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Modernization, value change and fertility in the Soviet Union
Focusing on social change in the Soviet Union, this work explores the way in which the social, economic and political transformations encompassed by modernisation affect values and behaviours. Its analytical focus is the family and the system of norms and values governing sex roles and familial relations.
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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.
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The zoo
\"There are certain things that Yuri Zipit knows: That being official food-taster for the leader of the Soviet Union requires him to drink too much vodka for a 12-year-old. That you do not have to be an Elephantologist to see that the great leader is dying. That Marshal Bruhah has been known to eat his own children, while Comrade Krushka is only fit to run a slaughterhouse, and that one of them has Yuri's father somewhere here in the Dacha. That it's a crime to love your family more than you love Socialism, the Party, or the Motherland. That, because of his damaged mind, everyone thinks Yuri is a fool. But Yuri isn't. He sits quietly through another excessive state dinner and witnesses it all--betrayals, body doubles, buffoonery. He's starting to get the hang of this politics thing, but there's so much to learn. Who knew that a man could be in five places at once? That someone could break your nose as a sign of friendship? That people could be disinvented? The Zoo is a cutting satire, told through the refreshing voice of one gutsy boy who will not give up on hope.\"-- Provided by publisher.
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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.
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The Madonna on the moon
\"November, 1957. The Soviets have just launched the Sputnik, and communism rules in Eastern Europe, but the village of Baia Luna, nestled in the Carpathian mountains, is a world unto itself, populated with gypsy-philosophers and mysterious priests. But for fifteen-year-old Pavel Botev, this world begins to come apart the day teacher asks him to hang a photo of the new party secretary, then whispers a startling directive into his ear. \"Send this man straight to hell. Exterminate him.\" The next morning, she has disappeared. Once a priest turns up murdered, Pavel sets out on a journey for answers - one that leads him into the frontiers of a new life. By turns grippingly realist and enchantingly surreal, The Madonna on the Moon announces the arrival of an important new voice in fiction.\"--Page [4] of cover.
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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
Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room
Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by
Room investigates what happens to domestic
spaces, architecture, and the lives of urbanites during a
socioeconomic upheaval. Kateryna Malaia analyzes how
Soviet and post-Soviet city dwellers, navigating a crisis of
inadequate housing and extreme social disruption between the late
1980s and 2000s, transformed their dwellings as their countries
transformed around them. Soviet infrastructure remained but, in
their domestic spaces, urbanites transitioned to post-Soviet
citizens.
The two decades after the collapse of the USSR witnessed a major
urban apartment remodeling boom. Malaia shows how, in the context
of limited residential mobility, those remodeling and modifying
their homes formed new lifestyles defined by increased spatial
privacy. Remodeled interiors served as a material expression of a
social identity above the poverty line, in place of the outdated
Soviet signifiers of well-being. Connecting home improvement,
self-reinvention, the end of state socialism, and the lived
experience of change, Malaia puts together a comprehensive portrait
of the era.
Malaia shows both the stubborn continuities and the dramatic
changes that accompanied the collapse of the USSR. Making the case
for similarities throughout the former Soviet empire, this study is
based on interviews and fieldwork done primarily in Kyiv and Lviv,
Ukraine. Many of the buildings described are similar to those
damaged or destroyed by Russian bombings or artillery fire
following the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. A book
about major historic events written through the lens of everyday
life, Taking Soviet Union Apart is also about the meaning
of home in a dramatically changing world.
eBook
Blacks, Reds, and Russians
One of the most compelling, yet little known stories of race relations in the twentieth century is the account of blacks who chose to leave the United States to be involved in the Soviet Experiment in the 1920s and 1930s. Frustrated by the limitations imposed by racism in their home country, African Americans were lured by the promise of opportunity abroad. A number of them settled there, raised families, and became integrated into society. The Soviet economy likewise reaped enormous benefits from the talent and expertise that these individuals brought, and the all around success story became a platform for political leaders to boast their party goals of creating a society where all members were equal.In Blacks, Reds, and Russians, Joy Gleason Carew offers insight into the political strategies that often underlie relationships between different peoples and countries. She draws on the autobiographies of key sojourners, including Harry Haywood and Robert Robinson, in addition to the writings of Claude McKay, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. Interviews with the descendents of figures such as Paul Robeson and Oliver Golden offer rare personal insights into the story of a group of emigrants who, confronted by the daunting challenges of making a life for themselves in a racist United States, found unprecedented opportunities in communist Russia.
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