Aggregated everyday life in the Stalin's era: to the definition of the problem

The article deals with methodological problems of the research of Soviet everyday life of the 1930s - 1950s. The genealogy of the concept of everyday life by Schütz, Berger and Luckmann is considered. The concept singles out everyday life from the areas of finite values and gives it the status of a higher reality. This image of everyday life could take shape only in conditions of a firmly established bourgeois way of life, subjected to state intervention in the era of wars and revolutions. That is why the concept of everyday life has been used for the apology of the private sphere as a source of rationality, tradition, meaning, and stability. This concept needs to be revised to characterize Soviet everyday life. In Soviet society, after the collapse of NEP, private space had been gradually shrinking. Thus, the space of everyday life was fundamentally restructured. Two mutually complementary processes were unfolding: the publication of the intimate and personal and the domestication of large social institutions. It illustrates situationality and arbitrary combination of heterogeneous social practices. It is proposed to consider the everyday life of the Stalin epoch as extended, in its most adequate definition - aggregated. Methodological principles derived from this definition are formulated in the paper. The first is addressed to researchers of everyday life: its analysis extends to the studies of big social institutions. To the extent they are domesticated, they do not always become part of everyday routine of a rational type. The second conclusion is addressed to supporters of the institutional approach to the studies of Soviet reality: while studying sociocultural institutes, the researcher should take into account the effect of traditional, or archaic, cultures: tribalism, nepotism, clanism, paternalism, etc.