By tracing the history of surveillance in Europe and the Soviet bloc, the historian Sophie Cœuré explains the differences between democracies and dictatorships in this area. She also urges us to put things in perspective: We do not (yet) live in a “surveillance society.”
Though the Soviet system’s ambitions were initially universalistic, the system of social protection that it established quickly proved discriminatory and insufficiently generous. In a recent book, Dorena Caroli uses social protection as a prism for considering the Soviet state’s broader dysfunctions.
The ordered occupation of public spaces by the masses played a central role in the rituals of the Soviet state. Drawing on a long tradition of Russian holidays, mass festivals were supposed to display for all to see the happy marriage between leaders and citizenry. They also contributed to the economic collapse of the Soviet Union.
Alexandre Sumpf defends his view of political education in the Soviet Union. Anything but another study on the Bolshevik agenda in the countryside, his book investigates the process of professionalization of Soviet agents, and emphasizes the fluidity of individuals’ approach to politics in the early stages of the Soviet regime’s attempt to shape a New Man.
Film censorship in post-Stalin Russia was neither rational, nor a product of ideology. As, historian Martine Godet convincingly shows, it was rather the result of a fluid and unpredictable process, where status and stratagems played a key role.
Bolcheviks en Campagne extensively documents the balance between coercion and persuasion in the Bolsheviks’ treatment of the peasants. However, the author underestimates the peasants’ agency and should have distanced himself more from the image of a backward peasantry, which the government used to justify collectivization and repression.
