Workers in Soviet Museum Ethnography in the 1950s: Class Analysis and Politics of Time

 
Код статьиS086954150016802-2-1
DOI10.31857/S086954150016802-2
Тип публикации Статья
Статус публикации Опубликовано
Авторы
Аффилиация: The Russian Museum of Ethnography
Адрес: Russian Federation, St. Petersburg
Название журналаЭтнографическое обозрение
Выпуск№4
Страницы313-328
Аннотация

Drawn on archival materials produced by The State Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR (nowadays The Russian Museum of Ethnography) in the 1950s, the article explores the ways in which the image of workers was constructed as an object of ethnographic inquiry and museum representation in the context of social and political changes that marked the period stretching from the late Stalinism to Khrushchev’s “thaw”. It focuses on the Russian workers seen as the largest and most significant “national group of the proletariat”. Ethnographic studies of workers conducted during the period were conceptually based on the monolinear class analysis that was instrumental in establishing a temporal hierarchy separating the “advanced” working class from the “backward” peasantry. Yet, if in the early 1950s museum ethnographers tended to draw sharp lines between the workers and the peasants in their scholarly writings and exhibitions, the situation started to change with the coming of the Khrushchev “thaw” when class distinctions began to be blurred and ethnographers would constantly emphasize commonalities and similarities in the everyday life and culture of both groups.

Ключевые словаSoviet ethnography, State Museum of Ethnography, Russian Museum of Ethnography, workers, class analysis, politics of time
Источник финансированияThis article is a translation of: Петряшин С.С. Рабочие в советской музейной этнографии 1950-х годов: классовый анализ и политика времени // Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie. 2021. No 4. P. 156–174. DOI: 10.31857/S086954150016707-7
Получено22.09.2021
Дата публикации28.09.2021
Кол-во символов56509
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1 There is in the Russian Museum of Ethnography1 in St. Petersburg in the 1980s and 1990s, a large exposition on the ethnography of the Russian people was built. Despite its advanced age, it is still open and represents primarily the traditional culture of Russian peasants at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. Various peasant crafts are shown in the second hall of the exhibition, but one of the walls of the hall is devoted to the history and life of industrial workers. There are two skillfully executed models of the workshops of a weaving factory and a foundry of the late XIX century among the photographs, tools and other materials.2 These ones show difficult working conditions and immerse the viewer in the atmosphere of factory life: women work 15-16 hours a day at closely spaced looms, they are helped by children; men work in a gloomy dirty workshop filled with heat from a molten steel. Such pictures of working life are out of the general "positive" exposition narrative and seem like an unfit sample in an ethnographic museum specializing on traditional rural culture. 1. It was founded in 1902 as the Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum, since 1934 - the State Museum of Ethnography, since 1948 - the State Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR, since 1992 - the Russian Museum of Ethnography.

2. The model of the foundry of the metallurgical plant was created based on the materials of the Rosenkrantz copper rolling plant in St. Petersburg (since 1922 - the Krasny Vyborzhets plant). The layout of the textile workshop was made according to the narratives of the older generation of workers in Ivanovo.
2 Now this part of the exhibition seems to be a strange and accidentally surviving relic. Nevertheless, It was in the 1950s part of a new ambitious project of Soviet ethnography to study the working class in the past and present. It was this time that the models describing life of Russian workers were made. Studies of everyday life of workers began in the late 1940s and were part of the post-war turn of Soviet ethnography to actual questions of modernity. A number of works are devoted to this turn, but all of them focus on the study of the life and culture of the collective farm peasantry as a main direction of ethnography of this time (Slezkine 1994; Abashin 2011; Haber 2014; Alymov 2010; Novozhilov 2012). The history of studying workers remains untold. The ethnography of contemporaneity ("new life", "socialist construction") of the 1920s and 1930s was also mainly engaged in rural residents (Hirsch 2005; Verniaev 2005; Petriashin 2018). It can be said that Soviet ethnographers of this time continued the romantic tradition of studying the rural population of European countries as a carrier of historical traditions and the "national spirit". The ethnography of workers, on the contrary, made a radical break with this tradition, since its object was the most “advanced” class of society from the point of view of the Soviet ideology. The Marxist "subject of history” and the collective sovereign of the Soviet "dictatorship of the proletariat" turned out to be on a par with the usual objects of colonization and ethnographic description as peasants and “exotic” natives. At the same time, when looking out of core of ethnography, workers were not a favorable object for research in comparison with a study of the Russian peasants, since the tasks, methods and scientific value of a study of the Russian working class were not clear.
3 This paper should answer the following questions. What were principles of a shaping of a working class as an object of study in a frame of the Soviet ethnography? How ideological models of class and national relations in the USSR were reflected in the ethnography of the workers and its research and representation practices?
4 Finally, how did the ethnography of the workers change under conditions of socio-political transformations of the 1950s? The main sources are archival and published materials of the State Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR (the SME): scientific reports on expeditions, thematic and exposition plans, transcripts of discussions, guides to exhibitions and etc. The specifics of museum materials will allow to reveal the ethnography of the workers in two perspectives as academic research and museum representation. I focus on the Russian workers as the largest and most ideologically significant "national formation of the proletariat" in the USSR.
5 I consider a formation of the working class as a subject of ethnography in the context of the Soviet "politics of time". This concept was demonstrated by J. Fabian: " If it is true that Time belongs to the political economy of relations between individuals, classes, and nations, then the construction of anthropology’s object through temporal concepts and devices is a political act; there is a “Politics of Time.” " (Fabian 1983: X). According to Fabian, anthropological discourse is characterized by allochronism as placing the persons, which are subject of study, in a different time, as investigator regards them, with the help of temporalizing concepts as, for example, traditional and modern, peasant and industrial, rural and urban, etc. (Ibid.: 23). Anthropologists attributed modernity and development to Western societies, while other societies (often these ones are postcolonial) were considered to be backward and archaic. The ethnographic study of the peasantry in the Russian Empire and the USSR, as one of the tools of internal colonization, fits well into this model (Gouldner 1977–1978; Viola 1996; Etkind 2011; Etkind et al. 2012). Studies of industrial workers, however, require making adjustments to this one. The appearance of the workers as an object of researches at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s left only the Soviet intelligentsia out of the ethnographic focus in the position of an actor of this research. At the same time, subject-object allochronism between the intelligentsia and the workers was impossible due to the ideological importance of the proletariat. The Soviet working class, as the most progressive and playing a ”leading role“ in a society, could not be pushed by the intelligentsia into the ”past“ and in ideological terms rather embodied the ”future in the present“. As a result, the temporal hierarchy of the “advanced” working class and a lagging behind peasantry as two objects of the research has become constitutive for the ethnography of the workers.

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