ABSTRACT
Explaining their methods and approaches in their book A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History, which consists of eight in-depth interviews with Russian women, the editors Barbara Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck state that 'we planned to avoid the narratives of "heroines" because we feared they would be too close to conventional, Soviet-style biography', and that 'precisely because of her successful career, we almost disqualified Sofia Pavlova for this book about "ordinary" Soviet women – she seemed too much like a Soviet-style heroine'. 1 Because my own interests in Soviet women's autobiographical sketches from the post-Stalin period deal especially with the construction of the 'Soviet-style heroine', the editors' statements brought me a whole range of further questions: what did they consider to constitute a 'Soviet-style heroine'; how could she be characterised; wasn't she also one of the 'ordinary' Soviet women; how did they define a 'successful' Soviet woman in contrast to an 'ordinary' woman? As well as the editors' use of the notions as if there was a common consensus or obvious understanding of them, they seemed to have a certain view on 'ordinariness': the main features were suffering and survival, including often also imprisonment or exile, or at least some 'secret dissident' views on the Soviet power system and the politics of ordinary life. For me this appeared to be a limited and universalising understanding, which constructed 'The Soviet Woman', or the 'Soviet Everywoman' as Yuri Slezkine puts it, 2 as a victimised and homogeneous category: Soviet women are described as first and foremost interested in the private, 'non-political' activities of their lives.
