Reviews Everyday life in rural Belarus. In the shadow of the last kolkhozes
A Taste for Oppression — A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus Ronan Hervouet: (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2021) 254 pages. (Original: Ronan Hervouet: Le Goût Des Tyrans. Une Ethnographie Politique Di Quotidien En Biélorussie (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2020) 281 pages
Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW:2023 1-2, 120-123
Published on balticworlds.com on June 20, 2023
How can a system that imposes several broad constraints produce acceptable or even desirable ways of life, and loyalty to the authoritarian regime? Ronan Hervouet is trying to find an answer to this conundrum in his book on everyday life in Belarus and he seems to succeed. He studies the countryside governed by collective farms, the kolkhozes.
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