Description
Book SynopsisWhen Lenin asked, Who will beat whom? (Kto kogo?), he had no plan to wage revolutionary class war in culture. Many young Communists thought differently, however. Seeking in the name of the proletariat to wrest cultural hegemony from the intelligentsia, they turned culture into a battlefield in the 1920s. But was this, as Communist militants thought, a genuine class struggle between proletarian Communists and the bourgeois intelligentsia? Or was it, as the intelligentsia believed, an onslaught by the ruling Communist Party on the eternal principles of cultural autonomy and intellectual freedom?
In this volume, one of the foremost historians of the Soviet Union chronicles the fierce battle on the cultural front from the October Revolution through the Stalinist 1930s. Sheila Fitzpatrick brings together ten of her essaystwo previously unpublished and all revised for inclusion herewhich illuminate key arenas of the prolonged struggle over cultural values and institutional co
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"Fitzpatrick is a giant in the field whose work has added excitement to and deepened our understanding of Soviet history in the critical decades before World War II. Historians are taking a fresh look at this period and at the subject Fitzpatrick so ably interrogates in this volume: the relationship between the authorities and the intelligentsia." -- Donald J. Raleigh
"Sheila Fitzpatrick has established herself as one of a small number of prominent historians of the first two decades of Soviet history who have changed the way students of the Soviet Union look at politics, society, and culture. Fitzpatrick's work certainly deserves the attention, respect, and scrutiny of the broader historical community, and this collection will be an indispensable guide to her understanding of Soviet history." -- Mark von Hagen
