Required
Bardach, Janusz and Kathleen Gleeson. Surviving Freedom: After the Gulag.
Alexeyeva, Ludmilla and Paul Goldberg. The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era.
Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices
from Cherynobyl. Keith Gessen, trans.
Additional, article-length readings, as indicated in the class schedule. Some are available through JSTOR, and others are in a U-PAK for sale at the bookstore.
Recommended
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The
Soviet Experiment:
Study Questions
Sept 15: Gorsuch
What is the author’s thesis?
What are her sources?
At first glance it might seem that a study of Soviet tourism is a silly topic. What are its claims to broader political significance? Are you persuaded?
Gorsuch describes the concept of “USSR Tourist” (763), which might seem a pretty peculiar notion and idiosyncratic in its politicization of tourism. What American analogies spring to mind?
Sept 22: Bardach
What passage in the book did you find most poignant or illuminating?
How does the postwar atmosphere
in
In what ways are Bardach’s observations those of an insider? And outsider? How do you think his perspective as a Polish citizen differed from that of the Soviet citizens he met?
What are the implications of what Bardach observes about Soviet society for its ability to move beyond Stalinism? Can you identify an social or political traits that will stand in the way of reform after Stalin’s death? Perhaps anything that will facilitate it?
What light does the book shed on
anti-Semitism in the
Sept 29: Field
How does the Field article illuminate the relationship between the public and private spheres?
What is Communist morality? Who gets to define it and when do they deploy those definitions?
On p. 608, Field makes a major point about the power judges had in Soviet divorce cases. Why is this such an important claim? How does this point about judicial discretion counter conventional ideas about the Soviet system?
How does the author structure her introduction? What is included?
Even without being able to read the Russian in her footnotes, can you figure out what kinds of sources Field draws on? Point to some junctures in the text where she gives the reader information about her sources.
What analogies to the dynamics
Field explores do you see at work in other times and places with which you are
more familiar, including contemporary
Oct 6: Alexeyeva
What was samizdat and why was it so threatening to the regime?
How does the author explain how she was drawn into the dissident movement?
What were kompanii and what role did they play in the
What do we learn from Alexeyeva about Soviet family life? The role of women?
What strategies did the dissidents employ?
How does the book illuminate the
tension between public and private in the
How does Alexeyeva’s experiences and observations highlight the changes between the Stalin and Brezhnev era?
What does Alexeyeva claim to be the accomplishments of the dissident movement?
Oct 13: Bushnell
What does Bushnell identify as the most important catalyst for growing pessimism within the Soviet middle class?
Though written over 10 years
before the Soviet Union’s demise, how does Bushnell speak, albeit in
retrospect, to the question of the origins of the
How does this article make an implicit, if not wholly explicit, argument about the political power of everyday life?
Oct 20: Goscilo
Goscilo is a colorful, distinctive writer. Identify two or three aspects of the way she writes that enhances her efficacy. Bring to class specific examples to illustrate your point.
What has been the impact of glasnost on women’s writings?
What accounts for the insistence by Soviet women writers that gender is a non-issue for them?
Bringing Daneliia (director of Autumn Marathon), and Goscilo into dialogue with one another, what seem to be some of the dominant characteristics of gender relations in the 1970s and 1980s?
Drawing on your knowledge of Soviet family life (from Bardach, Field, Alexeyeva, Daneliia), how does Goscilo’s discussion of women writers, their work, and the broader position of women under glasnost reshape your picture of the Soviet family?
Oct 27: Alexievich
If you could choose only one passage, which would you identify as the most poignant? Why?
Beyond what the book has to say
about
Several interviewees make reference to WW2. What do you gather from their comments about the meaning of this war for Soviet citizens?
What did it mean to be a man in
the
What do you think the Soviet
government did wrong in how it handled the accident at
Nov 10: Sabonis-Chafee
What are ‘final vocabularies’ and how does this construct help us to understand kitsch?
What types of kitsch are there and how do they differ?
What does kitsch say about Russian society’s relationship to history, both Soviet and Imperial?
What kind of generational rifts are there in relation to kitsch?
Can you think of American corollaries to the kind of kitsch the author examines?
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