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Author : P. Messana
Publisher : Springer
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2011-03-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9780230118102
This book brings together fascinating testimonies from thirty inhabitants of the 'Kommunalka,' the communal apartments that were the norm in housing in the cities of Russia during the whole history of the Soviet Union.
Author : Andy Willimott
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : Communal living
ISBN : 9780198725824
Living the Revolution offers a pioneering insight into the world of the early Soviet activist. At the heart of this book are a cast of fiery-eyed, bed-headed youths determined to be the change they wanted to see in the world. First banding together in the wake of the October Revolution, seizing hold of urban apartments, youthful enthusiasts tried to offer practical examples of socialist living. Calling themselves 'urban communes', they embraced total equality and shared everything from money to underwear. They actively sought to overturn the traditional family unit, reinvent domesticity, and promote a new collective vision of human interaction. A trend was set: a revolutionary meme that would, in the coming years, allow thousands of would-be revolutionaries and aspiring party members to experiment with the possibilities of socialism. The first definitive account of the urban communes, and the activists that formed them, this volume utilizes newly uncovered archival materials to chart the rise and fall of this revolutionary impulse. Laced with personal detail, it illuminates the thoughts and aspirations of individual activists as the idea of the urban commune grew from an experimental form of living, limited to a handful of participants in Petrograd and Moscow, into a cultural phenomenon that saw tens of thousands of youths form their own domestic units of socialist living by the end of the 1920s. Living the Revolution is a tale of revolutionary aspiration, appropriation, and participation at the ground level. Never officially sanctioned by the party, the urban communes challenge our traditional understanding of the early Soviet state, presenting Soviet ideology as something that could both frame and fire the imagination.
Author : Lynne Attwood
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 374 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2013-07-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9781847797650
This book explores the housing problem throughout the 70 years of Soviet history, looking at changing political ideology on appropriate forms of housing under socialism, successive government policies on housing, and the meaning and experience of ‘home’ for Soviet citizens. She examines the use of housing to alter gender relations, and the ways in which domestic space was differentially experienced by men and women. Much of Attwood’s material comes from Soviet magazines and journals, which enables her to demonstrate how official ideas on housing and daily life changed during the course of the Soviet era, and were propagandised to the population. Through a series of in-depth interviews, she also draws on the memories of people with direct experience of Soviet housing and domestic life. Attwood has produced not just a history of housing, but a social history of daily life which will appeal both to scholars and those with a general interest in Soviet history.
Author : Yuri Slezkine
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 1128 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2017-08-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9781400888177
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.
Author : Christine Varga-Harris
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2016-02-19
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9781501701849
Stories of House and Home is a social and cultural history of the massive construction campaign that Khrushchev instituted in 1957 to resolve the housing crisis in the Soviet Union and to provide each family its own apartment. Decent housing was deemed the key to a healthy, productive home life, which was essential to the realization of socialist collectivism. Drawing on archival materials, as well as memoirs, fiction, and the Soviet press, Christine Varga-Harris shows how the many aspects of this enormous state initiative—from neighborhood planning to interior design—sought to alleviate crowded, undignified living conditions and sculpt residents into ideal Soviet citizens. She also details how individual interests intersected with official objectives for Soviet society during the Thaw, a period characterized by both liberalization and vigilance in everyday life. Set against the backdrop of the widespread transition from communal to one-family living, Stories of House and Home explores the daily experiences and aspirations of Soviet citizens who were granted new apartments and those who continued to inhabit the old housing stock due to the chronic problems that beset the housing program. Varga-Harris analyzes the contradictions apparent in heroic advances and seemingly inexplicable delays in construction, model apartments boasting modern conveniences and decrepit dwellings, happy housewarmings and disappointing moves, and new residents and individuals requesting to exchange old apartments. She also reveals how Soviet citizens identified with the state and with the broader project of building socialism.
Author : Michael T. Westrate
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2016-04-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9781498523417
What the world is now witnessing in Ukraine is the cumulative effect of history and memory in the lives of the people of the region—and this book directly addresses those subjects. Although the majority of scholarship on the Soviet Union focuses on top-level political and intellectual elites, these groups were only tiny minorities. What was life like for the rest of society? What was it like for the vast population that usually supported the regime, mostly accepted the rules, essentially internalized the ideology, and generally made the same choices as their neighbors and friends? What was it like to live Soviet as the USSR hit its peak as a superpower and then fell apart? What was it like to live Soviet in Ukraine in the decade after independence? This book answers those questions. It is an oral history of a group of military colonels and their wives, children, and contemporaries, covering their lives from childhood to the present. During this period, these military families went from comfortable economic circumstances, professional prestige, and political influence as part of the Soviet upper stratum, to destitution and disgrace in the 1990s. Today, many of them are part of Europe’s largest ethnic minority—Russians in Ukraine. The geographic focus is Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Europe’s second-largest country, a Russian-speaking city in eastern Ukraine. Based on 3,000+ pages of interview transcripts and supplemented with materials gleaned from unprecedented access to personal, family, and institutional archives, the book investigates how families endured shifting social, cultural, and political realities. By analyzing the lives of individuals in context, Westrate provides insights at the grassroots level. He reveals how ideological, professional, gender, ethnic, and national imperatives—as developed and transmitted by elites—were internalized, transformed, or rejected by the rank and file. He reveals how the subjective identities of individuals and small groups developed and changed over time, and how that process relates to the parallel projects pursued by the leaders of their countries. In the process, he shows what those experiences have to offer the study of Soviet, post-Soviet, and transnational history, bridging the boundaries created by the collapse of the USSR and exploring the foundations of both twenty-first-century Ukraine and today’s conflicts.
Author : Susanne Schmid
Publisher : Birkhäuser
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2019-10-21
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9783035618686
The book tells the story of communal living from about 1850 until today. Three motives of sharing - the economic, political and social intention - divide the residential objects, which are investigated in a historical analysis and allocated to nine development phases. The author investigates and compares different forms of housing and the way they developed from their origins until today; she illustrates how everyday shared living and the degrees of privacy in housing are practiced in Europe. Owing to its comprehensive documentation, the analysis of typologies, layout plans, and user and expert interviews, the book can also be considered to be a lexicon or handbook on communal living. A detailed overview that is unique in this form.
Author : Nikki Silva,Davia Nelson
Publisher : Rodale
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2005-10-21
Category : Cooking
ISBN : 159486313X
A volume based on the popular NPR radio series explores how communities come together through food, combining popular stories from the show with new interviews, photographs, and recipes from a wide array of atypical kitchens.
Author : Daniel Bertaux,Anna Rotkirch,Paul Thompson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2004-08-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9781134391479
For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became dangerous. The new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s resulted in a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television and more formally collected by new Russian oral history groups and western researchers. This book is a fascinating collection of life stories and family history interview material collected by the editors and two Russian groups of interviewers.
Author : Sheila Fitzpatrick
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 1999-03-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780195050004
Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.
Author : Leo Lowenthal
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9781351508414
For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became dangerous. The situation changed dramatically with the new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s. The result was a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television, and more formally collected by new Russian oral history groups and also by Western researchers. Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson both began collecting life story and family history interview material in the early 1990s, and this book is the outcome of their initiative. Living Through the Soviet System analyzes, through personal accounts, how Russian society operated on a day-to-day level. It contrasts the integration of different social groups: the descendents of the pre-revolutionary upper classes, the new industrial working class, or the ethnically marginalized Russian Jews. It examines in turn the implications of family relationships, working mothers, absent fathers and caretaking grandmothers; patterns of eating together, and of housing; the secrecy of sex; the suppression of religion; and the small freedoms of growing vegetables on weekends on a dacha plot. Because of its basis in direct testimonies, the book reveals in a highly readable and direct style the meaning for ordinary men and women of living through those seven dark decades of a great European nation. Because of the centrality of Soviet Russia to the history of the twentieth-century world, this book will be of interest to a wide range of readers. It will be of importance to students, researchers and teachers of history and sociology, as well as specialists in East European and other communist societies.
Author : Daniel Bertaux,Paul Richard Thompson,Anna Rotkirch
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 9781412804875
For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became dangerous. The situation changed dramatically with the new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s. The result was a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television, and more formally collected by new Russian oral history groups and also by Western researchers. Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson both began collecting life story and family history interview material in the early 1990s, and this book is the outcome of their initiative. Living Through the Soviet System analyzes, through personal accounts, how Russian society operated on a day-to-day level. It contrasts the integration of different social groups: the descendents of the pre-revolutionary upper classes, the new industrial working class, or the ethnically marginalized Russian Jews. It examines in turn the implications of family relationships, working mothers, absent fathers and caretaking grandmothers; patterns of eating together, and of housing; the secrecy of sex; the suppression of religion; and the small freedoms of growing vegetables on weekends on a dacha plot. Because of its basis in direct testimonies, the book reveals in a highly readable and direct style the meaning for ordinary men and women of living through those seven dark decades of a great European nation. Because of the centrality of Soviet Russia to the history of the twentieth-century world, this book will be of interest to a wide range of readers. It will be of importance to students, researchers and teachers of history and sociology, as well as specialists in East European and other communist societies. Daniel Bertaux is directeur de recherches at the Centre d'Etudes des Mouvements Sociaux, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Paul Thompson is research professor in sociology at the University of Essex and fellow at the Institute of Community Studies in London. Anna Rotkirch is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Helsinki.
Author : Rebecca Friedman
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2020-07-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9781350112445
Revolution, war, dislocation, famine, and rivers of blood: these traumas dominated everyday life at turn-of-the-century Russia. As Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Russia explains, amidst such public turmoil Russians turned inwards, embracing and carefully curating the home in an effort to express both personal and national identities. From the nostalgic landed estate with its backward gaze to the present-focused and efficient urban apartment to the utopian communal dreams of a Soviet future, the idea of time was deeply embedded in Russian domestic life. Rebecca Friedman is the first to weave together these twin concepts of time and space in relation to Russian culture and, in doing so, this book reveals how the revolutionary domestic experiments reflected a desire by the state and by individuals to control the rapidly changing landscape of modern Russia. Drawing on extensive popular and literary sources, both visual and textual, this fascinating book enables readers to understand the reshaping of Russian space and time as part of a larger revolutionary drive to eradicate, however ambivalently, the 19th-century gentrified sloth in favour of the proficient Soviet comrade.
Author : Steven E. Harris
Publisher : Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Johns Hopkins University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2013-03-29
Category : History
ISBN : 1421405660
This fascinating and deeply researched book examines how, beginning under Khrushchev in 1953, a generation of Soviet citizens moved from the overcrowded communal dwellings of the Stalin era to modern single-family apartments, later dubbed khrushchevka. Arguing that moving to a separate apartment allowed ordinary urban dwellers to experience Khrushchev’s thaw, Steven E. Harris fundamentally shifts interpretation of the thaw, conventionally understood as an elite phenomenon. Harris focuses on the many participants eager to benefit from and influence the new way of life embodied by the khrushchevka, its furniture, and its associated consumer goods. He examines activities of national and local politicians, planners, enterprise managers, workers, furniture designers and architects, elite organizations (centrally involved in creating cooperative housing), and ordinary urban dwellers. Communism on Tomorrow Street also demonstrates the relationship of Soviet mass housing and urban planning to international efforts at resolving the “housing question” that had been studied since the nineteenth century and led to housing developments in Western Europe, the United States, and Latin America as well as the USSR.
Author : Choi Chatterjee,David L. Ransel,Mary Cavender,Karen Petrone
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 443 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2015-01-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9780253012609
A panoramic, interdisciplinary survey of Russian lives and “a must-read for any scholar engaging with Russian culture” (The Russian Review). In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, distinguished scholars survey the cultural practices, power relations, and behaviors that characterized Russian daily life from pre-revolutionary times through the post-Soviet present. Microanalyses and transnational perspectives shed new light on the formation and elaboration of gender, ethnicity, class, nationalism, and subjectivity. Changes in consumption and communication patterns, the restructuring of familial and social relations, systems of cultural meanings, and evolving practices in the home, at the workplace, and at sites of leisure are among the topics explored. “Offers readers a richly theoretical and empirical consideration of the ‘state of play’ of everyday life as it applies to the interdisciplinary study of Russia.” —Slavic Review “An engaging look at a vibrant area of research . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice “Volumes of such diversity frequently miss the mark, but this one represents a welcomed introduction to and a ‘must’ read for anyone seriously interested in the subject.” —Cahiers du Monde russe
