Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801452314
- eISBN:
- 9780801454776
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801452314.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Russian and Former Soviet Union History
This introductory chapter explores the transformative possibilities of reading Shakespeare for women, both collectively and individually, by combining work on women's clubs with recent work on the ...
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This introductory chapter explores the transformative possibilities of reading Shakespeare for women, both collectively and individually, by combining work on women's clubs with recent work on the role of reading for individual and collective agency. It focuses on the variety of ways Shakespeare was read by American club women in order to suggest some of the repercussions of their literate practices for individual women, for groups, and for their communities in the decades around the fin de siècle. Women readers in large cities and small towns across America helped spread the idea that Shakespeare was for everyone, not just cultural elites in metropolitan areas. The efforts of club women to improve their communities also established Shakespeare as a local foundation of American culture and as a marker for learning, self-improvement, civilization, and entertainment for a broad array of populations.Less
This introductory chapter explores the transformative possibilities of reading Shakespeare for women, both collectively and individually, by combining work on women's clubs with recent work on the role of reading for individual and collective agency. It focuses on the variety of ways Shakespeare was read by American club women in order to suggest some of the repercussions of their literate practices for individual women, for groups, and for their communities in the decades around the fin de siècle. Women readers in large cities and small towns across America helped spread the idea that Shakespeare was for everyone, not just cultural elites in metropolitan areas. The efforts of club women to improve their communities also established Shakespeare as a local foundation of American culture and as a marker for learning, self-improvement, civilization, and entertainment for a broad array of populations.
Michael Khodarkovsky
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801449727
- eISBN:
- 9780801462894
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801449727.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Russian and Former Soviet Union History
Russia's attempt to consolidate its authority in the North Caucasus has exerted a terrible price on both sides since the mid-nineteenth century. This book tells a concise and compelling history of ...
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Russia's attempt to consolidate its authority in the North Caucasus has exerted a terrible price on both sides since the mid-nineteenth century. This book tells a concise and compelling history of the mountainous region between the Black and Caspian seas during the centuries of Russia's long conquest (1500–1850s). The history of the region unfolds against the background of one man's life story, Semën Atarshchikov (1807–1845). Torn between his Chechen identity and his duties as a lieutenant and translator in the Russian army, Atarshchikov defected, not once but twice, to join the mountaineers against the invading Russian troops. His was the experience more typical of Russia's empire-building in the borderlands than the better-known stories of the audacious kidnappers and valiant battles. It is a history of the North Caucasus as seen from both sides of the conflict, which continues to make this region Russia's most violent and vulnerable frontier.Less
Russia's attempt to consolidate its authority in the North Caucasus has exerted a terrible price on both sides since the mid-nineteenth century. This book tells a concise and compelling history of the mountainous region between the Black and Caspian seas during the centuries of Russia's long conquest (1500–1850s). The history of the region unfolds against the background of one man's life story, Semën Atarshchikov (1807–1845). Torn between his Chechen identity and his duties as a lieutenant and translator in the Russian army, Atarshchikov defected, not once but twice, to join the mountaineers against the invading Russian troops. His was the experience more typical of Russia's empire-building in the borderlands than the better-known stories of the audacious kidnappers and valiant battles. It is a history of the North Caucasus as seen from both sides of the conflict, which continues to make this region Russia's most violent and vulnerable frontier.
Barbara Alpern Engel
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801449512
- eISBN:
- 9780801460692
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801449512.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Russian and Former Soviet Union History
Russia's Great Reforms of 1861 were sweeping social and legal changes that aimed to modernize the country. In the following decades, rapid industrialization and urbanization profoundly transformed ...
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Russia's Great Reforms of 1861 were sweeping social and legal changes that aimed to modernize the country. In the following decades, rapid industrialization and urbanization profoundly transformed Russia's social, economic, and cultural landscape. This book explores the personal, cultural, and political consequences of these dramatic changes, focusing on their impact on intimate life and expectations and the resulting challenges to the traditional, patriarchal family order, the cornerstone of Russia's authoritarian political and religious regime. The widely perceived “marriage crisis” had far-reaching legal, institutional, and political ramifications. The book draws on archival documentation to explore changing notions of marital relations, domesticity, childrearing, and intimate life among ordinary men and women in imperial Russia. It illustrates the human consequences of the marriage crisis and reveals that the new and more individualistic values of the capitalist marketplace and commercial culture challenged traditional definitions of gender roles and encouraged the self-creation of new social identities. The book captures the intimate experiences of women and men of the lower and middling classes in their own words, documenting instances not only of physical, mental, and emotional abuse but also of resistance and independence. These changes challenged Russia's rigid political order, forcing a range of state agents, up to and including those who spoke directly in the name of the tsar, to rethink traditional understandings of gender norms and family law.Less
Russia's Great Reforms of 1861 were sweeping social and legal changes that aimed to modernize the country. In the following decades, rapid industrialization and urbanization profoundly transformed Russia's social, economic, and cultural landscape. This book explores the personal, cultural, and political consequences of these dramatic changes, focusing on their impact on intimate life and expectations and the resulting challenges to the traditional, patriarchal family order, the cornerstone of Russia's authoritarian political and religious regime. The widely perceived “marriage crisis” had far-reaching legal, institutional, and political ramifications. The book draws on archival documentation to explore changing notions of marital relations, domesticity, childrearing, and intimate life among ordinary men and women in imperial Russia. It illustrates the human consequences of the marriage crisis and reveals that the new and more individualistic values of the capitalist marketplace and commercial culture challenged traditional definitions of gender roles and encouraged the self-creation of new social identities. The book captures the intimate experiences of women and men of the lower and middling classes in their own words, documenting instances not only of physical, mental, and emotional abuse but also of resistance and independence. These changes challenged Russia's rigid political order, forcing a range of state agents, up to and including those who spoke directly in the name of the tsar, to rethink traditional understandings of gender norms and family law.
Faith Hillis
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801452192
- eISBN:
- 9780801469268
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801452192.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Russian and Former Soviet Union History
This book recovers an all-but-forgotten chapter in the history of the Tsarist Empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River—which today is located at the ...
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This book recovers an all-but-forgotten chapter in the history of the Tsarist Empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River—which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine—was one of the Russian Empire's last territorial acquisitions, annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the nineteenth century, this region generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. The southwest's Russian nationalists sought to empower the ordinary Orthodox residents of the borderlands and to diminish the influence of their non-Orthodox minorities. Right-bank Ukraine would seem unlikely terrain to nourish a Russian nationalist imagination. It was among the empire's most diverse corners, with few of its residents speaking Russian as their native language or identifying with the culture of the Great Russian interior. Nevertheless, as the book shows, by the late nineteenth century, Russian nationalists had established a strong foothold in the southwest's culture and educated society; in the first decade of the twentieth, they secured a leading role in local mass politics. By 1910, right-bank activists expanded their sights beyond the borderlands, hoping to spread their nationalizing agenda across the empire. Exploring why and how the empire's southwestern borderlands produced its most organized and politically successful Russian nationalist movement, the book puts forth a new interpretation of state–society relations under tsarism as she reconstructs the role that a peripheral region played in attempting to define the essential characteristics of the Russian people and their state.Less
This book recovers an all-but-forgotten chapter in the history of the Tsarist Empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River—which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine—was one of the Russian Empire's last territorial acquisitions, annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the nineteenth century, this region generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. The southwest's Russian nationalists sought to empower the ordinary Orthodox residents of the borderlands and to diminish the influence of their non-Orthodox minorities. Right-bank Ukraine would seem unlikely terrain to nourish a Russian nationalist imagination. It was among the empire's most diverse corners, with few of its residents speaking Russian as their native language or identifying with the culture of the Great Russian interior. Nevertheless, as the book shows, by the late nineteenth century, Russian nationalists had established a strong foothold in the southwest's culture and educated society; in the first decade of the twentieth, they secured a leading role in local mass politics. By 1910, right-bank activists expanded their sights beyond the borderlands, hoping to spread their nationalizing agenda across the empire. Exploring why and how the empire's southwestern borderlands produced its most organized and politically successful Russian nationalist movement, the book puts forth a new interpretation of state–society relations under tsarism as she reconstructs the role that a peripheral region played in attempting to define the essential characteristics of the Russian people and their state.
Diane P. Koenker
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451539
- eISBN:
- 9780801467738
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451539.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Russian and Former Soviet Union History
The Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917 armed with an ideology centered on the power of the worker. From the beginning, however, Soviet leaders also realized the need for rest and leisure within ...
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The Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917 armed with an ideology centered on the power of the worker. From the beginning, however, Soviet leaders also realized the need for rest and leisure within the new proletarian society and over subsequent decades struggled to reconcile the concept of leisure with the doctrine of communism, addressing such fundamental concerns as what the purpose of leisure should be in a workers’ state and how socialist vacations should differ from those enjoyed by the capitalist bourgeoisie. This book offers a sweeping and insightful history of Soviet vacationing and tourism from the Revolution through perestroika. It shows that from the outset, the regime insisted that the value of tourism and vacation time was strictly utilitarian. Both the sedentary vacation and tourism were part of the regime’s effort to transform the poor and often illiterate citizenry into new Soviet men and women. The book emphasizes a distinctive blend of purpose and pleasure in Soviet vacation policy and practice and explores a fundamental paradox: a state committed to the idea of the collective found itself promoting a vacation policy that increasingly encouraged individual autonomy and selfhood. The history of Soviet tourism and vacations tells a story of freely chosen mobility that was enabled and subsidized by the state. While the book focuses primarily on Soviet domestic vacation travel, it also notes the decisive impact of travel abroad (mostly to other socialist countries) which shaped new worldviews, created new consumer desires, and transformed Soviet vacation practices.Less
The Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917 armed with an ideology centered on the power of the worker. From the beginning, however, Soviet leaders also realized the need for rest and leisure within the new proletarian society and over subsequent decades struggled to reconcile the concept of leisure with the doctrine of communism, addressing such fundamental concerns as what the purpose of leisure should be in a workers’ state and how socialist vacations should differ from those enjoyed by the capitalist bourgeoisie. This book offers a sweeping and insightful history of Soviet vacationing and tourism from the Revolution through perestroika. It shows that from the outset, the regime insisted that the value of tourism and vacation time was strictly utilitarian. Both the sedentary vacation and tourism were part of the regime’s effort to transform the poor and often illiterate citizenry into new Soviet men and women. The book emphasizes a distinctive blend of purpose and pleasure in Soviet vacation policy and practice and explores a fundamental paradox: a state committed to the idea of the collective found itself promoting a vacation policy that increasingly encouraged individual autonomy and selfhood. The history of Soviet tourism and vacations tells a story of freely chosen mobility that was enabled and subsidized by the state. While the book focuses primarily on Soviet domestic vacation travel, it also notes the decisive impact of travel abroad (mostly to other socialist countries) which shaped new worldviews, created new consumer desires, and transformed Soviet vacation practices.
David L. Hoffmann
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801446290
- eISBN:
- 9780801462832
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801446290.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Russian and Former Soviet Union History
Under Joseph Stalin's leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were ...
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Under Joseph Stalin's leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of repressions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people's well-being. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand in hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture. This book examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime. To analyze Soviet social policies, the book places them in an international comparative context. It explains Soviet technologies of social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices. These practices developed in conjunction with the ambitions of nineteenth-century European reformers to refashion society, and they subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive regulations in countries around the world. The mobilizational demands of World War I impelled political leaders to expand even further their efforts at population management, via economic controls, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence. Born at this moment of total war, the Soviet system institutionalized these wartime methods as permanent features of governance. Party leaders, whose dictatorship included no checks on state power, in turn attached interventionist practices to their ideological goal of building socialism.Less
Under Joseph Stalin's leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of repressions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people's well-being. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand in hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture. This book examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime. To analyze Soviet social policies, the book places them in an international comparative context. It explains Soviet technologies of social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices. These practices developed in conjunction with the ambitions of nineteenth-century European reformers to refashion society, and they subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive regulations in countries around the world. The mobilizational demands of World War I impelled political leaders to expand even further their efforts at population management, via economic controls, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence. Born at this moment of total war, the Soviet system institutionalized these wartime methods as permanent features of governance. Party leaders, whose dictatorship included no checks on state power, in turn attached interventionist practices to their ideological goal of building socialism.
Valerie Kivelson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451461
- eISBN:
- 9780801469381
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451461.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Russian and Former Soviet Union History
In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe ...
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In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe in the same period. While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars’ courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy. This book places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. The book explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused to create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture, the book addresses questions about the Muscovite courts’ equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated. Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people.Less
In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe in the same period. While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars’ courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy. This book places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. The book explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused to create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture, the book addresses questions about the Muscovite courts’ equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated. Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people.
Jeffrey S. Hardy
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781501702792
- eISBN:
- 9780801458514
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501702792.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Russian and Former Soviet Union History
This book reveals how the vast Soviet penal system was reimagined and reformed in the wake of Stalin's death. The text argues that penal reform in the 1950s was a serious endeavor intended to ...
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This book reveals how the vast Soviet penal system was reimagined and reformed in the wake of Stalin's death. The text argues that penal reform in the 1950s was a serious endeavor intended to transform the Gulag into a humane institution that re-educated criminals into honest Soviet citizens. Under the leadership of Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Dudorov, a Khrushchev appointee, this drive to change the Gulag into a “progressive” system where criminals were reformed through a combination of education, vocational training, leniency, sport, labor, cultural programs, and self-governance was both sincere and at least partially effective. The new vision for the Gulag faced many obstacles. Re-education proved difficult to quantify, a serious liability in a statistics-obsessed state. The entrenched habits of Gulag officials and the prisoner-guard power dynamic mitigated the effect of the post-Stalin reforms. And the Soviet public never fully accepted the new policies of leniency and the humane treatment of criminals. In the late 1950s, they joined with a coalition of party officials, criminologists, procurators, newspaper reporters, and some penal administrators to rally around the slogan “The camp is not a resort” and succeeded in re-imposing harsher conditions for inmates. By the mid-1960s the Soviet Gulag had emerged as a hybrid system forged from the old Stalinist system, the vision promoted by Khrushchev and others in the mid-1950s, and the ensuing counter-reform movement. This new penal equilibrium largely persisted until the fall of the Soviet Union.Less
This book reveals how the vast Soviet penal system was reimagined and reformed in the wake of Stalin's death. The text argues that penal reform in the 1950s was a serious endeavor intended to transform the Gulag into a humane institution that re-educated criminals into honest Soviet citizens. Under the leadership of Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Dudorov, a Khrushchev appointee, this drive to change the Gulag into a “progressive” system where criminals were reformed through a combination of education, vocational training, leniency, sport, labor, cultural programs, and self-governance was both sincere and at least partially effective. The new vision for the Gulag faced many obstacles. Re-education proved difficult to quantify, a serious liability in a statistics-obsessed state. The entrenched habits of Gulag officials and the prisoner-guard power dynamic mitigated the effect of the post-Stalin reforms. And the Soviet public never fully accepted the new policies of leniency and the humane treatment of criminals. In the late 1950s, they joined with a coalition of party officials, criminologists, procurators, newspaper reporters, and some penal administrators to rally around the slogan “The camp is not a resort” and succeeded in re-imposing harsher conditions for inmates. By the mid-1960s the Soviet Gulag had emerged as a hybrid system forged from the old Stalinist system, the vision promoted by Khrushchev and others in the mid-1950s, and the ensuing counter-reform movement. This new penal equilibrium largely persisted until the fall of the Soviet Union.
Mark Bassin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801445941
- eISBN:
- 9781501703393
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801445941.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Russian and Former Soviet Union History
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacy of Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992) has attracted extraordinary interest in Russia and beyond. The son of two of modern Russia's greatest poets, ...
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Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacy of Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992) has attracted extraordinary interest in Russia and beyond. The son of two of modern Russia's greatest poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev spent thirteen years in Stalinist prison camps, and after his release in 1956 remained officially outcast and professionally shunned. Out of the tumult of perestroika, however, his writings began to attract attention and he became a well-known and popular figure. Despite his highly controversial (and often contradictory) views about the meaning of Russian history, the nature of ethnicity, and the dynamics of interethnic relations, Gumilev now enjoys a degree of admiration and adulation matched by few if any other public intellectual figures in the former Soviet Union. Leading politicians, President Vladimir Putin included, are unstinting in their deep appreciation for his legacy, and one of the most important foreign-policy projects of the Russian government today is inspired by his particular vision of how the Eurasian peoples formed a historical community. This book presents an analysis of this phenomenon. It investigates the complex structure of Gumilev's theories, revealing how they reflected and helped shape a variety of academic as well as political and social discourses in the USSR, and traces how his authority has grown yet greater across the former Soviet Union. The themes highlighted are critical to understanding the political, intellectual, and ethno-national dynamics of Russian society from the age of Stalin to the present day.Less
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacy of Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992) has attracted extraordinary interest in Russia and beyond. The son of two of modern Russia's greatest poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev spent thirteen years in Stalinist prison camps, and after his release in 1956 remained officially outcast and professionally shunned. Out of the tumult of perestroika, however, his writings began to attract attention and he became a well-known and popular figure. Despite his highly controversial (and often contradictory) views about the meaning of Russian history, the nature of ethnicity, and the dynamics of interethnic relations, Gumilev now enjoys a degree of admiration and adulation matched by few if any other public intellectual figures in the former Soviet Union. Leading politicians, President Vladimir Putin included, are unstinting in their deep appreciation for his legacy, and one of the most important foreign-policy projects of the Russian government today is inspired by his particular vision of how the Eurasian peoples formed a historical community. This book presents an analysis of this phenomenon. It investigates the complex structure of Gumilev's theories, revealing how they reflected and helped shape a variety of academic as well as political and social discourses in the USSR, and traces how his authority has grown yet greater across the former Soviet Union. The themes highlighted are critical to understanding the political, intellectual, and ethno-national dynamics of Russian society from the age of Stalin to the present day.
Jane R. Zavisca
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450372
- eISBN:
- 9780801464300
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450372.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Russian and Former Soviet Union History
This book examines Russia's attempts to transition from a socialist vision of housing, in which the government promised a separate, state-owned apartment for every family, to a market-based and ...
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This book examines Russia's attempts to transition from a socialist vision of housing, in which the government promised a separate, state-owned apartment for every family, to a market-based and mortgage-dependent model of home ownership. In 1992, the post-Soviet Russian government signed an agreement with the United States to create the Russian housing market. Privatization gave socialist housing to existing occupants. New financial institutions laid the foundation for a market. Next the state tried to stimulate mortgages—and reverse the declining birth rate—by subsidizing loans for young families. Imported housing institutions, however, failed to resonate with local conceptions of ownership, property, and rights. Instead of stimulating home ownership, privatization, combined with high prices and limited credit, created a system of “property without markets,” leading most Russians to call for a government-controlled housing market. Under the Soviet system, residents retained lifelong tenancy rights, perceiving the apartments they inhabited as their own. In the wake of privatization, young Russians can no longer count on the state to provide their house, nor can they afford to buy a home with wages, forcing many to live with extended family well into adulthood. The book shows that the contradictions of housing policy are a significant factor in Russia's falling birth rates and the apparent failure of its pronatalist policies.Less
This book examines Russia's attempts to transition from a socialist vision of housing, in which the government promised a separate, state-owned apartment for every family, to a market-based and mortgage-dependent model of home ownership. In 1992, the post-Soviet Russian government signed an agreement with the United States to create the Russian housing market. Privatization gave socialist housing to existing occupants. New financial institutions laid the foundation for a market. Next the state tried to stimulate mortgages—and reverse the declining birth rate—by subsidizing loans for young families. Imported housing institutions, however, failed to resonate with local conceptions of ownership, property, and rights. Instead of stimulating home ownership, privatization, combined with high prices and limited credit, created a system of “property without markets,” leading most Russians to call for a government-controlled housing market. Under the Soviet system, residents retained lifelong tenancy rights, perceiving the apartments they inhabited as their own. In the wake of privatization, young Russians can no longer count on the state to provide their house, nor can they afford to buy a home with wages, forcing many to live with extended family well into adulthood. The book shows that the contradictions of housing policy are a significant factor in Russia's falling birth rates and the apparent failure of its pronatalist policies.
The Art of the Bribe
Between Truth and Time
Charand-o Parand
Classics for the Masses
