Description

Book Synopsis

Gleaning for Communism is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal scholars legislated a large modern state as a household, with guaranteed rights to a commons of socialist property, rather than private possessions. Starting with former Leningrad workers'' everyday stories about smuggling industrial scrap home over factory fences, Xenia Cherkaev traces collectivist ethical logic that was central to this socialist household economy, in theory and practice: from its Stalin-era inception, through Khrushchev''s major foregrounding of communist ethics, to Gorbachev''s perestroika, which unfurled its grounding tension between the interests of any given collective and of the socialist household economy itself.

A story of how the socialist household economy functioned, how it collapsed, and how it was remembered, this book is haunted throughout by a spectral image of the totalitarian state, whose jealous political control over the

Table of Contents

Introduction: Households and Historiographies
1. The "Soviet" Things of Postsocialism
2. Gleaning for the Common Good
3. Songs of Stalin and Khrushchev
4. Chuvstvo khoziaina: The Feeling of Being an Owner
Conclusion: Russian Socialism

Gleaning for Communism

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    A Hardback by Xenia A. Cherkaev

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      Book details

      Publisher Cornell University Press
      Published 15 July 2023
      ISBN-13 9781501770234
      978-1501770234
      ISBN-10 1501770233
      Also in:
      Social and cultural anthropology

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      Gleaning for Communism is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal scholars legislated a large modern state as a household, with guaranteed rights to a commons of socialist property, rather than private possessions. Starting with former Leningrad workers'' everyday stories about smuggling industrial scrap home over factory fences, Xenia Cherkaev traces collectivist ethical logic that was central to this socialist household economy, in theory and practice: from its Stalin-era inception, through Khrushchev''s major foregrounding of communist ethics, to Gorbachev''s perestroika, which unfurled its grounding tension between the interests of any given collective and of the socialist household economy itself.

      A story of how the socialist household economy functioned, how it collapsed, and how it was remembered, this book is haunted throughout by a spectral image of the totalitarian state, whose jealous political control over the

      Table of Contents

      Introduction: Households and Historiographies
      1. The "Soviet" Things of Postsocialism
      2. Gleaning for the Common Good
      3. Songs of Stalin and Khrushchev
      4. Chuvstvo khoziaina: The Feeling of Being an Owner
      Conclusion: Russian Socialism

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