Donald Raleigh's Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the fascinating life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation. For this book, Raleigh has interviewed sixty 1967 graduates of two "magnet" secondary schools that offered intensive instruction in English, one in Moscow and one in provincial Saratov. Part of the generation that began school the year the country launched Sputnik into space, they grew up during the Cold War, but in a Soviet Union increasingly distanced from the excesses of Stalinism. In this post-Stalin era, the Soviet leadership dismantled the Gulag, ruled without terror, promoted consumerism, and began to open itself to an outside world still fearful of Communism. Raleigh is one of the first scholars of post-1945 Soviet history to draw extensively on oral history, a particularly useful approach in studying a country where the boundaries between public and private life remained porous and the state sought to peer into every corner of people's lives. During and after the dissolution of the USSR, Russian citizens began openly talking about their past, trying to make sense of it, and Raleigh has made the most of this new forthrightness. He has created an extraordinarily rich composite narrative and embedded it in larger historical narratives of Cold War, de-Stalinization, "overtaking" America, opening up to the outside world, economic stagnation, dissent, emigration, the transition to a market economy, the transformation of class, ethnic, and gender relations, and globalization. Including rare photographs of daily life in Cold War Russia, Soviet Baby Boomers offers an intimate portrait of a generation that has remained largely faceless until now.

Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (Oxford Oral History Series)

History

Raleigh, Donald J.

Russia

Oxford University Press

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922

This book is the only comprehensive history of the total experience of the Russian Civil War. Focusing on the key Volga city of Saratov and the surrounding region, Donald Raleigh is the first historian to fully show how the experience of civil war embedded itself into both the people's and the state's outlook and behavior. He demonstrates how and why the programs and ideals that had propelled the Bolsheviks into power were so quickly lost and the repressive Soviet party-state was born.
Experiencing Russia's Civil War is based on exhaustive use of previously classified local and central archives. It is also bold and ambitious in its breadth of thematic coverage, dealing with all aspects of the war experience from institutional evolution and demographics to survival strategies. Complicating our understanding of this formative period, Raleigh provides compelling evidence that many features of the Soviet system that we associate with the Stalin era were already adumbrated and practiced by the early 1920s, as Bolshevism became closed to real alternatives. Raleigh interprets this as the consequence of a complex dynamic shaped by Russia's political tradition and culture, Bolshevik ideology, and dire political, economic, and military crises starting with World War I and strongly reinforced by the indelible, mythologized experience of survival in the Civil War.
Fluidly written, replete with new information, and always engaged with important questions, this is history finely wrought.

Princeton University Press

Europe

Book, Used Politics - History - Sociology - Current Events

Revolution on the Volga: 1917 In Saratov (Studies in Soviet History and Society)

Americas

Cornell Univ Pr

The closed nature of the Soviet Union, combined with the West’s intellectual paradigm of Communist totalitarianism prior to the 1970s, have led to a one-dimensional view of Soviet history, both in Russia and the West. The opening of former Soviet archives allows historians to explore a broad array of critical issues at the local level. Provincial Landscapes is the first publication to begin filling this enormous gap in scholarship on the Soviet Union, pointing the way to additional work that will certainly force major reevaluations of the nation’s history.Focusing on the years between the Revolution and Stalin’s death, the contributors to this volume address a variety of topics, including how political events and social engineering played themselves out at the local level; the construction of Bolshevik identities, including class, gender, ethnicity, and place; the Soviet cultural project; and the hybridization of Soviet cultural forms. In showing how the local is related to the larger society, the essays decenter standard narratives of Soviet history, enrich the understanding of major events and turning points in that history, and provide a context for the highly visible socio-political and cultural role individual Russian provinces began to play after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions Of Soviet Power 1917-1953 (Russian and East European Studies)

University of Pittsburgh Press

In Stalin's Shadow: Career of Sergo Ordzhonikidze (New Russian History)

In the voluminous secret history of the 1930s, one episode that still puzzles researchers is the death in 1937 of one of Stalin's key allies - his fellow Georgian, G.K. Ordzhonikidze. Whether he took his own life or, like Kirov, was murdered, the case of Ordzhonikidze intersects several long-debated problems in Soviet political history. What role did Politburo members play in decision making during the Stalin era? What formed the basis of Stalin's alliances? Were there conflicts between Stalin and his comrades and, if so, how far did they go? Was there in fact opposition to Stalin? These and other questions are addressed by one of Russia's best young historians whose pioneering work in previously closed party and government archives is refining our understanding of the political history of the Stalin era.

In Stalin's Shadow: Career of Sergo Ordzhonikidze (New Russian History) (The New Russian History)

Khlevniuk, Oleg V.

Nordlander, David J. V.

Routledge

Since glasnost began, Russia's most eminent historians have taken advantage of new archival access and the end of censorship and conformity to reassess and reinterpret their history. Through this process they are linking up with Russia's great historiographic tradition while producing work that is fresh and modern. In "The Emperors and Empresses of Russia", renowned Russian historians tell the story of the Romanovs as complex individual personalities and as key institutional actors in Russian history, from the empire builder Peter I to the last tsar, Nicholas II. These portraits are contributions to the writing of history, partaking neither of wooden ideologisation nor of naive romanticisation.

The Emperors and Empresses of Russia: Reconsidering the Romanovs (New Russian History)

Iskenderov, A.A.

Since glasnost began, Russia's most eminent historians have taken advantage of new archival access and the end of censorship and conformity to reassess and reinterpret their history. Through this process they are linking up with Russia's great historiographic tradition while producing work that is fresh and modern. In "The Emperors and Empresses of Russia", renowned Russian historians tell the story of the Romanovs as complex individual personalities and as key institutional actors in Russian history, from the empire builder Peter I to the last tsar, Nicholas II. These portraits are contributions to the writing of history, partaking neither of wooden ideologisation nor of naive romanticisation.

The Emperors and Empresses of Russia (The New Russian History)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Raleigh, Donald J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Raleigh, Donald J.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Raleigh, Donald J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (Oxford Oral History Series)

Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (Oxford Oral History Series)

Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922

Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922

Revolution on the Volga: 1917 In Saratov (Studies in Soviet History and Society)

Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions Of Soviet Power 1917-1953 (Russian and East European Studies)

In Stalin's Shadow: Career of Sergo Ordzhonikidze (New Russian History) (The New Russian History)

The Emperors and Empresses of Russia: Reconsidering the Romanovs (New Russian History)

The Emperors and Empresses of Russia (The New Russian History)