What Remains: Traces of the Soviet Past

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Notes

1. All translations of titles and headings from Schlögel, Das sowjetische Jahrhundert: Archäologie einer untergegangenen Welt into English are my own. An earlier, shorter version of this text appeared in Slavic Review 78, no. 1 (2019): 272–74. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/slr.2019.61).

2. Lewin, The Soviet Century.

3. There is mild criticism of Lewin’s approach in Schlögel’s emphasis of the sheer dimensions— spatial, temporal, numerical—of the social shifts the early Stalin years brought about (see Das sowjetische Jahrhundert, 126 and note 37, 858); Lewin’s strictly archival research cannot capture this.

4. This is the title of Gronow’s study, Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia, an account of the—premature—push toward luxury products during the second and third Five-Year Plans.

5. Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche. Odobrena Institutom pytania Akademii meditsinskikh nauk SSSR.

6. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever. His account analyzes and deconstructs the binaries inside and about Soviet everyday life from an anthropological perspective.

7. See for instance Smith, Sensing the Past.

8. Neidhart, Russia’s Carnival.

9. For instance, Assmann, Erinnerungsräume.

10. The German Wikipedia site conveniently offers both a reproduction and Benjamin’s interpretive comment at: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus_Novus (accessed June 17, 2018).

11. The book is “masterfully narrated, and “the Soviet archaeologist is, in reality, a great author.” Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair 2018. Jury Decision. http://www.preis-der-leipziger-buchmesse.de/de/Preistraeger/Karl-Schloegel/(accessed June 15, 2018).