Everyday Stalinism:Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s

Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of repressions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people's well-being. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand in hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture.

In Cultivating the Masses, David L. Hoffmann examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime, a regime intent on transforming the socioeconomic order and the very nature of its citizens. To analyze Soviet social policies, Hoffmann places them in an international comparative context. He explains Soviet technologies of social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices. These practices developed in conjunction with the ambitions of nineteenth-century European reformers to refashion society, and they subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive regulations in countries around the world.

The mobilizational demands of World War I impelled political leaders to expand even further their efforts at population management, via economic controls, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence. Born at this moment of total war, the Soviet system institutionalized these wartime methods as permanent features of governance. Party leaders, whose dictatorship included no checks on state power, in turn attached interventionist practices to their ideological goal of building socialism.

From a distinguished author in the field, The New Global History is a critical inquiry into the historical process of globalization, which is seen as a distinctly twentieth century phenomenon with its roots in the age of expansion of the early modern world.

Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, The New Global History offers a fresh, overarching view of the process of globalization that is always empirically based and discusses the most important themes, such as policy, trade, cultural imperialism and warfare. Bruce Mazlish argues that globalization is not something that the West has imposed upon the rest of the world, but the result of the interplay of many factors across continents.

Students of history, politics and international studies, will all find this a valuable resource in the pursuit of their studies.

A historical novel about the most unlikely of lovers, interwoven with the mysticism of the Jewish occult.