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.
Download or read book Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev s Russia written by Deborah A. Field and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on previously inaccessible records, this book discusses love, sex, marriage, divorce, and child-rearing during Khrushchev's «thaw» of the 1950s and early 1960s. It analyses the Soviet government's attempts to supervise private life and enforce communist morality, and it describes the diverse ways in which people responded to official prescriptions. Written in a lively and accessible style, this book provides an innovative exploration of the interactions between Soviet ideology and everyday life.
Download or read book Public and Private in Thought and Practice written by Jeff Weintraub and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-03-15 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays, by widely respected scholars in fields ranging from social and political theory to historical sociology and cultural studies, illuminate the significance of the public/private distinction for an increasingly wide range of debates. Commenting on controversies surrounding such issues as abortion rights, identity politics, and the requirements of democratization, many of these essays clarify crucial processes that have shaped the culture and institutions of modern societies. In contexts ranging from friendship, the family, and personal life to nationalism, democratic citizenship, the role of women in social and political life, and the contrasts between western and (post-)Communist societies, this book brings out the ways the various uses of the public/private distinction are simultaneously distinct and interconnected. Public and Private in Thought and Practice will be of interest to students and scholars in disciplines including politics, law, philosophy, history, sociology, and women's studies. Contributors include Jeff Weintraub, Allan Silver, Craig Calhoun, Daniela Gobetti, Jean L. Cohen, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Alan Wolfe, Krishan Kumar, David Brain, Karen Hansen, Marc Garcelon, and Oleg Kharkhordin.
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.
Download or read book Gorbachev His Life and Times written by William Taubman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 928 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist “Essential reading for the twenty-first [century].” —Radhika Jones, The New York Times Book Review In the first comprehensive biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, Taubman’s intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev’s remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.
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.
Download or read book Gender and housing in Soviet Russia written by Lynne Attwood and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the housing problem throughout the 70 years of Soviet history, looking at changing political ideology on appropriate forms of housing under socialism, successive government policies on housing, and the meaning and experience of ‘home’ for Soviet citizens. She examines the use of housing to alter gender relations, and the ways in which domestic space was differentially experienced by men and women. Much of Attwood’s material comes from Soviet magazines and journals, which enables her to demonstrate how official ideas on housing and daily life changed during the course of the Soviet era, and were propagandised to the population. Through a series of in-depth interviews, she also draws on the memories of people with direct experience of Soviet housing and domestic life. Attwood has produced not just a history of housing, but a social history of daily life which will appeal both to scholars and those with a general interest in Soviet history.
Download or read book The Whisperers written by Orlando Figes and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2008-11-25 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning author of A People's Tragedy and Natasha's Dance, a landmark account of what private life was like for Russians in the worst years of Soviet repression There have been many accounts of the public aspects of Stalin's dictatorship: the arrests and trials, the enslavement and killing in the gulags. No previous book, however, has explored the regime's effect on people's personal lives, what one historian called "the Stalinism that entered into all of us." Now, drawing on a huge collection of newly discovered documents, The Whisperers reveals for the first time the inner world of ordinary Soviet citizens as they struggled to survive amidst the mistrust, fear, compromises, and betrayals that pervaded their existence. Moving from the Revolution of 1917 to the death of Stalin and beyond, Orlando Figes re-creates the moral maze in which Russians found themselves, where one wrong turn could destroy a family or, perversely, end up saving it. He brings us inside cramped communal apartments, where minor squabbles could lead to fatal denunciations; he examines the Communist faithful, who often rationalized even their own arrest as a case of mistaken identity; and he casts a humanizing light on informers, demonstrating how, in a repressive system, anyone could easily become a collaborator. A vast panoramic portrait of a society in which everyone spoke in whispers—whether to protect their families and friends, or to inform upon them—The Whisperers is a gripping account of lives lived in impossible times.
Download or read book Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More written by Alexei Yurchak and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-07 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation. Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period. The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie--and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.
Download or read book Thank You Comrade Stalin written by Jeffrey Brooks and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thank you, our Stalin, for a happy childhood." "Thank you, dear Marshal [Stalin], for our freedom, for our children's happiness, for life." Between the Russian Revolution and the Cold War, Soviet public culture was so dominated by the power of the state that slogans like these appeared routinely in newspapers, on posters, and in government proclamations. In this penetrating historical study, Jeffrey Brooks draws on years of research into the most influential and widely circulated Russian newspapers--including Pravda, Isvestiia, and the army paper Red Star--to explain the origins, the nature, and the effects of this unrelenting idealization of the state, the Communist Party, and the leader. Brooks shows how, beginning with Lenin, the Communists established a state monopoly of the media that absorbed literature, art, and science into a stylized and ritualistic public culture--a form of political performance that became its own reality and excluded other forms of public reflection. He presents and explains scores of self-congratulatory newspaper articles, including tales of Stalin's supposed achievements and virtue, accounts of the country's allegedly dynamic economy, and warnings about the decadence and cruelty of the capitalist West. Brooks pays particular attention to the role of the press in the reconstruction of the Soviet cultural system to meet the Nazi threat during World War II and in the transformation of national identity from its early revolutionary internationalism to the ideology of the Cold War. He concludes that the country's one-sided public discourse and the pervasive idea that citizens owed the leader gratitude for the "gifts" of goods and services led ultimately to the inability of late Soviet Communism to diagnose its own ills, prepare alternative policies, and adjust to new realities. The first historical work to explore the close relationship between language and the implementation of the Stalinist-Leninist program, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! is a compelling account of Soviet public culture as reflected through the country's press.
Download or read book The Private Life of the Soviet Elite written by Ilya Zemtsov and published by Crane Russak, Incorporated. This book was released on 1985 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia written by Christina Kiaer and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did it mean to live as a subject of early Soviet modernity? In the 1920s and 1930s, in an environment where every element of daily life was supposed to be transformed by Soviet ideology, routine activities became ideologically significant, subject to debate and change. Drawing on original archival materials and theoretically informed, the essays in this volume examine ways in which Soviet citizens sought to align their private lives with the public nature of Soviet experience by taking the Revolution ""inside."" Topics discussed include the new sexuality, family loyalty during the Terror, the advertisement of Soviet commodities, the employment of domestic servants, children's toys and Pioneer camps, and narratives of self, ranging from diaries to secret police statements to monologues on the Soviet screen and stage. Bringing into dialogue essays by scholars in history, literature, sociology, art history, and film studies, this interdisciplinary volume contributes to the growing understanding of the Soviet Union as part of the history of modernity, rather than its totalitarian ""other.""
Download or read book Quality Of Life In The Soviet Union written by Horst Herlemann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Quality of life" is a difficult concept to define, and particularly so when referring to the Soviet Union because Westerners have many preconceptions about Soviet living conditions. This volume goes a long way toward illuminating the realities of daily Soviet life and stands as an important contribution to our understanding of the Soviet Union. Contributors focus primarily on the relation of quality of life to living conditions but also discuss the quality and availability of state-provided services such as education, health care, and housing. Of special interest is their coverage of problems in Soviet society, including working conditions in factories, living conditions in rural areas, alcohol abuse, and the status of the elderly. Together these essays show that although the Soviet government has made great strides in improving the living conditions of its citizens, Soviet living standards and services are relatively poor by Western standards and several important social problems continue to burden the Soviet people.
Download or read book Russian Journal written by Andrea Lee and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A subtly crafted reflection of both the bleak and golden shadings of Russian life . . . Its tones belong more to the realm of poetry than journalism.” –The New York Times Book Review At age twenty-five, Andrea Lee joined her husband, a Harvard doctoral candidate in Russian history, for his eight months’ study at Moscow State University and an additional two months in Leningrad. Published to enormous critical acclaim in 1981, Russian Journal is the award-winning author’s penetrating, vivid account of her everyday life as an expatriate in Soviet culture, chronicling her fascinating exchanges with journalists, diplomats, and her Soviet contemporaries. The winner of the Jean Stein Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters–and the book that launched Lee’s career as a writer–Russian Journal is a beautiful and clear-eyed travel-writing classic. “[Lee] takes us wherever she is, conveying a feeling of place and atmosphere that is the mark of real talent.” –The Washington Post Book World “A book of very great charm . . . [Lee] records what she saw and heard with unassuming delicacy and exactness.” –Newsweek
Download or read book Russia s Dangerous Texts written by Kathleen F. Parthe and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia’s Dangerous Texts examines the ways that writers and their works unnerved and irritated Russia’s authoritarian rulers both before and after the Revolution. Kathleen F. Parthé identifies ten historically powerful beliefs about literature and politics in Russia, which include a view of the artistic text as national territory, and the belief that writers must avoid all contact with the state. Parthé offers a compelling analysis of the power of Russian literature to shape national identity despite sustained efforts to silence authors deemed subversive. No amount of repression could prevent the production, distribution, and discussion of texts outside official channels. Along with tragic stories of lost manuscripts and persecuted writers, there is ample evidence of an unbroken thread of political discourse through art. The book concludes with a consideration of the impact of two centuries of dangerous texts on post-Soviet Russia.
Download or read book Soviet Baby Boomers written by Donald J. Raleigh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-19 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Classical Liberal Case for Privacy in a World of Surveillance and Technological Change written by Chris Berg and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-21 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should a free society protect privacy? Dramatic changes in national security law and surveillance, as well as technological changes from social media to smart cities mean that our ideas about privacy and its protection are being challenged like never before. In this interdisciplinary book, Chris Berg explores what classical liberal approaches to privacy can bring to current debates about surveillance, encryption and new financial technologies. Ultimately, he argues that the principles of classical liberalism – the rule of law, individual rights, property and entrepreneurial evolution – can help extend as well as critique contemporary philosophical theories of privacy.
