Stalinist Society 1928-1953

A fresh analytical overview of the complex social formation ruled over by Stalin and his henchmen from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. Drawing on declassified archival materials, interviews with former Soviet citizens, old and new memoirs, and personal diaries, as well as the best of sixty years of scholarship, this book offers a non-reductionist account of social upheaval and social cohesion in a society marred by violence. Combining the perspectives fromabove and from below, the book integrates recent writing on everyday life, culture and entertainment, ideology and politics, terror and welfare, consumption and economics.

Mark Edele is Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Australia and is the author of Soviet Veterans of the Second World War. A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941-1991 (2008), which is also published by Oxford University Press.