On Russia

Waking the Tempests:
Ordinary Life in the New Russia
By Eleanor Randolph. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. 431 pp., $26.

Common Places:
Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia
By Svetlana Boym. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. 356 pp., $49.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

These two books on daily life in the New Russia approach their subject from disparate vantage points. In Waking the Tempests, Eleanor Randolph, who lived in Moscow during a 1991-1993 Washington Post assignment, offers the observations of an American encountering Russia for the first time during a historic changing of the guard, arriving in the final months of the Gorbachev era and present as Yeltsin ushered in a period of exhilarating and unsettling new freedom.

Randolph assumed a position akin to that of an anthropologist: in addition to the historical and professional sources she consulted as a journalist, she enlisted the aid of cultural "informants." Her discussions of Russia's real estate market, health care system, and attempts at legal reform, as well as such experiences as motherhood, coming of age, and growing old, are illustrated with the anecdotes and observations of these "informants," the circle of friends and acquaintances she met over the course of her stay. The result is an engaging and humane account both of Randolph's introduction to and growing acquaintance with Russia, and the struggles of her hosts to come to terms with the oppressions of their past and the new burdens and pressures of the future.

Randolph notes that her book "is not the work of a scholar or historian" but rather that of a journalist "fortunate enough to be in an extraordinary country at an extraordinary time." Though Randolph's "small sketches" lack macroeconomic and comparative statistical analyses, they provide a more widely accessible complement to such an approach "by looking at the life rather than analyzing the system."

A more abstract approach, at least at the outset, is employed in Common Places. Separated from her native experience of Russia by nine years' expatriation in the United States, Boym, a Harvard professor of humanities, attempts to discern the essential realities of pre- and post-Soviet life through the application of cultural theory.

The first illustration in Boym's book of the insidiousness of Soviet repression thus comes through an analysis of a painting from the early 1950's and the censorship of various elements in that painting under subsequent Soviet leaderships. Under Soviet rule, something as seemingly innocuous as a rubber plant in the foreground of a picture could be found objectionable and cropped out in public display. Under Boym, the same rubber plant is deciphered as "an iconographic blemish on the image of Socialist Realist domestic bliss [that] . . . can function as a trigger of cultural memory and a key to the archeology of Soviet private and communal life." At such moments it can be difficult to decide whether it is the former Soviet system or Boym's prose that is ultimately more oppressive.

But the initial abstractions one encounters in Boym's book are deceptive, since they set the stage for what is gradually revealed to be an intensely self-conscious, intellectually complex, and infinitely sly tour of Russian culture and daily life. Brief autobiographical reminiscences, photographs of Russian streets and homes, and shameless wordplay (in an analysis of a business and financial advertisement that depicts a woman in lingerie reclining atop a vast pile of rubles, Boym notes that Westerners will be familiar with the marketing tactic, "although the currency around the green lingerie is not very hard") are intertwined with accounts of life in the Russian communal apartment during and after Soviet rule, the rise of an avant garde art scene, and the clumsy Russian attempt to adopt Western marketing methods.

Above all this is a portrait of the labyrinthine interiority of the Russian mind, confined by the relentless Soviet encroachment on privacy for the greater part of a century to small spaces and small expressions, that emerges so clearly and elegantly from this book. Ultimately it is not the trashiness of the kitsch she has simultaneously mocked and exalted throughout that Boym warns us and her fellow Russians against so much as it is that kitsch's ideological outgrowth, the phenomenon she calls "post-Soviet nostalgia." Resistance, she suggests, if not futile, nevertheless cannot be total: "I can only develop a genre of nostalgia mediated by irony, which combines estrangement with the longing for the familiar-in my case this happens to be a familiar collective oppression."

Megan J. Breslin