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Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland does what the title promises. It takes readers on a journey into a world few knew existed: the lives and thoughts of Soviet hippies, who in the face of disapproval and repression created a version of Western counterculture, skilfully adapting, manipulating, and shaping it to their late socialist environment. As a quasi-guide into the underground hippieland, readers are situated in the world of hippies firmly in late Soviet reality and are offered an unusual history of the last Soviet decades as well as a case study in the power of transnational youth cultures. Flowers through Concrete recounts not only a compelling story of survival...
Towards the end of the Khrushchev era, a major Soviet initiative was launched to rekindle enthusiasm for the revolution, giving rise to over 150 biographies and historical novels, authored by prominent dissidents, leading historians, and popular historical novelists. What new meanings did revolution take on as it was reimagined by these writers?
The Second World War in Eastern Europe is far from a neglected topic, especially since social, cultural, and diplomatic historians have entered a field previously dominated by operational histories, and produced a cornucopia of new scholarship offering a more nuanced picture from both sides of the front. However, until now, the story has still been disjointed and specialized, whereby military, social, economic, and diplomatic histories continue to give their own separate accounts. This collection of essays attempts to bring these themes into a more cohesive whole that tells a complex, multifaceted story of war on the Eastern Front as it truly was. This is one of the few critical examinations...
Starting in 1943, millions of children were separated into boys' and girls' schools in cities across the Soviet Union. The government sought to reinforce gender roles in a wartime context and to strengthen discipline and order by separating boys and girls into different classrooms. The program was a failure. Discipline further deteriorated in boys' schools, and despite intentions to keep the education equal, girls' schools experienced increased perceptions of academic inferiority, particularly in the subjects of math and science. The restoration of coeducation in 1954 demonstrated the power of public opinion, even in a dictatorship, to influence school policies. In the first full-length stud...
This dissertation investigates the impact of the Second World War on Magnitogorsk, a defense industrial center in the Urals, and its people. Drawing on interviews and sources located in Magnitogorsk and Cheliabinsk archives, this study explores the city authorities' strategies to overcome social, economic, and political problems created by the war, and the ways in which the urban inhabitants responded to governmental policies, by investigating three important aspects of postwar daily life: living conditions, labor, and social security.
'Stalin's last generation' was the last generation to come of age under Stalin, yet it was also the first generation to be socialized in the post-war period. Its young members grew up in a world that still carried many of the hallmarks of the Soviet Union's revolutionary period, yet their surroundings already showed the first signs of decay, stagnation, and disintegration. Stalin's last generation still knew how to speak 'Bolshevik', still believed in the power of Soviet heroes and still wished to construct socialism, yet they also liked to dance and dress in Western styles, they knew how to evade boring lectures and lessons in Marxism-Leninism, and they were keen to forge identities that we...
Sarah Phillips examines how disabled persons in the Ukraine struggled to secure their rights during the tumult of the past two decades. She documents their creative strategies & argues that public storytelling is a powerful means to expand notions of relatedness, kinship & social responsibility.
This text is divided into six. The first four deal with different manifestations through the centuries of what would be today considered violence and neglect. The fifth and sixth chapters look at the various violent and non-violent strategies used by children as coping mechanisms in what to us seems a very harsh world.