How state and society made everyday life socialist and transformed the meaning of socialism in doing so has been a central question of Soviet history. Recently, scholars interested in these questions have focused on the post-Stalin decades when massive growth in housing and consumption created new opportunities to revive socialism and give it concrete form, but not without unintended changes to what socialism meant. The vexing question of how to bring socialist ideas into life did not first appear in the late Soviet era when people acquired separate apartments, purchased automobiles, and went shopping for household goods. There were much deeper roots, which Andy Willimott's engaging study of urban communes demonstrates by refocusing our attention on the first decade of the socialist experiment.
Released on the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Living the Revolution is a timely contribution to our understanding of how urban dwellers struggled to make living spaces and the workplace socialist. Scholars have traditionally seen the urban communes as utopian communities that embodied a pure revolutionary spirit but were crushed by Stalinism. Whereas historians have privileged the impact of avant-garde architects and their house communes (doma-kommuny) on housing of the Stalin and Khrushchev eras, the lived experience of communards and their influence beyond the 1920s have been largely ignored. Living the Revolution reveals a more complex story of these collectives of young activists, students, and workers who were at the forefront of translating socialist ideas into practice and then willingly rode the results into the Stalin era. This book makes an original contribution to the growing body of scholarship that interprets Stalinism as the radical realization of practices and ideas that initially took root among revolutionary activists and visionaries deeply frustrated with the pace and social values of the New Economic Policy (NEP).
Focusing primarily on Petrograd (Leningrad) and Moscow, Living the Revolution is based on impressive research in published and archival sources, including the collections of individual communards, local municipal governments, and factories. In the first chapter, Willimott shows that communards drew their understanding of “revolutionary collectivism” (26) from a constellation of pre-revolutionary texts, institutions, and practices including Nikolai Chernyshevskii's What Is To Be Done? (1863), student kruzhki, worker artels, and the Paris Commune. Although they distanced themselves from rural life, the peasant commune likewise informed communards’ notions of collective living. From these various sources, they cobbled together a collectivist worldview that emphasized equality and comradeship, “self-regulation and plain asceticism,” enlightening those around them, and “shared-living space and the overhaul of family customs” (48). Whereas the young Bolshevik state took collectivism to mean falling in line behind its policies, the communards saw it more widely as a collection of ideas about proper living and working relationships that, once implemented, would be the foundation of socialism.
To illustrate how they did this, Willimott devotes a chapter to each of the three urban communes: student communes in dormitories; apartment communes in already existing housing; and workplace communes at factories. A final chapter traces their influence into the First Five-Year Plan. Willimott argues that urban communes gave form and meaning to critical concepts of early Soviet ideology such as “cultural revolution” and “civic-mindedness” (obshchestvennost΄) from which a “new way of life” (novyi byt) would arise (15–18). The communards became an avant-garde promoting practices and campaigns that ultimately predominated during Iosif Stalin's industrialization drive. These included scientific management of work and home; writing letters and diaries as methods of self-improvement and raised consciousness; criticism and self-criticism; shock-work at the factory floor; generational conflict and renewed class warfare.
By the early 1930s, however, most urban communes disbanded or were absorbed by factory management, but none were violently repressed or even heavily criticized as were some members of the architectural avant-garde. Instead, as Willimott shows, the end of the urban communes had more to do with communards’ own embrace of the Five-Year Plan as a confirmation of the priorities they had long espoused. Having outgrown their communes (and their youth), the communards were ready for the next stage of building socialism.
Although Willimott mentions the architectural avant-garde in passing, more could have been said about architects’ relationship to urban communes and whether there was any mutual influence between the two. Similarly, little attention is paid to the communal apartment (kommunalka) and its relationship to the urban communes, despite its ubiquitous presence in Leningrad and Moscow in the 1920s and its critical role in giving socialist ideals concrete form. These criticisms notwithstanding, Living the Revolution stands as a model for a renewed social history of ideas. Critical of studies of ideology that focus on disembodied discourses, Willimott's painstaking research on the lived experience of the urban communes produces a far richer and more complex story of how socialist ideas changed over time.
Living the Revolution will be of particular interest to historians of the NEP and the early Stalin era, and it will work well in both undergraduate Soviet history courses and graduate seminars. As suggested at the beginning of this review, historians of housing and consumption in the post-Stalin decades should also read this book to understand how tensions between ideology and everyday life in late socialism were shaped by the earliest attempts to live the Revolution.
