Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times : Soviet Russia in the 1930sHere is a pioneering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by one of our foremost authorities on modern Russian history. Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, Sheila Fitzpatrick shows that with the adoption of collectivization and the first Five-Year Plan, everyday life was utterly transformed. With the abolition of the market, shortages of food, clothing, and all kinds of consumer goods became endemic. It was a world of privation, overcrowding, endless queues, and broken families, in which the regime's promises of future socialist abundance rang hollow. We read of a government bureaucracy that often turned everyday life into a nightmare, and of the ways that ordinary citizens tried to circumvent it, primarily by patronage and the ubiquitous system of personal connections known as blat. And we read of the police surveillance that was ubiquitous to this society, and the waves of terror, like the Great Purges of 1937, that periodically cast this world into turmoil. Fitzpatrick illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, traveling, telling jokes, finding an apartment, getting an education, landing a job, cultivating patrons and connections, marrying and raising a family, writing complaints and denunciations, voting, and trying to steer clear of the secret police. |
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abortion activists anti-Soviet arrested artists became blat Bolshevik bureaucratic Central Committee child class enemies collectivization communal apartments Communist Cultural Revolution dacha dekulakization denunciations disfranchised elections elite everyday example exile factory Five-Year Plan former GARF Gorky Gulag Harvard Project Homo Sovieticus housing husband ibid industrial intelligentsia iust Khlevniuk Kirov kolkhoz kolkhozniks Komsomol Kotkin Krok Krokodil kulaks labor Lenin Leningrad letter living Magnitogorsk meant ment Mikhail Molotov Moscow newspaper NKVD officials OGPU Ordzhonikidze party leaders party’s passports People’s Politburo political popular population practice Pravda priests privilege proletarian Purges rationing regime’s regional reported respondent RTsKhIDNI rubles Russian Sheila Fitzpatrick shortages show trials social aliens social origin Soviet citizens Soviet power Soviet Union Stakhanovites Stalin Stalin’s Peasants Stalinist story suicide terror theater tion trade Trud TsGAIPD urban viet Vyshinsky wife wives woman women workers writers wrote young