scholarly journals “FOOD EXPEDITIONS” AND “AVOSKA”: CONSUMER PASSIONS OF “HOMO SOVIETICUS” IN THE MODERN PROSE

2021 ◽  
pp. 48-59
Author(s):  
Liudmyla Danylenko
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Happy Life ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
True Values ◽  
Homo Sovieticus

Contemporary Ukrainian prose has been actively appealing to the memory of the Soviet past recently. Especially interesting is the literary reconstruction of everyday life that creates a background for demonstrating a specific type of ‘homo sovieticus’. A discussion on this large-scale and promising process has already started within literary studies. The paper deals with O. Ilchenko’s “Fog Pickers” and S. Baturyn’s “Shyzgara”, which represent the everyday life of Kyiv in the Soviet era. The focus is on the literary treatment of consumerism as a feature of a unified model representing the Soviet man. The researcher explains the ideas of debunking the myths about happy life in the USSR, analyzes the ways of creating the panoramic view of everyday life, traces the consistency of the authors’ interpretations that shows how accurately the experiences are depicted. The gastronomic routes of Kyiv residents, the methods of obtaining the foodstuffs, the social relationships established during purchases presented in the literary works are worth special attention. The writers are definitely critical regarding everyday living conditions in the recent past. They put characteristic features of the Soviet everyday life at the center of events, namely the lines in the stores of all kinds and their primitive range of products. Some Soviet euphemisms related to the food theme have been explained in the paper as well. The researcher comes to the conclusion that reconstruction of the everyday life of a Soviet man in the works by O. Ilchenko and S. Baturyn reveals the despicable nature and danger of the totalitarian system, shows the groundlessness of the nostalgic gasps for the Soviet Union. The literary representation of life in the USSR prompts one to reflect on the true values and uphold human dignity in a free state.

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.

scholarly journals Homo sovieticus – „jednowymiarowy klient komunizmu”, czy „fenomen o wielu twarzach”?

2018 ◽  
pp. 157-170
Author(s):  
Eliza Kania
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interesting Approach ◽  
Considerable Impact ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
The Right ◽  
Homo Sovieticus

The paper analyzes a symbolic notion that entered Polish political discourse at the time of political transformation, namely the notion of homo sovieticus. The author emphasizes a dichotomy in how this notion has been presented in Poland and in the Soviet Union, and later in the Russian Federation. In Poland this symbol was primarily assigned all the negative features associated with the pre-transformation society and with soviet ‘communism’ (Rev. J. Tisch- ner). In Russia, the associations most frequently evoked by the notion of homo sovieticus were more varied (A. Zinovjev, S. Alieksiyewich, W. Yerofieyev). Ideological zeal, or commitment to the ethos of work, were referred to more often there. Czes3aw Milosz presented an- other interesting approach to the topic, interpreting homo sovieticus more in terms of a victim of the ‘totalitarian system’ while emphasizing the issue of violence – both symbolic and subjective, and the uniformization of society (which had a considerable impact on ‘shaping’ the social mass as desired by the authorities). The paper attempts to stress the fact that the notion of homo sovieticus or soviet man is frequently refused the right to an actual identity, as it is mainly associated with the negative aspects of human nature. It is forgotten that an individual identity is the sum total of many factors: its self-identification and placement, the collective self-consciousness of the group, the historical conditions or axiological system prevailing and socially accepted in a given historical period.

scholarly journals Modernity and the Failure to Maintain the Peace (1918–1938): Comparing the Cases of the Soviet Union and the German Reich

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-131
Author(s):  
Штефан Мерль
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Expert Advice ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Perspective ◽  
State Organization ◽  
German Reich

Citation: Merl S. (2020) Modernity and the Failure to Maintain the Peace (1918–1938): Comparing the Cases of the Soviet Union and the German Reich. Mir Rossii, vol. 29, no 1, pp. 103–131. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2020-29-1-103-131 Modernity brought the promise of a better world – a world in which society and the economy are more rationally organized and in which people themselves could be improved. In the 1880s, European states began to translate the findings of the social sciences into practical politics (“the scientization of the social”). Once the established monarchies had been overthrown in Germany and in Russia, the new political forces needed to legitimize their claim to power before the people. The most practical way to do so was to exploit the idea that the social could be subjected to scientization, and thus legitimize political domination by means of implementing a new type of rationality. With the transition to Stalinism and National Socialism, their approaches became more radical. Both dictatorships launched large-scale projects to restructure their societies according to the concepts of class and race respectively. They bet on an unprecedented degree of state organization and control over the economy and society. Their economic success in the 1930s owed much to rearmament programs, which could do nothing but resolve into a new war. Today it appears surprising how naively expert advice was handled at that time, such that the complete physical destruction of enemies and the idea that lives could be treated as worthless could be sold as a “scientific” means of creating better societies. In order to understand what happened in the Soviet Union and Germany, one cannot look at it from a single national perspective. That is why I adopt an entangled history approach. The dissemination of modern ideas and the scientization of the social were taking place through a network connecting scholars and thinkers from all over the world. This article sets the inter-war period in the context of the whole period during which the scientization of the social was taking place without any particularly critical reflection (from the 1880s to the early 1970s). In the first part, I present the concepts of Modernity and the scientization of the social and propose a periodization of their political use. In the second part, I  focus more specifically on the events and developments in the Soviet Union and Germany, and the means of political communication by which the legitimization of the new powers were achieved.

Life and Death in the Demiansk Pocket: The 123rd Infantry Division in Combat and Occupation

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-380
Author(s):  
Jeff Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social

During the past two decades, focus on the German-Soviet war has shifted from a nearly exclusive fascination with field marshals and their battles—“chaps and maps”—to one more concerned with the social aspects of the war. Issues of resistance and collaboration, German occupation policies and everyday life under Nazi rule, and the Soviet Union's recovery from the catastrophe of 1941 and its subsequent unprecedented mobilization during the latter stages of the war now constitute the main emphases of research. Many of these new lines of investigation revolve around the implementation and results of the German Vernichtungskrieg, the war of annihilation carried out by the Wehrmacht, SS, and myriad other German agencies against the Soviet state and population. As the army was the largest and most powerful German institution operating in the Soviet Union, it has recently attracted the most attention and generated the most controversy. Historians have reached a rough consensus concerning the German High Command's complicity in implementing the Vernichtungskrieg; here, the set of orders commonly referred to in the literature as the “criminal orders” illustrate the army's means of achieving Hitler's goals. More recently, scholars have begun to investigate the army's responsibility for starving millions of Soviet civilians. While some dissenting voices have been heard, it is clear that the German High Command willingly and even enthusiastically participated in the war of annihilation.

The North Caucasus During Collectivisation

2018 ◽  
pp. 227-254
Author(s):  
Jeronim Perović
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
North Caucasus ◽  
Mountain Communities ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Ways Of Life

This chapter presents the first detailed account of the tragic impact of the collectivization and “de-kulakization” campaign in the North Caucasus based on Soviet archival sources. In 1929-30, under the slogan of “socialist transformation of the country,” the Soviet state reached out to the countryside, trying forcibly to change traditional economic ways of life and break up the existing social structures within the villages. In the eyes of the peasants, however, the state’s collectivization and “de-kulakization” campaign represented nothing less than a brutal assault, plunging the whole country into chaos and provoking large-scale rebellions. Resistance was especially fierce in the Muslim-dominated parts of the North Caucasus, where Soviet structures were weak and the social cohesion of mountain communities strong. Ultimately, the Red Army and the armed forces of the secret police crushed these rebellions ruthlessly. However, especially in Chechnia, Ingushetia, Karachai, and the mountainous parts of Dagestan, they were at least sufficiently violent for the Soviet leadership to decide to suspend their collectivization attempt altogether. In fact, it was not until mid-1930s, much later than in most other areas of the Soviet Union, that collectivization was formally completed.

Utopias of One

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Original Research ◽  
The Soviet Union

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

Striking Factory and Strike of Consciousness in the Work of S. M. Eisenstein

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elen Vogman
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday Work ◽  
Political Model

The Soviet Union of the 1920s produces and supports multiple connections between the policy of work in factories and the research in medical, neurological, and collective physiology. The theatrical and cinematic work of S. M. Eisenstein forms a specific prism where these interconnections appear in a spectrum of concrete attempts to engage the factory as an aesthetic and political model. The factory as a concrete topos which Eisenstein exploits in Gas Masks and Strike questions the interrelations between the human body and machine in a new iconology of a striking factory. For the duration of the Strike, the factory is represented beyond any functionality: the workers’ body movements and gestures are all the more expressive the less they have to do with their everyday work. This modulated status of production appears in Capital, Eisenstein’s unfulfilled project to realize Marx’s political economy with methods of inner monologue invented by Joyce. This last project transfigures the factory strike into the structure of cinematographic thinking where the neuro-sensorial stimuli constantly strike the logic of the everyday consciousness in the non-personal, polyphonic, and intimate monologue.

RESTORATION OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF YALTA IN 1944

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (72) (4) ◽  
pp. 24-36
Author(s):  
N. D. Borshchik
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Food Industry ◽  
Southern Coast ◽  
Recreational Facilities ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Health Resorts ◽  
Post War ◽  
Short Time

The article considers little-studied stories in Russian historiography about the post-war state of Yalta — one of the most famous health resorts of the Soviet Union, the «pearl» of the southern coast of Crimea. Based on the analysis of mainly archival sources, the most important measures of the party and Soviet leadership bodies, the heads of garrisons immediately after the withdrawal of the fascist occupation regime were analyzed. It was established that the authorities paid priority attention not only to the destroyed economy and infrastructure, but also to the speedy introduction of all-Union and departmental sanatoriums and recreation houses, other recreational facilities. As a result of their coordinated actions in the region, food industry enterprises, collective farms and cooperative artels, objects of cultural heritage and the social and everyday sphere were put into operation in a short time.

SPATIAL LAYOUT OF THE SOVIET UNION TIMBER PROCESSING COMPLEX: THE IDEA BEHIND THE FIRST FIVE-YEAR PLAN

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-154
Author(s):  
Ivan V. ZYKIN
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Far East ◽  
Spatial Layout ◽  
Capital Investments ◽  
Wood Industry ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Central Regions

During the years of Soviet power, principal changes took place in the country’s wood industry, including in spatial layout development. Having the large-scale crisis in the industry in the late 1980s — 2000s and the positive changes in its functioning in recent years and the development of an industry strategy, it becomes relevant to analyze the experience of planning the spatial layout of the wood industry during the period of Stalin’s modernization, particularly during the first five-year plan. The aim of the article is to analyze the reason behind spatial layout of the Soviet wood industry during the implementation of the first five-year plan. The study is based on the modernization concept. In our research we conducted mapping of the wood industry by region as well as of planned construction of the industry facilities. It was revealed that the discussion and development of an industrialization project by the Soviet Union party-state and planning agencies in the second half of the 1920s led to increased attention to the wood industry. The sector, which enterprises were concentrated mainly in the north-west, west and central regions of the country, was set the task of increasing the volume of harvesting, export of wood and production to meet the domestic needs and the export needs of wood resources and materials. Due to weak level of development of the wood industry, the scale of these tasks required restructuring of the branch, its inclusion to the centralized economic system, the direction of large capital investments to the development of new forest areas and the construction of enterprises. It was concluded that according to the first five-year plan, the priority principles for the spatial development of the wood industry were the approach of production to forests and seaports, intrasectoral and intersectoral combining. The framework of the industry was meant to strengthen and expand by including forests to the economic turnover and building new enterprises in the European North and the Urals, where the main capital investments were sent, as well as in the Vyatka region, Transcaucasia, Siberia and the Far East.

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.

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