Imagining socialism in the soviet century
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2017-07-03
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Abstract
Much of the current conversation about social justice, economic responsibility and individual self-realization is informed by an explicit or implicit comparison between capitalist and socialist modernities. The Soviet Union’s variety of socialism understandably serves as a critical master referent in this conversation. In this regard, a dominant historical narrative that ties the history of Soviet socialism to the Bolshevik origins imposes serious limitation to available depictions of socialism and histories of the twentieth century. This article turns the Bolshevik fundamentals assigned to the Soviet project into a problem of historical analysis and argues that the Soviet experience has more than one normative vision of socialism to offer. The goal is to foreground the divergence of normative conceptions of the socialist society and individual by historicizing the two principal and presently closely identified ideological-educational undertakings: those of the New Man and the ‘New Soviet Person’. By tracing the histories of the two projects, the article shows how the collectivist ethos of the Bolshevism of the 1910–1920s that rejected the ontological differentiation between the individual and his or her social milieu failed to retain its ideological, institutional, and cultural currency even during the 1930s, not to mention throughout the Soviet period.
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Krylova, A (2017). Imagining socialism in the soviet century. Social History, 42(3). pp. 315–341. 10.1080/03071022.2017.1327640 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15159.
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Anna Krylova
Anna Krylova is an associate professor at Duke in the Department of History with a joint appointment in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She has written on questions of historical and social theory, gender theory, socialist feminism, Western and Soviet Marxism, as well as modern Russia and challenges posed in envisioning a socialist alternative in the age of industrial, post-industrial, and post-colonial modernity. She is the author of Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge University Press, 2010), the winner of the 2011 AHA Herbert Baxter Adams Prize.
She is currently working on two book projects. One, The Grip of History: Essays in Historical Criticism and Social Theory, is a collection of essays that rethinks American historians’ encounter with the poststructuralist intellectual project and explores the analytical and political price the discipline has paid for the poststructuralist upgrade of its analytics. The other is a new cultural history of Soviet Russia, provisionally titled Imagining Socialism in the Soviet Century. Her most recent publications include “Marx and the Many Lives of Marxism in 20th the 21st Centuries,” Social History, May 2024; “Foucault, Poststructuralism, and the Fixed “Openness of History,” Modern Intellectual History, May 2024; and “Agency and History,” American Historical Review, June 2023; “Imagining Socialism in the Soviet Century,” Social History, August 2017; “Legacies of the Cold War and the Future of Gender in Feminist Histories of Socialism,” in The Routledge International Handbook to Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (2021); and “Gender Binary and the Limits of Poststructuralist Method,” Gender and History, August 2016. Many of her publications are accessible at https://duke.academia.edu/AnnaKrylova.
She has been Fellow at the National Humanities Center; George Kennan Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Fellow at Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and visiting scholar at the Institute of Eastern European History at Tubingen University (Germany). Her work has been supported by the Mellon Faculty Book Manuscript Workshop Fellowship, SSRC, and IREX.
Degrees:
Ph.D., History, 2001, Johns Hopkins University.
M.A., History, 1998, Johns Hopkins University.
M.A., Political Science, 1995, Johns Hopkins University.
Awards and Honors
Fellow, National Humanities Center, 2013-2014.
Member, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Spring Term, 2013.
2011 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, awarded for the best first book in European history.
2008-2009 Mellon Faculty Book Manuscript Workshop Fellowship, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University.
2006-2010 Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History, Duke University.
2005-2002 Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University.
1998-1999 Social Science Research Council Dissertation Write-up Grant.
1999 Stulman Graduate Student, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University.
1997-1998 IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunities Fellowship.
1997-1998 Pre-Dissertation Fellowship Award, Association for Women in Slavic Studies.
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