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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' 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...
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 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.
An in-depth study of late Stalinist youth and youth culture, illuminating the complex relationship between the Soviet state and its youth and providing a new framework for understanding late Stalinism and its impact on the future development of the Soviet system.
The second volume of The Cambridge History of Communism explores the rise of Communist states and movements after World War II. Leading experts analyze archival sources from formerly Communist states to re-examine the limits to Moscow's control of its satellites; the de-Stalinization of 1956; Communist reform movements; the rise and fall of the Sino-Soviet alliance; the growth of Communism in Asia, Africa and Latin America; and the effects of the Sino-Soviet split on world Communism. Chapters explore the cultures of Communism in the United States, Western Europe and China, and the conflicts engendered by nationalism and the continued need for support from Moscow. With the danger of a new Cold War developing between former and current Communist states and the West, this account of the roots, development and dissolution of the socialist bloc is essential reading.
This book presents compelling essays by leading Hungarian and foreign authors on the variety of social movements and parties that seek influence and power in a Hungary mired in deep and manifold crisis. The main question the volume tries to answer is: what can we expect after the fall of the semi-authoritarian Orb n regime in Hungary.ÿ Who will be the new players?ÿ What are their backgrounds? What are their political and social ideals, intentions and methods? The studies in the first section of the volume provide the reader with the reasons of the emergence of these new movements: a deep analysis of the historical, political and cultural background of the current situation. The second part...
satisfaction of his denouement.
Towards the end of the Khrushchev era, a major Soviet initiative was launched to rekindle enthusiasm for the revolution, giving rise to over 150 biographies and historical novels, authored by prominent dissidents, leading historians, and popular historical novelists. What new meanings did revolution take on as it was reimagined by these writers?
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.