The “Soviet vinogradie” in Pomorye: Practices and contexts of symbolic resistance

Abstract

The paper dwells on the phenomenon of the “Soviet vinogradie” songs that emerged in the middle of the 20th century on the Pomor coast of the White Sea region and are preserved in the memory of the inhabitants of the village Nyukhcha to the present day. Obscene texts were sung to the tunes of traditional ritual songs and emerged as a reaction of some kind to the working situations in Soviet kolkhozes in the 1940s-70s, which were considered “wrong” from the perspective of the traditional lifestyle of the Pomors. The creators and first performers of the “Soviet vinogradie” were Pomor young women who worked as loggers without any male help during the 1940s; from them the songs were passed on to young Pomor men in the 1970s, who were forced to remain in workers’ cabins during downtime in bad weather under the threat of criminal prosecution for leaving their workplace. The author suggests various conceptualizations of the “Soviet vinogradie” based on field recordings and interview materials, interprets the emergence of the genre, its functions and connections with other folklore genres, texts and representations that existed in the traditional culture of Pomorye. Within the framework of Mary Douglas’s concept of the relationship between forms of social life and cognitive classifications, the main provisions of which were formulated in the work “Purity and Danger”, the “Soviet vinogradie” (as “wrong”, indecent songs “out of place”) reflected the attitude of the Pomors to violations of traditional conventions on the allocation of time for economic activities depending on weather conditions as well as on age and gender norms of work in kolkhozes. Within the logic of the conception of symbolic resistance as written by James Scott, the “Soviet vinogradie” as a “weapon of the weak” performed the function of a “hidden transcript” expressing dissatisfaction with the Soviet regime and of symbolic resistance to the power of women / girls due to working situations in the kolkhozes in the 1940-70s that were seen as “wrong” from the perspective of traditional Pomorian lifestyle.