Material Culture in the USSR and Steampunk Tinkering: Points of Intersection
Opposite the Western overabundance, the lack of commodities in the USSR shaped the everyday practices of consumption very differently. With a clear difference between the Western trends of DIY as counter-cultures and protests against consumerism and capitalism, the Soviet accounts for repair and re-adjustments were a result of the necessity caused by the “shortage economy” (or “storage economy” as proposed by Serguei Oushakine). Such consumption often led to the level of physical destruction of the commodity, and on the other hand a practice of constant repair and repurposing that would “revive” the commodity over and over again. It also meant the forging of a special relationship between people and things, which was described as “taming a veshch” [a thing] by Galina Orlova, or saving a friend by Ekaterina Gerasimova and Sofya Chuikina. In this paper, I argue that certain practices of consumption in the USSR share similar steampunk attitudes to things in terms of tinkering and remaking, repair and recycling, as well as a technocratic vision of the future. To do so, I draw mainly on James H. Carrott and Brian David Johnson’s Vintage Tomorrows (Maker Media, Inc., 2013) and works by Russian scholars on material culture in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia (Orlova, Olga Gurova, Gerasimova and Chuikina, and Ekaterina Dyogot). I will conclude by discussing “Soviet vintage” as an emerging category, which as time unfolds will likely become more expensive and desired, and enter the domain of popular culture, while certain objects of technological advancements of the Soviet Union, in a similar way to Victorian culture with its steam engines, can be re-imagined (or re-discovered?) as Soviet steampunk or “red steam” in the years to come.
Ksenia Papazova is a PhD candidate researching book design and book culture in modern Russia at the department of Russian Studies at The University of Manchester. For her research, she looks at material culture, vintage aesthetics, and how a concept of time can be embedded in the material object of the book. Ksenia received her MA in Book and Digital Media Studies from Leiden University, The Netherlands. She is also a TA for the UCIL courses AI: Robot Overlord, Replacement, or Colleague? and Digital Society.
