two families of children). Accounts of Moscow that compared it implicitly with, say, suburban Massachusetts (not even with Manhattan) made no sense to me at all; I have yet to find comparisons that presuppose readers who live in a Florida trailer park, as some of my relatives do. Americans without means—many of us—rarely travel by air, much less abroad, much less to Russia, and rarely for more than a few weeks, young scholars on fellowships and young journalists being among the exceptions. On my first trip to Russia, a study tour in 1988, my observations never synced with those of most of my tripmates, children of lawyers and doctors and ambassadors. Beyond our relatively successful little nuclear pod, our adult kin work as infantry soldiers, sailors, assembly line workers, paramedics, meat cutters, harvest laborers, seamstresses, cashiers, mortuary workers, construction workers, one pool shark, and one painter. When I first visited Russia, my points of reference for gauging living conditions included our house, a tiny, grim Manhattan dorm room with speedy little roaches, decrepit student rentals with sagging porches in Madison and Chicago, a trailer set on concrete blocks in the northern Alabama mountains, and occasional glimpses of the domestic paradises in which a few beloved schoolmates lived, where I learned about concepts like “cable television,” and “finished basement.” Skills and chores learned from maternal kin helped me more in Russia than did academic hints: my girl cousin showed me how to weave beads; my aunt spent sweaty days canning. Boy cousins showed us how to track deer and to play chess, a game learned in the army. Our grandparents taught everybody to sing harmony.
While many Americans on that trip reported bleak impressions of a grey, crumbling Russia—how much better is our country, they would agree on the tour bus—my impressions never lined up with theirs. First encounters with Soviet objects stirred sentiments not of American superiority, but of comfort and delight in discovery, admiration for humans who had differently imagined techniques and tools for living and made them accessible to more of us. When I first stepped onto a Soviet train from Helsinki to Leningrad in 1988, the cars smelled of wood paneling and hot steel wheels. A huge electric kettle was built in at the front of the car—a samovar always ready to dispense hot water: convenience. Next to the samovars, a chart labeled all parts of the machine, indicating how it worked and how it might be repaired, inviting us to learn and to act if need be: genius. Russia offered luxuries new to me, in things I was allowed to touch: porcelain tea sets and Czech cut-glass chandeliers (and also imitation plastic ones, which I thought just as cool). Real butter at every meal, carved into shells. Flowers, fresh flowers, people always buying and carrying flowers. The giant, lush house plants in the lobby of the Leningrad youth hostel, late afternoon summer sun streaming between rubber plant leaves, a disco up in the mezzanine playing Michael Jackson, the sound bending around towering palms and ferns.
These early tourist impressions were later tempered in village buildings with no indoor plumbing (with outhouses like those of my country relatives), and during the hardest days of the early 1990s by searches for food in grocery stores or for supplies in hospitals, where a lack of cotton, gloves, and antiseptics meant taking care of people at home instead (as we had done for my mother in the 1970s, when the hospital would not nurse her after an operation). I was not blind to the rough state of mailboxes in the high-rise entryways. However, I have come to prickle when I hear contrasts between some specific Russian bit of trouble and an American ideal of plenty, or a dream of luxury, color, and variety that many of us did not live. Compare Urals plumbing to Michigan water pipes, if you will, but look not only at contrasts, or even similarities, but also for connections. To avoid standing upon the sands of covert comparison to American ideals, as if they exemplify a neutral standard, this book keeps contrasts and comparisons specific, and when I do incorporate American places and patterns, it is in ways that attempt symmetry and acknowledge influence.
FIELDWORK
This books draws from several decades of ethnographic and archival research in Russia from 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall fell and three years before the USSR would deconstruct itself, through 2017, one hundred years after the Russian Revolution. I write at a time when Americans are acutely unsure about how to interpret anyone, how to intuit the intentions of their own leaders, not to mention those of other states. This moment would be different had government encouraged Americans to learn multiple languages; perhaps we would be more brave about tuning in to foreign channels and attempting our own translations. Outside academe, the very fact that I study Russian is an anomaly, either exotic or suspect. All this in mind, Throughout the book, whenever possible, I provide the time and place of observations from my fieldnotes; in some cases, doing so would violate standard ethnographic ethical practice, and so I deliberately leave time and place unstated.
In 1988, after six years of formal Russian study, I spent a summer in Leningrad. In 1990 and 1991, my several monthlong trips included family home stays and research affiliations to survey the archives. In August 1991 I began my first long, two-year sojourn in Moscow; I arrived in time to witness the attempted coup that catalyzed the dismantling of the USSR. I visited many times throughout the 1990s and carried out another long-term field project in 2002–2003 and 2005 at the Russian State Theatrical Academy, living with students in the dorm, documenting interactions in classrooms and rehearsals, as well as backstage and in the hallways.16 I keep in touch with that cohort and with a few other cohorts, and return about once a year. Over the decades, I have lived in Moscow, Tver’, Perm’, and Kungur and have visited other cities and villages. I have lived with Roma and with other Russians, in cities and in villages, with friends and with families of friends, in cottages and dachas, and in apartments and dormitories.
Over time I accumulated many observations by accident, for example, by translating pro bono for a British lawyer observing a court trial or wandering around Moscow talking to strangers during the 1991 coup attempt. Ethnographers study encounters among beings who are not made to sit naked in a lab—and while we might influence, we cannot control, what will happen in any situation. Some people try, and it is our job to understand how, not to try to control situations ourselves. To capture variation across such situations, this book thus draws from events that reached beyond the bounds of research sites or moments of interviewing.
There are nevertheless ethical reasons that anthropologists endeavor, in writing and in note taking, to separate “research” from “life” and to report only on the former. For such reasons, I have waited many years to write about certain encounters that did not at the time fall under the umbrella of research. I still take care to write in ways that do not identify anyone. For similar reasons, I draw from films, radio, and books. For one thing, because such media are not produced for me, they offer coordinates from which to triangulate examples that are more ethnographic, situations in which I was present and possibly affected what might have been said or done. For another thing, such media also offer surrogate examples, to shield actual people from censure or embarrassment while demonstrating the ubiquity of certain themes. In addition, many of my interlocutors’ livelihoods involve creating and curating photos, plays, films, or radio broadcasts, which makes it all the more important that I show Anglophone readers a few landmarks in the Russian mediascape that serve as common points for their work, as well as for the play of laughter and debate.
The fact is, however, that I came to know many people in spaces where being an anthropologist, or even a being foreigner, was subsumed under other, joint work. My friends include people with whom I spent hours on a song chorus, guitar riff, or recording level or on deciding a camera angle or a costume choice. I spent time with people seeking perfection of this karate technique or that roller derby rule or this beading skill. Some of us collaborated on stage plays, translations, films, musical concerts, and recordings. In 1992, between research grants, I helped proof the English edition of a telephone directory. On film sets (one on which Romani consultants were working, one in a Urals prison), I played tiny roles as an extra actor. In Perm’ I collaborated on an anthology of Russian rock to benefit a children’s oncology center. In Moscow I acted and directed for an expat theatrical ensemble. Throughout, when not “doing fieldwork”—when not out at 4:00 A.M. at a wedding table, taping an interview, or writing up notes—I might be arguing with a musician about phrasing, running a sound check in a blues club, buying a fish for New Year’s, or weeding around cucumbers. Such joint projects make it difficult
