Description
Book SynopsisSoviet official culture underwent a dramatic shift in the mid-1930s, when Stalin and his fellow leaders began to promote conventional norms, patriarchal families, tsarist heroes, and Russian literary classics. For Leon Trotsky—and many later...
Trade ReviewHoffmann... argues that campaigns for literacy, sobriety, personal hygiene and 'cultured speech' helped promote an aspect of social transformation that coexisted with the forced labor camps and mayhem. Drawing on original archival research, he documents a less well-known movement that involved reproduction incentives in the face of plummeting birth rates during the 1930s, which ironically coincided with earlier efforts for sexual abstinence to preserve 'energy for socially productive work.'
* Library Journal *
Using a variety of sources, including the Russian archives, the author has written a brilliant description of Stalinist values and proved that Stalin was an ideologue to the end. He shows that the ideology failed precisely because it was an ideology—out of touch with reality and people. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
* Choice *
Hoffmann provides a new cultural framework for understanding Soviet history during the interwar period.... Hoffmann argues that the Stalinist state neither 'betrayed' the socialist revolutionary nor 'retreated' to traditional Russian mores. Instead he shows that the Stalinist order, like other European post-Enlightenment states, sought to catalogue, mobilize, and shape its citizens into ideal men and women. Defining modernity as the rise of the interventionist state and the birth of mass politics, Hoffmann details the various ways that the Soviet state tried to enlighten and transform human nature in their quest to create an ideal socialist order.... This book will force us to think about the wider international implications of Stalinism. The writing is a model of clarity, and the text can be used at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.
-- Choi Chatterjee * American Historical Review *
