Ol’ga Gurova. Span of things

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Russian Social Science Review, vol. 50, no. 4, JulyAugust 2009, pp. 4960. 2009 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.ISSN 1061-1428/2009 $9.50 + 0.00.

OLGAGUROVA

The Life Span of Things inSoviet Society

Notes on the Sociology of Underwear

Critically adopting concepts drawn from Anglophone consumption and

material culture studies, including the cultural biography of things,the article addresses the history of Soviet things in the last three decades

of the USSR in terms of a sociology of everyday practices.

The Concept of a Cultural Biography of Things

The history of things has until recently been analyzed in the contextof the sociology of social processes and associated with the idea of

social modernization, an approach that was warranted inasmuchas the history of things essentially constitutes a social process. I,suggest, however, that we instead look at objects from a differentperspectivethat of the sociology of everyday practices.

The idea of a cultural biography of things was first formulated inthe works of the sociologists Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff.1The theoretical core of their concept is that things are not only

English translation 2009 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text 2004Neprikosnovennyi zapas. Prodolzhitelnost zhizni veshchei v sovetskomobshchestve: zametki po sotsiologii nizhnego belia Neprikosnovennyi zapas


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50 RUSSIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW

goods or an economic reality but also a reality inherent in thecultural order. Things, like people, live in a social organism. Asa result, the social life of things may be studied in the same wayas a persons biographyas an aggregate of life experiences laidout in chronological order. The following questions may be askedwith regard to the life of things: Where did the object come fromand who brought it into the world? What has its life been like,and what kind of life do people hold to be ideal for it? What is its

normal life span? What cultural markers exist for it? How does thevalue of things change over the years? And what will happen tothe item when it has exhausted its usefulness?2

Three basic periods may be identified in the biography ofthings: appearance, functioning, and disappearance. Appearanceaddresses how the object came onto the market and thence intothe consumers hands. The analysis of an objects functioningimplies study of the practices that reflect how the person and

items of material culture interact and of the sociocultural contextsin which those items function. Particular attention is accorded tothe displacement of things from one cultural context to another, anexample of which would be importation, a phenomenon involvingthe commercial displacement of an everyday object from oneculture to another. In the sociological sense, importation is thedisplacement of things and of the accompanying codes (names),functions, ideologies, styles, and everyday practices from one

cultural context to another. The arrival of a given object changesthe cultural context, and as a result the social meaning of the objectitself also changes. The analysis of a things life spanis associatedwith the establishment of its usage duration, based on whether thereplacement tempo is fast or slow.

Appadurai and Kopytoff argue that a cultural biography is abrief life story of an individual object of material culture. Thenthere is the social history of a class or object, which reveals long-term historical shifts and dynamic transformations. Yet the culturalbiography and social history of a thing are linked since the social


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framework allowing the analysis of the life span of everydaythings on the microlevel, on the level of daily practices where thethings subsist and in which the mundane, routine interaction ofperson and thing in society is reflected.

Here we propose to dwell on one aspect of the culturalbiography of thingsthe life span of outerwear and underwearin Soviet society.

The Life Span of Things in Soviet Society:A Sociological Analysis of Everyday Practices

Let us now examine the life span of things in the context of ourchosen theoretical paradigm. An object appears on the market andthen in everyday life. It operates as an item with defined functions,structures a persons life, satisfies his/her requirements, and is ofbenefit. An items demise occurs when it loses its functional sig-

nificance, its social value, and its ability to be of benefit, whether inthe utilitarian or the symbolic sense. So, a shawl that is moth-eatenand therefore fails in its basic function (to keep a person warm)loses its practical utility. A dated dress is also apt to lose its socialvalue, but the point in this case is the loss of its symbolic func-tion of denoting modishness. In both cases, the loss of the itemssocial value may result in it being junked and ending its life in thegraveyard of objects (a trash can or a trash heap). The issue then

becomes how long items can function, how soon they end up on atrash heap, and what causes their social demise.

According to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, thingsare replaced in contemporary culture at breakneck speed.3Goods,clothing, footwear, and household utensils function within theconcept of novelty. The responsibility for the rapid demise ofthings is borne, first, by fashion, which changes every season;second, by mass production, which has brought into being a vastquantity of things; and, third, by competition among producers,on which the relative accessibility of things is predicated


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he was writing his classic works The System of Objectsand SymbolicExchange and Death. But we should ask whether Baudrillardsinferences are relevant to another context and another time.

The materials I collected in the course of my research indicatethat in Soviet culture things functioned in a state of constant,uninterrupted consumption. Indeed, this specification of the thingmay be designated as key to the material milieu of Soviet society.Immortality and constancy are the existence mode of the Soviet

thing, whose essence resides in the permanence and irreplaceability,in the never-ending renewal of an items functions. In counterweightto a consumer culture, wherein consumption is associated withdestruction of the thing and the most rapid completion possible ofits functional cycle, the consumption of things in Soviet culture wasaccompanied by the endless return of those goods to life.

Two of the most characteristic answers to the question of howlong things would be kept were Things werent thrown out. Some

use was found for them all the time4and It was a different age.A different value was placed on things; there were fewer things.5These excerpts underscore how the life span of things differs indifferent ages. In Soviet culture, objects had to be preserved.Preservation was important because relatively few items wereavailable for consumption; a different value was placed on thingsbecause there were fewer of them.

The small quantity of things was contingent on the level of

economic development. The economy of the Soviet Union wasinherently marked by a rift between the field occupied by theproducers of items and that occupied by the consumers of items.That gap was expressed in the divergence between the quantityand quality of goods produced and the needs, preferences, andtastes of Soviet people. The shortages that were to some degreeinherent in the consumer market throughout Soviet history keptthe quantity of things in Soviet culture lower than it needed to be,making objects rare and insufficiently accessible.6

The insufficient accessibility of things was partially offset by


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used it to sew everything.7

Sewing skills were acquired in school,in sewing circles, or in courses on pattern cutting and sewingthat were offered in Soviet Russia from the 1920s on.8 In time,needlework was introduced into the compulsory school curriculumfor girls. Sewing was taught in schools not only during the yearsof shortages but also during the Thaw, when problems with goodsaccessibility became less pressing. There were classes in patterncutting and sewing in school. Later they started calling them labor

classes. The odd thing about those classes was that they started outby teaching us to sew briefs and nightgowns, and only then to sewall the other things. That surprised me somewhat, because briefswere made of stockinet and they could be bought in the shops. Wemade them out of white cotton or sateen, I think. Probably theywere a holdover from the early days in the syllabus.9

Needlework was also a popular topic in other places besides theschool curriculum, with the publication of various small-format

books on knitting and sewing. At home we still had a book calledThe Needlewoman[Rukodelnitsa], from the 1950s or the 1960s. Itsaid that every girl should know how to make her own brassieresand briefs. 10 It should also be noted that the skills of patterncutting and sewing became a measure of a womans competencein Soviet society.11Any real woman was supposed to know howto take a pattern, sew a dress or housecoat, and tailor clothing tofit. The popularity of that practice was less a tribute to tradition

than an attempt to adapt to shortages and the idiosyncrasies of thematerial environment in Soviet society.

There were several reasons for the popularity of manipulatingthings. First, industrially produced things were of a single type,similar, assembled from identical and, as a rule, monochromematerials; this even, to some extent, constituted a kind of visualrepresentation of the clich of the gray mass that was commonlyapplied to the Soviet people. These qualities basically relatedto outerwear but were also accurate with respect to underwear.The received wisdom was that men should wear only dark blue


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Second, things often hung wrong. There was the ordinary,factory-made underwear that never once fit me as it should have.I had to take it in, fix it up, or, in a best-case scenario, make myown.13If a garment had an awkward cut, it would be a bad fit.Awkwardness of cut was exemplified by brassiere design. Itshould all be so simple. What is a breast? Its a hemisphere. Sowe take a circle, snip out some wedges, sew the rest together andthere you have a hemisphere. But who has a breast like that? No

one. Its very rare . . . but the cuts used to be as simple as couldbe.14

Third, we have accounts of problems with finding things inappropriate sizes. We had them custom-made, with broad straps.Because they came in standard sizesthree, four, up to a five.But you couldnt get anything for a fuller figure. And, vice versa,you couldnt get a size zero. In the 1980s, though, you could buythe best-selling sizes, no problem. Different kinds, satin, flower

patterns. Pretty ones.15Amateur needlework was a way not only for a woman to

make new things with her own hands but also to create original,unique objects that corresponded to individual demands, which,following Michel de Certeau, we may call the chance offeringsof the moment.16One example of a chance offering was theersatz tights that resulted when womens or childrens stockingswere sewn to underpants. Reminiscences yield the reasons

behind these particular makeshifts: Stockings were a terriblyinconvenient piece of clothing. They were always coming undoneor slipping down. They were inconvenient in all sorts of ways.They created all kinds of embarrassing situations, as my childrenexperienced. So to make their lives easier, I sewed some of thosetights. Ordinary tights for children appeared later, but my childrenwere grown by then.17 As this quotation shows, ersatz tightsmade their appearance due to the recognized inconveniences ofexisting designs for stockings and childrens undergarments andthe unavailability of tights for children Another original discovery


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these makeshifts and the uniqueness of the resulting garmentsmade people sad to throw [them] out, which gave them a longlife with their owner.

Michel de Certeaus theoretical arsenal also includes theconcept of tactics, which are practices of resistance to power.What distinguishes such tactics is that in employing them peoplesymbolically wrest from power the space of things that it hadmade and subordinated to itself. Such tactics, de Certeau says,

are an art of the weak, a last resort of self-manifestation forthose who have no power.18The practices described above mayindeed be viewed as types of resistance to power, because bycreating, altering, or embellishing something, Soviet people ineffect prevailed over shortages or appropriated and customizedthose standardized, uniform, factory-made items that they wereable to acquire. Thereby, through their strategies of the weak,they opposed power.

Not only sewing but also the practices of preserving things andprolonging their lives may be regarded as tactics of resistance(resistance to time). One way to prevail over the low quality ofobjects was clothing repair: for example, darning. We darnedaway, we darned everything. We mended things. We wore thingsfor a very long time.19Or darning stockings, there you go. Wedarned with kapron thread. You unraveled an old kapron stocking,and if it was the right color, it could be used for mending. The

joins were visible, of course. They were visible no matter whatyou did.20Darning was necessary because things wore out beforepeople thought they could be thrown out.

Another means of preservation was the practice of handing thingsdown. This practice, which was widespread in Soviet culture, gaveordinary things almost the status of heirlooms. One example ofthat practice was wearing out [donashivanie]. The characteristicsof wearing out are, first, that it is regulated by the rules not ofcommoditymoney exchange but of barter. Second, the exchangeis made between individuals who are relatives acquaintances or


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her best to wear them very carefully, so as to hand them on to me.And theyve survived! At this point, theyre the faintest shade ofblue, but theyre indestructible, blast them!21Another example: Inthe 1950s, we made friends with China; and my brother, a soldier,brought his wife some lovely underwear sets [matching camisoleand pantiesO.G.], as they called them then, made of satin-backcrepe. Fantastic. Then they came to me. . . . To this day I regrethaving probably thrown them out.22 Clothing was passed from

generation to generation, with youngsters using up their elderspreworn clothing, sons putting on their fathers undergarments,and girls wearing their mothers dresses and shoes.

These examples demonstrate that durability could be evaluatedboth positively and negatively. So, in the first example, the practiceis negatively assessed. The potential owner of the drawers wantsno part in wearing them out, thereby problematizing an age-relateddifferentiation of consumer models regarding underwear. The

drawers in question were the flannel ones imported into SovietRussia in the 1950s, when there was a lively trade with China.The everyday name for them was Friendship [Druzhba], after thecompany name on the label, and they were valued for their consumerqualities of softness and warmth. But as the example shows, thosequalities were important to the grandmas generation; youngwomen would rather not have had such pieces of clothing in theirwardrobes.

In some instances, things were exchanged with and handeddown not only to relatives but also to friends and neighbors. Therewas a woman living in a neighboring apartment. She worked incommerce. She had such lovely things. Then she died and left meher chemises. Just lovely. Such fine little shoulder straps, suchembroidery. No, no, not kapron. There was a kapron gusset in someplaces. But not everywhere. All my life Id never worn anything norhad anything like them.23As can be seen, even neighbors handedthings down. The social networks of which things were a partextended beyond family and blood relatives to include apartment


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child whom it would fit. Adult clothing could also pass from oneowner to another.The relevance of handing things down was determined by three

factors. First, objects were difficult to acquire, due to shortages.Second, the quantity of items was, under normal circumstances,relatively small. Third, goods were not available to everyone,the degree of availability being determined by the individualsproximity to distribution channels. The above quotation notes

that the slips were inherited from a woman who had worked incommercea professional position that made it easier to obtainitems that were later handed on to others lacking that access.

In other instances, objects were stored, finding safe havenin wardrobes and storage rooms in hopes that they would come inhandy one day. My grandmother lived her whole life by the rulebetter in us than in the bin. Food had to be eaten rather than thrownout, even if it was spoiled. As for an objectyou never know, it

might come in handy.24This interviewee noted that efforts weremade to save even things that had lost all their consumer properties,if living conditions permitted. In Leningrad, that was complicated bythe prevalence of communal apartments in which storage space wasextremely limited. Even where there was limited space, however,room was found for things. In self-contained apartments, a speciallocation was often set aside for unneeded things.

Soviet culture lacked the idea of disposability, that certain

items could be used once and then discarded.25There were alsono secondhand stores. The life of objects in Soviet culture wasvirtually endless. Interesting confirmation of this thesis is foundin the specialist literature about the maintenance of things. Three

Hundred Handy Hints[300 poleznykh sovetov], which was issuedin a print run of 150,000 in 1958, had a separate section on clothescare and included hints on refurbishing dresses, prolonging thewearability of footwear, mending kapron stockings, and preservingelasticized things.26 Periodicals, including Nauka i zhizn andthe womens magazines Rabotnitsa and Krestianka ran regular


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things whose properties had been lost but also to adjust or adaptunserviceable clothing as the consumer wished.When an undergarment finally became unwearable, having

lost its original functions, it would not be sent to perish on atrash heap but was instead transformed into something with otherfunctions. An example of that transformation would be the use ofold clothing as cloths for dusting or cleaning floors. Cloths weremade out of old clothes. They never used to sell anything special

to use as cloths. Here, where there were no synthetic fabrics,everything was very absorbent.27 Special cloths for cleaningcould indeed not be purchased until recently, the assumption beingthat this function would be performed by clothing that could nolonger be worn. Therefore the role of a cloth for cleaning the tablecould well be taken by some repurposed thinga pair of old knitswimming trunks, for example. The final parting from a thing, anevent fixed in memory, was truly atypical for the Soviet person.

A singular use was found for underwear that had served out itsuseful life: a soft knit-cotton undershirt with excellent absorptionbecame a floor cloth or dust cloth; a kapron stocking, being air-permeable, was the best place to store onions or was pulled overa broom to keep it from shedding or was used to make a plaitedrug. The indicator of the immortality of an object elicited by theseexamples is its secondary usebut this time as an item with newfunctions, or, in a sense, a new thing.

So while things today circulate within a framework of noveltyand immediacy, the Soviet thing functioned in a state of constantconsumption. Members of various social groups recount their expe-rience of preserving, repairing, darning, and handing things down.Since the functional mode of Soviet things was constant consump-tion, the Soviet thing may, in a sense, be called immortal.

When an object acquired new functions by becoming a floorcloth, this assumed a change in that objects status. Following thecultural theoretician Mikhail Epshtein, we may say that thingshave their own career ladder much as people do and that a floor


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Notes1. Arjun Appadurai, Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,

in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,ed. Appadurai(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 363; Igor Kopytoff, TheCultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process, in The Social Lifeof Things,pp. 6667.

2. Kopytoff, The Cultural Biography of Things. [Gurovas framing of thequestions does not exactly match Kopytoffs on pp. 6667.Trans.]

3. Zh. Bodriiiar, Simvolicheskii obmen i smert[Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic

Exchange and Death] (Moscow: Dobrosvet, 2000), p. 387.4. Interview with a male subject with a higher education, b. 1937.5. Interview with a female subject with a higher education, b. 1967.6. On shortages as a condition of the consumer market, see E.A. Osokina,Za

fasadom stalinskogo izobiliia: raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniiav gody industrializatsii, 19271941(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997); Sh. Fittspatrik,Povsednevnyi stalinizm. Sotsialnaia istoriia Sovetskoi Rossii v 30-e gody[SheilaFitzpatrick,Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. SovietRussia in the 1930s] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001); and Vera S. Durham,In StalinsTime: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1979).

7. Interview with a male subject with a higher education, b. 1937.8. See, for example, S. Anisimova, V shkole kroiki i shitia,Rabotnitsa,

1925, no. 3.9. Interview with a female subject, b. 1971.

10. Kniga otzyvov vystavki Pamiattela: nizhnee bele sovetskoi epokhi.Sankt-Peterburg. Noiabr2000 g.ianvar2001 g.The orthography and punctua-tion of the author have been preserved [but not in translationEd.].

11. A womans competence in the Soviet gender framework is discussed byAnna Temkina and Anna Rotkirch in Soviet Gender Contracts and Their Shiftsin Contemporary Russia (www.valt.helsinki.fi/staff/rotkirch/gendcontract.htm).[The title at this URL is The Fractured Working Mother and Other New GenderContracts in Contemporary Russia. The publication cited in this note does notcurrently appear to be available online.Trans.]

12. Interview with a male subject with a higher education, b. 1955.13. Interview with a female subject, b. 1937.14. Interview with a female subject, b. 1937.15. Interview with a female subject, b. 1961.16. Michel de Certeau [Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol,] The Practice of Ev-

eryday Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 37. [Gurovais referring to vol. 2:Living and Cooking,trans. Timothy J. Tomasik. Vol. 1 waspublished earlier, with a different translator and press. Quotations in this articleare taken from Steven F. Rendalls translation of Certeaus Practice of Everyday


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19. Interview with a female subject with a secondary specialized education,b. 1961.

20. Interview with a female subject with a higher education, b. 1950.21. Kniga otzyvov vystavki Pamiattela: nizhnee bele sovetskoi epokhi.22. Ibid.23. Interview with a female subject with a higher education, b. 1950.24. Interview with a female subject with a higher education, b. 1967.25. S. Boim, Obshchie mesta. Mifologiia povsednevnoi zhizni[Svetlana Boym,

Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia] (Moscow: Novoeliteraturnoe obozrenie, 2002), p. 89.

26. Trista poleznykh sovetov(Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1958).27. Interview with a female subject with a higher education, b. 1935.28. M. Epshtein, Paradoksy novizny. O literaturnom razvitii XIXXX vekov

(Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1998), p. 324.


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Ol’ga Gurova. Span of things

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