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Mass Political Culture Under Stalinism
This book is the first full-length study of the Soviet Constitution of 1936, exploring Soviet citizens’ views of constitutional democratic principles and their problematic relationship to the reality of Stalinism. Drawing on archival materials, the book offers an insight into the mass political culture of the mid-1930s in the USSR and thus contributes to wider research on Russian political culture. Popular comments about the constitution show how liberal, democratic and conciliatory discourse co-existed in society with illiberal, confrontational and intolerant views. The study also covers the government’s goals for the constitution’s revision and the national discussion, and its disappointment with the results. Outcomes of the discussion convinced Stalin that society was not sufficiently Sovietized. Stalin's re-evaluation of society's condition is a new element in the historical picture explaining why politics shifted from the relaxation of 1933-36 to the Great Terror, and why repressions expanded from former oppositionists to the officials and finally to the wider population.
Popular Perceptions of Soviet Politics in the 1920s
This is the first study of popular opinions in Soviet society in the 1920s. These voices which made the Russian revolution characterize reactions to mobilization politics: patriotic militarizing campaigns, the tenth anniversary of the revolution and state attempts to unite the nation around a new Soviet identity.
New Myth, New World
The Nazis' use and misuse of Nietzsche is well known. In this pioneering book, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal excavates the trail of long-obscured Nietzschean ideas that took root in late Imperial Russia, intertwining with other elements in the culture to become a vital ingredient of Bolshevism and Stalinism.
Building a Ruin
A masterful account of the global Cold War’s decisive influence on Soviet economic reform, and the national decay that followed. What brought down the Soviet Union? From some perspectives the answers seem obvious, even teleological—communism was simply destined to fail. When Yakov Feygin studied the question, he came to another conclusion: at least one crucial factor was a deep contradiction within the Soviet political economy brought about by the country’s attempt to transition from Stalinist mass mobilization to a consumer society. Building a Ruin explores what happened in the Soviet Union as institutions designed for warfighting capacity and maximum heavy industrial output were reim...
Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands
Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands engages with the evolving historiography around the concept of belonging in the Russian and Ottoman empires. The contributors to this book argue that the popular notion that empires do not care about belonging is simplistic and wrong. Chapters address numerous and varied dimensions of belonging in multiethnic territories of the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union, from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. They illustrate both the mutability and the durability of imperial belonging in Eurasian borderlands. Contributors to this volume pay attention to state authorities but also to the voices and experiences of te...
Propaganda State in Crisis
The USSR is often regarded as the world's first propaganda state. Particularly under Stalin, politically charged rhetoric and imagery dominated the press, schools, and cultural forums from literature and cinema to the fine arts. Yet party propagandists were repeatedly frustrated in their efforts to promote a coherent sense of "Soviet" identity during the interwar years. This book investigates this failure to mobilize society along communist lines by probing the secrets of the party's ideological establishment and indoctrinational system. An exposé of systemic failure within Stalin's ideological establishment, Propaganda State in Crisis ultimately rewrites the history of Soviet indoctrination and mass mobilization between 1927 and 1941.
The Scaffolding of Sovereignty
What is sovereignty? Often taken for granted or seen as the ideology of European states vying for supremacy and conquest, the concept of sovereignty remains underexamined both in the history of its practices and in its aesthetic and intellectual underpinnings. Using global intellectual history as a bridge between approaches, periods, and areas, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty deploys a comparative and theoretically rich conception of sovereignty to reconsider the different schemes on which it has been based or renewed, the public stages on which it is erected or destroyed, and the images and ideas on which it rests. The essays in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty reveal that sovereignty has alwa...
Rethinking Malevich
The Russian artist Kazimir Malevich was one of the great figures of twentieth-century art, and a pioneer of abstraction, whose painting The Black Square of 1915 has become an icon of modernism. Yet he is a creative figure about whom much still remains to be elucidated. Soviet scholarship ignored him for decades, and Western scholars were inevitably only able to work with the limited visual and documentary material that was available to them. It was only after the fall of Communism in 1991 that access to such material became easier. This book represents the fruits of the research that has been conducted since then by a range of Russian and Western scholars who have been able to shed vital new light on the artist's life, his training, his art, his career, his relationships with other artists and movements, and his theories.
Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union
During the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union. In this rigorous and thoughtful study, Felix Wemheuer analyzes the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial programs endorsed by Stalin and Mao Zedong created greater disasters than those suffered under prerevolutionary regimes. Focusing on famine as a political tool, Wemheuer systematically exposes how conflicts about food among peasants, urban populations, and the socialist state resulted in the starvation death of millions. A major contribution to Chinese and Soviet history, this provocative analysis examines the long-term effects of the great famines on the relationship between the state and its citizens and argues that the lessons governments learned from the catastrophes enabled them to overcome famine in their later decades of rule.
Political Religion Beyond Totalitarianism
The success of fascist and communist regimes has long been explained by their ability to turn political ideology into a type of religion. These innovative essays explore the notion that all forms of modern mass-politics, including democracies, need a form of sacralization to function.
