Heart of an intelligent: Popular history and the justification of class revival in Russia

Michele Rivkin-Fish, Dept of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An exploration of popular narratives of Soviet history as a key site in which urban Russians articulated class-based subjectivities for themselves and others in the 1980s and '90s, as the legitimating institutions of state socialism collapsed. Through ethnographic examination of debates between the author and Russian interlocutors on Mikhail Bulgakov's story "Heart of a Dog," the essay identifies local narratives of the Soviet past that indict communist "class" policies for long-standing injustice against educated groups. These narratives map comparative experiences of suffering onto essentialized social categories -- "workers" and "intelligentsia" -- depicted as enduring social entities with distinct moral characters. Invoked in the late Soviet era and first decade after the Soviet collapse, such visions legitimized renewed privileges for educated groups and erased the ambivalence people otherwise felt toward market reforms.