Life in Stalin's Soviet Union

(Paperback)

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Life in Stalin's Soviet Union is a collaborative work in which some of the leading scholars in the field shed light on various aspects of daily life for Soviet citizens. Split into three parts which focus on Food, Health and Leisure, the Lived Experience and Religion and Ideology, the book is comprised of chapters covering a range of important subjects, including: * Food * Health and Housing * Sex and Gender * Education * Religion (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) * Sport and Leisure * Festivals There is detailed analysis of urban and rural life, as well as explorations of life in the gulag, life as a peasant, life in the military and what it was like to be disabled in Stalins Russia. The book also engages with the wider Soviet Union wherever possible to ensure the most in-depth discussion of life, in all its minutiae, under Stalin. This is a vitally important book for any student of Stalins Russia keen to know more about the human history of this complex period of dictatorship.

Reviews

Life in Stalins Soviet Union is a welcome addition to the volumes currently available for teaching the history of Stalinism. While earlier collections tend to focus on the 1930s, many of the chapters in this work chart the full period of Stalinist rule, from the late 1920s to 1953. * Canadian Slavonic Papers *
A popular interpretation of the Soviet Union in the West, particularly from the 1950s to the 1960s, emphasized the totalitarian nature of a communist regime that strictly controlled the daily lives of its citizens. Written for a general readership, Life in Stalins Soviet Union, edited by Kees Boterbloem, successfully challenges such a historiographical approach by highlighting the many strategies Soviet citizens used to circumvent, even defy, such a regimented and brutal government and, by the same token, recover some of their freedom. * Histoire sociale/Social History *
Kees Boterbloem brings together a formidable cast of first-rate scholars for this study of daily life in Stalinist Russia. The result is an extremely impressive book that offers cutting-edge research with a remarkably wide scope. Its focus lies at the intersection of everyday life and the horrors of Stalinism, to which Soviet citizens were subjected for decades. This remarkable book helps us to see what it was to live in Stalinist Russia; I can think of no other text that does this as effectively. * Erik van Ree, Assistant Professor of Eastern European Studies, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands *
With contributions from some of the most original and insightful historians of the Soviet Union, this volume demonstrates how the cataclysmic changes unleashed by Stalin impacted the daily lives of ordinary Soviet citizens. It is a story of brutal transformations and heroic resilience. * Jeffrey Veidlinger, Professor of History and Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, USA. *

Author Bio

Kees Boterbloem is Professor of History at the University of South Florida, USA. He is the author of nine books on Russian, Soviet and World History, including A History of Russia and Its Empire (2nd edition, 2018), The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896-1948 (2004) and Life and Death under Stalin (1999). He was, from 2008 to 2018, editor of the journal The Historian.