The Body Soviet

The Body Soviet

Author: Tricia Starks

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2009-01-06

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0299229637

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In 1918 the People's Commissariat of Public Health began a quest to protect the health of all Soviet citizens, but health became more than a political platform or a tactical decision. The Soviets defined and categorized the world by interpreting political orthodoxy and citizenship in terms of hygiene. The assumed political, social, and cultural benefits of a regulated, healthy lifestyle informed the construction of Soviet institutions and identity. Cleanliness developed into a political statement that extended from domestic maintenance to leisure choices and revealed gender, ethnic, and class prejudices. Dirt denoted the past and poor politics; health and cleanliness signified mental acuity, political orthodoxy, and modernity. Health, though essential to the revolutionary vision and crucial to Soviet plans for utopia, has been neglected by traditional histories caught up in Cold War debates. The Body Soviet recovers this significant aspect of Soviet thought by providing a cross-disciplinary, comparative history of Soviet health programs that draws upon rich sources of health care propaganda, including posters, plays, museum displays, films, and mock trials. The analysis of propaganda makes The Body Soviet more than an institutional history; it is also an insightful critique of the ideologies of the body fabricated by health organizations. "A masterpiece that will thoroughly fascinate and delight readers. Starks's understanding of propaganda and hygiene in the early Soviet state is second to none. She tells the stories of Soviet efforts in this field with tremendous insight and ingenuity, providing a rich picture of Soviet life as it was actually lived."— Elizabeth Wood, author of From Baba to Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia


Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution

Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution

Author: Tsuyoshi Hasegawa

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-10-25

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0674972066

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Introduction -- Prelude to revolution -- Rising crime before the October revolution -- Why did the crime rate shoot up? -- Militias rise and fall -- An epidemic of mob justice -- Crime after the Bolshevik takeover -- The Bolsheviks and the militia -- Conclusion


Soviet Medicine

Soviet Medicine

Author: Frances Lee Bernstein

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1501756621

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Thanks to the opening of archives and the forging of exchanges between Russian and Western scholars interested in the history of medicine, it is now possible to write new forms of social and political history in the Soviet medical field. Using the lenses of critical social histories of healthcare and medical science, and looking at both new material from Russian archives and interviews with those who experienced the Soviet health system, the contributors to this volume explore the ways experts and the Soviet state radically reshaped medical provision after the Revolution of 1917. Soviet Medicine presents the work of an international group of leading scholars. Twelve essays—treating subjects that span the 74-year history of the Soviet Union—cover such diverse topics as how epidemiologists handled plague on the Soviet borderlands in the revolutionary era, how venereologists fighting sexually transmitted disease struggled to preserve the patient's right to secrecy, and how Soviet forensic experts falsified the evidence of the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940. This important volume demonstrates the crucial role played by medical science, practice, and culture in the shaping of a modern Soviet Union and illustrates how the study of Soviet medical history can benefit historians of medicine, science, the Soviet Union, and social and gender historians.


Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union

Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union

Author: Linda Edmondson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1992-08-20

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780521413886

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Until the late 1960s, most Western scholars studying the history, culture, social and political life and economy of Russia and the Soviet Union, paid scant attention to the participation and experience of women. The multifarious ways in which gender roles and perceptions of gender were influenced by and in turn influenced the heterogeneous cultures of the Soviet empire were largely ignored. However, this neglect has slowly been rectified and now the study of women and gender relations has become one of the most productive fields of research into Russian and Soviet society. This volume demonstrates the originality and diversity of this recent research. Written by leading Western scholars, it spans the last decade of tsarist Russia, the 1917 revolutions and the Soviet period. The essays reflect the interdisciplinary nature of women's work, women and politics, women as soldiers, female prostitution, popular images of women and women's experience of perestroika.


Russian and Soviet Health Care from an International Perspective

Russian and Soviet Health Care from an International Perspective

Author: Susan Grant

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-02-20

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 331944171X

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This collection compares Russian and Soviet medical workers – physicians, psychiatrists and nurses, and examines them within an international framework that challenges traditional Western conceptions of professionalism and professionalization through exploring how these ideas developed amongst medical workers in Russia and the Soviet Union. Ideology and everyday life are examined through analyses of medical practice while gender is assessed through the experience of women medical professionals and patients. Cross national and entangled history is explored through the prism of health care, with medical professionals crossing borders for a number of reasons: to promote the principles and advancements of science and medicine internationally; to serve altruistic purposes and support international health care initiatives; and to escape persecution. Chapters in this volume highlight the diversity of experiences of health care, but also draw attention to the shared concerns and issues that make science and medicine the subject of international discussion.


Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia

Sexual Revolution in Bolshevik Russia

Author: Gregory Carleton

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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After the Bolshevik Revolution sx and sexuality became a battleground for debates about Soviet future, and literature emerged as a way in which sex could be imagined and discussed. This work challenges Western portrayals of revolutionary Russia as prudish or hedonistic; examining what circulated in Bolshevik culture and why.


Red Medicine

Red Medicine

Author: Arthur Newsholme

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2013-10-22

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1483194558

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Red Medicine: Socialized Health in Soviet Russia reviews the medical organization and administration in Soviet Russia. This book is organized into 24 chapters that particularly tackle the city of Moscow and Leningrad. It addresses the travels of the authors from Moscow to Georgia and the Crimea, providing an overview of the background of Russian life. Some of the topics covered in the book are the progress of Russia towards Communism; developments in the introduction of Communism; type of government of USSR; description of industrial conditions and health; features of agricultural conditions; state of religion, civil liberty, and law; and characteristics of home life, recreation, clubs, and education. Other chapters deal with the condition of women in Soviet Russia, state of marriage, and divorce. These topics are followed by discussions of the care of maternity, children and youths, as well as the treatment in residential and non-residential institutions. The final chapters describe the characteristics of medical practice and the general considerations on the medical care in large communities. The book can provide useful information to the historians, doctors, students, and researchers.


Russia in Revolution

Russia in Revolution

Author: Stephen Anthony Smith

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0198734824

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The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of the twentieth century. Now, to mark the centenary of this epochal event, historian Steve Smith presents a panoramic account of the history of the Russian empire, from the last years of the nineteenth century, through the First World War and the revolutions of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik regime, to the end of the 1920s, when Stalin simultaneously unleashed violent collectivization of agriculture and crash industrialization upon Russian society. Drawing on recent archivally-based scholarship, Russia in Revolution pays particular attention to the varying impact of the Revolution on the various groups that made up society: peasants, workers, non-Russian nationalities, the army, women and the family, young people, and the Church. In doing so, it provides a fresh way into the big, perennial questions about the Revolution and its consequences: why did the attempt by the tsarist government to implement political reform after the 1905 Revolution fail?; why did the First World War bring about the collapse of the tsarist system?; why did the attempt to create a democratic system after the February Revolution of 1917 not get off the ground?; why did the Bolsheviks succeed in seizing and holding on to power?; why did they come out victorious from a punishing civil war?; why did the New Economic Policy they introduced in 1921 fail?; and why did Stalin come out on top in the power struggle inside the Bolshevik party after Lenin's death in 1924? A final chapter then reflects on the larger significance of 1917 for the history of the twentieth century - and, for all its terrible flaws, what the promise of the Revolution might mean for us today.