scholarly journals Under Lenin’s watchful eye: Growing up in the former Soviet Union

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 529-534
Author(s):  
Marina Levina
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Black Markets ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Soviet Ideology

Using autoethnography as a primary methodology, I draw on my experience growing up in the former Soviet Union in the late 1970s and 1980s to illuminate the everyday life in the authoritarian regime and its surveillance apparatus. At that point, the corruption of the regime was evident to most citizens as black markets flourished; illegal monetary exchanges were widespread, and bribery became a legitimate and widespread institution.  However, as the economical sector was slipping out of Soviet control, the public institutions such as media and education were still in business of propagating Soviet ideology. That ideology permeated every aspect of culture, however, it was not enforced through a top-down surveillance, but rather through an internalized surveillance based in belief and faith in authoritarian institutions of power. As a result, it produced individuals torn between faith in the ideals and the reality of the everyday life. In the essay I plan to examine my own experiences through theoretical lens of self-surveillance to make an argument about the production of subjectivity in authoritarian regimes. 

Emancipation and Domesticity: Decoding Personal Manuscript Cookbooks from the Soviet Union

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 111-126
Author(s):  
Anastasia Lakhtikova
Keyword(s):  
Family History ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Ideology ◽  
The Cost

A product of their time and of the internalized Soviet ideology that to a great extent shaped women's gendered self-fashioning as women and mothers, Soviet manuscript cookbooks became popular among Soviet women in the late 1960s. Based on the semiotic reading of two personal manuscript cookbooks in the author's family, this article explores what these cookbooks, in combination with the author's family history, tell about how Soviet women used and reshaped the gender roles available to them in late Soviet everyday life. The author also asks questions about the cost of emancipation in a society that could not truly support such progress socially or economically.

scholarly journals Between Berlin and Moscow: Polish Western Thought in the Twenty-Year Interwar Period

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Masnyk
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Academic Publications ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
The Russian Empire

This article deals with the professional discussion about the so-called “difficult questions” of Russian history that involves historians and teachers in the now independent republics of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Block. Both academic publications and teaching books are used as primary sources for the study. In the first section, the author studies several problems connected with the origin of Russian statehood, the Varangian question, and civilizational characteristics of East Slavic nations. The second section is devoted to the Russian imperial past and especially to the discourse on colonialism, which is often used as an explanatory model for the imperial period by historians and textbook authors in some of the post-Soviet countries. The third section is concerned with the conception of the 1917 revolution. The author emphasizes the fact that the conception of a continuous revolutionary process (1917–1922) has yet to be accepted by Russian secondary schools. In this part, the author considers several other factors significant for understanding the revolutionary process including issues such as the origins of the First World War and the developmental level of the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century. In the fourth section, the article discusses the conception of the 1930s Soviet modernization along with negative opinions about the Soviet period given by scholars of different former Soviet republics. In the fifth section, the author briefly observes contemporary studies of culture and everyday life. It is concluded that the history of culture is not represented well in Russian school textbooks, and it is also found that the studies on everyday life are often lacking in depth. Discussing various “difficult questions” of Russian history, the author highlights controversial historical ideas and opinions, formulated in the post-Soviet countries during the last decades.

scholarly journals Nineteenth Century Public And Private Spheres

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-117
Author(s):  
REMINA SIMA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Kate Chopin ◽  
Daily Activities ◽  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract The aim of this paper is to illustrate the public and private spheres. The former represents the area in which each of us carries out their daily activities, while the latter is mirrored by the home. Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are two salient nineteenth-century writers who shape the everyday life of the historical period they lived in, within their literary works that shed light on the areas under discussion.

VISUALIZATION OF SOVIET CHILDHOOD IN DRAWINGS BY EUGENIYA DVOSKINA

2020 ◽  
pp. 96-115
Author(s):  
Zhanna V. Umanskaya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Behavioral Characteristics ◽  
Visual Sociology ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Soviet Ideology ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Artistic Skill

The author explores ways to visualize the everyday life of the Brezhnev period’s soviet childhood in a Eugeniya Dvoskina’s drawings cycle «#forthosewhoremember». Comparing the artist’s work with other modern visual nostalgic projects, the significance of the selected source is justified: this cycle allows us to give an idea of the visual environment of the child, typical kinds of the children’s territory, public and private areas in the collective memory of the generation. Based on the methodology of visual sociology (P. Shtompka, O.V. Gavrishina), the author analyzes the reasons for the cycle’s perception of the older generation as uniquely “Soviet” and raises the question about markers of “Soviet childhood”. The universality and heritability of many children’s practices makes them timeless, so the design of the material world and symbols of Soviet ideology are main signs of the historical era. Compositional and graphic solutions of images play an important role for the viewer’s perception. Knowledge of nature and artistic skill allows the artist to create heroes with accurate behavioral characteristics and evokes, in addition to visual, almost all types of sensory memory (tactile, motor, audio). The use of accompaniment text, often in the form of speech formulas, is crucial for this effect. If we consider this cycle in the logic of S.”Boym’s reasoning about nostalgia, drawings about soviet childhood can be attributed to the procedural type of nostalgia, which is characterized by irony and contradictory attitude to the past. Eugeniya Dvoskina’s work provides a complex multi-faceted visualization of the everyday life of Soviet childhood in the 60–80s of the XX century.

scholarly journals Everyday Life Under Communism: Practices and Objects

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (02) ◽  
pp. 207-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larissa Zakharova
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Basic Consumer

Why should we consider the everyday life of ordinary citizens in their countless struggles to obtain basic consumer goods if the priorities of their leaders lay elsewhere? For years, specialists of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies neglected the history of everyday life and, like the so-called “totalitarian” school, focused on political history, seeking to grasp how power was wielded over a society that was considered immobile and subject to the state's authority. Furthermore, studies on the eastern part of Europe were dominated by political scientists who were interested in the geopolitics of the Cold War. The way the field was structured meant that little attention was paid to sociological and anthropological perspectives that sought to understand social interaction.

Violence, Crisis, and the Everyday

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 798-800 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veena Das
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Long Period ◽  
The Everyday

An important issue in considering violence at both the conceptual and empirical levels is the question of what counts as “violence” and how it is acknowledged. In many polities of the Middle East, including Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there is no clear boundary between war and peace. Conflicts have lasted over a long period and even the project of securing a future in which the struggle for decolonization and political autonomy can be kept alive faces enormous hurdles as everyday life is corroded by betrayals, accusations, and the sheer exhaustion of keeping political energies from waning. Most acute observers of prolonged conflicts recognize the corrosive effects of these conflicts on everyday life. In this brief thought piece, I want to reflect on one aspect of the problem: that of the relation between sexual violence as an aspect of dramatic and spectacular violence—in wars (including modern ones), pogroms against ethnic or religious minorities, or episodes of lethal riots between sectarian groups—and everyday forms of sexual violence that could be both part of the public domain and constitutive of domestic intimacy. Said otherwise, I am interested in how experience of violence travels from one threshold of life to another.

scholarly journals A book as an attribute of everyday life culture (based on the German classics)

Bibliosphere ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 27-35
Author(s):  
N. N. Misyurov
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Material Thing ◽  
Literary Reading ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Inner World

The functional role of books (scientific, artistic, philosophical, religious and moralistic) in the public prac­tice of the German Enlightenment is comparable to the significance of such major national concepts as the Lutheran faith and a special German character. The idea of aesthetic education in contemporary historical circumstances and socio-political circumstances actually became the ideology of national self-determina­tion. The book, its semantic «images» as literary reading images enshrined in famous works of German clas­sics, helps better revealing the spiritual content of the era and the human inner world (in typical «hero of time»). Educational book (serious and entertaining) defines the vector of social development in Germany.  German book in its «materiality» belongs to the everyday life culture, reflects the level of development of the book business in Germany and the specificity of the «culture of consumption». Everyday life culture is a holistic «life world» shared «values» and «meanings» perceived as a world attitudes and behavioral habits and regarded as a natural space of human activity. Such an approach makes it possible to study the typical, recurring forms of «cultural practices», before remaining on the periphery of classical humanities. «Reading» could be attributed to this range of socio-cultural practices. Philosophical basis of the study is the following: everything that a thing opens our perception is simply «a scheme of sensation» changing in accordance with «angles», in which we perceive them; what the thing is in its materiality can be revealed only through our final experiences. A material thing and its «causality» base in sensory perception of a subject. This series of «material things» should include «the book in general» and specifically German book as an attribute of everyday life culture of the Enlightenment. The author investigates representations of meanings of «books» (ash an abstracted subject of study) realized in the «chronotope» of a literary work. The structure of «reading image» and «book image» identified during the texts analysis of famous masterpieces of German classics have a moral connotation.  

scholarly journals Inverse modelling of the Chernobyl source term using atmospheric concentration and deposition measurements

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Evangeliou ◽  
Thomas Hamburger ◽  
Anne Cozic ◽  
Yves Balkanski ◽  
Andreas Stohl
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Source Term ◽  
Main Direction ◽  
Inverse Modelling ◽  
Spent Fuel ◽  
Atmospheric Concentration ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Modelling Techniques

Abstract. The present paper describes the results of an inverse modelling study for the determination of the source term of the radionuclides 134Cs, 137Cs and 131I released after the Chernobyl accident. The accident occurred on 26 April 1986 in the Former Soviet Union and released about 1019 Bq of radioactive materials that were transported as far away as the USA and Japan. Thereafter, several attempts to assess the real magnitude of the emissions were made that were based on the knowledge of the core inventory and the levels of the spent fuel. More recently, when modelling tools were further developed, inverse modelling techniques were applied to the Chernobyl case for source term quantification. However, because radioactivity is a sensitive topic for the public and attracts a lot of attention, high quality measurements, that are essential for inverse modelling, were not made available except for a few sparse activity concentration measurements far from the source and far from the main direction of the radioactive fallout. For the first time, we apply Bayesian inversion of the Chernobyl source term using not only activity concentrations, but also deposition measurements from the most recent public dataset. These observations refer to a data rescue attempt that started more than 10 years ago, with a final goal to give such kind of measurements into anyone interested. As regards to our inverse modelling results, emissions of 134Cs were estimated to be 80 PBq or 30–50 % higher than what was previously published. From the released amount of 134Cs, about 70 PBq were deposited all over Europe. Similar to 134Cs, emissions of 137Cs were estimated as 86 PBq, in the same order with previously reported results. Finally, 131I emissions of 1365 PBq were found, which are about 10 % less than the prior total releases. The inversion pushes the injection heights of the three radionuclides to higher altitudes (up to about 3 km) than previously assumed (≈ 2.2 km) in order to better match both concentration and deposition observations over Europe. The results were of the present inversion were confirmed using an independent Eulerial model, for which deposition patterns were also improved when using the estimated posterior releases. Although the independent model tends to underestimate deposition in countries that are not in the main direction of the plume, it reproduces country levels of deposition very efficiently. The results were also tested for robustness against different set-ups of the inversion through sensitivity runs. The source term data from this study are made publically available.

POLITIČKA KONTROLA UPRAVE

Glasnik prava ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-117
Author(s):  
Stefan Milić
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Individual Member ◽  
Important Place ◽  
The Public ◽  
Administrative Control ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Government

The administration occupies an extremely important place in the everyday life of citizens. The essential elements of administration are organization, competence, control and responsibility. Given that the contact of citizens with the work of the administration is inevitable and that this work is based on rules that must apply, the question arises who can control compliance with and implementation of these rules. There are two types of administrative control: legal and political. This second form of control, political control, is the topic of this paper. It analyzes which entities can control the expediency of the work of administrative bodies and the compliance of that work with the public interest. The paper presents the instruments of control used by active subjects when assessing expediency. These instruments are: parliamentary question, interpellation, vote of no confidence in the Government or an individual member of the Government, formation of inquiry committees and commissions. These instruments are used in order to control the administration by the highest representative body, ie the parliament. There will also be talks about the possibility of controlling the work of the administration by public opinion and political parties.

Born Amid Bullets

In Harm's Way ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Auyero ◽  
María Fernanda Berti
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Local Residents

This chapter examines the concatenations of different types of violence that coexist in Arquitecto Tucci. It begins with a series of ethnographic descriptions of the different forms and uses of violence that sometimes overlap in the everyday life of local residents. It then considers the ways in which social science has approached the issue of interpersonal violence before engaging in a series of ethnographic reconstructions that depict the concatenations of different types of intentional perpetration of physical harm in Arquitecto Tucci. It shows that children and adolescents growing up in the neighborhood not only encounter criminal and police violence, but domestic and sexual violence also frequently put their lives in danger, either as victims or as witnesses. It also explains how violence acquires a form other than restricted reciprocity and is deployed not simply as a means of retaliation. Finally, it discusses the link between drugs and violence.

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