Everiday stalinism. Ordinary life in extraordinary times: soviet Russia in the 1930s
Editorial OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Festland Spanien
- Verlag OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
- ISBN13 9780195050004
- ISBN10 0195050002
- Gegenstandsart Buch
- Buchseiten 288
- Jahr der Ausgabe 1999
- Bindung Stoffeinband
Abschnitte
Zeitgenössische WeltgeschichteEveriday stalinism. Ordinary life in extraordinary times: soviet Russia in the 1930s
Editorial OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Festland Spanien
Buch Details
Here is a pioneering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by one of our foremost authorities on modern Russian history. Focusing on urban areas in the '30s, Sheila Fitzpatrick shows that with the adoption of collectivization and the first Five-Year Plan, everyday life was utterly transformed. With the abolition of the market, shortages of food, clothing, and all kinds of consumer goods became endemic. It was a world of privation, overcrowding, endless queues, and broken families, in which the regime's promises of future socialist abundance rang hollow. We read of a government bureaucracy that often turned everyday life into a nightmare, and of the ways that ordinary citizens tried to circumvent it, primarily by patronage and the ubiquitous system of personal connections known as blat. And we read of the police surveillance that was ubiquitous to this society, and the waves of terror, like the Great Purges of 1937, that periodically cast this world into turmoil. Fitzpatrick illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, traveling, telling jokes, finding an apartment, getting an education, landing a job, cultivating patrons and connections, marrying and raising a family, writing complaints and denunciations, voting, and trying to steer clear of the secret police.