Forces of things – Weekend – Kommersant

The publishing house “New Literary Review” published a book by the historian Alexei Golubev “Thing Life”, a study of late Soviet material culture – from airplane models to Luber dumbbells.

Almost all the influential books on Soviet history that have been published in recent decades have, in one way or another, developed the problem of subjectivity — how the Soviet man was born, changed, and came to his end. Aleksey Golubev is also working on this topic, but he is moving a little sideways from the main line. He notes: all these studies proceeded from the fact that personality exists primarily in language, is formed in relations with ideologies and ideas. To be a Soviet person is, to use the famous formula from Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain (the book that paved the way for the study of subjectivity), “to speak Bolshevik.” Everything else – from terror to outer space – is already a consequence.

This logocentric approach creates a huge blind spot. After all, a person becomes what he is, not only because of what he is told, but also because of the objects that surround him, the spaces in which he lives. If you add things to words, the history of Soviet subjectivity may turn out to be a little different than the one we are used to. Golubev does not write about this directly, but the conclusion suggests itself: in their semi-blindness to the material world, Sovietologists are like the Soviet ideologists themselves. They see official dialectical materialism and rightly discern a construct in it, but they do not see the true relationship with the things that are hidden behind it. Golubev calls these relations “spontaneous materialism” (using Engels’ term, but filling it with a new meaning). “Thing Life” is a series of essays highlighting this elemental materialism from different angles. All of them are devoted to seemingly marginal phenomena; all seem to be unrelated, but in fact form an extremely curious network.

Magazines print instructions for assembling everything in the world – from vacuum cleaners to airplanes – from improvised means, and their reader, the average representative of the engineer, feels his life is part of a great scientific and technological progress. At the same time, the shortage of necessary goods is not becoming an omnipresent disaster, but a source of inspiration for creativity. Modeling airplanes, ships and other military and civilian equipment turns out to be a way of asserting ideas about history, completely cleansed of the class struggle, filled with national pride and the exploits of great people (designers, pilots, captains), that is, alternative to the official ideology. Children create this historical narrative literally with their own hands. The authorities are starting a new building program, hoping that affordable houses and well-arranged microdistricts will contribute to a better organization of life, but everything does not go according to plan. Passage and utility rooms become spaces for the socialization of marginalized youth: boys and girls get to know each other, drink, learn about life, sort things out and have sex in porches, garages and basements. Urban space is appropriated, rethought and largely determines their future life trajectories (which in turn becomes a source of concern for the authorities). In the 1980s, the plot about the unplanned use of public spaces takes on a dangerous development: bodybuilders, who are at odds with the “official” Soviet physical education, equip their rocking chairs in the basements, and from them the Luber subculture arises. And so on.

Briefly, the main idea of ​​these essays can be formulated as follows: sometimes being really determines consciousness. Far from the most remarkable circumstances – whether the light is on in the entrance where the TV is located, what crafts are collected at the school circle – turn out to be key to the formation of a person’s identity. The Soviet material here provides space for fascinating investigations.

One of the most ingenious moves in Golubev’s book: in various manifestations of late Soviet materiality, he discovers the paradoxical heritage of the avant-garde era. So the jock, who is in an almost intimate relationship with his “iron” (barbells, weights, etc.), turns out to be the reincarnation of an avant-garde man-machine in the spirit of Alexei Gastev’s fantasies. The practice of amateur designers collecting and reassembling things from auxiliary junk (into which, if desired, the whole world could be turned), seems to be a curious successor to the production ideology of the industrialization era. The practice of post-war restoration of wooden architecture, with its pathos of cleansing from accretions, the search for the ideal state of things, inherits the techniques of constructivist architecture, which also sought to clear the building of everything superfluous, to present a pure form; only instead of organizing the life of the future, the goal here becomes the creation of a perfect, never-existing past.

Golubev’s method is a method of bringing together seemingly distant things. This is his strength – the ability to generate unexpected moves, and this is also some of his problematic. In order to come together, things must remain separate. So the era of industrialization and avant-garde, with its techno-utopianism, the pathos of conquering the world and remaking human nature, and the late Soviet era, with its triumph of private life, rejection of the future and fixation on the past, with its slightly ridiculous, toy texture (perfectly caught in the chapter on models) turn out to be not moments of one complex continuum of the Soviet time, but two, as it were, separate and self-contained worlds, precisely because of this separation, capable of calling each other with paradoxical rhymes. The same generally applies to the two main spaces for the book – the material world and the world of language, ideology, history. In order to repeat the gesture of crossing this boundary, to reveal the influence of the first on the second, this boundary must be drawn again and again, which is why a certain mechanistic character arises in the analysis. However, this mechanic has an important political or even ethical dimension. The history of ideas appears in Golubev as the history of victors in power—that is, the state and the intelligentsia. The history of Soviet things is also valuable because it focuses on marginalized spaces, suspicious for this government, such as basements and dark entrances. The conclusion here is clear: things can sometimes speak for those who have no words. This political potential of the method is certainly valuable.

Alexey Golubev. Material life: the materiality of late socialism. M.: New Literary Review, 2022. Translation: Tatyana Pirusskaya

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