Product Description

Here is a pioneeering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by one of our foremost authorities on modern Russain history. Focusing on urban areas in the 1930's, Sheila Fitzpatrick shows that with the adoption of collectivisation and the first Five Year Plan, everyday life was utterly transformed. with the abolition of the market, shortages of food, clothing, and all kinds of consumer goods became endemic. As peasants fled the collectivised villages, major cities were soon in the grip of a major housing crisis, with families jammed for decades into tiny single rooms in communal appartments, counting living space in square metres. It was a world of overcrowding, privation, endless queues, and broken families, in which the regime's promise of future socialist abundance rand hollowly. We read of a government bureaucracy that often turned everyday life into a nightmare, and of the ways that ordinary citizens tried to circumvent it, primarily by patronage and the ubiquitous system of personal connections known as "blat". And we read of the police surveillance that was endemic to this society, and the waves of terror like the Great Purges of 1937, that periodically cast this world into turmoil. Fitzpatrick illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shoppping, travelling, telling jokes, finding an apartment, getting an education, cultivating patrons and connections, marrying and raising a family, writing complaints and denunciations, voting, and trying to steer clear of the secret police. Based on extensive research in the Soviet archives only recently opened to historians, this superb book illuminates the ways ordinary people tried to live normal lives under extraordinary circumstances.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #151259 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

About the Author
Sheila Fitzpatrick is Bernadotte E. Schmidt Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago. A past President (1997) of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic studies, and co-editor of "The Journal of Modern History", she is the author of "The Russian Revolution", "Stalin's Peasants", and many other books and articles about Russia. She lives in Chicago and Washington, DC.

Customer Reviews

Valuable and readable.
Subtitled "Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times" this book is not a narrative political history of Stalin. Rather it offers a more complex viewpoint, convincingly offering a portrait of urban dwellers (Fitzpatrick has separately written on "Stalin's Peasants")and a broader power structure. In so doing it manages to question our modern imposed perceptions of "the state" and conventional hierarchies. Both interesting and informative, this book deserves to be read as it provides valuable insight into the reality of the bizarre world of life in 1930's soviet russia.

Interesting stuff, but not a light summer read.
If you want to learn about Joseph Stalin, try something else. Surprisingly, Stalin is reduced to a bit player in this book; the real players here are the bureaucrats staking out their territory and enforcing their small visions of the ideal Soviet society, and ordinary citizens denouncing other citizens for the smallest of gains. Changes resulting from the occasional fiat from on high - although almost never from Stalin himself, who protected his cult of personality by speaking only in the most general of terms - are examined, but the real meat is the lasting damage done by peers and government lackies.

Everyday life and the state under Stalin
Sheila Fitzpatrick, specialist in the Stalin period of the USSR, has written a counterpart to her history of peasants and their lives in this era (Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization). Here, in "Everyday Stalinism", she chronicles the urban experience of life under Stalin during the 1930s, with all its paranoia, hardship and oddities.

The book is focused in particular on the relationship of daily life and the state, with relatively little attention for cultural history. However, making much use of the Harvard Project interviews with Soviet citizens from this period, she offers a compelling and fascinating view into the attitude of Soviet citizens towards the state, towards Stalin, and towards each other. Much more than just a tale of survival under threat of secret police, Fitzpatrick shows how people got by in terms of getting consumer goods, getting ahead, and getting even. Of course the Great Purges are given due attention, but what is particularly interesting is that in this book we see those events, as well as the earlier show trials, from the bottom up: not the political history of Stalin eliminating his enemies, but a struggle for power between the Party elites (largely received with disinterest by the general populace), and subsequently a series of rapid repressive maneouvres that descend onto the unsuspecting middle level.

Fitzpatrick pays excellent attention also to social policy and what effect this had on women, social and ethnic minorities, and so on. The USSR as an "affirmative action empire" has been well chronicled: The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Wilder House Series in Politics, History & Culture). Nevertheless, Fitzpatrick's overview is clear and cogent, and we get also get a good idea of the immense advances in literacy, cultural knowledge and general outlook that were made in roughly the period 1927-1937. Whereas in 1926 only 57% of those aged between 9 and 49 were literate, in 1939 81% of the whole population was literate. Similarly, the entire mass of the population learned basic culture such as appreciating poetry, washing regularly, using soap and towels, not leaving cigarette butts everywhere and not spitting on the floor, etc.

Striking is the amount of critical letters and appeals that people kept sending to Party and Politburo leaders in the (often, but not always vain) hope of redress of grievances or changes in policy. This was already a set tradition dating back to Czarist times, but was maintained during the Revolution and post-Revolutionary period in the form of public debate in leftist papers and letters to Lenin (see Voices of Revolution, 1917). This gives us a good indication however of the public opinion in the Stalinist days, to which Fitzpatrick usefully adds the NKVD reports of overheard conversations and the like. This surprisingly indicates that skepticism towards Stalin himself as well as the general system was reasonably widespread, despite the "cult of the personality".

Overall, this is a well written and interesting history of urban life in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. It must be emphasized though (as this is not directly apparent from the book description) that it only deals with urban life, and only the 1930s. Neither WWII nor the post-War Stalinist period is discussed.