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"Middle-class values" and Soviet life in the 1930s
Fitzpatrick, Sheila
Fitzpatrick, Sheila
Author
Abstract
This chapter deals with the new privileged elite of the Stalin period— Vera Dunham middle class and Djilas’s “new class”—and its place in the emerging Soviet value system. It focuses on the problems of accommodating elite privilege and status within a Soviet framework and the process of assimilating middle-class values. In 1938, some local party and Soviet leaders are so incensed by the grotesquely ill-fitting suits delivered to them by the “Sixteenth Party Congress” tailoring artel that they parade them before a meeting of the Bashkir Soviet, provoking general hilarity and public censure of the tailors. The change in Soviet attitudes to wives is part of the broader readjustment of values in the 1930s that Timasheff labeled the “Great Retreat.” If peasant husbands stand in the path of their wives’ progress, the wives are justified in divorcing them, though divorce in higher strata of Soviet society is already frowned upon.
Keywords
Date
1988
Type
Book chapter
Journal
Book
Soviet society and culture : Essays in honor of Vera S. Dunham
Volume
Issue
Page Range
20-38
Article Number
ACU Department
Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
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Open Access Status
License
All rights reserved
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Controlled