ABSTRACT

Over the past decade or so, there has been increasing interest in the habits, values and practices of everyday life in tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Collaborative projects, conferences and scholarly endeavours have sprung up in Russia, in the United States, in Europe and in the interstices of cyberspace. In a number of notable cases, scholars who spent their childhoods in Moscow, St Petersburg or elsewhere in Russia are documenting for outside observers – including scholars, students and communities – how they, and those around them, grew up and managed in the everyday under the harsh conditions of Soviet – and in some cases post-Soviet Russian – life. One central aspect of these explorations is childhood. From Ilya Utekhin’s St Petersburg kommunalka (communal apartment) on-line museum, to Olga Matich’s virtual St Petersburg entitled Mapping St Petersburg, to the Russian State University of the Humanities’ (Moscow) project on representations of childhood, viewers and readers are invited in to learn, remember and understand the contours of childhoods and daily lives of the past.1