Status Updates From Everyday Stalinism: Ordinar...

Interessant, was Leben und Erziehung da geheißen hat. An erster Stelle kam Hygiene, Zähne putzen, nicht auf den Boden spucken, Seife und Handtücher benutzen, dann Lesen und Schreiben lernen. Frauen und Kinder nicht schlagen. Nicht so viel saufen, dass man nicht zur Arbeit erscheinen kann.
Erst dann kam die politische Ebene. Tolles Buch. Alltags- Forschung.

"It has been argued that it makes no more sense to ask whether Soviet citizens did or did not accept the Soviet worldview than to ask whether medieval people accepted the Christian worldview: there was simply no other available. ... The argument is useful in reminding us that most people most of the time do accept their governments, and the chances are that the Russian urban population in the 1930s was no exception."

"The striking thing was that Pravda had appropriated some themes of popular complaint [about Communist officials living in luxury] that, if uttered by a citizen in normal times, would have risked being labeled “anti-Soviet” or “hostile.” The behaviors it described were characteristic of the whole cohort of Communist cadres, even though they were being attributed only to certain scapegoated “enemies of the people.”"

⚽️ "A Leningrader wrote to a Leningrad party secretary bemoaning the defeats of Leningrad's two football teams and asking him to do something about it."