More Shopping OptionsOffering an innovative and challenging lens to understand Soviet socialism, this fascinating book argues that in Russia the relations between culture and nation, art and life, commodity and trash, often diverged from familiar Western European or American versions of modernity. The essays show how public and private overlapped and shaped each other, creating new perspectives on individuals and society in the Soviet Union.
Lewis Siegelbaum is Professor of History at Michigan State University. He is the author of Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (1988), and co-author of Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents (2000). He currently is working on a history of automobiles in the Soviet Union.
“"In this unique and fascinating collection of essays, Lewis Siegelbaum and his kollektiv of authors explore the private spaces in socialist society. From cars and pets to apartments and peasant gardens, friendship circles to hooligans, they sketch a canvas that locates where the Soviet heart was and who Soviet man's best friend was. Soviet people found their own outlets for expression of what was most meaningful to them, and privacy survived in a world where the state, often ineffectively, hovered above the individual."
--Ronald Grigor Suny, Professor of History, The University of Michigan
"This is a wonderfully conceived, extraordinarily cohesive, and highly accessible volume. Each of the authors rejects a rigid distinction between public and private, and argues that under Soviet socialism, the distinction is especially fluid. A fascinating reassessment of the 'lived experience' of socialism, in which the Soviet Union’s particular characteristics are understood as part of the much broader modern experience of public and private life."-- Diane P. Koenker, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“This lively and innovative volume, offering a fascinating selection of the newest scholarship on Soviet society in the Stalin and Khrushchev periods, will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered about the private lives of Soviet citizens and how they negotiated the boundaries between the private and the public.”
--Sheila Fitzpatrick, University of Chicago
Introduction: Mapping Private Spheres in the Soviet Context --Lewis H. Siegelbaum * Part One: Private Enterprise and Private Property* Claiming Property: The Soviet-Era Private Plots as "Women's Turf"--Esther Kingston-Mann * The Art Market and the Construction of Soviet Russian Culture--Andrew Jenks * Separate Yet Governed: The Representation of Soviet Property Relations in Civil Law and Public Discourse--Charles Hachten * Cars, Cars, and More Cars: The Faustian Bargain of the Brezhnev Era --Lewis H. Siegelbaum * Part Two: Domesticity and Domestic Space * Domestic Life and the Activist Wife in the 1930s Soviet Union--Rebecca Neary * A Hearth for a Dog: The Paradoxes of Soviet Pet Keeping--Amy Nelson * The Meaning of Home: "The Only Bit of the World You Can Have to Yourself"--Susan E. Reid * "I Know All the Secrets of My Neighbors": The Quest for Privacy in the Era of the Separate Apartment--Steven E. Harris * Private Matters or Public Crimes: The Emergence of Domestic Hooliganism in the Soviet Union, 1939-1966--Brian LaPierre * Part Three: Behavior and Private Life * A Symbiosis of Errors: The Personal, Professional, and Political in the Kirov Region, 1931-1941--Larry E. Holmes * Friends in Private, Friends in Public: The Phenomenon of the Kompaniia Among Soviet Youth in the 1950s and 60s --Juliane Fürst * The 1959 Liriki-Fiziki Debate: Going Public with the Private?--Susan Costanzo
