Provincial Landscapes

Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917–1953

Donald J. Raleigh

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780822970613
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

The closed nature of the Soviet Union, combined with the WestÆs intellectual paradigm of Communist totalitarianism prior to the 1970s, have led to a one-dimensional view of Soviet history, both in Russia and the West. The opening of former Soviet archives allows historians to explore a broad array of critical issues at the local level. Provincial Landscapes is the first publication to begin filling this enormous gap in scholarship on the Soviet Union, pointing the way to additional work that will certainly force major reevaluations of the nationÆs history.Focusing on the years between the Revolution and StalinÆs death, the contributors to this volume address a variety of topics, including how political events and social engineering played themselves out at the local level; the construction of Bolshevik identities, including class, gender, ethnicity, and place; the Soviet cultural project; and the hybridization of Soviet cultural forms. In showing how the local is related to the larger society, the essays decenter standard narratives of Soviet history, enrich the understanding of major events and turning points in that history, and provide a context for the highly visible socio-political and cultural role individual Russian provinces began to play after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Rise and Fall of Smolensk’s Moderate Socialists:The Politics of Class and the Rhetoric of Crisis in 1917
• 2. Bolshevik Without the Party: Sychevka in 1917
• 3. Local Politics and the Struggle for Grain in Tambov, 1918-21
• 4. A Provincial Kronstadt: Popular Unrest in Saratov at the End of the Civil War
• 5. Local Science and Public Enlightenment: Iaroslavl Naturalists and the Soviet State, 1917–31
• 6. Hujum: Unveiling Campaigns and Local Responses in Uzbekistan, 1927
• 7. Grain Crisis or Famine? The Ukrainian State Commission for Aid to Crop-Failure Victims and the Ukrainian Famine of 1928–29
• 8. Popular Religion and Local Identity During the Stalin Revolution: Old Believers in the Urals, 1928–41
• 9. Modernity and Backwardness on the Soviet Frontier: Western Siberia in the 1930s
• 10. Mobilizing Medicine: Medical Cadres, State Power, and Center-Periphery Relations in Wartime Kazakhstan
• 11. “People Without a Definite Occupation”: The Illegal Economy and “Speculators” in Rostov-on-the-Don, 1943–48
• 12. Celebrating the Soviet Present: The Zhdanovshchina Campaign in Ukrainian Literature and the Arts
• 13. Local-Outsider Negotiations in Postwar Sevastopol’s Reconstruction, 1944–53.
• 14. At the Margins of Memory: Provincial Identity and Soviet Power in Oral Histories, 1940–53.
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index