Leonid Brezhnev was leader of the Soviet Union for almost two decades when it was at the height of its powers. This book is a long overdue reappraisal of Brezhnev the man and the system over which he ruled. By incorporating much of the new material available in Russian, it challenges the received wisdom about the Brezhnev years, and provides a fascinating insight into the life and times of one of the twentieth century's most neglected political leaders.
"Focusing on the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, this book places the Soviet development of Central Asia, and the Soviet hope for communism's bringing prosperity to a supposedly backward area, in global context"--
“First-class, rigorously researched, richly documented, and thought-provoking” essays on the consumer experience in socialist Eastern Europe (Graham H. Roberts, author of Material Culture in Russia and the USSR). As communist regimes denigrated Western countries for widespread unemployment and consumer excess, socialist Eastern European states simultaneously legitimized their power through their apparent ability to satisfy consumers’ needs. Moving beyond binaries of production and consumption, the essays collected here examine the lessons consumption studies can offer about ethnic and national identity and the role of economic expertise in shaping consumer behavior. From Polish VCRs to Ukrainian fashion boutiques, tropical fruits in the GDR to cinemas in Belgrade, The Socialist Good Life explores what consumption means in a worker state where communist ideology emphasizes collective needs over individual pleasures.
The essays in this collection make up the first study of “dropping out” of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks. Under socialism, this phenomenon was little-known outside the socialist sphere. Only very recently has it been possible to reconstruct it through archival work, oral histories and memoirs. Such a diverse set of subcultures demands a multi-disciplinary approach: the essays in this volume are written by historians, anthropologists and scholars of literature, cultural and gender studies. The history of these movements not only shows us a side of state socialist life that was barely known in the west. It also sheds new light on the demise and eventual collapse of late socialism, and raises important questions about the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western subcultures.
This book traces the evolution of Soviet and East European responses to the multifaceted pressures of a rapidly changing world and looks at the implications of ideological developments in the Soviet bloc for economic reforms, general policymaking, and political and social change. The authors discuss the concept of developed socialism and its essential components as seen in communist societies; analyze current policy and likely future policy directions in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Yugoslavia in light of the concept; and assess the impact that ideological trends have had, and are likely to have, on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in general.
This book explores how intellectuals of the later Soviet decades – the 1970s and 1980s – sought to bring about the socialist utopian world. It argues that the last two decades of the Soviet Union were not characterised by state withdrawal and malaise, as some scholars have argued; attempts to envisage and enact Utopia remained as imaginative and creative as ever. The book considers what these utopian ideas looked like through housing schemes, layouts of districts and cities, design of objects and interiors, and proposals for the organisation of family and social life. Relating developments in the Soviet Union to evolving social theory and postmodernism more broadly, the book draws transnational parallels between the intellectual history of east and west in the late twentieth century.
This book presents, above all, a study of the establishment and development of the Soviet organization and system of fashion industry and design as it gradually evolved in the years after the Second World War in the Soviet Union, which was, in the understanding of its leaders, reaching the mature or last stage of socialism when the country was firmly set on the straight trajectory to its final goal, Communism. What was typical of this complex and extensive system of fashion was that it was always loyally subservient to the principles of the planned socialist economy. This did not by any means indicate that everything the designers and other fashion professionals did was dictated entirely from above by the central planning agencies. Neither did it mean that their professional judgment would have been only secondary to ideological and political standards set by the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, as our study shows, the Soviet fashion professionals had a lot of autonomy. They were eager and willing to exercise their own judgment in matters of taste and to set the agenda of beauty and style for Soviet citizens. The present book is the first comprehensive and systematic history of the development of fashion and fashion institutions in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Our study makes use of rich empirical and historical material that has been made available for the first time for scientific analysis and discussion. The main sources for our study came from the state, party and departmental archives of the former Soviet Union. We also make extensive use of oral history and the writings published in Soviet popular and professional press.
This volume shows how the rise of consumer culture took a unique form in Eastern Europe. It investigates the ways in which pleasurable activities were both a space in which these communist governments tried to insinuate themselves and thereby further expand the reach of their authority.
