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Living the Revolution

Urban Communes & Soviet Socialism, 1917-1932. Oxford Studies in Modern European History

By (author) Andy Willimott
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom
Published: 17th Nov 2016
Dimensions: w 160mm h 240mm d 17mm
Weight: 464g
ISBN-10: 0198725825
ISBN-13: 9780198725824
Barcode No: 9780198725824
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Synopsis
Living the Revolution offers a pioneering insight into the world of the early Soviet activist. At the heart of this book are a cast of fiery-eyed, bed-headed youths determined to be the change they wanted to see in the world. First banding together in the wake of the October Revolution, seizing hold of urban apartments, youthful enthusiasts tried to offer practical examples of socialist living. Calling themselves 'urban communes', they embraced total equality and shared everything from money to underwear. They actively sought to overturn the traditional family unit, reinvent domesticity, and promote a new collective vision of human interaction. A trend was set: a revolutionary meme that would, in the coming years, allow thousands of would-be revolutionaries and aspiring party members to experiment with the possibilities of socialism. The first definitive account of the urban communes, and the activists that formed them, this volume utilizes newly uncovered archival materials to chart the rise and fall of this revolutionary impulse. Laced with personal detail, it illuminates the thoughts and aspirations of individual activists as the idea of the urban commune grew from an experimental form of living, limited to a handful of participants in Petrograd and Moscow, into a cultural phenomenon that saw tens of thousands of youths form their own domestic units of socialist living by the end of the 1920s. Living the Revolution is a tale of revolutionary aspiration, appropriation, and participation at the ground level. Never officially sanctioned by the party, the urban communes challenge our traditional understanding of the early Soviet state, presenting Soviet ideology as something that could both frame and fire the imagination.

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With this book, Andy Willimott enters the small circle of historians devoted to the communal movement in the early USSR. * Eric Aunoble, University of Geneva, The International Newsletter of Communist Studies * original and engaging ... Willimott has got close to his subjects and tells their stories with enthusiasm. He acknowledges that they are only a small part of the history of the Revolution, but he is not troubled by whether their experience is representative, precisely because they offer new stories told from unusual angles that illuminate wider themes. There is much for students and scholars to enjoy and learn from in this important book. * Mark B. Smith, Slavonic and East European Review * By presenting communards as driven by both revolutionary hope and belief that an interventionist state could create a harmonious, rational, modern world, and by indicating how their ideas for daily life, cultural enlightenment and building the new socialist person persisted into the 1930s, Willimott revises the understanding that their initiatives constituted a fleeting manifestation of utopian visions that was extinguished by rising state socialist construction.
That this older interpretation largely held ground since 1989 (when Richard Stites offered the first significant scholarly treatment of urban communes in his Revolutionary Dreams) speaks to the path-breaking nature of this book. * English Historical Review * Willimott's prose, which is consistently inviting, paints a vivid portrait of daily life in urban communes * Edward Cohen, Journal of Modern History * Andy Willimott takes an almost entirely unknown topic and makes it his own, turning what could have been a traditional 'thesis book' into something of real lasting value. This fine, energetic piece of scholarship offers a genuinely new perspective on the revolutionary developments of the 1920s by making a compelling case for the importance of the much neglected urban commune movement ... Willimott's impressive command of his sources enables him to expand the scope of
his conclusions beyond his field of specialism and to make a major contribution to revitalising the study of early Soviet Russia. He is a worthy winner of this year's Nove Prize. * Comments by the jury of the BASEES Alexander Nove Prize 2016 * Dr Willimott's book provides a lively insight into the attempts of some young people in early Soviet Russia to live out in practice the proclaimed ideals of the new Communist regime. He describes vividly the hopes inspiring their experiments in collective living, their successes, frustrations and failures, and how ultimately those experiments were integrated into the emerging totalitarian structure of the Stalinist regime. * Geoffrey Hosking, University College, London * Living the Revolution is about those youthful citizens of the new Soviet republic - men and women - who sought to remake their lives by throwing in their lot with the Bolsheviks. It is, to be sure, a critical analysis of their many projects. But, unlike previous historians who all too easily dismissed them as "utopian," it revivifies the spirit of those efforts, putting the reader in touch with the emotional energy of the revolution. Here, at last, is a
rigorously researched yet unapologetically sympathetic account of the multiple initiatives undertaken in the first decade of Soviet power to bring the revolution into the workplace, the classroom, and the home. * Lewis Siegelbaum, Michigan State University * Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and bursting with narrative appeal, Willimott's study of early Soviet communes demonstrates that a hundred years after the Russian Revolution not all has been said about the revolution's layers, complexities, and legacies. From the very first sentence - a question to his readers - Willimott draws us into an energetic world of enthusiasm, idealism, and activism, but also of disappointment, fracture, and conflict. He
convincingly shows that neither did spontaneous self-experimentation end with the advent of Soviet power, nor was every aspect of revolutionary utopianism irrevocably lost during the Stalin years. Rather he weaves a fine net of dense description, in which he brings the elusive communes to life, while
subtly quoting, probing, and pushing existing scholarship on the period and indeed beyond. * Juliane Furst, University of Bristol * This is an excellent book that deserves to be read widely by all those interested in early Soviet history, the origins of Stalinism, revolutions, the nature of 20th-century dictatorships, and the functioning of political ideologies in authoritarian regimes. * James Ryan, Reviews in History * Willimott's highly original, groundbreaking study of the urban commune movement in the early years of the Soviet regime is an important contribution to understanding the popular experience of revolution ... this important contribution to the study of the 1917 revolution in its centennial year deserves to be read not only by specialists but also by those scholars interested in revolutions, political theory, and the like ... Essential. * CHOICE * an exemplary study of the people who founded, developed and lived in urban communes in the early Soviet Union ... I strongly recommend this book to any scholars interested in the early Soviet period, as well as scholars interested more generally in issues of ideology and lived experience. Willimott's work is analytically insightful, methodologically rich, and carefully written. It is an excellent addition to our scholarly understanding of experience and culture in
early Soviet Russia. * Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman, Revolutionary Russia * skilfully pieced together existing evidence to present a fascinating account of spontaneous attempts to make the communist dream a reality in the early Soviet era. * Clayton Black, European History Quarterly * Living the Revolution will be of particular interest to historians of the NEP and the early Stalin era, and it will work well in both undergraduate Soviet history courses and graduate seminars ... historians of housing and consumption in the post-Stalin decades should also read this book to understand how tensions between ideology and everyday life in late socialism were shaped by the earliest attempts to live the Revolution. * Steven E. Harris, Slavic Review *