From: "Rotkirch" <[log in to unmask]>
On Living Through Soviet Russia. ed. D.Bertaux, P.Thompson & Anna Rotkirch.
Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative, London 2003.
Synopsis: On Living Through soviet Russia analyses, through
personal accounts, how Russian society operated at a day-to-day
level. It contrasts the integration of different social groups: the
descendants of pre-revolutionary upper classes, the new
industrial working class or religious minorities. It examines in
turn the implications of family relationships, working mothers,
absent fathers and caretaking grandmothers; patterns of eating
together and of housing; the secrecy of sexuality; the suppression
of religion; and the small freedoms such as growing vegetables
on a dacha plot. Because of its basis in direct testimonies, the
book reveals in a highly readable and direct style the meaning of
ordinary men and women of living through those seven decades
of state socialism.
CONTENTS
Part I Creating Soviet Society
-D.Bertaux & M.Malysheva: The cultural model of the Russian popular classes
and the transition to market economy
-V.Semenova: Equality in poverty: the symbolic meaning of kommunalki in the
1930s-50s
-E.Foteeva: Coping with revolution: the experiences of well-to-do Russian
families
Part II Personal and family life
-A.Rotkirch: 'What kind of sex can you talk about?': acquiring sexual
knowledge in three Soviet generations
-V.Semenova & P.Thompson: Family models and transgenerational influences:
grandparents, parents and children
in Moscow and Leningrad from the Soviet to the market era
-A.Rotkirch: 'Coming to stand on firm ground': the making of a Soviet
working mother
-N.R.Galtz: The strength of small freedoms: a response to Ionin, by way of
stories told at the dacha
Part III The Marginal and the Successful
-I-.Korovoushkina Paert: Memory and survival in Stalin's Russia: old
believers in the Urals during the 1930s-50s
-N.Adler: The return of the suppressed: survival after the Gulag
-M.Liljestrom: Success stories from the margins: Soviet women's
autobiographical sketches from the late Soviet period
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