The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-19-536690-7
Verlag: OUP USA

Buch, Englisch, 480 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 587 g

Using a source-based approach, The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century is the first text designed to help students, general readers, and scholars understand how people constructed Communist ways of life around the world. Taking a global approach, it extends beyond Russia and Eastern Europe to examine the lives of people in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Algeria, Peru, Cuba, and elsewhere. The book provides an inside look at the Communist experience, where people were--sometimes simultaneously so--enthusiasts, reshapers, resisters, and victims of an ideological project that was (and, for some, still is) both humanity's darkest nightmare and brightest hope. Since the collapse of Communist regimes beginning in 1989, vital questions--about how people subjectively experienced Communism, helped to shape it, and constructed an idea of "self" in such restrictive environments--have not lost their political significance. In fact, just the opposite holds true. The opening of many formerly closed Communist archives has given scholars the opportunity to research the political significance that the construction of the self had across Communist regimes, polities, and movements. Incorporating the latest scholarship, The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century includes previously unavailable documents, such as diaries and letters, which are now accessible as a result of the archival revolution. A photo essay, "Everyday Life and Everyday Things under Socialism, 1945-1989," uses visual evidence to explore everyday life across the Communist civilizations. A locator map at the beginning of each chapter identifies the places associated with each of the sources, and a chronology provides a comparative timeline for Communist and world history.

Zielgruppe

Undergraduate students in courses in 20th Century World History

Autoren/Hrsg.

Young, Glennys

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Ideologien Marxismus, Kommunismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
List of Maps
List of Illustrations
Chronology: Twentieth-Century World History and the History of Communism
1. Becoming a Communist
2. Children of the Revolutions
3. Varieties of Communist Subjects: Beyond the Ordinary
4. Ideology and Self-Fashioning
5. Contesting the Meaning of State Violence and Repression
6. Everyday Life I: Work
7. Everyday Life, II: Space
8. Everyday Life, III: Are We Having Fun Yet? Entertainment, Sports, and Travel
PHOTO ESSAY
9. Search for the Self and the Fall of Communism
10. Taking Stock: Reckoning with Communism's Pasts
Suggestions for Further Reading, and Additional Resources
Index
Thematic Table of Contents
Education
Document 1.1 Russia: Semen Kanatchikov (1879-1940) on his circuitous road to Marxism
Document 1.3 United States of America: Angelo Herndon (1913-1997) on his first exposure to Communism
Document 1.7 Latin America: Testimonies from members of Peru's Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso)
Document 2.1 Spain/USSR, Late 1930s: Letters by Spanish children evacuated during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) (Letters are addressed to family and friends in Spain, 1938)
Document 2.2 China, Late 1940s: An orphan of China's War with Japan tries to make sense of Communism
Document 2.3 Cambodia, 1975-1979: Childhood under the Khmer Rouge
Document 2.4 North Korea: A child and his aquarium during deportation to a concentration camp
Document 2.5 Havana, Early 1960s: Childhood in Castro's Cuba
Document 2.6 Peru: Testimony from a child conscripted by the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso)
Document 3.3 Kazakhstan, USSR: A Chinese student reflects on his role in the Soviet Union's virgin lands campaign in 1958
Document 4.1 USSR: The politics of self-presentation in the 1921 autobiography of a Communist Party member.
Document 4.2 St. Louis, 1948: A Communist Party cell puts <"White Chauvinism>" on trial in a Baptist Church
Document 4.5 Czechoslovakia, 1968: Students explain to workers and farmers why they are on strike, and why their strike is <"socialist>"
Document 4.6 China, 1966-76: Contesting the official meaning of China's <"Cultural Revolution>": Raeyang (1950- )
Document 5.1 USSR: A Soviet teenager (Nina Sergeevna Lugovskaya, 1918-1993) grapples with the meaning of violence in 1934 in Stalinist Russia
Document 5.4 China, 1989: Chinese writers on state violence before and after the massacre on Tiananmen Square
Figure 6.1 Cuban Poster. <"Let's do our job!,>" for campaign for literacy, ca. 1961
Document 6.1 Moscow, 1928: A Chinese student in the USSR grapples with Love, Sex, Labor, and the building of Socialism
Document 6.3 East Germany, June 17, 1953: Workers (and others!) against the <"workers' state>"
Document 6.5 Bratislava, June 1963: The <"Working People of Slovakia>" express their grievances to the President of Czechoslovakia and the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Antonin Novotný
Document 6.7 Leningrad/St. Petersburg, Early 1980s/Early 1990s/Early 2000s: Alexei Rybin (1960- ), the guitarist for the Soviet rock band Kino, on the meaning of work and other things
Document 7.1 Timi?oara, Romania: University students, <"Living Space,>" and everyday life after World War II
Document 7.2 Nowa Huta (<"New Steelworks>"), Poland: Building Socialism in Poland's new socialist town from a cultural perspective
Figure 8.1 Photograph of Sabira Kumushalieva (1917-2007)
Document 8.1 Kyrgystan: Sabira Kumushalieva (1917-2007) on becoming a star of the Kyrgyz Stage and screen
Document 8.2 A former Chinese student (Huang Jian, a.k.a. Yura Huanpin, 1927- ) in the USSR on what sports meant for his life and for socialism
Document 8.3 Seoul, Korea, 1950: Working as an actress for the North Korean communists
Document 8.6 USSR 1970s and 1980s: Inventing Soviet Rock 'n' roll
Discovering the Beatles: Vsevolod Gakkel of the Soviet Rock Band Akvarium
Document 9.1 Pola

Über Autor(innen)

Young, Glennys
Glennys Young is Associate Professor of History and International Studies and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at the University of Washington. She is the author of Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists in the Village (1997), which was awarded an Honorable Mention for the Hans Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.