Authors

Discussion

One of the most understudied aspects of Russia’s « continuum of crises », unfolding from the beginning of the 20th century and – at least conventionally – stretching to the suppression of the Basmachi uprising in the Ferghana Valley in 1926, is the effect of chaos, scarcity and disruption on the fabric of everyday life. Imperial Russia’s subjects experienced a continuous series of shocks that unsettled not only their social relations, but also their values systems, relationships to the politic, and material lives. In my research, I focus on an object that is both a product and a practice : tea. Although the history of food practices in various areas of the Russian Empire has been largely documented, tea has remained outside the purview of most Western historians and slavists. Yet tea’s worldwide career as a globally appreciated drink, valuable cash crop and key item of Eurasian trade is well-known to historians. It took the efforts of a few dedicated Russian historians to put tea on the historiographical table again, both as a crucial marker of a purportedly Russian cultural identity, and as a key item in Imperial Russia’s transnational trade. Tea had become the Empire’s favorite non-alcoholic drink by the last third of the 19th century, its wide popularization reflecting Imperial Russia’s growing integration within global markets and circuits of exchange. The fact that not only the bulk of Russia’s mostly rural population, but also indigenous and settler communities as far as northeastern Siberia now consumed it daily became a source of both pride and uneasiness for imperial elites. Maintaining a steady supply of tea into the Empire became a major concern for Russia’s autocratic government in the beginning of the 20th century, a concern that remained well after power fell to the Bolsheviks. How Russia’s rulers intended to achieve this goal during these critical times of war and disruption, and to what extend they actually succeeded, is the subject of my presentation. Having tea as my focal point allows me to question how everyday interactions, whether at home, in the marketplace, at work or leisure were distorted by the constraints of war and scarcity. I will try to display the subtle survival strategies that helped ordinary citizens of a dismantled state to keep on sustaining themselves, their loved ones, their homes and their aspirations. Drawing on an array of different sources, from state-issued publications to ego-documents, newspaper clippings, paintings, promotional objects and records from local archives, I find theoretical guidance mostly in sensory history, history of transnational transfers, situated social history and in the eco-feminist concept of the « subsistence economy of the everyday », as articulated by sociologist Geneviève Pruvost.

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