Cornell University Press
The Cultural Front: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race
Key Metrics
- Sheila Fitzpatrick
- Cornell University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780801421969
- 9.25 X 6 X 0.9 inches
- 0.06 pounds
- History > Russia & the Former Soviet Union
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
When 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 Sheila Fitzpatrick brings together ten of her essays--two previously unpublished and all revised for inclusion here--which illuminate key arenas of the prolonged struggle over cultural values and institutional control. Individual essays deal with such major issues as the Cultural Revolution, the formation of the new Stalinist elite, and socialist realism, as well as recounting colorful episodes including the uproar over Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, arguments over sexual mores, and the new consumerism of the 1930s. Closely examining the cultural elites and orthodoxies that developed under Stalin, Fitzpatrick offers a provocative reinterpretation of the struggle's final outcome in which the intelligentsia, despite its loss of autonomy and the debasement of its culture, emerged as a partial victor.
The Cultural Front is essential reading for anyone interested in the formative history of the Soviet Union and the dynamic relationship between culture and politics.
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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