Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 by David L. Hoffmann, David Lloyd Hoffman ISBN: 0-8014-8821-4 Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr Pub. Date: August, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)
Rating: 3
Summary: Academic, dry, but interesting nonetheless
Comment: New access to Soviet archives have enriched the picture of daily life in the 1930s in Russia, and this book shows how Stalin and the Soviet elite reverted to more conservative artistic and social norms in a unique fashion.
Leon Trotsky thought that Stalin was "Thermidorean" like the French middle-class revolutionaries who defused the extremes of Robespierre and St-Just.
This book shows instead that Stalin maintained Bolshevik radicalism while culturally transforming Russia into what it was under Leonid Brezhnev: a socialist society, with top-down control tempered by growing incompetence, run by the equivalent of American building superintendants, iron workers, and hard-hats.
Those guys did not like artistic or sexual experimentation much and their values were patriarchal.
What's interesting was that in the short-term, this dealt real socialism, other than the "socialism" of a single corporation run by the state for the benefit of a *nomenklatura*, a death-blow.
What's interesting, also, in practical terms, is that the society then proceeded to self-destruct, in an agonizingly slow fashion, from 1940 to 1989.
Ultimately, there may have been a deep "contradiction" inserted in the Stalin years, for by encouraging artistic conservatism and shoring up the authoritarian family, Stalin only created people less able than the generation of the Civil Wars and the 1920s to see any reason for acting in other than their own good and that of their families.
Real "socialism" may be unnameable and undescribable for it would go all the way down to intimate relations. As it was, the culture of Stalinism imposed a false image of reality completely at variance with daily life, as young Mikhail Gorbachev noticed growing up on a collective farm in the late 1940s. His heroism (uncelebrated because for the people of Russia he was in charge during a Time of Troubles) was that he bided his time, married well, and brought the curtain down on the untenable scene. We are in Mikhail Sergeyevich's debt (and, hurts me to say it, Ron Reagan's debt) for doing the job without a great big war.
 |
Title: Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice Under the Tsars by Valerie A. Kivelson, Robert H. Greene ISBN: 0271023503 Publisher: Pennsylvania State Univ Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: August, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
 |
Title: Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Shelia Fitzpatrick ISBN: 0195104595 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: January, 1996 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
 |
Title: The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the Ussr, and the Successor States by Ronald Grigor Suny ISBN: 0195081056 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: September, 1997 List Price(USD): $44.95 |
 |
Title: Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 by Golfo Alexopoulos ISBN: 0801440297 Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
 |
Title: Women in Air War: The Eastern Front of World War II by Kazimiera J. Cottam (Translator) ISBN: 0968270212 Publisher: New Military Publishing Pub. Date: 31 December, 1997 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
