The feelings of progress peripheral temporalities during late socialism (original) (raw)
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Invading the void: social time production as a developmental tool in the late Soviet periphery
Canadian Slavonic Papers Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, 2023
This paper examines the multi-temporal character of postwar Soviet development. By analyzing personal histories of the timber production workers’ settlement of Muezerka in northwest Karelia, the author argues that industrial development did not entirely standardize social space and time, but it initially served as a vehicle of disintegration in newly developed areas. She shows that, in order to start the development of a new territory, it was necessary to create a symbolic starting point – “zero time.” Each time a new settlement emerged, the entire path to progress had to be traversed anew, and the production of a special temporality of development, which implied a temporary withdrawal from modernity, was an essential working element in this path.
TEMPORAL REGIMES IN YOUNG POST-SOVIET TOWNS
Historia @ Teoria, 2017
The study of a young town allows to understand how “the absence of its own past” (lack ofits own history) coexists with the present and is conveyed to the future. How was the time compressed under the influence of the super-eff orts mobilized for the town or the enterprise construction? Was there any time dilation? How did the content of the temporal regime change in young towns with the time? Th e answers to these questions have been discussed in this article. At present, two seemingly incompatible temporal regimes coexist in the post-Soviet young towns: the fi rst is the accelerated, compressed time, and the second the slowed down time. During the fi rst years, the young Soviet towns were distinguished by their intensive development, as well as by rapid construction of infrastructure and housing facilities. Aft er the period of rapid growth, the period of a relatively quiet life and reproduction started. Nowadays we can say that the dominant in these towns is the stopped or slowed down time. Th e snail-paced way of life may create an expulsive eff ect, when people want to get away from this environment. Our study involved four young towns of Sverdlovsk region of Russia: Kachkanar, Krasnoturyinsk, Zarechny and Lesnoy. To collect the information, we used the methods of documentary analysis, photo mapping and go-along interviewing.
HOW TO TURN TOWARDS SOVIET TEMPORALITY? SETTING THE ANALYTICAL OPTICS
2022
Responding to the reproaches addressed by Michel de Certeau a quarter of a century ago to historians, who use time as a taxonomic tool without reflecting on its social structure, we seek to make time visible through the analytical tools developed currently by sociologists and anthropologists of time. Setting the analytical optics, we are turning in a performative way towards temporality in the history of the Soviet 20th century, transferring the temporal turn from the declaration into presence. Continuing to experiment with looking at the Soviet reality through a temporality lens, we are gathering the subjects of our two-year research in the text. The number of co-authors, unusual for the humanities; the composition of paper; and the wide range of topics express and embody the letter and spirit of our project, where the Soviet social time is jointly studied from different perspectives. Compositionally, the article consists of six analytical short stories. In each of them, the results of one of our research cases, united under the umbrella of the Soviet temporality project, are interpreted with one of the core concepts or approaches introduced by the temporal turn.
Canadian Slavonic Papers Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, 2023
In this article, the author examines how all-Union anniversaries during the 1960s–70s were used propagandistically to disseminate Soviet values as well as modern spatio-temporal ideas to rural communities. As part of the program to build communism, announced at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party in 1961, anniversaries were employed to help minimize differences between city and countryside and to bring the way urban and rural people understood time and space into closer alignment. The author argues that the memory of the Soviet past, as propagated through anniversaries, created a memory framework that infused local history with Soviet notions of space and time.
Memory, Space, and Time Perceptions in a Postsocialist Village of Southern Slovakia
2005
The aim of this paper is to analyze the way social actors perceive time and space in a period of high instability and change. The main thesis is that in conditions of uncertainty and profound transformation, the mental categorization of places and time is a dialectical process linking people to their past. This is done through the use of memory. The past can become an idealized cognitive domain, even when the actors themselves have never directly experienced it. In tum, such idealization leads them to mentally exclude those categories and social facts that belong to a period that is not remembered with pleasure. The past, as reconstructed in the words and through the actions of people, becomes in this way a venue for conveying their present choices, aspirations, and needs.