In this brilliant, uneven, original, incomplete, engaging, and frustrating book, Xenia A. Cherkaev pursues an historical ethnography of the late Soviet and post-Soviet economy. Her aim is to reconceptualize it as a “household,” complete with its own distinctive transactions and ethics, which were dominated, she argues, by mutual aid rather than selfish gain, and by a particular sense of the collective and the communal. The way of life and worldview this engendered transcended the familiar categories of public and private, however one complicates them. It created informal rights of ownership that cannot be understood as corruption. In other words, Cherkaev is the exceptional kind of thinker who tries to understand socialism and its afterlife on their own terms, and not merely through liberal or “neoliberal” lenses.

She seeks to show how the relationship between citizens and the things in their possession determined their wider social ties, both with their fellow-citizens and their government. Property law, in its formal and subjective realities, therefore lies at the heart of her discussion. Cherkaev pursues this by combining ethnographic and historical research, drawing both on interviews conducted during the 2010s together with a reading of certain historical documents and some of the secondary literature. Her point of departure is those conversations in Leningrad Region “today”; her destination quickly becomes an historical one. Plainly, this raises an immediate problem. How far can questions about the recent past that derive from conversations with “ordinary” people about their household economies in the present day really be the subject of sustained historical enquiry? Should not the questions emerge from one’s initial reading of past documents instead? Is not the risk that we merely transpose present-day concerns onto past experiences? Of course, Cherkaev is concerned with precisely this methodological problem. Through her conversations, she notices a phenomenon that will be familiar to many other researchers: the tendency of Russians of a certain age to use the term perestroika to describe the first half of the 1990s rather than the Gorbachev era itself. But Cherkaev is unusual in pursuing at length the implications of this apparent chronological mislabeling. It allows her to rethink the periodization of the thirty or so years between approximately 1986 and 2020 by trying to understand the aftershock and traumas of the Soviet collapse on people who lived through it. She points out that “the stories that people told me about Soviet times often concerned transactions that happened in the early 2000s,” and “people often contrasted this Soviet era to the 2010s narrative present, in which, I was told, everything had been sold (vse prodano) and everything had been bought (vse kupleno)” (5). This general approach allows her to make two really substantial achievements. The first is to offer a sophisticated conceptualization of the moral economy of the post-Stalin Soviet Union and its relationship to the changes of the 1990s. The second is to reimagine the Gorbachev era by drawing out how the reforms of perestroika were related to the dismembering of the collective basis of the Soviet way of life.

True enough, the blend of ethnographic and historical sensibilities generates occasionally insuperable problems. First, her questioning of de-Stalinization as a historical category seems to be based on too partial a reading of the secondary literature to sustain her bold conclusions. Second, her discussion of Soviet property law and in particular the category of personal property needs further historicization and engagement with the scholarly literature really to work. Overall, the potential of her arguments seem much richer when applied to the period from the 1980s to the 2000s than from the 1950s to the 1970s. It might be that historical ethnography as a method for studying the Soviet and post-Soviet experience has chronological limits beyond which it cannot stretch. Even so, the sensibility and empathy that Cherkaev brings to her work are likely to make her approach indispensable for understanding the period since the 1980s. Gleaning for Communism, with its atmosphere of sincerity and curiosity, challenges readers to debate with the author and themselves from the first page to the last. It is one of those diamond-like books whose flaws are as interesting as its sparkling facets. Gleaming for Communism raises issues of interpretation and method that deserve sustained attention from students and scholars across the field. I hope Cherkaev uses her powerful, problematic approach in other projects that stretch from the last years of the USSR up to the present day.