Author: Donald J. Raleigh
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199744343
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 435
Book Description
Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation. Illuminating a critical generation of people who had remained largely faceless up until now, the book reveals what it meant to "live Soviet" during the twilight of the Soviet empire.
Soviet Baby Boomers
Author: Donald J. Raleigh
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199744343
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 435
Book Description
Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation. Illuminating a critical generation of people who had remained largely faceless up until now, the book reveals what it meant to "live Soviet" during the twilight of the Soviet empire.
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199744343
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 435
Book Description
Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation. Illuminating a critical generation of people who had remained largely faceless up until now, the book reveals what it meant to "live Soviet" during the twilight of the Soviet empire.
Soviet Baby Boomers
Author: Donald J. Raleigh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199912394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434
Book Description
Donald Raleigh's Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the fascinating life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation. For this book, Raleigh has interviewed sixty 1967 graduates of two "magnet" secondary schools that offered intensive instruction in English, one in Moscow and one in provincial Saratov. Part of the generation that began school the year the country launched Sputnik into space, they grew up during the Cold War, but in a Soviet Union increasingly distanced from the excesses of Stalinism. In this post-Stalin era, the Soviet leadership dismantled the Gulag, ruled without terror, promoted consumerism, and began to open itself to an outside world still fearful of Communism. Raleigh is one of the first scholars of post-1945 Soviet history to draw extensively on oral history, a particularly useful approach in studying a country where the boundaries between public and private life remained porous and the state sought to peer into every corner of people's lives. During and after the dissolution of the USSR, Russian citizens began openly talking about their past, trying to make sense of it, and Raleigh has made the most of this new forthrightness. He has created an extraordinarily rich composite narrative and embedded it in larger historical narratives of Cold War, de-Stalinization, "overtaking" America, opening up to the outside world, economic stagnation, dissent, emigration, the transition to a market economy, the transformation of class, ethnic, and gender relations, and globalization. Including rare photographs of daily life in Cold War Russia, Soviet Baby Boomers offers an intimate portrait of a generation that has remained largely faceless until now.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199912394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434
Book Description
Donald Raleigh's Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the fascinating life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation. For this book, Raleigh has interviewed sixty 1967 graduates of two "magnet" secondary schools that offered intensive instruction in English, one in Moscow and one in provincial Saratov. Part of the generation that began school the year the country launched Sputnik into space, they grew up during the Cold War, but in a Soviet Union increasingly distanced from the excesses of Stalinism. In this post-Stalin era, the Soviet leadership dismantled the Gulag, ruled without terror, promoted consumerism, and began to open itself to an outside world still fearful of Communism. Raleigh is one of the first scholars of post-1945 Soviet history to draw extensively on oral history, a particularly useful approach in studying a country where the boundaries between public and private life remained porous and the state sought to peer into every corner of people's lives. During and after the dissolution of the USSR, Russian citizens began openly talking about their past, trying to make sense of it, and Raleigh has made the most of this new forthrightness. He has created an extraordinarily rich composite narrative and embedded it in larger historical narratives of Cold War, de-Stalinization, "overtaking" America, opening up to the outside world, economic stagnation, dissent, emigration, the transition to a market economy, the transformation of class, ethnic, and gender relations, and globalization. Including rare photographs of daily life in Cold War Russia, Soviet Baby Boomers offers an intimate portrait of a generation that has remained largely faceless until now.
Russia's Sputnik Generation
Author: Donald J. Raleigh
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253112149
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Book Description
Russia's Sputnik Generation presents the life stories of eight 1967 graduates of School No. 42 in the Russian city of Saratov. Born in 1949/50, these four men and four women belong to the first generation conceived during the Soviet Union's return to "normality" following World War II. Well educated, articulate, and loosely networked even today, they were first-graders the year the USSR launched Sputnik, and grew up in a country that increasingly distanced itself from the excesses of Stalinism. Reaching middle age during the Gorbachev Revolution, they negotiated the transition to a Russian-style market economy and remain active, productive members of society in Russia and the diaspora. In candid interviews with Donald J. Raleigh, these Soviet "baby boomers" talk about the historical times in which they grew up, but also about their everyday experiences -- their family backgrounds; childhood pastimes; favorite books, movies, and music; and influential people in their lives. These personal testimonies shed valuable light on Soviet childhood and adolescence, on the reasons and course of perestroika, and on the wrenching transition that has taken place since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253112149
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Book Description
Russia's Sputnik Generation presents the life stories of eight 1967 graduates of School No. 42 in the Russian city of Saratov. Born in 1949/50, these four men and four women belong to the first generation conceived during the Soviet Union's return to "normality" following World War II. Well educated, articulate, and loosely networked even today, they were first-graders the year the USSR launched Sputnik, and grew up in a country that increasingly distanced itself from the excesses of Stalinism. Reaching middle age during the Gorbachev Revolution, they negotiated the transition to a Russian-style market economy and remain active, productive members of society in Russia and the diaspora. In candid interviews with Donald J. Raleigh, these Soviet "baby boomers" talk about the historical times in which they grew up, but also about their everyday experiences -- their family backgrounds; childhood pastimes; favorite books, movies, and music; and influential people in their lives. These personal testimonies shed valuable light on Soviet childhood and adolescence, on the reasons and course of perestroika, and on the wrenching transition that has taken place since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
A Generation of Sociopaths
Author: Bruce Cannon Gibney
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0316395803
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 593
Book Description
In his "remarkable" (Men's Journal) and "controversial" (Fortune) book -- written in a "wry, amusing style" (The Guardian) -- Bruce Cannon Gibney shows how America was hijacked by the Boomers, a generation whose reckless self-indulgence degraded the foundations of American prosperity. In A Generation of Sociopaths, Gibney examines the disastrous policies of the most powerful generation in modern history, showing how the Boomers ruthlessly enriched themselves at the expense of future generations. Acting without empathy, prudence, or respect for facts--acting, in other words, as sociopaths--the Boomers turned American dynamism into stagnation, inequality, and bipartisan fiasco. The Boomers have set a time bomb for the 2030s, when damage to Social Security, public finances, and the environment will become catastrophic and possibly irreversible--and when, not coincidentally, Boomers will be dying off. Gibney argues that younger generations have a fleeting window to hold the Boomers accountable and begin restoring America.
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0316395803
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 593
Book Description
In his "remarkable" (Men's Journal) and "controversial" (Fortune) book -- written in a "wry, amusing style" (The Guardian) -- Bruce Cannon Gibney shows how America was hijacked by the Boomers, a generation whose reckless self-indulgence degraded the foundations of American prosperity. In A Generation of Sociopaths, Gibney examines the disastrous policies of the most powerful generation in modern history, showing how the Boomers ruthlessly enriched themselves at the expense of future generations. Acting without empathy, prudence, or respect for facts--acting, in other words, as sociopaths--the Boomers turned American dynamism into stagnation, inequality, and bipartisan fiasco. The Boomers have set a time bomb for the 2030s, when damage to Social Security, public finances, and the environment will become catastrophic and possibly irreversible--and when, not coincidentally, Boomers will be dying off. Gibney argues that younger generations have a fleeting window to hold the Boomers accountable and begin restoring America.
Socialist Fun
Author: Gleb Tsipursky
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Book Description
Most narratives depict Soviet Cold War cultural activities and youth groups as drab and dreary, militant and politicized. In this study Gleb Tsipursky challenges these stereotypes in a revealing portrayal of Soviet youth and state-sponsored popular culture. The primary local venues for Soviet culture were the tens of thousands of clubs where young people found entertainment, leisure, social life, and romance. Here sports, dance, film, theater, music, lectures, and political meetings became vehicles to disseminate a socialist version of modernity. The Soviet way of life was dutifully presented and perceived as the most progressive and advanced, in an attempt to stave off Western influences. In effect, socialist fun became very serious business. As Tsipursky shows, however, Western culture did infiltrate these activities, particularly at local levels, where participants and organizers deceptively cloaked their offerings to appeal to their own audiences. Thus, Soviet modernity evolved as a complex and multivalent ideological device. Tsipursky provides a fresh and original examination of the Kremlin's paramount effort to shape young lives, consumption, popular culture, and to build an emotional community—all against the backdrop of Cold War struggles to win hearts and minds both at home and abroad.
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Book Description
Most narratives depict Soviet Cold War cultural activities and youth groups as drab and dreary, militant and politicized. In this study Gleb Tsipursky challenges these stereotypes in a revealing portrayal of Soviet youth and state-sponsored popular culture. The primary local venues for Soviet culture were the tens of thousands of clubs where young people found entertainment, leisure, social life, and romance. Here sports, dance, film, theater, music, lectures, and political meetings became vehicles to disseminate a socialist version of modernity. The Soviet way of life was dutifully presented and perceived as the most progressive and advanced, in an attempt to stave off Western influences. In effect, socialist fun became very serious business. As Tsipursky shows, however, Western culture did infiltrate these activities, particularly at local levels, where participants and organizers deceptively cloaked their offerings to appeal to their own audiences. Thus, Soviet modernity evolved as a complex and multivalent ideological device. Tsipursky provides a fresh and original examination of the Kremlin's paramount effort to shape young lives, consumption, popular culture, and to build an emotional community—all against the backdrop of Cold War struggles to win hearts and minds both at home and abroad.
Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples
Author: Adrienne Edgar
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501762958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples examines the racialization of identities and its impact on mixed couples and families in Soviet Central Asia. In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single "Soviet people." Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized in the USSR's final decades. In this context, Adrienne Edgar argues, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply "Soviet." Looking back on their lives in the Soviet Union, ethnically mixed people often reported that the "official" nationality in their identity documents did not match their subjective feelings of identity, that they were unable to speak "their own" native language, and that their ambiguous physical appearance prevented them from claiming the nationality with which they most identified. In all these ways, mixed couples and families were acutely and painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples is based on more than eighty in-depth oral history interviews with members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, along with published and unpublished Soviet documents, scholarly and popular articles from the Soviet press, memoirs and films, and interviews with Soviet-era sociologists and ethnographers.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501762958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples examines the racialization of identities and its impact on mixed couples and families in Soviet Central Asia. In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single "Soviet people." Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized in the USSR's final decades. In this context, Adrienne Edgar argues, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply "Soviet." Looking back on their lives in the Soviet Union, ethnically mixed people often reported that the "official" nationality in their identity documents did not match their subjective feelings of identity, that they were unable to speak "their own" native language, and that their ambiguous physical appearance prevented them from claiming the nationality with which they most identified. In all these ways, mixed couples and families were acutely and painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples is based on more than eighty in-depth oral history interviews with members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, along with published and unpublished Soviet documents, scholarly and popular articles from the Soviet press, memoirs and films, and interviews with Soviet-era sociologists and ethnographers.
Everyday Life in Russia
Author: Choi Chatterjee
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253012600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 443
Book Description
A panoramic, interdisciplinary survey of Russian lives and “a must-read for any scholar engaging with Russian culture” (The Russian Review). In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, distinguished scholars survey the cultural practices, power relations, and behaviors that characterized Russian daily life from pre-revolutionary times through the post-Soviet present. Microanalyses and transnational perspectives shed new light on the formation and elaboration of gender, ethnicity, class, nationalism, and subjectivity. Changes in consumption and communication patterns, the restructuring of familial and social relations, systems of cultural meanings, and evolving practices in the home, at the workplace, and at sites of leisure are among the topics explored. “Offers readers a richly theoretical and empirical consideration of the ‘state of play’ of everyday life as it applies to the interdisciplinary study of Russia.” —Slavic Review “An engaging look at a vibrant area of research . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice “Volumes of such diversity frequently miss the mark, but this one represents a welcomed introduction to and a ‘must’ read for anyone seriously interested in the subject.” —Cahiers du Monde russe
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253012600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 443
Book Description
A panoramic, interdisciplinary survey of Russian lives and “a must-read for any scholar engaging with Russian culture” (The Russian Review). In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, distinguished scholars survey the cultural practices, power relations, and behaviors that characterized Russian daily life from pre-revolutionary times through the post-Soviet present. Microanalyses and transnational perspectives shed new light on the formation and elaboration of gender, ethnicity, class, nationalism, and subjectivity. Changes in consumption and communication patterns, the restructuring of familial and social relations, systems of cultural meanings, and evolving practices in the home, at the workplace, and at sites of leisure are among the topics explored. “Offers readers a richly theoretical and empirical consideration of the ‘state of play’ of everyday life as it applies to the interdisciplinary study of Russia.” —Slavic Review “An engaging look at a vibrant area of research . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice “Volumes of such diversity frequently miss the mark, but this one represents a welcomed introduction to and a ‘must’ read for anyone seriously interested in the subject.” —Cahiers du Monde russe
Stalin's Citizens
Author: Serhy Yekelchyk
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199378444
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
The first study of the everydayness of political life under Stalin, this book examines Soviet citizenship through common practices of expressing Soviet identity in the public space. The book is set in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv during the last one and a half years of World War II and immediate postwar years, the period best demonstrating how formulaic rituals could create space for the people to express their concerns, fears, and prejudices, as well as their eagerness to be viewed as citizens in good standing.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199378444
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
The first study of the everydayness of political life under Stalin, this book examines Soviet citizenship through common practices of expressing Soviet identity in the public space. The book is set in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv during the last one and a half years of World War II and immediate postwar years, the period best demonstrating how formulaic rituals could create space for the people to express their concerns, fears, and prejudices, as well as their eagerness to be viewed as citizens in good standing.
The Gorbachev Factor
Author: Archie Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0192880527
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 441
Book Description
The author writes about Gorbachev, both as the statesman and as the man. He explores how an ordinary man can become a world leader, wielding enormous power.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0192880527
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 441
Book Description
The author writes about Gorbachev, both as the statesman and as the man. He explores how an ordinary man can become a world leader, wielding enormous power.
The Private World of Soviet Scientists from Stalin to Gorbachev
Author: Maria Rogacheva
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107196361
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
A major new contribution to understanding the transition of Soviet society from Stalinism to a more humane model of socialism.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107196361
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
A major new contribution to understanding the transition of Soviet society from Stalinism to a more humane model of socialism.