A welcome addition to the field of women's history, Melanie Ilic's latest book provides a survey of the experiences of women in the Soviet period. Based on women's narratives, reflective writings and interviews, this work seeks to reveal women's “daily routines and activities; their life ambitions; and their attitudes and behaviors… to identify some of the generalities and commonalities in everyday existence, regular practices and aspects of life and attitudes that would have been easily recognizable to those women living in Soviet society” (3).
The work is engagingly written, weaving personal accounts together with published research on various aspects of Soviet life. Divided into thematic chapters covering identities, childhood, love, equality, health and welfare, reproduction and motherhood, consumption, customs and rituals, and emigration, each chapter provides a chronological narrative that shows how life changed over time and varied depending on location, ethnicity or nationality, and socio-economic status. While focusing on women's experiences, the book of necessity reveals much about men's experiences as well and includes insights into the various support systems (or lack thereof) that shaped the daily life experience of all Soviet citizens—schools, medical facilities, childcare facilities, clubs, workplaces, and stores.
Ilic asserts that she is interested in in the question of how researchers can make “what appear on the surface to be a series of experiential anecdotes arising from the exploration of everyday lives into ‘history’” (1). This approach has served her well in producing a coherent narrative of how life in the Soviet Union was lived. While the book will be most useful for undergraduate and lay readers, even seasoned scholars may find some surprises, particularly regarding the variety of survival strategies that women adopted in various times and places when economic shortages or bureaucratic stonewalling created untenable situations that women had to resolve, often with quite creative methods.
The nature of Ilic's source base limits her engagement with several topics. The section on sexuality has very little on homosexuality and nothing on non-binary sexualities or genders, since these are topics that were largely taboo in Soviet society and therefore not discussed either in diaries, memoirs, or even interviews. Because most of the sources are from the educated and urban population, the discussion focuses far more on the experiences of women from those groups than on peasant or working-class women. Ilic acknowledges this and includes information on these groups from other sources or from the perspective of the urban women who visited the countryside or who discussed experiences of their relatives or friends from the rural or working-class milieu. Several of the sources that Ilic mines are from women who were privileged to travel abroad or who spent time in prison camps or at the front in World War II, providing glimpses of life in these contexts that were certainly not universal, but affected millions of women nonetheless.
This book will be very useful in survey courses as a way to introduce students to the realities of Soviet life. My only criticism is that the book lacks a conclusion. While summing up all of the experiences would not be possible, a concluding discussion to tie the framework laid out in the introduction to the analysis of life throughout would be very useful.
