Женское лицо авиаграда: память о повседневной жизни жительниц Жуковского в годы оттепели
The Female Face of the Air City: The Memory of the Everyday Life of the Inhabitants of Zhukovsky During the Thaw

Summary/Abstract: The women’s history of the settlement near Moscow, which became the city of Zhukovsky, is reconstructed by the authors on the basis of oral stories and publications of memoirs and other ego-documents. The purpose of the analysis is to decipher the peculiarities of perception and interpretation by the community of town residents of the realities of everyday life as a space of adaptive behavior. Reflections on the sequences of published memoirs and unstructured biographies of Zhukovsky’s old-timers collected by the authors revealed special constellations of collective and individual memory, typical of science cities (in particular, an air city). On the one hand, the high proportion of corporate culture, the presence of special supplies that made life easier, the liberal atmosphere of cultural life, designed the basis of social optimism, born half a century or more ago and passed on to children and even a generation later to grandchildren. On the other hand, the city of aviators was part of the Soviet social and economic model, and “ordinary” women (not the wives of designers or prominent scientists) had to experience considerable difficulties, sometimes not reflected in memory (this is a long life in the barracks, and gender inequality in labor relations and salaries, and the general severity of women’s life, characteristic of Soviet conditions, etc.), which left their mark and somewhat corrected the discourse of “sovnostalgia” typical of residents of Soviet science cities. Memory of everyday life of Zhukovsky women in the 1950s–60s. becomes a confirmation of the fusion and flow of the individual with the collective.

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