The last two decades have witnessed a surge in scholarship on Soviet material culture, as historians have revisited the former empire's built environment from fresh vantage points. Scholarly attention has generally concentrated on the creation of buildings, urban spaces, and objects from the 1920s through the 1960s as part of a broader reconsideration of communist futures past, as evidenced in the spate of studies on monuments, city planning, housing, and cultural institutions. In recent years the scope of inquiry has widened beyond documenting the shock of the new, with growing interest paid to the more quotidian aspects of Soviet modernity.
Alexey Golubev's innovative new book on material life in late Soviet Russia reflects this new development. In it he pursues the ways in which these bold dreams of radical reconstruction were materialized, miniaturized, and literally domesticated for and by ordinary citizens. In The Things of Life, Golubev casts his net widely in reinterpreting common material forms of everyday life from the Nikita Khrushchev era through the fall of the regime. He is good on the faith and frustration of Soviet planners (ranging from designers to bureaucrats) who believed that the material environment determined consciousness and would help create new enlightened Soviet citizens, often maintaining an “animist” ideological attitude toward the power of everyday “materiality” to reshape social life to their liking. Golubev moves beyond the world of intention and ideals to explore how the production of Soviet spaces and objects created “hybrid social creatures” who managed to fashion their own lives and habitus beyond the norms of proper Soviet citizenship.
These Soviet spaces and things were inherently heterogeneous and multi-layered, and pointed to the imaginative creativity of ordinary Russian people who used them. In particular, he is interested in in-between social spaces, such as hallways, stairways, and basements, revealing how people (especially teenagers) inhabited, co-opted and repurposed available domestic spaces for their own ends. One example was the boom in male bodybuilding in the 1980s, which usually took place surreptitiously in residential block basements, serving as a “grey zone” of sport in that it was seen as defying socialist models of youth (bodybuilders were accused of being self-obsessed and uninterested in collective life). Notable too is how television recast Russian domestic space and behavior in the late 1980s, best seen with the huge popularity of televised paranormal healing séances and the advent of fitness shows that converted living rooms into home exercise centers.
No less interesting is Golubev's analysis of how the Soviet material forms often carried with them multiple visions of history. One chapter takes up the popularity of do-it-yourself scale-model kits and magazines, in which hobbyists, amateur engineers, and teenage enthusiasts lovingly built miniature models of Soviet bomber planes, ships, battle tanks, and the sundry hardware of Russian military might. The manufacturers traded on pre-Soviet histories of Russian material power, as this DIY scale-model hobby culture—despite official ideology to the contrary—openly peddled nation over class, even rebranding foreign models (such as RAF fighter planes) as part of the “plastic historicity” of popular patriotism. Golubev also notes the importance of historical preservation as a social practice, addressing the campaign from the 1960s onward to restore traditional wooden architecture in Karelia and Kizhi Pogost in northern Russia, including churches and regional fishing boats. This was all part of Khrushchev Era reforms (driven by Aleksandr Opolovnikov) to preserve material heritage as cultural patrimony to help connect past and present in the Soviet historical imagination—yet it did open up a different cultural consciousness based on an alternative people's history of the region.
That said, there are points that might have been explored in more depth. At various points Golubev touches on how western objects and practices exerted a key if awkward influence, be it in body-building, punk, and Jane Fonda-inspired aerobics workouts, but it would have been useful to hear more on this theme. The conclusion touches on the need to put this Soviet material history in a wider “landscape of modernity,” though this comparative aspect is never developed. This is a pity, not least because many of the examples he describes found expression in communist societies across eastern Europe and Asia. In any case, Golubev has written a fresh and suggestive account of overlooked aspects of Russian “late socialism” that will be of substantial value to historians of Modern Europe and late twentieth century material culture more generally.
