Oxford University Press, USA
Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization
Key Metrics
- Sheila Fitzpatrick
- Oxford University Press, USA
- Paperback
- 9780195104592
- 9.27 X 6.13 X 1.1 inches
- 1.27 pounds
- History > Russia & the Former Soviet Union
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Stalin's Peasants is a story of struggle between transformationally-minded Communists and traditionally-minded peasants over the terms of collectivization--a struggle of opposing practices, not a struggle in which either side clearly articulated its position. But it is also a story about the impact of collectivization on the internal social relations and culture of the village, exploring questions of authority and leadership, feuds, denunciations, rumors, and changes in religious observance. For the first time, it is possible to see the real people behind the facade of the Potemkin village created by Soviet propagandists. In the Potemkin village, happy peasants clustered around a kolkhoz (collective farm) tractor, praising Stalin and promising to produce more grain as a patriotic duty. In the real Russian village of the 1930s, as we learn from Soviet political police reports, sullen and hungry peasants described collectivization as a second serfdom, cursed all Communists, and blamed Stalin personally for their plight.
Sheila Fitzpatrick's work is truly a landmark in studies of the Stalinist period--a richly-documented social history told from the traumatic experiences of the long-suffering underclass of peasants. Anyone interested in Soviet and Russian history, peasant studies, or social history will appreciate this major contribution to our understanding of life in Stalin's Russia.
Author Bio
Sheila Fitzpatrick is Professor of History at the University of Sydney and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of the University of Chicago. Her books include Everyday Stalinism (2000), Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (2005), My Father’s Daughter (2010) and a memoir of Moscow in the 1960s, A Spy in the Archives (2013.
Her most recent monograph, On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, was published by Princeton University Press and Melbourne University Press in September 2015 and won the Prime Minister's Prize for Non-Fiction in Australia in 2016.
She is currently working on a project on displaced persons from the Soviet Union after the Second World War and the issue of repatriation. Her book on the experiences of Michael and Olga Danos as DPs in Germany is now finished and will be published as Mischka`s War: A European Odyssey of the 1940`s by Melbourne University Press and I.B.Tauris in London in July of this year.
Source: Central European University
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