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Print Price: $42.00

Format:
Paperback
384 pp.
138 mm x 216 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199236411

Publication date:
March 2011

Imprint: OUP UK

Stalinist Society

1928-1953

Mark Edele

Series : Oxford Histories

Stalinist Society offers a fresh analytical overview of the complex social formation ruled over by Stalin and his henchmen from the late 1920s to the early 1950s.

Drawing on declassified archival materials, interviews with former Soviet citizens, old and new memoirs, and personal diaries, as well as the best of sixty years of scholarship, this book offers a non-reductionist account of social upheaval and social cohesion in a society marred by violence. Combining the perspectives from above and from below, the book integrates recent writing on everyday life, culture and entertainment, ideology and politics, terror and welfare, consumption and economics.

Utilizing the latest archival research on the evolution of Soviet society during and after World War II, this study also integrates the entire history of Stalinism from the late 1920s to the dictator's death in 1953. Breaking radically with current scholarly consensus, Mark Edele shows that it was not ideology, terror, or state control which held this society together, but the harsh realities of making a living in a chaotic economy which the rulers claimed to plan and control, but which in fact they could only manage haphazardly.

Readership : All those interested in the history of Russia in the twentieth century and the history of Communism

Preface
Introduction
Part I
1. A Stalinist Life
Part II
2. Forces of Destruction
3. Patterns of Chaos
4. Family Chronicles
5. Limping Behemoth
6. Utopia, Apocalypse, and the Weather
7. 'Thank You, Comrade Stalin!'
8. Economy of Scarcity, Economy of Favors
Part III
9. Politics of History
Select Bibliography
Index

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Mark Edele is Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Australia and is the author of Soviet Veterans of the Second World War. A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941-1991 (2008), which is also published by Oxford University Press.

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Special Features

A completely fresh analytical overview of the complex social formation of Stalinist society.
Uses a wide range of sources, from declassified archives, to interviews, memoirs, personal diaries, as well as the best of sixty years of scholarship.
Integrates the entire Stalinist period, from the 1920s through to the 1950s.
Presents a radical alternative to the current consensus on what held Stalinist society together.