Inheriting and re-imagining rights: assessing references to a Soviet past among young women in neoliberal and neoconservative Russia

An abundance of research examines the resonance and relevance of the Soviet past in con-temporary Russia, engaging with the frames of nostalgia and collective memory. There is also a vibrant field of youth studies that explores how collective memory projects and inheritances of this past shape young people’s current and imagined futures (Krupets et al, 2016). Howev-er, there is less research asking why younger, non-activist, women – coming of age, or born, in the 1990s – continue to make references to a Soviet ‘past’. This chapter bridges and con-tributes to these research fields by analysing when discussions of a Soviet past featured in in-terviews with young women about their rights and political engagements. Focusing largely on ‘naturally occurring’ passing references to Soviet past/s across a range of projects, this chap-ter provides greater insights into which aspects of pasts are being inherited and reimagined on a daily basis and how they are then used in young women’s own citizenship ideals and future imaginaries. The interviews cited in this chapter were conducted in a provincial Russian city between 2005 and 2014. This time span captures an evolving Russian social, economic and political context that is particularly vexing for young women variously situated within ongo-ing economic difficulties, deepening neo-conservativism, and global narratives of neoliberal personhood. The chapter shows how inherited memories of Soviet rights and citizenship are being transmitted, but also disrupted, in daily intergenerational interactions in the family. The ambiguities and ambivalences apparent in young women’s inherited memories of a Soviet past reveals a re-imagined and idealised Soviet social citizenship, that is seen as both emanci-patory and restrictive in its expectations of, and effects on, women

Educate or serve: the paradox of “professional service” and the image of the west in legitimacy battles of post-socialist advertising

This article investigates a puzzle in the rapidly evolving profession of advertising in post-socialist Hungary: young professionals who came of age during the shift to market-driven practices want to produce advertising that is uncompromised by clients and consumers, and to educate others about western modernity. It is their older colleagues—trained during customer-hostile socialism—who emphasize that good professionals serve their clients’ needs. These unexpected generational positions show that 1) professions are more than groups expanding their jurisdiction. They are fields structured by two conflicting demands: autonomy of expertise and dependence on clients. We can explain the puzzle by noting that actors are positioning themselves on one or the other side based on their trajectory or movement in the field relative to other actors. Old and new groups vie for power in the transforming post-socialist professional field, responding to each other’s claims and vulnerabilities, exploiting the professional field’s contradictory demands on its actors. 2) The struggle is not between those who are oriented to the west and those that are not. Rather, the west is both the means and the stake of the struggle over historical continuity and professional power. Imposing a definition of the west is almost the same as imposing a definition of the profession on the field. In this historical case, “field” appears less as a stable structure based on actors’ equipment with capital, than as dynamic relations moved forward by contestation of the field’s relevant capital