Stephen Lovell

The Russian reading revolution : print culture in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras

List of Abbreviations Introduction: Russias Reading Myth The Creation of the Soviet Reader The Arrival of the New Reader: The Post-Stalin Period Reading Revitalized? The Perestroika Project and its Aftermath The Periodical Press: Background and Case Studies Reading in Post-Soviet Russia Conclusion Bibliography Index

The Making of the Stalin‐Era Dacha*

As postcommunist Russia began to inventory the perquisites of the Soviet elite, the dacha emerged as one of the main accessories of the privileged class. There was no more high-profile commentary on this subject than Nikita Mikhalkov’s Oscar-winning Burnt by the Sun (1994). In its mise-en-scene this film is a Chekhovian ensemble piece: a family assembles at its country house, but soon the air is thick with tension as long-standing animosities and disagreements are discharged into the atmosphere. Conflicts—along social, generational, and emotional fault lines—threaten vaguely, but persistently, to erupt into acrimonious skandal. But this is no cherry orchard. Rather, it is a dacha owned by a family from the prerevolutionary Moscow intelligentsia—the older generation remembers receiving here such illustrious guests as Shaliapin and Rakhmaninov—that has now been incorporated into a settlement for artists, writers, performers, and musicians (the acronym, KhLAM, spells a Russian word meaning “junk”). The daughter of the family, Marusia, has married an Old Bolshevik and civil war hero, Kotov, a rough-hewn national celebrity. This domestic milieu provides the setting for the entrance of the other main character, Mitia, a former sweetheart of Marusia, who, after compromising himself by siding with the Whites, was lured into becoming a Bolshevik agent. Now, in 1936, he is working for the NKVD and, as is revealed in the denouement, has been given the task of arresting Kotov, who is to fall victim to the next wave of the Terror. The film was deservedly admired for its fine acting and high production values. But, like so much of Mikhalkov’s work, it aims for rather more than that, implying nothing less than an interpretation of modern Russian history and society. The broad-shouldered, potent, heroic, nationally rooted, ultimately martyred man of the people (Kotov) stands in opposition to the opportunist, cowardly, villainous, slightly built, childless cosmopolitan intellectual (Mitia). Kotov’s manly qualities are in further contrast to the almost painfully Chekhovian family into which he has entered by marriage. His in-laws are as cultured, sociable, high-strung and charmingly set in their ways as any Gaev or

Broadcasting Bolshevik: The Radio Voice of Soviet Culture, 1920s-1950s

Propaganda was always a key preoccupation of the Soviet regime and it was not limited to the printed word. Public speaking – whether in meetings and lectures or on the radio – had a prominent place in the Soviet version of modernity. From the early 1920s onwards, propagandists, journalists and performers debated how best to use the spoken word: what was the balance to be struck between oratory and information, edifcation and theatricality, authority and popular participation? Radio professionals struggled with these issues more than anyone: they had to get broadcasts right, yet studios worked under great pressure and faced serious technological constraints. By 1937 experimental and interactive forms of broadcasting were effectively banned. They made a slow comeback in the postwar era, thanks in no small part to technological improvements such as the introduction of mobile recording equipment. The story of how Russia learned to speak on air is an important and hitherto overlooked aspect of Soviet ‘cultural construction’.

Russia in the Microphone Age : A History of Soviet Radio, 1919-1970

Glossary Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction: Why Radio? 1. Institutionalizing Soviet Radio 2. Radio and the Making of Soviet Society 3. How Russia Learned to Broadcast 4. Mobilizing Radio: The War 5. From Wire to Efir 6. The Magnitofon and the Art of Soviet Broadcasting 7. Radio Genres and Their Audiences in the Postwar Era Epilogue Note on Sources Bibliography Index

Finding a Mate in Late Tsarist Russia: The Evidence from Marriage Advertisements

ABSTRACT This article examines a hitherto unstudied source – the marriage newspapers of late tsarist Russia – for the light it can shed on two important but elusive subjects for historical inquiry. First, the history of marriage in an era of astonishingly rapid social and economic change. Second, the history of social identities. It is argued that the small and apparently trivial texts of marriage advertisements offer a rare opportunity to see the language of social description in cultural practice – to discover, in other words, how the various labels of class, estate, occupation and status acquired meaning in peoples everyday lives and discourse.