The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia by Alexey Golubev (review)

In the vibrant field of research on socialist material culture, late socialism has been understudied compared to the early Soviet period. When explored, material everyday life in the 1960s–1980s has mostly been approached through the lens of architecture, mass housing, and consumption. It is only very recently that objects and design of the late Soviet era have aroused the interest of scholars, such as Yulia Karpova and Tom Cubbin, but also that of curators and artists.¹ Alexey Golubev's The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia is thus a timely contribution to this emerging trend. Original and exciting, it illuminates the entanglement of materiality, agency, and selfhood. Golubev has already extensively published on a large range of things: illustrated magazines, do-it-yourself culture, wooden architecture, and affective machines – to name just a few. Some of his earlier articles have been revised and included in the book as the core of chapters 2 and 3. So the book reflects a decade of Golubev's scholarship, summarizing his main findings.

Golubev takes his readers on an intellectual journey through Soviet everyday life, in private and public places, inside and outside the domestic environment. This journey is arranged into six chapters, each based on a case study. Outlining the spatial and social margins and liminalities and focusing on the resistance and stubbornness of the Soviet material environment, the author explicates the unintended and unexpected effects of the relationship between things and people, and emphasizes the contradictions, dysfunctions, and failures of the Soviet system. More important, Golubev uses materiality as a way to make visible the people who otherwise seem to have left no trace in the archives and are absent from the dominant narratives, telling their stories through the tangibility and visibility of the objects and spaces they interacted with. He thus writes a history of the temporal and spatial experience of Soviet people.

As the book's title suggests by its subtle reference to Arjun Appadurai The Social Life of Things,² Golubev's approach follows the dominant trend of the so-called material turn. His understanding of materiality is broad, covering objects and spaces, but also human bodies, minds, and images. Golubev focuses on the relationship between the material and the social, on human–thing interactions, while also writing the "social biographies of things" and discussing their "agency."³ To Golubev, things have a social or historical agency, which he also calls "power" (P. 11). In his scheme of things, the material world "produces social effects" (P. 165) by influencing people, both individually and collectively, structuring their interactions with the environment, with each other, and with themselves. In other words, the material world "structure(s) the social" (P. 2).

Applied to the Soviet context, these conceptual perspectives are particularly fruitful because, Golubev recalls, of the "elemental materialism" (Friedrich Engels) of Soviet culture, even in the last years of the USSR. Following the recent studies of consumption and commodities, Golubev does not consider Soviet society as one of only scarcity and shortage, but as a society where materiality was omnipresent.⁴ Moreover, Golubev convincingly demonstrates, theoretically and historically, the existence of a Soviet cultural "fantasy" (Pp. 33, 35, 159) of total control over the material world that led, among other things, to a practice of selfhood that was "object-centered" (P. 2).

Still, the central question of the book is even broader and more central to the field of Soviet studies: What made the Soviet people and society "Soviet"? Alongside this inquiry, three important aspects structure the author's reflection: the importance to the Soviet regime of exercising control over space and time; the complex imbrication of nationalist and Marxist – internationalist and class-based – discourses; and the Soviet "fetishization of historical continuity" (P. 87), as well as the striking continuity between lateand post-Soviet Russia. At the end of almost every chapter, Golubev refers to the present day to...