Stalinism

6 articles tagged with stalinism were found.

Targeting Ukrainians that praise the armed resistance to USSR. Putin’s authoritarian turn justified by the past

The Future of the Soviet Past: The Politics of History in Putin’s Russia Anton Weiss-Wendt & Nanci Adler, eds., Bloomington, Indiana University Press 2021. 258 pages.

By David Gaunt June 22, 2022

Shara Zhienkulova as the “femina Sovietica”. Emanicipation in Stalinist Kazakhstan

This article explores the potential of the Kazakh “model woman” narrative in the context of the socio-cultural perspectives of Stalinism in traditional oriental societies. In her well-written memoirs, Shara Zhienkulova, founder of the Kazakh dance school, reconstructs personal accounts of the Bolshevik cultural modernization project, through the introduction of new cultural practices and her own hard-won battle for a place in the new Soviet culture. We argue here that while her body served the regime as a kinesthetic mediator for the projected ideological imperatives to be oriented on European style – in the Soviet manner – her soul and mind remained (as containers of personal and ethnic memory) ethnic Kazakh in nature. Through her memoirs Shara Zhienkulova intended to leave not only a name but also a voice in the Kazakh culture, recounting the inner world and thoughts of subaltern women.

By Didar Kassymova and Elmira Teleuova April 22, 2021

Revolutionary Synchrony: A Day of the World

A Day of the World (Den’ mira) was a documentary volume, published in 1937, that was intended to provide a snapshot of the entire globe on a single day, September 27, 1935. The tensions within and around A Day of the World capture some of the basic contradictions in socialist realism, the official aesthetic method of Soviet art: between publicity and intimacy and between the dream of synchronous, global revolution and the aberrant temporalities of individual experience.

By Robert Bird November 10, 2017

SILENCE AND SURVEILLANCE a history of culture and communication

The history and sociology of the telephone in Russian society have only slowly become the object of serious study. The scope of this essay is limited to the following two topics: first, the forms of use, in pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union, of the telephone as a means of communication, potentially universally available and “horizontal” but actually restricted by “vertical” forces; and second, the symbolism that accumulated around this means of communication in Russian and Soviet culture.

By Lars Kleberg April 10, 2012

On the road towards a “European culture of memory”? Coming to grips with Stalinism

+ Julia Obertreis & Anke Stephen (eds.) Erinnerungen nach der Wende: Oral History und (post)sozialistische Gesellschaften, Essen: Klartext Verlag 2009, 401 pages.

By Kristian Gerner March 24, 2010

The Cybernetics Scare and the Origins of the Internet

Cybernetics was created in the Soviet Union in the ’50s; it celebrated technical progress as the future of mankind. Cybernetics proceeded from the encounter between human and machine.

Essay by Slava Gerovitch February 11, 2010