Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia - Hardcover

Shlapentokh, Vladimir

9780195042665: Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195042662 ISBN 13: 9780195042665

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1989

From the late 1950s to the early 1980s, the Soviet people's acceptance of official state ideology was gradually replaced by an emphasis on the family and the individual. Perhaps one of the most important social, economic, and political processes to occur in modern Soviet society, privatization has caused people to withdraw their time, energy, and emotion from state controlled activities, investing them instead in family and friendship. Utilizing novels, films, and his own surveys done in the Soviet Union, the author, an emigre sociologist, analyzes the evolution of attitudes toward family and friendship and the emergence and development of civil society as a sphere of interaction not directed by the state. Finally, Shlapentokh examines Gorbachev's reforms as an attempt by the political elite to restore the authority of the state and the prestige of official public activity as well as to exploit some elements of privatization in the interests of the state. A gripping and revealing account of an aspect of Soviet society usually hidden from Westerners, this book will attract a broad audience.

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About the Author:

Vladimir Shlapentokh, Professor of Sociology, Michigan State University.

Review:

"Has special significance in documenting the shift in attitudes toward privatization and consumerism that underlies much of what is happening today."--Foreign Affairs

"An able sociological introduction to the valuative context of the Soviet order between the times of Stalin and Gorbachev."--American Journal of Sociology

"This work is valuable for a number of reasons. First, it presents and argues convincingly a central thesis, namely that 'since the late 1950s the Soviet people have gradually but unswervingly diverted their interests from the state to their primary groups...and to semilegal and illegal civil society as well as to illegal activity inside the private sector.' Second, Shlapentokh makes excellent use of a wide variety of Soviet survey data, and supplements it with a wide-ranging knowledge of Soviet life gained from personal experience and from Soviet literature and films....Recommended for undergraduate and graduuate libraries."--Choice

"An extremely useful summary of a mass of recent survey information."--Sociology

"Extremely interesting....Will find quite a broad audience in academia, government and the general public. I found the book genuinely gripping and I learned a great deal from it."--Abbott Gleason, Brown University

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