This collection examines practical and ethical issues inherent in the application of oral history and memory studies to research about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Case studies highlight the importance of ethical good practice, including the reflexive interrogation of the interviewer and researcher, and aspects of gender and national identity. Researchers use oral history to analyze present-day recollections of the Soviet past, thereby extending our understanding beyond archival records, official rhetoric and popular mythology. Oral history explores individual life stories, but this has sometimes resulted in rather incomplete, incoherent, inconsistent or illogical narratives. Oral history, therefore, presents the researcher with a number of methodological and ethical dilemmas, including the interpretation of "silence" in biographical accounts. This collection links the discussion of oral history ethics with that of memory studies. Memories are shaped by factors that may be, simultaneously, both consecutive and disrupted. In written accounts and responses to interview questions, respondents sometimes display nostalgia for the Soviet past, or, conversely, may seek to de-mythologize the realities of Soviet rule. Case studies explore what to do when interview subjects and memoirists consciously, sub-consciously or unconsciously "forget" aspects of their own past, or themselves seek to take control of the research process.

In Symbolic Traces of Communist Legacy in Post-socialist Hungary, Lisa Pope Fischer shows how personal practices symbolically refurbish elements from the Communist era to fit present-day challenges. A generation who lived through the socialist period adapt to post-socialist Hungary in a global context. Life histories weave together case studies of gift giving, procurement strategies, harvest ritual, healthcare, and socialist kitsch to illustrate turns towards mysticism, neo-traditionalism, nostalgia, nationalism, and shifts in time-place. People’s unrequited past longing for future possibilities of a Western society facilitate desires for a lost way of life. Not only does this work gain understanding of an aging population’s life experiences and the politics of everyday practices, but also social change in a modern global world.

If socialism did not end as abruptly as is sometimes perceived, what remnants of it linger today and will continue to linger? Moreover, if postsocialism is an umbrella term for the uncertain times of various transitions that followed in socialism's wake, how might the "post" be rendered complicated by the notion that the unfinished business of socialism continues to influence the trajectory of the future? The Future of (Post)Socialism examines this unfinished business through various disciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches that seek to illuminate the postsocialist future as a cultural and social fact. Drawn from the fields of history, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, education, linguistics, literature, and cultural studies, contributors analyze various cultural forms and practices of the formerly socialist cultural spaces of Eastern Europe. In so doing, they question the teleology of linear transitional narratives and of assumptions about postsocialist linear progress, concluding that things operate more as continued interruptions of a perpetually liminal state rather than as neat endings and new beginnings.

This handbook brings together recent and emerging research in the broad areas of women and gender studies focusing on pre-revolutionary Russia, the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet Russian Federation. For the Soviet period in particular, individual chapters extend the geographic coverage of the book beyond Russia itself to examine women and gender relations in the Soviet ‘East’ (Tatarstan), Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) and the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). Within the boundaries of the Russian Federation, the scope moves beyond the typically studied urban centres of Moscow and St Petersburg to examine the regions (Krasnodar, Novosibirsk), rural societies and village life. Its chapters examine the construction of gender identities and shifts in gender roles during the twentieth century, as well as the changing status and roles of women vis-a-vis men in Soviet political institutions, the workplace and society more generally. This volume draws on a broad range of disciplinary and methodological approaches currently being employed in the academic field of Russian studies. The origins of the individual contributions can be identified in a range of conventional subject disciplines – history, literature, sociology, political science, cultural studies – but the chapters also adopt a cross- and inter-disciplinary approach to the topic of study. This handbook therefore builds on and extends the foundations of Russian women’s and gender studies as it has emerged and developed in recent decades, and demonstrate the international, indeed global, reach of such research

This book explores the impact on different generations of Lithuanians of the fifty-year Soviet modernisation project which was implemented in Lithuania from 1940 to 1991. It reveals the specific characteristics of ‘the last Soviet generation’, born in the 1970s, and sets this generation apart from those who were born earlier and later. It analyses changes in attitudes, choices and relationships in a variety of social spheres and contexts and the adaptation skills which were required during the late Soviet and post-Soviet transformation processes. Overall, it presents a great deal of detail on the social experiences of different generations in late Soviet and post-Soviet society.

Gendering Postsocialism explores changes in gendered norms and expectations in Eastern Europe and Eurasia after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The dismantlement of state socialism in these regions triggered monumental shifts in their economic landscape, the involvement of their welfare states in social citizenship and, crucially, their established gender norms and relations, all contributing to the formation of the postsocialist citizen. Case studies examine a wide range of issues across 15 countries of the post-Soviet era. These include gender aspects of the developments in education in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Hungary, controversies around abortion legislation in Poland, migrant women and housing as a gendered problem in Russia, challenges facing women’s NGOs in Bosnia, and identity formation of unemployed men in Lithuania. This close analysis reveals how different variations of neoliberal ideology, centred around the notion of the self-reliant and self-determining individual, have strongly influenced postsocialist gender identities, whilst simultaneously showing significant trends for a “retraditionalising” of gender norms and expectations. This volume suggests that despite integration with global political and free market systems, the postsocialist gendered subject combines strategies from the past with those from contemporary ideologies to navigate new multifaceted injustices around gender in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room investigates what happens to domestic spaces, architecture, and the lives of urbanites during a socioeconomic upheaval. Kateryna Malaia analyzes how Soviet and post-Soviet city dwellers, navigating a crisis of inadequate housing and extreme social disruption between the late 1980s and 2000s, transformed their dwellings as their countries transformed around them. Soviet infrastructure remained but, in their domestic spaces, urbanites transitioned to post-Soviet citizens. The two decades after the collapse of the USSR witnessed a major urban apartment remodeling boom. Malaia shows how, in the context of limited residential mobility, those remodeling and modifying their homes formed new lifestyles defined by increased spatial privacy. Remodeled interiors served as a material expression of a social identity above the poverty line, in place of the outdated Soviet signifiers of well-being. Connecting home improvement, self-reinvention, the end of state socialism, and the lived experience of change, Malaia puts together a comprehensive portrait of the era. Malaia shows both the stubborn continuities and the dramatic changes that accompanied the collapse of the USSR. Making the case for similarities throughout the former Soviet empire, this study is based on interviews and fieldwork done primarily in Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine. Many of the buildings described are similar to those damaged or destroyed by Russian bombings or artillery fire following the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. A book about major historic events written through the lens of everyday life, Taking Soviet Union Apart is also about the meaning of home in a dramatically changing world.

In Survival of a Perverse Nation, Tamar R. Shirinian traces two widespread rhetorics of perversion—sexual and moral—in postsocialist Armenia, showing how they are tied to anxieties about the nation’s survival. In her fieldwork with Armenians, Shirinian found that right-wing nationalists’ focus on sexual perversion centers the figure of the homosexual, while questions of moral perversion surround oligarchs and other members of the political economic elite. While the homosexual is seen as non- or improperly reproductive, the oligarch’s moral deviations from the caring and paternalistic expectations associated with national leadership also endanger Armenia’s survival. Shirinian shows how both figures threaten the nation’s proper social reproduction, a source of great anxiety for a nation whose primary point of identity is surviving genocide. In the existential threat posed by these forms of perversion Shirinian finds paths where nonsurvival might mean the creation of futures that are queerer and more just. Detailing how the language of perversion offers trenchant critiques of capitalism as a perversion of life, Shirinian presents a new queer theory of political economy.

This volume explores the different mechanisms and forms of expression used by women to come to terms with the past, focusing on the variety and complexity of women’s narratives of displacement within the context of Central and Eastern Europe. The first part addresses the quest for personal (post)memory from the perspective of the second and third generations. The touching collaboration established in reconstructing individual and family (post)memories offers invaluable insights into the effects of displacement, coping mechanisms, and resilience. Adopting the idea that the text itself becomes a site of (post)memory, the second part of the volume brings into discussion different sites and develops further this topic in relation to the creative process and visual text. The last part questions the past in relation to trauma and identity displacement in the countries where abusive regimes destroyed social bonds and had a lasting impact on the people lives.

Maria Rogacheva’s Soviet Scientists Remember gives voice to one of the most prominent and educated groups in the late USSR: scientists. Lifting the veil of secrecy that covered scientists during the Cold War, this book brings together six first-person accounts of residents of the formerly closed scientific town of Chernogolovka. In their interviews, scientists talk about growing up in Stalin’s Russia and surviving the Great Patriotic War, their decision to join the scientific intelligentsia, and the outstanding opportunities that were available to them in the heyday of the Cold War. They reflect on their daily lives in a privileged scientific community and their relationship with the Soviet state and the Communist Party. Soviet Scientists Remember sheds light on how ordinary people experienced the transformation of Soviet society after Stalin’s death, as well as its tumultuous transition to the post-Soviet era in the 1990s.