"Under Stalin, the Soviet state used mass executions, forced deportations, and the Gulag prison system as tools to control the behavior of its citizens. However, while these activities were the most visible aspects of the regime's repression they were only one aspect of a larger experience of social control: the enforcement of social norms and the punishment of deviance from them. Such social control did not just come from above. Stalinist subjects themselves made legal claims based on their own interests, whether that meant suing for alimony, divorce, or damages, or initiating criminal cases on their own behalf. This volume assembles the latest research on a wide range of actors in the Stalinist system and the variety of ways of policing social and individual behavior. That includes essays on the Gulag and mass terror, but also juvenile delinquency, housing and property disputes, abortion, and alimony. The editors draw this together through the concept of "social control," which they draw from the scholarly literature in sociology and criminology. They have outlined a framework which should make the book useful to a wide range of Soviet and post-Soviet historians as well as scholars researching legal, sociological, and political aspects of modern authoritarian regimes."--

How did the Soviet Union control the behaviour of its people? How did the people themselves engage with the official rules and the threat of violence in their lives? In this book, the contributors examine how social control developed under Stalin and Khrushchev. Drawing on deep archival research from across the former Soviet Union, they analyse the wide network of state institutions that were used for regulating individual behaviour and how Soviet citizens interacted with them. Together they show that social control in the Soviet Union was not entirely about the monolithic state imposing its vision with violent force. Instead, a wide range of institutions such as the police, the justice system, and party-sponsored structures in factories and farms tried to enforce control. The book highlights how the state leadership itself adjusted its policing strategies and moved away from mass repression towards legal pressure for policing society. Ultimately, Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev explores how the Soviet state controlled the behaviour of its citizens and how the people relied on these structures.

Between Stalin's death in 1953 and 1960, the government of the Soviet Union released hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag as part of a wide-ranging effort to reverse the worst excesses and abuses of the previous two decades and revive the spirit of the revolution. This exodus included not only victims of past purges but also those sentenced for criminal offenses. In Khrushchev's Cold Summer Miriam Dobson explores the impact of these returnees on communities and, more broadly, Soviet attempts to come to terms with the traumatic legacies of Stalin's terror. Confusion and disorientation undermined the regime's efforts at recovery. In the wake of Stalin's death, ordinary citizens and political leaders alike struggled to make sense of the country's recent bloody past and to cope with the complex social dynamics caused by attempts to reintegrate the large influx of returning prisoners, a number of whom were hardened criminals alienated and embittered by their experiences within the brutal camp system. Drawing on private letters as well as official reports on the party and popular mood, Dobson probes social attitudes toward the changes occurring in the first post-Stalin decade. Throughout, she features personal stories as articulated in the words of ordinary citizens, prisoners, and former prisoners. At the same time, she explores Soviet society's contradictory responses to the returnees and shows that for many the immediate post-Stalin years were anything but a breath of spring air after the long Stalinist winter.

Tells the life story of twentieth-century Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, featuring information from previously inaccessible Russian and Ukrainian archives.

This fascinating and deeply researched book examines how, beginning under Khrushchev in 1953, a generation of Soviet citizens moved from the overcrowded communal dwellings of the Stalin era to modern single-family apartments, later dubbed khrushchevka. Arguing that moving to a separate apartment allowed ordinary urban dwellers to experience Khrushchev’s thaw, Steven E. Harris fundamentally shifts interpretation of the thaw, conventionally understood as an elite phenomenon. Harris focuses on the many participants eager to benefit from and influence the new way of life embodied by the khrushchevka, its furniture, and its associated consumer goods. He examines activities of national and local politicians, planners, enterprise managers, workers, furniture designers and architects, elite organizations (centrally involved in creating cooperative housing), and ordinary urban dwellers. Communism on Tomorrow Street also demonstrates the relationship of Soviet mass housing and urban planning to international efforts at resolving the “housing question” that had been studied since the nineteenth century and led to housing developments in Western Europe, the United States, and Latin America as well as the USSR.

This book examines, through a detailed study of Soviet residential childcare homes and boarding schools, the much wider issues of Soviet policies towards deviance, social norms, repression, and social control. It reveals how through targeting children whose parents could not or did not take care of them, as well as children with disabilities, the system disproportionately involved children from socially marginal and poor families. It highlights how the system aimed to raise these children from the margins of society and transform them into healthy, happy, useful Soviet citizens, imbued with socialist values. The book also outlines how the system fitted in to Khrushchev’s reforms and social order policies, where the emphasis was on monitoring and controlling society without the recourse to direct repression and terror, and how continuity with this period was maintained even as the rest of Soviet society changed significantly.

From 1929 to 1958, hundreds of thousands of prisoners and exiles from across the Soviet Union were sent to the harsh yet resource-rich Komi Republic in Russia's Far North. When the Soviet Union collapsed, former prisoners sent their autobiographies to Komi's local branches of the anti-Stalinist Memorial Society and history museums. Using these previously unavailable personal records, alongside newspapers, photographs, interviews, and other non-state archival sources, After the Gulag sheds new light not only on how former prisoners experienced life after release but also how they laid the foundations for the future commemoration of Komi's dark past. Bound by a "camp brotherhood," they used informal social networks to provide mutual support amid state and societal oppression. Decades later, they sought rehabilitation with the help of the newly formed Memorial Society—the civic organization largely responsible for the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union. In sharing their life stories and family archives with Memorial, they sustained an alternate history of the Soviet Union. Offering an unprecedented look at the legacies of mass repression under Stalin, After the Gulag explores how ordinary political prisoners from across the Soviet Union navigated life after release, using memoirs, letters, and art to translate their experiences and shape the politics of memory in post-Soviet Russia.

The Soviet Colossus revisits the turning points in Russia’s modern history, from the fall of the tsarist regime to the establishment of the Bolshevik dictatorship and Stalinist totalitarianism; the reforms and counter-reforms of Khrushchev and Brezhnev to the reform program of Mikhail Gorbachev and the resultant collapse of the Soviet Union; and from the effort to build a democratic and free-market Russia under Boris Yeltsin to the political authoritarianism and the establishment of a state capitalist economy under Vladimir Putin. This eighth edition has been revised and updated to cover the latest developments from the Putin administration. These revisions include added emphasis on the increasing authoritarian nature of Russia’s political system, the serious challenges posed by the country’s unsolved economic and social problems, and the growing tensions between Russia on the one hand and the United States and the European Union on the other as a result of Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine. Kort combines this updated account with a broad exploration of Russia’s political history, examining how the Soviet past has been woven into the fabric of the modern Russian state, a state which plays such a major, assertive role in global affairs, but which simultaneously remains an allusive, secretive entity. With Russia’s increasing influence on the global stage and the controversies that often accompany this, The Soviet Colossus is an invaluable resource for students of history, politics, and international relations.

What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.