Crowley, David, and Susan E. Reid (eds). Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc

Crowley, David, and Susan E. Reid (eds). Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Berg, 2002).

Do spaces have politics? And do politics have spaces? Two question that editors take as the starting point of this volume. Aim to “bring new perspectives to bear on the formation, uses and representations of space in Soviet-type societies.” (4) Suggest that ideology populates sites of everyday life: “Everyday life was not opposed to ideological life. On the contrary, it was fundamental site of ideological intervention.” (7) Urban and domestic spaces alike become sites which the power aspires to populate with ideological meanings. Rewriting and rebuilding of old landscapes. “Domestic space was a particularly important site for ideological intervention, both at the level of design and production, and at the level of representations and efforts to share popular taste.” (11)

Underline that all these grand ideas of how changing material and spatial orientations would eventually produce a new subject worked on the level of discourse and representations. “It will come at no surprise that the research presented in this volume finds little evidence that the spatial project of socialism succeeded in making utopia a reality” (15)

Karl Qualls, “Accommodation and Agitation in Sevastopol”: how the post-war urban space was reconstructed as a result of negotiation between centralized ideas to emphasize “socialist” façade of the city and local desire to emphasize its imperial and Soviet naval past. Olga Sezneva, “Problems of Identity in Kaliningrad”: evaluates socialist reconstruction of Kaliningrad from her position of a late Soviet teenager who had nostalgia for another past. Hence her emphasis on facelessness of this reconstruction, as well as on local people’s desire to emphasize the German origins of the city. In reality, it looks more like it was a desire of intellectuals (like Sezneva).

Astrid Ihle, “Photography of Arno Fischer and Ursula Arnold” – two projects which focused on everyday life in Berlin before its division and in Leipzig. Compares them to Braudelian flaneur. Wants to interpret their photography as an experience in male gaze evaluating the fabric of the socialist everyday. Stephen Lovell in “Soviet Exurbia; Dachas in postwar Russia” wants to explore practice of dacha ownership (emphasizing: not discourses). Discusses how “general” social attitude to dachas was changing (building of houses, seeking of privacy, growing of vegetables); affectivity of dacha. It’s curious that he doesn’t discuss what it enabled Soviet people to objectify. Dacha can be, actually, a brilliant example of an (alternative) Soviet world in a miniature. Concludes by a claim that dachas can be interpreted not only as a rediscovery of private life, but also as “collective farms for underprovisioned urbanites, as open-air communal flats.” Hence speaks of “private publicness” of dachas.

Susan Reid, “Khrushchev’s Children’s Paradise: The Pioneer Palace, Moscow, 1958-1962” describes an attempt of de-Stalinization of Moscow’s urban landscape by building a pioneer palace next to one of Stalin’s skyscrapers, the main building of Moscow State University. An example of new modernism and new forms of self-realization of young soviet citizens. Interesting, although part of her discussion about “secluded space” seems too far-fetched.