A Social History of Twentieth Century Russia

Vladimir Andrle's study of Russian history shifts the focus of historical understanding from political leaders and their ideologies to the interactions of the State with the various social strata and the religious and national groups. The vantage point of the study is an interest in the small-scale realities of everyday life - such as work, leisure, education, marriage, consumer aspirations - that endow people with social identities and colour their perceptions of public issues. These realities have a multi-layered organizational and contextual nuance that can never be captured by the governmental categories of even the most autocratic states, not even the ones that succeed in suppressing free association. The intention has not been to rewrite late-tsarist/Soviet political history, but to supplement it by a reconstruction that brings into view the complex interplay between the mundane transactions of social life and the historic exertions of political will.