I checked my blog stats for the first time today and discovered to my great surprise and delight that at least two people stop by here on any day. And then surprise and delight were replaced by shame. I have not been posting a lot lately. I’m sorry. I’ll pour some ashes on my head and then go eat a pancake. Because today Russia celebrates Maslenitsa, so I’m really supposed to do both.
I’d also like to shamelessly direct you to off the bone, where you can find out more about this odd tradition.
I have largely moved from the archives to the museum of Uralmash history. Uralmash – short for “Ural machine-building plant” – was an industrial giant built in 1933. It turned iron ore into heavy factory machinery in the 30s, into tanks and artillery during the war, and into excavators and oil drilling equipment starting in the 50s – as well as into spoons, bed posts and shovels. Uralmash is still around and is still a town within a town – with its own well-planned topography, landmarks, even specially designed trash receptacles in the streets – and it maintains a strong sense of its historical importance. Hence the museum – a fantastic collection of photographs, memoirs commissioned from the plant’s veterans, personnel files, gifts from India and Romania (the factory sent many of its engineers to give consultations abroad), and lovingly constructed models of excavators and oil drills.
The museum is run by Nina Georgievna, an incredibly energetic middle-aged woman who has personally typed about 80% of cards in the card catalog and spends her days organizing temporary exhibitions and community events in the museum space, giving local history lectures to middle-schoolers, and nursing a dream to expand the Uralmash museum into a museum of the history of technology. She is the museum’s only full-time employee, but recruits a menagerie of volunteers – an artist friend to set up a new exhibit with her twelve-year-old daughter, a bright-eyed factory veteran to lead a walking tour to the historic water tower (a gorgeous example of constructivist architecture). She wears her curly hair in an unruly ponytail that has a life of its own – a puppy attuned to the mood of its owner – playfully messy when Nina Georgievna drinks tea and tells me about her last visit to St. Petersburg, frantic when the conversation turns to museum’s funding, suddenly sombre and severe when we discuss the history of repressions at Uralmash.
Reading memoirs is a luxuriously different proposition from reading Soviet government documents. I get excited in the archives, and I find some delightfully revealing things, but the raw emotion of memoirs, especially wartime memoirs, makes it easier to remember that I’m thinking and writing about real people. Actually, I think it may be one of the reasons why more is written on the history of the Soviet 20s and 30s than its 50s and 60s.
There are many other plausible explanations for this. We are historians – we take things in chronological order. More of the earlier documents – the really interesting ones – have been declassified. Origins, when things change rapidly and abruptly, are more interesting than carryings-on, when things change more slowly and incrementally. The 30s have the great famine, great terror, great utopianism and great industrialization; the 50s and 60s have corn, television, and dreams of separate apartments for everyone. And Cold War, but people who study that don’t usually cross over to social history.
But one just needs to look at the archives to see what I mean. Pick a long-lived institution and look through the inventory of its archival records, beginning to end, and you’ll see bureaucracies settling in, sinking into a vocabulary, replacing names with numbers. A “meeting to discuss the purging of the student body, 1933″ may be fundamentally about the same thing as “report on admissions, 1958,” but the former is more legible: you can pick it up and read names, arguments, sob stories, you can actually begin to learn what happened in that university room in 1933 and why. The latter is probably a folder of tables – lots of data, but almost meaningless at the first glance and incomplete without many other types of documents. And there are more folders like this the further you go.
And in my dream world they would be scanned and OCR’ed and put into databases so I can finally learn some statistical analysis and use this enormous wealth of data to go with my memoirs. And don’t think pages of tables and formulas, please – think a text like Freakonomics, but about the Soviet society, not present-day America. That could really be something.
I’ll write up some of my dissertation-y musings, but for now I bring you news from the Uralmash girls’ dormitories, 1959:
“Even in dormitory #2, which is very cultured, there are these festering sores. Take, for example, the retired auntie Shura Perunova, who lives in a separate little room in this dormitory, the supervisors’ room. The whole factory knows her name already. Even such a firm person as the dorm administrator comrade D. is helpless before her. As a rule, auntie Shura is always drunk, and in such a state she goes “on duty” at the dorm’s entrance, calls out to the “young and handsome” and responds to all attempts of censure by swearing like a sailor. The whole collective of several hundred people can’t get auntie Shura to behave.”
The girls clearly needed to call the guys from shop #41:
“The neighborhood watch brigade of shop #41, which consists of 148 people and is lead by a Communist, comrade Z., does really excellent work. This brigade skillfully combines methods of verbal and physical persuasion, and when shop #41 is on duty violators of public order walk on tiptoe.”
When I walk into my grandparent’s apartment I don’t know what to do with my elbows. It’s tiny, in a crumbling Khrushchev-vintage five-story building, gently falling apart. Not like the horror-story apartments you sometimes see on the news – with rusty exposed pipes, plaster peeling off the ceiling, screaming babies in damp cots in the background, buckets on the floor to catch water drips – hopeless suicidal dwellings on IV drips. In my grandparents’ apartment things simply retire with a sigh and other things rearrange themselves to take up the slack. A pink plastic bucket takes the place of a flushing mechanism. A flower basked lined with a plastic grocery bag edges out a cracked trash can. A box of matches sits next to a broken lighter. Cracked mugs move to the back of the cupboard, replaced by their rested comrades on the front lines.
I remember the place being spacious. Remember playing on a particular patch of the common room floor, an awkward niche two feet by six. Remember hiding in the broom closet and reading for hours with a flash light. Now I alternate between anxiety over breaking something with an clumsy step, a turn, a gesture and a desire to take control of this space by stopping its slow decomposition, fixing things, throwing away the old ones, buying the new. It’s inherited, this desire. For as long as her health allowed, my grandmother conducted quixotic, feverish annual repairs, refusing help and overriding objections – repainting floors, scrubbing walls and kitchen cabinets, carrying bags of old newspapers out to the dump, replacing kitchen rags. My mother, after moving out, engineered upgrades during summer visits – new fridge, new pipes, new door and locks. I replace, annually, sponges and dish detergent, broken lighting fixtures, clocks, radio sets, scrub the pots and use the long-unused cooking utensils.
My grandfather is the only person who has always been comfortable in this apartment, never felt the need to change anything except the light bulb in his desklamp. Nothing else on his territory ever broke (book shelves, desk, a closet with acidic, crumbling, alphabetized papers), and he could leave the rest of the space be. He is the only one still living in it, and the apartment feels oddly spacious again, but still tiny and fragile.
I’m currently researching the part of my dissertation where my engineers get prosecuted by the state. Or don’t, as the case may be. The jury (i.e. statistical analysis and close reading of documents) is still out, but it seems like they’ve been able to get away with a hell of a lot compared to what we think we know about their working conditions in the 1930s.
A guy is almost three hours late for work, during the war, in a defense enterprise, and the decision to expel him from the party is overturned. Another falls asleep while supposedly guarding a metallurgy lab (while everyone is out for the 7 November celebrations), someone steals lab keys as a result, and he only gets a reprimand. Two workers die in a mine shaft because it runs near an old flooded mine that’s not marked on any maps and collapses: a criminal investigation begins, just about everyone with any authority gets accused at some point, but the whole thing grinds to the halt and the blame is shifted to unidentified engineers of the OLD mine who didn’t submit their maps to the ministry. Every single thrasher produced by a factory in three months gets sent back because it doesn’t work – and not a single person loses their job. Not quite the way one imagines a rule of terror. Interesting. I can’t get a general picture here – general statistics are in Moscow (and quite, quite possibly on microfilm at Lamont – ha!), but I’m getting nice details.
I’m also getting my pdf tables typed into excel so I can actually analyze wage and housing data. By the new boy in the archives, who has nothing else to do – it’s getting close to New Year’s, so no-one wants to teach him or start a new project and I suggested he works on my stuff, and he was even excited. My god. I hope the bookstore he likes sells gift certs – I don’t think he’ll take cash, and he just told me off for not having read Dostoyevsky. (No, I really haven’t. No, I’m not planning to do it in the near future. No, he’s not going to recommend me any modern Russian writers until I fill that shameful gap in my literary education. *facepalm*)
Speaking of being told off, the other day a lady at a little book counter in the university lobby shamed me for no less than five minutes for “not treating a book nicely” when I started flipping its pages. I got a lecture about how to tell if a book is useful (hint: DO NOT FLIP PAGES! IT RUINS THE BOOK FOR LIFE!) that concluded with a theatrical sigh and a mournful declaration that I “don’t love books.”
And some colleagues say that Russians are supposed to be accepting and nonjudgmental. I bet they never tried to talk about literature.
I got almost no work done this afternoon. I showed up at the archive and all, but my documents didn’t show up until four, and even then the ruckus in the room was such that focused reading was perfectly impossible and I couldn’t skim, because I just started on an entirely new collection. Criminal case files. They look exciting, but I’ll write more about them later. I want to write about the ruckus.
The general ruckus was due to there being a new boy on staff. The rest of the staff consists of two very pretty girls and a rather paternal boss, and the rest of the staff is excited. There’s no flirting, yet, but the girls talked a bit louder than usual, and laughed a little more, and the air was thick with expectation. The boy is quite cute, in a dark and brooding sort of way, and reads literary journals. Heh. I really want to write more about the soap opera that is the archive, but that feels a bit too much like gossiping. Maybe I should learn to write fiction and turn it into a short story…
My personal ruckus had to do with the staff’s growing misperception of me as an online research guru and of the internet as a land of opportunity. These people are starved for books. Academic books. In English. Online, and free, if possible. They slip notes with titles onto my lap, and I explain that it would be almost impossible to find the full text of a book online, but maybe that author also published articles? What about book reviews? Yes, ok, we can meet in the university computer lab and search and maybe toss something together. And have you heard of that author, too?
I may have promised someone a book from the States.
It may not be good for my productivity, but I hope it’s good for my academic karma. Besides, I’m probably in karmic debt right now. I wonder if it can be paid with cookies.
I spent my Thursday night jumping around and howling songs in a crowd of college students. If you cannot quite imagine me doing that, take heart – my husband cannot either. The occasion was a Brainstorm concert – they are a band from Riga, and I went to see them as much out of nostalgia as out of love for their music. I’m not good at describing music, but they have streaming audio on their website, so you can go and listen. It’s energetic and pretty cheerful rock, with a bit of angst thrown in and nice lyrics.
They actually sound better on CD than in concert. But as performers they are fantastic.
The lead singer, Reinars, is this short, skinny guy, who looks a little creepy and dresses like a dork: he started in a black shirt with purple pinstripes and a stripy vest with a brown cloth flower pinned to the lapel, then changed to a stripy t-shirt, which also quickly got soaked. He can make his voice sound like a banshee’s wail, and does these weird zombie things with his arms. He leaps on stage. He jumps to the beat, in perfect synchrony with the guitarist (the guitarist’s head is shiny bold, and he wears a white brocade vest on his bare torso). His eyes are a bit wild. His hair is soaked and ruffled. Within minutes, every girl in the audience is in love with him.
They work for it. I don’t remember seeing another band playing so much for the audience – they repeated favorite verses a bit more slowly so people could sing along, asked for favorite songs, and once switched from their own song to a popular Russian rock cover – to the same rhythm, and barely skipping a beat, which brought the audience to its knees. Twenty minutes into the concert, they sang a gentle song in Latvian, and the crowd joined hands and brought out lighters, and I was so happy I almost cried, and somebody, in the end, yelled “Dievs sveti Latviju!” (the first line of the national anthem), and Reinars gave a little wave in their direction, with an impish grin.
*heart*
I went for a walk on a lake today. A few miles. It’s a big lake. And what I wanted most of all, for an hour and a half, was for someone to call me and ask me where I was, just so I could say “On the Shartash lake. Close to the middle, I think.”
If you’ve known me for more than a year, you’ve probably heard me gripe about winter and threaten to move to California. What I’m realizing here is that I don’t hate winter at all. I just hate winter in Boston.
I found the architecture commission stuff, in the most obvious place. Feel like an idiot. When in doubt, check the guide…
I will be sorely tempted to get a research assistant to type in all the stats I’m finding.
Missing: a few hundred pages of questionnaires. I hope they at least went to a big archive in the sky, and not a hundred little wastepaper baskets.
Mr Rempel, DSc, gave a lecture on “Atomic energy and its uses” in the Sverdlovsk psychiatric hospital, to a 62-person audience.
Countless Komsomol membership cards were stolen in trams. One, however, was “cut up into little pieces by [the bearer's] younger brother while [the bearer] was in the next room,” one burned in a house fire, and one was left in a Leningrad apartment which the bearer fled when the bombing began. Everybody’s cards were replaced (after a reprimand), but the Leningrader was excluded from Komsomol for “careless treatment” of the card.
