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This study examines how early Soviet culture sought to render time perceptible, governable, and politically productive by translating Futurist “chrontology” into socialist “chronization.” Taking Aleksandr Kusikov’s 1922 polemic on the Berlin journal Veshch (Thing)—edited by Ilya Ehrenburg and El Lissitzky—as its point of departure, it reconstructs a “third-way” Futurism shaped by postrevolutionary transit and exile, in which anticipatory futurity was inseparable from an intensified orientation toward materiality, technique, and constructive making. Against the backdrop of modern heterochrony—where “times” proliferate and synchronization remains contested—the essay traces how Soviet actors devised new units, comparisons, and pedagogies for living in a temporally unstable present. Two case studies anchor the argument. First, the League of Time (1923–1925) promoted multiscalar time-management practices through campaigns, memos, and didactic graphics that treated clocks, routines, and efficiency as instruments of socialist subject-formation. Second, illustrated children’s books translated variegated temporal sensibilities into a pedagogy of images, making futurity legible via “thingful” traces that recoded the past as a catalogue of obsolete objects. Chronization thus appears as an ambitious cultural technology for producing a planned, dynamic, and productive socialist way of being. By foregrounding work, visualization, and material comparison, these projects converted temporal uncertainty into actionable, collective everyday socialist practice.

The sudden dissolution of the Soviet Union altered the routines, norms, celebrations, and shared understandings that had shaped the lives of Russians for generations. It also meant an end to the state-sponsored, nonmonetary support that most residents had lived with all their lives. How did Russians make sense of these historic transformations? Serguei Alex. Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in Russia. In Barnaul, a major industrial city in southwestern Siberia that has lost 25 percent of its population since 1991, many Russians are finding that what binds them together is loss and despair.The Patriotism of Despairexamines the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, graphically described in spray paint by a graffiti artist in Barnaul: \"We have no Motherland.\" Once socialism disappeared as a way of understanding the world, what replaced it in people's minds? Once socialism stopped orienting politics and economics, how did capitalism insinuate itself into routine practices? Oushakine offers a compelling look at postsocialist life in noncosmopolitan Russia. He introduces readers to the \"neocoms\": people who mourn the loss of the Soviet economy and the remonetization of transactions that had not involved the exchange of cash during the Soviet era. Moving from economics into military conflict and personal loss, Oushakine also describes the ways in which veterans of the Chechen war and mothers of soldiers who died there have connected their immediate experiences with the country's historical disruptions. The country, the nation, and traumatized individuals, Oushakine finds, are united by their vocabulary of shared pain.

What do we need, comrades? We need the broad masses laughing as much as possible. We need laughter so badly, it is enough to make you weep. . . . We need laughter. Thoughtful, serious laughter without the slightest grin. Nikolai Erdman and Vladimir Mass,A Meeting about Laughter, 1933 Laughter can be different. Yet, such terms as “ours” [nash] and “theirs” [ne nash]—trite as they are—have no difficulty in finding dieir proper coun-terparts. . . . “Our laughter” and “their laughter” are not mere abstractions. The two are separated by a gulf of different social reasoning [propasf raznogo sotsial´nogo osmysleniia]. —Sergei Eisenstein, The Bolsheviks Are Laughing, 1930s

In this article, I explore how a group of women in a distant Russian province learned to live in the state of grief by creating a space for the traumatic experience in their daily order of things, their personal narratives, and public landscape. Using materials from my fieldwork in Siberia in 2001-03,I demonstrate how the Altai Regional Committee of the Soldiers' Mothers domesticated and privatized losses of their sons, which were caused by the Russian state's military politics of the last 20 years. By devising elaborate memorializating practices, the mothers managed to materialize evidence of their loss and suffering. It is precisely this collective and individual production of metonymies of death, I suggest, that not only became the main source of the Committee of the Soldiers' Mothers' new public identities but also acted as the principal vehicle of their politics of pity.

In the texts of prominent Soviet figures such as writer Maxim Gorky, the agrobiologist Trofim Lysenko, and the educator Anton Makarenko, the uncertainty of social norms in early Soviet society became equated with an instability of environment in general and nature in particular. A powerful and vivid rhetoric of a \"second nature,\" to use Gorky's phrase, overcame the absence of clearly articulated models for subjectivity. A series of disciplining routines and activities capable of producing the new Soviet subject compensated in the 1930s for the dissolution of the daily order of things and all the structuring effects, social networks, and reciprocal obligations that were associated with it.

Following an emerging trend in the ethnography of socialist things, this article seeks to move beyond the powerful paradigms of “the culture of shortage” and “the economy of scarcity” that have been defining the studies of socialist consumption for the last few decades. By displacing “scarcity” as the primary explanatory lens on Soviet consumption, we can open up some analytical and ethnographic room for processes, practices, concepts, or paradigms that have been overshadowed by the politically charged emphasis on shortages. The dominant Soviet perception of consumption as a form of production reduced the complexity of the Soviet commodity to one dimension: use‐value. In the situation of a planned economy with regulated prices, neither exchange‐value, nor even value itself, were of particular importance or interest for those who determined the shape and structure of Soviet consumption. The Soviet commodity made itself known through its “sensuous characteristics” and its ability to meet (or, more commonly, fail to meet) the requirements of functionality. When seen in this context, the productivist framework of Soviet‐style consumption emerges less as a material representation of “the dictatorship over needs”–with “the perfect homogenization of society and the (perhaps forcible) uniformization of needs” as its main goal–but rather as a historically situated attempt to take rationality (and rationalization) to its limits.

During the first decade after the Russian Revolution, the new Soviet state went through a major mediatization campaign. Deploying various genres and platforms, the state created a diverse network of institutions and mechanisms that could represent and disseminate important Communist ideas and concepts. The essay explores only one dimension of this campaign: the radical turn towards the optical in the early Soviet media. More specifically, it traces the transformation of photomontage by looking closely at a distinctive genre of the illustrated book: the so-called Leniniana for children. Lenin’s death in 1924 generated a wave of publications for children in which their own stories, recollections, and poetry about the leader were accompanied with texts written by adults. Often, these textual collages were interspersed with photo-illustrations and photomontages that prominently featured Lenin surrounded by children. Amalgamating ideology, text, painterly devices, and photographic images, photomontages in children’s literature offered convincing visual models of plausible belonging and connectedness for the young reader: realist and spectacular at the same time. As the essay suggests, the 1924-25 memorial media campaign was instrumental in merging the abstract language of the Russian avant-garde with the concrete visual idioms of the documentary photography. In the memorial books, the Communist abstraction was concretized: the utopian future found its embodiment in multiple images of the first Soviet generation.

This volume addresses precisely this dual process of the intelligensia's decline as a significant social force and the erosion of values and practices that constituted the ideological and habitual core of the moral elite of late socialism. Written by sociologists, the articles in this volume are mostly concerned with practices and forms of their symbolization rather than with genealogies of ideas. Each essay traces a particular aspect of the transformation of late socialist intelligentsia into a non-socialist actor. In some cases, this transformation entailed a complete departure from intellectual activities, in others it meant a radical reformatting of intellectual or artistic practices. What remains common in all of these cases is a striking disappearance of the moral core that was so crucial for the intelligentsia of earlier periods. Appeals to universal truth and common values are replaced by group interests, professional codes, and identity politics. Adapted from the source document.

Following closely the public debates about the nature and purpose of distinctively Soviet laughter and comedy in the 1920-1950s, this essay distills rationales used by producers of Stalinist culture for determining a socially acceptable discursive place for the comic in Soviet Russia. As the essay demonstrates, these debates reveal a complicated argumentative strategy devised by the Soviet political and cultural authorities in order to reclaim, appropriate and adapt for the needs of the socialist state previously ignored comic genres. Adapted from the source document.