Introductory description

This undergraduate final-year Advanced Option explores the history of the body in Soviet Russia from revolution to the collapse of the USSR, in light of revolutionary claims that socialism would bring about ‘a higher social-biologic type, or if you please, a superman’.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Term 1

1. Mind/Body/Social: Revolutionary Understandings of the Physical [Introduction to History of the Body as a field; exploration of early revolutionary theorising on the intersection between mind, body and society in socialism]
2. The Machine Man and the New Soviet Person [Utopian dreams of the body in the early Soviet period, impact of technology/psychology on unfolding state policy to ‘shape’ bodies through healthcare, training]
3. The New Soviet Woman [Gendered dimensions of Soviet vision of the body; understandings of the female body as an ‘obstacle’ to socialist transformation]
4. Disease and Deviance in the Early Soviet Period [Behaviours/identities/physical states defined by Soviet state as ‘parasites’ on the Soviet body politic]
5. Sensory Regimes of Socialism [Attempts by early Soviet cultural practitioners to shape new, revolutionary ways of hearing/seeing/smelling/tasting/touching the world]
6. Reading Week
7. Acculturating the Soviet Body [Stalinist attempts to foster ‘cultured’ bodies through hygiene, consumption, fashion]
8. Bodies of the Five-Year Plan [How planned economy under Stalin sought to shape bodies through physical culture and labour practices; consideration of how industrial labour damaged bodies]
9. Stalinist Fantasies of Embodiment [How Socialist Realist texts, films and art promoted ideal socialist bodies in the 1930s]
10. Nikolai Ostrovskii and the Disabled Hero [The case study of Nikolai Ostrovskii’s novel How the Steel was Tempered (1936), a Socialist Realist classic about a disabled man]

Term 2

1. Violence and the Body Politic during the Purges [The Purges as an embodied history: consideration of torture and violent death (or the anticipation of it) as a universal Soviet experience]
2. Bodies as Weapons in WWII [Soviet policy towards military preparedness; cultural depictions of military bodies; gendered experiences of the Eastern Front]
3. Marks of Trauma [Late Soviet attempts to come to terms with the twin traumas of the Purges and WWII; looking at bodily manifestations of these experiences (e.g. prison tattooing)]
4. Late Socialist Work, Rest and Play [Changing understandings of the ideal Soviet body under Khrushchev’s Thaw: from labour machine to object of leisure]
5. Technological Utopias of the Body [The impact of the Scientific-Technological Revolution on understandings of the body: from space habitats to prosthetics]
6. Reading Week
7. Pleasures in Socialism [The concept of pleasure (sensual/emotional) in late Soviet society; the impact of Cold War competition on understandings of luxury)
8. The Soviet-Afghan War [Soviet popular representations of Afghanistan veterans’ crippled bodies as a crisis of socialism; discussion of Svetlana Aleksievich’s Zinky Boys (1990)]
9. Ageing Soviet Bodies [The demographic crisis of the late Soviet period; popular responses to the ‘gerontocracy’ in the Kremlin (Brezhnev’s ageing body)]
10. Reclaiming the Body during Glasnost [Impact of Gorbachev’s reforms on Soviet view of the body; the ‘epidemics’ of drug use, prostitution and suicide as a rejection of Soviet socialism]

Term 3

1. Revision, long essay/dissertation meetings
2. Revision, long essay/dissertation meetings

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a systematic knowledge and understanding of the ways in which the Soviet Union envisaged the ideal socialist body, and the various policies it used to bring that body about
• Critically analyse and evaluate a broad range of primary sources (including literary, cinematic and visual texts) relating to the history of the Soviet body
• Effectively communicate ideas, and make informed, coherent and persuasive arguments, about the tensions between ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ bodies in the Soviet context
• Critically review and consolidate theoretical, methodological, and historiographical ideas relating to the history of the Soviet body.

Indicative reading list

Primary Sources

• Aleksievich, Svetlana, Julia Whitby, and Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, trans. by Robin Whitby (New York: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1992)
• Applebaum, Anne, ed., Gulag Voices: An Anthology, Annals of Communism Series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011)
• Baldaev, Danzig, and Sergei Vasiliev, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, Vols 1-3, ed. by Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell, (London: FUEL, 2009)
• Bidlack, Richard, and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives, Annals of Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012)
• Engel, Barbara Alpern, and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, eds., A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997)
• Fitzpatrick, Sheila, and Yuri Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)
• Garros, Véronique, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930’s (New York: New Press, 1995)
• Clark, Katerina and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953, Annals of Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)
• Korotych, Vitaliĭ Oleksiĭovych, and Cathy Porter, eds., The Best of Ogonyok: The New Journalism of Glasnost (London: Heinemann, 1990)
• Rosenberg, William G., Bolshevik Visions: Creating Soviet Cultural Forms : Art, Architecture, Music, Film, and the New Tasks of Education (University of Michigan Press, 1990)
• ———. , ed., Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, Part 1 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1990)
• Shalamov, Varlam, Kolyma Tales, trans. by John Glad (London ; New York: Penguin Classics, 1994)
• Siegelbaum, Lewis H., A. K. Sokolov, L. Kosheleva, and Sergei Zhuravlev, eds., Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents, Annals of Communism Series (New Haven, Conn. ; London: Yale University Press, 2000)
• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 Abridged: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Reissue, Abridged edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007)
• Thurston, Robert W., and Bernd Bonwetsch, The People’s War: Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (University of Illinois Press, 2000)
• Trotsky, Lev, Literature and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005)
• Von Geldern, James, and Louise McReynolds, eds., Entertaining Tsarist Russia: Tales, Songs, Plays, Movies, Jokes, Ads, and Images from Russian Urban Life, 1779-1917, Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies (Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press, 1998)

Websites

• Marxists Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/archive/
• Seventeen Moments in Soviet History: http://soviethistory.msu.edu/

Films

• Bed and Sofa (dir. Abram Room, 1927)
• Circus (dir. Grigorii Aleksandrov, 1936)
• Little Vera (dir. Vasilii Pichul, 1988)
• The Cranes Are Flying (dir. Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)
• The Irony of Fate (dir. El’dar Riazanov, 1976)

Secondary Sources

• Beer, Daniel, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880 - 1930, 1 edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)
• Bernstein, Frances L., Christopher Burton, and Dan Healey, Soviet Medicine: Culture, Practice, and Science (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010)
• Bernstein, Frances Lee, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses, 1 edition
• (DeKalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007)
• Chatterjee, Choi, Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910-1939 (University of Pittsburgh Pre, 2002)
• Crowley, David, and Susan Reid, eds., Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2012)
• Fainberg, Dina, and Artemy M. Kalinovsky, eds., Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: Ideology and Exchange (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016)
• Geyer, Michael, Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, 1 edition (New York, N.Y: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
• Grant, Susan, Physical Culture and Sport in Soviet Society: Propaganda, Acculturation, and Transformation in the 1920s and 1930s, 1 edition (New York: Routledge, 2012)
• ———. , ed., Russian and Soviet Health Care from an International Perspective: Comparing Professions, Practice and Gender, 1880-1960, 1st ed. 2017 edition (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
• Hoffmann, David L., Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914-1939, Reprint edition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014)
• Kaganovsky, Lilya, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity Under Stalin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008)
• Krylova, Anna, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front, Reprint edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
• Naiman, Eric, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology / Eric Naiman. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997)
• Plamper, Professor of History Jan, ed., Personality Cults in Stalinism - Personenkulte Im Stalinismus, Bilingual edition (Göttingen: V&r Unipress, 2004)
• Rasell, Michael, and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova, eds., Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: History, Policy and Everyday Life, 1 edition (London ; New York: Routledge, 2013)
• Shaw, Claire L., Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991 (Cornell University Press, 2017)
• Siegelbaum, Lewis H., Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941, 1st Edition edition (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
• Starks, Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia, Russian History through the Senses: From 1700 to the Present, ed. by Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks, 1 edition (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)
• Starks, Tricia, The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State, 1 edition (Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009)
• Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, New Ed edition (New York Oxford: Oxford University Press USA, 1989)
• Widdis, Emma, Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017)

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.