Suchergebnisse

Drawing on newly-opened Soviet archives, especially the letters of complaint and petition with which peasants deluged the Soviet authorities in the 1930s, Stalin's Peasants analyzes peasants' strategies of resistance and survival in the new world of the collectivized village. Stalin's Peasants is a story of struggle between peasants and Communists over the terms of collectivization. But it is also a story about the impact of collectivization on the internal social relations and culture of the village in the 1930s, exploring questions of authority, religious practice, feuds, denunciations, and rumors. For the first time, it is possible to see the real people behind the facade of the "Potemkin village" created by Soviet propagandists. In dramatic contrast to the official story of happy peasants clustered around a tractor and praising Stalin, Fitzpatrick portrays a village in which sullen peasants called collectivization a "second serfdom" and showed their resistance to the new order by working like serfs, that is, doing as little work on the collective farm as they could get away with. Far from naively venerating Stalin as "the good Tsar," these real-life peasants held Stalin personally responsible for collectivization and the famine, and hoped for his overthrow. Sheila Fitzpatrick's work is truly a landmark in Soviet studies - the first richly-documented social history of the 1930s, whose perspective "from below" sheds a new light on the whole relationship of Soviet state and society during (and indeed after) the Stalin period. Anyone interested in Soviet and Russian history, peasant studies, or social history will appreciate this major contribution to our understanding of life in Stalin's Russia

SUMMARY: Opening a discussion forum "Mainstream Narratives of Soviet History and the Laughter of Surprise," Sheila Fitzpatrick's essay proposes applying the mode of black comedy to the narration of Soviet history. Noting that all comedy thrives on the unexpected, Fitzpatrick points to humorous reactions to social paradoxes and conflicts in the Russian and Soviet literary tradition as well as in western Sovietology. The essay implies that the comedic mode can be productive in highlighting heterogeneity and incongruities in Soviet history. Резюме: Эссе Шейлы Фитцпатрик, в котором черная комедия рассматривается как возможный модус повествования советской истории, открывает форум "Мейнстримные нарративы советской истории и смех от удивления". Отмечая, что жанр комедии использует эффект неожиданности, Фитцпатрик отмечает случаи юмористической реакции на социальные парадоксы и конфликты в российской и советской литературной традиции, а также западной советологии. В эссе аргументируется продуктивность использования жанра черной комедии для демонстрации гетерогенности советской истории и несоответствий в советском прошлом.

Post‐war Jewish immigration from Europe to Australia has been much discussed in the scholarship, primarily with reference to the question of discriminatory (anti‐semitic) intention on the part of the Australian government and the Department of Immigration bureaucracy. The assumption has often been made that the existence of discriminatory policy and practices necessarily led to a reduction in the number of Jewish migrants entering Australia. Using new data on Jewish entrants under the Mass Resettlement programme (1947–51) and under individual sponsorship on landing permits, as well as material from the archives of the International Refugee Organization which administered the Mass Resettlement programme, this article revisits the related questions of discriminatory intentions and quantitative outcomes, concluding that discriminatory intent, while stimulating evasive strategies of resistance on the part of individuals and institutions, does not necessarily result in significant reduction in the rate of entry of the migrants who are the object of discrimination.

The Russian Revolution has long been a subject of controversy among Russian/Soviet historians, both in the West and Russia/the Soviet Union. Now that the centenary has arrived, conferences are being held widely in Europe and the Americas, but less widely in the Russian Federation. For Putin's regime, with its ambiguous relationship to the Soviet past, the centenary of the Russian Revolution is something of an embarrassment. An attempt to celebrate under the slogan of 'reconciliation' may or may not succeed.

Sheila Fitzpatrick offers a brief tour of her new book, which takes an insistently humanising view of Stalin and the group of men who supported his leadership and later succeeded him.