On the History of Developing the Foundations of Sources and Historiography for Research on Everyday Life of Bolshevik Elites

Abstract

The everyday life of Bolshevik elites had remained for many decades a subject avoided in Soviet research both due to the political and ideological restrictions and the scarcity of the source base that formed under their influence. In connection with the recent anthropological turn in the Russian humanities and the keen interest in the history of everyday life (a branch of historical knowledge that focuses on studying the lifestyle of social groups, the evolution of the inner world of individuals and their relationships with various objects and events), we consider it important to draw attention to the history of development of the empirical and historiographical base for research on the life of Bolsheviks in the 1920s–1930s. We qualify the early stage of development of the Soviet historiography (1920s–1940s) as a period of ignoring the topic of the life of elites, which had to do with an unspoken ban put on discussing the living conditions of the top representatives of the Soviet society. We take the second period (1950s–1980s) – the time of the birth of ethnographic interest in the everyday and ordinary in city life – to be the years of “discovery of the topic”. Finally, we associate the third period with the years of stagnation and the beginning of Perestroika. We characterize the active translation of works by foreign researchers on everyday life and the formation of a shared collaboration space with Western scholars (from the early 1990s to the present) as essential prerequisites for understanding the relationship between the social/political transformation of the Soviet/post-Soviet period and the politics of memory, including the memory of the social establishment of the Soviet society during the period of the “great Bolshevik experiment”.