SEHI2009 Media, Culture and Society in the Soviet Union from Stalin to 1991

Summative Assessment

Coursework: 2x 2000-2500 word essays (25%)

2 hour examination (75%)

Formative Assessment

To be confirmed

Module Outline

This course explores the history of the Soviet Union’s experiment in creating a socialist “culture for the masses” from Stalinism through to 1991. In lectures and discussions, we will analyze the relationship of cultural developments to key issues in the history of the late USSR, such as the nature of power in the Soviet system,(Stalinist and post-Stalinist), the question of national and supra-national, or Soviet, identity formations, issues of generational conflict, “lifestyle” politics, and the cold war, and the impact of technological and sociological modernization. Readings will draw from secondary sources, first-person narratives, and documents in translation. The course focuses in-depth on cinema as a key sphere for cultural production and consumption in the USSR.

Indicative Texts

• James von Geldern and Richard Stites, eds. Mass Culture in Soviet Russia, 1917-1953 (1995)

• Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (2000)

• Richard Stites, ed. Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (1995)

• Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Summer 2002), 211-252 JSTOR

• Stephen Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1917-1970 (2015)

• P. Blake & M. Hayward, eds., Half-way to the Moon: New Writing from Russia (1965)

• Christine Evans, “Song of the Year and Soviet Mass Culture in the ‘70s,” Kritika, Vol 12, no. 3 (Summer 2011)

• Yitzhak Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991 (1998)

• Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad: Myth, Memories and Monuments (2006)

Please note: This outline is accurate at the time of publication. Minor amendments may be made prior to the start of the academic year.