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Flowers Through Concrete
Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland takes the reader on a journey into the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies. In the face of disapproval and repression, they created a version of Western counterculture, skillfully adapting to, manipulating, and shaping their late socialist environment. Flowers through Concrete takes its readers into the underground hippieland and beyond, situating the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and offering both an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study of transnational youth culture and East-West globalization. Flowers through Concrete is based on over a hundred interviews, declassified documents, an...
Stalin's Last Generation
'Stalin's last generation' was the last generation to come of age under Stalin, yet it was also the first generation to be socialized in the post-war period. Its young members grew up in a world that still carried many of the hallmarks of the Soviet Union's revolutionary period, yet their surroundings already showed the first signs of decay, stagnation, and disintegration. Stalin's last generation still knew how to speak 'Bolshevik', still believed in the power of Soviet heroes and still wished to construct socialism, yet they also liked to dance and dress in Western styles, they knew how to evade boring lectures and lessons in Marxism-Leninism, and they were keen to forge identities that we...
Flowers Through Concrete
In the face of disapproval and repression Soviet hippies created a version of Western counterculture, skilfully adapting to, manipulating, and shaping their late socialist environment. This book explores their lives and thoughts.
Dropping out of Socialism
The essays in this collection make up the first study of “dropping out” of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks. Under socialism, this phenomenon was little-known outside the socialist sphere. Only very recently has it been possible to reconstruct it through archival work, oral histories and memoirs. Such a diverse set of subcultures demands a multi-disciplinary approach: the essays in this volume are written by historians, anthropologists and scholars of literature, cultural and gender studies. The history of these movements not only shows us a side of state socialist life that was barely known in the west. It also sheds new light on the demise and eventual collapse of late socialism, and raises important questions about the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western subcultures.
Late Stalinist Russia
The late Stalinist period, long neglected by researchers more interested in the high-profile events of the 1930s, has recently become the focus of much new research by people keen to understand the enormous impact of the war on Soviet society and to understand Soviet life under 'mature socialism'. Written by top scholars from high profile universities, this impressive work brings together much new, cutting edge research on a wide range of aspects of late Stalinist society. Filling a gap in the literature, it focuses above all on the experience of the Soviet people and their interaction with ideology, state policy and national and international politics.
The Cambridge History of Communism
The third volume of The Cambridge History of Communism spans the period from the 1960s to the present, documenting the last two decades of the global Cold War and the collapse of Soviet socialism. An international team of scholars analyze the rise of China as a global power continuing to proclaim its Maoist allegiance, and the transformation of the geopolitics and political economy of Cold War conflict in an era of increasing economic interpenetration. Beneath the surface, profound political, social, economic and cultural changes were occurring in the socialist and former socialist countries, resulting in the collapse and transformations of the existing socialist order and the changing parameters of world Marxism. This volume draws on innovative research to bring together history from above and below, including social, cultural, gender, and transnational history to transcend the old separation between Communist studies and the broader field of contemporary history.
Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era
This volume contributes to a growing reevaluation of the Brezhnev era, helping to shape a new historiography that gives us a much richer and more nuanced picture of the time period than the stagnation paradigm usually assigned to the era. The essays provide a multifaceted prism that reveals a dynamic society with a political and intellectual class that remained committed to the ideological foundations of the state, recognized the challenges that the system faced, and embarked on a creative search for solutions. The chapters focus on developments in politics, society, and culture, as well as the state’s attempts to lead and initiate change, which are mostly glossed over in the stagnation narrative. The volume challenges the assumption that the period as a whole was characterized by rampant cynicism and a decline of faith in the socialist creed and instead points to the persistence of popular engagement with the socialist ideology and the power it continued to wield within the Soviet Union.
Feeling Revolution
Stalin-era cinema was designed to promote emotional and affective education. The filmmakers of the period were called to help forge the emotions and affects that befitted the New Soviet Person - ranging from happiness and victorious laughter, to hatred for enemies. Feeling Revolution shows how the Soviet film industry's efforts to find an emotionally resonant language that could speak to a mass audience came to centre on the development of a distinctively 'Soviet' cinema. Its case studies of specific film genres, including production films, comedies, thrillers, and melodramas, explore how the genre rules established by Western and prerevolutionary Russian cinema were reoriented to new emotio...
A Full-Value Ruble
A new history shows that, despite MarxismÕs rejection of money, the ruble was critical to the Soviet UnionÕs promise of shared prosperity for its citizens. In spite of Karl MarxÕs proclamation that money would become obsolete under Communism, the ruble remained a key feature of Soviet life. In fact, although Western economists typically concluded that money ultimately played a limited role in the Soviet Union, Kristy Ironside argues that money was both more important and more powerful than most histories have recognized. After the Second World War, money was resurrected as an essential tool of Soviet governance. Certainly, its importance was not lost on Soviet leaders, despite official Co...
The Cambridge History of Communism
The first volume of The Cambridge History of Communism deals with the tumultuous events from 1917 to the Second World War, such as the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the revolutionary turmoil in post-World War I Europe, and the Spanish Civil War. Leading experts analyse the ideological roots of communism, historical personalities such as Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky and the development of the Communist movement on a world scale against this backdrop of conflict that defined the period. It addresses the making of Soviet institutions, economy, and society while also looking at mass violence and relations between the state, workers, and peasants. It introduces crucial communist experiences in Germany, China, and Central Asia. At the same time, it also explores international and transnational communist practices concerning key issues such as gender, subjectivity, generations, intellectuals, nationalism, and the cult of personality.
