The queue as narrative: a Soviet case study

The queue was a constant and immediately recognisable attribute of Soviet everyday life. In ideological terms, it signified the ‘temporary’ hardships the country was facing. For those having to queue, it was an inescapable quotidian ritual, a waste of time, and a source of irritation. If queues exist across time and space, they nevertheless had a special or, at the very least, fairly specific role to play in the life of the Soviet individual. Right up until the 1990s, the phenomenon of the queue caught the attention of Soviet citizens and foreigners, in particular, those among them who were able to compare the living conditions in their home countries with those in the USSR.2 Today, things have changed: queues are less common, and, most importantly, the very concept of the queue has ceased to occupy the place in social discourse that it did back then. In sociological terms, this is reason enough for further discussion. Obviously, changes to the economic and political life of a society do not necessarily signify immediate changes to the forms of self-identification of the people who make up that society. To what extent does the transformation represented by the social changes that took place in the former Soviet Union (the disappearance of Soviet symbolism or the shifts in phraseology, for example) fit with people’s established psychology, the character of the cultural tradition itself? Before trying to answer this (essentially, sociological) question, it might be useful, in more ways than one, to borrow from the methodological tools of the folklorist/ethnographer. By ‘folklore’ I mean here not only fairytales, epic poems, legends, and so on, but also the ‘common places’ of collectively meaningful experience, rules and taboos, jokes and rhetorical clichés, everyday sayings, adages, citations, and authoritative cross-referencing. In this sense, folklore is a realm of meaning where specialised everyday discourses take on the quotidian nature of language itself and perform a comparable role in social construction.3