Abstract
This ambitious monograph examines how ideas of time were refracted and reflected through domestic spaces in Russia between the fin de siècle and the first decade of the Bolshevik Revolution, approximately from 1900 to 1930. It is divided into three major sections; the urban apartment in late Imperial Russia; the gentry estate and peasant handicrafts; and a return to the urban apartment in early Soviet Russia. The author emphasizes continuities across the usual revolutionary divide; narratives of progress and technological innovation framed how urban living was conceived throughout the decades. Similarly, she argues that the obsession with “backwardness,” the fear of the peasant and the rural encroaching on the urban was common to both Late Imperial and early Soviet Russia. She looks at Russia in its transnational dimension, as a participant in early twentieth century modernity, with a burgeoning urban consumer society and one in which domestic interiors took on new meanings, “including ideas about efficiency in the emergent bourgeois consumer culture of the now, a longing for a Russian national past and dreams of a utopian future.” (7) The book begins by outlining theories of time by leading philosophers, such as Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger, and contributions to the “temporal turn” by contemporary historians. This, for me, is one of the least successful parts of the books. Complex ideas are represented through quotes from secondary sources, making them hard to grasp in their entirety. Friedman seems to be arguing that rather than modernity being characterized by a linear progressive sense of time, in actuality, it is characterized by “heterogeneity” and a layering of time. She continues on to illustrate this in three separate sections, drawing on primary sources, such as lifestyle magazines (particularly those aimed at women), diaries, ego-documents, fiction, and specialized journals on architecture, technology, and hygiene.
The first section of the book looks at the urban apartment in late Imperial Russia, or how norms and ideals of urban apartment living were circulated to “middle class” women through magazines and journals. Against a backdrop of mass peasant in-migration to towns, political upheaval, and industrialization, efficiency, control, and hygiene were the key concepts, as they would be in Soviet times. Dust and dirt in the family home were ever-present reminders of the peasant past and had to be driven away. They could also be seen as bringers of disease and therefore an unknowable and threatening future. Friedman is concerned with how domestic ideologies regarding space and time helped with the development of female individual subjectivities (“Character and identity,” p. 52) and urban sensibilities among non-aristocratic but middle-class women. Yet many of the plans and advice include spaces for maids, cooks, and live-in nannies. This section could have been enriched by some reflections on how they experienced time and the spaces of the apartment. One of the areas of the apartment most thought about was the children's sections and Friedman successfully links this into the increased visibility of, and concern for, childhood in late Imperial Russia. Children represented the future and were also seen as most vulnerable to the problems of Russia's present. Concern for children has often been seen as a key marker of modernity, and this too continued into the Soviet epoch.
The second section shifts the book's focus outside the city to the gentry estate and elite attempts to encourage the peasant handicrafts (kustar’) in Late Imperial Russia. She argues that “modernity” created a sense of linear, progressive time while also an awareness of historical time and the novel concept of “nostalgia,” regret for a lost, possibly non-existent time. In Russia, this led to a fetishization and fascination with the late eighteenth century as a time of grace and civilization, and the gentry or noble estate, just when such estates were being abandoned or sold off to the nouveau riche. Another example she gives is the nostalgia surrounding the 300-year anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, celebrated in 1913. She shows how newspapers, exhibitions, and self-writings at the beginning of the twentieth century mobilized sentiments of nostalgia for an imagined past, while sections of Russian society were simultaneously and self-consciously careering into a modern future. Again, she successfully links this with the growing “cult of childhood” in Russia, which is often seen as beginning with the publication of Tolstoy's semi-autobiographical novel, My Childhood in the 1850s. Peasant crafts were, like gentry estates, seen as representing Russian national identity and encouraged and patronized by Russian elites, reinvented and aimed at the modern market for children's toys and bedroom furniture. This was a permissible way for the peasant “past” to enter the domestic spaces of Russian urban elites.
The third section examines the utopian schemes for communal living and revolutionary art after the revolution, before the Soviet nuclear family was held up by Stalin as the key support for the regime in the 1930s. These revolutionary projects and plans have been studied to a great extent before, but Friedman shows how they always co-existed with appeals to Russia's past and state support for art forms that were supposed to appeal more to the peasantry, who made up 90% of the Soviet population in the 1920s. This complicates the view of Stalinism as an abrupt break with a more revolutionary 1920s. The Bolsheviks believed that they were fulfilling a historical mission and pushing Russia forward to “catch up and overtake” the West, showing the rest of the world the path forward that they too would follow. The calendar changed from the Julian to the Gregorian one, to align with the rest of the world and Lenin was embalmed for perpetuity and displayed on Red Square, simultaneously dead, alive, and immortal (Lenin lived/Lenin lives/Lenin will live was a widely displayed slogan in Soviet times).
Inevitably, there is great focus on women and gender, particularly in the final section. Following on from Marx, Bolshevik leaders such as Lenin were ideologically committed to the emancipation of women from “kitchen slavery” so that they could participate in the creation of a new society and realize their full human potential. In the Soviet Union, domestic labour-saving devices for the kitchen—electric kettles, noodle machines—were therefore imbued with a revolutionary impetus. Many schemes and dreams of communal kitchens, laundries, childcare centres were devised by the early Bolsheviks and their supporters. Friedman argues, as others have done, that as masculinity was never reconstructed by the Bolsheviks, women's true emancipation from the domestic sphere was crippled by the state and conservative gender roles survived. In general, communal living projects were “concrete utopias” and “part of the process of the continual production of the future in everyday life” (136). In Soviet times, the future was always embedded in the present and Friedman illustrates the various ways in which the Soviet woman was meant to sweep away the debris of the past. Yet at the same time, in the relatively liberal times of the New Economic Policy, a Society for Enthusiasts of Gentry Estates was allowed to organize itself and the Bolshevik leaders approved tours of old estates with costumed guides. This reveals the overlapping and heterogenous nature of modern times.
The book concludes with some reflections on Soviet nostalgia in the contemporary Russian Federation and the multi-layering of time in modern capitalism; Soviet retro restaurants sit alongside Western luxury brand stores and bookshelves of nineteenth century Russian writers. An amalgamation of time frames to create a “usable past” and stable present, as Putin and the current Russian leadership are known to desire.
As said at the beginning, this is an ambitious research project and one that has some lapses. One of the most interesting themes in the book is related to the well-known Russian fear of “backwardness,” or rather the gap between Russia and the West, and what Friedman refers to as the “always-encroaching past of the village.” (15) The book shows how these large concepts have been captured in Russian domestic spaces. At its best, her book tries to give a window into the mentalities of a section of Russian society between 1900 and 1930 and how they may have experienced space and time. This is a refreshing and unique perspective and opens up further areas for research, in particular the debates about Russian/Soviet modernity project, the construction of identities and the development of subjectivities. It should be widely read by academics and graduate students in modern Russian history.