Pattern for Soviet Youth


Book Description

Studies the Komosol, the Communist League of Youth, as the chief instrument of indoctrination and control of young people ages fourteen to twenty-five from 1918-1959.




Soviet Youth Culture


Book Description

Soviet youth behaviour and contemporary problems are discussed, including culture and pop music, gangs and drug addicts, delinquents and deviants, providing an insight into their life and attitudes, and an opportunity to understand youth problems in another society and the ways they are dealt with.




The Cambridge History of Communism


Book Description

The second volume of The Cambridge History of Communism explores the rise of Communist states and movements after World War II. Leading experts analyze archival sources from formerly Communist states to re-examine the limits to Moscow's control of its satellites; the de-Stalinization of 1956; Communist reform movements; the rise and fall of the Sino-Soviet alliance; the growth of Communism in Asia, Africa and Latin America; and the effects of the Sino-Soviet split on world Communism. Chapters explore the cultures of Communism in the United States, Western Europe and China, and the conflicts engendered by nationalism and the continued need for support from Moscow. With the danger of a new Cold War developing between former and current Communist states and the West, this account of the roots, development and dissolution of the socialist bloc is essential reading.




Youth in Revolutionary Russia


Book Description

What were the consequences if prerevolutionary and "bourgeois" culture and social relations could not be transformed into new socialist forms of behavior and belief?".




The Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1917-1932


Book Description

The study of Soviet youth has long lagged behind the comprehensive research conducted on Western European youth culture. In an era that saw the emergence of youth movements of all sorts across Europe, the Soviet Komsomol was the first state-sponsored youth organization, in the first communist country. Born out of an autonomous youth movement that emerged in 1917, the Komsomol eventually became the last link in a chain of Soviet socializing agencies which organized the young. Based on extensive archival research and building upon recent research on Soviet youth, this book broadens our understanding of the social and political dimension of Komsomol membership during the momentous period 1917–1932. It sheds light on the complicated interchange between ideology, policy and reality in the league's evolution, highlighting the important role ordinary members played. The transformation of the country shaped Komsomol members and their league's social identity, institutional structure and social psychology, and vice versa, the organization itself became a crucial force in the dramatic changes of that time. The book investigates the complex dialogue between the Communist Youth League and the regime, unravelling the intricate process that transformed the Komsomol into a mere institution for political socialization serving the regime's quest for social engineering and control.




Russian Nationalism, Foreign Policy and Identity Debates in Putin's Russia


Book Description

The contributors to this book discuss the new conjunctions that have emerged between foreign policy events and politicized expressions of Russian nationalism since 2005. The 2008 war with Georgia, as well as conflicts with Ukraine and other East European countries over the memory of the Soviet Union, and the Russian interpretation of the 2005 French riots have all contributed to reinforcing narratives of Russia as a fortress surrounded by aggressive forces, in the West and CIS. This narrative has found support not only in state structures, but also within the larger public. It has been especially salient for some nationalist youth movements, including both pro-Kremlin organizations, such as "Nashi," and extra-systemic groups, such as those of the skinheads. These various actors each have their own specific agendas; they employ different modes of public action, and receive unequal recognition from other segments of society. Yet many of them expose a reading of certain foreign policy events which is roughly similar to that of various state structures. These and related phenomena are analyzed, interpreted and contextualized in papers by Luke March, Igor Torbakov, Jussi Lassila, Marlène Laruelle, and Lukasz Jurczyszyn.




Young Heroes of the Soviet Union


Book Description

Can trauma be inherited? In this luminous memoir of identity, exile, ancestry, and reckoning, an American writer returns to Russia to face a family history that still haunts him. It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a cycle of estrangement that had endured for nearly a century. His search takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth. In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal grandfather--most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin--to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family. He returns to Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to revisit the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for, learning that the boundary between history and biography is often fragile and indistinct. And he visits his birthplace, Moscow, where his glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother dosed dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a living by selling black-market jazz and rock records. Finally, Halberstadt explores his own story: that of a fatherless immigrant who arrived in America, to a housing project in Queens, New York, as a ten-year-old boy struggling with identity, feelings of rootlessness, and a yearning for home. He comes to learn that he was merely the latest in a lineage of sons who grew up alone, separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family's formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens' lives.




Gendering Post-Soviet Space


Book Description

This volume combines approaches from three disciplines – economics, sociology, and demography – and empirically analyzes the key aspects of the labor market and social demography processes in post-Soviet transitional societies while focusing on the gender perspective. Here, readers will find empirical studies on such countries as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. The volume contributes to the literature by addressing the lack of academic empirical research on gender difference issues in the labor markets of post-Soviet countries as well as gender inequalities in fertility preferences, gender disparities among the youth and elderly, the gender pay gap, gender differences in employment, and female voices. The book brings together researchers of different disciplines from a variety of countries, distinguishing this project as international and interdisciplinary. The authors use the quantitative survey micro-data approach as well as the qualitative methods of interview data analysis to provide a comprehensive and detailed overview of the economic and social developments in the region regarding gender differences. The volume consists of three parts tackling the following topics: 1) gender differences and demography (family formation and fertility, youth and elderly employment); 2) gender differences and labor market (gender wage gap, motherhood wage penalty, gender differences among freelancers, and women in STEM science); and 3) gender differences, well-being, and gender equality attitudes (women’s voices, women’s collective actions, gender equality attitudes, and spending patterns of housewives).







Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc


Book Description

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc explores the rise of youth as consumers of popular culture and the globalization of popular music in Russia and Eastern Europe. This collection of essays challenges assumptions that Communist leaders and Western-influenced youth cultures were inimically hostile to one another. While initially banning Western cultural trends like jazz and rock-and-roll, Communist leaders accommodated elements of rock and pop music to develop their own socialist popular music. They promoted organized forms of leisure to turn young people away from excesses of style perceived to be Western. Popular song and officially sponsored rock and pop bands formed a socialist beat that young people listened and danced to. Young people attracted to the music and subcultures of the capitalist West still shared the values and behaviors of their peers in Communist youth organizations. Despite problems providing youth with consumer goods, leaders of Soviet bloc states fostered a socialist alternative to the modernity the capitalist West promised. Underground rock musicians thus shared assumptions about culture that Communist leaders had instilled. Still, competing with influences from the capitalist West had its limits. State-sponsored rock festivals and rock bands encouraged a spirit of rebellion among young people. Official perceptions of what constituted culture limited options for accommodating rock and pop music and Western youth cultures. Youth countercultures that originated in the capitalist West, like hippies and punks, challenged the legitimacy of Communist youth organizations and their sponsors. Government media and police organs wound up creating oppositional identities among youth gangs. Failing to provide enough Western cultural goods to provincial cities helped fuel resentment over the Soviet Union’s capital, Moscow, and encourage support for breakaway nationalist movements that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Despite the Cold War, in both the Soviet bloc and in the capitalist West, political elites responded to perceived threats posed by youth cultures and music in similar manners. Young people participated in a global youth culture while expressing their own local views of the world.