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The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
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Abstract: For American sovietology the seventies represent a turning point. This is the moment when a second generation of social historians challenged the then-prevailing “totalitarian model” elaborated mainly by political scientists immediately after the Second World War, and started to use new keys in order to “unlock the mystery of Stalinism” . Undoubtedly, one of the most prominent of these new social historians is Chicago Universityʼs professor Sheila Fitzpatrick. Through her books and studies such as The Cultural Revolution in Russia 1928-1931, Indiana University Press (1978); Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921-1934, Cambridge University Press (1979); Stalinʼs Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization, Oxford University Press, 1994; Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford University Press, 1999; The Commissariat of Enlightenment. Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, 1917–1921. Oxford University Press, 1970 she proposed new patterns of understanding both old and new issues regarding Soviet (social) history. Her concerns as social historian regarding the evolution of the ordinary individualʼs universe inside the mighty machine set in motion by the first two supreme leaders, Lenin and Stalin, starts as she openly claims, from what the education of homo sovieticus really meant and ends up with such diverse aspects as communal living inside the crowded dwellings much too common in the towns scattered throughout the Union. The process of education and its evolution, the formation of the culture of a new type, the adaptation of ordinary men and women to the transformations which Russian society had to bear during the first half of the twentieth century, the relations between these ordinary people and the political leaders had been all reinterpreted and put in a new light by Dr Fitzpatrickʼs research conducted during the last 30 years. One of her recent project, entitled Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia published by Princeton University Press in 2005, falls in the same paradigm, or pattern of interpretation and analysis. |
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