Winner of the Heldt Prize of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies; Named an Outstanding Academic Book for 1995 by ^IChoice^R
Sheila Fitzpatrick is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor of History at the University of Chicago. She is the author or editor of numerous books including The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (1992).
"In this pathbreaking study, Sheila Fitzpatrick portrays collective
farm life in the 1930s from the perspective of the
peasantry...Stalin's Peasants is an accessible and fascinating
glimpse into the Soviet countryside."--Journal of Social
History
"Fitzpatrick makes her account vivid with quotations of
first-person experiences, but she resists the temptation to
oversimplify the issues."--Kirkus Reviews
"A pioneering piece of historical sociology that delineates the
deplorable reality of ideological utopias."--ALA Booklist
"Stalin's Peasants is well-researched and richly detailed. It adds
a great deal of new information on rural conditions and attitudes
in the 1930s. No other work comes close to it in recounting the
tragedy of collectivization from the peasant's point of
view."--Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"This is an outstanding contribution both to the history of the
USSR and the social history of peasants by a remarkable historian.
She makes us hear the Russian peasants of the Stalin era speak
(largely via hitherto closed archival records) and the echo of
their voices in post-Soviet Russia today."--Eric Hobsbawm, The New
School for Social Research
"Fitzpatrick's study is truly a landmark in the historiography of
the Stalinist period of Soviet history, something that has been
long overdue--a thickly documented social history of 1930s, not
from the perspective of the 'system' of Stalinism, but of the
traumatic experiences and changes in life texture of that
long-suffering underclass, the Russian peasantry."--Allan Wildman,
Ohio State University
"With prodigious energy and diligence in newly-opened archives and
employing the theoretical insights of recent historical and
anthropological studies, Sheila Fitzpatrick shows how in the
Russian village after collectivization peasants used the 'weapons
of the weak' to pry from the Stalinist state what they needed in
order to survive. She tells a tragic story filled with small
triumphs by the subaltern in dynamic and moving prose. This is an
empirical and
conceptual tour de force."--Ronald Grigor Suny, The University of
Michigan
"Sheila Fitzpatrick has written yet another path-breaking book,
introducing us once more to an untold history and hitherto unused
sources. She shows that Stalin's peasants were unmistakably kin to
the peasants of Peter and Catherine, and the two Nicholases. They
resisted the often unbearable pressure of the state as best they
could, exploited the regime's dependence upon peasant cooperation,
adopted the language of the regime as they pursued their own
intravillage feuds, and remained cynically indifferent to the
regime's goals."--John Bushnell, Northwestern University
"Fitzpatrick offers the first large-scale study of collectivization
and its impact upon the peasantry since the opening of the archives
in the late 1980s...Fitzpatrick has written a pioneering book that
will inspire future researchers."--International Labor and
Working-Class History
"...A work that should be read by all students of Russian and
Soviet culture, and will be of interest to sociologists,
anthropologists, and anyone interested in cultural
theory."--Russian Review
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