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"In 1955 the Soviet Union re-legalized abortion on the basis of women's rights. However, this fact is not widely known. In the absence of a feminist movement, how did the idea of women's rights to abortion emerge in an authoritarian society, decades before it appeared in the West? The answer is found in the history of the Soviet politics of reproduction after World War II, a devastation in which 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians perished. This enormous loss of predominantly adult males posed a threat to economic recovery. In order to replace the dead, the Soviet Union introduced the 1944 Family Law based on the proposal submitted by Nikita S. Khrushchev. This extreme pronatalist polic...
This is a collection of case studies that explore when and how half of the twenty most populous countries in the world invented and implemented population policies. It presents analyses of reproductive politics in Brazil, China, Egypt, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, Nigeria, the USSR/Russia, and the United States. The essays focus on the official, organized efforts that states pursued to facilitate state decisions about how many people, and which people, would be born within their borders.
"Men Out of Focus charts conversations and polemics about masculinity in Soviet cinema and popular media during the liberal period--often described as "The Thaw"--between the death of Stalin in 1953 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The book shows how the filmmakers of the long 1960s built stories around male protagonists who felt disoriented by a world that was becoming increasingly suburbanized, rebellious, consumerist, household-oriented, and scientifically complex. The dramatic tension of 1960s cinema revolved around the male protagonists' inability to navigate the challenges of postwar life. Selling over three billion tickets annually, the Soviet film industry became a fault line of postwar cultural contestation. By examining both the discussions surrounding the period's most controversial movies as well as the cultural context in which these debates happened, the book captures the official and popular reactions to the dizzying transformations of Soviet society after Stalin."--
Fortress Dark and Stern tells the epic tale of the Soviet home front during World War II as Soviet workers rapidly evacuated industry, food, and people thousands of miles to the east, resulting in massive suffering and sacrifice, and their key role in supplying the front and making global victory over fascism possible.
"Doesn't an educated person—simple and working, sick and with a sick child—doesn't she have the right to enjoy at least the crumbs at the table of the revolutionary feast?" Disabled single mother Maria Zolotova-Sologub raised this question in a petition dated July 1929 demanding medical assistance and a monthly subsidy for herself and her daughter. While the welfare of able-bodied and industrially productive people in the first socialist country in the world was protected by a state-funded insurance system, the social rights of labor-incapacitated and unemployed individuals such as Zolotova-Sologub were difficult to define and legitimize. The Right to Be Helped illuminates the ways in wh...
The Frontline presents a selection of essays drawn together for the first time to form a companion volume to Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl. Here he expands upon his analysis in earlier works of key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s complex relations with Russia and the West, the burden of tragedies such as the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and Ukraine’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Juxtaposing Ukraine’s history to the contemporary politics of memory, this volume provides a multidimensional image of a country that continues to make headlines around the world. Eloquent in style and comprehensive in approach, the essays collected here reveal the roots of the ongoing political, cultural, and military conflict in Ukraine, the largest country in Europe.
With cutting-edge research and contributions from top scholars, the late Stalinist period is thoroughly explored in this impressive work. It explores a wide range of aspects of late Stalinist society, focusing on the experience of the Soviet people and their interaction with ideology, state policy and national and international politics.
'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...
A sweeping chronicle of women’s battles for reproductive freedom Reproductive politics in the United States has always been about who has the power to decide—lawmakers, the courts, clergy, physicians, or the woman herself. Authorities have rarely put women’s needs and interests at the center of these debates. Instead, they have created reproductive laws and policies to solve a variety of social and political problems, with outcomes that affect the lives of different groups of women differently. Reproductive politics were at play when slaveholders devised “breeding” schemes, when the US government took indigenous children from their families in the nineteenth century, and when docto...