Palaces on Monday

J. Arch Getty

• Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s by Sheila Fitzpatrick
  Oxford, 280 pp, £25.00, January 1999, ISBN 0 19 505000 2

It was not until the 1970s that ‘Soviet studies’ evolved into ‘Soviet history’. The totalitarian model, with its focus on government control of an inert population, gave way to the study of modern Russian society. The new Soviet social history insisted that society mattered, even in dictatorships, that the Stalinist regime had had to deal with a society whose traditions, structure and inertia could derail or modify the state’s plans. Although society never ‘won’ the contest, neither were the state’s victories complete. Even in the 1930s, the regime, which wanted communal farms, sometimes had to settle for private plots and privatised cows.