Suchergebnisse

The communists of East Central Europe came to power promising to bring about genuine equality, paying special attention to achieving gender equality, to build up industry and create prosperous societies, and to use music, art, and literature to promote socialist ideals. Instead, they never succeeded in filling more than a third of their legislatures with women and were unable to make significant headway against entrenched patriarchal views; they considered it necessary (with the sole exception of Albania) to rely heavily on credits to build up their economies, eventually driving them into bankruptcy; and the effort to instrumentalize the arts ran aground in most of the region already by 1956, and, in Yugoslavia, by 1949. Communism was all about planning, control, and politicization. Except for Yugoslavia after 1949, the communists sought to plan and control not only politics and the economy, but also the media and information, religious organizations, culture, and the promotion of women, which they understood in the first place as involving putting women to work. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Robert K. Merton on functionalist theory, this book shows how communist policies were repeatedly undermined by unintended consequences and outright dysfunctions.

The communists of East Central Europe came to power promising to bring about genuine equality, paying special attention to achieving gender equality, to build up industry and create prosperous societies, and to use music, art, and literature to promote socialist ideals. Instead, they never succeeded in filling more than a third of their legislatures with women and were unable to make significant headway against entrenched patriarchal views; they considered it necessary (with the sole exception of Albania) to rely heavily on credits to build up their economies, eventually driving them into bankruptcy; and the effort to instrumentalize the arts ran aground in most of the region already by 1956, and, in Yugoslavia, by 1949. Communism was all about planning, control, and politicization. Except for Yugoslavia after 1949, the communists sought to plan and control not only politics and the economy, but also the media and information, religious organizations, culture, and the promotion of women, which they understood in the first place as involving putting women to work. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Robert K. Merton on functionalist theory, this book shows how communist policies were repeatedly undermined by unintended consequences and outright dysfunctions

In 1953, just after Stalin's death, the Soviet state machine tool publishing house released A. A. Kanaev's From the Water Wheel to the Atomic Engine (Ot vodianoi mel'nitsy do atomnogo dvigateli). Like other books and articles published in the popular and scientific press in the USSR in this period, From the Water Wheel to the Atomic Engine explored the political, economic, and cultural significance of an incipient "atomic century" and touted the nearly limitless applications of the power of the atom in agriculture, medicine, and industry. Indeed, there was little doubt among scientists, engineers, economic planners, and party officials that the Soviet Union would soon enter the stage of "communist construction": communism would be achieved within their lifetimes, owing to the omniscient leadership of the Communist Party and on the basis of the achievements of science and technology. By the end of the decade, the average Soviet citizen, too, came to believe that the glorious future had arrived. Many people wrote letters to prominent physicists with suggestions on how to tame the power of the atom to improve the quality of life. For citizens, scientists, and officials alike, successes in atomic energy provided undeniable confirmation that at long last society had embarked on the final leg of the long journey to communism.