Download or read book Life Has Become More Joyous Comrades written by Karen Petrone and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000-11-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades Celebrations in the Time of Stalin Karen Petrone A lively investigation of the official and unofficial meanings of Stalinist celebrations. "An impressive and highly readable book that... casts a clear and disturbing light on the relationship of Stalinist mythology, state power, popular participation, and the unending complexities of social and cultural survival mechanisms and daily life." --Richard Stites In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, public celebrations flourished while Stalinist repression intensified. What explains this coincidence of terror and celebration? Using popular media and drawing extensively on documents from previously inaccessible Soviet archives, Karen Petrone demonstrates that to dismiss Soviet celebrations as mere diversion is to lose a valuable opportunity for understanding how the Soviet system operated. As the state attempted to mobilize citizens to participate in the project to create New Soviet men and women, celebration culture became more than a means to distract a population suffering from poverty and deprivation. The planning and execution of celebrations reflected the Soviet intelligentsia's efforts to bring social and cultural enlightenment to the people. Physical culture demonstrations, celebrations of Arctic and aviation exploits, the Pushkin Centennial of 1937 and the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, and the celebration of New Year's Day were opportunities for the Soviet leadership to fuse traditional prerevolutionary values and practices with socialist ideology in an effort to educate its citizens and build support for the state and its policies. However, official celebrations were often appropriated by citizens for purposes that were unanticipated and unsanctioned by the state. Through celebrations, Soviet citizens created hybrid identities and defined their places in the emerging Stalinist hierarchy, allowing them to uphold the Soviet order while arrests and executions were rampant. This rich look at celebrations reveals the complex dialogues and negotiations between citizens and leaders in the endeavor to create Soviet culture. Karen Petrone is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies--Alexander Rabinowitch and William G. Rosenberg, editors Contents Interpreting Soviet Celebrations Part 1: Soviet Popular Culture and Mass Mobilization Parading the Nation: Demonstrations and the Construction of Soviet Identities Imagining the Motherland: The Celebration of Soviet Aviation and Polar Exploits Fir Trees and Carnivals: The Celebration of Soviet New Year's Day Part 2: The Intelligentsia and Soviet Enlightenment A Double-edged Discourse on Freedom: The Pushkin Centennial of 1937 Anniversary of Turmoil: The Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution Celebrating Civic Participation: The Stalin Constitution and Elections as Rituals of Democracy Celebrations and Power
Download or read book Stalin s Library written by Geoffrey Roberts and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling intellectual biography of Stalin told through his personal library "[A] fascinating new study."--Michael O'Donnell, Wall Street Journal In this engaging life of the twentieth century's most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, this book explores all aspects of Stalin's tumultuous life and politics. Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated, revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Based on his wide-ranging research in Russian archives, Roberts tells the story of the creation, fragmentation, and resurrection of Stalin's personal library. As a true believer in communist ideology, Stalin was a fanatical idealist who hated his enemies--the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors--but detested their ideas even more.
Download or read book Stalin written by Simon Sebag Montefiore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This widely acclaimed biography of a Soviet dictator and his entourage during the terrifying decades of his supreme power transforms our understanding of the Marxist leader and Russian tsar. • From the bestselling author of The Romanovs. “The first intimate portrait of a man who had more lives on his conscience than Hitler.... Disturbing and perplexing.” —The New York Times Book Review Based on groundbreaking research, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals the fear and betrayal, privilege and debauchery, family life and murderous cruelty of this secret world. Written with bracing narrative verve, this feat of scholarly research has become a classic of modern history writing. Showing how Stalin's triumphs and crimes were the product of his fanatical Marxism and his gifted but flawed character, this is an intimate portrait of a man as complicated and human as he was brutal and chilling.
Download or read book Club Red written by Diane P. Koenker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-24 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bolsheviks took power in Russia 1917 armed with an ideology centered on the power of the worker. From the beginning, however, Soviet leaders also realized the need for rest and leisure within the new proletarian society and over subsequent decades struggled to reconcile the concept of leisure with the doctrine of communism, addressing such fundamental concerns as what the purpose of leisure should be in a workers' state and how socialist vacations should differ from those enjoyed by the capitalist bourgeoisie.In Club Red, Diane P. Koenker offers a sweeping and insightful history of Soviet vacationing and tourism from the Revolution through perestroika. She shows that from the outset, the regime insisted that the value of tourism and vacation time was strictly utilitarian. Throughout the 1920s and '30s, the emphasis was on providing the workers access to the "repair shops" of the nation's sanatoria or to the invigorating journeys by foot, bicycle, skis, or horseback that were the stuff of "proletarian tourism." Both the sedentary vacation and tourism were part of the regime’s effort to transform the poor and often illiterate citizenry into new Soviet men and women.Koenker emphasizes a distinctive blend of purpose and pleasure in Soviet vacation policy and practice and explores a fundamental paradox: a state committed to the idea of the collective found itself promoting a vacation policy that increasingly encouraged and then had to respond to individual autonomy and selfhood. The history of Soviet tourism and vacations tells a story of freely chosen mobility that was enabled and subsidized by the state. While Koenker focuses primarily on Soviet domestic vacation travel, she also notes the decisive impact of travel abroad (mostly to other socialist countries), which shaped new worldviews, created new consumer desires, and transformed Soviet vacation practices.
Download or read book Stalin s Folly written by Konstantin Pleshakov and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin's cunning and ruthlessness brought him to supreme power in the Soviet Union. Yet in the summer of 1941 he appeared to lose his touch. With unparalleled access to the Soviet archives, this text reveals why the dictator behaved as he did.
Download or read book Stalin and Europe written by Timothy Snyder and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soviet Union was the largest state in the twentieth-century world, but its repressive power and terrible ambition were most clearly on display in Europe. Under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union transformed itself and then all of the European countries with which it came into contact. This volume considers each aspect of the encounter of Stalin with Europe: the attempt to create a kind of European state by accelerating the European model of industrial development in the USSR; mass murder in anticipation of a war against European powers; the actual contact with Europe's greatest power, Nazi Germany, first as ally and then as enemy; four years of war fought chiefly on Soviet territory and bringing untold millions of deaths, including much of the Holocaust; and finally the reestablishment of the Soviet system, not just in prewar territory of the USSR, but in Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany.
Download or read book Stalin s Citizens written by Serhy Yekelchyk and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-04 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being a good citizen under Stalin meant taking an active part in political rituals, such as elections, parades, festive meetings, political information sessions, and subscriptions to state bonds. In Stalin's Citizens, Serhy Yekelchyk examines how ordinary citizens came to embrace some parts of this everyday Stalinist politics and resist others. The first study of the everyday political life under Stalin, this book examines citizenship through common practices of expressing Soviet identity in the public space. The Stalinist state understood citizenship as practice, with participation in a set of political rituals and public display of certain "civic emotions" serving as the marker of a person's inclusion in the political world. The state's relations with its citizens were structured by rituals of celebration, thanking, and hatred-rites that required both political awareness and a demonstrable emotional response. Soviet functionaries transmitted this obligation to ordinary citizens through the mechanisms of communal authority, including workplace committees, volunteer agitators, and other forms of peer pressure, as much as through brutal state coercion. Yet, the populace also often imbued these ceremonies with different meanings: as a popular fête, an occasion to get together after work, a chance to purchase goods not available on other days, and an opportunity to indulge in some drinking. The people also understood these political rituals as moments of negotiation whereby they would fulfill their "patriotic duty" but expected the state to reciprocate by providing essential services and basic social welfare. Nearly-universal passive resistance to required attendance challenges theories about the mass internalization of communist ideology. Focusing on the last years of World War II and immediate postwar years, Yekelchyk shows how formulaic rituals under Stalin 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.
Download or read book The Stalin Cult written by Jan Plamper and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, one of the most persuasive personality cults of all times saturated Soviet public space with images of Stalin. A torrent of portraits, posters, statues, films, plays, songs, and poems galvanized the Soviet population and inspired leftist activists around the world. In the first book to examine the cultural products and production methods of the Stalin cult, Jan Plamper reconstructs a hidden history linking artists, party patrons, state functionaries, and ultimately Stalin himself in the alchemical project that transformed a pock-marked Georgian into the embodiment of global communism. Departing from interpretations of the Stalin cult as an outgrowth of Russian mysticism or Stalin's psychopathology, Plamper establishes the cult's context within a broader international history of modern personality cults constructed around Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, and Mao. Drawing upon evidence from previously inaccessible Russian archives, Plamper's lavishly illustrated and accessibly written study will appeal to anyone interested in twentieth-century history, visual studies, the politics of representation, dictator biography, socialist realism, and real socialism.
Download or read book Life in Stalin s Soviet Union written by Kees Boterbloem and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-05 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life in Stalin's Soviet Union is a collaborative work in which some of the leading scholars in the field shed light on various aspects of daily life for Soviet citizens. Split into three parts which focus on 'Food, Health and Leisure', the 'Lived Experience' and 'Religion and Ideology', the book is comprised of chapters covering a range of important subjects, including: * Food * Health and Housing * Sex and Gender * Education * Religion (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) * Sport and Leisure * Festivals There is detailed analysis of urban and rural life, as well as explorations of life in the gulag, life as a peasant, life in the military and what it was like to be disabled in Stalin's Russia. The book also engages with the wider Soviet Union wherever possible to ensure the most in-depth discussion of life, in all its minutiae, under Stalin. This is a vitally important book for any student of Stalin's Russia keen to know more about the human history of this complex period of dictatorship.
Download or read book The Last Days of Stalin written by Joshua Rubenstein and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monografie over de laatste maanden in het leven van Stalin en de periode daarna.
Download or read book Joseph Stalin written by David R. Egan and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2007-07-25 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the opening of Russian and communist-bloc archives dating from the Soviet-era, there has been a significant increase of scholarly writings pertaining to Joseph Stalin. Widely considered to be among the most influential historical figures of the twentieth century, Stalin continues to be a source of intense study. In the absence of a comprehensive compilation of periodical literature, the need for Joseph Stalin: An Annotated Bibliography of English Language Periodical Literature to 2005 is conspicuous. Ranging from editorials and news reports to academic articles, the more than 1,700 sources cited collectively cover the full range of his life, the various aspects of his leadership, and virtually all facets of the system and practices traditionally associated with his name. The coverage in this bibliography extends beyond the person of Stalin to include the subjects of Stalinism, the Stalinist system, the Stalin phenomenon, and those policies and practices of the Communist Party and Soviet state associated with him. This volume also provides a record of scholarly opinion on Stalin and sheds light on the evolution and current state of Stalinology. An effort has been made to list only those articles in which Stalin figures prominently, but, in some instances, articles have been included which do not center on Stalin but are worthy of listing for other reasons. The book is divided into fourteen main sections: General Studies and Overviews; Biographical Information and Psychological Assessments; The Revolutionary Movement, October Revolution and Civil War; Rise to Power; Politics; Economics; Society and Social Policy; Nationalism and Nationality Policy; Culture; Religion; Philosophy and Theory; Foreign Relations and International Communism; Military Affairs; and De-Stalinization. Including a subject index of several hundred headings and even greater number of subheadings, this comprehensive annotated bibliography should be of benefit to those individuals who, for the purpose of research or classroom instruction, are seeking sources of information on Stalin.
Download or read book Stalin s Ninos written by Karl D. Qualls and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using multiple languages, numerous archives, press reports, oral histories, letters, and memoirs, Stalin's Niños investigates the well-resourced boarding schools designed specifically for nearly 3,000 child refugees from the Spanish Civil War.
Download or read book Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin written by Kendall E. Bailes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Soviet technical intelligentsia emerged more than three quarters of recent Politburo members, including Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgorny. The largest single group of dissenters, including Grigorenko, Sakharov, and Solzhenitsyn, have also been members. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Anniversaries and Holidays written by Bernard Trawicky and published by American Library Association. This book was released on 2009-04-16 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Completely revised and updated, with more than 3,000 listings honoring a variety of cultural traditions, this authoritative, painstakingly researched compendium is one of the most-used references in libraries and schools nationwide.
Download or read book LIFE written by and published by . This book was released on 1970-11-27 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.
Download or read book Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Russian written by Tatiana Smorodinskaya and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 779 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia is an invaluable resource on recent and contemporary Russian culture and history for students, teachers, and researchers across the disciplines.
Download or read book Bitter Waters written by Gennady M. Andreev-Khomiakov and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 1998-08-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on life and work after the author's release in 1935 from a Soviet labor camp, his story is told chronologically, and begins with his difficulties finding a job in the Russian provinces. This memoir may be most valuable for what it reveals about Russian society and economy and the indomitable creativity with which ordinary people sustained both their lives.
