Iuliia Gataulina. From the family archives
Histories
of (post)socialism
Working with
family archives
Research project, 2020–ongoing
Family photo and video archives, 1970s-2010s
Russian SFSR and Kirghiz SSR; Russia
I began working with my family photo and video archives in 2020
This collection spans from the 1970s until 2010s and were taken in Osh (Kirghiz SSR), and Ulyanovsk, Penza, Orenburg, Belgorod, Kaluga, and St Petersburg in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. What began as a project about family history eventually developed into an auto‑ethnographic study revealing broader patterns of mobility and processes in the Soviet Union, processes of militarization, or political economy of the post‑Soviet Russia.
I was interested in how my family moved across the Soviet Union – from the Volga region to the Kirghiz SSR, then briefly to Ukraine and Siberia, before eventually settling back in the Volga region in Ulyanovsk. Even after settling in Ulyanovsk, my family members often travelled around the USSR and afterwards in the post-Soviet Russia to visit their relatives living elsewhere, sometimes thousands of kilometers away. These stories of mobility signal the mass movements of people within the Soviet Union under the planned economy, sometimes resulting in violent displacement and uprooting, but also reflecting an openness of borders and an entanglement of cultures. I also paid attention to my mother’s stories about kindergartens and schools reflecting practices of youth upbringing within communist and collectivist ideology: belonging to the youth organizations such as Little Octobrists and Young Pioneers or participation in summer labour camps, where young people worked in agricultural fields.
Post‑Soviet images felt also important to revisit. They allowed me to return to my childhood memories and, through temporal and epistemic distance, to view the social organization and political economies that have shaped post‑Soviet Russia. I compare my mother’s photos from kindergartens and schools to my own from the 1990s and 2000s when free welfare infrastructures of childcare and education continued to exist.
Or another episode catched my attention: all her life my mother has been working as a salesperson, first at the bazaar and later in various kiosks. These small private enterprises proliferated across Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, often operating in poorly regulated conditions and reflecting the precarious nature of post‑Soviet labour. From a similar temporal and epistemic distance, I revisited photographs and memories of my grandmother’s dacha – a Soviet tradition of community gardening where people grew their own vegetables and berries. In the post‑Soviet period, the dacha often became a source of supplementary income, especially for older people, while also representing a resilient, slow, and ecological form of food production in contrast to capitalist agricultural markets.
In the photographs, I also encounter absences. My grandfather was Tatar, but he lost contact with his entire family during childhood. This rupture created empty spaces in our family history and my liminal cultural and ethnic identity.
The entry point for this inquiry was my Tatar heritage: I carry a Tatar surname from my grandfather, Shamil’, yet my family retained no memories of this heritage, as he lost connection with his entirely Tatar family at a very young age, partly due to the anti-national policies of the Soviet Union.
Through this autobiographical exploration of lost familial connections, the study developed into a broader reflection on the Soviet Union’s anti-national and anti-religious politics, as well as the mass migrations of people across its vast territories. These processes led not only to the loss of ties to ancestral lands but also, paradoxically, to the formation of embodied intercultural connections.
The study has been conducted in collaboration with the genealogical bureau “Vrazbros”
A compilation from the family video archives shot in Ulyanovsk, Russia, in 1997-1999. The video extracts depict such scenes as family gatherings, kindergarten celebrations, bazaars and garages as places of work, industrial and urban infrastructures, Volga landscapes and others.