devoted to the popular Soviet cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, and examines the prevalent modes of the representation of social identity and social interaction in the culture of late socialism. The author selected the relational sociology of Harrison White as her theoretical framework. Attention is primarily paid to White‘s concept of identity. He associates identity with the seeking of control, and attaches a crucial meaning to the process of switching between different “netdoms”; in the process; an interiorization of the “social noise” (contradictory, inconsistent, and without corresponding social roles and images of social reality) is inescapable. Based on White’s theory, the author of the article concludes that such a process was extremely hindered in the conditions of a totalitarian society when an attempt of political monopolization of control was undertaken. The Stalin-era official narrative implied the elimination of any “social noises”, that is, any contradictions between the various domains of Soviet life and the adjusted anthropology of Soviet man, who is obliged to be absolutely identical to himself (and to the normative prescriptions) in different contexts. At the same time, the destruction of the horizontal ties and the increasing social atomization had a place in the pre-narrative levels the of social reality, so the mechanism of switching could not have been sufficiently operative as well. The article demonstrates that in post-totalitarian late Soviet cinema which arose after the dissolution of the canons of the Stalinist “Grand Style”, the forms of representation of social domains became substantially more complicated, but the mechanism of switching between them seems to be broken. This was reflected in the fact of the conglutination of different contexts of the social interaction (“formal” and “informal”, for example), the vagueness of the role and interpersonal boundaries peculiarly longing for the “authentic self”, and the regular escaping from the role interaction to the imaginary spaces of dream, reminiscences, etc.

Soviet Information Abroad: Working Peculiarities of TASS under the Iron Curtain

New tasks for the Soviet press were set by the humanization of the Soviet system and the fall of the iron curtain in the latter half of the 1950s. First, it concerned TASS as the primary source of information for the USSR papers and a loud hailer of the Soviet Union on the international scene. The agency began the reconstruction and strengthening of the news service targeted at the foreign reader. It was necessary not only to inform the western reader on the achievements of the USSR in various industries, but also to win its sympathy and to propagandize a life style of the Soviet person. Initially, the foreign media considered this information “red propaganda”. But since the 1960s such point of view began to change. The management of TASS addressed the western acceptances of a material feed. Then, they started to take this information and were ready to pay for it. Nevertheless, ideological implication and propaganda in news remained. It was required by the policy of the party, and journalists of the agency skillfully and unobtrusively incorporated this information into texts. At the same time, the TASS news feed was a certain tuning fork for the Soviet press. Journalists of TASS were a role model for the workers of the Soviet newspapers and at the same time sustained the competition to the western colleagues. They perfectly coped with an application task and created the necessary image of the Soviet life in the foreign press. But they remained true to the principles of their profession. Together with obligatory information on plenums and achievements in hundreds newspapers they published stories about human dignity and lively moments in life of the Soviet people. So, TASS created a positive image of the country abroad.

From All Sides: Interdisciplinary Knowledge, Scientific Collaboration, and the Soviet Criminological Laboratories of the 1920s

The erosion of boundaries was a common motif in descriptions of Soviet life during the 1920s. It provided a powerful way of signifying the different rules in operation after the Bolshevik Revolution. Soviet criminal science was a microcosm of this larger change in thought and practice. Mikhail Nikolaevich Gernet, the jurist and criminologist, was particularly fond of using the imagery of prerevolutionary boundaries and their post-revolutionary destruction to describe developments in his field. Under the autocracy, he claimed, scientists were kept away from criminals and their site of containment—the prison. It was, Gernet noted with a degree of dark humor, rather easy to gain entry to a Tsarist prison cell as a political activist, but not as a researcher, who was met at the prison door with the sign: “Entrance to outsiders is strictly prohibited.” In sharp contrast, Soviet scientists were invited into the prisons and given direct access to the inmates. Gernet wrote: “The possibility for us to go right up to living criminals first appeared under Soviet power; until then, we only saw them in the courtroom and behind prison bars, and were not given the opportunity to get near them.”

ЖИЗНЕННЫЙ ОПЫТ ДАТЧАНКИ В СССР В КОНТЕКСТЕ СОВЕТСКО-ДАТСКИХ ОТНОШЕНИЙ 1920-1950-Х ГГ

This article deals with the transformation of a Danish woman’s perception of the Soviet life through the prism of her personal life experience. The study is based on the analysis of Sigrid Ulrikka Alma Aagaard’s letters addressed to her mother and younger sister from the Soviet Union, the memoirs of her sons and closest associates. All these materials were stored in the author’s personal archive and published for the fi rst time. The study reveals a close connection of the woman’s personal life with foreign political events, changes in the Soviet-Danish relations that directly infl uenced her fate and worldview. Particular attention is paid to the gradual alienation of the woman from her roots, the need to get used to the new reality and master the rules of the game dictated by the Soviet reality. Having understood the work of the Soviet system, she tried to comply fully with all its requirements. She turned from an idealist into a submissive performer of the will of the state. She was aware that she was always under surveillance, “hooked”, and at any time she could be put before a moral choice. Sigrid ceased to be a Dane, she no longer belonged to the world in which she had been born and grown up. What she had learned in thirty years of her life outside her homeland forever alienated her from her compatriots. At the same time, she found faithful friends in the Mordovian camp TEMLAG, where she was from 1937 to 1946, among the wives of appointees, who, like her, went through hardships, arrests and imprisonment.

STATE-MUSLIM RELATIONS IN USSR DURING 1944–1949

During the Great Patriotic War the relations between Soviet state bodies and Soviet Muslims went through considerable changes in the way to its liberalization. In 1944 were established the new bodies of control over confessions activities. Among them are the Council for the Aff airs of Religious Cults under Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, the Muslim Religious Board for Transcaucasia and the Muslim Religious Board for North Caucasus. The author analyzes archive papers and documents which were until the recent time unknown to the wide scientifi c community. At the example of such important events in Muslim life as attending mosques, releasing of prayer books and conducting rituals the author shows that for the short time the relations between state authorities and Soviet Muslims became better. The author analyzes numerous papers which indicate interference of Soviet authorities into activities of Muslims communities. Such interference from the one side contradicted to the basic concepts of Islam but from the other side it gave Muslims some chances to get adapted to a new reality of Soviet life and Soviet religious internal policy. Basing on the documents which include written fi xations of the talks and negotiations between the higher offi cials of the Soviet Union and the representatives of the state Council for the Aff airs of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Council for the Aff airs of Religious Cults, this research work brings to a conclusion that the confessions and religious communities in USSR had not perspectives for the even limited integration into the life of Soviet society.

VOKS, Cultural Diplomacy and the Shadow of the Lubianka: Olavi Paavolainen’s 1939 Visit to the Soviet Union

Existing scholarship suggests that Stalin’s Great Terror of 1936–8 seriously undermined Soviet cultural diplomacy and forced its main promoter, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), to succumb to the strict control of the party and secret police. By contrast, this article argues that by the spring and summer of 1939 VOKS was recovering from stagnation and reintroducing customs from before the Great Terror. Through a micro-historical analysis of Finnish writer Olavi Paavolainen’s exceptionally long visit to the Soviet Union between May and August 1939, the article demonstrates how case studies of select VOKS operations can explain many of the dilemmas and peculiarities of Soviet cultural diplomacy during the thus far scantily researched 1939–41 period. By focusing on the interactions between Paavolainen, the VOKS vice-chairman Grigori Kheifets and Soviet writers, the article illustrates that after the purges, VOKS continued its efforts to disseminate a positive and controlled image of Soviet life by complex means that linked propaganda with network-building. Finally, the article highlights the role of individuals in cultural diplomacy and explores how an outsider perceived the Great Terror’s effects on Soviet cultural intelligentsia.

Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities

Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities

The History of a PhD

The Commissariat of Enlightenment,1 published in 1970, was the expression of a new way of thinking about internal conflict in the Soviet Union. Sheila Fitzpatrick, its author, had studied the creation and development of the Narkompros – the Soviet Ministry of Education – under its first Commissar, Anatol Lunacharsky, and had done so using the state archives. Her book presented a challenge to the dominant approach of western sovietology, which argued that the Soviet system of government was monolithic, meaning that decisions were made at the top and were the result of internal party intrigue. Once a decision was made it was obeyed by the lower echelons, whether willingly or as a result of coercion. It followed that in the Soviet Union politics was primary, and that the analysis of any aspect of Soviet life should be an analysis of the relationships and policies of its leaders – kreminology. This was not a universal position. John Erickson, whose magisterial study of the Red Army, The Soviet High Command,2 was published (in its first volume) in 1962, emphasized the need to look for explanations other than party decisions. But most authorities concurred.

USSR IN REPORTS OF ITALIAN DIPLOMATS (1924-1941)

In this article the reports of Italian diplomatic officials who worked in the USSR between the two World Wars will be analyzed. On the basis of the unpublished sources, an attempt to explain Mussolini's decision to enter the war against the USSR in 1941 will be carried out. As a historical source, the diplomatic reports present, on one hand, rich material about different aspects of soviet life as seen by foreigners and presented by them with thorough details. On the other hand, the subjective character of the diplomatic information foresees a critical approach towards the judgements and opinions of Italian diplomats. However, despite the limitation of their sources from where the Italian diplomats obtained the information, we have to underline the importance of the diplomatic reports and to consider the diplomatic channel as one of the multiple factors in the determining process of the international fascist policy. The attention is focused on two aspects of soviet reality: public sentiment and the national mentality of Russian people. The goal of the article is to examine the mechanism that led to the diplomats' conclusions about the soviet power instability and about its imminent collapse in the case of foreign invasion.

Haslam, Jonathon Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence (review)

REVIEWS 361 Le Blanc takes Trotskii’s major works, and explains them to the reader, with no attempt at analysis or criticism. My Life is ‘an activist’s resource’ (p. 73); The History of the Russian Revolution is a ‘literary masterpiece’ constructed around the ‘conceptual framework of the theory of permanent revolution’ (p. 77); The RevolutionBetrayedillustrateshowtheSovietSectionoftheFourthInternational would lead the masses in the revolutionary overthrow of ‘the bureaucracy’ (p. 109). Le Blanc’s agitprop efforts become fantasy pure and simple when he writes: ‘In 1937 small groups of dissident communist heroes and heroines, the men and women of the Left Opposition, waged their final struggle against the bureaucratic and murderous authoritarianism of the Stalin regime in the USSR, and for the original ideas of the Russian Revolution of 1917’ (p. 117). The final two sentences say it all: ‘Long after his death, Trotsky’s passion and his ideas have continued to resonate. Whether they will again animate multitudes, reaching for a hopeful future, remains to be seen’ (p. 186). This is not a serious academic study, but a primer for the faithful. Central and East European Studies Geoffrey Swain University of Glasgow Haslam, Jonathon. Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2015. 366 pp. Map. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £20.00. Jonathon Haslam’s intention with this book is to condense our expanding knowledge of Soviet intelligence into a single accessible volume, which can also function as a window onto the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet system itself. This is an excellent idea, for Soviet intelligence has hitherto been a relatively obscure subject — in part, of course, because of the challenge of getting reliable sources on the theme. The remit of the volume is broader than the widely-acclaimed works on the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin. It aspires to cover all branches of intelligence: the KGB (civilian intelligence) and the GRU (military intelligence); human communications and cryptography; and foreign and counter-intelligence. As Haslam explains, this integrated approach is important for a number of reasons: much has been written on the KGB, but the GRU is less well-known; cryptography needs adequate attention, because the exaggerated emphasis on human intelligence in the Soviet Union was very costly for the regime; and counter-intelligence has been less studied because the relative paucity of defectors in this area has meant fewer memoirs to build upon. Haslam outlines the institutional history of the KGB and GRU in some detail, at the same time emphasizing their independence from one another and recurring rivalry; and in doing so he challenges any temptation we may have SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 362 to see Soviet intelligence as a single cohesive operation. Another important theme of his book is the way Stalin’s paranoia at times undermined the Soviet intelligence effort. The Terror took its toll on the intelligence community, as it did in other areas of Soviet life. Of course, Stalin’s most disastrous mistake was his decision not to heed warnings about the imminent Nazi invasion in 1941. But the regime’s failure to invest adequately in cryptography was also rooted in his misjudgements. Of course, this failure links the history of intelligence with the wider history of Soviet science; the USSR’s technological deficit in intelligence had its roots in the personalized nature of the system, just as did its failures in the spheres of genetics and agriculture. Other figures also come in for criticism alongside Stalin, including Beria — ‘the most disastrous head of intelligence the Soviet Union ever had’ — and Khrushchev’s first choice as head of the KGB, Ivan Serov — ‘a natural bully, but innately clever’. Haslam makes it clear that it is impossible to understand some of the key events in Soviet history without understanding the relevant intelligence history: for example, the Polish interception of Soviet signals was a vital factor in checking the Bolshevik advance on Warsaw in 1920; already in 1941 intelligence reports were reaching Moscow from the West on the emerging project to create an atomic bomb; the Soviet victory at the battle of Kursk owed much to the information passed to them by British...

Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Post-Socialism and Gendered Sexualities By Francesca Stella

Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Post-Socialism and Gendered Sexualities By Francesca Stella

A post-queer study of post socialism: Francesca Stella: Lesbian Lives in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

A post-queer study of post socialism: Francesca Stella: Lesbian Lives in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities, written by Francesca Stella

Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia: Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities, written by Francesca Stella

Ritzarev, Marina. Tchaikovsky's ‘Pathétique and Russian Culture (review)

REVIEWS 363 personified in Gan’s close association with the artists Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova. Lodder argues that Gan was a man of wide-ranging talents, and as such it is difficult to categorize him (p. xi). He edited two important journals, CinemaPhoto (Kino-Fot, 1922–23), and Contemporary Architecture (Sovremennaya arkhitektura — SA, 1926–30), which articulated Constructivist theory and practice in relation to film, photography and architecture. Gan also worked in theatre and film, designed some of the first kiosks embodying Constructivist principles, and developed the theory and practice of typography along Constructivist lines (p. ix). Lodder also explores Gan’s organizational and administrative involvement with the arts after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and amid the context of the emerging debates on Constructivism’s role in contemporary Soviet life. Her examination of the artistic and political setting profoundly enriches Gan’s text, making this publication a crucial resource for future scholarship on this important figure. Lodder’s knowledge of Gan’s career and reputation, her mastery of the complex historical and theoretical debates of the time and her ability to analyse diverse cultural positions in an integrated manner is impressive. In her account of Gan’s career, Lodder interweaves discussion of both contemporary theory and art-historical debates of the 1920s with close reading of a wide range of primary sources. This volume is an important contribution to the growing literature on Russian Constructivism, and will become essential reading for scholars and students of Russian cultural history and politics of the twentieth century. Rutgers University Alla Rosenfeld Ritzarev, Marina. Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathétique’ and Russian Culture. Ashgate, Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2014. xiv + 169 pp. Music examples. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £60.00. Ever since Rimskii-Korsakov first pressed Chaikovskii for details of the programme he claimed to have heard in the Sixth Symphony on the occasion of its premiere on 16 October 1893, critics have expended a great deal of effort and not a little imagination in trying to uncover the hidden narrative of the Pathétique. They are justified, of course, by Chaikovskii’s claim, made in a letter to his nephew, Bob Davydov, that the idea behind the work ‘will remain a riddle for everybody’ (p. 1), as well as by his early intention to call the new work a ‘programme symphony’. Marina Ritzarev’s new interpretation of the symphony is just the latest attempt at solving the riddle and in many ways, SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 364 it is an auspicious project. Ritzarev is a well-respected historian of Russian music, with a strong command of sources and a feeling for cultural semiotics (her principle area of expertise has been the eighteenth century). With her insider’s knowledge of the field, she is hardly likely to make the errors of interpretation that so mar the writings of certain Western scholars, such as Timothy L. Jackson’s now infamous Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) (Cambridge, 1999). Blessedly, Ritzarev dispenses with the disreputable notion that the symphony was a requiem for the composer himself, a musical suicide note written as he faced a scandal over an alleged affair with a young man with high connections. Rather, she argues that the work is an ‘artistic reflection of the Passion in symphonic form’ (p. 47). Superficially, Ritzarev’s intuition has much to recommend it and she adduces a considerable body of evidence relating to the question of the composer’s religious faith (or lack thereof). She makes interesting parallels with the writings of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, as well as with the prominent depiction of religious themes in the visual arts at the time (although it must be said that Chaikovskii’s feeling for painting was rather limited, at least in comparison to his literary sensibility). She even assays an etymological interpretation of the symphony based on the fact that the Greek word pathos and the Latin one passionis may both allude to Christ’s suffering, as well as to human emotion, as in the interplay between the Russian words strasti and stradaniia (p. 156). That fact is, however, that the symphony’s subtitle was proposed by Chaikovskii’s brother, Modest, and not by the composer...

Korostoleva, Elena. The European Union and its Eastern Neighbours: Towards a More Ambitious Partnership? (review)

REVIEWS 391 Another strength of the book is that the oral history interviews allows Cohen to critically assess the relationship between wartime experiences and official post-war memory politics. As Cohen finds, the chaotic and painful realities of life and survival under occupation were not accounted for in the official memory of the post-war years. Perhaps for that reason, the war myth, despite sustained official efforts to institute it, seems to have exerted limited power over the minds of Cohen’s interviewees. The book’s main weakness is the lack of clear, guiding research questions. For instance, we learn that the main thesis of chapter seven (‘Propaganda and Persuasion’) is that ‘all the ‘rational’ or ‘logistical’ energies, resources, and time that went into persuading civilians by word (written or oral) or illustration (poster or motion picture) probably had less of a long-term influence or footprint than the overall emotions that the enduring occupation evoked’ (p. 149). Such vague and convoluted research questions are hardly answerable, and as a result too much of the book reads like a report on the author’s sources. While the sources are often interesting in and of themselves, better research questions would have focused the narrative and added to the book’s argumentative value. While the source base in general appears adequate, it is somewhat curious that the author has not consulted archival holdings in Germany. The reason for the omission is not clear. Not least with regard to popular attitudes and propaganda, military records held in Freiburg could have offered much valuable information. The above objections notwithstanding, Smolensk under the Nazis remains a fascinating account of everyday Soviet life under German rule in Russia which adds substantially to our knowledge of the period. It deserves to be read by scholars and others interested in the Great Patriotic War in general and everyday life under occupation in particular. Norwegian Defence Research Establishment Johannes Due Enstad Korostoleva, Elena. The European Union and its Eastern Neighbours: Towards a More Ambitious Partnership? BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies, 78. Routledge, London and New York, 2012. xix + 188 pp. Map. Figure. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £85.00. Elena Korostolova’s book aims to contribute to scholarly — and policy — debate in two main areas, both of which are well covered in the literature and sound familiar. First, as the title indicates, to explore the nature and difficulties of the EU’s policy towards the eastern neighbourhood, focusing on the EU’s core instruments of engagement — the European Neighbourhood Policy SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 392 (ENP) and its offspring Eastern Partnership (EaP). Second, to draw from this some conclusions about the effectiveness of the EU as an external actor and the familiar discourse of the EU as a ‘transformative power’. Published in 2012, the study is based on field research carried out between 2008 and 2011 in four countries — Belarus, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine. Data was collected via multiple methods including national surveys, focus group discussions, interviews (over 100) and school essays. Thus a key quality and distinct feature is the originality of the underpinning research that provides insights into: the extent to which the wider population in those four countries are informed about the EU and the level of interest in it; how citizens of various ages and backgrounds view the EU itself, the merits of the EU’s policy towards and relations with their country and their country’s policy towards and engagement with the EU. There are seven chapters including the introduction and conclusions. The introduction provides an extremely useful overview of the evolution of the ENP/EaP, highlighting the interventions and competing preferences of actors and institutions within the EU and also reflects on the scholarly literature. Chapters one and two cover the concepts of partnership and the primacy of governance in EU policy respectively. Chapters three, four and five are the country case studies. The contradiction between, and consequences of, the EU’s rhetoric of partnership and the reality of the EU’s actual approach is the central theme. The study emphasizes the EU’s de facto adherence to its longstanding practice of conditionality-based transfer of rules and legislation — that...