Working on two PhDs was not Aliesia Soloviova’s goal. “It wasn’t the initial plan,” she says. “But life sometimes makes choices for you.”
When Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine began, she was finishing her first doctorate in Kyiv, where she had been researching the history of Ukraine’s foreign policy after independence. Around the same time, she was in Florence as a visiting fellow at the Historical Archives of the European Union, based at the EUI. A new research project started taking shape, and that work eventually grew into her second PhD, now in the EUI Department of History.
What stayed with her through the disruption was a curiosity about how big political ideas end up living inside ordinary days. This time, though, the place where she looks for those ideas is not diplomacy or institutions. It is something closer to home. “I research how the Soviet Union sought to build the ideal marriage of two ideal Soviet citizens,” Aliesia explains.
Her dissertation focuses on Soviet Ukraine between 1953 and 1991. These are decades often described through high politics or industrial modernisation, but Aliesia looks at them from a different angle. She treats marriage as a place where the state tried to teach people how to live.
As she puts it, in Soviet discourse marriage mattered because it connected private life to public goals. It shaped expectations about what a “normal” life was supposed to look like.
After the Second World War, those questions became pressing in a very direct way. The demographic losses were catastrophic. At the same time, women had already been part of paid labour for decades in the Soviet Union, which made any simple “return” to domesticity impossible, she adds.
“What happens after the war,” Aliesia explains, “is that women are needed in the workforce, but they are also needed in domestic spaces.”
That sentence sits at the heart of her project. Officially, the Soviet system spoke the language of equality. In daily life, Aliesia finds a different logic at work. Women were expected to do it all: paid labour, childbirth, and the full weight of domestic organisation. Gradually, the language around emancipation begins to change.
“As the Soviet period progresses, there is more and more negative talk about emancipation,” she says, “and more emphasis on women’s responsibility for marital success.”
To understand how these expectations reached people, Aliesia starts with what surrounded Soviet citizens, the things that felt ordinary because they were everywhere: women’s magazines, journals, popular films, posters, advice literature. The everyday visual environment that moved through homes and public spaces in Soviet Ukraine.
“I look at what people actually saw,” she says. “What they read, what they watched, what felt normal.”
She reads that material alongside oral testimonies. People describing their lives in their own words, often without naming any of it as political. “When people talk about their past,” Aliesia says, “they usually don’t think of it as ideology. They just describe what was normal.”
Working with those testimonies, and with gender history more broadly, was not her starting point. Her first doctorate was rooted in international relations. This second project demanded a different relationship to evidence, and a different way of listening. At the EUI, she found space to make that transition. Methodological support and supervision mattered. “Working with Benno [Bastian Gammerl] as my supervisor was very important for me,” she explains. “I could rebuild my approach to sources, because gender history is very different from doing the history of international relations.”
Oral testimonies, she adds, are not treated as a simple record of what “really happened”. They are part of the story, not a shortcut around interpretation. “I don’t take oral testimonies as something that is simply true,” she says. “I look at how people articulate norms and expectations.”
One testimony that stayed with her comes from Lyubov, from the Kyiv region, whose account appears in the archived oral history collection Aliesia works with. Recalling family life in the early 1950s, Lyubov did not describe marriage as a romantic horizon. She described it as a condition for being taken seriously, and for moving forward.
“If you wanted to develop your career, to achieve something in life, then no matter how bad your family was, you had to be in it, or at least to the appearance of one,” she recalled. “People hid a lot of things; they hid relationships between. It is not like lovers did not exist — they did — but all this was hidden.”
And then she offered an image that says almost everything Aliesia is trying to capture.
“On the surface there was one thing, like an iceberg,” Lyubov said. “All that negative stuff remained submerged.”
For Aliesia, that is not a dramatic metaphor added for effect. It is a research finding. Marriage functioned as a public façade, a visible sign of conformity that mattered for respectability and opportunity. It was not just about personal life, but about demonstrating social acceptability, a visible signal that one was a “proper” Soviet citizen.
This is where the story becomes more uncomfortable than the official language of equality. In the interviews Aliesia works with, people often begin by insisting their marriages were equal. “They would say: We were equal,” Aliesia recalls, “but then describe very different lives. Who worked, who waited in queues, who organised food, who carried responsibility for the household.”
In the shortage economy of the Soviet Union, the household was not only about cooking and cleaning. Aliesia explains that it was about also about queues and hunting for goods, especially before holidays and major family events. Much of that labour was invisible, yet it took time, skill, and persistence.
“This was also work,” she says. “And much of it fell on women.”
Popular culture reinforced these expectations. Aliesia points to a poem titled Miners’ Wedding, published in the satirical magazine Perets in 1952. The poem glorifies the marriage of two people from the same profession, and frames the wedding as a collective achievement rooted in productive labour. Marriage reads less as intimacy and more as proof of usefulness. Even the guests are expected to match the ideal.
What she does not find, though, is widespread open resistance. People rarely describe themselves as opposing the system. “There was no explicit resistance,” she says. “But people continued traditional practices quietly.” Church weddings and baptisms persisted alongside Soviet registration and rituals shifted. Sometimes they were masked through Soviet holidays or simply continued under the radar.
Some of the clearest edges in Aliesia’s research appear when marriage did not fit the prescribed model at all. Divorce, for instance, was legally possible, but it carried procedures and pressures that made it difficult in practice.
“Judges were expected to help couples stay together,” she explains. “And for party officials, divorce could mean public scrutiny, even the loss of party membership.”
So, people stayed married, at least on paper. Sometimes long after relationships had ended. And when women became single mothers, the contradiction sharpened again. “They were officially supported,” Aliesia says, “but socially seen as problematic.”
Her dissertation also examines what she calls “forbidden unions”, relationships that fell outside the Soviet definition of marriage as a registered union between a man and a woman.
“Looking at what was forbidden helps define what was considered normal,” she explains. “By studying these unions, you can see the boundaries of the ideal marriage more clearly.”
Same-sex relationships are one part of that chapter. The legal and social treatment was gendered. “For men, it was criminalised,” she explains. “For women, it was not criminalised, but medicalised, and socially condemned.”
Marriages with foreigners form another sensitive category. For a long time, such unions could not be officially registered. Even after restrictions were lifted in 1955, suspicion remained, and it could persist well into the late Soviet period. “When I read late Soviet sources from the 1980s,” Aliesia says, “there are still letters warning that marriages with foreigners could be harmful to society.”
Interethnic marriages between Soviet citizens occupied a different position. Officially, they were encouraged and celebrated as evidence of harmony and the success of the Soviet project. In everyday life, Aliesia finds them more complicated because these unions brought identity and social hierarchies into the home.
“Children from these marriages could choose their ethnicity,” she explains. “And that choice could shape their entire life.” In her research, Russian identity and language often appear as the safest option, particularly in urban settings. Other identities carried stigma. Language mattered, because it signalled belonging and mobility. “Russian was seen as an urban language,” she says. “Ukrainian was often associated with rural life.”
Aliesia also looks closely at men, and at the ways masculinity was framed in the late Soviet period. Concerns about men “losing authority” appear frequently in her sources, particularly in relation to women’s emancipation. “There was acknowledgment of the missing father,” she says, “but it was framed more in terms of authority than emotional involvement.”
Put together, her research shows how ideals of marriage were neither simply imposed from above nor openly refused. They were absorbed, negotiated, and normalised over time. Marriage became one of the places where the Soviet system taught people how to be seen and respected.
“Many of the people I study are still alive,” she says. “The norms they grew up with did not disappear in 1991. They continue to shape expectations about family, gender, and responsibility, even if people no longer think of them as Soviet.”
She is careful not to turn that into a neat line of continuity. Ukraine’s recent decades have been shaped by upheaval, economic change, and war, which reconfigure everyday life in ways that no historical framework can ignore.
“But if we want to understand why certain expectations still feel natural,” she reflects, “we need to understand where they came from.”
Alongside her dissertation, Aliesia is also developing a 3D visualisation project as a public-facing outreach tool. It reconstructs media environments from different decades, particularly the 1970s and 1980s, using the magazines, journals, and films people themselves recalled as meaningful. The goal is to show the media world that surrounded people, and to make visible how that world formed the backdrop to lived experience.
For Aliesia, studying marriage is not about judging the past. It is about noticing how ideology settles into ordinary life, sometimes so smoothly that it stops being visible. And how people learn to live with it.
That, she suggests, is why these histories still matter.
Aliesia Soloviova is a PhD researcher in the EUI Department of History. Her doctoral thesis, “Crafting Love: Marriage Dynamics in Soviet Ukraine (Second Half of the Twentieth Century)”, examines how marriage functioned as a social and ideological institution in Soviet Ukraine. Her research is supervised by Benno Bastian Gammerl, with Pieter Judson as second reader.
Photo via shutterstock.com / fotoak