On Living through Soviet Russia ed. by Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson, Anna Rotkirch (review)

436 Рецензии/Reviews Elke FEIN Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson, Anna Rotkirch (Eds.), On Living through Soviet Russia (Routledge Studies in Memory & History, Vol. 13) (London and New York: Routledge , 2004). 336 pp. Bibliography, Index. ISBN: 0-415-30966-2. In this volume the editors – social scientists from the universities of Paris (EHESS), Essex and Helsinki – present a collection of interview-based articles about life in the Soviet Union. Drawing on a stock of impressive interview material focusing mainly on the experience of Stalinism, the volume contains contributions from ten scholars from France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the US, Finland, and Russia. The most important of the interview projects, which gathered both individual in-depth life-story interviews and family case-history interviews, were carried out from the beginning of the 1990s, i.e. at a time when Soviet society began to open up and re-examine the previously orthodox official views about history , in the process lifting long-kept family secrets and reconsidering their meanings. A list and description of these projects is given in the epilogue, along with the data they contain and their places of storage. All of the chapters are fairly well structured and of high analytical quality, and each of them highlights a particular aspect of everyday life under Soviet socialism. The topics explored comprise family relations, living and working conditions, experiences of freedom and repression, and the role of religion in everyday life, as well as sex and gender issues . These are investigated by the authors mainly through qualitative case studies of one or several individual or family cases. By shifting their focus toward the perspective of the individual, they aim at portraying the complex relations between the Soviet regime and its citizens and thereby at elaborating a “more qualified” and differentiated view of totalitarianism and the Soviet experience (P. 71), as well as at uncovering the “actual hidden rules of Soviet society – hidden not only to foreigners, but to Soviet citizens too” (P. 5). Without claiming to deliver a complete or fully representative picture, the pieces nevertheless provide interesting insights into such problems as changing social structures, the strategies of adaptation of various social groups to the totalitarian regime, the credibility of the Soviet leadership, and the internalization of Soviet values. In this respect, one of the central claims of several of the volume’s chapters is that Soviet society was characterized by a “dual structure” – in the sense that the official ideology had 437 Ab Imperio, 4/2005 a rather limited grasp on people’s minds. This is shown by Victoria Semenova and Paul Thompson in their discussion of the widespread practice of creating double identities and concealing certain secrets about one’s identity even from own family members, by Irina Korovushkina Paert with regard to the religious practices of the Old Believers, and by Ekaterina Foteeva with respect to the value systems of formerly wellto -do Russian families. Korovushkina Paert, who introduces herself as a grandchild of Old Believers, analyzes their religious coping strategies in the Urals during the 1930-50s with respect to the atheist policies of the regime. She portrays the Old Believers as faithful and loyal practitioners of their beliefs who managed to find ways to bypass official restrictions and evade sanctions by elaborating skilled “spiritual survival techniques” for their communities. Moreover, the author claims that “the use of violence by the authorities undermined the moral basis of their power” (P. 200) while giving the believers themselves a feeling of moral superiority. In her article about the experiences of well-to-do Russian families in coping with the revolution, Foteeva presents the members of the pre-revolutionary social and intellectual elite not primarily as victims of repression, but looks at them as active agents of their own destinies. Even though they were forced to behave like everybody else, to “become invisible in a crowd and thus remain unnoticed by the regime” (P. 78), they tried everything to obtain higher education and to preserve and transmit their cultural capital to their children. An analogous claim is made by Daniel Bertaux and Marina Malysheva concerning what they call the “moral economy” of the Russian popular classes. They argue that not only their...