On Living Through Soviet Russia

Author : Daniel Bertaux
Publisher : Psychology Press
ISBN 13 : 9780415309660
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On Living Through Soviet Russia written by Daniel Bertaux and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became dangerous. The new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s resulted in a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television and more formally collected by new Russian oral history groups and western researchers. This book is a fascinating collection of life stories and family history interview material collected by the editors and two Russian groups of interviewers.

Author : Christina Kiaer
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780253217929
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.2X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia written by Christina Kiaer and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Soviet citizens in the 1920s and 1930s internalized Soviet ways of looking at the world and living their everyday lives.

Author : Alexey Golubev
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501752901
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Things of Life written by Alexey Golubev and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."

Author : Orlando Figes
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780312428037
Total Pages : 788 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Whisperers written by Orlando Figes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-11-25 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History.

Author : Sheila Fitzpatrick
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0195050002
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Everyday Stalinism written by Sheila Fitzpatrick and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-04 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Leo Lowenthal
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351508423
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Living Through the Soviet System written by Leo Lowenthal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became dangerous. The situation changed dramatically with the new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s. The result was a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television, and more formally collected by new Russian oral history groups and also by Western researchers. Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson both began collecting life story and family history interview material in the early 1990s, and this book is the outcome of their initiative. Living Through the Soviet System analyzes, through personal accounts, how Russian society operated on a day-to-day level. It contrasts the integration of different social groups: the descendents of the pre-revolutionary upper classes, the new industrial working class, or the ethnically marginalized Russian Jews. It examines in turn the implications of family relationships, working mothers, absent fathers and caretaking grandmothers; patterns of eating together, and of housing; the secrecy of sex; the suppression of religion; and the small freedoms of growing vegetables on weekends on a dacha plot. Because of its basis in direct testimonies, the book reveals in a highly readable and direct style the meaning for ordinary men and women of living through those seven dark decades of a great European nation. Because of the centrality of Soviet Russia to the history of the twentieth-century world, this book will be of interest to a wide range of readers. It will be of importance to students, researchers and teachers of history and sociology, as well as specialists in East European and other communist societies.

Author : Daniel Bertaux
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1412804876
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Living Through the Soviet System written by Daniel Bertaux and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became dangerous. The situation changed dramatically with the new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s. The result was a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television, and more formally collected by new Russian oral history groups and also by Western researchers. Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson both began collecting life story and family history interview material in the early 1990s, and this book is the outcome of their initiative. Living Through the Soviet System analyzes, through personal accounts, how Russian society operated on a day-to-day level. It contrasts the integration of different social groups: the descendents of the pre-revolutionary upper classes, the new industrial working class, or the ethnically marginalized Russian Jews. It examines in turn the implications of family relationships, working mothers, absent fathers and caretaking grandmothers; patterns of eating together, and of housing; the secrecy of sex; the suppression of religion; and the small freedoms of growing vegetables on weekends on a dacha plot. Because of its basis in direct testimonies, the book reveals in a highly readable and direct style the meaning for ordinary men and women of living through those seven dark decades of a great European nation. Because of the centrality of Soviet Russia to the history of the twentieth-century world, this book will be of interest to a wide range of readers. It will be of importance to students, researchers and teachers of history and sociology, as well as specialists in East European and other communist societies. Daniel Bertaux is directeur de recherches at the Centre d'Etudes des Mouvements Sociaux, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Paul Thompson is research professor in sociology at the University of Essex and fellow at the Institute of Community Studies in London. Anna Rotkirch is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Helsinki.

Author : Gábor Rittersporn
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN 13 : 0822980258
Total Pages : 409 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Anguish, Anger, and Folkways in Soviet Russia written by Gábor Rittersporn and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2014-11-07 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anguish, Anger, and Folkwaysin 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 Gabor 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.

Author : Vladimir Shlapentokh
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Public and Private Life of the Soviet People written by Vladimir Shlapentokh and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the late 1950s to the early 1980s, the Soviet people's acceptance of official state ideology was gradually replaced by an emphasis on the family and the individual. Perhaps one of the most important social, economic, and political processes to occur in modern Soviet society, privatization has caused people to withdraw their time, energy, and emotion from state controlled activities, investing them instead in family and friendship. Utilizing novels, films, and his own surveys done in the Soviet Union, the author, an emigre sociologist, analyzes the evolution of attitudes toward family and friendship and the emergence and development of civil society as a sphere of interaction not directed by the state. Finally, Shlapentokh examines Gorbachev's reforms as an attempt by the political elite to restore the authority of the state and the prestige of official public activity as well as to exploit some elements of privatization in the interests of the state. A gripping and revealing account of an aspect of Soviet society usually hidden from Westerners, this book will attract a broad audience.

Author : David J. O'Brien
Publisher : Woodrow Wilson Center Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801869600
Total Pages : 454 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rural Reform in Post-Soviet Russia written by David J. O'Brien and published by Woodrow Wilson Center Press. This book was released on 2002-03-20 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rural Reform in Post-Soviet Russia reviews change in agricultural and rural life since 1990 through historical, political, sociological, and anthropological investigation. The contributors' interest is not so much in agriculture itself but in agrarian issues such as the relationship between rural interests and changing Russian institutions, the economic and social organization of rural households, and the quality of life in rural families and villages.