The Soviet Social Contract and why it Failed

The Soviet Social Contract and why it Failed

Author: Linda J. Cook

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780674828001

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This book is the first critical assessment of the likelihood and implications of such a contract. Linda Cook pursues the idea from Brezhnev's day to our own, and considers the constraining effect it may have had on Gorbachev's attempts to liberalize the Soviet economy.


Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class

Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class

Author: Jennifer Patico

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

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What happens when your once-dignified profession no longer supports a dignified lifestyle? In 1990s St. Petersburg, teachers had to find out the hard way. Although the institutions and ideologies of Soviet life situated them as "cultured" consumers, contemporary processes of marketization and privatization left them unable to attain what they now considered to be respectable material standards of living. In this fascinating new ethnographic study, Patico examines the various ways in which teachers have adjusted their activities and interactions as consumers, demonstrating how this has led to dramatic shifts in their assessments of their own lives and of the society around them. Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class presents a much-needed look at the lives of ordinary people in Russia today, in the process contributing both to postsocialist studies of social change and to broader anthropological theorizations of consumption and value.


Social Change in Soviet Russia

Social Change in Soviet Russia

Author: Alex Inkeles

Publisher: Touchstone Books

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13:

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Representing the results of more than twenty years of study by one of this country's foremost experts on the Soviet Union, this collection of twenty-one essays by Alex Inkeles is the first broad sociological survey of Soviet social institutions to be available in English.


Women in Soviet Society

Women in Soviet Society

Author: Gail Warshofsky Lapidus

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 0520321804

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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.


Social and Cultural Change in Central Asia

Social and Cultural Change in Central Asia

Author: Sevket Akyildiz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 113449520X

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Focusing on Soviet culture and its social ramifications both during the Soviet period and in the post-Soviet era, this book addresses important themes associated with Sovietisation and socialisation in the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The book contains contributions from scholars in a variety of disciplines, and looks at topics that have been somewhat marginalised in contemporary studies of Central Asia, including education, anthropology, music, literature and poetry, film, history and state-identity construction, and social transformation. It examines how the Soviet legacy affected the development of the republics in Central Asia, and how it continues to affect the society, culture and polity of the region. Although each state in Central Asia has increasingly developed its own way, the book shows that the states have in varying degrees retained the influence of the Soviet past, or else are busily establishing new political identities in reaction to their Soviet legacy, and in doing so laying claim to, re-defining, and reinventing pre-Soviet and Soviet images and narratives. Throwing new light and presenting alternate points of view on the question of the Soviet legacy in the Soviet Central Asian successor states, the book is of interest to academics in the field of Russian and Central Asian Studies.


The Unmaking of Soviet Life

The Unmaking of Soviet Life

Author: Caroline Humphrey

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780801487736

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The Unmaking of Soviet Life brings together ten essays from award-winning author Caroline Humphrey. Humphrey explores such topics as the mafia, barter, bribery, and the new shamanism, locating them in the experiences of a wide range of subjects.


Post-Soviet Social

Post-Soviet Social

Author: Stephen J. Collier

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2011-08-08

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1400840422

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The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken--casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In Post-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state. Drawing on Michel Foucault's lectures from the late 1970s, Post-Soviet Social uses the Russian case to examine neoliberalism as a central form of political rationality in contemporary societies. The book's basic finding--that neoliberal reforms provide a justification for redistribution and social welfare, and may work to preserve the norms and forms of social modernity--lays the groundwork for a critical revision of conventional understandings of these topics.


The Making of the Soviet System

The Making of the Soviet System

Author: Moshe Lewin

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13:

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In this Now-Classic Book, The Making of the Soviet System, Moshe Lewin traces the transformation of Russian society and the Russian political system in the period between the two world wars, a transformation that was to lead to Stalinism in the 1930s. Lewin focuses on the changes stemming from war, revolution, civil war, and industrialization, and he discusses such topics as rural society and religion in the twentieth century; the background of Soviet collectivization; Soviet prewar policies of agricultural procurement; the kolkhoz and the muzhik; Leninism and Bolshevism; industrial relations during the five-year plans of 1928-1941; and the social background of Stalinism. Through this comprehensive approach to understanding the origins and problems of Stalinism, Lewin makes a significant contribution to the study of Russia's social history before the revolution as well as in the Soviet period.