Preface: On the Importance of Non-Fictitious Things Acknowledgments List of Figures Part 1 The Materiality of Being 1 The Flexible and the Pliant: Disturbed Organisms of Soviet Modernity 1 Being Outside 2 Shattering Heredity 3 Mentoring Heredity2 Things to Watch: Labour and Ethnicity in Picturebooks for Soviet Children 1 Learning to See Labour 2 Tools and Garbs of Labour 3 Flowerbeds of Ethnicities 4 National Forms 5 Artificial Simplifications 6 Portraits of Things 7 Marching towards the Common?3 The Formalist Thing (Theory) or Why Tolstoy's Sofa Should Matter 1 A Colony of Psychologism 2 Feeling through Parody 3 Shklovsky's Latour 4 Theatres of Life 5 Key Stones Part 2 Thing-Systems 4 'Against the Cult of Things': On Soviet Productivism, Storage Economy, and Commodities with No Destination 1 The Thing-System of Soviet Productivism 2 Soviet Trade: Commodity Mess and Its Value 3 The Soviet Mode of Life: The Baza and the Superstructure 4 People, Things, and Otovarki 5 Crimes of Substitution: Detection in Late Soviet Society 1 A Crime (Story) of Our Own 2 Reversing the Order 3 Criminal Analogies 4 Hypocrisy of a Chameleon6 Houses That Never Fall: Post-Utopian Dreamscapes of Late Soviet Paper Architecture 1 Post-Utopian Dreamscapes 2 Feeling Time and Space Differently 3 Grounding Pluritopic Dreamscapes 4 Storytellers of Embeddedness 5 Houses That Never Fall Part 3 Thingful Times 7 The Quantity of Style: Imaginary Consumption in the New Russia 1 Making Up the Subject 2 Introjecting Political Changes 3 Symbolising Excess 4 The Culture of Symbolic Shortage8 Aesthetics without Law: Cinematic Bandits in Post-Soviet Space 1 The Brigands of Brigada 2 Private Space under Construction 3 Expropriating Professional Space9 Totality Decomposed: Objectalising Late Socialism in Post-Soviet Biochronicles 1 A New Sobriety: Objectalism 2 Biochronicles: Filming Raw Life 3 Lately : Field Notes of the Era 4 The Soviet Upbringing Has No Use Part 4 Long-Term Things 10 'We're Nostalgic but We're Not Crazy': Retrofitting the Past in Russia 1 Placing (Art in) Products 2 The Past as Pastiche 3 Borrowed Language 4 Uniforms and Surcoats11 Remembering in Public: On the Affective Management of History 1 Getting New Perceptions 2 Connective Tissues 3 Mnemonic Formations as Objects of Affection12 Second-Hand Nostalgia: An Ethnography of Things That Refuse to Perish 1 Touching Machines and Smelly Memories 2 In the Aftermath of Nostalgia 3 Painting with Things 4 Real. Soviet. Moving. 5 A Dreamlike Wondering Bibliography Index.