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EVERYDAY STALINISM

ORDINARY LIFE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES: SOVIET RUSSIA IN THE 1930S

“Everyday Stalinism” may seem like an oxymoron, but life did go on even in those terrible circumstances, and it is the virtue of this book that it attempts to understand what life was like for ordinary people. Since this is an account of urban life, the killing of millions of peasants, dealt with by Fitzpatrick (Modern Russian History/Univ. of Chicago) in her earlier Stalin’s Peasants (1994), takes place offstage here, but it profoundly affected the —30s, not just in the massive social dislocation, the overcrowding in communal apartments, and a rationing system close to collapse, but in the pervasive fear. Criminal penalties could be imposed on a worker 20 minutes late for work. The bureaucracy accumulated enormous power over people’s lives. In one factory, after a hairdresser had been appointed, it became a criminal offense to shave oneself. It became too dangerous to participate in policy debates. And then, over and above the millions claimed by the Purges, there was the simultaneous round-up and execution of thousands of ’socially dangerous elements,— church people, —counter-revolutionaries,— and habitual criminals. Fitzpatrick tells us that the target figure for executions was 70,000 and for dispatch to the Gulag 200,000. Fitzpatrick does show that there were some who were either favored by the process or unaffected by it, or who thought that these were necessary sacrifices on the way to a radiant future. The scale of the sacrifice was concealed from the people by a state that was increasingly secretive and unwilling to allow knowledge of what it was doing to be disseminated. There are some curious judgments: that Stalin —perhaps covertly encouraged— the cult of personality, or that the idea of remaking the human being ’seems to have had some genuinely inspirational impact— in the Gulag. But Fitzpatrick makes subtle use of the press and of police reports tzao assist in giving us one of the most comprehensive accounts to date of what it meant to live in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-19-505000-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

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