A Review of Xenia A. Cherkaev, Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2023, XV+189 pp.

The book Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice by Xenia A. Cherkaev analyzes the concept of socialist property and its impact on grassroots economic practices. By analyzing how the “Soviet” appears in the narratives of workers and employees of former Soviet enterprises recorded during fieldwork in St Petersburg in the 2010s, Cherkaev offers us an anthropological view of Soviet everyday life through political economy and ethics. According to Cherkaev, the major periods of Soviet history (War Communism, NEP, Stalinism, the Thaw, and Perestroika) can be viewed through the prism of an ethical understanding of socialist property embedded in changing legislation. To understand how Soviet society emerged and how the Soviet state suddenly vanished into thin air, she examines the evolution of these regimes from 1917 to the early 1990s. At the same time, Cherkaev makes an important contribution to the history of ideas and intellectual history as she consistently traces the emergence, development, transformation, and decline of the concept of “socialist property” (“socialist economy”) from the early post-revolutionary years to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cherkaev’s work will be an important contribution to scholarship on late-Soviet social and economic history.