An Archaeology of Socialism

by Victor Buchli

This highly original case study, which adopts a material culture perspective, is unprecedented in social and cultural histories of the Soviet period and provides a unique window on social relations. The author demonstrates how Moisei Ginzburg's Constructivist masterpiece, the Narkomfin Communal House, employed classic Marxist understandings of material culture in an effort to overturn capitalist and patriarchal social structures. Through the edifying effects of architectural forms, Ginzburg attempted to induce socialist and feminist-inspired social and gender relations. The author shows how, for the inhabitants, these principles manifested themselves, from taste to hygiene to gender roles, and how individuals variously appropriated architectural space and material culture to cope with the conditions of daily life, from the utopianism of the First Five Year Plan and Stalin's purges to the collapse of the Soviet Union. This book makes a major contribution the history of socialism in the Soviet Union and, more generally, Eastern Europe; material culture studies; architectural history; archaeology and social anthropology.

Genres: Theory, Anthropology

240 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1999

About the author

Victor is Professor of Material Culture within the Material Culture Group at UCL and works on architecture, domesticity, the archaeology of the recent past, and critical understandings of materiality and new technologies. He also teaches on the UCL Urban Studies MSc and supervises on the Mphil/PhD programme at the Bartlett and the Slade and serves on the Board of the Victoria and Albert/Royal College of Art MA History of Design Programme as well as on the Steering Committee of the Victoria and Albert Research Institute (VARI).

Reviews

[Barry Avis · Rating 4 out of 5]

An archaeology of Socialism focusses on a housing development located in the outskirts of Moscow and how its form and function changed from the initial designs in the wake of the October revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsins’ stint as Russian president. In the initial Leninist era, the development worked towards a decentralised and shared community with small sparse apartments and community kitchens, laundry facilities etc. Then, during the Stalin period the state moved away from control of the home, and this was controlled locally with vague guidelines and so the apartments became more self-contained moving away from community resources. After Stalin died there was then a move back towards the Leninist community-based systems until Gorbachev took power and it changed again.
This book made me think about how our homes and in particular how new build homes have changed in the last one hundred years to reflect modern living. In the UK we have moved away from parlours to small living rooms, added car ports and garages and away from country hosing to large urban sprawls.
The first chapter of this book is difficult to understand (for me anyway) and reads like a dissertation with multiple references to other works. This did not inspire me to read the rest of the book but once you get into chapter two it starts to be much easier to read and follow and it makes interesting reading.
Overall, it is a good book that makes the reader think about the subject. The book is clearly aimed at a small group of people such as archaeologists and sociologists but, with the exception of chapter one is easily read and understood by lay people such as me.