Women’s Autobiographical Narratives: Soviet Presentations of Self

In Eva Hoffman's moving memoir of her emigration from Poland to North America, she describes the constructed nature of memory in reference to another earlier Jewish emigrant: "The America of her time gave her certain categories within which to see herself – a belief in self-improvement, in perfectibility of the species, in moral uplift – and these categories led her to foreground certain parts of her own experience, and to throw whole chunks of it into the barely visible background."¹ These three excellent edited collections of Soviet women's life stories show that the same was clearly true, in different, but even more exaggerated ways, in Soviet Russia. The collections are part of a recent outpouring of memory from the former Soviet Union in the form of autobiography, published diaries, and oral interviews.² This outpouring stems in part from the post-Soviet opening of Russia and the release of previously private material, as well as from the possibility of asking questions about topics and of people previously closed to us. The focus on women's memoirs accords with this "opening," as the private lives of women have been generally less accessible to our eyes and our understanding than the more public lives of (some) men.³ As the citation from Eva Hoffman suggests, however, using life stories as sources for historical understanding prompts questions as well as suggesting new answers. Some of these questions relate to the life stories themselves, others to the meaning ascribed to these life stories by historians and literary scholars. What were the "categories" within which Soviet women saw themselves? What was the relationship between women, the Soviet experience, and women's own sense of self as described in these life stories? Was women's sense of self a gendered sense? Secondly, how do we use these life stories? How do we compare and evaluate the meaning, or even the "truth," of works written for official purposes, diaries written for the desk drawer, comments made around the kitchen table, and interviews done 40 years later? Are they best understood as narratives or are they also repositories of experience? Can we generalize about women's selfhood in Soviet Russia on the basis of these individual accounts?

In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, contains the widest variety of source materials from the widest variety of women – émigrés writing from Paris, dissidents writing in the 1960s, Soviet heroines writing their autobiographies for newspapers, and peasant women telling their life stories in oral interviews. Although the book extends from 1917 to the eve of World War II, the collection is organized around key historical periods – the Revolution and Civil War, NEP, and the 1930s – and there are only a few women whose stories cover the entire period. In contrast, A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History contains the life stories of only eight women, again of varied backgrounds (working class, peasant, the daughters of nobles and of parish priests), but we hear about each life experience from the Revolution through the early 1950s. These narratives come to us through interviews conducted by Anastasia Posadskaya in the post-Soviet period, and then selected, edited, and annotated by Posadskaya and Barbara Alpern Engel. The editors of A Revolution of Their Own write that they looked for "ordinary" women to interview; they "did not actively seek out stories either of...