Dropping out of Socialism
The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc
Contributions by Maria-Alina Asavei, Irina Costache, Madigan Andrea Fichter, Juliane Fürst University of Bristol, Irina Gordeeva, Joachim Häberlen, Jeff Hayton, Anna Kan, Ewgeniy Kasakow, Peter Angus Mitchell, Terje Toomistu, Patryk Wasiak, Josephine von Zitzewitz Edited by Juliane Fürst University of Bristol, Josie McLellan
Publication date:
13 December 2016Length of book:
352 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
236x160mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781498525145
The essays in this collection make up the first study of “dropping out” of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks. Under socialism, this phenomenon was little-known outside the socialist sphere. Only very recently has it been possible to reconstruct it through archival work, oral histories and memoirs. Such a diverse set of subcultures demands a multi-disciplinary approach: the essays in this volume are written by historians, anthropologists and scholars of literature, cultural and gender studies. The history of these movements not only shows us a side of state socialist life that was barely known in the west. It also sheds new light on the demise and eventual collapse of late socialism, and raises important questions about the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western subcultures.
Many of these essays could be successfully employed as introductory material for undergraduate and graduate courses in history, anthropology, and literature, and they can also help provide a useful background to introduce more recent political processes in the area. . . . Dropping Out of Socialism constitutes an important step toward the creation of international and interdisciplinary collaborations for the study of an importan [sic] subject, which clearly needs to be explored further in all of its complex ramifications.