Lingering Aftertaste of the USSR. Review of Dmitrii Travin (2024). Kak my zhili v SSSR [How we lived in the USSR]. Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: If a person has never tasted an orange, there is no way to describe its flavor to them.If a person has never lived in the USSR, they cannot fully understand what it was like.Such knowledge is acquired only through personal experience and perception.Thus, attempting to describe "our life in the USSR" seems futile.For those who lived it, any account would feel incomplete and fragmented; for those who did not, it would appear detached and impersonal.Nevertheless, Dmitrii Travin made a leap of faith.As he states, it took him ten years to complete the book, which was published by Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie [New Literary Review] as part of the series "Chto takoe Rossiia" [What Russia Is].The title of the series subtly alludes to Fyodor Tyutchev's famous poem 1 , which asserts that Russia cannot be conceived by the intellect.At the same time, the series' name seems to tentatively claim the opposite, that is, that Russia can, in fact, be understood through reason.The author identifies as a Soviet "Seventier," 2 though it would be more accurate to call him an "Eightier," since it was in the 1980s that those born in the early 1960s, including Travin, became actively engaged in social life and co-authored Gorbachev's Perestroika and later Yeltsin's reforms.In the 1970s, they were still in school-passive but thirsty for knowledge witnesses to the final years of socialism.Given that the life they observed unfolded in the 1970s and 1980s, a more appropriate title for the book might have been How We Lived in the Late USSR.
Author: Sergey V. Moshkin
Institution: Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Language: English
Topic: Soviet and Russian History
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4412385008