The Unmaking Of Soviet Life

In order to understand today's Russia and former Soviet republics, it is vital to consider their socialist past. Caroline Humphrey, one of anthropology's most highly regarded thinkers on a number of topics including consumption, identity, and ritual, is the ideal guide to the intricacies of post-Soviet culture. The Unmaking of Soviet Life brings together ten of Humphrey's best essays, which cover, geographically, Central Russia, Siberia, and Mongolia; and thematically, the politics of locality, property, and persons.Bridging the strongest of Humphrey's work from 1991 to 2001, the essays do a great deal to demystify the sensational topics of mafia, barter, bribery, and the new shamanism by locating them in the lived experiences of a wide range of subjects. The Unmaking of Soviet Life includes a foreword and introductory paragraphs by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries that precede each essay.

Drawing on diaries, correspondence, interviews and memoirs, and applying historical, anthropological and linguistic analyses, this text explores late Soviet period (1960s-80s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

A detailed academic treatise of the history of nationality in Tatarstan. The book demonstrates how state collapse and national revival influenced the divergence of worldviews among ex-Soviet people in Tatarstan, where a political movement for sovereignty (1986-2000) had significant social effects, most saliently, by increasing the domains where people speak the Tatar language and circulating ideas associated with Tatar culture. Also addresses the question of how Russian Muslims experience quotidian life in the post-Soviet period. The only book-length ethnography in English on Tatars, Russia’s second most populous nation, and also the largest Muslim community in the Federation, offers a major contribution to our understanding of how and why nations form and how and why they matter – and the limits of their influence, in the Tatar case.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians have seen the ruble steadily lose ground to alternative means of payment such as barter and privately issued quasi-monies. Industry now collects as much as 70 percent of its receipts in nonmonetary form, leaving many firms with too little cash to pay salaries and taxes. In this ground-breaking book on the Russian economy, David Woodruff argues that Moscow's inability to control the nation's currency is not a carry-over from the Soviet past. Rather, the Russian government has failed to build the administrative capacity and political support demanded by monetary consolidation—a neglected but crucial aspect of capitalist statebuilding. Drawing on a vast array of empirical evidence, Woodruff shows how the widespread use of barter arose as local authorities tried to protect industry against the destructive effects of price increases and crude tax and accounting systems. As businesses fled or were driven from the money economy, provincial governments invented new ways to tax in kind and issued substitutes for the ruble. In turn, the federal authorities, unable to coerce firms either to operate in the money economy or to abandon business altogether, were forced to make accommodations to barter and to ruble alternatives. Woodruff describes the enormous fiscal difficulties that resulted and recounts the intense political battles over attempts to address the problem. Through an overview of monetary consolidation in other nations, Woodruff demonstrates that the struggles of the new Russian state have much to teach us about the political history of money worldwide. Sovereignty over money cannot, he argues, be imposed by government on a recalcitrant society. Nor can it be assumed as a by-product of disciplined policies aimed at market reform. Monetary consolidation is, at heart, a political achievement requiring political support.

Boym provides a view of Russia that is historically informed, replete with unexpected detail, and stamped with authority. Alternating analysis with personal accounts of Russian life, she conveys the foreignness of Russia and examines its peculiar conceptions of private life and common good, of Culture and Trash, of sincerity and banality.

The sudden dissolution of the Soviet Union altered the routines, norms, celebrations, and shared understandings that had shaped the lives of Russians for generations. It also meant an end to the state-sponsored, nonmonetary support that most residents had lived with all their lives. How did Russians make sense of these historic transformations? Serguei Alex. Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in Russia. In Barnaul, a major industrial city in southwestern Siberia that has lost 25 percent of its population since 1991, many Russians are finding that what binds them together is loss and despair. The Patriotism of Despair examines the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, graphically described in spray paint by a graffiti artist in Barnaul: "We have no Motherland." Once socialism disappeared as a way of understanding the world, what replaced it in people's minds? Once socialism stopped orienting politics and economics, how did capitalism insinuate itself into routine practices? Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in noncosmopolitan Russia. He introduces readers to the "neocoms": people who mourn the loss of the Soviet economy and the remonetization of transactions that had not involved the exchange of cash during the Soviet era. Moving from economics into military conflict and personal loss, Oushakine also describes the ways in which veterans of the Chechen war and mothers of soldiers who died there have connected their immediate experiences with the country's historical disruptions. The country, the nation, and traumatized individuals, Oushakine finds, are united by their vocabulary of shared pain.