Description
Book SynopsisGleaning 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
