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A pioneering insight into the world of the early Soviet activist in the wake of the October Revolution, exploring how young radicals banded together in 'urban communes'; at first an experimental lifestyle choice for a handful of young socialists, but growing into a cultural phenomenon espoused by tens of thousands of youths by the end of the 1920s.
List of contents
- Introduction: Making Their Revolution
- 1: Revolutionary Beginnings
- 2: Socialism in One Dormitory: Student Communes
- 3: Socialism in One Apartment: Byt Communes
- 4: Socialism in One Factory: Production Communes
- 5: Early Stalinism and the Urban Communes
- Conclusion The Commune is Dead, Vive le communard!
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Dr Andy Willimott is Lecturer in Modern Russian History and Fellow of the Insitute for Humanities and Social Science at Queen Mary University of London. A graduate of the School of History at UEA, and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies between 2012 and 2015, he currently lives in London and is a frequent visitor to Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Summary
Living the Revolution offers a pioneering insight into the world of the early Soviet activist. At the heart of this book are a cast of fiery-eyed, bed-headed youths determined to be the change they wanted to see in the world. First banding together in the wake of the October Revolution, seizing hold of urban apartments, youthful enthusiasts tried to offer practical examples of socialist living. Calling themselves 'urban communes', they embraced total equality and shared everything from money to underwear. They actively sought to overturn the traditional family unit, reinvent domesticity, and promote a new collective vision of human interaction. A trend was set: a revolutionary meme that would, in the coming years, allow thousands of would-be revolutionaries and aspiring party members to experiment with the possibilities of socialism.
The first definitive account of the urban communes, and the activists that formed them, this volume utilizes newly uncovered archival materials to chart the rise and fall of this revolutionary impulse. Laced with personal detail, it illuminates the thoughts and aspirations of individual activists as the idea of the urban commune grew from an experimental form of living, limited to a handful of participants in Petrograd and Moscow, into a cultural phenomenon that saw tens of thousands of youths form their own domestic units of socialist living by the end of the 1920s.
Living the Revolution is a tale of revolutionary aspiration, appropriation, and participation at the ground level. Never officially sanctioned by the party, the urban communes challenge our traditional understanding of the early Soviet state, presenting Soviet ideology as something that could both frame and fire the imagination.
Additional text
Living the Revolution will be of particular interest to historians of the NEP and the early Stalin era, and it will work well in both undergraduate Soviet history courses and graduate seminars ... historians of housing and consumption in the post-Stalin decades should also read this book to understand how tensions between ideology and everyday life in late socialism were shaped by the earliest attempts to live the Revolution.
