MICHELE RIVKIN-FISH University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Tracing landscapes of the past in class subjectivity:

Practices of memory and distinction in marketizing Russia
A B S T R A C T
The creation of class subjectivities is an important but understudied topic for social memory studies, particularly in former socialist contexts. Soviet policies generated fertile conditions for the intertwining of class subjectivity and popular memory by deploying the categories of intelligentsia and worker as reied, enduring, and oppositional groups and privileging these groups in contradictory and often hypocritical ways. In this article, I explore the traces such policies left on contemporary, educated Russians sense of themselves as long-standing victims of class-based dispossession. Ethnographically, I examine debates I had with Russian friends about Mikhail Bulgakovs popular novel, Heart of a Dog, which depicts the Bolsheviks establishment of power in the 1920s through the eyes of an elite physicianscientist. Exploring Russians reactions to this story and their sense of its broader relevance reveals how aspiring middle-class subjects embraced a narrative of the Soviet past to justify the emerging inequalities of market reforms. Narrative landscapes of the socialist past illuminate a politics of victimization and moral restitution that underlies the contemporary embrace of inequality and stratied consumption. [memory, class, stratied consumption, health care, postsocialism, Russia]

The rich never have enough money, and the poor will always nd it. Anna Petrova, chief midwife of a St. Petersburg maternity hospital

n the early 1990s, Russian state ofcials granted clinics and hospitals permission to begin offering fee-for-service options in selected service spheres, such as childbirth. Hospitals in large cities immediately began remodeling to accommodate patient desires for privacy and more comfortable conditions. Prices for these luxury services started at $90$150 at the beginning of the 1990s, amounts that surpassed doctors monthly wages and that have continued to rise to the present; by 2008, one of the most expensive hospitals in St. Petersburg priced its deluxe services at $4,240 for births without complications (Avaclinic 2004). During eldwork I conducted on reproductive health reforms from the early 1990s to early 2000s in St. Petersburg, providers spoke avidly about the people who paid for these new services. When I asked Anna, the head midwife of one maternity hospital, whether many women clients were able to pay for comfort, privacy, and better equipment, she shifted the focus of discussion away from money itself to suggest that what was at stake was not peoples nancial situation but their values. The rich never have enough money, and the poor will always nd it, Anna replied. Vera, the head midwife of another maternity hospital, echoed this assumption and lauded the 10 percent of birthing women in St. Petersburg who did pay for such comfort services. She explained that those who paid the fees for private rooms cared more about their health and were on a higher level than the majority of people. For Vera, spending decisions and habits were evidence of the type of person one was, and paying for health care proved ones high moral caliber. Both Vera and Anna diverted my questions about inequality into discussions of peoples choices and priorities, their values, and their consciousness. The two womens comments symbolically authorized the privileges of the aspiring middle class and elite and fetishized money spent on health care as a sign of enlightenment. Although such statements were commonplace among health experts, none took into account the ease or difculty with which people can access money, the unequal extent of contacts

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 7995, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.01110.x

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 1 February 2009

and support systems that enable some but impede others, and the distinct skill sets that differently situated people bring to the process of nding money for things they valuein short, the complex ways socioeconomic positions shape health practices. And, although in the early 1990s, many providers recognized that nancial hardship would preclude most women from choosing paid births, by the end of the decade, discourses that emphasized patients personal decisions and moral values drowned out recognition of the uneven playing eld.1 Consumers of paid health services came to be seen as members of a deserving class, their payments naturalized as an index of their social identity and moral stature.2 This logic of mapping moral caliber onto class distinctions also emerged in health providers tendency to blame poor and marginalized people for their health problems. Even as providers regretted the withdrawal of state resources for public health needs, many explained womens health problems as largely a result of peoples spiritual, moral impoverishment or their low level of culture (Rivkin-Fish 1999, 2005). Our women have a low level of culture. They come into the maternity hospital about to give birth having not read anything to prepare themselves. They hide in the bathrooms to smoke, and dont want to listen to the doctors. So staff at the maternity hospital where I conducted 12 months of eldwork in the mid-1990s frequently complained. Time and again, health care providers told me that Russias poor reproductive health indicators were the result of the populations ignorance and apathy.3 Experts did not consider this supposed lack of knowledge to stem from the unavailability of effective educational programs, or conict and violence in womens reproductive relations, or an overall sense of lack of control over ones life, or a combination of these factorsbut, rather, from womens own, pervasive failure to take responsibility for their lives. These discourses suggest that health care is becoming a vivid site from which to analyze emerging common sense about social inequality in contemporary Russia.4 What follows is an attempt to explain the ideological embrace of stratied consumption in health care services at a time when Russian leaders were actively dismantling the countrys social safety net and intensifying the stratication of society. Market economics, with its severe upheavals and increasing vulnerability for the vast majority of Russians, has also spawned new desires and offered shifting images of the kinds of lifestyles that are possible. In the process, Russians have experienced a range of emotional responses: On the one hand, they have known profound fear and anger at the loss of social stability; on the other hand, they have acceptedat times, even celebratedgrowing stratication and inequalities (Patico 2005; Shlapentokh 1999). How does one explain this seeming contradiction? In other words, how have market reforms derived legitimacy, even

among those Russianssuch as poorly paid midwives with relatively little chance of reaping their benets?5 Pursuing answers to these questions requires exploring cultural processes that inform the clinic setting but also extend far beyond it. With discourses of payment as individual responsibility continually offered in response to my questions about the difculty of paying for health care, clearly my critical view of growing inequality in Russian society did not resonate with many locals. Yet, methodologically, asking professionals directly about their comments was awkward: Challenging my interlocutors for appearing indifferent to poor peoples plight not only would have put them on the defensive but also would have situated me in a self-righteous position, neither of which likely would have enhanced my understanding of how this logic made sense locally. It was through participant-observation in the lives of close friends in Russia that I came to understand how growing social inequities could be understood as societal progress, a moral form of development. Our conversations took us outside the realm of health care into narrative landscapes of memory, where friends recalled early Soviet policies of class justice as having wrought particularly costly, long-lasting harm to the countrys educated strata, referred to as the intelligentsia.6 Viewing this imagined community as an essentialized social entity that endured, despite incredible hardship, for generations, my friends saw the post-Soviet era as holding the promise that the intelligentsia would nally see its long-deserved privileges renewed.

Social memory studies and post-Soviet change: Toward an understanding of class subjectivities
Numerous themes and goals characterize anthropological interest in social memory, but two overarching concerns stand out: the need to understand how knowledge about a social world gets transmitted, preserved, and altered over time (Olick and Robbins 1998:108) and how interpretations of the past serve as vehicles for the legitimation or contestation of present conditions. The study of memory, thus, ts well within the rubric of practice theory (Bourdieu 1984), and most contemporary work has moved beyond the study of collective memory as a thing to emphasize processes of remembering and forgetting, the dynamics of mnemonic practices, and the deployment of technologies of memory (Olick and Robbins 1998; Paxson 2005). Scholars have examined such key questions as, How do culturally salient narratives of the past get constructed, and what do they omit (Schudson 1992; Trouillot 1995)? Why do they become persuasive, contested, and altered at various moments in time? How does one capture the relationships between personal and collective memory in different contexts (Birth 2006)? And what forms does social memory take? This last issue involves examining varying modes of retrospection and the aesthetics of social remembering, often

80

Landscapes of the past in class subjectivity

American Ethnologist

in commemoration and ritual, as well as efforts to grapple with the loss associated with the pasts irretrievability (Hirsch 1996). The political implications of distinct modes of representing the past, a theme central to studies of the relationship between social memory and identity, inform studies of nationalism, nostalgia, and the search for disjunctures between ofcial and unofcial, alternative narratives of the past (Olick and Robbins 1998). Memory work has been explored as a means of creating connections among and between generations, often through shared mourning for lost and destroyed worlds; it has also been a means for expressing ambivalence about contemporary societal relations, lived in the shadows of horrors past that continue to reverberate (Hirsch 1996). Finally, scholarship addresses the ways performances of social memory rely on larger frames of knowledge that create a sense of shared experience among those who appreciate its referential background while excluding or denying membership to those with alternative perspectives on the past. During the Soviet Unions glasnost era in the mid1980s, recovering hidden and distorted truths of the past became an important strategy for some in Russia to revalorize their personal experiences in relationship to ofcial Soviet accounts. And yet, not long afterward, people grew weary of the continual reassessment of painful historical events, and many Russians became cynical toward claims of historical Truth (Ries 2002). Caroline Humphrey has described this stance as a pervasive rejection of senseless historical facts, a rejection of all these revelations, all this rummaging in our tombs (2002:36). A frequent consequence is that this dilemma strips narration of the Soviet past of legitimate explanation power (Humphrey 2002:36; see also Khazanov 2000). Serguei Oushakine (2007), drawing on Lev Vygotsky, has termed this loss of a means of representing the past in any coherent way aphasia, and he posits that recent nostalgic efforts to resurrect symbols, songs, and rituals of the Soviet era have less to do with a longing for the politics of Soviet life (as most Western observers assume) than with a desire to mine that era for shared experiences and a sense of connection among those who lived through it.7 Using the past as raw material for creating social connections in the present raises the central issue of identity, another arena of complex recongurations since the transitions from state socialism. Although a substantial amount of research on Russia has examined the reshaping of national identity through social memory, the relationship between social memory and the re-creation of class subjectivities has received far less attention.8 Class issues in the aftermath of socialism have been explored ethnographically largely through questions of how shifting economic positions are being built on existing forms of symbolic domination or are generating new possibilities for the expression of identity or both (Caldwell 2004; Dunn 2004;

Feh rv ry 2002; Gapova 2004; Kideckel 2002, 2008; Lemon e a 1998; Mandel and Humphrey 2002; Ost 2005; Patico 2001, 2002, 2005; Ries 2002; Shevchenko 2002a, 2002b; Verdery 1999a, 1999b). Consumption has been an important site for such questions, inasmuch as practices of consumption provide symbolic venues for performing a changing sense of self, conveying messages about ones position in a shifting social sphere, and expressing rejection of, or nostalgia for, the socialist past (Berdahl 1999; Feh rv ry 2002; e a Humphrey 1995, 2002; Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004a, 2004b; Oushakine 2000; Patico 2001, 2002, 2005; Raussig 2002; Shevchenko 2002a, 2002b). I use the concept of class in four ways in this article: First, I use class to refer to objective qualities of groups and persons, considering it a concept that condenses peoples place in the stratied social setting that has shaped their opportunities, both material and symbolic. Second, I explore how class has been a historical category of the state, used for classifying differences and granting attendant privileges. A key discursive object for socialism, the Soviet state deployed class for political manipulation and instrumentalized it for violence and terror. Third, I explore class as a subjective category of identication through which Russian people gave expression to their horizons of opportunity and with which they performed distinction from others. Finally, and this is a central theme of the article, I examine how people deployed class as a signier of distinction that apportioned recognition and prestige to others. The decade of the 1990s was a time when all four of these aspects of class were undergoing rapid and uncertain change. Not surprisingly, the terminology of class identities that existed in the Soviet era was no longer entirely applicable amidst the newly burgeoning opportunities in the market sphere. When poor midwives lauded respectable consumers of paid health care services (i.e., those who were not perceived as rude, boorish, and associated with the maa), they invoked the image of intelligentsia as a signier of what I am calling class distinction. Along with many others in Russia, they reied the imagined community of intelligentsia as an important social entity; indeed, this label was often deployed to convey what can arguably be characterized as a sacred quality, merging and condensing the symbolism of kulturnost (culturedness), high education, and the attendant respect and authority that derive from honesty and moral righteousness. In this article, I use the term intelligentsia as an indigenous category of distinction while working against its reication by highlighting the instability of its borders. For, as Vera, Anna, and my close friend Karina endorsed the symbolic capital of kulturnost and high education long associated with the intelligentsia, they were also longing for bearers of these forms of capital to become recipients of newly available economic comfort. This shift, bringing together traits traditionally associated with the intelligentsia and claims to material privilege,

81

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 1 February 2009

warrants notice: I therefore describe these actors with the analytic term aspiring middle class. Key to my discussion is a recognition that both the intelligentsia and the middle class are imagined communities, with the latter evoking the fantasized Western subject with whom many Russians associated the Western standard of living (as did many Hungarians; see Feh rv ry 2002). e a Aspiring middle-class Russianspeople who usually had higher education and professional positions, although struggling with povertyfound their expectations about who deserved to enjoy material prosperity and dignity pushing up against their sense of who was actually able to do so. Jennifer Patico (2005) has detailed the ambivalence St. Petersburg schoolteachers felt as they grappled with such cultural contradictions of market reforms. With the explosive birth of a consumption society, teachers confronted the reality that their Soviet-era cultural capital was not the currency that would provide them ready access to new, highly visible, forms of prestige. Patico notes that amidst this troubling, seismic shift, a central question gnawed at aspiring middle-class Russians: Is ones level of material privilege supposed to correspond roughly to their moral legitimacy? (2005:480). As the rst decade of market reforms wore on, traditional Russian and Soviet associations between morality and asceticism gave way to a new equation, in which consuming expensive luxury items increasingly became compatible with positively valued images of culturedness and civilization. The hope that worthy, cultured individuals . . . [would] be the proper beneciaries of higher standards of living (Patico 2005:490) made consumerism and the promises of capitalist development appear increasingly salubrious. My argument in this article builds on Paticos ndings to suggest that the gradual eclipse of ambivalence toward markets and money among aspiring middle-class Russians is rooted in complex historical experiencesand local knowledge about the pastthat deserve closer examination. Discourses that narrate the Soviet past, particularly visions about how privilege and suffering, and advantage and oppression, were distributed offer key insights into current logics embracing stratied consumption for those deemed to be the intelligentsia. As I detail below, Soviet policies generated fertile conditions for the intertwining of class subjectivity and popular memory, by deploying the categories of intelligentsia and worker as reied, enduring, and oppositional groups and privileging these groups in contradictory and often hypocritical ways. In the sections that follow, I explore the traces such policies left on contemporary, educated Russians sense of themselves as long-standing victims of class-based dispossession. Specifically, through ethnographic analysis of discussions about the Soviet past and post-Soviet change prompted by Mikhail Bulgakovs novel Heart of a Dog, I reveal the ways aspiring middle-class Russians positioned themselves within a nar-

rative of long-standing victimization of the intelligentsia by the Soviet state. On this basis, new opportunities such as paid health care services that enabled educated groups to undertake practices of distinction became viewed as holding particular legitimacy. Drawing on these conversations about the Soviet past and post-Soviet present inspired by Heart of a Dog, I argue that new privileges for the educated middle class are commonly viewed as realizing moral restitution for the historical dispossession of the intelligentsia by the Soviet regime. Narrative landscapes of the socialist past illuminate the politics of victimization and moral restitution that underlies the contemporary embrace of inequality and stratied consumption.

Class in a classless society

As an analytic category designating social differentiation, class had a complex history in Soviet society. In claiming the revolutionary act of creating a socialist society, the Bolsheviks set out to destroy the capitalist and landowning classes, create a workers state, and eventually eliminate class divisions. Yet social distinctions could not be eradicated altogether, because the state needed them for both ideological and practical purposes. As Sheila Fitzpatrick (1992) has shown, during the rst decades of the Soviet Union, Bolshevik anxieties to distinguish loyal citizens from enemies of the state drew on the language of class to create ofcial categories through which types of people would be known and privileged or discriminated against. With the social structure of the prerevolutionary society undergoing chaotic ruptures due to the revolution and civil war, mass migration due to famine, and purges, class identitieseither in the sense of relationship to the means of production or in the sense of ones position in an established social structurecould not be ascertained. Class identity was, instead, based on social origins, trajectories, and occupational differentiations. Ofcial class-based discrimination was inaugurated with the 1918 Constitution of the Russian Republic (of the USSR), which extended full citizenship and voting rights only to the category of toilers; bourgeois groups were not only disenfranchised but also purged as class aliens from government employment, Communist Party membership, and institutions of higher education. The concept of class justice took hold in the court system, providing leniency for accused persons with a proletariat background. Stigmatization of people with unfavorable social backgrounds continued throughout the 1930s, reaching the level of witch hunts that attacked bourgeois specialists, urban businessmen (Nepmen), and kulaks (supposedly wealthy peasants), the latter of which Stalin infamously aimed to liquidate . . . as a class (Fitzpatrick 1992:26). Although the institutional organization of class war slackened in the latter part of the 1930s, particularly

82

Landscapes of the past in class subjectivity

American Ethnologist

following the Stalin constitution of 1936 that extended the franchise to all citizens, including formerly stigmatized groups, Soviet ascriptive denitions of class continued to shape the systematically politicized kinds of privileges or vulnerabilities that various groups had. A key survival strategy people undertook in this repressive context was to negotiate their ofcial class identity, by avoiding ascription to an undesirable class or moving from an undesirable class to a more acceptable one. By the purges of 193738, the language of class enemies was replaced with the concept of enemies of the people, and social position became the ofcial entry in passports. Social position included worker, employee, kolkhoznik (member of collective state farm), and, for members of the educated white-collar occupations (intelligentsia), specic professions such as doctor, engineer, teacher, or factory director would be listed (Fitzpatrick 1992:34).9 Notably, the label working class also became an ideological tool in this context, rather than a meaningful collective self-representation that united people from similar backgrounds and social positions for shared goals (Hoffman 1994:209215). Hoffman argues that, as early Soviet leaders eliminated independent (nonparty) trade unions, they prevented workers from conceptualizing and struggling for their collective interests, even as they claimed to be the party representing these interests. As a result, he argues, Communist functionaries co-opted the image of the working class and turned the notion of working-class identity into a sterile tool: In the Soviet context, working class symbolized neither collectivity nor revolutionary opposition to the established order. It dened all members of the industrial workforcethemselves in sharp conict with one anotheras supporters of the Soviet government, and it delineated their privileged place in Soviet society (Hoffman 1994:215, emphasis added). As I show below, this association linking working-class people with support for the Soviet government would have long-term, negative effects on the ways mainstream Russian society thought about actual working-class and underclass people, especially in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods. At this point, it is important to note that, for several decades after the establishment of the Soviet Union, class was a discursive term that the state appropriated for its own political interests, from mobilizing support for its rule to deploying terror against those citizens considered enemies. Its use eventually diminished, but the notion that workingclass social position would be linked with state-distributed privileges continued. In the postwar period, shifts occurred in the relationship between the party-state and educated groups, including those categorized or who categorized themselves as intelligentsia. Vera Dunham (1991) describes how the state entered into a Big Deal with educated sectors of Soviet society: In return for their compliance, the regime loosened

demands for the active building of socialism and enabled the pursuit of personal interests, private life. These accommodations to what Dunham calls middle class values were unannounced and barely perceptible yet, nonetheless, amounted to the states partial submission to professionals desires. Educated sectors in branches of the labor force deemed productivethat is, socially signicantgained access to benets that workers did not enjoy, including opportunities related to consumption and leisure. These included benets such as special food packets, club memberships, summer vacation tours, and plots of land to build summer homes. Over time, however, the Big Deal generated not satisfaction but more desirea sense of entitlement that, by the 1990s, was experienced as perpetually unfullled. These contradictory ways that concepts of class and actual privileges were discussed, manipulated, and silenced shaped the ways stratication became knowable in the Soviet era. There were few public discussions of poverty and inequality, but social differentiation was constantly being created and talked about in other terms. One important set of discourses emerged in state-sponsored campaigns to modernize backward groups and extend the civilizing process to peasants, the illiterate, and poorly educated peopleoften referred to as products of poor breeding. A key vehicle for this moral education was the concept of kulturnost, widely accepted as an index of good manners, honesty, education, and decency in interpersonal relations. By the early 1930s, the Soviet state began what became a decades-long, widespread campaign to increase the populations kulturnost, and this elastic concept was associated with everything from cleanliness and personal hygiene to broader notions of a prosperous, civilized lifestyle; it served to legitimiz[e] what had once been thought of as bourgeois concerns about possessions and status (Kelly and Volkov 1998:295). Moreover, the mass media enrolled individuals in the project of continually cultivating their level of kulturnost as the most important means of developing themselves. In 1936, for example, the popular magazine Ogonek invited people to assess their level of knowledge of science, literature, and the arts through weekly quizzes entitled, Are You a Cultured Person? (Kelly and Volkov 1998:301). Erudition and good manners became central elements in Soviet ideals of respectable personhood. In a context in which income differentials and material afuence were less pronounced than in Western settings, performing kulturnost and associating with the Russian intelligentsia became key symbolic practices of dening oneself as a culturedread: digniedperson. The implied Others in this symbolic framework were less educated groups, people whose lack of erudition or indifference to high culture became associated with a lack of civilization and with backwardness. As Catriona Kelly and Vadim Volkov note, the campaign to inculcate kulturnost

83

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 1 February 2009

reached across classes to construct an ideal collective of respectable, decent, educated citizens while those spurning the new values could be seen as riff-raff (hooligans, bohemians) (1998:312). Class identity became associated with lifestyle, values, aspirations; the intelligentsia subject became something necessary to emulate whereas a working-class or alternative aesthetic became highly discredited. Yet ofcial state rhetoric never repudiated its supposed identication with the proletariat. Instead, the policies and practices of distinction that had developed since the Stalin era resulted in an implicit cultural situation in which working class became symbolically associated with a range of negative images, including poor breeding, low levels of culture, support for the Soviet government, and bureaucratic privilege. These politicized hypocrisies of class politics in the Soviet Union shaped popular notions of inequality at work in late Soviet society and continue to inform current notions of justice.

Interpreting Bulgakovs Heart of a Dog: Creating a popular history of early Soviet society
The class-related policies and social ideals described above inform practices of social memory common among aspiring middle-class Russians today. With a narrative of the Soviet era as one of class-based dispossession of the intelligentsia, new forms of stratied consumption such as paid health care services have become valued as a kind of moral restitution for harms perpetrated against deserving, educated groups. I came to see this logic during discussions I had with friends about Bulgakovs popular novel Heart of a Dog in the early 2000s. My friends interpretations of this story generated popular accounts of Soviet history, the nature of its injustice, and the forms of compensation appropriate in its wake. But it took me years to appreciate this storys local signicance.10 Numerous Russian friends over the years spoke of their fondness for Heart of a Dog, but I repeatedly witnessed their enthusiasm with an uncomfortable mix of confusion and dismay. The story seemed to me to celebrate the intolerant pedanticism of an elite professor insisting on exacting norms of propriety. I found its contemptuous portrait of the working class and its Communist leaders artless, viewing it, at best, as an unapologetic, biting caricature of a marginalized population daring to contest its lot. It was my close friend Karina who nally helped me understand the broader referential world that aspiring middle-class Russians brought to their interpretations of Heart of a Dog. During intense conversations about this story, Soviet history, and post-Soviet change, Karina explained the moral economy of class victimization and restitution that she and many others read into this popular narrative. I rst met Karina in 1994 on the prenatal ward of the maternity hospital where I conducted eldwork; she

worked there as a cleaner. Still, dening Karinas class position is not easy. She shared many experiences and constraints with Russians who were decidedly working class. At the same time, she had been raised by parents with university degrees who supported her passion for art, literature, and history. Karina related to the worldviews of the hospitals doctors no less than to those of her housekeeping colleagues. Her educational background and employment prospects indexed hidden processes of discrimination in Soviet society but did not completely capture her lifeworld. Her lack of irony in reading Bulgakovs story and her steadfast respect for the professor were echoed by numerous friends and acquaintances I met over the course of my research, reecting a common logic among people who identify with what Dunham (1991) calls middle class values regarding the signicance of the Soviet system and the necessary paths for healthy societal revival.11 Having developed a long-standing and close friendship with Karina, I was able to ask her honest and pointed questions, both about the comments I had heard concerning poor patients and paying clients as well as about my confusion over local interpretations of Heart of a Dog. Over four intense weeks in the summer of 2001, when she visited me in New Jersey, we watched the lm version repeatedly, discussing and debating its meanings; these conversations continued for several years. Through her patience and openness, I have come to see that the story constructs and reconrms key principles of cultural knowledge for Russias aspiring middle class. It details the characteristics of moral persons, portrays the trials that Communism burdened them with, and depicts the heroic strategies they deployed to survive with dignity. Through this narrative of the early Soviet advance, the story constructs and reies an image of the intelligentsia as an enduring, moral social type with which many contemporary Russians identied. Below, I explore this process by examining three central themes of Heart of a Dog, analyzing my own and my friends divergent interpretations and offering insights from Western historical writing on class in the Soviet Union.

Heart of a Dog: Dramatis personae of an origin myth

Heart of a Dog revolves around the consequences of a wellintentioned medical experiment gone dreadfully wrong. Professor Preobrazhensky, an internationally renowned scientist whose surname means transguration, is devoted to nding the cure for aging. As the tale begins, the distinguished professor is about to embark on the experimental apex of his career. He will surgically insert a human pituitary gland and testicles into a dog to test the potential of interspecies organ transplantation for rejuvenation. First, he locates a suitable street mutt, Sharik, a highly intelligent and tormented character for whom readers feel

84

Landscapes of the past in class subjectivity

American Ethnologist

ready affection. Soon after, he obtains a corpse from the city morgue. The body, as Bulgakov reveals, is that of 25-year-old Klim Chugunin. With no relatives in sight and no traces of social connections, his police record provides the only data about his life. He had earned his wage as a balalaika player in saloons. Arrested three times for ghting, he was released at least once because of his proletariat origins. The most recent brawl had nished him off. Preobrazhensky conducts the operation in his private surgery, which is located in his home. To everyones surprise, the dog survives. More shocking still, it mutates into a form of the unwitting human organ donor. The new creature is a small-framed adult man, capable of rational calculations if of low intelligence, and with the lingering problem of attracting eas. He is a scientic wonder but a great social tragedy. Taking the ludicrous name Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov (printer, son of printer),12 he is crass, offensive, and unruly, a debased, degraded drunk. Although he is physically human, his behavior bespeaks uncivilized, animal originsan irony because his earlier, canine self was far less bestial.13 And that, indeed, is the point: The sympathetic dog, Sharik, has been transformed into Klim Chugunin, the proletarian: The creature Sharikov dresses garishly, eats vulgarly, spews obscenities, spits on the oor, and smokes carelessly, letting his ashes fall on the rug and his clothes. He harasses and attacks women. Sharikov lls the professors household with misery and chaos. The story proceeds to detail the rise of the Communists, represented by the regenerated Sharikov and his Communist leader, Shvonder, who gain increasing power in the new Soviet society. Readers view these events from the perspective of the esteemed Professor Preobrazhensky and his young assistant, Doctor Bormenthal, who represent Russias morally anguished intelligentsia. The two scientists are agonized at the turn of events and steadfast in their refusal to compromise with the Communists. Against the onslaught of the vulgar Sharikov and menacing Shvonder, the doctors struggle to retain their professional integrity and personal dignity. Russians found ample material here for drawing historical analogy. Many explained the attempt to alter the essence of a species, to turn a dog into a person, as a metaphor for the ill-fated, unnatural Soviet project of transforming the crude proletariat into societys leaders.14 The irony that it was the professor himself who created Sharikovas, indeed, it was members of the Russian intelligentsia who led the Bolshevik Revolutionmakes the farce even more tragic. Less metaphorically, my friends drew on Heart of a Dog to argue that the Soviet system originated in an unjust process of attacking the persons and values of the intelligentsia, with their humanitarian aims; dedication to high levels of scientic expertise; traditional norms of interpersonal respect; elite, discriminating tastes; and politics that rejects violence as a means of social change.

The Communists reversed the social hierarchy that privileged the intelligentsia and rewarded, instead, the most uneducated, culturally undeveloped classes. My friends explained that the society of the government of all the people valued the personality traits and behaviors characteristic of the crudely formed masses and Communistssuch as impudence and indifferencewhile demoting and destroying the source of morality and truththe intelligentsia. The Sharikovs and Shvonders had proliferated, risen through the ranks, and wreaked immeasurable damage on Russia. Doctors, professors, educated elites, and intelligentsia had suffered, and the nation had lost. This narrative of Soviet history thus maps comparative levels of suffering and privilege onto historically rooted categories of people, imagined communities whose identities are presumed to be stable and essential. My friends recognized in the professor a real portrait of the enduring Russian intelligentsia, and Sharikov and Shvonder were also understood as representatives of essential social typesproletariat and proletariat supporters.15 Indeed, when Russians referred me to Heart of a Dog, they invoked this account of the early years of Soviet rule as an origin narrative that explained the roots of contemporary social conicts and contradictions. For, as the systematic empowerment of the proletariat continued, I was told, this crude, morally adrift sector of society became the core of the Soviet population, lled the ranks of its bureaucracy, and taught its enduring proletarian values to upcoming generations. The unjust empowerment of people like Sharikov and his descendents was the cause of the interpersonal hostility one frequently encountered in state institutions, including hospitals; doctors cited it to explain poor health outcomes and the indifference to professional recommendations concerning their health that patients supposedly showed. In such interpretations, Heart of a Dog offered a narrative of how the Soviet system distributed suffering and privilege to familiar, enduring social types (classes). In the postsocialist era, the logic goes, these values may again be reversed: The perverse reward system and class hierarchy of Soviet socialism is being eliminated, and educated, professional Russians can nally gain back their long-deserved privilege. Capitalism (and, by extension, the inequality and stratication of consumption that accompany it), the claim goes, will enable Russian society to return to a natural (because not Soviet) form of social hierarchy.16

Imagining the enemy: The proletarian threat

The opposition between the proletariat and intelligentsia depicted by Bulgakov in Heart of a Dog reects the Bolshevik terms of discourse manifest since the earliest years of Soviet society. The mutual hostility between these groups is a central theme of Bulgakovs plot, which unfolds from

85

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 1 February 2009

the perspective of the professor: The story details the nature of the threat the intelligentsia faced with the advent of the Communists, a calamity experienced as an invasion of the intelligentsias personal, domestic life. Readers are led to identify with the professor as he confronts the proletariat as an alien seizing his property, fragmenting it into collective dwellings, and personally occupying it. Sharikov represents the worst nightmare of the communal apartment neighbor, destroying the domestic order and spoiling the safety of home. Bulgakov depicts the proletariat as having vulgar, morally depraved personalities. Klim Chugunin, recall, had no family or friends, worked in a bar playing the balalaika to accompany bawdy folk songs, and got into repeated ghts. Sharikov, his unwitting descendant, is rude, drunk, and preys on women. Just barely literate, he has no patience for complex analyses of Russias social plight: His view of the solution to unequal wealth is summed up in one short phraseJust take everything and divide it up! (Bulgakov 1968:89). The upheaval of traditional values is clearly depicted when Shvonder and the housing committee arrive to seize two of Preobrazhenskys seven rooms and reallocate them in the name of the state. The committee appears as a gang of rebels belligerently confronting the old regime in the person of the professor. The young revolutionaries (one of whom is a woman dressed and groomed as a man17 ) claim legitimacy for their work in the name of equality and justice, but the hatred they spew belies their intentions. The professor sees through their empty Soviet slogans to the evidence of their activities. Since the housing committee took over his building, he exclaims, he has witnessed only destruction, disorder, and disrespect. Over the previous 14 years, while his numerous patients came and went and all 12 apartment doors remained unlocked, not one item of personal or public property had ever been stolen. And yet, he laments, as soon as the Communists arrived in March 1917, every pair of galoshes disappeared, together with the galoshes stand, three canes, a coat, the rug from the front stairway, and the porters samovar. The Communists sullied the staircase with their muddy boots, removed plants from the landing, and boarded up one of the buildings entrances to force people to enter through the backyard. Residents were gathered together nightly for choral singing to rejoice at the advent of a workers state. Meanwhile, the pipes in the toilets froze, the boiler cracked, and the electricity was constantly being turned off. Through Preobrazhenskys tirades against the housing committee, Bulgakov portrays the Communist project from its beginnings as insidious vandalism and the proletariat as a self-serving band of thugs. Klim Chugunin, reincarnated as Sharikov, and the Communist leader Shvonder provide a composite of the proletariat and their supporters as hostile, socially alienated, and ethically unrestrained.18

There is truth in this portrait. Fitzpatrick (1992:218) has detailed how the Bolshevik Party conceptualized the world in terms of binary oppositions: proletariatbourgeoisie, revolutionarycounterrevolutionary, allyenemy, thesis antithesis. The Bolsheviks deployed military metaphors to characterize their battle to transform society, and they targeted representatives of high culture, the intelligentsia. The portrait of belligerence, rowdiness, vulgarity, and drunkenness reects historically accurate, documented behaviors and images of workers, soldiers, and peasants of the era (Chase 1987:173). Yet historical accounts of rural migrants in Moscow from the end of the 19th century on reveal much closer and more complex social relationships than Bulgakov portrays: Evidence shows that migrants maintained extensive ties with their villages, and support from fellow zemliaki (home villagers) was a crucial resource for new arrivals. Newcomers found work in the city through their village contacts. Moreover, peasant migrants supported each other in cultural ways: In the early part of the century, they maintained their distinctive village folk-song traditions, forming choral groups with fellow villagers (Johnson 1979:75). Historical research reveals a multiplicity of voices, experiences, levels of education, modes of expression, and conicts among working-class people of this era (Hoffman 1994). Mark Steinberg, for example, found that, in 1917, members of an elected soldiers committee expressed their frustration with their constituents behavior by insisting that real freedom called for sacrice of personal material interest and self-restraint to curb the willful exercise of liberty (amoral and self-serving volia), a self-control that was said to be a matter not just of necessity and survival but of duty, honor, morality, and respect for others (2001:11). When I objected to the caricatured portrait of Sharikov as a wholly derogatory image of the working class, Karina countered by drawing on popular knowledge about early Soviet history that reected only part of this evidence. She explained that, as peasants left the rural areas and migrated for work to the cities, they broke away from the mir, the peasant commune that had been the established source of traditional authority and moral boundaries. Ripped away from their roots and ethical constraints, she said, people like Klim Chugunin were not even actual workers but lumpen proletariat. They were employed in factories that provided them with awful living conditions; their main source of entertainment was drinking and partying. It was not Klim Chugunins fault that he had such low culture, she offered, because his living conditions were so bad and his opportunities for improving his level of culture so few. Nevertheless, she asserted, Bulgakovs account of Klim Chugunin as utterly socially alienated, with no family ties, captured the circumstances of thousands of people in between rural and urban worlds who would become

86

Landscapes of the past in class subjectivity

American Ethnologist

beneciaries of the Soviet system and, in turn, Bolshevik supporters. Popular understandings of Soviet history, themselves derived largely from Soviet discourses about class, led Karina and others to consider Bulgakovs portrait of Sharikov reasonable.19

Heart of the intelligent: Morality, truth, and resistance

In Bulgakovs portrayal, the attacks against the existing societal hierarchy are personal. Readers accompany Professor Preobrazhensky through the most intimate experiences of his struggles against the Communists advancein face-toface interactions he has with representatives of the politically ascendant proletariat determined to seize his property and destroy his domestic order. As Karina explained it to me, Preobrazhenskys righteousness emerges clearly in his rejection of violence and terror, his commitment to alternative means of securing safety and power. The bulk of the story explores the professors efforts to cope with and resist the advancing proletariat menace. To dispel the toxic inuence of Sharikov, the professor and his assistant endeavor to train, discipline, socialize, and morally educate him, to cultivate his appreciation for literature and opera, to teach him how to eat with a fork, a knife, and a napkin: Remove that rag from your neck. You . . . Sha . . . just take a look at yourself in the mirror, see what you look like. A clown. Stop throwing butts on the oorI ask you for the hundredth time. And no more swearing in the apartment! No spitting! Here is a spittoon. Take care when you use the toilet. Stop all conversation with Zina [the housekeeper]. She complains that you lie in wait for her in the dark. Look out! Who said to a patient, The son of a bitch knows!? What is this, do you think you are in a saloon? [Bulgakov 1968:6970] But all the professors efforts to civilize Sharikov are in vain. Ungrateful toward his progenitor, Sharikov, instead, follows the lead of the chairman of the local Communist housing committeethe indignant Shvonder, who inculcates Sharikov with Communist ideology. In return for his loyalty, Shvonder secures Sharikov a place on the rungs of societys new ladder: The former hound becomes director of the city service for purging stray cats. When hostilities between the pet-turned-predator and the professor grow, Sharikov produces a denunciation of Preobrazhensky that is based on a mix of lies and exaggerations. In the lived reality of Soviet society, as Russians were palpably aware, this document could have ensured exile if not death. Bulgakov leaves the reader to recall the horric costs actually exacted by vicious neighbors, denunciations, and purges and then ends his tale in fantasy, with the professor successfully reversing the operation and transforming Sharikov back into a dog.

When I told Karina about my discomfort with the professors blatant defense of expertise and societal hierarchy, she offered an alternative view of Bulgakovs hero: The professor is not merely educated; he is a character of personal integrity, self-respect, and accountability in all endeavors. With these qualities, she explained, Professor Preobrazhensky exemplies the Russian intelligent. Karina further explained that society inevitably teems with competing forms of power. What distinguished Preobrazhensky was that his status and privilege were deserved, deriving from his diligent and (mostly) successful scientic achievements to benet society. Paternalistic, not despotic, and authoritative, not authoritarian, the professor established his social dominance through his devoted sense of responsibility. He was generous to his servants, kind to his pet, and accountable to his patients. His loyalty was not to any self-interested political group, Karina emphasized, but to the truths of science and humanism. Whereas I bristled at the unabashed elitism I saw in his disdain for the proletariat, Karina understood him as defending high culture and human integrity from the onslaughts of politically supported vulgarity and violence. The professors efforts to domesticate and civilize Sharikov held considerable interest for my friends. Several compared his faith in enlightenment as a source of moral progress with the long-standing mission of the Russian intelligentsia to redeem their country. Others mocked this comparison as a naive Russian beliefseized on by the Communiststhat nurture could overcome nature for a socially backward population. This view considered people from the working class or underclass to be inherently uncultured, morally irredeemable. Russians who expressed this perspective endorsed the professors goal of raising kulturnost rather than using violence as a means of solving Russias problems, but they nonetheless greatly doubted the potential of moral education to realize effective social change among certain groups of the population. As an esteemed professor of psychotherapy told me in the mid-1990s, using a metaphor I found shocking and disturbing, Society is like a garden: We have to let the owers blossom and we must pull out the weeds. His unstated assumption, of course, was that highly educated experts like himself should determine who counted as a ower and who a weed. Whether or not one believed that the uncivilized Other could be tamed, Bulgakovs Professor Preobrazhensky modeled strategies for defending the traditional values and social status of the educated elite that Russiansfrom a range of social backgroundsapplauded. They related to the humiliations Preobrazhensky endured as the proletariat seized power, and they found his reactions inspiring. As Shvonders and Sharikovs attacks become increasingly intolerable, the professor rmly defends his commitment to humanism, his faith in tradition, and his right to live

87

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 1 February 2009

without state intervention. When the Soviet housing committee initiates its expropriation of his rooms, Preobrazhensky defends his rights to work and live with dignity. Fighting the seizure of his dining room and examining room in the name of revolution and equality, he insists, I shall dine in the dining room, and operate in the surgery! You may report this to the general meeting, and now I beg you to return to your respective business and allow me to take my meal where all normal people take theirs, that is, in the dining room, and not in the foyer or the nursery (Bulgakov 1968:27). For Russians painfully familiar with the indignities of having to work, entertain guests, eat meals, and conceive and raise children all in the same cramped space, his outrage seemed just. They saw the professors refusal to acquiesce, his self-assurance in the face of direct affronts to his ability to live a normal life, as cause for applause. Cheering his objections to this social system, my friends agreed with his image of the Bolshevik project as an illicit, criminal attack on his dignity and individualism and as the unwarranted destruction of a cultured, respectable social order. I came to appreciate this applause as I sat with Karina in the small, dilapidated one-room apartment where she lived with her husband and adult daughter. The stubborn resistance to the Communists demeaning of afuent professionals that the story imagines is deeply satisfying. Yet the image it perpetuates of the intelligentsia as pure, moral, uncompromising, and uncompromised is a ction. Identifying with Preobrazhensky as representing an enduring social type obscures the complex historical changes that shaped and reshaped the composition and values of educated groups over decades, as a Soviet intelligentsia was formed and socialized on the basis of shifting values that included a mix of traditional and Communist ideals.20 Instead, Russian fans of the story drew on Bulgakovs image of the intelligentsia to reconrm a nostalgic vision of an essentialized cultural elite whose characteristics endure through time and across historical circumstances; and it was this idealized intelligentsia that was the imagined, deserving recipient of a renewed system of class privilege in the post-Soviet era. Of course, such images sideline important questionsabout how educated groups were implicated in Soviet power as well as how educated elites, no matter how morally anguished and committed to honesty and fairness, have inevitably been entangled in power relations that have perpetuated multiple forms of inequality, whether in imperial, Soviet, or post-Soviet societies. The essentialized character of class memory made possible by the images in Heart of a Dog makes avoiding such questions so easy.

when several friends and acquaintances referred to it to explain Soviet history and society to me. People drew on the narrative to explain the dysfunctional roots of their society, to make sense of their daily lives, and to elaborate on the moral kinds of transformation they desired. The personas of the storySharikov, Shvonder, and the professoreven if caricaturesseemed familiar to them; in turn, the storys images reconrmed essentialist views of social class that many people found useful to draw on for present-day purposes.21 People recalled these characters to represent not xed social roles such as the doctor and layperson but to designate the internal characters of supposedly enduring social types based on class. Thus, in conictual contexts of state power such as a hospital, patients often viewed providers, and providers often viewed patients, as well as other providers, as the undeserving recipients of privilege and power from the state. They portrayed their adversaries as emotionally impenetrable, aggressively impudent (kham) people, whose social ascendancy reected the unfair and dangerous effects of the perverse Soviet reward systemperfectly depicted by the crude, morally depraved Sharikov. Conversely, people who paid for health care services were viewed as taking responsibility for their condition by aspiring to a higher quality of care than that ensured by the socialist system of equality: The act of payment was seen as literally placing value on ones health and on the work of the professionals caring for it. For Vera, Anna, and Karina, I suggest, these actions evoked the image of the intelligentsiain contrast not only to the supposedly uneducated, apathetic masses but also to another group that was spending money in post-Soviet Russianamely, the stereotyped New Russians. In the 1990s, impoverished but educated Russians viewed people who spent ostentatiously as crass, corrupt, stupid, and lacking ethical values.22 In the case of paying patients assumed to represent the intelligentsia, the use of money for quality health care was read as a sign that class privilege for those with educational and cultural capital was revivinga process perceived as moral restitution for Soviet violence to the intelligentsia over 70 years.

Legitimating stratication: Inequality as moral restitution for the aspiring middle class
I began this article hoping to contribute to an understanding of how market reforms, with their promises of afuence and comfort readily available for only a few and brutal economic dislocations for the majority, became so widely legitimated among educated but impoverished Russians. Why did midwives, themselves struggling with long-standing and unabated poverty, consider paying health care consumers to be morally superior to the 90 percent of patients who relied on free services? At the time of our conversation, Vera lived in one room of a communal apartment that she

Enduring popularity and uses of Heart of a Dog

I became aware that Heart of a Dog had broad resonance for Russians who identied with the educated intelligentsia

88

Landscapes of the past in class subjectivity

American Ethnologist

explained was in too great disrepair for me to visit. Likewise, my close friend Karina derived no economic benets from market reforms; she saw her standard of living and safety net for the future disintegrate before her eyes. And yet she agreed that the existence of paid services represented a degree of societal improvement over socialist equality, for she believed that growing stratication represented the potential for a (deserved) middle-class privilege to develop, generating social stability and a better situation for the entire country. These views are paradoxical on several levels. Discourses demeaning the poor and lauding those who pay for services seem to invert classic Russian visions of human value and morality, in which the poor and those who suffer have been construed as good and innocentbecause ruled by their consciencewhereas the wealthy and powerful were regarded with suspicion. Unlike the Protestant West of Max Webers depictions, where success in business was a sign of ones place among the elect, in Russia poverty has long had a mystical quality to it, and suffering, rather than success, has been associated with spiritual rewards (Pesman 2000; Ries 1997). Jokes that were widespread throughout the 1990s denigrating rich New Russians as stupid and perverse reconrmed these long-standing discourses; they linked corruption and moral compromise with wealth and invoked the idea that spiritual depth was associated with those who refused to engage in business. Yet the popularity of such jokes diminished in the 2000s, and the very category New Russians has become less salient (Patico 2005:491). Market reforms have ushered in traumatic processes for the vast majority of the Russian population.23 They have resulted in drastic cutbacks in health, education, employment, and housingbasic social entitlements that were a core right of citizenship during the Soviet era, even if the state never fullled them to citizens satisfaction. Educated groups, in particular, have seen many of the material and symbolic privileges they enjoyed under state socialism, such as affordable vacations and opportunities to participate in art and cultural events, eroded; today, fashion models and businesspeople have more reason to expect inclusion in high-prole and desirable public events than artists and intellectuals do. And even those who enjoy the benets of the new opportunities afforded by market-based economics often nd that fee-for-service systems, in and of themselves, offer no guarantees of high quality and safety. Paid health care services have developed without strong oversight or regulatory mechanisms, leaving consumers with few protections against the inherent dangers that exist when medicine is made available for prot (Rivkin-Fish 2005). Given all of this, why did those excluded from participating in the commodication of medicine, nonetheless, project cultural capital onto paying consumers? As Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has shown, material capital in and of itself does not create social status; symbolic mark-

ers that resonate with locally authoritative ideologies must be in play for wealth to become a signier of distinction. So, even in the absence of large disparities in economic wealth, as in the Soviet Union, groups who aspired to distinction and recognition could still deploy symbolic markers of prestige. The image of the intelligentsia and claims to kulturnost offered a means of creating such distinction throughout much of the Soviet era. In the 1990s, as material wealth was gradually becoming a new medium for performing ones identity, identifying with the intelligentsia remained a viable form of currencyand for those without access to signicant amounts of money, it was an especially important practice for establishing social respectability. Positively assessing paying medical consumers as responsible allowed health providers to identify with the values of personal responsibility associated with the intelligentsia, despite their own material difculties in displaying such responsible modes of consumption themselves. At stake in their embrace of a system that excluded them from its material benets was the symbolic struggle for personal dignity. The immense power of kulturnost as a symbol of civilization, respect, and decency meant that few alternative logics existed for conceptualizing and denoting a sense of respectability and moral personhood. Projecting moral righteousness onto erudition and polite behaviors, kulturnost became closely associated with the image of the intelligentsia. Praise for responsible consumption, like the longing to be happy in a Mercedes that impoverished teachers expressed in Paticos (2005) study, were less about the objects consumed than about the desire to reconrm conventional notions of who is morally superior, now possible to signify through material privilege. At stake in this view was the hope that market reforms would enable a redistribution of privilege for the benet of those imagined as morally deserving and the demotion of those considered to have beneted unjustly from the past regime. As consumer society took hold and its images of glamour and prosperity came to shape public notions of desirability, there was virtually no public discussion aiming to reconceptualize the image of the worker, to cultivate empathy for socially and economically marginalized groups. For the midwives discussed here and many others marginalized from the benets of market reforms, the value of the cultured intelligentsia as an ideal remained conceptually inviolable. This, I suggest, is the key to the ironic practices of educated groups experiencing material losses caused by market reforms: By associating themselves with kulturnost signied by a shifting set of signs, including stratied opportunities denable as responsible consumptionthey accessed a degree of symbolic capital that partially offset the dispossession they experienced in a market economy. However, the essentialized image of the intelligentsia

89

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 1 February 2009

they invested in was, of course, a ction. It elided both the complexities and contradictions of educated peoples lives, the moral compromises they routinely made, and the impossibility of avoiding entanglements in power. It unfairly projected morality onto education and denied decency, dignity, and ethics to less educated or working-class peoplegroups that aspiring middle-class people themselves could easily have been associated with. As the signiers associated with status continue to shift and become more closely linked with material advantage, holding on to the link with kulturnost will become ever more difcult for many such people. Yet, rather than deconstructing the image of the intelligentsia and challenging the symbolic value of kulturnost as a sine qua non of morality, my friends have invested in it even more. The historically structured identication with intelligentsia as morally superior and the related distaste for working-class people as ethically debased have resulted in a situation in which there is little basis on which to express empathy for the poor, even among those who have increasingly experienced disenfranchisement themselves.

Conclusion: Social memory and the production of class subjectivities

With inequalities and new forms of social distinction proliferating in former socialist societies and beyond, critical attention to social memory can help make sense of the ways class gets expressed and contested. This is important for all the same reasons that scholars study the production of national and ethnic identity through social memory. Memory and narrative are building blocks of identity and subjectivity, sites at which the past is made useful for purposes in the present. Discourses and practices of class are vehicles for creating social distinction and justifying practices of exclusionand they are also, often, rooted in visions of the past. But we need to understand the precise mechanisms through which this occurs. What forms do memories that address class take, and where are they located in particular social landscapes? In this article, I have offered a rst step toward that goal. The case presented here suggests several key aspects about the ways class, in particular, may be inscribed in social memory and how that memory gets evoked in daily life. Unlike national, ethnic, or religious identity, class in Russia has not been the object of ofcial commemoration. Rather, it has been a form of subjectivity, felt, enacted, performed, attributed to others, acted on, and constructed in practices such as consumption. Acknowledged not through formal rituals, it has become a mode of distinction expressed in popular narratives, from novels and lms to jokes. Rather than celebrated through ofcial discourses, it has become an implicit ideal motivating daily practices such as consumption. These ndings highlight the centrality of land-

scapes of daily practice as sites at which class gets expressed through practices of social memory.24 Discussing Heart of a Dog was such a practice. As my friends explained what they appreciated about the story, they pointed to the pleasure they gained as gaping incommensurabilities between ofcial Soviet representations and their own, everyday experiences were exposed. Until the mid-1980s, discrepancies between state narratives of the past and many peoples inchoate sense of victimhood could not be overtly acknowledged in public; they had largely been relegated to private conversations and jokes with close friends at the proverbial kitchen table. In its portrayal of workers as insincere opportunists with morally empty, even violent, characters and Communists as the cunning, manipulative support system for those workers, my friends saw Heart of a Dog as presenting real categories of Soviet citizens in ways that opposed ofcial representations of them. Similarly, the storys resurrection of the oppositional intelligent as courageous, dignied, and, although fallible, ready to take responsibility for his or her mistakes, spoke to peoples longing for a heroic role model who lived out supposedly oppositional (bourgeois) values they admired; through these images, the story illuminated points of view that people perceived as alternative to ofcial state ideology. The celebration of the image of the intelligent cannot be described as a major departure from the actual policies that Soviet leaders had been pursuing for several decades when Russians encountered Heart of a Dog in the mid- to late 1980s: As historians and scholars have shown, unannounced but extensive accommodations to the desires of educated groups began to be made soon after WWII. Educated groups enjoyed privileges that working-class people did not and perceived an implicit societal recognition that their work had greater status and value; but the contradictions between this tacit logic and ofcial representations had not emerged in public discourse. This disjuncture created highly fertile ground for Bulgakovs story, with its satiric depictions of the Communists and romanticized image of the intelligentsia, to be well received. The storys satiric depiction of Shvonder and his Communist thugs included imitations of Soviet language and practices through an ironic frame, creating a dislodged perspective that enabled the readerviewer to arrive at a parallel perception (Knight 2004:6) to that of ofcial Soviet representations. Such an experience was electrifying but not really distinct from cultural assumptions that had been cultivated by state policies for decades. Discussing Heart of a Dog became a practice of creating social memory about the Soviet past and asserting its relevance for the present and future. My friends decoded the story for historical truths that they felt they knew through personal experience: For, although none was old enough to have lived through the era Bulgakov described, they saw themselves as suffering from the ongoing reverberations of

90

Landscapes of the past in class subjectivity

American Ethnologist

the events of that era decades later. The project of turning a dog into a man (and then reversing the operation) was cited as an allegorical reference to how the Russian intelligentsias good intentions created monstrous outcomes; the half dogmans assuming the role of city chief for purging cats was explained as a metaphor for how people with proletarian origins were promoted in the bureaucracy and acquired great power to conduct violent purges against innocents perceived as enemies. Other aspects of the story were cited as literal representations of Soviet historyespecially those that resonated with existing ideas about class differences. Karina explained proletariat Sharikovs vulgar, rude, obtuse character as resembling the all too common loathsome personality (zhlob) she encountered among state bureaucrats, and she saw Bulgakovs narrative of Sharikovs rise to power over the intelligentsia as a useful portrait for interpreting the source of the authority enjoyed by the impudent bureaucrats around her. Another literal reading of Sharikov came from my friend Volodya, in the Russian Academy of Sciences. He met my approving comment about Sharikovs resistance to the oppression faced by the working class with shock and anger. Recalling the scene in which Preobrazhensky asked Sharikov how he thinks the problems of inequality should be solved, Volodya glared at me and recited Sharikovs response from memory: Whats there to propose? Just take everything and divide it up! (Bulgakov 1968:89). For Volodya, this statement accurately captured the crude, treacherous algorithm that Communists used to establish the Soviet regime. Angered that I could even think of defending the proletariats arguments against class discrimination, he retorted that Sharikovs statement epitomized the Communists thoughtless pursuit of power, their willingness to mow down all obstacles in their path toward societal hegemony. For Volodya, Just take everything and divide! represented a mode of thought that enabled historically tragic experiences of violent property seizure, invasion, robbery, usurpation, terror, humiliation, and death. As Volodya and Karinas comments reveal, Heart of a Dog provided Russians with images and narrative material to formulate a vision of the past and present that not only reied workers, Communists, and the intelligentsia but also made the latters class dispossession and victimization the central issue for moral restitution in the postSoviet era. Certainly some in Russia apply a degree of irony when invoking the term intelligentsia (Gessen 1997); others, no doubt, nd that term and even the concept of kulturnost irrelevant to their lives. Yet, for many educated Russians, especially those who aspire to the status of educated middle class, the concept of the intelligentsia continued to be taken literally as an image of respect, admiration, and moral authority. For them, Heart of a Dog offered a reading of the Soviet past and

post-Soviet future based on the comparative suffering and privilege of historically enduring social classes. It is this narrative landscape of the past that underlies contemporary practices of distinction, as evident in the justication of stratied consumption for educated, responsible health care users. Identifying with the intelligentsia involves practices of social memory, journeying through a terrain of romantic essentialisms and politically shaped omissions about social stratication. Understanding this vision of the past is critical for analyzing the vectors of empathy and admiration and those of blame and suspicion that inform contemporary Russians class subjectivities and practices of distinction.

Notes
Acknowledgments. This article has beneted enormously from the insights of a great number of colleagues and friends. I thank Sandra Hyde, Rebecca Kay, Jonathan Oldeld, and Eugene Raikhel for their thoughtful comments on drafts presented at McGill University and the University of Glasgow; and I express my deep gratitude to Shai Ginsburg, Julie Hemment, Alaina Lemon, Ilana Levin, Karen Petrone, Olga Shevchenko, Anna Temkina, Elena Trubina, Tatiana Venediktova, Elena Zdravomyslova, and three anonymous reviewers for closely reading and commenting on drafts of the manuscript. Conversations with Elena Gapova, Natasha Ivanova, Sergei Zakharov, and Marko Zivkovic were invaluable, and I thank them for their friendship and interest in these topics. A thank you also goes to AE editor Donald Donham for supporting my overall framework and concerns in this article and for his suggestions in helping me clarify them. Finally, I thank Ziggy Rivkin-Fish for discussing these topics with me for more than seven years, reading numerous drafts, and never tiring of talking about Bourdieu, Bulgakov, and the burdens of kulturnost. Of course, any remaining errors are mine. 1. In the mid-1990s, health care providers frequently expressed reservations about the introduction of fee-for-service care. But, by 1998, when the ruble crashed and peoples long-standing economic stress redoubled, health care providers spoke of the dire need to develop paid services. Providers in one of St. Petersburgs last remaining maternity hospitals that offered all services for free portrayed their chief doctor, who refused to institute paid luxury services, as hopelessly stuck in a dangerous Soviet mentality (Rivkin-Fish 2005). 2. Paying clients who claimed outrageous entitlements from hospital staff on the basis of their ability to pay for services constituted an important exception. Rumors raged throughout maternity hospitals about so-called New Russians who tried to use their money in what were considered inappropriate ways. One story recounted a woman who demanded a bedpan from a doctor. When she was told, No, you can get up and walk to the bathroom, the patient replied, Ill pay you. The doctor, proud and indignant, retorted, You could never afford that! In another tale that shocked listeners, a rich husband, in the delivery room with his wife, pulled a gun on the doctors, demanding that they take good care of his wife and baby. 3. Reproductive health is widely understood to be in crisis in Russia, as evidenced in low fertility rates, high abortion rates, and high rates of sexually transmitted infections. For example, the total fertility rate (TFR) in 1980 was 1.89, whereas in 2004, it was 1.34,

91

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 1 February 2009

and an estimated 55 percent of all pregnancies currently end in induced abortion (Vishnevskii 2006:240, 264). In the 1990s, rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) rose astronomically, with syphilis reaching a rate of 277.6 per 100,000 population in 1997 (an increase of 64.5 over statistics for 1989; Vishnevskii 2000:86). Although the rate of syphilis fell to 106.2 per 100,000 population by 2001, the rate of HIV rose from 0.8 per 100,000 in 1996 to 235.8 in 2001 (Aral et al. 2005:2187). And, although the HIV epidemic has been concentrated among users of injection drugs mostly 20 30 years of age, evidence indicates that sexual modes of transmission are increasing as is the proportion of women getting infected (Aral et al. 2005:2187). 4. For a study of the cultural shifts occurring as money enters health care in China, a society dealing with similar shifts as it moves away from socialism, see Farquhar 1996. 5. While Russian society has engaged in extensive debate over the social costs and traumas that have resulted from capitalistinduced economic disorder, at the same time, for many urban groups with higher education, market economics has gained the status of being natural and necessary (for dynamics of this debate in health care policy, see Rivkin-Fish 2005; see also Patico 2005; Ries 2002; Shlapentokh 1999 for these dynamics in other social areas). 6. The intelligentsia is an important local category in both Russian history and contemporary society. Prior to the 1917 Revolution, it referred to educated groups that opposed the tsarist autocracy; during the early years of Bolshevik rule, it referred to the anti-Communist cultural elite. In this article, I examine the deployment of this term as a discursive category referring to educated people thought to deserve renewed entitlements, for they are assumed to have inherited the moral capital of their parents and grandparents. 7. On the growing prominence of nostalgic forms of imagining the past, see also Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004a, 2004b and Paxson 2005. 8. This is, of course, true for social memory studies in general, but is perhaps more surprising in the post-Soviet case inasmuch as market economics is in large part a project to create and expand class differences (Gapova 2004). 9. Fitzpatrick argues that an ironic feature of Stalins social structure, with its three major social groups in the late 1930sworkers, collectivized peasants, and the intelligentsiawas its similarity to prerevolutionary estate groupings (sosloviia). Sosloviia were distinct groups dened in terms of their obligations to the state, rather than their relationships vis-` -vis each other. Soviet peasants, for a example, had the collective right to work the land but faced severe restrictions on their mobility that other groups, such as intelligentsia and workers, did not have. During this same period, privileged workers (udarniki and Stakhanovites), lauded for their high productivity, gained honors and privileges, and an elite upper class of leading cadres and specialists came into being that enjoyed a range of luxuries and privileges. Notably, however, Fitzpatrick cautions against seeing this group as a ruling class; rather, it is best understood as a new privileged one, a latterday service nobility (1992:39). 10. When it was written in 1925, Soviet authorities did not appreciate the novel, and it was not available in mass quantities until glasnost. When nally published, it attained the level of cult status and became even more popular after being made into a lm in 1988 (Bortko 1988). From my earliest acquaintances with Russians in the late 1980s, I had been urged to read this novel repeatedly by a range of people who sang its praises time and again. It was part of the curriculum in a Russian language course I took in St. Petersburg prior to my research. The adult daughter of Nina Sergeevna, one of the doctors with whom I worked closely during eldwork, knew the

lm version by heart and joked about herself as a Heart of a Dog guideexpert. My friends Valya and Boris, owners of a successful business, were always eager to screen it for me on their VCR; my friend Yulia, a typist who lived in a communal apartment, labeled Heart of a Dog essential reading for understanding the tensions structuring Soviet society. My friend Volodya, a scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, knew key passages by heart. And years later, when I found the video in an immigrant grocery store in New Jersey, the Russian clerk smiled and conrmed the lms brilliance. 11. During a public presentation I gave of my analysis, a Russian member of the audience hastened to emphasize that Karinas perspective does not represent the only interpretation of the story and countered that its satiric elements are clear and that only less educated readers would take it as a real, historical source. (This commentator equated satire with a lack of realism, a link inconsistent with literary analysis.) Implicit in this response, of course, is the reication I critique herethe assumption that anyone belonging to the educated intelligentsia would have the accurate understanding of the story (although the speaker did not elaborate on what that would be). 12. Early revolutionary generations often invented names celebrating the Communist victory and industrialization; for example, Vladilena was an amalgam of Vladimir Ilich Lenin. By having Sharik choose a name that exaggerates this fashion, Bulgakov mocks it. 13. Thus, when the professors assistant exclaims that Sharikov is a man with the heart of a dog, Preobrazhensky corrects him: The whole horror, you see is that his heart is no longer a dogs heart, but a human one. And the vilest you could nd! (Bulgarov 1968:105). 14. No matter how well intentioned, my friends asserted, such manipulations must fail: They go against the laws of nature. Bulgakov scholar Lesley Milne (1990:63) found that Preobrazhenskys later rejection of his experiment for its attempt to force nature was a mirror of Bulgakovs own stance favoring the gradual evolution of an industrialized society in Russia rather than the Bolshevik rush to coerce a proletarian revolution. 15. Most Russian commentators, including Karina, noted that Klim Chugunin and Sharikov were not actual members of the proletariat, for they were not workers. They represent the lumpen, or underclass, but nonetheless benet from the social mobility extended to workers (Klim Chugunin is saved from arrest because of his social origins and later elevated to a position as a low-level boss in the bureaucracy). So, from the very beginning, the typecasting of Sharikov as part of the proletariat betrays the conation of lifestyle and economic category, with lifestyle being far more dominant. For Karina and others, a circular logic emerged: The lifestyle of a stereotypical working-class person became symbolized by Sharikovs vulgar, crude behaviorthat of a zhloband a zhlob was, by denition, emblematic of the working class. I thank Olga Shevchenko for helping clarify this for me. 16. For example, in a discussion about approaches to analyzing social change in contemporary Russia, one Russian social scientist admonished me when I insisted on the need for research to focus on social stratication and the experiences of the poor. Im tired of this political correctness, she said with an exasperated tone. This was the approach of the Soviet Union, to focus so much on the poor. And look what it led to. No. Educated people should be in the elite position. My interest in focusing on the needs of poor Russians in social science research evoked in her mind the poorly conceived Soviet policies that had caused great harm to her society. Even though I made no mention of policy issues, she saw in my approach a line of argument concerning which social groups deserve attention, andrecalling this historical narrative that divides privilege and suffering on the basis of classshe rejected a focus on poor, uneducated, socially marginalized sectors.

92

Landscapes of the past in class subjectivity

American Ethnologist

17. In this unattering image of a cold-hearted, bellicose female revolutionary, Bulgakov mocks Bolshevik ideals of womens emancipation. 18. Even Sharikovs loyalty to the Communist cause is seen to derive from his cynical expectations of personal prot, rather than his belief in a broader collective good, as when the professor assumes he will likely switch allegiances when the advantage shifts (Bulgakov 1968:105). 19. At the same time, Karina entertained multiple interpretations depending on the context and direction of our discussion. When I probed her perspective on Communists, she acknowledged that the portraits of Sharikov and Shvonder could not simply be taken as literal interpretations of all Communists but were theatrical devices. She told me of relatives and friends whom she held dear and who had been party members, held positions of power, and remained rened, loving people. The association between personality and class worked for Karina at certain moments, when she sought to capture and explain repugnant forms of interaction as rooted in the Communist attack against the intelligentsia. It offered a way of interpreting Soviet history that appealed to her aspiring middle-class sensibility, even if it did not stand up to all aspects of reality and historical experience that she knew. 20. For insights into the creation of a Soviet intelligentsia, see Fitzpatricks (1992:141148) discussion of vydvizhenie (proletarian promotion). 21. The appropriation of literary gures and tropes for everyday identity performances in Russia has been noted by several scholars of Russia. Irina Paperno (1988) discusses this in relation to educated groups in the 19th century; Alaina Lemon (2000) examines how the appropriation of literary gures in everyday performances of identity plays into existing symbolic hierarchies in the contemporary era. 22. In scores of jokes circulating through Russian society soon after the Soviet Union collapsed, the caricatured image of the New Russian became an important site for negotiating the moral signicance of market reforms, consumption society, and the new displays of privilege they make possible. These jokes played out a carefully calibrated equilibrium between the New Russians incredible wealth and their incredible stupidity: He was a buffoon, his wife a bored and boring princess, and their quest for prestige through conspicuous consumption was exposed time and again as the dance of fools in a parade of the grotesque. In this way, the power of the New Russians wealth was symbolically deated and neutralized. Yet it bears noting that the target of these jokes mirth was the person of the New Russian and his comical use of money, not money or wealth per se. My goal in this article has been to explore another set of discourses that gradually became authoritative in contemporary Russia, discourses that made the expenditure of money symbolically protable, when done by the right people in the right way. 23. The outcomes of market-based policies have been farreaching and are only beginning to be critically analyzed and understood. For some key texts that capture these processes, see Burawoy et al. 2000, Field et al. 2000, and Manning and Tikhonova 2004. 24. It is perhaps not surprising that a popular, satirical, and romanticized narrative would become the vehicle for social memory of class. For, in comparison with national, religious, and ethnic identities, the place of class identities in social consciousness and action is, arguably, less certain; although class is no longer ofcially invoked as a signier of privilege, it is not irrelevant in societal organization and policy making, either; its meanings are shaped by the political and social history of privilege and dispossession that still echo in peoples consciousness, but these meanings have not yet

been subject to public analysis. Given such complex, liminal standing, memory practices surrounding class will likely emerge in daily practice rather than ofcial or formal arenas and discourses.

References cited
Aral, Sevgi O., Janet S. St. Lawrence, Roman Dyatlov, and Andrei Kozlov 2005 Commercial Sex Work, Drug Use, and Sexually Transmitted Infections in St. Petersburg, Russia. Social Science and Medicine 60(10):21812190. Avaclinic 2004 Rossiisko-Finskaia Klinika Skandinaviia Glavnaia/ Rodilnoe otdelenie/Tseny. Electronic document, http:// www.avaclinic.ru, accessed October 3, 2008. Berdahl, Daphne 1999 Where the World Ended: Re-Unication and Identity in the German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press. Birth, Kevin 2006 The Immanent Past: Culture and Psyche at the Juncture of History and Memory. Ethos 34(2):169191. Bourdieu, Pierre 1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bulgakov, Mikhail 1968 Heart of a Dog. Mirra Ginsburg, trans. New York: Grove. Burawoy, Michael, Pavel Krotov, and Tatyana Lytkina 2000 Involution and Destitution in Capitalist Russia. Ethnography 1(1):4365. Caldwell, Melissa 2004 Not by Bread Alone: Social Support in the New Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chase, William 1987 Workers, Society, and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow, 19181929. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Dunham, Vera 1990[1976] In Stalins Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dunn, Elizabeth 2004 Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Farquhar, Judith 1996 Market Magic: Getting Rich and Getting Personal in Medicine after Mao. American Ethnologist 23(2):239 259. Feh rv ry, Krisztina e a 2002 American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a Normal Life in Postsocialist Hungary. Ethnos 67(3):369 400. Field, Mark G., David M. Kotz, and Gene Bukhman 2000 Neoliberal Economic Policy, State Desertion, and the Russian Health Crisis. In Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor. Jim Yong Kim, Joyce V. Millen, Alec Irwin, and John Gershman, eds. Pp. 155173. Monroe, ME: Common Courage. Fitzpatrick, Sheila 1992 The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gapova, Elena 2004 The Nation in Between; or, Why Intellectuals Do Things with Words. In Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures through an East-West Gaze. Sibelan Forrester,

93

American Ethnologist

Volume 36 Number 1 February 2009

Magdalena J. Zaborowska, and Elena Gapova, eds. Pp. 6587. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gessen, Masha 1997 Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia after Communism. London: Verso. Hirsch, Marianne 1996 Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile. Poetics Today 17(4):659 686. Hoffmann, David L. 1994 Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 19291941. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Humphrey, Caroline 1995 Creating a Culture of Disillusionment: Consumption in Moscow, a Chronicle of Changing Times. In Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local. Daniel Miller, ed. Pp. 4368. New York: Routledge. 2002 The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Johnson, Robert 1979 Peasant and Proletariat: The Working Class of Moscow at the End of the Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kelly, Catriona, and Vadim Volkov 1998 Directed Desires: Kulturnost and Consumption. In Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 18811940. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds. Pp. 291313. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Khazanov, Anatoly M. 2000 Selecting the Past: the Politics of Memory in Moscows History Museums. City and Society 12(2):3562. Kideckel, David A. 2002 The Unmaking of an East-Central European Working Class. In Postsocialisms: Ideals, Ideologies, and Practices in Eurasia. C. M. Hann, ed. Pp. 114132. New York: Routledge. 2008 Getting By in Postsocialist Romania: Labor, the Body, and Working-Class Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Knight, Charles A. 2004 Literature of Satire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lemon, Alaina 1998 Your Eyes Are Green Like Dollars: Counterfeit Cash, National Substance, and Currency Apartheid in 1990s Russia. Cultural Anthropology 13(1):2255. 2000 Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Postsocialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mandel, Ruth, and Caroline Humphrey, eds. 2002 Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism. Oxford: Berg. Manning, Nick, and Nataliya E. Tikhonova, eds. 2004 Poverty and Social Exclusion in the New Russia. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Milne, Lesley 1990 Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nadkarni, Maya, and Olga Shevchenko 2004a The Politics of Nostalgia: The Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Practices 1. Ab Imperio 2:18. 2004b The Politics of Nostalgia: The Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Practices 2. Ab Imperio 2:14. Olick, Jeffrey K., and Joyce Robbins 1998 Social Memory Studies: From Collective Memory to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices. Annual Review of Sociology 24:105140.

Ost, David 2005 The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Oushakine, Serguei 2000 The Quantity of Style: Imaginary Consumption in the New Russia. Theory, Culture and Society 17(5):97120. 2007 Were Nostalgic but Were Not Crazy: Retrotting the Past in Contemporary Russia. Russian Review 66(July):451 482. Paperno, Irina 1988 Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Patico, Jennifer 2001 Globalization in the Postsocialist Marketplace: Consumer Readings of Difference and Development in Urban Russia. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 86:127 142. 2002 Chocolate and Cognac: Gift Exchange and the Recognition of Social Worlds in Post-Soviet Russia. Ethnos 67(3):345 368. 2005 To Be Happy in a Mercedes: Tropes of Value and Ambivalent Visions of Marketization. American Ethnologist 32(3):479 496. Paxson, Margaret 2005 Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pesman, Dale 2000 Russia and Soul: An Exploration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rausing, Sigrid 2002 Re-Constructing the Normal: Identity and the Consumption of Western Goods in Estonia. In Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism. Ruth Mandel and Caroline Humphrey, eds. Pp. 127142. Oxford: Berg. Ries, Nancy 1997 Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2002 Honest Bandits and Warped People: Russian Narratives about Money, Corruption, and Moral Decay. In Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change. Carol J. Greenhouse, Elizabeth Mertz, and Kay B. Warren, eds. Pp. 276315. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rivkin-Fish, Michele 1999 Sexuality Education in Russia: Dening Pleasure and Danger for a Fledgling Democratic Society. Social Science and Medicine 49(6):801814. 2005 Womens Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schudson, Michael 1992 Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. New York: Basic Books. Shevchenko, Olga 2002a Between the Holes: Emerging Identities and Hybrid Patterns of Consumption in Post-Socialist Russia. Europe-Asia Studies 54(6):841866. 2002b In Case of Fire Emergency: Consumptions, Security, and the Meaning of Durables in a Transforming Society. Journal of Consumer Culture 2(2):147170. Shlapentokh, Vladimir 1999 Social Inequality in Post-Communist Russia: The Attitudes of the Political Elite and the Masses (19911998). Europe-Asia Studies 51(7):11671181.

94

Landscapes of the past in class subjectivity

American Ethnologist

Steinberg, Mark 2001 Voices of Revolution, 1917. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 1995 Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon. Verdery, Katherine 1999a Fuzzy Property: Rights, Power and Identity in Transylvanias Decollectivization. In Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Pp. 5382. Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleeld. 1999b The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Vishnevskii, A. G., ed. 2000 Naselenie Rossii 1999. Moscow: Institut Narodnokhozi-

aistvennogo prognozirovaniia RAN Tsentr demograi i ekologii cheloveka. 2006 Naselenie Rossii 20032004. Moscow: Nauka.

accepted August 4, 2008 nal version submitted August 22, 2008 Michele Rivkin-Fish University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Department of Anthropology 301 Alumni Building CB #3115 Chapel Hill, NC 27599 mrsh@unc.edu

95