"In the Soviet village, socialism was embodied in the institution of the collective farm, or kolkhoz. In spite of petitions and protests, Solovyovo had its turn at collectivization in 1933, and vilagers there spent the next sixty years working primarily for the state rather than for their extended families. [...] In 1992, just as Moscow was beginning its wild ride toward capitalism, Solovyovo's collective farm had a decision to make: What to do with its eighty-five head of cattle, now that subsidies from the state could no longer be counted on? The answer: Slaughter them. Sell the meat. Leave that enterprise behind, and concentrate on selling off the wood of the rich forests of the region. The result: In Solovyovo, as in countless small villages throughout the vast Russian countryside, the primary economy is now based on subsistence farming. The collective farm has not yet been privatized, although the villagers are beginning to use some of its land. Farmers in Solovyovo are still making do with the potato plots assigned to their families in earlier decades and with the tangled gardens around their homes. They hunt in the forest and fish in the nearby lake. They keep bees for honey." (pg. 3)
"This is a book about memory. It is about a single small place, and the ways that place conjures its past into its present, and then casts its present into the future. It is about a Soviet place, a place where history was treated as a burden that had to be lifted. It is about the difficulty of cultural, social, and even economic erasure. And it is about the ghosts of ancestors, who come not only to haunt, but also to heal. [...] I wish to speak of continuities in time – of social memory, as it were – not in the language of inevitable essences, nor in the language of neutrally negotiated, randomly constructed (and easily erased) realities. I wish to speak in terms of use, and action, and habit – and the weathered, eroded, cognitive and symbolic landscapes they forge. Because of my argument – which claims that memory is cumulative and layered, and, yes, weighty – this book with be full of evidence and voices, full of the stuff of social memory. There was no other way to write it: From earth, to foot, from hand and eye, to sky, and story, and song, and lament. From Iuliia's hands, to her voice, to her walk from then, to then." (pg. 9)
"There are two important ways that memory has been linked explicitly to landscape in past scholarship. First, geographical landscapes have been treated as the sites of memory, and therefore the sites of symbol. People remember places, and can remember them through culturally appropriate images. In Social Memory, Fentress and Wickham (1992:93n) discuss this 'geographical sensibility,' and link it, in particular, to agrarian societies. Most often, it is people's own local landscapes that bear meaning and history. In a related way, there have been works that look at the physical landscape as a place of symbolic reverie. Bachelard's lyrical work, Poetics of Space (1964), takes us to lived locations and describes the poetry of houses, corners, and hearths. Schama's Landscape and Memory (1995) is a historian's walk through the woods, down waters, and over rock, regarding these places in light of the symbolic features that fill them. In these sorts of works, the link between space and memory is essentially one in which space and place trigger cultural memory." (pg. 20)
"There are ways in which memory's landscape changes over time in great, layered shifts. States change; ideologies change. Hegemonies, with their range of powers over mind and body, change. In Russia, there have been discrete periods of history marked by distinct ideological agendas – each more or less aggressively introduces by the state and its institutions. In each, the past was instrumentalized as programs of power were set for the present. Reactions to these efforts were varied: local practices were at times in harmony with "national maps and hegemonies" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993:xxiii), and at times they opposed them in the form of defiance or quiet resistance. A Soviet commemoration, for example, would appropriate a holiday from the Orthodox Church, and villagers, in turn, woulg use the same day to regulate their relations with the ancestors. Could it be said, then, that the weight of the dead generations was lifted, light as air? In fact, rituals, commemorations, and crucial symbolic landmarks have been contested in Solovyovo. Archeological layers formed by the advance and retreat of states are traced in this book along institutional lines (Foucault 1969), as hegemony finds its way into the deepest pathways of social memory." (pg. 24)
Margaret Paxson in Solovyovo: The Story of Memory In A Russian Village, published 2005 by Woodrow Wilson Center Press
