This article examines museum practices relating to indigenous cultures at the Taimyr Museum of Local History (kraevedcheskiy muzey) during the period 1970–1985. Drawing on archival and museum materials, published memoirs, interviews, and personal documents that preserve oral history, the author approaches the museum space and its associated discourses as a “contact zone”, where state nationalities policy, expert interests, and the cultural work of indigenous community members intersected. Within this space, voices carried unequal weight, certain objects existed simultaneously in the “overcome past”; and the “socialist present” and diverse statements were produced in the course of studying and constructing indigenous culture and identity. Particular attention is paid to the role of those designated as the “national intelligentsia” — indigenous people who acted not merely as informants for visiting researchers or local experts, but as active agents of cultural production, creating hybrid forms of representation of traditional culture within the Soviet canon. The author analyses the contradictory processes of archaisation and actualisation of traditional practices, examining cases of powerful religious objects transferred to the museum, histories connected to indigenous art, and work with folklore. The study shows how, under ideological constraints, distinctive forms of cultural representation emerged in which members of indigenous communities appropriated Soviet cultural institutions and developed new instruments for expressing their own subjectivity. These practices are today recognised by scholars as constitutive of heritage production.

The main focus in our article is paid to mass, primarily student initiatives for the preservation of historical and cultural heritage in the late USSR. The emergence of a discourse on “cultural heritage” and awareness of the importance of heritage preservation helped attract students to the restoration movement, as did systematic funding of restoration work. The popularity of the student restoration movement, combined with an interest in the history and culture of the Russian north, contributed to the emergence of a new generation of restorers. As an example of student restoration activity, the authors reconstructed the history of the construction team of the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI) for the resto ration of the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery (Kirillov, Vologda region). The authors explore the personal experience of students involved in the practice of heritage preservation, their immersion in the history of restored objects, and becoming restorers. The article is based on the reports of the VOOPIiK, the journals of the supervision of the Kirillo-Belozersky Museum and oral memoirs of the participants of the student restoration teams.

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The article is based on material from eight interviews with surrogate mothers (12 children born within the surrogacy programme), received by the authors of the article in 2023. The outline structure of the interviews includes the family history of the informants, their current marital status, motivation for participation in the surrogacy programme and assessment of the experience gained. An analysis of the interviews helps to define the places where frames shift, as well as the active rôle of the informants in framing their own life situation. The article aims to describe the main repertoire of autobiographical stories that encompass personal experience of surrogate motherhood, and to identify the most sensitive topics and the narrative means that surrogate mothers use to reduce their vulnerability. These include communication with the “close” and “distant” circles of people who are aware of woman’s participation in the surrogate motherhood programme; specifying a child’s status and the surrogate mother’s place in the child’s birth; perception of the biological parents and the type of communication with them. The study of this sphere of social interactions helps to develop a language for discussing various methods of reproductive technologies that is beneficial for the programme participants. In conversation with an interviewer women demonstrate good self-control and a skilful distribution of limited resources and control over their own emotional sphere; they emphasise the businesslike nature of their relations with the biological parents. The article discusses those cases when the behavioural strategies and narrative modes of surrogate mothers are determined by their negative social expectations of themselves or their children. The article pays special attention to the way participants in fast-developing medical practices adapt to the intolerant environment and change it gradually. In general, the surrogate motherhood case, despite its ethical vulnerability, is an opportunity to achieve a new level of “autobiographical competence”, which is an exceptional experience that makes such women unique.

The article discusses the infrastructural foundations of the cinema process during Perestroika. This study fills the historiographical gap caused by the deficiency of research about economic practices at all stages of film production in the second half of the 1980s. The descriptive part analyses the supply chains of production / distribution / exchange of cinefilm and the practice of constructing facilities for film production. The first paragraph examines the relationship between organisations from the USSR Goskino system and cinefilm makers from the Ministry of Chemical Industries system. In addition, ways to acquire alternatives to national products are demonstrated: imported cinefilm and video tape. The second paragraph describes three areas of construction policy in which cinema organisations were involved: 1) objects for film exhibition (for example, cinemas); 2) buildings for studio work (for instance, film production plants); 3) buildings for industrial use (in particular, workshops for film copying, production and repair of equipment, etc.). The study is based on a historiographical tradition, according to which material objects are interpreted as the basis for the circulation of exchanges, the distribution of power and the legitimisation of ideas. Accordingly, the film-infrastructure is placed in the context of the struggle of actors. This allows us to formulate problems for rethinking the approach to the interpretation of the “political” during perestroika. Thus, the first conclusion highlights the tension between the declared need for the formation of autonomies and the actual practices of managing infrastructure flows. The second statement formulates the interpretation of the system of resources exchange. Relations between government departments were highly hierarchical, which made it difficult to find consensus in the context of increasing deficit. The emergence of new economic actors only complicated the situation. Their activity added to the problem of the coexistence of parallel systems for realising limits and formed the conditions for the transition from the right to use infrastructure to the right of ownership.