Borders of Socialism Private Spheres of Soviet Russia

Offering an innovative and challenging lens to understand Soviet socialism, this fascinating book argues that in Russia the relations between culture and nation, art and life, commodity and trash, often diverged from familiar Western European or American versions of modernity. The essays show how public and private overlapped and shaped each other, creating new perspectives on individuals and society in the Soviet Union.

Lewis Siegelbaum is Professor of History at Michigan State University. He is the author of Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (1988), and co-author of Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents (2000). He currently is working on a history of automobiles in the Soviet Union.

Introduction: Mapping Private Spheres in the Soviet Context--Lewis H. Siegelbaum * Part One: Private Enterprise and Private Property*  Claiming Property: The Soviet-Era Private Plots as "Women's Turf"--Esther Kingston-Mann * The Art Market and the Construction of Soviet Russian Culture--Andrew Jenks * Separate Yet Governed: The Representation of Soviet Property Relations in Civil Law and Public Discourse--Charles Hachten * Cars, Cars, and More Cars: The Faustian Bargain of the Brezhnev Era --Lewis H. Siegelbaum * Part Two: Domesticity and Domestic Space * Domestic Life and the Activist Wife in the 1930s Soviet Union--Rebecca Neary * A Hearth for a Dog: The Paradoxes of Soviet Pet Keeping--Amy Nelson * The Meaning of Home: "The Only Bit of the World You Can Have to Yourself"--Susan E. Reid * "I Know All the Secrets of My Neighbors": The Quest for Privacy in the Era of the Separate Apartment--Steven E. Harris * Private Matters or Public Crimes: The Emergence of Domestic Hooliganism in the Soviet Union, 1939-1966--Brian LaPierre * Part Three: Behavior and Private Life * A Symbiosis of Errors: The Personal, Professional, and Political in the Kirov Region, 1931-1941--Larry E. Holmes * Friends in Private, Friends in Public: The Phenomenon of the Kompaniia Among Soviet Youth in the 1950s and 60s--Juliane Fürst * The 1959 Liriki-Fiziki Debate: Going Public with the Private?--Susan Costanzo
Introduction: Mapping Private Spheres in the Soviet Context --Lewis H. Siegelbaum * Part One: Private Enterprise and Private Property*  Claiming Property: The Soviet-Era Private Plots as "Women's Turf"--Esther Kingston-Mann * The Art Market and the Construction of Soviet Russian Culture--Andrew Jenks * Separate Yet Governed: The Representation of Soviet Property Relations in Civil Law and Public Discourse--Charles Hachten * Cars, Cars, and More Cars: The Faustian Bargain of the Brezhnev Era --Lewis H. Siegelbaum * Part Two: Domesticity and Domestic Space * Domestic Life and the Activist Wife in the 1930s Soviet Union--Rebecca Neary * A Hearth for a Dog: The Paradoxes of Soviet Pet Keeping--Amy Nelson * The Meaning of Home: "The Only Bit of the World You Can Have to Yourself"--Susan E. Reid * "I Know All the Secrets of My Neighbors": The Quest for Privacy in the Era of the Separate Apartment--Steven E. Harris * Private Matters or Public Crimes: The Emergence of Domestic Hooliganism in the Soviet Union, 1939-1966--Brian LaPierre * Part Three: Behavior and Private Life * A Symbiosis of Errors: The Personal, Professional, and Political in the Kirov Region, 1931-1941--Larry E. Holmes * Friends in Private, Friends in Public: The Phenomenon of the Kompaniia Among Soviet Youth in the 1950s and 60s --Juliane Fürst * The 1959 Liriki-Fiziki Debate: Going Public with the Private?--Susan Costanzo