«Everything was given with great difficulty and in any weather»: women's memory of everyday disorder in the post-war new Soviet city of the 1950s

Abstract

The proposed work explores some aspects of women's memory of everyday life in a Soviet socialist city in the 1950s. The work is based on the materials of oral history, the history of everyday life, gender expertise of social phenomena and the theory of historical memory. The main conclusion - that the social memory of the townspeople transformed urban everyday life into an alternative historical space - is proved by comparing published documents and oral history materials in a historical context. In this refraction, the disorder of life, associated, among other things, with the formation of the urban environment, the necessary social infrastructure, a number of lost ethno-cultural traditions and the realities of the Soviet economic model of the post-war industrialization stage became part of nostalgia for the Soviet past in the 2020s. It was in this form that this nostalgia for the Soviet was transformed in the turning points of modern Russian history and in connection with the paradigm shift.