ACQI 1 – Boym, Svetlana Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in      Russia, 1994; Chapter Two  pp. 121-167 and Victor Buchli, 1997, ‘Khrushchev, Modernism and the fight against petit-bourgeois       consciousness in the Soviet home, (In Journal of Design History, vol. 10, no. 2)

Central quotation : « The communal apartment was the cornerstone of the now disappearing Soviet civilization. It was a specifically Soviet form of urban living, a memory of a never implemented utopian communist design, an institution of social control, and the breeding ground of police informants between the 1920 and the 1980 ».

Argument : Svetlana Boym presents how the communal apartment is at the center of Soviet cultural consciousness and how it changed through the « life-time » of the Soviet Union. She expresses how the communal apartment embedded the application in « real life » of socialist utopias. She presents the communal apartment in term of evolution through time and temathics but also through the lens of artistic works.

The communal apartment was framed by the socialist government and was supposed to represent and embed the socialist life, represent the community brought by the revolution. In practice it turns out to be a place of frustration even psychological, were neighbors were trying to avoid the communal experience in order to obtain a form of intimacy – through the partition of area with curtains from example. The communal apartment created a desire for private commodities that reflected in the soviet literature. A lot of people were alcoholic which can be related to the stillness of leaving and metaphoric stagnation.

For her the failure of the soviet union was not due to the poor economical situation of the country. In her opinion it is the clashes between the utopias which came with the socialist ideals and the actual reality that came out of it when putted into practice.

Experiential connection : In my opinion, the communal apartment existed because of economic crisis and lack of apartment, but this chapter gave me a new insight to it : the existence of « crowded » apartment as a political tool for the implementation of socialist culture.

In the beginning of this chapter she puts in parallel socialism and capitalism in the implementation of new utopia. Thinking about house as embedding the main ideology of the society, can be putted, in my opinion, in parallel with capitalist house where the commodities inside such as washing machine, dish washer, especially in the 1950’s when the acquisition of these commodities were a sign of individual work success.

Textual connection : « The discourse of byt reform relied upon byt reformist objectives of the first cultural revolution as the only remaining legitimating socialist discourse on the domestic realm in the wake of Stalin’s death and the dimanting of the cult of personality. »
Victor Buchli presented the ways regulation on household impacted the design inside the house on the long term. He presents how the Staline government was very controlling of the way houses were organized and were actually visiting the house of people to insure it was in accordance to the socialist advices. The purpose was to avoid the petit bourgeois consciousness.

The two authors present the way the laws impacted the way houses were install : the communal house is presented by Boym and Buchli presents the decoration that was imposed like the renewal of news paper at every bank holiday. Buchli was more interested in the mechanism of that, life the visit to particular, and the outcome on the long term, whereas Boym presented more the ontological implication of the house organisation mainly through the artistic vision of it. Both of those texts offer a very good insight of everyday life in Soviet Union through the analysis of household organisation and material proving the importance of such details in the cosmology of a society.

Implications : Understanding the links between house hold and ideology can allow to be more conscious of the impact of politics on our everyday life, which is the only way to resist it.

Also, for this particular topic, understanding communal apartment can allow to explain some pathology that exist or existed in Soviet Union like alcoholism as the author underlines.

ACQI 2 – From Russia with Blat: Can Informal Networks Help Modernize Russia?, Alena Ledeneva

Central Quotation : «  the oppressive nature of the communist regime, and its privilege-based way of distributing goods, introduces another twist in interpretation of the nature of blat practices: if blat corrupted the corrupt regime, can we refer to it as corruption? »

Argument : Ledeneva aim in this article is to show how blat influences, even today, Russian politics. She underlines the importance of not mistaking blat for corruption, explaining why it is different in nature and in fonction. That is why she does believe that blat can have, to some extent, a possitive impact on Russia’s developement.
Corruption is perceived as the use of public goods/money for ones own good. Blat is much more a system of exchange, based on reciprocity, which made me though about exchange gift based society like the Trobian Island and the Kula Ring. She recall Weber argument : it is the institutionalisation of patrimonial system that creates corruption. But her purpose is to recall that even in an institutionalise system, what we call corruption, might be more about personal relations and link of power.

She first presents where Blat comes from, how it was embeded in social life during the Soviet time, and how it explains both how the regime stayed in place, and how people survived in a regime of scarcicity. She explains that with the fall of the USSR, blat changed nature : it is not only good and service exchanged anymore, but also money which became important. The new informal practices that appeared after the fall of the soviet union, include money (for eg : tax evasion). It is explain by the shift in the hierarchy of needs.

The notion of service exchange and link of power between individuals are also Blat’s heritage. She mentions the importance of oral instruction much more that written instruction in russian governance. Justice desicions can also be oriented directly by the governement, but mainly through self-censorship. Finally, appointment represents was blat as become. In the public administration, having an appointment with someone high in the hierarchy means more than just facility to find a job, it has an hidden function. The capacity to have access to it, is the particularity of the middle class in Russia today.

Overall she argues that Blat which appears under the Soviet Union Regime, evolved after its collapse but more in term of nature that in term of fonction.

Question : How is Blat influencing politics in other countries that were part of the Soviet Union?

Experimental connection : I lived in Angola for four years as a teenager, and so, was confronted to some forms of « corruption » – for example, police man making you stop for any reason and not letting you go until you gave them some money, phenomenon that actually was more important before christmas. Eventhough it can not be reducted to that, Angola was alligned with the USSR, and was a geographic area of proxy war, it can be in some way considered as a post-socilaist country. Therefore, I am now wondering in what way « the corruption » I experienced could be considered as « blat ». I am thinking for exemple about how one social position in the entreprise my father was working for, influenced how fast one could get a visa, or how the fact that I was friend with the daughter of the airport chief, avoid us numerous queus everytime we were travelling.

Textual connection : « Unwritten rules exist in all societies but predominate (and even become indis- pensable) in conditions of overregulation and underenforcement of formal rules, and especially where formal rules and informal codes do not constitute coherent rules of the game. » In this second article, Ledeneva expose more the social mechanisms around informal networks such as Blat. Those two articles reasonate in the sens that one presents one particular informal network and its effect on the long term, whereas the other presents the mechanims created by the existance of informal networks in general. It allows to understand how Blat survived throughout the years. Everyone knew about it, but it was unspoken : an open secret that created smile. Those smiles are a social representation of the open secret that blat is.

Implications :  This anthropological approach to a phenomenon considered as a political issue – corruption – can help remoove some bad connotation to it and understand more the importance of such informal network for the fonctionnement of a country.

ACQI 3 Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 1999. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1999. pp. 24-29, 40-66, 71-83, 95-106, 109-114, 164-172, 175-178, 182-189, 190-217, 218-227. and Fitzpatrick, Sheila., (1996) Stalin’s peasants : resistance and survival in the Russian village after collectivization Oxford Univ. Press

Central quotation : « The threat that collectivization represented to a traditional way of life was conveyed in the epidemic of hysterical rumors that all kolkhozniks would sleep under one blanket; that they would be forced to dress like convicts; that wives would become common property; that whole families would be made to wear “one cotton jacket for the whole family and … go around in it like convicts,” and so on. »

Argument: Sheila Fitzpatrick retraces the history of collectivisation in URSS and the perception that peasants had of it, how they made sense of that new agricultural scheme. She presents the gradual change of peasants’ status, from serf to being part of the collective farm – Kolkhoz. Before 1861 and the Emancipation, peasants were Serf, which means that they belong to a Land Master and were attached to the land and had to give them the produce of their work. The emancipation broke that status, but the peasants had massive debt from the bad harvest of the previous year. In the 1890’s rapid industrialisation and urban growth change Russia. After the revolution, the provisional government redistributed land. The expropriation of Kulaks’ land started at the local level. The peasants, after the civil war, were disappointed with the Bolsheviks. Villages were suffering from the lack of men that died in the first world war and the fact that young people were starting to move to urban area favorised by Bolsheviks. The Kulak question was a significant one for Bolshevik Marxist. They described kulaks as capitalist owning land and so wanted to evict them. Social classes existed in rural Russia but based on family history more than proper ownership of properties. Therefore, the division made by Bolshevik between Kulak and other peasants did not map the reality. Conflict over religion also occurred, because Bolchevik were atheist which shaped the relationship to church in villages. The perception of collectivisation and arrestations of Kulaks lead to rumours about Christian apocalypse. Overall she presents the profound conflict between the Bolchevik and the Peasants.

Question: How did the class division still affected the peasants after the kulak’s arrestation (considering that it was not a proper description of the peasants class system)?

Experimental connection: This article can be related to the General Line in which collectivisation is shown as coming from the peasants themselves, and appears as a new marvellous word. Also, the deportation of the kulaks is absent of the film. This article allows retracing the « real » history of the USSR and not the one presented by Eisenstein and Stalin.

Textual connection: The author presents collectivisation and therefore relations between USSR power and peasants, from both sides. S. S. Fitzpatrick is presenting the evolution of peasantry in history and describes what it was like to live in a Russian village between 1860 and 1930. She presents in the other reading, these changes but from the government Optique. The central question is how did Stalin decide collectivisation and the arrestation of Kulaks. She presents his rise to power from the 1930s when he was still secretary of the Soviet Party, until 1952. The technique used by Stalin on peasants were similar to the one he was using on his associates – notably, he used to threaten their families, but also arrested some persons whom he suspected of anti-soviet activities. Regarding collectivisation, he did not make many public politic statement, but expressed that Kulaks need to be « liquidated as a class ». S. Fitzpatrick reveals that people expressed anger about the anti-religious attitude of the government. Stalin used ambiguity and secrecy to preserve the idea that he was not responsible. Her work presents the other side of collectivisation and USSR policies. It allows a better understanding of the political aspect of historical facts.

Implications: Those articles allow a better understanding of the USSR’s policies functioning both in term of how they were made, implemented and in term of their implications on people actual life. They both convey small time capsules of what it was like to live everyday life in a village at the beginning of the USSR and allows to be more critical about it, maybe to destroy some pre-construct suppositions.

ACQI 4 Edward Snajdr (2005) “Gender, Power, and the Performance of Justice: Muslim Women’s Responses to Domestic Violence in Kazakhstan.” American Ethnologist 32(2):294-311 Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of gender after socialism, Princeton University Press, 2000—Chapters 1, 2, 3

Central quotation: « Such an approach is quite unlike the efforts of other local women’s organizations that seek to criminalize the problem and that have gained the attention of the international development community, which is increasingly recognizing domestic violence as a global issue. The SMW’s interventions are performed at the grassroots level and provide an alternative to the state’s responses to victims of violence. »

Argument: Edward Snajdr introduces the Society for Muslim Women and their struggle against domestic violence in Kazakhstan in the particular context of transition. After the USSR fell, western capitalism appeared in the country and radically changed everyday life. He asserts that market economy heavily contrasts with the poverty. In this radical socio-economic organisation, the cultural division persists. It reveals contradictory gender discourses. Secular activists in Kazakhstan denounces traditional heritage as the cause for domestic abuse. They tried to work with the government, up to the creation of a ministry cabinet in 1999, but which failed to change anything. SMW considered those feminist to be their primary opponents. They accuse « international feminist » to reject traditional value and to negotiate with corrupted state organisation. SMW was created in 1990 in Amaury. They defend the idea that even though Islam is a male-dominated place in Kazakhstan, women have their role to play in it. Victim of domestic violence can call this association for help. They provide a safe lodgement for some time and mostly work on family reconciliation. E. Snajdr ethnography reveals how SMW activists do not believe in divorce but rather than family conflict resolution solves domestic abuse through patience and discretion. SMW does not work with the state, but its activists believe in a grassroots level and the importance of cultural value.

Question: Through the lines it is possible to understand that SMW developed thanks to the fall of the USSR, allowing a new identity to Muslim Women, who could not express this part of it before. Though, how did political institutions responded to this newly revealed identity, both locally and internationally?

Experimental Connection: In Kazakhstan, a part of the population is absent of political imagination about citizenship. Muslim women do not find that they can rely on the institutions, and so for good reasons: police officers themselves agree that domestic abuse is not their priority. This denial of cultural particularity similarly exists in France, which, for instance, refuses ethnical statistic. In government fight for gender inequalities, it can lead to misunderstandings about women’s hope, but also to forget the resources that they already have in their particular cultural setting.

Textual connection: Susan Gal and Gail Kligman presents the link between policy and gender relations after the fall of the USSR. They present different way institutions influence gender relations, how gender division determinate some aspect of the institution. In the ethnography of E. Snadjr, it is the lack of a proper institutional answer to a gender issue that explains the creation of a new public organ. Institution influences also the ways gender relations are questioned. SMW cases also reveal the contradiction of socialist gender policies. Even though women accessed education, they still stay at home, and gender violence is persistent. It is possible that a part of the population that the socialist government did not address gender violence through a cultural perspective, failing to touch everyone. In the meantime, Susan Gal and Gail Kligman offer the critique that soviet governments were full of paradoxes. For instance, they claimed to fight for gender equality and in the meantime promoted the strong imaginary around motherhood. Their analysis shed light on the paradox revealed by E. Snadjr that even though the Russian government conducted gender equality based policy, such as education for women, gender-based violence persisted in post-soviet society.

Implications: SMW considers domestic abuse to be a form of family dispute. Paradoxically, police officers expressed to E. Snajdr that they did not take domestic violence seriously in a sense because it was part of life. This idea that domestic abuse is similar to a family fight, can be considered as a culturally embedded man domination over his wife. Therefore, would it be possible that both SMW and the institutions are wrong in their approach of domestic abuse by not framing it regarding power relations?

Patico, J. (2002). Chocolate and Cognac: Gifts and the Recognition of Social Worlds in Post-Soviet Russia. Ethnos, 67(3), 345-368. and Caldwell, M. (2004). Domesticating the French Fry: McDonald’s and Consumerism in Moscow. Journal of Consumer Culture, 4(1), 5-26.

Central Quotation: « That is, chocolates and cognac are mobilized in certain kinds of social contexts to establish or confirm particular kinds of social relationship, in which the specific contributions of each participant and the unique nature of their social link are quite important. » pp355

Argument: Jennifer Patico analyse the influence of Russia’s marketisation after the fall of the USSR on gift giving. Her main claim is that choice of gift tels a lot about incorporation of the market in everyday life in Russia because of the Russian particular sociality of economic relation. In the former USSR it was the numer of social relations one had which influenced is capacity to access goods and services, epitomizes by the notion of Blat, because of the shortage of ressources and the way consumption was organised. Gift-giving is one place where this social organisation around economy persists in nowadays Russia, and for Jennifer Patico, this phenomenon can be observed through the giving of Chocolate and Cognac to teachers. Teachers, especially private one, receive gift for holidays, and receive mainly chocolate and cognac which embed established social relaion. Gift-giving signifies the recognition of a person by the gift giver.

Question: How far is this particular to Russia, and how far is it linked to the previous economic system?

Experimental connection:  I lived in Indonesia, and mc Donald had mostly chicken-based food, because it is what is most part of people food habits. In France, the compagny launched more fancy burgers after many restaurant open selling « French burgers » (with better ingredients, many different version of burgers etc). Mc Donald marketing is based on exploiting cultural particularism.

Textual connection: « I have suggested that the uniqueness of McDonald’s experience in Russia is evident in the ways that consumers affirm its place in local culture not simply by embracing it as just another part of the ordinary routines of daily life, but more accurately by taking it for granted ». Melissa L. Caldwell advocates that Mc Donal was incoporated to Russian culture in a particular way by Russian themself. She defends that Russian incorporated  McDonald into their intimate life in the same way that the kitchen was the central place for intimate relation. She defends as Jennifer Patico that former USSR specific social economy shaped so deeply people way of thinking about consumption that it is still visible in some shade of consumption nowadays.

Implications: If population just deal with the marketisation by incorporating it to their culture, it would mean that globalisation does not tend to normalised culture all around the world. However, I believe that this position might be giving to much agency to individual as social group. In the case of McDonald, it is clear that the compagny shape their restaurant in order to match each country cultural context, although, hat does not change the fact that people can and do incoporate it to their values.

Buchli, Victor. “Introduction.” An Archaeology of Socialism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1999. 1–22. Materializing Culture. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 25 Mar. 2019. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474214261.ch-001>.

Central quotation :  « The reason for examining this particular building was that the Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow was specifically created by the Bolshevik elite to overcome the unsettling social, economic and political contradictions of early twentieth century industrial capitalism in Russia . The building is an embodiment of a grandiose project to overcome these antagonisms and realize the terms of the good life for the greater number of people »

Argument : Victor Buchli argues that studying the change in architecture allow give to anthropologists a frame for understanding how people cope with rapid social change. He believes that the will of Stalin governemnt to change architecture is explained by the importance of domestic architectural space to change the nature of social relations. To him cosmologies is imprented in the material world and in the case of the USSR this imprenting of cosmology went even further because it was done on purpose to participate in the building of the communist world. The material constructions made after the Revolution allow to predicated the couscisouness of the new society.

Question: How did architects decided what the ‘communist architecture’ would look like? How did they invented the genra to make it similar to the communist ideology?

Experimental connection: In the 1850’s, Hauffman change redesigned Paris and created the famous aspect of  it with Parisian famous roofs. This change came from a voluntee of the governement, which wanted to remoove poorest citizens from within the Intramuros Paris city to create more security. This new architecture radically change the feeling of Parisian, which did feel more secure after that, but it also change the social aspect of the citizen, making Paris a town for richer people, and putting the workers away from the center. This can arguably be described as a change in opposition with the USSR one which aimed was to make all the workers live in a city that would be their.

Textual connection: «The city- its architecture, infrastructure and social life- constitutes the key site of the making and unmaking of socialism The pri- mary mechanism, which enabled the construc- tion of the socialist city—and which determined its spatial and aesthetic parameters, as well as the forms of everyday life which inhabited it—was the deprivatization of the proprietorial structure of the city, which all state socialist re- gimes undertook, to a greater or lesser extent, while the core means by which the socialist city is unmade, or by means of which it lingers, is the reprivatization of urban property » M. Murawskt analyses furthermore the implementation of a cosmology through architecture by including aspects of economy and social categories of people facing the change. He argues that the radical architectural change of the USSR is not only a material one, but a sociological and economical one. The architecture of the USSR reflects mainly the de-privatisation of the space which is in his opinion the real disruptive aspect of this change.

Implication: The analyse of architecture can allow to reunite economical, sociological and historical anlysis of the USSR.

Roberts, S. (2004). TOASTING UYGHURSTAN: NEGOTIATING STATELESS NATIONALISM IN TRANSNATIONAL RITUAL SPACE. Journal of Ritual Studies,18(2), 86-105.

Central Quotation: Despite the continued prevalence of the “modernist” idea that the forces of globalization and transnationalism will eventually supercede national and local identities with a global culture, the experience of the Uyghurs of Almaty illustrates that for many people in the world today the struggle for national sovereignty is still very much present.

Argument: S. Roberts defend the idea that ritual are a place in witch society living under a centralised power can express their particularims. In the case of the Uyghur, they have been throughout history a opressed group, living under the domination of different empire and it impacted their way of living and expressing their claim for a national space. Under the Soviet Regime, they lived as a Muslim group, in a empire that left few space to religion in its state life because of ideological clashes which result in paradoxes in rituals. He presents the case of wedding and the particular way Uyghur consume or not alcohol – which is a specific aspect of life under the Soviet Union, whereas is describes as Haram in the Muslim world. Ritual also allow Uyghur to express their community in a communal experience and to educate youth to the particularism of Uyghur culture.

Question: To what extend the Soviet Union was a colonial empire?

Experimental Connection: The use of ritual as a way of integrating aspect of the dominating culture is not specific to Uyghur. Jean Rouch famous film Les Maitres Fous presents a ritual which incorporated aspect of western culture such as the Machine – the train, or the Colonel, which are part of the English colonialist culture. It can arguiably be a way of negociating the domination by incorporating it to their own habit and a way of resisting it.

Textual Connection : A. Lemon unpack the concept of ‘Race’ in the former Soviet Union by anlysing how citizens talked about race. The claim of the Soviet Union was that race was not a concept at all, not something that should be considered as real. But although the state denied the existance of this concept, people still had a perception and consideration of race. They perceived any non-white citizens as Black and critique north american for looking at ethnicity. To them ‘racism was a concept from America’. In the case of gypsies stereotypes were quite strong through romantisication but also disctrimination. In the end she says that Russians care about skin color.

Implication: Both this text ask for a different looking at the concept of ethnicity : the first one claim that opressed ethnic group find their way to resist oppression in their ritual and that therefore this implies that imperialism does not erase differences. The second article explains that eventhough states have a will to deny any ethnicity, this cannot completely erase the idea of difference present in people mind.

Howell, J. (1998). Poverty, Children and Transition in Kyrgyzstan: Some Reflections from the Field. Journal of International Affairs, 52(1), 131-144.

Central Quotation:‘Yet focusing on the child is important not only because children represent the future, but also because such an approach challenges conceptualizations of the household as an aggregate, unified actor, where intra-household relations are assumed to be trivial and unproblematic.’

Argument: J. Howell analyses the effect of the fall of the USSR on children especially through the lens of the impovershiment of schooling. She argues that the political independance of Kyrgystan in 1991 brought with it the begining of a market economy which profoundly impacted the school system but also the capacity of children to attend school. Because of the liberalisation of the country, prise rised up and so leaving family to poor to buy proper clothes or heating. Decollectivisation also created a need for children to work in the field. Finally the material organisation of the school changed, with for example the books are not financed anymore by the states so family as to take loan to the school for the books, which create precarity in families. Overall the new economy impacted the life of people, especially impovershing them, because of the rising prices and changes in the consumption behaviours, which had effect on the capacities of children to pursue a proper education.

Question: What kind of impact had the market based economy on university? I also wonder how the sentiment ‘it was better before’ presented by O. Aydorava is specific to USSR or present in all countries especially in eduation?

Experimental connection: Last year in Sciences Po I followed a class on the importance of having only state-financed schools because of the negative impact of a market based education on children even in the upper education such as university. Examples of countries that have the best result in Europe are Scandinavian countries which entire educational system are founded by the state although the rest of the economy can be described as liberal.

Textual connection: ‘In this paper, I have demonstrated the effects of the past in the Russian context: in participants’ assessment of educational reforms not as a path of progress but rather as a path of destruction and decline, in the contestations over a new grading system that decreases the quality of students’ knowledge, and in a divided moral order, in which students of the present fade in comparison with the students of the past.’ O. Aydorava presents the impact of the fall of the USSR on students adding to J. Howell’s analysis of external factors explaining the empoverishment of educational level of student, a explanation that focus on direct impact on school organisation. The new Ministry of education was renamed Ministry for Future which aim is to align education on the standard of the Western world educational system. O. Aydorava also studies the perception of this change by teachers and students : teacher express a nostalgia for the past saying ‘it was better before’ and for students that never truly experienced the previous educational system this nostalgia is also present because of the collective memory of it.

Implication: To look at the school organisational system and external factors that impacts its performance can allow though an transcholars approach to understand a society and potentially its future.