Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR PDF Download

Author: James R. Millar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521348904
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Politics, work, and daily life in the USSR is designed to illustrate how the Soviet social system really works and how the Soviet people cope with it. This study is based on the first comprehensive survey of life in the USSR since the Harvard Project over thiry-three years ago. The essays contained analyze the variations in attitude and behaviour reflected in the findings of the Soviet Interview Project, a five-year investigation of contemporary daily life in the USSR. The survey involved interviewing thousands of recent emigrants from the USSR to the United States as a means of learning about their former day-to-day lives. Some aspects of this survey dealt with areas the Soviets themselves had never investigated, so the data were not, and indeed still are not, available even in unpublished Soviet sources. This study of a large volume of firsthand observations is extremely valuable to anyone interested in the inner workings and behavioural dynamics of the contemporary Soviet social system.

Author: Kees Boterbloem
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 147428549X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
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.

Author: Katherine Eaton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313061106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Details what ordinary life was like during the extraordinary years of the reign of Soviet Union. Thirty-six illustrations, thematic chapters, a glossary, timeline, annotated multimedia bibliography, and detailed index make it a sound starting point for looking at this powerful nation's immediate past. What was ordinary life like in the Soviet police state? The phrase daily life implies an orderly routine in a stable environment. However, many millions of Soviet citizens experienced repeated upheavals in their everyday lives. Soviet citizens were forced to endure revolution, civil war, two World Wars, forced collectivization, famine, massive deportations, mass terror campaigns perpetrated against them by their own leaders, and chronic material deprivations. Even the perpetrators often became victims. Many millions, of all ages, nationalities, and walks of life, did not survive these experiences. At the same time, millions managed to live tranquilly, work in factories, farm the fields, serve in the military, and even find joy in their existence. Structured topically, this volume begins with an historical introduction to the Soviet period (1917-1991) and a timeline. Chapters that follow are devoted to such core topics as: government and law, the economy, the military, rural life, education, health care, housing, ethnic groups, religion, the media, leisure, popular culture, and the arts. The volume also has two maps, including a map of ethnic groups and languages, and over thirty photographs of people going about their lives in good times and bad. A glossary, a list of student-friendly books and multimedia sources for classroom and/or individual use, and an index round out the work, making it a valuable resource for high school as well as undergraduate courses on modern Russian and Soviet history. Copious chapter endnotes provide numerous starting points for students and teachers who want to delve more deeply.

Author: Gennady M. Andreev-Khomiakov
Publisher: Westview Press
ISBN: 0813323746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
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.

Author: Christopher J. Ward
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822971216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Heralded by Soviet propaganda as the "Path to the Future," the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway (BAM) represented the hopes and dreams of Brezhnev and the Communist Party elite of the late Soviet era. Begun in 1974, and spanning approximately 2,000 miles after twenty-nine years of halting construction, the BAM project was intended to showcase the national unity, determination, skill, technology, and industrial might that Soviet socialism claimed to embody. More pragmatically, the Soviet leadership envisioned the BAM railway as a trade route to the Pacific, where markets for Soviet timber and petroleum would open up, and as an engine for the development of Siberia. Despite these aspirations and the massive commitment of economic resources on its behalf, BAM proved to be a boondoggle-a symbol of late communism's dysfunctionality-and a cruel joke to many ordinary Soviet citizens. In reality, BAM was woefully bereft of quality materials and construction, and victimized by poor planning and an inferior workforce. Today, the railway is fully complete, but remains a symbol of the profligate spending and inefficiency that characterized the Brezhnev years.In Brezhnev's Folly, Christopher J. Ward provides a groundbreaking social history of the BAM railway project. He examines the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of workers from the diverse republics of the USSR and other socialist countries, and his extensive archival research and interviews with numerous project workers provide an inside look at the daily life of the BAM workforce. We see firsthand the disorganization, empty promises, dire living and working conditions, environmental damage, and acts of crime, segregation, and discrimination that constituted daily life during the project's construction. Thus, perhaps, we also see the final irony of BAM: that the most lasting legacy of this misguided effort to build Soviet socialism is to shed historical light on the profound ills afflicting a society in terminal decline.

Author: Herbert Metford Thompson
Publisher: Forgotten Books
ISBN: 9780656783014
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Excerpt from Russian Politics This book attempts to put the English reader in a position to understand the conditions of life and the problems of government that exist in the Russia of to day. Some knowledge of the aspects of the country, the ethnological descent of its inhabitants, and the story of the rise and maintenance of their autocratic form of government, seems necessary as a preliminary to such understanding, and the first three chapters of the volume are devoted to an exposition of these matters; but since modern political life is the subject of the book, they have not been allowed to expand into greater detail than will be helpful to the object in View. The reforms of the early years of Alexander II. Have been treated much more fully, for almost all the political questions of the day in Russia are intimately connected with them and with their subsequent partial abrogation witnessed during the reactionary period of the last quarter of a century. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195050002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
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.

Author: Anastasia Lakhtikova
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304099X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
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.

Author: Henry Brailsford
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781986591591
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
This book allows the reader to learn directly about the life and functioning of a Russian Soviet in the 1920s. How the soviet works is an amazing and almost never published document now coming back to the audience in a new and unexpensive edition. Brailsford visits factories, villages, getting in touch with workers, peasants and members of the Soviet Communist Party. During his journey he will partecipate to soviet elections as a witness, documenting a reality that was completely unknown in western countries. The account he made when he went back to the United Kingdom remains one of the most important works ever made about life as it was in Soviet Union. To read. Henry Noel Brailsford (1873 - 1958) was the most prolific British left-wing journalist of the first half of the 20th century. He rised to prominence in the 1890s as a foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, specialising in the Balkans, France and Egypt. In 1899 he moved to London, working for the Morning Leader and then The Daily News. His books in the 1930s include the anti-colonialist classic Rebel India (1931) and the anti-militarist Property or Peace? (1934).

Author: Frederick Charles Barghoorn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description