Everyday Life Under Communism: Practices and Objects

Abstract

Why should we consider the everyday life of ordinary citizens in their countless struggles to obtain basic consumer goods if the priorities of their leaders lay elsewhere? For years, specialists of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies neglected the history of everyday life and, like the so-called “totalitarian” school, focused on political history, seeking to grasp how power was wielded over a society that was considered immobile and subject to the state's authority. Furthermore, studies on the eastern part of Europe were dominated by political scientists who were interested in the geopolitics of the Cold War. The way the field was structured meant that little attention was paid to sociological and anthropological perspectives that sought to understand social interaction.

‘Two children to make ends meet’: the ideal family size, parental responsibilities and costs of children on two sides of the Iron Curtain during the post-war fertility decline

“…However, recent studies of everyday lives under capitalism and communism offer a different narrative. They have shown that individual realities on both sides of the Iron Curtain were, in fact, not that different and often surrounded by similar struggles to meet certain living standards and private life aspirations (Carter, 1997;Gerchuk, 2000;Reid, 2002Reid, , 2009Reid & Crowley, 2000;Zakharova, 2013). More importantly, the convergence in fertility rates in Western and Eastern Europe around the two-child family ideal also suggests that some similar processes were happening on the micro-level.…”

Lenin as a Child Visual Propaganda and Pedagogy

“…The second aspect is historicizing visual technologies, the effects of mediation: in my analysis, this feature appears at the mutual influences and interactions between painting and photography, framing and changing the visual (similar to what these days we might refer to as "photoshopping"). There have existed a lot of unreflected topoi of the socialist pedagogy, a special visual space with activities, symbols, icons, and leaders, like Lenin -his figure was included in the everyday experience of communism (Zakharova 2013), and this visuality formed our social constructions in an unnoticed manner. That is the third reason for emphasizing the importance of such interpretations.…”