Dangerous Soviet Things: Urban Legends and Fears in the USSR

Jeans infested with lice, larvae under the skin of an African visitor, a portrait of Mao Tse-tung projected at night on a Chinese carpet, swastikas hidden in the construction of buildings, chewing gum with crushed glass, this is an incomplete list of Soviet urban legends about dangerous things. The book by well-known folklorists and anthropologists Alexandra Arkhipova (Presidential Academy, Russian State University for the Humanities, New Economic School) and Anna Kirzyuk (Presidential Academy) is the first anthropological and folkloristic study of the Soviet man fears. Many of these fears found expression in texts and practices which are barely comprehensible to our contemporaries: in the 1930s, people were looking for a face of Trotsky on a matchbox, and in the 1970s, rumours were spread about refreshments poisoned by Americans. The book explains why such fears arose, how they turned into rumours and urban legends, how they influenced the behaviour of Soviet people and sometimes caused large-scale moral panics. The study relies on survey data, interviews, memoirs, diaries and archival documents.

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