Telling Russian History through Things

Abstract

Historians of the Soviet era have a distinctive relationship to written texts. On the one hand, many texts produced by the Soviet state and its citizens are assumed to be tainted by censorship, self-censorship, and outright falsification. On the other hand, the opening of the archives after the Soviet collapse provided historians with such a rich trove of new or underutilized documents that we have been slow to incorporate nonwritten sources into our research programs. Material culture as a constellation of methods (often informed by anthropology), as a variety of source material, and as a subject of analysis remained to the side of the Soviet field’s preoccupations with politics and empire for many years. It seemed the province of prerevolutionary Russian historians, especially scholars working in a quantitative