Seasoned Socialism

Seasoned Socialism PDF

Author: Anastasia Lakhtikova

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-04-01

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 025304099X

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Seasoned Socialism considers the relationship between gender and food in late Soviet daily life. Political and economic conditions heavily influenced Soviet life and foodways during this period and an exploration of Soviet women’s central role in the daily sustenance for their families as well as the obstacles they faced on this quest offers new insights into intergenerational and inter-gender power dynamics of that time. Food, both in its quality and quantity, was a powerful tool in the Soviet Union. This collection features work by scholars in an array of fields including cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, history, and food studies, and the work gathered here explores the intersection of gender, food, and culture in the post-1960s Soviet context. From personal cookbooks to gulag survival strategies, Seasoned Socialism considers gender construction and performance across a wide array of primary sources, including poetry, fiction, film, women’s journals, oral histories, and interviews. This collection provides fresh insight into how the Soviet government sought to influence both what citizens ate and how they thought about food.

Laboratory of Socialist Development

Laboratory of Socialist Development PDF

Author: Artemy M. Kalinovsky

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-05-15

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1501715585

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"Focusing on the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, this book places the Soviet development of Central Asia, and the Soviet hope for communism's bringing prosperity to a supposedly backward area, in global context"--

The Unmaking of Soviet Life

The Unmaking of Soviet Life PDF

Author: Caroline Humphrey

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1501725726

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In order to understand today's Russia and former Soviet republics, it is vital to consider their socialist past. Caroline Humphrey, one of anthropology's most highly regarded thinkers on a number of topics including consumption, identity, and ritual, is the ideal guide to the intricacies of post-Soviet culture. The Unmaking of Soviet Life brings together ten of Humphrey's best essays, which cover, geographically, Central Russia, Siberia, and Mongolia; and thematically, the politics of locality, property, and persons.Bridging the strongest of Humphrey's work from 1991 to 2001, the essays do a great deal to demystify the sensational topics of mafia, barter, bribery, and the new shamanism by locating them in the lived experiences of a wide range of subjects. The Unmaking of Soviet Life includes a foreword and introductory paragraphs by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries that precede each essay.

The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia

The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia PDF

Author: Melissa Chakars

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2014-05-10

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9633860148

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The Buryats are a Mongolian population in Siberian Russia, the largest indigenous minority. The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia presents the dramatic transformation in their everyday lives during the late twentieth century. The book challenges the common notion that the process of modernization during the later Soviet period created a Buryat national assertiveness rather than assimilation or support for the state.

Everyday Stalinism

Everyday Stalinism PDF

Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1999-03-04

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0195050002

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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.

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More PDF

Author: Alexei Yurchak

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-08-07

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1400849101

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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.

Socialism and Capitalism Through the Eyes of a Soviet Émigré

Socialism and Capitalism Through the Eyes of a Soviet Émigré PDF

Author: Svetlana Kunin

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2020-09-10

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 1663200939

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Growing up in Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the 1950-60s, a period defined by Soviet leaders as time of “developed socialism", Svetlana believed in the greatness of socialism: fairness, equality and the benevolence of the communist leaders managing society’s march toward progress. Gradually, disillusion set in as historical and contemporary events exposed the true reality behind the veil of empty words. The decision to immigrate wasn’t easy. Parents, relatives, and friends were left behind. Then, in 1980, came the unexpected discovery of a new life in capitalist USA. This unusually personal story that starts in the Soviet Union and ends in the United States draws parallels between two economic and political systems and provides a missing perspective and commentary on parallels to life in the USA. In this book Svetlana makes the case for how a free market economy in the USA leads to a dramatically better life for a common person, than that of powerful centralized government as she experienced living in both the USA and the former USSR. Many articles that the author published in the Investor’s Business Daily under “IBD Exclusive Commentary Series: Perspectives of a Russian Immigrant” are poignantly relevant today. They are included in the book with IBD’s permission.

Cultivating the Masses

Cultivating the Masses PDF

Author: David L. Hoffmann

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-10-18

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 0801462843

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Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of repressions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people's well-being. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand in hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture. In Cultivating the Masses, David L. Hoffmann examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime, a regime intent on transforming the socioeconomic order and the very nature of its citizens. To analyze Soviet social policies, Hoffmann places them in an international comparative context. He explains Soviet technologies of social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices. These practices developed in conjunction with the ambitions of nineteenth-century European reformers to refashion society, and they subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive regulations in countries around the world. The mobilizational demands of World War I impelled political leaders to expand even further their efforts at population management, via economic controls, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence. Born at this moment of total war, the Soviet system institutionalized these wartime methods as permanent features of governance. Party leaders, whose dictatorship included no checks on state power, in turn attached interventionist practices to their ideological goal of building socialism.