Conclusion

Abstract

My conversations with women in Yaroslavl offer certain insights into how the end of Soviet socialism was experienced in everyday life, although there are limits to how much one can generalize from the stories I have presented here. These were the experiences of a very particular group of Russians—female, urban, mostly middle-aged, middle-class educated members of the intelligentsia, mothers of young children or adolescents during the difficult years of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their narratives were also shaped by my own identities—as an American, an academic, a woman older than several of my respondents, a wife, and the mother of a grown daughter. Overall, the pictures the women painted were of difficult times overcome with intelligence, strength, and above all character—frugality, resilience, lack of ostentation, “culturedness”. While recognizing that many of their accomplishments were possible precisely because of the changes that had made those times so difficult, they did not generally view present success as justifying past hardships, and clearly believed that the difficulties had been far greater than necessary. Four months talking with women in Yaroslavl about their lives before, during and after the Russian government’s introduction of economic “shock therapy” led me to appreciate more fully the insight offered by a woman in Astrakhan in 2010: “For you in the West, the transition is still in the front of your minds, but for us, it’s a long time ago and we’ve gone on with our lives.”