Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia

Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia PDF Author: Gregory Carleton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
After the Bolshevik Revolution sx and sexuality became a battleground for debates about Soviet future, and literature emerged as a way in which sex could be imagined and discussed. This work challenges Western portrayals of revolutionary Russia as prudish or hedonistic; examining what circulated in Bolshevik culture and why.

Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia

Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia PDF Author: Gregory Carleton
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822970872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Gregory Carleton offers a comprehensive literary and cultural history of sex and society in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. The Bolshevik Revolution promised a total transformation of Russian society, down to its most intimate details. But in the years immediately following 1917, it was by no means clear how this would come about. Sex and sexuality became a crucial battleground for debates about the Soviet future, and literature emerged as a primary domain through which sex could be imagined and discussed.Despite optimistic claims that bolshevism would overcome bourgeois depravity, the writings of the 1920s in all genres were awash in sexual adventure, promiscuity, various chauvinisms, date and gang rape, unwanted pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases, as well as sex-related alcohol abuse, depression, and suicide. In discussions about sex, party officials contradicted themselves, sociologists grappled with difficult social problems, and writers experimented in fictional form with modern identities and relationships.Drawing on an uncommonly varied body of sources, including novels, journals, diaries, sociological research, public health brochures, surveys, and party documents-many examined here for the first time in English-Carleton reveals the dramatic, bizarre, and intriguing ways the sexual revolution was discussed and represented. Amidst this chaos, he discerns a historical process of codification and reaction, leading ultimately to the quelling of debate in the 1930s through the harsh dictates of Stalinism.Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia challenges Western writers who portray revolutionary Russia as either prudish or hedonistic by reconstructing a fuller picture of what circulated in Bolshevik culture and why. Carleton brings a complex human dimension to the subject, demonstrating that this controversy should not be viewed as a sideshow curiosity, but rather as a central aspect of the dramatic debates on early Soviet literature and culture.

Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia

Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia PDF Author: Dan Healey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226322339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
The first full-length study of same-sex love in any period of Russian or Soviet history, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia investigates the private worlds of sexual dissidents during the pivotal decades before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Using records and archives available to researchers only since the fall of Communism, Dan Healey revisits the rich homosexual subcultures of St. Petersburg and Moscow, illustrating the ambiguous attitude of the late Tsarist regime and revolutionary rulers toward gay men and lesbians. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia reveals a world of ordinary Russians who lived extraordinary lives and records the voices of a long-silenced minority.

Bolshevik Sexual Forensics

Bolshevik Sexual Forensics PDF Author: Dan Healey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501768557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
In an effort to modernize criminal and civil investigations, early Bolsheviks gave forensic doctors—most of whom had been trained under the tsarist regime—new authority over issues of sexuality. Revolutionaries believed that forensic medicine could provide scientific and objective solutions to sexual disorder in the new society. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics explores the institutional history of Russian and Soviet forensic medicine and examines the effects of its authority when confronting sexual disorder. Healey compares sex crime investigations from Petrograd and Sverdlovsk in the 1920s to the numerous publications by forensic doctors and psychiatrists of the prerevolutionary and early Soviet periods to illustrate the role that these specialists played. In addition, Healey presents a fascinating look at how doctors diagnosed and treated hermaphroditism, showing how Soviet physicians revolutionized the standard scientific view in these cases by taking into account individual desire. This study sheds light on unexplored radical and reactionary forces that shaped the Bolshevik "sexual revolution" as lawmakers defined new ways of seeing sexual crime and disorder. Forensic doctors struggled to interpret the replacement of the age of consent with a standard of "sexual maturity," a designation that made female sexuality a collective "resource," not part of an individual's personality. "Innocence," "experience," and virginity played a major role in the expertise doctors furnished in rape and abuse trials. Psychiatrists recoiled from the language of sexual psychology in their investigations of sex criminals. Yet in the clinic, Soviet physicians probed the desires of the two-sexed citizen, whose psychology served as the basis for a distinctly modern approach to the "erasure" of the hermaphrodite. Healey concludes that the vision of men and women as equals after a "sexual revolution" was undermined from the outset of the Soviet experiment. Law and medicine failed to protect women and girls from violence, and Soviet medicine's physiological and biological model of sexual citizenship erased the vision of sexual self-expression, especially for women. This groundbreaking study will appeal to Soviet historians and those interested in gender studies, sexuality, medicine, and forensics.

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism PDF Author: Kristen R. Ghodsee
Publisher: Bold Type Books
ISBN: 1568588895
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
A spirited, deeply researched exploration of why capitalism is bad for women and how, when done right, socialism leads to economic independence, better labor conditions, better work-life balance and, yes, even better sex. In a witty, irreverent op-ed piece that went viral, Kristen Ghodsee argued that women had better sex under socialism. The response was tremendous — clearly she articulated something many women had sensed for years: the problem is with capitalism, not with us. Ghodsee, an acclaimed ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies, spent years researching what happened to women in countries that transitioned from state socialism to capitalism. She argues here that unregulated capitalism disproportionately harms women, and that we should learn from the past. By rejecting the bad and salvaging the good, we can adapt some socialist ideas to the 21st century and improve our lives. She tackles all aspects of a woman's life - work, parenting, sex and relationships, citizenship, and leadership. In a chapter called "Women: Like Men, But Cheaper," she talks about women in the workplace, discussing everything from the wage gap to harassment and discrimination. In "What To Expect When You're Expecting Exploitation," she addresses motherhood and how "having it all" is impossible under capitalism. Women are standing up for themselves like never before, from the increase in the number of women running for office to the women's march to the long-overdue public outcry against sexual harassment. Interest in socialism is also on the rise -- whether it's the popularity of Bernie Sanders or the skyrocketing membership numbers of the Democratic Socialists of America. It's become increasingly clear to women that capitalism isn't working for us, and Ghodsee is the informed, lively guide who can show us the way forward.

Bolshevik Medicine and Russia's Sexual Revolution

Bolshevik Medicine and Russia's Sexual Revolution PDF Author: D. Healey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 19

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Book Description
The paper will look at the ways in which Bolshevik ideas of sexual politics overlapped and interacted with the Bolshevik's faith in science to deliver solutions to human problems.

How the Soviet Man Was Unmade

How the Soviet Man Was Unmade PDF Author: Lilya Kaganovsky
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 9780822973430
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In Stalinist Russia, the idealized Soviet man projected an image of strength, virility, and unyielding drive in his desire to build a powerful socialist state. In monuments, posters, and other tools of cultural production, he became the demigod of Communist ideology. But beneath the surface of this fantasy, between the lines of texts and in film, lurked another figure: the wounded body of the heroic invalid, the second version of Stalin's New Man. In How the Soviet Man Was Unmade, Lilya Kaganovsky exposes the paradox behind the myth of the indestructible Stalinist-era male. In her analysis of social-realist literature and cinema, she examines the recurring theme of the mutilated male body, which appears with startling frequency. Kaganovsky views this representation as a thinly veiled statement about the emasculated male condition during the Stalinist era. Because the communist state was "full of heroes," a man could only truly distinguish himself and attain hero status through bodily sacrifice-yet in his wounding, he was forever reminded that he would be limited in what he could achieve, and was expected to remain in a state of continued subservience to Stalin and the party.Kaganovsky provides an insightful reevaluation of classic works of the period, including the novels of Nikolai Ostrovskii (How Steel Was Tempered) and Boris Polevoi (A Story About a Real Man), and films such as Ivan Pyr'ev's The Party Card, Eduard Pentslin's The Fighter Pilots, and Mikhail Chiaureli's The Fall of Berlin, among others. The symbolism of wounding and dismemberment in these works acts as a fissure in the facade of Stalinist cultural production through which we can view the consequences of historic and political trauma.

The Firebird and the Fox

The Firebird and the Fox PDF Author: Jeffrey Brooks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
A century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it.

Women, the State and Revolution

Women, the State and Revolution PDF Author: Wendy Z. Goldman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521458160
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Focusing on how women, peasants and orphans responded to Bolshevk attempts to remake the family, this text reveals how, by 1936, legislation designed to liberate women had given way to increasingly conservative solutions strengthening traditional family values.

Russia in Revolution

Russia in Revolution PDF Author: Stephen Anthony Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198734824
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the twentieth century. Now, to mark the centenary of this epochal event, historian Steve Smith presents a panoramic account of the history of the Russian empire, from the last years of the nineteenth century, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik regime, to the end of the 1920s, when Stalin simultaneously unleashed violent collectivization of agriculture and crash industrialization upon Russian society. Drawing on recent archivally-based scholarship, Russia in Revolution pays particular attention to the varying impact of the Revolution on the various groups that made up society: peasants, workers, non-Russian nationalities, the army, women and the family, young people, and the Church. In doing so, it provides a fresh way into the big, perennial questions about the Revolution and its consequences: why did the attempt by the tsarist government to implement political reform after the 1905 Revolution fail?; why did the First World War bring about the collapse of the tsarist system?; why did the attempt to create a democratic system after the February Revolution of 1917 not get off the ground?; why did the Bolsheviks succeed in seizing and holding on to power?; why did they come out victorious from a punishing civil war?; why did the New Economic Policy they introduced in 1921 fail?; and why did Stalin come out on top in the power struggle inside the Bolshevik party after Lenin's death in 1924? A final chapter then reflects on the larger significance of 1917 for the history of the twentieth century - and, for all its terrible flaws, what the promise of the Revolution might mean for us today.

A Companion to the Russian Revolution

A Companion to the Russian Revolution PDF Author: Daniel Orlovsky
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118620895
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
A compendium of original essays and contemporary viewpoints on the 1917 Revolution The Russian revolution of 1917 reverberated throughout an empire that covered one-sixth of the world. It altered the geo-political landscape of not only Eurasia, but of the entire globe. The impact of this immense event is still felt in the present day. The historiography of the last two decades has challenged conceptions of the 1917 revolution as a monolithic entity— the causes and meanings of revolution are many, as is reflected in contemporary scholarship on the subject. A Companion to the Russian Revolution offers more than thirty original essays, written by a team of respected scholars and historians of 20th century Russian history. Presenting a wide range of contemporary perspectives, the Companion discusses topics including the dynamics of violence in war and revolution, Russian political parties, the transformation of the Orthodox church, Bolshevism, Liberalism, and more. Although primarily focused on 1917 itself, and the singular Revolutionary experience in that year, this book also explores time-periods such as the First Russian Revolution, early Soviet government, the Civil War period, and even into the 1920’s. Presents a wide range of original essays that discuss Brings together in-depth coverage of political history, party history, cultural history, and new social approaches Explores the long-range causes, influence on early Soviet culture, and global after-life of the Russian Revolution Offers broadly-conceived, contemporary views of the revolution largely based on the author’s original research Links Russian revolutions to Russian Civil Wars as concepts A Companion to the Russian Revolution is an important addition to modern scholarship on the subject, and a valuable resource for those interested in Russian, Late Imperial, or Soviet history as well as anyone interested in Revolution as a global phenomenon.