Abstract
Reviewed by: Sarah Badcock, University of Nottingham, UK
This provocative and engaging book addresses a question that lies at the very heart of social history – how are historians to understand and interpret the daily lives, experiences and actions of those people who left little trace of their own lives and voices in written records? Medieval scholars talked about the ‘silent majority’ and Foucault referred to the ‘infamous men’, while postcolonial scholarship developed a distinctive branch, subaltern studies, to tackle this problem. In this work, Ilya Gerasimov presents a distinctive theoretical framework for the study of Russia’s lower-class urban dwellers, a group he refers to as plebeians. He argues that historians should look beyond the textual traces left by lower class urban dwellers, and that they should instead strive to read the ‘language’ of people’s bodies, actions and practices. He illustrates his theories through the narration of case studies selected from four cities across the Empire – Odessa, Kazan, Nizhnii Novgorod and Vilna (Vilnius). He draws on a diverse array of literature, but his highly individual approach ignores some of the recent rich historiography of this topic.
His work is structured into five chapters, each tackling a specific space or theme. Chapter 1 opens with a very engaging summary of how ordinary people lived, sketching out the common man’s day as he got up, drank tea and went about his daily business. He goes on to explore a series of anonymous letters, and proposes that these offer a rich collective vision of the lower-class self. He concludes the chapter by speculating that Russia’s civil society remained very small because many people on the peripheries of the middle classes were actually associated more closely with the plebeian elements, and these plebeian elements did not fit into the discourses shaped by civil society. Chapter 2 focuses on crime reports in Nizhnii Novgorod and Kazan as a vector into lower class life. The author presents crime reports as offering an unmediated window into lower-class life, which is compelling but not entirely satisfactory – many people lived without recourse to practices that the state identified as illegal. The exploration of motivations and actions in terms of pogroms and violent incidents seeks to illuminate the complexity of relationships between different groups, in this case Russians, Tatars and Jews, and makes the apt point that friendships rather than violent incidents are often better way-markers of popular feeling. He concludes the chapter by stating that there was a disjoint between elite ideas and plebeian everyday experience in shaping ethnic interactions, which were densely played out in urban, lower-class space. Chapter 3 weaves in and out of sex work in Vilna, street signs, pimping, and other aspects of life on the street. This is the only chapter where gender is prominent as a category of analysis – in the others, as with Foucault, the voiceless citizen is usually a man. Chapter 4 argues that deadly violence and sexual violence can be used to read a sort of language among lower class people. This argument requires a wide range of contortions in terms of evidence-based practice. The author presents a whole range of speculations, which fit in with his broader narrative, and give an engaging possible insight into the inner lives of his voiceless people. I was left wondering, however, about the extent to which individual lives were overwritten in the name of the author’s master narrative. At one point in this chapter, the author infers a direct relationship between the transition from pre-revolutionary order to an unleashing of inter-ethnic rivalry that culminated in the 1940s. Such unqualified direct correlations leave the author open to accusations of over-simplification. The fifth chapter explores aspects of legality and illegality. I was surprised that the author did not engage with the extensive literature that has already explored this question, particularly in relation to peasant conceptions of justice and illegality.
The book concludes with an epilogue that runs into a lengthy speculation on the nature of the Russian revolution, and on society, legality, violence and material well-being in the Soviet Union. The author’s elision of Bolshevik success with Bolshevik popularity is problematic. Gerasimov argues for continuity for lower-class citizens from late Imperial to early Soviet Russia, and suggests that lower-class people relied on social practices that they had developed in the late Imperial period. He also argues that lower-class people were able to adapt to appalling living conditions in the 1930s because these were continuations of pre-revolutionary practice, including extremely cramped living conditions, close quarters, threat of violence on the streets, lack of spare money, and food shortages. It is difficult to see how late Imperial experience was definitive in the responses to the profound social, economic and demographic breakdown of the civil-war period, when lower-class people had no choice but to adapt and survive.
Gerasimov privileges ethnicity and nationality as defining characteristics throughout this work, unfailingly utilizing ethnic definitions in describing his protagonists. Many of his stories actually emphasized that ethnicity seemed not to have been an important marker for those involved. On page 126, the author discusses the attack of eight Tatar men on a young Chuvash woman, and engages in reflections on the ethnic aspects of the attack. But was her ethnicity any indicator in this attack? If she had been Tatar, or Russian, would she have been left unmolested? While the author’s speculations on such questions are intelligent and thought-provoking, I would have preferred more open acknowledgement from the author of doubt and unknowability.
This is an energetic and thought-provoking book, with some important insights alongside some vivid and compelling anecdotes. I welcome the call for scholars to pay more attention to people on the margins of Russian society, and to take more care in the ways in which they engage with the available sources.