A new man - a new death? Funeral culture of the early USSR
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11.99 €
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A new man - a new death? Funeral culture of the early USSR
14.99 €
11.99 €
The history of the USSR is often measured in tens and hundreds of millions of tragic and violent deaths - from famine, repression, war, and the catastrophic costs of the social and economic policies of the Soviet regime. But the vast number of victims of the Soviet experiment was surrounded by even more immense death: we are talking about millions and millions of people who died of old age, disease, and accidents. The book by historian and anthropologist Anna Sokolova is an analysis of state policy on death and burial, as well as the bizarre metamorphoses of funeral culture in the major cities of the USSR. This topic has long been overshadowed by studies of political repression and war, as well as works on traditional village funeral culture. While these aspects of Soviet mortality have been well researched, the question of what death and funerals represented in material and symbolic dimensions for the average Soviet city dweller has been little studied. Meanwhile, it is very important for understanding who the "new Soviet man" proclaimed by the revolution was (or was to become). The analysis of transformations in the sphere of funeral culture also sheds light on another question: was the experience of radical reform of society in the USSR absolutely unique or, despite its radicalism, was it part of a large-scale modernization transition to industrial societies? Anna Sokolova is a candidate of historical sciences, researcher at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a lecturer at the History of Soviet Civilization program at the Moscow School of Social Sciences.
See also:
- All books by the publisher
- All books by the author
- All books in the series RELIGIOUS STUDY