Conclusions

This chapter summarizes the observations pointed out in the book about the materiality of Soviet objects such as stairwells, weightlifting equipment, and television sets. It concludes that these were created by hybrid social creatures whose practices were influenced not only by ideology and language but also by things around them, and as a result, Soviet artifacts have their politics. The chapter describes elemental materialism as a part of the cultural logic of late socialism. It supplied officials and intellectuals with persistent and routinely reproduced metaphors that assessed people through their mastery of professional equipment, consumption practices, and hobbies. It also influenced the social topography of late socialism. The chapter talks about soviet objects and spaces, and how they interfered in the processes of subjectivation by suggesting forms of selfhood that fell out of the civilizing frameworks of the Soviet enlightenment project. It discusses soviet materiality and how it acquired its historical agency through the bodies of people who were fascinated with various material objects of late socialism and for whom these objects were instrumental in suggesting and objectifying their individual and collective selves. Material objects of late socialism encapsulated different and often conflicting visions of the past, present, and future, structured the social landscape, and suggested various forms of navigating through it. Examining the ways they did so makes it possible to better understand Soviet society as a complex historical phenomenon.

When Spaces of Transit Fail Their Designers

This chapter looks at the mass housing program launched by the Soviet leadership in the late 1950s from the perspective of urban planning and management. It looks into the transit spaces of new socialist neighborhoods, focusing on the stairwells of Soviet apartment blocks. Designed as utilitarian spaces for the fast passage of people from home to work to leisure activities, they revealed an ability to accumulate people and connect them in various ways, which Soviet authorities and intellectuals often interpreted as threatening to the public good. The Soviet stairwell established different affective regimes of Soviet people's interactions with urban space and provoked some of the hidden social conflicts of late socialism that became reflected in socially dominant structures of the Soviet self. The communities discussed in the chapter are predominantly male. The material and social conditions of late socialism provoked different regimes and forms of masculinity, which is another important topic of this book.

Time in 1:72 Scale

This chapter explores the scale model hobby in the USSR, focusing on models as objects that made manifest the historical imagination inherent in Soviet technopolitics. Models, especially when assembled in collections, challenged Marxist interpretations of history and helped organize the Soviet historical imagination along national lines. As with their prototypes, scale models were also affective but in a different way, because of their ability to showcase Soviet industrial and technological capabilities and to stand as a synecdoche for historical progress. The miniaturization of history in its particular technocentric and national understanding made models performative, as they organized history into a spectacle for the educated male gaze of Soviet model enthusiasts. The chapter also addresses the themes of the public space, performativity, and visuality.

The Men of Steel

This chapter continues the exploration of the marginal urban spaces of late socialism from a slightly different perspective, as it examines the peculiar phenomenon of basement bodybuilding in the late USSR. Driven by the transnational imagery of the cultured male body as hypermuscular, many Soviet teenagers and men turned to weightlifting equipment with its power to help achieve muscle gain and transform their bodies into cultured bodies. At the same time, the failure of Soviet bodybuilding to become part of the official sports system led to its social marginalization, which became visible in social topography. The Soviet press repeatedly denounced basement bodybuilding as a criminal activity. But for most people who engaged in it, it was a form of acquiring strength, health, self-assurance, and — through it — social agency, which many of them interpreted as loyalty to the dominant symbolic and political order.

Techno-Utopian Visions of Soviet Intellectuals after Stalin

This chapter explores the link between material objects and the different temporalities of post-Stalinist Soviet society. The chapter looks at the productivist language of late socialism as a discursive framework that inspired and produced Soviet elemental materialism and was itself inspired and reproduced by it. Productivist language linked a vision of the grand Soviet future with technological objects and sought a rational social organization along industrial production and scientific progress. It abducted the imagery of Soviet factories, machines, vehicles, and space rockets, immersed it into the hermetic space of visual and textual representations, and used it to define, for the Soviet symbolic order, the position of the USSR at the cutting edge of technological progress. In this discourse, technologies and technological objects secured the possession of the present and future of human history for Soviet society, as well as ensured the superiority of the USSR in its competition with the Western bloc. The perceived might and transformative agency of Soviet technological objects made them affective for the Soviet public, and they became translated into distinctive discursive practices — vernaculars of the Soviet Techno-Utopianism — that sought to transform the Soviet material world but instead represented rigorous forms of self-making. In addition to affect and its politics, the chapter introduces several other key themes that are discussed in the following chapters, including the idea of making oneself by making things, which Soviet educators and ideologists understood in terms of the development of creativity, and the performativity of objects.

Introduction

This chapter gives a brief history of and defines the term “elemental materialism” as a culturally rooted recognition of the power of matter and things to shape human bodies and selves, which is a prominent feature in the Soviet system of signification that regulated the production of meanings on a daily basis. The chapter raises the question on the place of elemental materialism in the ideological landscape of late socialism. It explains that a focus on things, on their ability to organize society, communities, and human bodies and selves can account for a more complex understanding of historical change in modern societies in general. The chapter discusses approaches to the study of material objects, and previous studies that have been done for body and material culture. It talks about studies done by Bronislaw Malinowski and Igor Kopytoff, Pierre Bourdieu and Daniel Miller, and Sergei Tretiakov and Viktor Shklovsky. Finally, it discusses materiality as an integral part of the study of Soviet politics.

Ordinary and Paranormal

This chapter investigates how the television set as a material object changed the Soviet domestic space and Soviet selfhood. The chapter brings together most of the topics discussed in the book. It looks at the social conflict between the educated class and marginalized groups in Soviet society, which found its manifestation in public debates over the presumably healing or harmful effects of the television set. The chapter focuses on the material form in addition to the content of television to argue that its inclusion in the Soviet home instigated new forms of identity performances that cannot be reduced to the content of television programs but can rather be traced to the physical nature of television as a medium of mass communication. Focusing on the phenomenon of paranormal seances broadcast on Soviet television in 1989, the chapter explores the various ways in which Soviet television audiences discovered that the television set had power over their bodies and selves, as well as looks at different forms of social reaction that this discovery caused in late Soviet culture.

History in Wood

This chapter turns to other types of material objects that were capable of performing history: timber buildings associated with cultural heritage and historical ship replicas. The last three decades of the Soviet Union evidenced a fast growth in the number of heritage sites related to traditional wooden architecture. The chapter examines the museumification of old architecture as a process that was similar to the scale modeling hobby in its politics, but stimulated the nationalist understanding of Soviet history in its Romantic, rather than Techno-Utopian, interpretation. In particular, the chapter shows how wood, a traditional building material, became a symbol that objectified the “deep cultural roots” of Soviet society and served, because of its texture, as a living witness of its authentic history.