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Visitors to contemporary Russia find themselves surrounded by things ‘made in the USSR’ – buildings, streets, statues. Yet there was once also a vast world of less imposing, though no less significant, Soviet-made objects—the taksofon (public telephone), for example, and the budenovka (soft woollen soldier’s cap with a red star), papirosy (cardboard-tipped cigarettes) and the ‘Bolon’ia’ plashch (a thin, unlined nylon raincoat). This module analyzes the meaning and impact of such material things in the USSR over the decades, exploring in tandem their biographies and the life-cycle of the Soviet society that used them.

As cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues, ‘persons and things are not radically distinct categories, and …the transactions that surround things are invested with the properties of social relations’. Radical theorists of the Soviet 1920s, advancing similar claims, conjured up not only a new Soviet person, but a whole new universe of Soviet objects as their helpmeets and educators. What does the actual Soviet-made material world, in theory and in practice, have to teach us about Soviet experience? Was there a distinctive material culture in the Soviet Union? How did it differ from western material culture, and how did it change over time? What was the relationship between Soviet things and the evolution of key institutions like the family, the army, the party, and the gulag, between the design of everyday objects and the worlds of ‘high’ politics and ‘high’ culture? Can things be historical actors?

This module will introduce students to material culture studies by reading the work of major theorists and historians and by analysing objects, thereby preparing students to develop dissertation topics.