Russia between Yesterday and Tomorrow

Marika Pruska-Carroll. Russia Between Yesterday and Tomorrow. Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1995. 180 pp. Photographs. $17.95, paper. Like the early 1920s, the last years of perestroika and the beginnings of the new Federation spurred a cosmogony of visions and organizations operating on the assumption that all alternatives were open to Russia after the collapse of the old order. Marika Pruska-Caroll, professor of and Eastern European politics at Concordia University, was there to document those post-Soviet dreams, grievances, and opinions from the mouths of Russians from all walks of life. Hers is a book about everyday life in Russia based on over 150 taped interviews and conversations she had, as well as observations she made during her visits in Russia in the summers of 1992, 1993, and 1994. The author sought to register how Russians of different generations-men and women-looked upon the decade of reform that followed Gorbachev's coming to power. The material is organized in thematic but not seamless chapters and subchapters. The narrative often returns to some of the same topics. However, this is hardly a disadvantage. As her pen follows the flow of specific conversations and interviews with individual Russians, with whom she usually touched on more than one topic, Pruska-Caroll attains the unpretentious goal of becoming the reader's guide and translator on a tour of contemporary Russia. She records a mostly gloomy landscape of characters and problems in a nation confused and battered by changes, which left one out of every four Russians below the poverty level, industrial plants idle, and most public buildings dilapidated. Pruska-Caroll makes no conclusions other than the prevalence of glaring paradoxes and the volatility of post-Soviet Russia-not one but two different countries divided between the new and the old, the young and the aged, the rich and the poor, those who clung to their Soviet-era professions and those who found other, lucrative ones. New glittering shops in Moscow and St. Petersburg cater mostly to Mafia millionaires while sullen unemployed workers gulp down vodka in unlit back alleys. Youths are driven to crime, drugs, or prostitution to afford the cornucopia of imported products and lifestyles promoted on TV. Their mothers are consumed by angst and their fathers drink themselves to a slow vodka-induced death, emasculated by the inability to shield their families from degradation. Pruska-Caroll warns the reader that she has no academic pretensions. Like many scholars who were caught in the whirlwind of events in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, she believes that this was not the time for lengthy social studies. While dramatic change in the 1990s did overtake the methodological apparatus of many a social discipline, Pruska-Caroll is more modest than many who dispensed with scholarly methodology without relinquishing claims to academic integrity. Her book has few of the trappings and fewer of the usual shortcomings but most of the merits of scholarly work. The author did not strive less than most scholarly researchers to make her sample as representative as possible: young and old, urban and rural, bluecollar and professional, students and dropouts, historic capitals, provincial towns and forsaken villages in European Russia. She meticulously describes the background of her interviewees and parameters of her encounters. She is a perceptive observer, spelling out remarks that might elude the casual reader, such as the stark polarization between male university students who harp on the impalpable qualities of the mystical Russian soul, and women who disassociate themselves from assumed distinctive values. Focusing her inquiry on a list of eighty most frequently asked questions of her students about Russia, Pruska-Caroll remains anchored in reality and tackles issues that have perplexed researchers and common folk alike in the West. In fact, the relative informality of her project may have increased the value of the answers Pruska-Caroll received. …

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