Description

The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, proletarian morality, and technology worship, rooted in Russian utopianism, generated a range of social experiments which found expression, in the first decade of the Russian revolution, in festival, symbol, science fiction, city planning, and the arts. In this study, historian Richard Stites offers a vivid portrayal of revolutionary life and the cultural factors--myth, ritual, cult, and symbol--that sustained it, and describes the principal forms of utopian thinking and experimental impulse. Analyzing the inevitable clash between the authoritarian elements in the Bolshevik's vision and the libertarian behavior and aspirations of large segments of the population, Stites interprets the pathos of utopian fantasy as the key to the emotional force of the Bolshevik revolution which gave way in the early 1930s to bureaucratic state centralism and a theology of Stalinism.

Reviews

"A dazzling compendium of the manifold ideas and projects that flashed across Russia after 1917."--Times Higher Education Supplement

"A major contribution to the social and cultural history of the USSR. Moreover, given its lucid and compelling style...there is no reason why [it] will not sell well to a broader reading public."-- Ronald G. Suny, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

"[An] original study....Stites has his subject well in hand and writes smoothly, and his work becomes a portrait of the Russian people as they reveal themselves by their dreams."--The New Yorker

"Recommended for all libraries."--Choice

"An exciting book that will be read and enjoyed by everyone interested in the history of Soviet culture and society. With grace and intelligence, the author illuminates myriad possibilities of social and cultural development that took shape in the revolutionary era. His unique contribution is to show the ambiguity of the first decade of Soviet society, when dreamers from Lenin...to pionerring artists and composers let their imaginations range freely. The result is also a new view of the 1930s as the era when dreams were smothered and the state declared 'war on the dreamers.'"--Jeffrey Brooks, University of Minnesota

Product Details

324 pages; 30 halftones; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-505536-8ISBN10: 0-19-505536-5

About the Author(s)