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Overview""I served not in defense of the bourgeois order, but only for a crumb of bread since I was burdened with five small children.""From 1923 to 1925 I worked as a musician but later my earnings weren't steady and I quickly stopped. Without an income to live on, I was drawn to the nonlaboring path.""As a man almost completely illiterate and therefore not prepared for any kind of work, I was forced to return to my craft as a barber.""I am as ignorant as a pipe.""Golfo Alexopoulos focuses on the lishentsy (""outcasts"") of the interwar USSR to reveal the defining features of alien and citizen identities under Stalin's rule. Although portrayed as ""bourgeois elements,"" lishentsy actually included a wide variety of people, including prostitutes, gamblers, tax evaders, embezzlers, and ethnic minorities, in particular, Jews. The poor, the weak, and the elderly were frequent targets of disenfranchisement, singled out by officials looking to conserve scarce resources or satisfy their superiors with long lists of discovered enemies.Alexopoulos draws heavily on an untapped resource: an archive in western Siberia that contains over 100,000 individual petitions for reinstatement. Her analysis of these and many other documents concerning ""class aliens"" shows how Bolshevik leaders defined the body politic and how individuals experienced the Soviet state. Personal narratives with which individuals successfully appealed to officials for reinstatement allow an unusual view into the lives of ""outcasts."" From Kremlin leaders to marked aliens, many participated in identifying insiders and outsiders and challenging the terms of membership in Stalin's new society. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Golfo AlexopoulosPublisher: Cornell University Press Imprint: Cornell University Press Dimensions: Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.907kg ISBN: 9780801440298ISBN 10: 0801440297 Pages: 256 Publication Date: 14 April 2003 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsReviewsOffers new perspectives on the old problem of Russia's 'missing' middle class, by taking us far from the thematic and chronological limits conventionally imposed on our views of this social group. We get a new sense of the vigor and scale of the emerging 'commercial culture' and its celebration of a marketplace of values in Russia before 1917. Dan Healey, University of Wales, Cultural and Social History 2004 1 (1) Alexopoulos explores the phenomenon of Lishentsy-those whom the Bolshevik regime categorized as 'exploiters' and the first Soviet constitution of 1918 formally disenfranchised. . . . This book suggests several important findings. Apart from details about the group's social profile (for example, gender, occupation, and ethnicity), it demonstrates the profound change in the meaning of this category from the mid-1920s-namely, from merely denoting exclusion from the electoral system to designation a group subject to pervasive discrimination and acute economic deprivation (which, for some, included deportation and hard labor). . . . It explores a new complex of sources and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Soviet social history. -Gregory L. Freeze, Brandeis University, Slavonica Vol. 10 No. 2, 2004 Author InformationGolfo Alexopoulos is Associate Professor of Russian/Soviet History at the University of South Florida. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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