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"Former Soviet Union"
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Cultivating the Masses
Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of repressions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people's well-being. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand in hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture.
InCultivating the Masses, David L. Hoffmann examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime, a regime intent on transforming the socioeconomic order and the very nature of its citizens. To analyze Soviet social policies, Hoffmann places them in an international comparative context. He explains Soviet technologies of social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices. These practices developed in conjunction with the ambitions of nineteenth-century European reformers to refashion society, and they subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive regulations in countries around the world.
The mobilizational demands of World War I impelled political leaders to expand even further their efforts at population management, via economic controls, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence. Born at this moment of total war, the Soviet system institutionalized these wartime methods as permanent features of governance. Party leaders, whose dictatorship included no checks on state power, in turn attached interventionist practices to their ideological goal of building socialism.
eBook
The Russian Revolution : a new history
\"Historian Sean McMeekin traces the origins and events of the Russian Revolution, which brought an end to Romanov rule and ushered the Bolsheviks into power\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia
The Buryats are a Mongolian population in Siberian Russia, the largest indigenous minority. The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia presents the dramatic transformation in their everyday lives during the late twentieth century. The book challenges the common notion that the process of modernization during the later Soviet period created a Buryat national assertiveness rather than assimilation or support for the state.
eBook
Uncle Vanya
\"A refreshingly intimate and modern spin on a Chekhovian classic.\" Devastatingly beautiful. People are going to be talking about this one for years.\"? The Village VoiceOne of the most-produced playwrights in the United States, Annie Baker lends her truthful observation and elegant command of the colloquial to Chekhov's despairing masterpiece. A critical hit in its sold-out Off-Broadway premiere, this contemporary telling is \"the most intimate and engaging exploration of Chekhov's bleak comedy since Andre; Gregory's Vanya on 42nd Street\" (Bloomberg News). Annie Baker's works include The Aliens (Obie Award), Body Awareness, Circle Mirror Transformation (Obie Award), Nocturama, and The Flick. Recent honors include a New York Drama Critics Circle Special Citation, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize nomination, Time Warner Storytelling Fellowship, MacDowell Fellowship and commissions from Center Theater Group and Playwrights Horizons.\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime and the Fate of Reform after Stalin
Between Stalin's death in 1953 and 1960, the government of the Soviet Union released hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag as part of a wide-ranging effort to reverse the worst excesses and abuses of the previous two decades and revive the spirit of the revolution. This exodus included not only victims of past purges but also those sentenced for criminal offenses. In Khrushchev's Cold Summer, Miriam Dobson explores the impact of these returnees on communities and, more broadly, Soviet attempts to come to terms with the traumatic legacies of Stalin's terror. Confusion and disorientation undermined the regime's efforts at recovery. In the wake of Stalin's death, ordinary citizens and political leaders alike struggled to make sense of the country's recent bloody past and to cope with the complex social dynamics caused by attempts to reintegrate the large influx of returning prisoners, a number of whom were hardened criminals alienated and embittered by their experiences within the brutal camp system. Drawing on private letters as well as official reports on the party and popular mood, Dobson probes social attitudes toward the changes occurring in the first post-Stalin decade. Throughout, she features personal stories as articulated in the words of ordinary citizens, prisoners, and former prisoners. At the same time, she explores Soviet society's contradictory responses to the returnees and shows that for many the immediate post-Stalin years were anything but a breath of spring air after the long Stalinist winter.
eBook
Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge
In Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge , Mayhill C. Fowler tells the story of the rise and fall of a group of men who created culture both Soviet and Ukrainian. This collective biography showcases new aspects of the politics of cultural production in the Soviet Union by focusing on theater and on the multi-ethnic borderlands. Unlike their contemporaries in Moscow or Leningrad, these artists from the regions have been all but forgotten despite the quality of their art. Beau Monde restores the periphery to the center of Soviet culture. Sources in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Yiddish highlight the important multi-ethnic context and the challenges inherent in constructing Ukrainian culture in a place of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Jews. Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge traces the growing overlap between the arts and the state in the early Soviet years, and explains the intertwining of politics and culture in the region today.
eBook
The Will to Predict
In The Will to
Predict , Eglė Rindzevičiūtė demonstrates how
the logic of scientific expertise cannot be properly understood
without knowing the conceptual and institutional history of
scientific prediction. She notes that predictions of
future population, economic growth, environmental change, and
scientific and technological innovation have shaped much of
twentieth and twenty-first-century politics and social life, as
well as government policies. Today, such predictions are more
necessary than ever as the world undergoes dramatic environmental,
political, and technological change. But, she asks, what does it
mean to predict scientifically? What are the limits of scientific
prediction and what are its effects on governance, institutions,
and society?
Her intellectual and political history of scientific prediction
takes as its example twentieth-century USSR. By outlining the role
of prediction in a range of governmental contexts, from economic
and social planning to military strategy, she shows that the
history of scientific prediction is a transnational one, part of
the history of modern science and technology as well as governance.
Going beyond the Soviet case, Rindzevičiūtė argues that scientific
predictions are central for organizing uncertainty through the
orchestration of knowledge and action. Bridging the fields of
political sociology, organization studies, and history, The
Will to Predict considers what makes knowledge scientific and
how such knowledge has impacted late modern governance.
eBook