Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

Alexei Yurchak. Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. In-formation Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. x, 331 pp. Halftones. Illustrations. Tables. $59.50, cloth. $24.95, paper.Reacting against the system/anti-system binarism that characterizes so many analyses of the late Soviet period, Alexei Yurchak casts the last Soviet generation in quite a different light. He confronts a paradox-that although young people were caught off-guard by the collapse of the USSR, as soon as it occurred realized that they had been prepared for that unexpected change-by arguing that the processes of everyday life that reproduced the Soviet system and those that resulted in its continuous internal displacement were mutually constitutive. No mask/reality; public/private; falsehood/truth dichotomy here. Instead, each of the book's chapters explores different, seemingly contradictory or nonconformist lifestyles and shows that these were enabled by the very laws and structures that they seemed to defy, but did not. Komsomol organizers performed their jobs wholeheartedly while distinguishing between tasks that were "pure formality" and "work with meaning." At the same time they blended love of Western heavy metal with their deep belief" in socialist values and often organized amateur rock bands to play at Komsomol events (Chapters 3 and 6). Based on letters, diaries, documents and retrospective interviews, Yurchak makes a convincing case that those involved in the youth wing of the Communist Party developed future-oriented notions of a good, interesting and "normal" life that included cacophonous electric music, jeans, and other products of the real or imaginary West (Chapter 5), along with socialist state welfare practices and a broader Marxist-Leninist vision.At the same time, other less conforming or less ambitious young people simply found the Komsomol and politics in general "uninteresting." Yurchak devotes Chapter 4 to how they formed deterritorialized communities and lived vnye-simultaneously inside and outside of the system-holding down jobs or pursuing studies that gave them both a wage, or stipend, and an opportunity to follow their decidedly apolitical interests. Living vny,; the amateur rock scene, those boiler-room attendants, guards and doormen who abjured careerism to focus almost exclusively on obshchenie (an intense form of socializing), and various kinds of pranksters, were, as Chapters 4, 6 and 7 show, agentive and creative choices but not resistance against the Communist Party or the state. In fact, Yurchak argues that this wide array of ironic, unconventional lifestyles was enabled by an entrenched paradox: "In the late Soviet context, when authoritative discourse became hypernormalized, its performative dimension grew in importance and its constative dimension became unanchored from concrete core meanings and increasingly open to new interpretations" (p. …

Everything Was Forever until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation

Caroline Humphrey. The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002. xviii, 265 pp. Map. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00, cloth. $18.95, paper.Caroline Humphrey has an established and well-deserved reputation as one of the leading anthropological specialists on the USSR and its successor states. This book is a collection often essays, all previously published (between 1991 and 2000) as either journal articles or chapters in edited collections, and introduced by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries. They focus on the diverse ways in which different groups in post-Soviet Russia and Mongolia have sought to cope, both physically (largely, but not exclusively, in an economic sense) and spiritually, with the legacies of the communist past and the often harsh realities of their divergent post-communist situations. While the various situations are often depressing, Humphrey looks for signs of innovation and renovation, and can usually find them in unexpected places.One theme permeating much of the book is that most citizens have been living in a "state of radical uncertainty" and insecurity since 1991. Another is that the political and the economic continue to be too closely intertwined in the post-Soviet world, which helps to explain popular mistrust of the state. A third is that Russia and Mongolia are in many ways still societies in which conceptions of property are fluid and hazy, and in which there continues to be greater commitment to the notion of the collective than is typical in many Western (especially predominantly Protestant) societies.Part One is titled "The Politics of Locality in an Unstable State." It deals primarily with how people cope in a time of breakdown and near-chaos by attempting to create "localities," their own identifiable and manageable spaces. This assumes highly diverse forms, including even identifying goods as insider (ours) and outsider (from somewhere else). Unfortunately, it also often involves exclusion of other people, not just goods, as dislocated groups and individuals seek to bring greater stability into their lives through the construction of identifiable boundaries. Some of the analysis of provincial and village Russia resonates well with Richard Rose's arguments concerning pre-modernity in post-communist Russia.My own research interests in corruption and organized crime meant that Part Two-"Strategies Beyond the Law"-was the most interesting for this reviewer. It examines the ways in which some people have sought to cope by exploiting confusion and desperate need, or by learning ways to make the authorities more manageable and human through bribery, which can soften otherwise hard boundaries. …

The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism

Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia

Although since de-Stalinization in the 1950s, Soviet citizens have witnessed a noticeable influx of elements of western culture in their lives, their imagination of the living standards in the continuum of countries situated behind the western border was based on a usually distorted understanding of certain values and images of that region. Such an imagination encouraged people to engage with practices that, non-existing or marginal in the west, came to be associated with an allegedly better life existent there. The material evidence of such a form of imagination was visible in simple everyday practices, like home decoration, listening to music, and procurement of clothing. Regular imitation of Western life, also known as practicing Imaginary West, defined some markers of a late Soviet generation’s identity. The analysis of such a cultural construct became crucial for the better understanding of identity processes in the Soviet and then post-Soviet region. Scholars, who analysed how the space of ...

Oleksandra Seliverstova

Papers

Keeping alive the “Imaginary West” in post-Soviet countries