Author: Rebecca Reich Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1609092333 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 401
Book Description
What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.
Author: Rob Hornsby Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107030927 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 325
Book Description
Robert Hornsby draws on a range of declassified archival material to analyse political protest and government repression in post-Stalin USSR.
Author: Melanie Ilic Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134023634 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 235
Book Description
This book examines the social and cultural impact of the 'thaw' in Cold War relations, decision-making and policy formation in the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev. With individual case studies exploring key aspects of Khrushchev's period of office, it offers an important new perspective on the Khrushchev era.
Author: Vivian Gornick Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 178873551X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 335
Book Description
“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.
Author: Philip Boobbyer Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317571223 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 297
Book Description
Embracing the political, intellectual, social and cultural history of Soviet Russia, this book provides a useful perspective of Putin’s Russia. Focusing on the ethics in Soviet Russia, it explores the history of moral thinking amongst dissidents, and examines the ethical assumptions of the perestroika era.
Author: Vladimir I. Lenin Publisher: ISBN: 9781410213006 Category : Capitalism Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
CONTENTS The Development of Capitalism in Russia The Theoretical Mistakes of the Narodnik Economists The Differentiation of the Peasantry The Landowners' Transition from Corvée to Capitalist Economy The Growth of Commercial Agriculture The First Stages of Capitalism in Industry Capitalist Manufacture and Capitalist Domestic Industry The Development of Large-Scale Machine Industry The Formation of the Home Market
Author: Jeremy Smith Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136831827 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
This book presents a new picture of the politics, economics and process of government in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Based in large part on original research in recently declassified archive collections, the book examines the full complexity of government, and provides an overview of the internal development of the Soviet Union in this period, locating it in the broader context of Soviet history.
Author: Stephen V. Bittner Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801446061 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
Bittner explores how the neighborhood changed during the period of ideological relaxation under Khrushchev that came to be known as the thaw.
Author: Peter Reddaway Publisher: Brookings Institution Press ISBN: 0815737742 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 374
Book Description
The nearly forgotten story of Soviet dissidents It has been nearly three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union—enough time for the role that the courageous dissidents ultimately contributed to the communist system's collapse to have been largely forgotten, especially in the West. This book brings to life, for contemporary readers, the often underground work of the men and women who opposed the regime and authored dissident texts, known as samizdat, that exposed the tyrannies and weaknesses of the Soviet state both inside and outside the country. Peter Reddaway spent decades studying the Soviet Union and got to know these dissidents and their work, publicizing their writings in the West and helping some of them to escape the Soviet Union and settle abroad. In this memoir he captures the human costs of the repression that marked the Soviet state, focusing in particular on Pavel Litvinov, Larisa Bogoraz, General Petro Grigorenko, Anatoly Marchenko, Alexander Podrabinek, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, and Andrei Sinyavsky. His book describes their courage but also puts their work in the context of the power struggles in the Kremlin, where politicians competed with and even succeeded in ousting one another. Reddaway's book takes readers beyond Moscow, describing politics and dissident work in other major Russian cities as well as in the outlying republics.
Author: Rebecca Reich
Author: Rob Hornsby
Author: Melanie Ilic
Author: Vivian Gornick
Author: Philip Boobbyer
Author: Diane P. Koenker
Author: Vladimir I. Lenin
Author: Jeremy Smith
Author: Stephen V. Bittner
Author: Peter Reddaway