No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
A Deceptive Stability: New Scholarship on Postwar Soviet Society
Review products
Mie Nakachi, Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021), 328 pp. (hbk), £28.99, ISBN: 9780190635138.
Marko Dumančić, Men Out of Focus: The Soviet Masculinity Crisis in the Long Sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 344 pp. (hbk), $79.00, ISBN: 9781487505257.
Juliane Fürst, Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 496 pp. (pbk), £22.99, ISBN: 9780192866066.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2023
Extract
In an essay written in 2013, Soviet historian Stephen Bittner called the wartime and post-1945 Soviet Union a ‘negentropic society’.1 Countering historians who emphasised the Soviet project's inevitable failure, Bittner argued that the Soviet Union defied the laws of thermodynamics in its capacity for reorganisation and regeneration, allowing it to survive in the face of multiple challenges. The essay was a rejoinder to those who would see harbingers of the Soviet collapse in the heterogeneous social tendencies of the postwar period. Instead, Bittner draws attention to the sources of cohesion that held the Soviet Union together through the challenges of wartime and beyond. However, Bittner intended his essay not as a general theory of post-war Soviet society, but as an observation about the integrative tendencies that kept the Soviet Union together during the Second World War and in the decades that immediately followed. So when did this alchemical potential for ‘self-organization, resilience, regeneration, redefinition, and creation of new social forms and structures’ come to an end?2
Information
- Type
- Review Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Bittner, Stephen V., ‘A Negentropic Society? Wartime and Postwar Soviet History’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 14, 3 (2013), 599–619CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Ibid., 602.
3 Nakachi, , Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021) 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Nakachi, Replacing the Dead, 182–183, 209–210; Jessica Lovett, ‘“The Fate of the Nation”: Population Politics in a Changing Soviet Union (1964–1991)’, Nationalities Papers, online first (10 June 2022).
5 Lovett, ‘Fate of the Nation’.
6 On new forms of spatiality and embodiment, see Oukaderova, Lida, The Cinema of the Soviet Thaw: Space, Materiality, Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bulgakowa, Oksana, ‘Cine-Weathers: Soviet Thaw Cinema in the International Context’, in Kozlov, Denis and Gilburd, Eleonory, eds., The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture During the 1950s and 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 436–81Google Scholar.
7 Nakachi, Replacing the Dead, 211–15.
8 Ghodsee, Kristen R., Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2018)Google Scholar; Valiavicharska, Zhivka, Restless History: Political Imaginaries and Their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria (Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 2021), 57–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
10 Ibid., 158–206.
11 For example, Schechter, Brandon, The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019)Google Scholar; Karpova, Yulia, Comradely Objects: Design and Material Culture in Soviet Russia, 1960s–1980s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021)Google Scholar.
12 For example, Hecht, Gabrielle, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 291–6.