Suchergebnisse

Letters have always been an important medium between rulers and subjects in the Soviet Union and Russia. This article looks at letters from young people to Soviet party officials, newspapers and youth organizations, using them as texts in their own right rather than as sources for the events they describe. A close and detailed analysis of the letters' language, structure and style reveals the subjective universe of their authors and the function of letters both in the personal life of their writers and in the Soviet system overall. Particular attention is paid to letters that employ confessionary narratives. The eschatological trajectory of other Soviet autobiographical texts, which chart the inevitable progress from an unenlightened state to ideological conviction, is reversed in these letters, leading the reader from a happy Soviet life to a point of confusion and ideological doubt. While the crises, which are at the heart of these letters, reveal the difficulties of young people in making sense of the Soviet world around them, they also demonstrate the extent to which young people's norms, values and language were infused by Bolshevik thought. The process of letter writing was thus both an affirmation of the system and a testimony to its failings.

Kuromiya, Hiroaki: Political youth opposition in late Stalinism: evidence and conjecture (Abingdon), 55 (June 2003) 4. - S. 631-638

The third volume of The Cambridge History of Communism spans the period from the 1960s to the present, documenting the last two decades of the global Cold War and the collapse of Soviet socialism. An international team of scholars analyze the rise of China as a global power continuing to proclaim its Maoist allegiance, and the transformation of the geopolitics and political economy of Cold War conflict in an era of increasing economic interpenetration. Beneath the surface, profound political, social, economic and cultural changes were occurring in the socialist and former socialist countries, resulting in the collapse and transformations of the existing socialist order and the changing parameters of world Marxism. This volume draws on innovative research to bring together history from above and below, including social, cultural, gender, and transnational history to transcend the old separation between Communist studies and the broader field of contemporary history

Acknowledgments -- Introduction: to drop or not to drop? / Juliane Fürst -- Dropping out in spirit -- The biography of a scandal : experimenting with yoga during Romanian late socialism / Irina Costache -- The imaginary elsewhere of the hippies in soviet Estonia / Terje Toomistu -- Art and "madness" : weapons of the marginal during socialism in Eastern Europe / Maria-Alina Asavei -- Student activists and Yugoslavia's Islamic revival : Sarajevo, 1970-1975 / Madigan Andrea Fichter -- Intellectual dropping out -- Reader questionnaires in Samizdat journals : who owns Aleksandr Blok? / Josephine von Zitzewitz -- The spirit of pacifism : social and cultural origins of the grassroots peace movement in the late soviet period / Irina Gordeeva -- Dropping out of socialism with the commodore 64 : Polish youth, home computers, and social identities / Patryk Wasiak -- Dropping out in style -- "We all live in a yellow submarine" : dropping out in a Leningrad commune / Juliane Fürst -- Ignoring dictatorship? : punk rock, subculture, and entanglement in the GDR / Jeff Hayton -- "Under any form of government, I am partisan" : the Siberian underground from anti-soviet to national-bolshevist provocation / Ewgeniy Kasakow -- Dropping out economics -- Living in the material world : money in the soviet rock underground / Anna Kan -- Socialism's empty promise : housing vacancy and squatting in the German Democratic Republic / Peter Angus Mitchell -- Conclusion: dropping out of socialism? : a Western perspective / Joachim Häberlen -- Bibliography -- About the contributors