In the summer of 1995, an American anthropologist travels with a 56 year old Russian woman back to her homeland, "to retrieve a small bit of soil from her rodina, or native land" (205); They had awaited the 2 day trip for months, preparing for it, carefully and painstakingly arranging for the household tasks to be taken care of, so that this aging farmer woman could finally return to the land where she had been born. Not that Iulia's childhood had been one of joy and ease; she was orphaned at age 6 and sent away to be raised in a state home. Since getting married 40 years ago, she had been away from her adopted, marital village, only once, for a 10 day trip to Leningrad. The pair comes to the center of her natal village, and the woman identifies a few familiar sites to the anthropologist, who has actually become known as her adopted "dochka," or daughter. Pointing to a green wooden house, she recalls, "This is where my house was. This one is a different one, smaller." They search for a familiar face or kin, to find out more. It takes some time. And then, when she finally finds an acquaintance whom she can talk to, only a few minutes pass, and Iulia returns from the woman's porch to update Maggie: "Everyone is dead." They leave, walking three kilometers to the highway without looking back. "I'm not going back. That's it. My soul was aching and now it has been calmed. I came to say good-bye to everyone and now the ache will pass."
What is memory, Margaret Paxson asks, and why remember? Why is it necessary to fill the breaths of the present with memories, especially the often painful accounts of loss, hunger, and violence, of social orders brutally disrupted, and of the suffering days and nights that followed? How do the acts of remembering shape the lives of people in rural Russia, and how does an ethnographic focus on social memory enable us to understand this community in fresh, complex ways? These are the guiding questions that inspire Paxson as she narrates the symbolic topography of daily life in a Russian village during the 1990s. As I read this account, I found myself immersed in a world of diverse but always richly elaborated social relationships, between people, living and dead, who are known through the highly significant categories of "one's own" or "other." This is a world that insists on the centrality of moral obligations to one's community, one's ancestors, one's land; where men and women live their lives intimately aware of the unpredictable forces of nature and potentially unforgiving spirits of the forest; and as a consequence, they make considered and carefully negotiated decisions÷sometimes in the context of ritual time and space, sometimes in routine time and space-- about how to conduct their lives. The rural Russians we meet in Paxson's book acknowledge the centrality of human interpersonal dependency and reciprocity for meaningful existence; and they take great pains to fulfill the responsibilities that stem from these interpersonal bonds. Memory is a glue that creates social relations; it does so in a myriad of ways with a variety of outcomes and implications for issues such as continuity and change, equality and power, authority and domination.
My comments in this review are organized around two key themes that capture the goals of this book and its major contributions. These are explicit framing devices that the author uses to introduce her study: first, how we can understand the social landscapes and purposes of memory, taken as a force that infuses daily life with meaning; and second, how the study of memory as social practice offers a corrective to the common misconceptions and stereotypes that often arise in discussions about Russia.
The question of whether to remember the past and why, and what the implications of remembering and forgetting may be, are philosophical issues that have been treated by more than a few of the world's greatest thinkers. Paxson opens her study of this question in the village of Solovyovo by noting the response given by that most important historical figure for Russia, a man whose ideas were used throughout most of the twentieth century to shape the destiny of the Soviet Union: Karl Marx. For Marx, "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living" (p.8). The past is a burden standing in the way of progress, of revolutionary transformation and a future "unfettered" by ghosts and their legacies. Science, rationality, and violent change in the name of collectivism and communism were the keys to overcoming the past and freeing individuals and social groups from its clutches.
If twentieth century Russia, and indeed, all socialist states functioned at least in part according to this logic, ordinary people related to the past in more ambivalent, equivocal ways, with questions and invocations and yearnings for healing through connection with the people and practices that came before them. Milan Kundera, writing in Czechoslovakia during what was to become the last decade of the socialist experiment, questioned Marx's vision of the relationship between the past and present, and posited that societal forgetting might be itself a kind of plague. "Is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?" (9) Paxson asks, drawing from Kundera-- "Or is there something in lightness, in the ease of erasure, which is unbearable?"
Paxson opens her ethnography with these opposing visions of memory proffered by Marx and Kundera, but not to prove one right and the other wrong. Instead, she offers an anthropological perspective on memory and forgetting as social acts, and positions an ethnographic lens along the twisting byways of life in Soloyovo, to navigate between and through Marx and Kundera's rather narrow visions of the pathways of where remembering and forgetting take us. As we join in this ethnographic journey, we come to appreciate the immensely complex workings and uses of social memory. We come to see daily life as filled with implicit, multiple, flexible, and sometimes contradictory responses to the dilemmas these thinkers raise.
A good example of the ways that daily life is built on memory, and memory the medium through which daily life is configured, organized, symbolically elaborated, emerges in the story I mentioned at the beginning of these remarks, when Iulia and Maggie visit Iulia's birthplace. Anthropological insights on kinship patterns and alliances help Paxson explain the profound pull, based on an emotional magnetism and yearning for fulfillment, to return to one's rodina (204). Marriage and residence patterns are exogamous at the village level and patrilocal, leaving women to cope with being new, alien, and subordinate in the household hierarchy. In a cultural context where a person is known either as "ours" or "foreign," the marriage residence patterns of patrilocality position women in a tense, contradictory situation. As time passes and women become deeply integrated into their adopted villages, they usually become part of "us." One of their many responsibilities becomes to maintain a healthy, attentive relationship with their husband's ancestral line. But this sense of belonging is never total or complete, and a woman's own rodina beckons; she feels pulled to the place of her birth, the place where her own dead are buried, and the place she must die. Obligations to remember and care for one's own ancestors remain, creating a force field or vector that directs a woman back towards her own rodina. Returning brings a sense of peace, of responsibility fulfilled, of being in that space where one belongs.
Paxson builds on the emotionally rich journey back to Iulia's rodina ö including the physical trip but encompassing also the planning before it and the recounting afterwards-- to explore its broader implications regarding how memory serves as a building block for experiences of belonging, moral responsibility and social and spiritual order. She tells us: "The rodina is not simply a place to live and die (although this is the explicit ideal), but a region endowed with a vector inward÷a centripetal vector. Coming home, arriving back to the rodina appears to be part of setting the order of things right; allowing, in the broad sense, the dead to do their job in their native land. The pull homeward is a pull that answers that need" (207).
Memory is thus inescapable as a framework of personal identity and meaningful existence. But memory, and the sense of belonging it creates, also reaches beyond the individual, connecting him or her to larger collectivities, where socio-political notions of allegiance and exclusion hold sway. The text elaborates the relationship between collective memory and political authority in numerous contexts; I'd like to highlight a particular memory landscape she discusses, and which I believe contains one of the most important contributions of Paxson's study÷the matter of how memories of the Stalin era are configured by Russian villagers, what their diverse narratives of Stalinism reveal about their understandings of contemporary Russia, and how they help us rethink the dilemmas posed by Marx and Kundera about the purposes and value of memory and forgetting.
Aleksandra Ivanovna, an older village woman, sits with Paxson and recalls how her father was arrested "for political reasons." At the same time, she insists that the Stalin era was good. How do we comprehend this seeming paradox? What tools are adequate to the task of rendering Aleksandra Ivanovna's perspective-- which was not uncommon in the village÷as reflecting a certain common sense, rather than dismissing it outright as tragically distorted? Paxson accomplishes this subtle work as she places villagers' commentaries on Stalinism within the broader cultural context of Russian life, symbolic material which is built out of layers upon layers of history that echo in the present. We see the connection between their nostalgia for Stalin's authoritative order and the awe attributed to the Tsar as benevolent, holy protector of the people; and again in the practice of obrashcheniia or appeal to the icon in the corner of every home, the power and authority of the domovoi or house spirit which can protect or grow angry at its children. Memories of the Stalin period as "good" evoke moral notions of the value of personal discipline, social order, and a commitment to collective goals for a higher purpose. In this agrarian world where the labor of ensuring daily subsistence requires strong organization, coordination, dedication to back-breaking work, and disciplined collaboration, we come to understand how villagers might assess collective fear during Stalinism as a positive societal force-- especially from the vantage point of contemporary Russian life, where the world mostly feels chaotic, lacking in protection and filled with gratuitous (non-purposeful) violence. Similarly, the strict and severe leadership of Stalin is longed for not as a perverse embrace of torture and repression, but as the discipline necessary for establishing moral order and the benevolence and bounty a good father devotes himself to providing.
Paxson provides a subtle and complex discussion of how villagers remember Stalinism and the purposes their narratives serve for contemporary life. The ethnography demonstrates how problematic it is to characterize villagers' views of Stalinism in any simple or even generalized way. Although Paxson does not say so directly, her insistence on the centrality of narrative genre and attention to metaphorical complexity in the ethnography certainly indicates the serious inadequacy of drawing conclusions about villagers' relationships to the Stalinist past from such literally minded vehicles as, for instance, opinion polls. Paxson shows us that social acts of remembering the past take us down different landscapes, or timescapes, which serve different purposes depending on the context. One prominent timescape for memories of villagers' childhoods is what Paxon has termed, "the radiant past." Accounts situated in the symbolic topography of the Radiant past" present a kind of grassroots alter ego to communism's "radiant future." Nostalgic for a stable, interpersonal connection based on deeply emotional bonds and shared societal goals, the severity of Stalinism here appears rather benign, as when Mikhail Alekseevich explains, "We don't remember repression. But it wasn't bad [if used] to keep discipline.. Now there is no discipline" and when Anna Petrovna adds, "He understood that you have to keep discipline. Before, there was more discipline. In khoziaistvo and in general." (101).
Taken on their own, these quotes could easily be misinterpreted as a denial of the terrors of the Stalin era and a romanticized, straightforward yearning to return to Soviet rule. Paxson carefully disabuses us of this analysis, explaining persuasively how the radiant past is a utopic timescape that gets projected onto the past but transcends any particular set of events. It "provides a template for social wellness and perfection· one that can be attached to any time or place. But the telling of the radiant past not only sings the song of fields and flowers and Edens. It also links Edenic places to social control" (101).
The key to understanding memory as a series of social acts and the formation of social relationships is in the way narratives of one set of experiences metaphorically echoes with parallels between encounters individuals have with supernatural wonders in and around geographical thresholds such as forests, and another set of narratives-- arrest stories. At the same time, villagers also recounted terror and violence through narratives outside the radiant past. Elderly villagers spoke about such events from the Stalin era, while younger villagers struggled to articulate the pain they witnessed and participated in during the war in Chechnya. What Paxson helps us understand through her paradigm of the symbolic topography of memory, is that the past is told through a variety of narrative genres that structure the language of the past. To make sense of the seeming paradoxes and inconsistencies between comments and stories requires us to recognize which genre a narrator is using when traversing the numerous paths one can take down the symbolic landscape that is memory.
The second major contribution of this book that bears emphasizing concerns Paxson's thoughtful process of debunking myths and stereotypes about rural Russians÷myths that, we might add, themselves have weighty histories that are not easily disrupted or dislodged from outsiders' assumptions. The stakes, however, are high, for misunderstandings and simplified visions of the dynamics and rhythms of Russian culture have led to dangerous geopolitical results in both Soviet and world history. In the process, she seeks to retire certain long-standing images and misconceptions about rural Russia, stereotyped concepts whose roots extend from the very well-springs of Russian intellectual culture and extend as far as the causal explanations developed by Western advisors, or transitologists, to account for the reasons Russia has not successfully adapted to capitalist democracy. Agrarian lifeways, farmers' knowledge and daily practices, and the forms of community that enliven this world with the strength and power and struggles of the human spirit, are ever so much more complex and contradictory than reductionist stereotypes about 'primitive mentalities' (Pipes 1974:157) allow us to comprehend.
Excellent examples of this complex are found in one of my favorite chapters ö"Healing." Paxson teaches us how the process of healing a person who is suffering from a any of a range of physical and social and spiritual causes, involves an important concept of obrashchenie, or appealing to forces beyond the individual self. Obrashchenie is a dynamic but historically embedded set of strategies for addressing and relating to the unknown, mysterious forces in the world; it reflects a firm knowledge that there is more to this world than what is visible and material, and that humility and attention to the otherworldly forces is a perennial human obligation. Paxson's close relationship with Mikhail Alekseevich and her descriptions of his life and relationships and healing work, demonstrates to all observers of Russia just how complex this world is. Mikhail Alekseevich was a long-time Soviet culture worker, a job that made him responsible for the village's ideological discipline and the moral education of its youth; he was also a healer who kept icons in the corner of his one room home and cured his fellow villagers from curses and other forms of psychic suffering. Through Mikhail Alekseevich's stories perhaps more than any other villager in this book, we come to see Russian people not as determined by the past, or structured decisively beyond creative human agency, but as a community embedded in a historically rich, layered cultural landscape that presents meaningful possibilities and repertoires of action for each individual to make use of as she or he sees fit. Mikhail Alekseevich firmly believed in the promises of communism and supported the state's vision of a properly disciplined social order. Yet he also makes decisions that reveal his independence from any overarching ideology. Although official Soviet policy was that the culture clubs were not to be opened on religious holidays, Mikhail Alekseevich realized that as a leader of his community, he needed to ensure people had a safe and productive venue for commemorating and celebrating the festivities. He tells Paxson: "So that there wouldn't be murders, and finally, other unpleasantries. For that reason, so that it would be easier and that these things wouldn't happen, they wouldn't let the clubs open on religious holidays. Let them be outside! Less responsibility. They didn't let us÷the club workers÷open the clubs. But, to the degree that I was convinced that there was nowhere else to go÷the church was closed÷I opened it. Didn't listen to the prededatel' of the sel'sovet. They're going to celebrate anyway." (308) With this example from a most everyday kind of event, we get an important glimpse into how Mikhail Alekseevich, a Party member, an ideology worker, wove a common sense in his decisions and used the principles of taking responsibility for community wellbeing, even when it involved bucking the official expectations from above.
In conclusion, this is an extremely rich ethnography on memory, forgetting, and the production of identity in rural Russia. Readers with interests in urban regions will also find much here to consider, as Paxson's inspiring narrative provokes questions of how continuity and transformation are inherently interwoven, always crossing spatial, metaphorical, and temporal boundaries.