Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era

by Louise McReynolds
Cornell University Press, Ithaka & London, 2003
320 pp., illus. Trade, $36.50
ISBN: 0-8014-4027-0.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

Pre-communist or late-Tsarist Russia for most readers probably brings to mind pictures of masses of semi-impoverished farmers, decadent aristocrats, and a court full of mad monks and ladies in long, richly embroidered dresses. At least it did for me before I read this book. The little I knew about the history of the Russian empire before the revolution stems from reading Marxist analysises and general history textbooks and watching Eisensteinish movies. Apparently I didn't pick the most objective and unbiased sources. Russia at Play paints a vivid image of an entirely different kind, with much more greens and pinks——lots of pinks actually——and all shades of colour going with bourgeois culture. Bourgeois culture in Russia before the Revolution? According to the established view, Russia even didn't have a bourgeoisie to speak of. Didn't Lenin himself say that Russia skipped a few stages of the evolution of capitalism, only to jump from a feudal system directly to the revolutionary era, socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, just one step away from communism and the complete abolishment of exploitation? If there was no bourgeoisie, how could it develop and support a bourgeois culture? Obviously, this view is badly mistaken.

In her introduction, Louise McReynolds convincingly argues that there actually was a rising bourgeoisie in Russia and that it played a vital role in the modernisation of Russian society. Taking their values or at least the expression of them from the intelligentsia, the self-claimed cultural leaders of the tsarist era, the middle classes cultivated their leisure time. Instead of just doing nothing during their non-working hours, they engaged in activities intended for "self-actualisation through the arts". "Broadening the category of "arts" to include the growing number of public spaces that had become commercialised, such as nightclubs, racetracks, and tourist hotels."

In the following chapters, the author takes us through five different fields of leisurely activity: the stage, sports, tourism, evening entertainment, and motion pictures. In each, McReynolds explores both the producers and consumers of leisure "to see how it was practised and experienced". The book is structured topically rather than chronologically, examining each activity on its own terms before connecting it with others. Although the main part of each story takes place after the middle of the nineteenth century, earlier histories of the various entertainments are discussed to provide the context for change. The analysis takes each activity through the Great War, offering new insight on the old question of the effects of war on social change. All activities were affected, but in different ways, rendering a single verdict inadequate.

The Tsarist era came to an end with the coming to power of the Bolsheviks in 1917. For the party leaders who identified strongly with the intelligentsia from Tsarist times, leisure was an exponent of bourgeois culture that must either be absorbed or destroyed by socialism. They severely limited the possibilities for (class) independence found in commercial leisure, but they had to take into account the fact that the values and expectations of the audiences had been affected. For that reason, McReynolds suggests, the embryonic Bolshevik government co-opted leisure. The new regime used the bolshevised forms of the leisure activities to affect the formation of state-based identities that helped them to consolidate and maintain their hold on power.