Touching Soviet Culture, 1910-53.

In simplest terms, this research project is an investigation into what anyone who visited the Soviet Union will recall as the textural density of Soviet everyday life. This is, or was, a culture in which carpets hung on walls, in which all restaurant windows had curtains, in which fabric shops were to be found on every street, and in which women were always fastidiously (and often well) dressed. And this seems to contradict what we know, or think we know, about the functionalist aesthetics of Soviet ideology, which was supposedly anti-fashion, anti-luxury, anti-bourgeois. It is my intention to account for how this textural aspect of everyday life fitted into these functionalist aesthetics, and how it can be considered as part of what recent scholarship has theorised as the phenomenon of 'Soviet subjectivity'.
I tackle this question by the investigation of two interrelated aspects of Soviet everyday life: the dressing of the self, and the dressing of the home. In so doing, however, it is not my intention to document the history of Soviet fashion, or of domestic space. Rather, I hope to reveal the role of sensory experience in the constitution of subjectivity. Following Marx's call for an 'emancipation of the senses', the Soviet project was a unique attempt to create new models of human experience, to correspond to the new political order. In this respect, it was an attempt to shape sensory experience itself, that apparently most personal and unpoliceable of realms. According to Marx, after all, the 'sensuous world' was 'not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society... a historical product'. As such, a new political and social order could and should create a new 'sensuous world.' This emphasis on the cultural shaping of the human sensorium is important for my purposes; my argument is that culture, in all its forms, participated in the project of creating the new Soviet subject, promoting new models of sensory experience.
Focusing on a wide-range of primary material, but with emphasis on cinema, I examine how cultural texts mediated ideological ideals of new sensory experience. What could and should people wear, and what did it say about them? How did one's physical experience of domestic space, its textures and its textiles, fit with the ideological imperatives of the age? I raise questions about the relationship between utilitarian and non-utilitarian objects in the new Soviet everyday, about the relationship between the public and private 'self', and public and private space, exploring how people 'lived' the imperative to internalize Soviet ideology, and how cultural texts anticipated the compromises needed to do so. Directing attention to the importance of the tactile, of sensory pleasure, across diverse fields of the Soviet discursive field, and revealing how tactile practices were written, talked about, and represented, we can approach some understanding of the importance of the anticipated pleasure of touch in Soviet Russia. In sum, the project represents an entirely original investigation into the role of sensory pleasure, of the tactile, within the function-led aesthetics (and everyday life) of Soviet Russia up to the death of Stalin.