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2006 •
Review essay on Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd, eds., The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); Brian LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012); and Lukas Mücke, Die allgemeine Altersrentenversorgung in der UdSSR, 1956-1972 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013). In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: History, we are often told, is the study of continuity and change. This truism, it seems to me, is an underestimation of the discipline, but one might argue that the specific questions that are asked of continuity and change do much to define the dynamism of a particular historical subfield. As Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd write in the introduction to their edited volume, The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s, study of the early post-Stalin era has long been “rooted in … the paradigm of ‘continuity and change’ between the Stalin years and their aftermath” (25). Questions in this paradigm began to be asked immediately after Stalin died in 1953 and would continue to be posed in the following decades. Indeed, as Kozlov and Gilburd note, “writing about [what came to be known as] the Thaw has a rich history” (24). Early analyses of the Thaw—which tended to focus on high politics and reforms, socioeconomic trends, and literature and the arts—did not reach a consensus on the extent to which the period marked a break in the history of the Soviet Union. Study of the Thaw has grown even richer over the last 15 years, as some scholars have explored earlier objects of analysis on the basis of new sources and approaches, while others have taken the cultural and subsidiary turns. Questions of continuity and change continue to be posed, only now they often concentrate on mentalities, identities, subjectivities, emotions, and various other cultural topics. The subfield of early post-Stalin studies has become increasingly dynamic, to be sure. Focusing on the social as well as the cultural and making important contributions to the subfield, each of the three books under review poses productive questions about the extent to which the death of Stalin marked a break in the history of the Soviet Union. In the ambitious introduction to The Thaw, Kozlov and Gilburd present a case for change. So, too, does Lukas Mücke in his Die allgemeine Altersrentenversorgung in der UdSSR, 1956–1972. In contrast, Brian LaPierre, in Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia, emphasizes continuity. In this review, I examine these three books’ engagement with the question of continuity and change in part by presenting them as exercises, if implicit, in the history of emotions. Indeed, affect is central to interpretations of the metaphor of a thaw; if some scholars present the metaphor to mean anticipation or optimism, others emphasize uncertainty or anxiety. Kozlov and Gilburd write of post-Stalin optimism, LaPierre of anxiety, and Mücke of feelings of gratitude and entitlement. The themes of emotions and continuity versus change overlap to an extent. For example, post-Stalin optimism suggests rupture in terms of affect, whereas anxiety implies continuity in that Soviet citizens continued to feel materially and physically insecure. The different arguments are in part a function of different objects of analysis. Like other scholars who write of optimism and change, Kozlov and Gilburd center their attention on intellectuals; like those who emphasize anxiety and continuity, LaPierre concentrates on the lower classes. Mücke, interested in pensioners of various social backgrounds, is more difficult to classify in this regard. A question that emerges is what might unite the different affective experiences of these as well as the various other social types discussed in the contributions to Kozlov and Gilburd’s volume and the growing literature on the 1950s and 1960s. In this connection, scholars of the post-Stalin era would be well served by directing attention to 1990s and early 2000s literature on the early Soviet period. Indeed, we would benefit in particular from turning to the work of the “modernity school,” one of the most innovative literatures in the Soviet field in the last two decades. Many of the insights of the modernity scholars suggest that what places intellectuals, hooligans, pensioners, and others in a single history is their interaction with an expansive state, whose ambition in the early post-Stalin years remained the molding and integration of its population. However, this review emphasizes not the modern state’s activities but citizens’ affective responses to its objectives. In so doing, the review foregrounds the notion that individuals, caught...
Slavic Review
Culture and Politics Under Stalin: A Reappraisal1976 •
Much is known about Soviet cultural life under Stalin. It has been described in a large memoir literature which, whether published in the Soviet Union or the West, basically expresses the viewpoint of the old Russian intelligentsia and tends to be a literature of moral protest, either against the Soviet regime as such or against the abuses of the Stalin period. There is an equally impressive body of Western scholarly literature analyzing the syndrome of “totalitarian control” of culture, with its characteristics of arbitrary repression, destruction of traditional associations, enforced conformity, censorship, political controls, and injunctions to writers and artists to act as “engineers of the human soul” in the Communist transformation of society. The concept of totalitarianism—developed in the postwar years, which were also the formative years of American Soviet studies—incorporated its own element of moral condemnation, making the scholarly literature strikingly similar in tone ...
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Book Review: The Landscape of Stalinism: the Art and Ideology of Soviet Space2005 •
In the early 1940s, the cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued that each historical epoch created its own distinctive 'chronotype', or conception of space. In loose pursuit of this Bakhtinian inspiration, the collection of essays under review sets out to identify and explore the ...
Kritika: Explorations in Russian & Eurasian History, 14: 2 (2013) 437-456.
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