Download or read book Communism on Tomorrow Street written by Steven E. Harris and published by Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating and deeply researched book examines how, beginning under Khrushchev in 1953, a generation of Soviet citizens moved from the overcrowded communal dwellings of the Stalin era to modern single-family apartments, later dubbed khrushchevka. Arguing that moving to a separate apartment allowed ordinary urban dwellers to experience Khrushchev’s thaw, Steven E. Harris fundamentally shifts interpretation of the thaw, conventionally understood as an elite phenomenon. Harris focuses on the many participants eager to benefit from and influence the new way of life embodied by the khrushchevka, its furniture, and its associated consumer goods. He examines activities of national and local politicians, planners, enterprise managers, workers, furniture designers and architects, elite organizations (centrally involved in creating cooperative housing), and ordinary urban dwellers. Communism on Tomorrow Street also demonstrates the relationship of Soviet mass housing and urban planning to international efforts at resolving the “housing question” that had been studied since the nineteenth century and led to housing developments in Western Europe, the United States, and Latin America as well as the USSR.
Download or read book Mass Housing written by Miles Glendinning and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major work provides the first comprehensive history of one of modernism's most defining and controversial architectural legacies: the 20th-century drive to provide 'homes for the people'. Vast programmes of mass housing – high-rise, low-rise, state-funded, and built in the modernist style – became a truly global phenomenon, leaving a legacy which has suffered waves of disillusionment in the West but which is now seeing a dramatic, 21st-century renaissance in the booming, crowded cities of East Asia. Providing a global approach to the history of Modernist mass-housing production, this authoritative study combines architectural history with the broader social, political, cultural aspects of mass housing – particularly the 'mass' politics of power and state-building throughout the 20th century. Exploring the relationship between built form, ideology, and political intervention, it shows how mass housing not only reflected the transnational ideals of the Modernist project, but also became a central legitimizing pillar of nation-states worldwide. In a compelling narrative which likens the spread of mass housing to a 'Hundred Years War' of successive campaigns and retreats, it traces the history around the globe from Europe via the USA, Soviet Union and a network of international outposts, to its ultimate, optimistic resurgence in China and the East – where it asks: Are we facing a new dawn for mass housing, or another 'great housing failure' in the making?
Download or read book Is This Tomorrow written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in the midst of the cold war, Is This Tomorrow is a classic example of red scare propaganda. The story envisions a scenario in which the Soviet Union orders American communists to overthrow the US Government. Charles Schulz contributed to the artwork throughout the issue. Reprinted here for the first time in 70 years.
Download or read book Building Communism and Policing Deviance in the Soviet Union written by Mirjam Galley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines, through a detailed study of Soviet residential childcare homes and boarding schools, the much wider issues of Soviet policies towards deviance, social norms, repression, and social control. It reveals how through targeting children whose parents could not or did not take care of them, as well as children with disabilities, the system disproportionately involved children from socially marginal and poor families. It highlights how the system aimed to raise these children from the margins of society and transform them into healthy, happy, useful Soviet citizens, imbued with socialist values. The book also outlines how the system fitted in to Khrushchev’s reforms and social order policies, where the emphasis was on monitoring and controlling society without the recourse to direct repression and terror, and how continuity with this period was maintained even as the rest of Soviet society changed significantly.
Download or read book Everyday Soviet Utopias written by Anna Alekseyeva and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how intellectuals of the later Soviet decades – the 1970s and 1980s – sought to bring about the socialist utopian world. It argues that the last two decades of the Soviet Union were not characterised by state withdrawal and malaise, as some scholars have argued; attempts to envisage and enact Utopia remained as imaginative and creative as ever. The book considers what these utopian ideas looked like through housing schemes, layouts of districts and cities, design of objects and interiors, and proposals for the organisation of family and social life. Relating developments in the Soviet Union to evolving social theory and postmodernism more broadly, the book draws transnational parallels between the intellectual history of east and west in the late twentieth century.
Download or read book The Tragedy of Property written by Maxim Trudolyubov and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-08-08 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian novels, poetry and ballet put the country squarely in the European family of cultures and yet there is something different about this country, especially in terms of its political culture. What makes Russia different? Maxim Trudolyubov uses private property as a lens to highlight the most important features that distinguish Russia as a political culture. In many Western societies, private property has acted as the private individual’s bulwark against the state; in Russia, by contrast, it has mostly been used by the authorities as a governance tool. Nineteenth-century Russian liberals did not consider property rights to be one of the civil causes worthy of defending. Property was associated with serfdom, and even after the emancipation of the serfs the institution of property was still seen as an attribute of retrograde aristocracy and oppressive government. It was something to be destroyed – and indeed it was, in 1917. Ironically, it was the Soviet Union that, with the arrival of mass housing in the 1960s, gave the concept of private ownership a good name. After forced collectivization and mass urbanization, people were yearning for a space of their own. The collapse of the Soviet ideology allowed property to be called property, but not all properties were equal. You could own a flat but not an oil company, which could be property on paper but not in reality. This is why most Russian entrepreneurs register their businesses in offshore jurisdictions and park their money abroad. This fresh and highly original perspective on Russian history will be of great interest to anyone who wants to understand Russia today.
Download or read book Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room written by Kateryna Malaia and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Yesterday s Tomorrow written by Bini Adamczak and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the communist revolution failed, presented in a series of catastrophes. The communist project in the twentieth century grew out of utopian desires to oppose oppression and abolish class structures, to give individual lives collective meaning. The attempts to realize these ideals became a series of colossal failures. In Yesterday's Tomorrow, Bini Adamczak examines these catastrophes, proceeding in reverse chronological order from 1939 to 1917: the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Great Terror of 1937, the failure of the European Left to prevent National Socialism, Stalin's rise to power, and the bloody rebellion at Kronstadt. In the process, she seeks a future that never happened.
Download or read book The High Title of a Communist written by Edward Cohn and published by Northern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-19 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1945 and 1964, six to seven million members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were investigated for misconduct by local party organizations and then reprimanded, demoted from full party membership, or expelled. Party leaders viewed these investigations as a form of moral education and used humiliating public hearings to discipline wrongdoers and send all Soviet citizens a message about how Communists should behave. The High Title of a Communist is the first study of the Communist Party's internal disciplinary system in the decades following World War II. Edward Cohn uses the practices of expulsion and censure as a window into how the postwar regime defined the ideal Communist and the ideal Soviet citizen. As the regime grappled with a postwar economic crisis and evolved from a revolutionary prewar government into a more bureaucratic postwar state, the Communist Party revised its informal behavioral code, shifting from a more limited and literal set of rules about a party member's role in the economy to a more activist vision that encompassed all spheres of life. The postwar Soviet regime became less concerned with the ideological orthodoxy and political loyalty of party members, and more interested in how Communists treated their wives, raised their children, and handled their liquor. Soviet power, in other words, became less repressive and more intrusive. Cohn uses previously untapped archival sources and avoids a narrow focus on life in Moscow and Leningrad, combining rich local materials from several Russian provinces with materials from throughout the USSR. The High Title of a Communist paints a vivid portrait of the USSR's postwar era that will help scholars and students understand both the history of the Soviet Union's postwar elite and the changing values of the Soviet regime. In the end, it shows, the regime failed in its efforts to enforce a clear set of behavioral standards for its Communists—a failure that would threaten the party's legitimacy in the USSR's final days.
Download or read book Architecture and the Housing Question written by Can Bilsel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architecture and the Housing Question examines how the design and provision of housing around the world have become central both to competing political projects and to the architecture profession. How have architects acting as housing experts helped alleviate or enforce class, race, and gender inequality? What are the disciplinary implications of taking on shelter for the multitude as an architectural assignment and responsibility? The book features essays in the historiography of architecture and the housing question, and a collection of historical case studies from Belgium, China, France, Ghana, the Netherlands, Kenya, the Soviet Union, Turkey, and the United States. The thematic organization of the collection, interrogating housing expertise, the state apparatus, segregation and colonialism, highlights the methodological questions that underpin its international outlook. The book will appeal to students and scholars in architecture, architectural history, theory, and urban studies.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures written by Aga Skrodzka and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 799 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stereotypes often cast communism as a defunct, bankrupt ideology and a relic of the distant past. However, recent political movements like Europe's anti-austerity protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street suggest that communism is still very much relevant and may even hold the key to a new, idealized future. In The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, contributors trace the legacies of communist ideology in visual culture, from buildings and monuments, murals and sculpture, to recycling campaigns and wall newspapers, all of which work to make communism's ideas and values material. Contributors work to resist the widespread demonization of communism, demystifying its ideals and suggesting that it has visually shaped the modern world in undeniable and complex ways. Together, contributors answer curcial questions like: What can be salvaged and reused from past communist experiments? How has communism impacted the cultures of late capitalism? And how have histories of communism left behind visual traces of potential utopias? An interdisciplinary look at the cultural currency of communism today, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures demonstrates the value of revisiting the practices of the past to form a better vision of the future.
Download or read book The City in Russian Culture written by Pavel Lyssakov and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities are constructed and organized by people, and in turn become an important factor in the organization of human life. They are sites of both social encounter and social division and provide for their inhabitants “a sense of place”. This book explores the nature of Russian cities, outlining the role played by various Russian cities over time. It focuses on a range of cities including provincial cities, considering both physical, iconic, created cities, and also cities as represented in films, fiction and other writing. Overall, the book provides a rich picture of the huge variety of Russian cities.
Download or read book Stalinism Reloaded written by Sándor Horváth and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hungarian city of Sztálinváros, or "Stalin-City," was intended to be the paradigmatic urban community of the new communist society in the 1950s. In Stalinism Reloaded, Sándor Horváth explores how Stalin-City and the socialist regime were built and stabilized not only by the state but also by the people who came there with hope for a better future. By focusing on the everyday experiences of citizens, Horváth considers the contradictions in the Stalinist policies and the strategies these bricklayers, bureaucrats, shop girls, and even children put in place in order to cope with and shape the expectations of the state. Stalinism Reloaded reveals how the state influenced marriage patterns, family structure, and gender relations. While the devastating effects of this regime are considered, a convincing case is made that ordinary citizens had significant agency in shaping the political policies that governed them.
Download or read book The Communist written by and published by . This book was released on 1868 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Men Out of Focus written by Marko Dumančić and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-12-16 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Men Out of Focus charts conversations and polemics about masculinity in Soviet cinema and popular media during the liberal period – often described as "The Thaw" – between the death of Stalin in 1953 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The book shows how the filmmakers of the long 1960s built stories around male protagonists who felt disoriented by a world that was becoming increasingly suburbanized, rebellious, consumerist, household-oriented, and scientifically complex. The dramatic tension of 1960s cinema revolved around the male protagonists’ inability to navigate the challenges of postwar life. Selling over three billion tickets annually, the Soviet film industry became a fault line of postwar cultural contestation. By examining both the discussions surrounding the period’s most controversial movies as well as the cultural context in which these debates happened, the book captures the official and popular reactions to the dizzying transformations of Soviet society after Stalin.
Download or read book A Sacred Space Is Never Empty written by Victoria Smolkin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.
Download or read book Living the Revolution written by Andy Willimott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living the Revolution offers a pioneering insight into the world of the early Soviet activist. At the heart of this book are a cast of fiery-eyed, bed-headed youths determined to be the change they wanted to see in the world. First banding together in the wake of the October Revolution, seizing hold of urban apartments, youthful enthusiasts tried to offer practical examples of socialist living. Calling themselves 'urban communes', they embraced total equality and shared everything from money to underwear. They actively sought to overturn the traditional family unit, reinvent domesticity, and promote a new collective vision of human interaction. A trend was set: a revolutionary meme that would, in the coming years, allow thousands of would-be revolutionaries and aspiring party members to experiment with the possibilities of socialism. The first definitive account of the urban communes, and the activists that formed them, this volume utilizes newly uncovered archival materials to chart the rise and fall of this revolutionary impulse. Laced with personal detail, it illuminates the thoughts and aspirations of individual activists as the idea of the urban commune grew from an experimental form of living, limited to a handful of participants in Petrograd and Moscow, into a cultural phenomenon that saw tens of thousands of youths form their own domestic units of socialist living by the end of the 1920s. Living the Revolution is a tale of revolutionary aspiration, appropriation, and participation at the ground level. Never officially sanctioned by the party, the urban communes challenge our traditional understanding of the early Soviet state, presenting Soviet ideology as something that could both frame and fire the imagination.
