The Everyday and Private Life of a Communist Ruling Class: Greed and Creed discusses the history of everyday life under state socialism and the ways in which post-1945 modernity reached the shores of Soviet Bloc societies. This book explains state socialism’s failure to deliver on its promise to create a new type of modern civilization, an alternative to capitalism. Placing the practices of the class of salaried functionaries of the party-state in the focus, György Péteri demonstrates the decisive role of this class in bringing Western values and patterns of everyday to the cultures and societies of Eastern Europe. The empirical work presented covers areas like consumption and consumerism, mobility (the advent of mass automobilism) and leisure (hunting and vacationing). Based on the Hungarian experience, the author finds the communist avantgarde of the state-socialist project in the act of giving up the ambition to create a new (socialist) civilization already in the late 1950s, early 1960s. From the 1960s on, state socialism was no longer a rival of capitalism (the ‘highly developed West’) in terms of creating a competitive, alternative modernity in its everyday. Rather, Eastern Europe settles among other regions of the periphery or semi-periphery of capitalist development, reacting to, imitating and, in general, following the patterns of the highly developed capitalist center of the world system with some delay.

Drawing on previously inaccessible records, this book discusses love, sex, marriage, divorce, and child-rearing during Khrushchev's «thaw» of the 1950s and early 1960s. It analyses the Soviet government's attempts to supervise private life and enforce communist morality, and it describes the diverse ways in which people responded to official prescriptions. Written in a lively and accessible style, this book provides an innovative exploration of the interactions between Soviet ideology and everyday life.

The essays in this collection make up the first study of “dropping out” of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks. Under socialism, this phenomenon was little-known outside the socialist sphere. Only very recently has it been possible to reconstruct it through archival work, oral histories and memoirs. Such a diverse set of subcultures demands a multi-disciplinary approach: the essays in this volume are written by historians, anthropologists and scholars of literature, cultural and gender studies. The history of these movements not only shows us a side of state socialist life that was barely known in the west. It also sheds new light on the demise and eventual collapse of late socialism, and raises important questions about the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western subcultures.

Russians in Cold War Australia explores the time during the Cold War when Russian displaced persons, including former Soviet citizens, were amongst the hundreds of thousands of immigrants given assisted passage to Australia and other Western countries in the wake of the Second World War. With the Soviet Union and Australia as enemies, skepticism surrounding the immigrants’ avowed anti-communism introduced new hardships and challenges. This book examines Russian immigration to Australia in the late 1940s and 1950s, both through their own eyes and those of Australia's security service (ASIO), to whom all Russian speakers were persons of interest.

Provides new analysis of the spread of central banking beyond Western Europe and North America in the 1920s and 1930s.

This study explores the little-known history of the Hungarian Autonomous Region (HAR), a Soviet-style territorial autonomy that was granted in Romania on Stalin’s personal advice to the Hungarian Székely community in the summer of 1952. Since 1945, a complex mechanism of ethnic balance and power-sharing helped the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) to strengthen—with Soviet assistance—its political legitimacy among different national and social groups. The communist national policy followed an integrative approach toward most minority communities, with the relevant exception of Germans, who were declared collectively responsible for the German occupation and were denied political and even civil rights until 1948. The Hungarians of Transylvania were provided with full civil, political, cultural, and linguistic rights to encourage political integration. The ideological premises of the Hungarian Autonomous Region followed the Bolshevik pattern of territorial autonomy elaborated by Lenin and Stalin in the early 1920s. The Hungarians of Székely Land would become a “titular nationality” provided with extensive cultural rights. Yet, on the other hand, the Romanian central power used the region as an instrument of political and social integration for the Hungarian minority into the communist state. The management of ethnic conflicts increased the ability of the PCR to control the territory and, at the same time, provided the ruling party with a useful precedent for the far larger “nationalization” of the Romanian communist regime which, starting from the late 1950s, resulted in “ethnicized” communism, an aim achieved without making use of pre-war nationalist discourse. After the Hungarian revolution of 1956, repression affected a great number of Hungarian individuals accused of nationalism and irredentism. In 1960 the HAR also suffered territorial reshaping, its Hungarian-born political leadership being replaced by ethnic Romanian cadres. The decisive shift from a class dictatorship toward an ethnicized totalitarian regime was the product of the Gheorghiu-Dej era and, as such, it represented the logical outcome of a long-standing ideological fouling of Romanian communism and more traditional state-building ideologies.

For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.

How Soviet citizens in the 1920s and 1930s internalized Soviet ways of looking at the world and living their everyday lives.

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