Post-Soviet Nostalgia

Confronting the Empire's Legacies

Otto Boele, Boris Noordenbos, Ksenia Robbe, Otto Boele, Boris Noordenbos, Ksenia Robbe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000507294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Bringing together scholars from Russia, the United States and Europe, this collection of essays is the first to explore the slippery phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia by studying it as a discursive practice serving a wide variety of ideological agendas. The authors demonstrate how feelings of loss and displacement in post-Soviet Russia are turned into effective tools of state building and national mobilization, as well as into weapons for local resistance and the assertion of individual autonomy. Drawing on novels, memoirs, documentaries, photographs and Soviet commodities, Post-Soviet Nostalgia is an invaluable resource for historians, literary scholars and anthropologists interested in how Russia comes to terms with its Soviet past.

Part I
Affect

1
Journeying to the Golden Spaces of Childhood

Nostalgic Longing in the Online Community The USSR Our Motherland Through the Visual Image of the Soviet Toy

Mandy Duijn

Author: bota; Date: 1 January 2012 18:27 |

I am looking at those pictures, and I simply want to cry, […] these are exactly the toys with which I used to play, during childhood […] Visiting your website was like going 30 years back in time, turning back to that carefree childhood, where my dreams remained, my friends remained

(“Igrushki SSSR,” No. 5)¹

On August 9, 2008, the administrator of the online community The USSR Our Motherland (SSSR Nasha Rodina)² posted a series of pictures that depict a wide variety of toys with which children in the Soviet Union used to play: electric models of loggers, shiny dolls with chubby limbs, a miniature windup spacecraft, toy pistols made of iron, tiny Red Army tanks, popular action and animation figures, and a model industrial complex including a halyard and a machine room (“Igrushki SSSR”). The photographs on the page Toys of the USSR triggered a large flow of emotional and nostalgic comments from community members from all over the former Soviet space on their childhood memories. User Ivanych describes how he still remembers the pleasant smell of a new toy when he would open its box for the first time (ibid., No. 1), whilst Sergei (gost’) recollects the euphonic crunching sound that his old Rubik’s Cube used to make (ibid., No. 2). Many thank the author for providing this “journey” to the golden days of their childhood.

The comments of bota and other users provide much food for thought. They demonstrate that the material “relic” of the Soviet toy has mediational features. The images of toys serve as an emotional mnemonic device, triggering memories on the more general features of Soviet childhood, society, everyday life, and public spaces. Moreover, the comments reflect the romantic idealization of childhood as a period of innocence and carefreeness (Wesseling 2017), and beyond that they illustrate that the time of childhood in the nostalgic imagination has spatial features (Creighton 2015), as the words “where” and “journey” indicate. The spatial dimensions of these childhood recollections, I argue, act as a specific frame: one that locates, situates, and makes sense of the experience of growing up in the Soviet Union. Even though in recent studies childhood nostalgia is largely discussed as a temporal concept (Wesseling 2017), I would argue that it is of surplus value to focus on the complex relation between the physical object of the Soviet toy and the spaces of childhood they seem to signify. In doing so, I examine how, within the comments section of the page Toys of the USSR, Soviet childhood is remembered, reimagined, and reconstructed as a historically specific trope in time and space.

As recent studies of post-Soviet (and post-socialist) nostalgia have shown,³ nostalgic memory discourses and practices are often far more complex than a simple yearning for or obsession with the past. While memories of Soviet childhood are channeled through nostalgic discourses, they signal temporal and spatial displacements of modern social relations, too (Boyer 2010, 23). They represent a “coping behavior,” a way to make sense of and create emotional bridges to a past that is lost, on the one hand, and to face the market-centered realities of the present in which people feel ill at ease on the other (ibid., 17–19). In that sense, it may be seen as an instrumental discourse used to discuss, criticize, or confront the present. Though located in the past, the spatial and temporal “frames” of memories are constantly readjusted through the developments of contemporary everyday life (West 2014, 177). By zooming in on these spatio-temporal structures, we learn more about the users’ perceptions of present-day conditions.

The physical object of the Soviet toy is particularly suitable to study such discourses. First, it strongly relates to the realm of childhood, a time and space essential to nostalgic recollections. Second, toys—or consumer products in general—never merely belong to the economic sphere of life only; they are deeply embedded in complex negotiations of ideology and identity (Berdahl 2010, 34). Therefore, the desire mediated through the pictures of toys signals a longing for the objects themselves no less than for the socialist consumption and production rituals that they represent. Finally, the toys could be seen as miniature versions of real-life iconic artifacts from the Soviet era, such as the Red Army tanks, space equipment, and motorized vehicles. Toys can be controlled by their owner: children can wind them up, move them around, and explore the spaces in which they use the toy. As such, the toy triggers bygone feelings of being in control of one’s life. Therefore, these Soviet toys have become vehicles through which the adult users of online communities can briefly reimagine being in charge of memories connected to the time and space of their childhood.

The principal aim of this analysis is to investigate which features of growing up in a context that is perceived as intrinsically Soviet are recalled and remediated through the visual image of the Soviet toy. By focusing on the spatial dimensions that “frame” these memories, I look beyond the temporal focus that has characterized many childhood nostalgia studies. I will focus on the discourses used in the comments section on the page Toys of the USSR. Of the 212 comments in total, posted between 2008 and 2014, I chose to include a random sample of 28 comments for the sake of clarity.⁴ In doing so, the aim is to describe how and to what extent these retrospective comments question and challenge present-day conditions and public policies.

The Ideals and Realities of a “Happy Childhood”

In order to assess the symbolic meaning that is given to Soviet toys by the users of The USSR Our Motherland, I begin with a few notes on their original value and on the ideals and realities of the context from which they became disassociated after 1991. The experience of being a child is particularly relevant in the Soviet context because of the active promotion of the idealized notion of a happy Soviet childhood as an indication of the success of the Soviet model (Knight 2009, 790). In the 1930s, the term “Happy Childhood” was officially adopted by the Soviet government as one of the main tropes of propaganda. Viktor Govorkov’s poster Thank You, Beloved Stalin, for a Happy Childhood! (Spasibo liubimomu Stalinu—za schastlivoe detstvo!) from 1936 is iconic in this respect. Stalin is portrayed as a smiling father figure wrapping his arms around a group of seemingly happy children that look at him with admiration (Kelly 2007, 94). Even though childhood was seen as “the material of future adulthood, to be disciplined and shaped as early as might be practicable,” children were allowed to enjoy themselves, to engage in childlike games, and to acquire material goods, as long as an ethos of “rational upbringing” was preserved (ibid., 570). Margaret Peacock argues that while the rest of the population was expected to lead a simple and austere life, in the case of the child, according to Soviet rhetoric, abundance was allowed (2014, 25).

In reality, however, the majority of children during the Stalin era did not have more than a few manufactured toys such as miniature cars and alphabet blocks (Kelly 2007, 445). Because of the dependence on raw materials from other dominant sectors of the Soviet industry, in combination with the authorities’ ardent efforts to censor ideologically unsound toys, the average household, especially in rural areas, relied on homemade items. This scarcity was also visible in kindergartens and day nurseries (ibid., 406).

From the 1960s onwards, in the context of the Cold War, the production capacity of state factories was seen as the manifestation of a successful revolution. In line with the increasing availability of consumer goods, toys appeared in larger numbers in the shops (Peacock 2014, 25). The flagship store Children’s World (Detskii mir) in Moscow started to sell a variety of newly produced toys, sometimes even without an educational purpose, such as models of popular fictional characters and fluffy animals. These toys triggered huge demand among the Soviet public despite the fact that they were quite expensive and would absorb a significant share of the average salary (Kelly 2007, 447). The previous ethos of sobriety and rationality was gradually replaced by one of “everything for the children.” Normative publications emphasized that toys should not merely be hygienic and practical but attractive as well, and they argued that every child in the Soviet Union should have “large numbers of special things” at their disposal (ibid., 393). As Monica Rüthers’ research on the visual representations of childhood and consumption in the 1960s illustrates, this renewed focus was accompanied by an intense visual propaganda campaign. Soviet achievements that improved everyday life were systematically documented, and pictures of toy stores with fully stocked shelves and happy customers circulated in the press (2009, 58). These photographs, however, should not be read as a realistic image of consumerism in the 1960s. They rather functioned as a promise or an imaginary space of the radiant future (ibid., 60). Catriona Kelly argues that in this period:

the myth of ‘happy childhood’ was readily absorbed by children themselves. […] By no means all children had the opportunity to ‘live the myth,’ but those who did came from the most influential sectors of Soviet society, in terms of public opinion, and thus their experience reinforced its dominance.

(2007, 423)

During the Perestroika, dolls and toys from Western companies such as Lego, Fisher-Price, and Mattel found their way to the Soviet Union, and they became extremely popular among children and their parents. Journalist Tatyana Volskaya remembers how thrilled she was seeing the shiny and feminine body parts of Barbie for the first time when her uncle brought her one from a business trip to Denmark.⁵ “This was obviously a creature from another world. I don’t know who was more excited—me or my mother. We sat her down on a little doll’s chair, and there she sat—illuminating everything around her with her presence” (2009).

This preference for Western toys was encouraged by the large numbers of branded consumer goods that started to enter the Soviet market and by newspaper articles that either exclaimed the superiority of the new and shiny foreign-made products or reported about the defects of Soviet-made items. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the products that embodied socialism were hastily replaced by the fancy packages of Barbie dolls and Lego construction sets. Soviet toys were stored in the back of the closet or thrown away, and nearly overnight they disappeared from the shelves of Children’s World.

Recreating Tropes of an Idealized Past

During the 1990s, the everyday lives of post-Soviet citizens were subjected to immense change of a political, social, economic, and cultural nature impacting on their sense of selfhood. The chaos and uncertainty that the rapid and simultaneous processes of democratization, privatization, and Westernization caused contributed to feelings of disappointment, disorientation, alienation, and nostalgia towards aspects of socialist life that now seemed increasingly warmer, safer, more human, and more moral (Boyer 2010, 18). The initial desire to draw a sharp line between the Soviet past and the non-Soviet present gradually exhausted itself by the mid-1990s, and people started to retrace their memories in order to diminish the painful rupture between their past and present (Oushakine 2007, 452). This coping behavior, recreating tropes of an idealized past, was both triggered by the touch of the new reality and the perceived loss of the old one. In other words, even though the nostalgic discourses are past-oriented, they signal several very contemporary projects: voicing estrangement from the post-socialist transition that seemed to be steered from outside the former Soviet space (Boyer 2010, 25–6), and signaling a process of reclaiming autonomy and control.

The period of childhood is often central to these nostalgic recollections. In times of transition or uncertainty, the idea of childhood “evokes an idyllic past in the minds of many adults, who associate childhood with stability and rootedness” (Shembel 2016, 80). At the individual level, a remembered, reimagined, and recreated construction of childhood memories offers an imaginary space of naive innocence, allowing a withdrawal from the chaos of contemporary adult life (Creighton 2015, 34). This yearning for the innocence of childhood is by no means a distinct post-Soviet feature; already at the turn of the 19th century, English Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth expressed longings for a lost childhood (Austin 2003, 75–6). A distinguishing feature of nostalgia for Soviet childhood is the fact that t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction: The Many Practices of Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Affect, Appropriation, Contestation
• PART I Affect
• PART II Appropriation
• PART III Contestation
• Afterword: After Nostalgia: A Backward Glance at a Backward Glance
• Notes on Contributors
• Index