The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class

The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class

Author: György Péteri

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2023-11-13

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1666923974

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The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class: Greed and Creed discusses the history of everyday life under state socialism and the ways in which post-1945 modernity reached the shores of Soviet Bloc societies. This book explains state socialism’s failure to deliver on its promise to create a new type of modern civilization, an alternative to capitalism. Placing the practices of the class of salaried functionaries of the party-state in the focus, György Péteri demonstrates the decisive role of this class in bringing Western values and patterns of everyday to the cultures and societies of Eastern Europe. The empirical work presented covers areas like consumption and consumerism, mobility (the advent of mass automobilism) and leisure (hunting and vacationing). Based on the Hungarian experience, the author finds the communist avantgarde of the state-socialist project in the act of giving up the ambition to create a new (socialist) civilization already in the late 1950s, early 1960s. From the 1960s on, state socialism was no longer a rival of capitalism (the ‘highly developed West’) in terms of creating a competitive, alternative modernity in its everyday. Rather, Eastern Europe settles among other regions of the periphery or semi-periphery of capitalist development, reacting to, imitating and, in general, following the patterns of the highly developed capitalist center of the world system with some delay.


Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev's Russia

Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev's Russia

Author: Deborah A. Field

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 9780820495026

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Drawing on previously inaccessible records, this book discusses love, sex, marriage, divorce, and child-rearing during Khrushchev's «thaw» of the 1950s and early 1960s. It analyses the Soviet government's attempts to supervise private life and enforce communist morality, and it describes the diverse ways in which people responded to official prescriptions. Written in a lively and accessible style, this book provides an innovative exploration of the interactions between Soviet ideology and everyday life.


Russians in Cold War Australia

Russians in Cold War Australia

Author: Sheila Fitzpatrick

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2024-03-15

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1666945005

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Russians in Cold War Australia explores the time during the Cold War when Russian displaced persons, including former Soviet citizens, were amongst the hundreds of thousands of immigrants given assisted passage to Australia and other Western countries in the wake of the Second World War. With the Soviet Union and Australia as enemies, skepticism surrounding the immigrants’ avowed anti-communism introduced new hardships and challenges. This book examines Russian immigration to Australia in the late 1940s and 1950s, both through their own eyes and those of Australia's security service (ASIO), to whom all Russian speakers were persons of interest.


Private Life under Socialism

Private Life under Socialism

Author: Yunxiang Yan

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2003-03-12

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0804764115

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For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.


The Ruling Class

The Ruling Class

Author: Gaetano Mosca

Publisher: Andesite Press

Published: 2017-08-24

Total Pages: 570

ISBN-13: 9781376214598

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.


Rebuilding Poland

Rebuilding Poland

Author: Padraic Kenney

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780801432873

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The first book to examine the communist takeover in Poland from the bottom up, and the first to use archives opened in 1989, Rebuilding Poland provides a radically new interpretation of the communist experience. Padraic Kenney argues that the postwar takeover was also a social revolution, in which workers expressed their hopes for dramatic social change and influenced the evolution--and eventual downfall--of the communist regime.Kenney compares Lödz, Poland's largest manufacturing center, and Wroclaw, a city rebuilt as Polish upon the ruins of wartime destruction. His account of dramatic strikes in the textile mills of Lödz shows how workers resisted the communist party's encroachment on factory terrain and its infringements of worker dignity. The contrasting absence of labor conflict among migrants in the frontier city of Wroclaw holds important clues to the nature of stalinism in Poland: communist power was strongest where workers lacked organizational ties or cultural roots. In the collective reaction of workers in Lödz and the individualism of those in Wroclaw, Kenney locates the beginnings of the end of the communist regime. Losing the battle for worker identity, the communists placed their hopes in labor competition, which ultimately left the regime hostage to a resistant work force and an overextended economy incapable of reform.


Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia

Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia

Author: Christina Kiaer

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780253217929

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How Soviet citizens in the 1920s and 1930s internalized Soviet ways of looking at the world and living their everyday lives.


Privilege in the Soviet Union (Routledge Revivals)

Privilege in the Soviet Union (Routledge Revivals)

Author: Mervyn Matthews

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-01-11

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1136716033

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First published in 1978, this unique work throws much-needed light upon the exact nature of privilege and elite life-styles in the contemporary Soviet Union, under the Communist regime. Dr Matthews' study places these life-styles in a historical perspective, and characterises, in sociological terms, the people who enjoyed them. This study is based on an extensive programme of personal interviews among emigré groups and a close analysis of original and little-known legal historical sources. There are special sections on the nature of change in the Soviet elite and on social mobility. This reissue will attract interest amongst students and scholars concerned with the history, politics and sociology of the Soviet Union; it will also be of value to all those concerned with the age-old problem of social equality.