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This in-depth exploration of five industries in the Kola Peninsula examines Soviet power and its interaction with the natural world.
Resistance has become an important and controversial analytical category for the study of Stalinism. The opening of Soviet archives allows historians an unprecedented look at the fabric of state and society in the 1930s. Researchers long spellbound by myths of Russian fatalism and submission as well as by the very real powers of the Stalinist state are startled by the dimensions of popular resistance under Stalin.Narratives of such resistance are inherently interesting, yet the topic is also significant because it sheds light on its historical surroundings. Contending with Stalinism employs the idea of resistance as a tool to explore what otherwise would remain opaque features of the social, cultural, and political history of the 1930s. In the process, the authors reveal a semi-autonomous world residing within and beyond the official world of Stalinism. Resistance ranged across a spectrum from violent strikes to the passive resistance that was a virtual way of life for millions and took many forms, from foot dragging and negligence to feigned ignorance and false compliance. Contending with Stalinism also highlights the problematic nature of resistance as an analytical category and stresses the ambiguous nature of the phenomenon. The topics addressed include working-class strikes, peasant rebellions, black-market crimes, official corruption, and homosexual and ethnic subcultures.
The collapse of the Soviet Union famously opened new venues for the theories of nationalism and the study of processes and actors involved in these new nation-building processes. In this comparative study, Kudaibergenova takes the new states and nations of Eurasia that emerged in 1991, Latvia and Kazakhstan, and seeks to better understand the phenomenon of post-Soviet states tapping into nationalism to build legitimacy. What explains this difference in approaching nation-building after the collapse of the Soviet Union? What can a study of two very different trajectories of development tell us about the nature of power, state and nationalizing regimes of the ‘new’ states of Eurasia? Toward Nationalizing Regimes finds surprising similarities in two such apparently different countries—one “western” and democratic, the other “eastern” and dictatorial.
With a new afterword by the authorA study of the early and turbulent years of the Soviet conservation movement. Focusing on the period from the October Revolution to the mid-1930s (from Lenin's rule to the rise of Stalin), Douglas R. Weiner studies the divergence between the growing ecological movement in the country and the state's social and economic policies. The book offers a view of both sides of this dispute: scientific conservation movements on the one hand and an industrializing nation's attitude toward science, scientists, nature, and massive development on the other. Weiner explains the development of pioneering conservation institutions, state practices, and ecological theory in the Soviet Union during the 1920s , and why those developments were sidelined or quashed by Stalin. The book provides a telling example of the social construction of science, showing how the perceived political implications of rival ecological theories influenced Soviet scientists, and chronicles the nature protection movement's conflicts with both the vigilantes of the Cultural Revolution and Stalin's first Five-Year Plan, which blatantly ignored potential environmental consequences in its quest to industrialize on a large scale.The new afterword reflects upon the study's impact and discusses advances in the field since the book was first published. Now in paperback, this classic text is well suited for course use in Russian history, environmental studies, and history of science.
"A most important and pioneering book--the only full-scale study of the Russian revolution and the peasant from 1917 through the first wave of mass collectivization in 1930." --Stephen F. Cohen
Leaders of the Soviet Union, Stalin chief among them, well understood the power of art, and their response was to attempt to control and direct it in every way possible. This book examines Soviet cultural politics from the Revolution to Stalin’s death in 1953. Drawing on a wealth of newly released documents from the archives of the former Soviet Union, the book provides remarkable insight on relations between Gorky, Pasternak, Babel, Meyerhold, Shostakovich, Eisenstein, and many other intellectuals, and the Soviet leadership. Stalin’s role in directing these relations, and his literary judgments and personal biases, will astonish many. The documents presented in this volume reflect the progression of Party control in the arts. They include decisions of the Politburo, Stalin’s correspondence with individual intellectuals, his responses to particular plays, novels, and movie scripts, petitions to leaders from intellectuals, and secret police reports on intellectuals under surveillance. Introductions, explanatory materials, and a biographical index accompany the documents.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force," and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.
The familiar story of Soviet power in Cold War Eastern Europe focuses on political repression and military force. But in Empire of Friends, Rachel Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union simultaneously promoted a policy of transnational friendship with its Eastern Bloc satellites to create a cohesive socialist world. This friendship project resulted in a new type of imperial control based on cross-border contacts between ordinary citizens. In a new and fascinating story of cultural diplomacy, interpersonal relations, and the trade of consumer-goods, Applebaum tracks the rise and fall of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia, as the country evolved after World War II from the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite to its most rebellious. Throughout Eastern Europe, the friendship project shaped the most intimate aspects of people's lives, influencing everything from what they wore to where they traveled to whom they married. Applebaum argues that in Czechoslovakia, socialist friendship was surprisingly durable, capable of surviving the ravages of Stalinism and the Soviet invasion that crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. Eventually, the project became so successful that it undermined the very alliance it was designed to support: as Soviets and Czechoslovaks got to know one another, they discovered important cultural and political differences that contradicted propaganda about a cohesive socialist world. Empire of Friends reveals that the sphere of everyday life was central to the construction of the transnational socialist system in Eastern Europe—and, ultimately, its collapse.
Introduction: setting the table -- Governance, or, How to solve the grain problem? -- Production -- Consumption, or, The Perestroika of the quotidian -- Nature -- Conclusion: vulnerabilities.
