Social Deviants, Urban Myths, and the Socialist Everyday

Historians have recently been paying more attention to the margins. This is partly the long-term germination of seeds sown by the emergence of such approaches as microhistory, gender history, and Alltagsgeschichte. But it is also a reflection of the contemporary cultural and political climate: many of our own societies are paying more attention to those who once were, or still remain, on their margins.

Scholarship on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is reflecting this broader trend. To their interrogations of Communist Party politics and the Cold War, examinations of the Terror and de-Stalinization, studies of the command economy and social transformations, and portraits of core social groups and main political actors, historians have begun to add fascinating studies dealing with the seemingly less central aspects of the socialist project. Taking our eyes off the thematic and geographic center has already produced rich insights. Recent investigations of youth subcultures, religious minorities, and gay men and women have added new dimensions to our image of socialist societies.¹ Excellent works on the Soviet empire’s geographical margins have advanced our understanding of how central policies shaped and, importantly, were shaped by its peripheries.²

A focus on the margins and marginality unites the four books under review. Maria Cristina Galmarini-Kabala’s monograph examines the state’s changing relationship with those who were pushed out of the Soviet body economic by Lenin’s famous dictum “he who does not work, shall not eat.” Aleksandra Arkhipova and Anna Kirziuk’s Dangerous Soviet Things analyzes Soviet urban myths, a subject that seems so marginal and unimportant to traditional scholarship that one Russian colleague questioned the authors’ interest in such a trivial matter during a conference (5). Nataliia Lebina’s Passengers on a Sausage Train brings together short essays on everyday objects and practices, many of which (enter potato chips) also seem to be of strikingly peripheral importance to the grander problems of socialism. The problem of margins, albeit posed in a very different way and in regards to Eastern Europe, forms the central preoccupation of the fourth book, The Socialist Good Life, whose editors contest the idea of socialist Eastern Europe being on the margins of Western modernity.

How much can these works on phenomena, groups, or perceptions of marginality add to our already significant understanding of the socialist project? As it turns out, a great deal.

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The Right to Be Helped is a meticulously researched and compassionately written study of social assistance offered to four categories of citizens whom the state considered a deviation from the norm: single unemployed mothers, behaviorally problematic youth, and deaf and blind adults. Drawing on a wealth of archival and published material from Moscow, Perḿ, and Omsk, Galmarini-Kabala traces the changing approach to social assistance during 1917–53 and considers the efforts of these marginalized citizens to define and defend their right to state assistance.

This examination makes it clear that marginal groups were quite central to the identity of the Soviet project from its very inception. With its own existence still far from assured, the fledging socialist state promised to save all those who had been cast out by the tsarist regime from a life of economic misery and social exclusion. Rationally organized and reliable social assistance distinguished Soviet socialism from...