Bringing the beast back in: The rehabilitation of pet keeping in Soviet Russia

Abstract

When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they condemned the practice of keeping pets as part of the bourgeois order they intended to overthrow. Yet within 30 years, pet keeping re-emerged as an integral part of urban, everyday socialism. This study charts shifting attitudes toward dogs in the Soviet period to reveal some of the paradoxes underlying practices of pet keeping and offers new insight into the contours of the private sphere in Soviet Russia. While pet keeping as a personal or familial activity constituted an important component of the private sphere, the pet fancy involved the public and the official realm of state authority as well. The celebrity of “space dogs” such as Laika presents an interesting avenue for exploring the connections between attitudes toward dogs as (private) pets and the celebration of (public) Soviet achievements. This chapter includes material previously published in: “A Hearth for a Dog: the Paradoxes of Soviet Pet Keeping”, in Lewis Siegelbaum (ed.), Borders of Socialism. Private Spheres of Soviet Russia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 123-144.