The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia

The Things of Life is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regime to transform them into a rationally organized, disciplined, and easily controllable community. Golubev argues that late Soviet materiality had an immense impact on the organization of the Soviet historical and spatial imagination. His approach also makes clear the ways in which the Soviet self was an integral part of the global experience of modernity rather than simply an outcome of Communist propaganda. Through its focus on materiality and personhood, The Things of Life expands our understanding of what made Soviet people and society "Soviet."

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Elemental Materialism in Soviet Culture and Society 1. Techno-Utopian Visions of Soviet Intellectuals after Stalin 2. Time in 1:72 Scale: The Plastic Historicity of Soviet Models 3. History in Wood: The Search for Historical Authenticity in North Russia 4. When Spaces of Transit Fail Their Designers: Social Antagonisms of Soviet Stairwells and Streets 5. The Men of Steel: Repairing and Empowering Soviet Bodies with Iron 6. Ordinary and Paranormal: The Soviet Television Set Conclusions: Soviet Objects and Socialist Modernity

About the Author :
Alexey Golubev is Assistant Professor of Russian History and Digital Humanities at the University of Houston. He is coauthor of The Search for a Socialist El Dorado.

Review :
Golubev (Univ. of Houston) has produced a provocative work on materiality in the late Soviet period. The study analyzes the role of material objects and spaces in the development of gender roles, social structures, and the socialist ideal in the last decades of the Soviet Union. (Choice) Golubev's book contributes to a more nuanced understanding of late-Soviet everyday life. [T]his analytical intervention makes Golubev's book a valuable resource for anthropologists working with materialities and their interfaces with selves and bodies. (Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford) The Things of Life is provocative, tantalizing and stimulating, and it fully achieves its aim of showing the importance and creative potential of centring the material at the heart of human experience. (Slavonic and East European Review) [A] highly readable text and an ideal integration of theory, empiricism, and narrative. This book lends itself well to teaching and is a welcome addition to our knowledge of late Soviet society, thoroughly researched and theorized, yet accessibly written in a lively tone. (The Russian Review) Golubev's book stands in a rich tradition of investigating the social agency of things and the entanglements between humans and objects in Soviet Russia and other European socialist countries. Golubev's book is certainly a welcome addition to the academic literature on (post)soviet materiality. (Technology and Culture) The Things of Life is an important book and a substantial contribution to the social and cultural history of the USSR, the history of Soviet materiality, and material culture in general. Although it is rather short, the book covers a lot of ground and offers important theoretical insights. It should stimulate scholars to continue the exploration of socialist material culture and other interstices of the Soviet individual and collective experience. (Ab Imperio)