The feelings of progress: peripheral temporalities during late socialism

Despite the different ways time is understood across cultures and even across academic disciplines, it is a human universal.Along with space, it sets the coordinates by which we understand the world and our place in it.The cluster of articles that follow examine how people who lived on the periphery of the Soviet Union from the 1960s to the 1980s used time to make sense of their lives and the reality in which they found themselves.In examining the "temporal regimes," both static and evolving, of the Vologda oblast, Lithuania, and Karelia in late socialism, these articles shed new light on how Soviet citizens interpreted their place in time and employed conceptualizations of temporality to effect changes in time.One of the most important means by which people mobilize and make sense of time, both privately and socially, is narrative.Narrative relates events sequentially, through emplotment it assigns meaning to certain events while denying it to others, and implicitly it validates a particular epistemological system. 1 Depending on the problems people hope to solve, time can function very differently in the narratives they create about reality.When constructing the history of a collective, for example, people instrumentalize time to create hierarchies, indicate trajectories of development, and shape identity. 2 In other words, time is not an ideologically or morally neutral category.Time is part of knowledgethat is, it is a category that helps one discourse dominate others.Like knowledge, time is connected with power.According to Michel Foucault, dominant knowledge is based not on truth but on power.Such knowledge becomes the mainstay of the state, which subjugates ideas of time, development, and progress to its own ends. 3Developing this idea, the anthropologist Johannes Fabian points to the inequality of time regimes.He argues that the Eurocentrism of world and global time is manifested in the fact that anthropologists "colonize" local temporal representations of non-European peoples and cultures, embedding them into a global analytical system based on European time. 4 In the context of Soviet history, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov sees an example of dominant temporal knowledge in the way elites presented "modernity" and "progress" to the people as "gifts," in exchange for popular gratitude and loyalty. 5 The papers in this collection identify different ways in which the Soviet temporal regime affected local interactions with time, sometimes displacing "subjugated" forms of knowledge, sometimes being displaced, and sometimes going unquestioned.