Everyday Soviet Utopias

Everyday Soviet Utopias PDF Author: Anna Alekseyeva
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351019767
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
This book explores how intellectuals of the later Soviet decades – the 1970s and 1980s – sought to bring about the socialist utopian world. It argues that the last two decades of the Soviet Union were not characterised by state withdrawal and malaise, as some scholars have argued; attempts to envisage and enact Utopia remained as imaginative and creative as ever. The book considers what these utopian ideas looked like through housing schemes, layouts of districts and cities, design of objects and interiors, and proposals for the organisation of family and social life. Relating developments in the Soviet Union to evolving social theory and postmodernism more broadly, the book draws transnational parallels between the intellectual history of east and west in the late twentieth century.

Everyday Soviet Utopias

Everyday Soviet Utopias PDF Author: Anna Alekseyeva
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351019767
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores how intellectuals of the later Soviet decades – the 1970s and 1980s – sought to bring about the socialist utopian world. It argues that the last two decades of the Soviet Union were not characterised by state withdrawal and malaise, as some scholars have argued; attempts to envisage and enact Utopia remained as imaginative and creative as ever. The book considers what these utopian ideas looked like through housing schemes, layouts of districts and cities, design of objects and interiors, and proposals for the organisation of family and social life. Relating developments in the Soviet Union to evolving social theory and postmodernism more broadly, the book draws transnational parallels between the intellectual history of east and west in the late twentieth century.

Petrified Utopia

Petrified Utopia PDF Author: Marina Balina
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 0857283901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Taken together, these essays redefine the preconceived notion of Soviet happiness as the product of official ideology imposed from above and expressed predominantly through collective experience, and provide evidence that the formation of the concept of individual happiness was not contained by the limitations of important state projects, controlled by state policies and aimed toward the creation of a new society.

Everyday Utopia

Everyday Utopia PDF Author: Kristen R. Ghodsee
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 198219023X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A dazzling tour through 2,000 years of audacious utopian thinking and experiments, exploring better ways to arrange our daily lives, plus a globetrotting jaunt to the communities already putting these seemingly fanciful visions into practice today. In the 6th century BCE, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras—a man remembered today more for his theorem about right-angled triangles than for his progressive politics—founded a commune in a seaside village in what’s now southern Italy. The men and women there shared their property, lived as equals, and dedicated themselves to the study of mathematics and the mysteries of the universe. Ever since, humans have been dreaming up better ways to organize how we live together, share our property, raise our children, and determine who’s part of our families. Some of these experiments burned brightly for only a brief while—but others carry on today. In Everyday Utopia, fascinatingly feminist thinker Kristen R. Ghodsee whisks you away on a tour through history and around the world to explore those places that have boldly dared to reimagine how we might live our daily lives: from the Danish cohousing communities that share chores and deepen neighborly bonds to matriarchal Colombian ecovillages where residents grow all their own food; and from Connecticut, where new laws make it easier for extra “alloparents” to help raise children not their own, to China, where planned microdistricts ensure everything a busy household might need is nearby. One of those startlingly rare books that upends what you think is possible, Everyday Utopia offers a radically hopeful vision for how to build more contented and connected societies, alongside a practical guide to what we all can do in the meantime to live the good life each and every day.

The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia

The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia PDF Author: Mikhail Suslov
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 178831705X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
More than 700 'utopian' novels are published in Russia every year. These utopias – meaning here fantasy fiction, science fiction, space operas or alternative history – do not set out merely to titillate; instead they express very real Russian anxieties: be they territorial right-sizing, loss of imperial status or turning into a 'colony' of the West. Contributors to this innovative collection use these narratives to re-examine post-Soviet Russian political culture and identity. Interrogating the intersections of politics, ideologies and fantasies, chapters draw together the highbrow literary mainstream (authors such as Vladimir Sorokin), mass literature for entertainment and individuals who bridge the gap between fiction writers and intellectuals or ideologists (Aleksandr Prokhanov, for example, the editor-in-chief of Russia's far-right newspaper Zavtra). In the process The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia sheds crucial light onto a variety of debates – including the rise of nationalism, right-wing populism, imperial revanchism, the complicated presence of religion in the public sphere, the function of language – and is important reading for anyone interested in the heightened importance of ideas, myths, alternative histories and conspiracy theories in Russia today.

Soviet Women – Everyday Lives

Soviet Women – Everyday Lives PDF Author: Melanie Ilic
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000033902
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Based on an extensive reading of a broad range of women’s accounts of their lives in the Soviet Union, this book focuses on many hidden aspects of Soviet women’s everyday lives, thereby revealing a great deal about how the Soviet Union operated on a day-to-day basis and about the place of the individual within it. Including testimony from both celebrated literary and cultural figures and from many ordinary people, and from both enthusiastic supporters of the regime and dissidents, the book considers women’s daily routines, attitudes and behaviours. It highlights some of the hidden inequalities of an ostensibly egalitarian society, and considers many wider questions, including how extensive was the ‘reach’ of the Soviet regime; how ‘modern’ was it; how far were there continuities after 1917 between the new Bolshevik regime and Russia’s imperial past; and how homogenous and how mobile was Soviet society?

Utopia in Power

Utopia in Power PDF Author: Mikhail Geller
Publisher: New York : Summit Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 888

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Book Description


Assignment in Utopia

Assignment in Utopia PDF Author: Eugene Lyons
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412817608
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 696

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Book Description
This is a story of belief, disillusionment and atonement. Long identified with leftist causes, the journalist Eugene Lyons was by background and sentiment predisposed to early support of the Russian Revolution. A "friendly correspondent," he was one of a coterie of foreign journalists permitted into the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era because their desire to serve the revolution was thought to outweigh their desire to serve the truth. Lyons first went to the Soviet Union in 1927, and spent six years there. He was there as Stalin consolidated his power, through collectivization and its consequences, as the cultural and technical intelligentsia succumbed to the secret police, and as the mechanisms of terror were honed. As Ellen Frankel Paul notes in her major new introduction to this edition, "It was this murderous reality that Stalin's censors worked so assiduously to camouflage, corralling foreign correspondents as their often willing allies." Lyons was one of those allies. Assignment in "Utopia "describes why he refused to see the obvious, the forces that kept him from writing the truth, and the tortuous path he traveled in liberating himself. His story helps us understand how so many who were in a position to know were so silent for so long. In addition, it is a document, by an on-the-scene journalist, of major events in the critical period of the first Five-Year Plan. As Ellen Frankel Paul notes in her major new introduction to this new edition, Assignment in "Utopia "is particularly timely. The system it dissects in such devastating detail is in the process of being rejected throughout Eastern Europe and is under challenge in the Soviet Union itself. The book lends insight into the "political pilgrim" phenomenon described by Paul Hollander, in which visitors celebrate terrorist regimes, seemingly oblivious to their destructive force. The book is valuable for those interested in the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union, those interested in radical regimes and political change, as well as those interested in better understanding current events in Europe. It will also be useful for the tough questions it poses about journalistic ethics.

Utopia

Utopia PDF Author: David Ayers
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110433001
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Utopian hope and dystopian despair are characteristic features of modernism and the avant-garde. Readings of the avant-garde have frequently sought to identify utopian moments coded in its works and activities as optimistic signs of a possible future social life, or as the attempt to preserve hope against the closure of an emergent dystopian present. The fourth volume of the EAM series, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, casts light on the history, theory and actuality of the utopian and dystopian strands which run through European modernism and the avant-garde from the late 19th to the 21st century. The book’s varied and carefully selected contributions, written by experts from around 20 countries, seek to answer such questions as: · how have modernism and the avant-garde responded to historical circumstance in mapping the form of possible futures for humanity? · how have avant-garde and modernist works presented ideals of living as alternatives to the present? · how have avant-gardists acted with or against the state to remodel human life or to resist the instrumental reduction of life by administration and industrialisation?

Russian Utopia

Russian Utopia PDF Author: Mark D. Steinberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350127234
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
List of Figures -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Wings of Utopia -- 2. The New Person -- 3. The New City -- 4. The New State -- Selected Further Reading -- Index.

The Soviet Union and Global Environmental Change

The Soviet Union and Global Environmental Change PDF Author: Jonathan D. Oldfield
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000393348
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
This book argues that the Soviet Union was a highly influential actor in furthering understandings of society-nature interaction on the international stage and played a key role in helping to shape, conceptualize and assess the relationship between humankind and the Earth system. It considers how humankind’s capacity to affect physical and biological systems at a global scale was acknowledged and studied by Soviet scientists, discusses how the interaction between Soviet and Western scientists stimulated the development of new technologies and insights, which simultaneously facilitated a more profound understanding of the Earth’s physical and biological systems, and explores how Soviet scientists drew upon pre-revolutionary intellectual traditions in order to make sense of society-nature interaction and did so in collaboration with a range of international initiatives. Overall, the book provides a deep analysis of how Soviet scientists conceptualized society-nature interaction and influenced the understanding of global physical and biological systems. Furthermore, it is argued that this intellectual legacy remains of importance today with respect to the activities of Russian science and contemporary global environmental challenges.