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"Intellectuals Soviet Union History."
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Making the Soviet intelligentsia : universities and intellectual life under Stalin and Khrushchev
\"Making the Soviet Intelligentsia explores the formation of educated elites in Russian and Ukrainian universities during the early Cold War. In the postwar period, universities emerged as training grounds for the military-industrial complex, showcases of Soviet cultural and economic accomplishments and valued tools in international cultural diplomacy. However, these feted Soviet institutions also generated conflicts about the place of intellectuals and higher learning under socialism. Disruptive party initiatives in higher education - from the xenophobia and anti-Semitic campaigns of late Stalinism to the rewriting of history and the opening of the USSR to the outside world under Khrushchev - encouraged students and professors to interpret their commitments as intellectuals in the Soviet system in varied and sometimes contradictory ways. In the process, the social construct of intelligentsia took on divisive social, political and national meanings for educated society in the postwar Soviet state\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Showcasing the great experiment : cultural diplomacy and western visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941
This book is a history of the Soviet tours of European and American intellectuals, writers, bohemians, professionals, and political tourists who saw the “Soviet experiment” in the 1920s and 1930s. It provides a new framework for understanding the relationship between intellectuals and communism and the Soviet reception of foreign visitors, including the leading fellow-travelers who praised Stalin and Stalinism in the interwar period. The work is based on a far-reaching analysis of the declassified archives of agencies charged with crafting the international image of the first socialist society, including VOKS (the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad). The book brings this story into new focus as one of the great transnational encounters of the twentieth century. As many visitors were profoundly influenced by their Soviet tours, so too was the Soviet system itself: the experiences of building showcases and tutoring outsiders to perceive the future-in-the-making comprise a neglected international dimension to the emergence of Stalinism. Probing entanglements between far-left and far-right ideological extremes, the work pays special attention to the covert interaction between communism and fascism, including Soviet attempts to recruit German “National Bolsheviks” and fascist intellectuals. The unprecedented scope of Soviet efforts to mold foreign, particularly Western public opinion created a new chapter in the history of modern cultural diplomacy. Setting the revolutionary regime's innovations in the context of the entire history of foreign visitors in Russia, the book argues that Soviet mobilization for the international ideological contest directly paved the way for the cultural Cold War.
eBook
Zhivago's children : the last Russian intelligentsia
This is an in-depth history of the cultural and intellectual evolution of the intelligentsia in Russia from Stalin's death in 1953 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
BOOK
Doubly Chosen
Doubly Chosen provides the first detailed study of a unique cultural and religious phenomenon in post-Stalinist Russia—the conversion of thousands of Russian Jewish intellectuals to Orthodox Christianity, first in the 1960s and later in the 1980s. These time periods correspond to the decades before and after the great exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt contends that the choice of baptism into the Church was an act of moral courage in the face of Soviet persecution, motivated by solidarity with the values espoused by Russian Christian dissidents and intellectuals. Oddly, as Kornblatt shows, these converts to Russian Orthodoxy began to experience their Jewishness in a new and positive way. Working primarily from oral interviews conducted in Russia, Israel, and the United States, Kornblatt underscores the conditions of Soviet life that spurred these conversions: the virtual elimination of Judaism as a viable, widely practiced religion; the transformation of Jews from a religious community to an ethnic one; a longing for spiritual values; the role of the Russian Orthodox Church as a symbol of Russian national culture; and the forging of a new Jewish identity within the context of the Soviet dissident movement.
eBook
Reconstructing Lenin : an intellectual biography
\"Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is among the most enigmatic and influential figures of the twentieth century. While his life and work are crucial to any understanding of modern history and the socialist movement, generations of writers on the left and the right have seen fit to embalm him endlessly with superficial analysis or dreary dogma. Now, after the fall of the Soviet Union and 'actually-existing' socialism, it is possible to consider Lenin afresh, with sober senses trained on his historical context and how it shaped his theoretical and political contributions. Reconstructing Lenin, four decades in the making and now available in English for the first time, is an attempt to do just that. Tamâas Krausz, an esteemed Hungarian scholar writing in the tradition of Gyèorgy Lukâacs, Ferenc Tîokei, and Istvâan Mâeszâaros, makes a major contribution to a growing field of contemporary Lenin studies. This rich and penetrating account reveals Lenin busy at the work of revolution, his thought shaped by immediate political events but never straying far from a coherent theoretical perspective. Krausz balances detailed descriptions of Lenin's time and place with lucid explications of his intellectual development, covering a range of topics like war and revolution, dictatorship and democracy, socialism and utopianism. Reconstructing Lenin will change the way you look at a man and a movement; it will also introduce the English-speaking world to a profound radical scholar\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle
Barbara Walker examines the Russian literary circle, a feature of Russian
intellectual and cultural life from tsarist times into the early Soviet period,
through the life story of one of its liveliest and most adored figures, the poet
Maximilian Voloshin (1877--1932). From 1911 until his death, Voloshin led a circle
in the Crimean village of Koktebel' that was a haven for such literary luminaries as
Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolai Gumilev, and Osip Mandelstam. Drawing upon the
anthropological theories of Victor Turner, Walker depicts the literary circle of
late Imperial Russia as a contradictory mix of idealism and communitas,
on the one hand, and traditional Russian patterns of patronage and networking, on
the other. While detailing the colorful history of Voloshinov's circle in the pre-
and postrevolutionary decades, the book demonstrates that the literary circle and
its leaders played a key role in integrating the intelligentsia into the emerging
ethos of the Soviet state.
eBook
Generation Stalin : French writers, the fatherland, and the cult of personality
\"Generation Stalin is the first comprehensive exploration of the instrumental role of French writers in the creation and propagation of Joseph Stalin's cult of personality. Focusing on the four most prominent writers affiliated with the French Communist Party (PCF) -- Henri Barbusse, Romaine Rolland, Paul Eluard, and Louis Aragon -- Andrew Sobanet traces the rise and evolution of the Stalin cult in France from the late 1920s through the 1950s. Barbusse was the author of the first official biography of Stalin, and the work served as a prototype for the dictator's official biographies into the early Cold War period. The PCF was one of the most important Communist parties, and these writers helped in significant ways to shape Stalinist propaganda in the international Communist sphere, including within the USSR. Fundamental to Generation Stalin is an exploration of complicity with authoritarianism on the part of PCF-affiliated writers, who were often cast as intellectual and moral guides. Sobanet provides analysis of how these writers used a variety of genres -- biography, novel, drama, film, poetry, essays, reportage -- to support dictatorial leadership. Focusing on French nationalism and the French \"culture of commemoration\" used to reinforce party doctrine, Generation Stalin analyzes what it was to be a French Stalinist\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Making the Soviet Intelligentsia
Making the Soviet Intelligentsia explores the formation of educated elites in Russian and Ukrainian universities during the early Cold War. In the postwar period, universities emerged as training grounds for the military-industrial complex, showcases of Soviet cultural and economic accomplishments and valued tools in international cultural diplomacy. However, these fêted Soviet institutions also generated conflicts about the place of intellectuals and higher learning under socialism. Disruptive party initiatives in higher education - from the xenophobia and anti-Semitic campaigns of late Stalinism to the rewriting of history and the opening of the USSR to the outside world under Khrushchev - encouraged students and professors to interpret their commitments as intellectuals in the Soviet system in varied and sometimes contradictory ways. In the process, the social construct of intelligentsia took on divisive social, political and national meanings for educated society in the postwar Soviet state.
eBook
On the Ideological Front
Having emerged, exhausted but triumphant, from the bloody and divisive Russian Civil War, V. I. Lenin and his colleagues turned to eliminating perceived ideological foes from within. InOn the Ideological Front, Stuart Finkel tells the story of the1922 expulsion from Soviet Russia of almost one hundred prominent intellectuals, including professors and journalists, philosophers and engineers, writers and agronomists. Finkel's meticulously researched and persuasively argued study sets this compelling human drama within the context of the Bolsheviks' determined efforts to impose ideological conformity, redefine the role of the intelligentsia, and establish a distinctly Soviet public sphere. The book demonstrates that the NEP period was not a time of intellectual pluralism and ideological retreat on the part of the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, from its formative years, the Soviet regime zealously policed the ideological front and laid the institutional and discursive foundations for the Stalinist state.
eBook