Publisher's Synopsis
The closed nature of the Soviet Union, combined with the West's intellectual paradigm of Communist totalitarianism prior to the 1970s, have led to a one-dimensional view of Soviet history, both in Russia and the West. The recent opening of former Soviet archives allowed historians to explore a broad array of critical issues at the local level. Provincial Landscapes is one of the first publications to begin filling this enormous gap in scholarship on the Soviet Union, pointing the way to additional work that will certainly force major reevaluations of the nation's history. Focusing on the years between the Revolution and Stalin's death, the contributors to this volume address a variety of topics, including how political events and social engineering played themselves out at the local level; the construction of Bolshevik identities, including class, gender, ethnicity, and place; the Soviet cultural project; and the hybridization of Soviet cultural forms. In showing how the local is related to the larger society, the essays decenter standard narratives of Soviet history, enrich the understanding of major events and turning points in that history, and provide a context for the highly visible sociopolitical and cultural roles individual Russian provinces began to play after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
