Author: Oleg Kharkhordin Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 9780520921801 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 568
Book Description
Oleg Kharkhordin has constructed a compelling, subtle, and complex genealogy of the Soviet individual that is as much about Michel Foucault as it is about Russia. Examining the period from the Russian Revolution to the fall of Gorbachev, Kharkhordin demonstrates that Party rituals—which forced each Communist to reflect intensely and repeatedly on his or her "self," an entirely novel experience for many of them—had their antecedents in the Orthodox Christian practices of doing penance in the public gaze. Individualization in Soviet Russia occurred through the intensification of these public penitential practices rather than the private confessional practices that are characteristic of Western Christianity. He also finds that objectification of the individual in Russia relied on practices of mutual surveillance among peers, rather than on the hierarchical surveillance of subordinates by superiors that characterized the West. The implications of this book expand well beyond its brilliant analysis of the connection between Bolshevism and Eastern Orthodoxy to shed light on many questions about the nature of Russian society and culture.
Author: Gábor Rittersporn Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press ISBN: 9780822963202 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Anguish, Anger, and Folkways in Soviet Russia offers original perspectives on the politics of everyday life in the Soviet Union by closely examining the coping mechanisms individuals and leaders alike developed as they grappled with the political, social, and intellectual challenges the system presented before and after World War II. As Gábor T. Rittersporn shows, the “little tactics” people employed in their daily lives not only helped them endure the rigors of life during the Stalin and post-Stalin periods but also strongly influenced the system’s development into the Gorbachev and post-Soviet eras. For Rittersporn, citizens’ conscious and unreflected actions at all levels of society defined a distinct Soviet universe. Terror, faith, disillusionment, evasion, folk customs, revolt, and confusion about regime goals and the individual’s relation to them were all integral to the development of that universe and the culture it engendered. Through a meticulous reading of primary documents and materials uncovered in numerous archives located in Russia and Germany, Rittersporn identifies three related responses—anguish, anger, and folkways—to the pressures people in all walks of life encountered, and shows how these responses in turn altered the way the system operated. Rittersporn finds that the leadership generated widespread anguish by its inability to understand and correct the reasons for the system’s persistent political and economic dysfunctions. Rather than locate the sources of these problems in their own presuppositions and administrative methods, leaders attributed them to omnipresent conspiracy and wrecking, which they tried to extirpate through terror. He shows how the unrelenting pursuit of enemies exacerbated systemic failures and contributed to administrative breakdowns and social dissatisfaction. Anger resulted as the populace reacted to the notable gap between the promise of a self-governing egalitarian society and the actual experience of daily existence under the heavy hand of the party-state. Those who had interiorized systemic values demanded a return to what they took for the original Bolshevik project, while others sought an outlet for their frustrations in destructive or self-destructive behavior. In reaction to the system's pressure, citizens instinctively developed strategies of noncompliance and accommodation. A detailed examination of these folkways enables Rittersporn to identify and describe the mechanisms and spaces intuitively created by officials and ordinary citizens to evade the regime's dictates or to find a modus vivendi with them. Citizens and officials alike employed folkways to facilitate work, avoid tasks, advance careers, augment their incomes, display loyalty, enjoy life’s pleasures, and simply to survive. Through his research, Rittersporn uncovers a fascinating world consisting of peasant stratagems and subterfuges, underground financial institutions, falsified Supreme Court documents, and associations devoted to peculiar sexual practices. As Rittersporn shows, popular and elite responses and tactics deepened the regime’s ineffectiveness and set its modernization project off down unintended paths. Trapped in a web of behavioral patterns and social representations that eluded the understanding of both conservatives and reformers, the Soviet system entered a cycle of self-defeat where leaders and led exercised less and less control over the course of events. In the end, a new system emerged that neither the establishment nor the rest of society could foresee.
Author: Graeme Gill Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319769626 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
This book studies the way in which the top leadership in the Soviet Union changed over time from 1917 until the collapse of the country in 1991. Its principal focus is the tension between individual leadership and collective rule, and it charts how this played out over the life of the regime. The strategies used by the most prominent leader in each period – Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev – to acquire and retain power are counterposed to the strategies used by the other oligarchs to protect themselves and sustain their positions. This is analyzed against the backdrop of the emergence of norms designed to structure oligarch politics. The book will appeal to students and scholars interested in the fields of political leadership, Soviet politics and Soviet history.
Author: Alex Inkeles Publisher: Touchstone Books ISBN: Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 508
Book Description
Representing the results of more than twenty years of study by one of this country's foremost experts on the Soviet Union, this collection of twenty-one essays by Alex Inkeles is the first broad sociological survey of Soviet social institutions to be available in English.
Author: Thomas Cushman Publisher: SUNY Press ISBN: 9780791425442 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 436
Book Description
Describes the Russian rock music counterculture and how it is changing in response to Russia's transition from a socialist to a capitalist society. It explores the lived experiences, the thoughts and feelings of the rock musicians as they meet the challenges of change.
Author: L. Siegelbaum Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1403984549 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
This fascinating book argues that in Russia the relations between culture and nation, art and life, commodity and trash, often diverged from familiar Western European or American versions of modernity. The essays show how public and private overlapped and shaped each other, creating new perspectives on individuals and society in the Soviet Union.
Author: R. W. Davies Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1349102555 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
During the events described in The Socialist Offensive the collective farms achieved a commanding position in the Soviet countryside. They were planned as giant, fully socialist enterprises, modelled on the state-owned factories, and employing wage labour. By the summer of 1930 the collective-farm compromise had been introduced. Collective farmers were permitted to retain a personal household plot and their own animals; and a free market continued side by side with state planning. This system continued throughout the Stalin period important features of it remain in the Soviet Union today. The emergence of the collective farm in 1929-30, discussed in detail in the present volume, was thus a crucial stage in the formation of the Soviet system.
Author: Oleg Kharkhordin
Author: Oleg Kharkhordin
Author: Gábor Rittersporn
Author: Jennifer Bloomer
Author: Graeme Gill
Author: Alex Inkeles
Author: Thomas Cushman
Author: L. Siegelbaum
Author: Robert William Davies
Author: R. W. Davies