Time and Material Culture: Rethinking Soviet Temporalities by JulieDeschepper, AntonyKalashnikov, and FedericaRossi, eds. Routledge Histories of Central and Eastern Europe. London: Routledge, 2025. ix + 265 pp. $190.00. ISBN 978‐1‐032‐45165‐7

This thought-provoking, interdisciplinary volume brings Soviet material culture studies into dialogue with recent scholarly work on how people and states experience, as well as seek to control, time. The eleven chapters are divided into three sections, and the book ends with a strong conclusion by Alexey Golubev, whose previous work on materiality in the late Soviet period has clearly influenced many of the contributions here. The chapters in the first section all demonstrate that no singular, coherent Soviet temporality ever emerged, no matter how hard the government may have tried to establish one. For example, Heather DeHaan’s chapter on post-World War II Baku reveals that, unlike Soviet leaders, residents of the city never saw themselves as backwards. Moreover, her research demonstrates that the drive to modernize housing initiated by Khrushchev was a spectacular failure in Baku, as were Soviet efforts to create lasting monuments to Sergei Kirov and the twenty-six members of the Baku Commune who were executed during the Civil War. Nastia Volynova reveals similar difficulties in her chapter concerning hydraulic seas and the Soviet government’s attempt to connect the control of water with modernity. She shows that efforts to introduce concepts of time based on industry—think labor days and the continuous work week of the late 1920s—were always hampered by workers who were less interested in regulating their lives that way and by material shortages and technological impediments that made it hard to meet the goals of the Five-Year Plans. Chapter 3 moves on to address the contradictory impulses at work in the preservation of “heritage” after the Second World War. Here Julie Deschepper outlines how abandoning Khrushchev’s promise that communism would be achieved by 1980 changed people’s sense of the future, arguably making the present more important. Moreover, de-Stalinization altered the commemorative practices of the government, although by the 1970s parts of the revolutionary past were less important. Instead, a new focus on celebrating the industrial achievements of the Soviet Union became a much more important aspect of the heritage movement. Finally, this section of Time and Material Culture ends with a solid chapter by Nelly Bekus that outlines the debates over heritage and architecture in Minsk, a city that was devastated during World War II. The next four chapters are gathered in a section devoted to material examples and temporal models. The topics covered range from how time and space were conceptualized on Soviet political posters of the 1920s and 1930s to how random objects from the prerevolutionary era (such as handrails and window frames) as well as architectural knowledge continued to influence, and be part of, the material environment in Lviv. A standout chapter is Federico Marcomini’s study of how Soviet Orientalism came to feature in Central Asian monumental architecture, usually via the incorporation of ornamental embellishments rather than, say, embracing the yurt as an inspiration for buildings. Marcomini uses Almaty’s Abai Opera Theater and Government House as his case studies. Other readers are sure to enjoy learning about the amateur filmmaking movement that emerged in the 1950s and is so well described in the chapter by Ekaterina Knoblauch that rounds out this section of the volume. The final section of Time and Material Culture shifts the focus to fashion and objects owned by important cultural figures. It opens with James Rann’s discussion of Vladimir Maiakovskii’s top hat, Parisian overcoat, and American sweater, which shows how these sartorial items were connected with death and daily repetition, in other words with concepts related to time. He argues that fashion can be an antidote to linear time, in part because clothes continue to hold the shape of those who have worn them even after they die. Rann’s chapter ends by describing how Maiakovskii’s overcoat has been displayed—thereby turning it into a heritage garment—by the state museum constructed to honor him. This discussion flows well into the next chapter where Olga Voronina delves into Soviet literary museums. She notes that these spaces tried to recreate the lives of great writers via the careful display of objects that they had owned. Given that much had been destroyed during the Revolution and Civil War, the museums came to valorize handwritten pages and manuscripts above other objects. Voronina also outlines how literary museums worked to reconcile the problematic class backgrounds of many of Russia’s greatest writers so that the country’s established literary canon did not have to be abandoned. Finally, Ekaterina Kulinicheva’s contribution to the volume describes how Soviet fashion operated according to its own socialist time frame. She notes that advice literature remained remarkably consistent over decades, while also strongly imparting the idea that people’s age mattered a great deal when it came to appropriate clothing choices. Yet consumption was also affected by Western imports that flowed into the USSR after World War II as well as the realities of production in a planned economy. In other words, fashion time was complicated since all of these factors—that could both speed up and slow down time—operated simultaneously. At the core of Time and Material Culture are the ideas that time was multilayered in the Soviet Union and that the study of objects has much to reveal about those layers. The volume’s various chapters offer solid proof in both regards, and hence they make important contributions to both scholarly fields. This book is sure to spark discussion and encourage more research into the ways in which material culture reflects notions of time.

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