Preliminary Programme

The presentation compares women’s memories (aged 80+) of their working lives under socialism in three countries: Serbia, Romania and Hungary. In these memories I discuss narrative forms of expressing nostalgia for times past hallmarked by the sovereigns’ names. Nostalgia, in the analysis figures not only as a mode of memory but as a narrative mode of representation, which organizes plots, the segmentation of time as well as the frames the different segments are interpreted in. Nostalgia, therefore, resides as much in the structure of the life narratives as in their themes and tones. Although nostalgia is emotionally charged, it is also politically-informed, critical and does not lack irony. It works to produce versions of historical narrative.
When women of the oldest living generation fondly remember their years in socialism, a correlation exists between their nostalgia and the tendency to construct a narrative of socialism as a period of progress. Employing the mode of “speaking bitterness” (Rofel 1999) in relating life experiences in socialism, women speak of much struggle, hardships and hard work – all of which nevertheless paid off for them in the later years of socialism. These narrators speak of socialism in terms of socio-economic conditions and rarely in terms of political and civil rights. Women often phrase their conditions using the trope of security and juxtapose it sharply with the era of the post-’89 transitions, which they criticize in tropes of ‘insecurity’, ‘corruption’, economic and moral ‘decay’.
Women in Hungary and Yugoslavia in their narratives share the feature of arranging life events into a socialism-as-progress framework. This implies that after the initial hard times of collectivisations, the system “evolved” and compared to the extreme poverty and ration-system of post-1945 Hungary and Yugoslavia the later years brought relative prosperity and economic security. While in the former (Kádár-nostalgia) ethnicity is unmarked, in the latter it becomes the major channel to express nostalgia for Tito’s socialist regime by constructing the image of the two Titos: Tito as the partisan-leader of early communism (collective punishment) and Tito as the head of a paternalistic and affluent regime (egalitarianism). Reconciling these two images, in the women’s own discourse the peaceful co-existence of different ethnicities finds expression in several anecdotes fortified by the Titoist discourse of egalitarianism, the argument for federalism, and for Yugoslavia. Such arguments the narrators use to contrast with the succeeding turmoils of post-’89 in order to establish historical rupture with the periodical marker of “Tito’s death”. In narratives coming from Romania, the socialism-as-progress framework can only scarcely be detected, as almost very few accounts conform to the pattern of socialist progress. Those few can only hold that stance and their nostalgic overtones by remaining silent about the recession years under Ceausescu in the early 1980s. The other accounts from Romania display a pre-socialist nostalgia, concretized in yearnings for the so-called “Hungarian world” of 1940-44, whose plot constructs a different narrative, one that reproduces an idealized framework of the nation as a basis of history. (Show less)

The socialist nostalgia appeared in Bulgaria relatively late and didn’t attained such significance in the public discourse like the Yugo-nostalgia/Tito-nostalgia in the former Yugoslavian republics or Ostalgie in the East-Germans provinces, but yet it is alive in popular culture and communicative memory of men and women from different generations and social milieu. It functions as counter-memory and ideology in the context of the neoliberal political discourse after 1989 and clashes with the pre-socialist nostalgia and revitalised collective memory of the opposite social groups.
The aim of my paper is to discuss some gender dimensions of socialist nostalgia in its relationship with the confronting discourse of the pre-socialist nostalgia in Bulgaria.
The paper investigates the link between nostalgia, on one hand, and collective memory and identity, on the other hand, and changing forms and social functions of nostalgia, as well.
It will be paid attention especially on the gender differences in the nostalgic memory of the state socialist and pre-socialist past and also on the both types of nostalgia as reflecting selective remembering and selective forgetting that occur at the individual and collective level.
The analysis will be based on qualitative research methods incl. biographical interviews with women and men belonging to different generations, sharing different political views. (Show less)

Up to now the every-day life of the intellectuals is not the object of interest for historians in Russia; they are firmly convinced that they know it enough. The sociologists concentrate their attention on statistical data and don’t try to reconstruct details of life-cycle of the scholars as a social group and the influence of socio-political, politico-situational and traditional ethno-cultural factors on it.
The gender component of the problem - the ways of life of men and women in a science, their social attitudes, axiosphere, time budget, social leadership, models of interpersonal and intergroup interaction in studying the scholars’ biographies – is especially marginal. Even in the western researches of the academy community the “feminine theme” does not consider as important (it is ignored, for example, in the classical work of Pierre Bourdieu. «Homo aсademiсus», 1984).
The thematization of the history of gender discriminations, the analysis of changes of their character after 1985 became possible owing to the collapse of the so-called “soviet scholarship”. However even those who study the gender asymmetry in a society as a whole, seldom think that in their own group the same mechanisms of exclusion and inequality are functioning; simply these facts are less often recorded. The rigid socio-cultural stereotypes of gender roles influenced female life strategies as up to the middle 1980s and after, though in some modified forms. That is why the reconstruction of the informal history of the Russian Academy community for the last twenty years on the basis of the biographical interviews with the women who made their careers in the social, natural sciences or mathematic (who have become professors before reaching the age of 40 and remained in a science, not having changed profession) allowed us to see inequality where it was accepted to be silent about.
The multi-level research strategy combining a number of methodical approaches (ethno-methodology, cultural and feminist anthropology, methods of psychohistory, comparative and biographical methods of qualitative sociology, the method of included observation, case-study, grounded theory, discourse-analysis, content-analysis etc.) opened the way to analyze the problems of gender asymmetry in the academic group through the eyes of the participants of the socio-professional situation). The tableau of every-day life of the contemporary Russian academic community is reconstructed on the basis of long (of many hours) leitmotif biographical interviews with several dozens of women-professors born between 1945 and 1970 and now living in two capitals of Russia (Moscow and Saint-Petersburg because over 75% of the academic institutes are concentrated there). The techniques of studying the interviews’ transcripts include the analysis of thematic sequences, their hermeneutics and the verification of results by the method of triangulation, the comparison with press materials, normative documents, etc.
The analysis of the algorithm of reproducing gender discriminations in the Russian Academy of Sciences gave a chance to understand some general mechanisms of reproduction of inequality among those who study it — scholars themselves in the post-Soviet scientific ambience.


Up to now the every-day life of the intellectuals is not the object of interest for historians in Russia; they are firmly convinced that they know it enough. The sociologists concentrate their attention on statistical data and don’t try to reconstruct details of life-cycle of the scholars as a social group and the influence of socio-political, politico-situational and traditional ethno-cultural factors on it.
The gender component of the problem - the ways of life of men and women in a science, their social attitudes, axiosphere, time budget, social leadership, models of interpersonal and intergroup interaction in studying the scholars’ biographies – is especially marginal. Even in the western researches of the academy community the “feminine theme” does not consider as important (it is ignored, for example, in the classical work of Pierre Bourdieu. «Homo aсademiсus», 1984).
The thematization of the history of gender discriminations, the analysis of changes of their character after 1985 became possible owing to the collapse of the so-called “soviet scholarship”. However even those who study the gender asymmetry in a society as a whole, seldom think that in their own group the same mechanisms of exclusion and inequality are functioning; simply these facts are less often recorded. The rigid socio-cultural stereotypes of gender roles influenced female life strategies as up to the middle 1980s and after, though in some modified forms. That is why the reconstruction of the informal history of the Russian Academy community for the last twenty years on the basis of the biographical interviews with the women who made their careers in the social, natural sciences or mathematic (who have become professors before reaching the age of 40 and remained in a science, not having changed profession) allowed us to see inequality where it was accepted to be silent about.
The multi-level research strategy combining a number of methodical approaches (ethno-methodology, cultural and feminist anthropology, methods of psychohistory, comparative and biographical methods of qualitative sociology, the method of included observation, case-study, grounded theory, discourse-analysis, content-analysis etc.) opened the way to analyze the problems of gender asymmetry in the academic group through the eyes of the participants of the socio-professional situation). The tableau of every-day life of the contemporary Russian academic community is reconstructed on the basis of long (of many hours) leitmotif biographical interviews with several dozens of women-professors born between 1945 and 1970 and now living in two capitals of Russia (Moscow and Saint-Petersburg because over 75% of the academic institutes are concentrated there). The techniques of studying the interviews’ transcripts include the analysis of thematic sequences, their hermeneutics and the verification of results by the method of triangulation, the comparison with press materials, normative documents, etc.
The analysis of the algorithm of reproducing gender discriminations in the Russian Academy of Sciences gave a chance to understand some general mechanisms of reproduction of inequality among those who study it — scholars themselves in the post-Soviet scientific ambience.

Up to now the every-day life of the intellectuals is not the object of interest for historians in Russia; they are firmly convinced that they know it enough. The sociologists concentrate their attention on statistical data and don’t try to reconstruct details of life-cycle of the scholars as a social group and the influence of socio-political, politico-situational and traditional ethno-cultural factors on it.
The gender component of the problem - the ways of life of men and women in a science, their social attitudes, axiosphere, time budget, social leadership, models of interpersonal and intergroup interaction in studying the scholars’ biographies – is especially marginal. Even in the western researches of the academy community the “feminine theme” does not consider as important (it is ignored, for example, in the classical work of Pierre Bourdieu. «Homo aсademiсus», 1984).
The thematization of the history of gender discriminations, the analysis of changes of their character after 1985 became possible owing to the collapse of the so-called “soviet scholarship”. However even those who study the gender asymmetry in a society as a whole, seldom think that in their own group the same mechanisms of exclusion and inequality are functioning; simply these facts are less often recorded. The rigid socio-cultural stereotypes of gender roles influenced female life strategies as up to the middle 1980s and after, thou (Show less)