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Everyday Life Under Communism: Practices and Objects*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Larissa Zakharova
Larissa Zakharova*
Affiliation:
Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen, EHESS
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Why should we consider the everyday life of ordinary citizens in their countless struggles to obtain basic consumer goods if the priorities of their leaders lay elsewhere? For years, specialists of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies neglected the history of everyday life and, like the so-called “totalitarian” school, focused on political history, seeking to grasp how power was wielded over a society that was considered immobile and subject to the state's authority. Furthermore, studies on the eastern part of Europe were dominated by political scientists who were interested in the geopolitics of the Cold War. The way the field was structured meant that little attention was paid to sociological and anthropological perspectives that sought to understand social interaction.

Type
Everyday Life Under Communism
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 207 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2013

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Antonela Capelle-Pogăcean, Grégory Dufaud, and Nadège Ragaru for their comments and suggestions.

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