Everyday Life in Russia Past and Present [Hardcover]

In these original essays on long-term patterns of everyday life in prerevolutionary, Soviet, and contemporary Russia, distinguished scholars survey the cultural practices, power relations, and behaviors that characterized daily existence for Russians through the post-Soviet present. Microanalyses and transnational perspectives shed new light on the formation and elaboration of gender, ethnicity, class, nationalism, and subjectivity. Changes in consumption and communication patterns, the restructuring of familial and social relations, systems of cultural meanings, and evolving practices in the home, at the workplace, and at sites of leisure are among the topics explored.

Choi Chatterjee is Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles.

David L. Ransel is Robert F. Byrnes Professor of History at Indiana University Bloomington.

Mary Cavender is Associate Professor of History at the Ohio State University at Mansfield.

Karen Petrone is Professor of History at the University of Kentucky.

Introduction
Part I. Approaches to Everyday Life
1. The Scholarship of Everyday Life / David L. Ransel
2. Provincial Nobles, Elite History and the Imagination of Everyday Life / Mary Cavender
3. Resisting Resistance: Everyday life, Practical Competence and Neoliberal Rhetoric in Postsocialist Russia / Olga Shevchenko,
4. The Oil Company and the Crafts Fair: From Povsednevnost to Byt in Postsocialist Russia / Douglas Rogers
Part II. Public Identities and Public Space
5. We dont talk about ourselves: Women Academics Recall Their Path to Success / Natalia Pushkareva
6. The Literature of Everyday Life and Popular Representations of Motherhood in Brezhnevs Time / Elizabeth Skomp
7. They Are Taking That Air From Us: Sale of Commonly Enjoyed Properties to Private Developers / David L. Ransel
Part III. Living Space and Personal Choice
8. Everyday Life and the Problem of Conceptualizing Public and Private dl3,