For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became dangerous. The situation changed dramatically with the new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s. The result was a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television, and more formally collected by new Russian oral history groups and also by Western researchers. Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson both began collecting life story and family history interview material in the early 1990s, and this book is the outcome of their initiative. Living Through the Soviet System analyzes, through personal accounts, how Russian society operated on a day-to-day level. It contrasts the integration of different social groups: the descendents of the pre-revolutionary upper classes, the new industrial working class, or the ethnically marginalized Russian Jews. It examines in turn the implications of family relationships, working mothers, absent fathers and caretaking grandmothers; patterns of eating together, and of housing; the secrecy of sex; the suppression of religion; and the small freedoms of growing vegetables on weekends on a dacha plot. Because of its basis in direct testimonies, the book reveals in a highly readable and direct style the meaning for ordinary men and women of living through those seven dark decades of a great European nation. Because of the centrality of Soviet Russia to the history of the twentieth-century world, this book will be of interest to a wide range of readers. It will be of importance to students, researchers and teachers of history and sociology, as well as specialists in East European and other communist societies.

This first volume of the collected writings of sociologist Leo Lowenthal contains his classic theoretical and historical writings on the relationship of art to mass culture. This book series presents Lowenthal's contributions to a theory of the role of communication in modern society. This volume lays out the basis for a theory of mass culture. Lowenthal demonstrates that the juxtaposition of a "low" mass culture and a "high" esoteric culture did not originate in contemporary industrial, bourgeois society but can be traced back to the Middle Ages and antiquity.

The studies in this volume deal with problems of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism. Lowenthal's book length contribution, "Prophets of Deceit," which begins this collection, is a classic of political psychology. This research study is followed by an essay, "Terror's Atomization of Man." Lowenthal uses this material for a theory of the psychological mechanisms operative under terrorist conditions and their significance for contemporary society.

The core of this volume is its presentation of Lowenthal's sixty-year-long intellectual career as a critical theorist and sociologist. The book includes some of his speeches on Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin and presents excerpts from conversations on his life as a scholar and teacher, as managing editor of the Institute for Social Research's famous journal, as government servant during and immediately after the war, and as observer and critic of contemporary culture and politics. Together these selections present an intriguing biographical panorama of a major intellectual figure.

For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became dangerous. The situation changed dramatically with the new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s. The result was a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television, and more formally collected by new Russian oral history groups and also by Western researchers. Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson both began collecting life story and family history interview material in the early 1990s, and this book is the outcome of their initiative. "Living Through the Soviet System" analyzes, through personal accounts, how Russian society operated on a day-to-day level. It contrasts the integration of different social groups: the descendents of the pre-revolutionary upper classes, the new industrial working class, or the ethnically marginalized Russian Jews. It examines in turn the implications of family relationships, working mothers, absent fathers and caretaking grandmothers; patterns of eating together, and of housing; the secrecy of sex; the suppression of religion; and the small freedoms of growing vegetables on weekends on a dacha plot. Because of its basis in direct testimonies, the book reveals in a highly readable and direct style the meaning for ordinary men and women of living through those seven dark decades of a great European nation. Because of the centrality of Soviet Russia to the history of the twentieth-century world, this book will be of interest to a wide range of readers. It will be of importance to students, researchers and teachers of history and sociology, as well as specialists in East European and other communist societies. "Daniel Bertaux" is directeur de recherches at the Centre d'Etudes des Mouvements Sociaux, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. "Paul Thompson" is research professor in sociology at the University of Essex and fellow at the Institute of Community Studies in London. "Anna Rotkirch" is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Helsinki.

This volume's predominant theme is bourgeois mentality and its historical development. The works of Lope de Vega, Calderon, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, among others, are analysed within the historical framework of the decline of feudalism and the rise of the absolute regimes. Those of Moliere and Goethe are set against the background of an evolving and consolidating bourgeois society in Western Europe.

This volume's predominant theme is bourgeois mentality and its historical development. The works of Lope de Vega, Calderon, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, among others, are analysed within the historical framework of the decline of feudalism and the rise of the absolute regimes. Those of Moliere and Goethe are set against the background of an evolving and consolidating bourgeois society in Western Europe.