Author: Christina Kiaer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253217929
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
How Soviet citizens in the 1920s and 1930s internalized Soviet ways of looking at the world and living their everyday lives.
Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia
Author: Christina Kiaer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253217929
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
How Soviet citizens in the 1920s and 1930s internalized Soviet ways of looking at the world and living their everyday lives.
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253217929
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Book Description
How Soviet citizens in the 1920s and 1930s internalized Soviet ways of looking at the world and living their everyday lives.
Everyday Stalinism
Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195050002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195050002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.
Seasoned Socialism
Author: Anastasia Lakhtikova
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304099X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Book Description
This essay anthology explores the intersection of gender, food and culture in post-1960s Soviet life from personal cookbooks to gulag survival. Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life, specifically between 1964 and 1985. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women’s central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time. Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women’s journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304099X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Book Description
This essay anthology explores the intersection of gender, food and culture in post-1960s Soviet life from personal cookbooks to gulag survival. Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life, specifically between 1964 and 1985. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women’s central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time. Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women’s journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.
The Whisperers
Author: Orlando Figes
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014180887X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 970
Book Description
Drawing on a huge range of sources - letters, memoirs, conversations - Orlando Figes tells the story of how Russians tried to endure life under Stalin. Those who shaped the political system became, very frequently, its victims. Those who were its victims were frequently quite blameless. The Whisperers recreates the sort of maze in which Russians found themselves, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it: a society in which everyone spoke in whispers - whether to protect themselves, their families, neighbours or friends - or to inform on them.
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014180887X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 970
Book Description
Drawing on a huge range of sources - letters, memoirs, conversations - Orlando Figes tells the story of how Russians tried to endure life under Stalin. Those who shaped the political system became, very frequently, its victims. Those who were its victims were frequently quite blameless. The Whisperers recreates the sort of maze in which Russians found themselves, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it: a society in which everyone spoke in whispers - whether to protect themselves, their families, neighbours or friends - or to inform on them.
The Unmaking of Soviet Life
Author: Caroline Humphrey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501725726
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295
Book Description
In order to understand today's Russia and former Soviet republics, it is vital to consider their socialist past. Caroline Humphrey, one of anthropology's most highly regarded thinkers on a number of topics including consumption, identity, and ritual, is the ideal guide to the intricacies of post-Soviet culture. The Unmaking of Soviet Life brings together ten of Humphrey's best essays, which cover, geographically, Central Russia, Siberia, and Mongolia; and thematically, the politics of locality, property, and persons.Bridging the strongest of Humphrey's work from 1991 to 2001, the essays do a great deal to demystify the sensational topics of mafia, barter, bribery, and the new shamanism by locating them in the lived experiences of a wide range of subjects. The Unmaking of Soviet Life includes a foreword and introductory paragraphs by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries that precede each essay.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501725726
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295
Book Description
In order to understand today's Russia and former Soviet republics, it is vital to consider their socialist past. Caroline Humphrey, one of anthropology's most highly regarded thinkers on a number of topics including consumption, identity, and ritual, is the ideal guide to the intricacies of post-Soviet culture. The Unmaking of Soviet Life brings together ten of Humphrey's best essays, which cover, geographically, Central Russia, Siberia, and Mongolia; and thematically, the politics of locality, property, and persons.Bridging the strongest of Humphrey's work from 1991 to 2001, the essays do a great deal to demystify the sensational topics of mafia, barter, bribery, and the new shamanism by locating them in the lived experiences of a wide range of subjects. The Unmaking of Soviet Life includes a foreword and introductory paragraphs by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries that precede each essay.
Anguish, Anger, and Folkways in Soviet Russia
Author: Gábor Rittersporn
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 9780822963202
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Anguish, Anger, and Folkways in Soviet Russia offers original perspectives on the politics of everyday life in the Soviet Union by closely examining the coping mechanisms individuals and leaders alike developed as they grappled with the political, social, and intellectual challenges the system presented before and after World War II. As Gábor T. Rittersporn shows, the “little tactics” people employed in their daily lives not only helped them endure the rigors of life during the Stalin and post-Stalin periods but also strongly influenced the system’s development into the Gorbachev and post-Soviet eras. For Rittersporn, citizens’ conscious and unreflected actions at all levels of society defined a distinct Soviet universe. Terror, faith, disillusionment, evasion, folk customs, revolt, and confusion about regime goals and the individual’s relation to them were all integral to the development of that universe and the culture it engendered. Through a meticulous reading of primary documents and materials uncovered in numerous archives located in Russia and Germany, Rittersporn identifies three related responses—anguish, anger, and folkways—to the pressures people in all walks of life encountered, and shows how these responses in turn altered the way the system operated. Rittersporn finds that the leadership generated widespread anguish by its inability to understand and correct the reasons for the system’s persistent political and economic dysfunctions. Rather than locate the sources of these problems in their own presuppositions and administrative methods, leaders attributed them to omnipresent conspiracy and wrecking, which they tried to extirpate through terror. He shows how the unrelenting pursuit of enemies exacerbated systemic failures and contributed to administrative breakdowns and social dissatisfaction. Anger resulted as the populace reacted to the notable gap between the promise of a self-governing egalitarian society and the actual experience of daily existence under the heavy hand of the party-state. Those who had interiorized systemic values demanded a return to what they took for the original Bolshevik project, while others sought an outlet for their frustrations in destructive or self-destructive behavior. In reaction to the system's pressure, citizens instinctively developed strategies of noncompliance and accommodation. A detailed examination of these folkways enables Rittersporn to identify and describe the mechanisms and spaces intuitively created by officials and ordinary citizens to evade the regime's dictates or to find a modus vivendi with them. Citizens and officials alike employed folkways to facilitate work, avoid tasks, advance careers, augment their incomes, display loyalty, enjoy life’s pleasures, and simply to survive. Through his research, Rittersporn uncovers a fascinating world consisting of peasant stratagems and subterfuges, underground financial institutions, falsified Supreme Court documents, and associations devoted to peculiar sexual practices. As Rittersporn shows, popular and elite responses and tactics deepened the regime’s ineffectiveness and set its modernization project off down unintended paths. Trapped in a web of behavioral patterns and social representations that eluded the understanding of both conservatives and reformers, the Soviet system entered a cycle of self-defeat where leaders and led exercised less and less control over the course of events. In the end, a new system emerged that neither the establishment nor the rest of society could foresee.
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 9780822963202
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Anguish, Anger, and Folkways in Soviet Russia offers original perspectives on the politics of everyday life in the Soviet Union by closely examining the coping mechanisms individuals and leaders alike developed as they grappled with the political, social, and intellectual challenges the system presented before and after World War II. As Gábor T. Rittersporn shows, the “little tactics” people employed in their daily lives not only helped them endure the rigors of life during the Stalin and post-Stalin periods but also strongly influenced the system’s development into the Gorbachev and post-Soviet eras. For Rittersporn, citizens’ conscious and unreflected actions at all levels of society defined a distinct Soviet universe. Terror, faith, disillusionment, evasion, folk customs, revolt, and confusion about regime goals and the individual’s relation to them were all integral to the development of that universe and the culture it engendered. Through a meticulous reading of primary documents and materials uncovered in numerous archives located in Russia and Germany, Rittersporn identifies three related responses—anguish, anger, and folkways—to the pressures people in all walks of life encountered, and shows how these responses in turn altered the way the system operated. Rittersporn finds that the leadership generated widespread anguish by its inability to understand and correct the reasons for the system’s persistent political and economic dysfunctions. Rather than locate the sources of these problems in their own presuppositions and administrative methods, leaders attributed them to omnipresent conspiracy and wrecking, which they tried to extirpate through terror. He shows how the unrelenting pursuit of enemies exacerbated systemic failures and contributed to administrative breakdowns and social dissatisfaction. Anger resulted as the populace reacted to the notable gap between the promise of a self-governing egalitarian society and the actual experience of daily existence under the heavy hand of the party-state. Those who had interiorized systemic values demanded a return to what they took for the original Bolshevik project, while others sought an outlet for their frustrations in destructive or self-destructive behavior. In reaction to the system's pressure, citizens instinctively developed strategies of noncompliance and accommodation. A detailed examination of these folkways enables Rittersporn to identify and describe the mechanisms and spaces intuitively created by officials and ordinary citizens to evade the regime's dictates or to find a modus vivendi with them. Citizens and officials alike employed folkways to facilitate work, avoid tasks, advance careers, augment their incomes, display loyalty, enjoy life’s pleasures, and simply to survive. Through his research, Rittersporn uncovers a fascinating world consisting of peasant stratagems and subterfuges, underground financial institutions, falsified Supreme Court documents, and associations devoted to peculiar sexual practices. As Rittersporn shows, popular and elite responses and tactics deepened the regime’s ineffectiveness and set its modernization project off down unintended paths. Trapped in a web of behavioral patterns and social representations that eluded the understanding of both conservatives and reformers, the Soviet system entered a cycle of self-defeat where leaders and led exercised less and less control over the course of events. In the end, a new system emerged that neither the establishment nor the rest of society could foresee.
The Things of Life
Author: Alexey Golubev
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501752901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Book Description
The Things of Life is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regime to transform them into a rationally organized, disciplined, and easily controllable community. Golubev argues that late Soviet materiality had an immense impact on the organization of the Soviet historical and spatial imagination. His approach also makes clear the ways in which the Soviet self was an integral part of the global experience of modernity rather than simply an outcome of Communist propaganda. Through its focus on materiality and personhood, The Things of Life expands our understanding of what made Soviet people and society "Soviet."
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501752901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Book Description
The Things of Life is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regime to transform them into a rationally organized, disciplined, and easily controllable community. Golubev argues that late Soviet materiality had an immense impact on the organization of the Soviet historical and spatial imagination. His approach also makes clear the ways in which the Soviet self was an integral part of the global experience of modernity rather than simply an outcome of Communist propaganda. Through its focus on materiality and personhood, The Things of Life expands our understanding of what made Soviet people and society "Soviet."
Daily Life in the Soviet Union
Author: Katherine Eaton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313061106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342
Book Description
Details what ordinary life was like during the extraordinary years of the reign of Soviet Union. Thirty-six illustrations, thematic chapters, a glossary, timeline, annotated multimedia bibliography, and detailed index make it a sound starting point for looking at this powerful nation's immediate past. What was ordinary life like in the Soviet police state? The phrase daily life implies an orderly routine in a stable environment. However, many millions of Soviet citizens experienced repeated upheavals in their everyday lives. Soviet citizens were forced to endure revolution, civil war, two World Wars, forced collectivization, famine, massive deportations, mass terror campaigns perpetrated against them by their own leaders, and chronic material deprivations. Even the perpetrators often became victims. Many millions, of all ages, nationalities, and walks of life, did not survive these experiences. At the same time, millions managed to live tranquilly, work in factories, farm the fields, serve in the military, and even find joy in their existence. Structured topically, this volume begins with an historical introduction to the Soviet period (1917-1991) and a timeline. Chapters that follow are devoted to such core topics as: government and law, the economy, the military, rural life, education, health care, housing, ethnic groups, religion, the media, leisure, popular culture, and the arts. The volume also has two maps, including a map of ethnic groups and languages, and over thirty photographs of people going about their lives in good times and bad. A glossary, a list of student-friendly books and multimedia sources for classroom and/or individual use, and an index round out the work, making it a valuable resource for high school as well as undergraduate courses on modern Russian and Soviet history. Copious chapter endnotes provide numerous starting points for students and teachers who want to delve more deeply.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313061106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342
Book Description
Details what ordinary life was like during the extraordinary years of the reign of Soviet Union. Thirty-six illustrations, thematic chapters, a glossary, timeline, annotated multimedia bibliography, and detailed index make it a sound starting point for looking at this powerful nation's immediate past. What was ordinary life like in the Soviet police state? The phrase daily life implies an orderly routine in a stable environment. However, many millions of Soviet citizens experienced repeated upheavals in their everyday lives. Soviet citizens were forced to endure revolution, civil war, two World Wars, forced collectivization, famine, massive deportations, mass terror campaigns perpetrated against them by their own leaders, and chronic material deprivations. Even the perpetrators often became victims. Many millions, of all ages, nationalities, and walks of life, did not survive these experiences. At the same time, millions managed to live tranquilly, work in factories, farm the fields, serve in the military, and even find joy in their existence. Structured topically, this volume begins with an historical introduction to the Soviet period (1917-1991) and a timeline. Chapters that follow are devoted to such core topics as: government and law, the economy, the military, rural life, education, health care, housing, ethnic groups, religion, the media, leisure, popular culture, and the arts. The volume also has two maps, including a map of ethnic groups and languages, and over thirty photographs of people going about their lives in good times and bad. A glossary, a list of student-friendly books and multimedia sources for classroom and/or individual use, and an index round out the work, making it a valuable resource for high school as well as undergraduate courses on modern Russian and Soviet history. Copious chapter endnotes provide numerous starting points for students and teachers who want to delve more deeply.
Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941
Author: Robert W. Thurston
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300074420
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Book Description
Examining Stalin's reign of terror, this text argues that the Soviet people were not simply victims but also actors in the violence, criticisms and local decisions of the 1930s. It suggests that more believed in Stalin's quest to eliminate internal enemies than were frightened by it.
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300074420
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Book Description
Examining Stalin's reign of terror, this text argues that the Soviet people were not simply victims but also actors in the violence, criticisms and local decisions of the 1930s. It suggests that more believed in Stalin's quest to eliminate internal enemies than were frightened by it.
Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia
Author: ChaeRan Y. Freeze
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1611684552
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 665
Book Description
This book makes accessibleÑfor the first time in EnglishÑdeclassified archival documents from the former Soviet Union, rabbinic sources, and previously untranslated memoirs, illuminating everyday Jewish life as the site of interaction and negotiation among and between neighbors, society, and the Russian state, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to World War I. Focusing on religion, family, health, sexuality, work, and politics, these documents provide an intimate portrait of the rich diversity of Jewish life. By personalizing collective experience through individual life storiesÑreflecting not only the typical but also the extraordinaryÑthe sources reveal the tensions and ruptures in a vanished society. An introductory survey of Russian Jewish history from the Polish partitions (1772Ð1795) to World War I combines with prefatory remarks, textual annotations, and a bibliography of suggested readings to provide a new perspective on the history of the Jews of Russia.
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1611684552
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 665
Book Description
This book makes accessibleÑfor the first time in EnglishÑdeclassified archival documents from the former Soviet Union, rabbinic sources, and previously untranslated memoirs, illuminating everyday Jewish life as the site of interaction and negotiation among and between neighbors, society, and the Russian state, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to World War I. Focusing on religion, family, health, sexuality, work, and politics, these documents provide an intimate portrait of the rich diversity of Jewish life. By personalizing collective experience through individual life storiesÑreflecting not only the typical but also the extraordinaryÑthe sources reveal the tensions and ruptures in a vanished society. An introductory survey of Russian Jewish history from the Polish partitions (1772Ð1795) to World War I combines with prefatory remarks, textual annotations, and a bibliography of suggested readings to provide a new perspective on the history of the Jews of Russia.