Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia
Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia

Author: Fran Markowitz

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13:

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Anthropologist Fran Markowitz interviewed more than one hundred Russian teenagers to discover how adolescents have been coping with their country's seismic transitions. Her findings present a substantive challenge to near-axiomatic theories of human development that regard cultural stability as indispensable to the successful navigation of adolescence.Markowitz's fieldwork leads to the surprising conclusion that the disruptions brought by glasnost, perestroika, and the fragmentation of the USSR exerted a greater impact on Western political hopes and on many of Russia's adults than on young people's perceptions of their lives. In their remarks on topics ranging from being Russian to religion, sex, music, and military service, the teenagers convey a flexible and optimistic approach to the future and a sense of security deriving from strong family, school, and neighborhood ties. Their perspectives suggest that culture change and social instability may be seen as positive forces, allowing for expressive opportunities, the establishment of individualized identities, and creative, pragmatic planning.

Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia
Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia

Author: Fran Markowitz

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13:

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Anthropologist Fran Markowitz interviewed more than one hundred Russian teenagers to discover how adolescents have been coping with their country's seismic transitions. Her findings present a substantive challenge to near-axiomatic theories of human development that regard cultural stability as indispensable to the successful navigation of adolescence.Markowitz's fieldwork leads to the surprising conclusion that the disruptions brought by glasnost, perestroika, and the fragmentation of the USSR exerted a greater impact on Western political hopes and on many of Russia's adults than on young people's perceptions of their lives. In their remarks on topics ranging from being Russian to religion, sex, music, and military service, the teenagers convey a flexible and optimistic approach to the future and a sense of security deriving from strong family, school, and neighborhood ties. Their perspectives suggest that culture change and social instability may be seen as positive forces, allowing for expressive opportunities, the establishment of individualized identities, and creative, pragmatic planning.

The Future Is History
The Future Is History

Author: Masha Gessen

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017-10-03

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13: 159463453X

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WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

Narrating the Future in Siberia
Narrating the Future in Siberia

Author: Olga Ulturgasheva

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 0857457667

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The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first full-length ethnographic study among the adolescence of Siberian indigenous peoples, it presents the young people's narratives about their own future and shows how they form constructs of time, space, agency and personhood through the process of growing up and experiencing their social world. The study brings a new perspective to the anthropology of childhood and uncovers a quite unexpected dynamic in narrating and foreshadowing the future while relating it to cultural patterns of prediction and fulfillment in nomadic cosmology. Olga Ulturgasheva is Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the Scott Polar Research Institute and Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. She has carried out fieldwork for a decade in Siberia on childhood, youth, religion, reindeer herding and hunting and coedited Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (Berghahn Books 2012).

Soviet Baby Boomers
Soviet Baby Boomers

Author: Donald J. Raleigh

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2012-01-12

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 0199744343

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Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation. Illuminating a critical generation of people who had remained largely faceless up until now, the book reveals what it meant to "live Soviet" during the twilight of the Soviet empire.

The Thaw Generation
The Thaw Generation

Author: Li͡udmila Alekseeva

Publisher:

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 9780822959113

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The Thaw Generation offers an insider's look at the Soviet dissident movement--the intellectuals who, during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, dared to challenge an oppressive system and demand the rights guaranteed by the Soviet constitution. Fired from their jobs, hunted by the KGB, “tried,” and imprisoned, Alexeyeva and other activists including Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov, Yuli Daniel, and Andrei Sinyavsky, through their dedication and their personal and professional sacrifices, focused international attention on the issue of human rights in the USSR.

Russian Postmodernism
Russian Postmodernism

Author: Mikhail Epstein

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 552

ISBN-13: 9781571810281

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The last ten years were decisive for Russia, not only in the political sphere, but also culturally as this period saw the rise and crystallization of Russian postmodernism. The essays, manifestos, and articles gathered here investigate various manifestations of this crucial cultural trend. Exploring Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, they provide a point of departure and a valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies which is currently insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. A brief but useful "Who's Who in Russian Postmodernism" as an appendix introduces many authors who have never before appeared in a reference work of this kind and renders this book essential reading for those interested in the latest trends in Russian intellectual life.

Citizens in the Making in Post-Soviet States
Citizens in the Making in Post-Soviet States

Author: Olena Nikolayenko

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-03-02

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1136824537

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The political outlook of young people in the countries of the former Soviet Union is crucial to their countries’ future political development. This is particularly relevant now as the first generation without firsthand experience of communism at first hand is approaching adulthood. Based on extensive original research and including new survey research amongst young people, this book examines young people’s political outlook in countries of the former Soviet Union; it compares and contrasts Russia, where authoritarianism has begun to reassert itself, and Ukraine, which experienced a democratic breakthrough in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution. The book examines questions such as: How supportive is this new generation of the new political order? What images of the Soviet Union prevail in the minds of young people? How much trust does youth place in current political and public institutions? Addressing these questions is crucial to understanding the extent to which the current regimes can survive on the wave of public support. The book argues that Russian adolescents tend to place more trust in the incumbent president and harbour more regrets about the disintegration of the Soviet Union than their peers in Ukraine; it demonstrates that young people distrust political parties and politicians, and that patriotic education shapes social and political values.

Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood
Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood

Author: Marina Balina

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-11-30

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1000780724

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Historical and Cultural Transformations of Russian Childhood is a collection of multidisciplinary scholarly essays on childhood experience. The volume offers new critical approaches to Russian and Soviet childhood at the intersection of philosophy, literary criticism, film/visual studies, and history. Pedagogical ideas and practices, and the ideological and political underpinnings of the experience of growing up in pre-revolutionary Russia, the Soviet Union, and Putin’s contemporary Russia are central venues of analysis. Toward the goal of constructing the "multimedial childhood text," the contributors tackle issues of happiness and trauma associated with childhood and foreground its fluidity and instability in the Russian context. The volume further examines practices of reading childhood: as nostalgic text, documentary evidence, and historic mythology. Considering Russian childhood as historical documentation or fictional narrative, as an object of material culture, and as embodied in different media (periodicals, visual culture, and cinema), the volume intends to both problematize but also elucidate the relationship between childhood, history, and various modes of narrativity.

Shush! Growing Up Jewish Under Stalin
Shush! Growing Up Jewish Under Stalin

Author: Emil Draitser

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2008-09-04

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0520254465

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"This memoir conveys us back to Draitser's childhood and adolescence and provides a unique account of post-Holocaust life in Russia. We live side by side with young Draitser as he struggles to reconcile the harsh values of Soviet society with the values of his working-class Jewish family. Despite the waves of anti-Jewish campaigns, which swept over the country and climaxed in the infamous "Doctors' Plot," we feel the Draitsers' loving family life - lively, evocative, and rich with humor. This intimate story ends with the death of Stalin and, through the author's anecdotes about his ancestors, presents a sweeping panorama of two centuries of Jewish history in Russia."--BOOK JACKET.