Title Soviet baby boomers : an oral history of Russia's Cold War generation / Donald J. Raleigh

Published New York : Oxford University Press, ©2012

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 420 pages) : illustrations Series The Oxford oral history series Oxford oral history series. Contents The real nuclear threat : Soviet families in transition -- Overtaking America in school : educating the builders of communism -- "Unconscious agents of change" : Soviet childhood creates the cynical generation -- The baby boomers come of age -- Living Soviet during the Brezhnev-era stagnation -- "But then everything fell apart" : Gorbachev remakes the Soviet dream -- Surviving Russia's Great Depression -- "It's they who have always held Russia together." Summary Donald Raleigh's Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the fascinating life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation. For this book, Raleigh has interviewed sixty 1967 graduates of two "magnet" secondary schools that offered intensive instruction in English, one in Moscow and one in provincial Saratov. Part of the generation that began school the year the country launched Sputnik into space, they grew up during the Cold War, but in a Soviet Union increasingly distanced from the excesses of Stalinism. In this post-Stalin era, the Soviet leadership dismantled the Gulag, ruled without terror, promoted consumerism, and began to open itself to an outside world still fearful of Communism. Raleigh is one of the first scholars of post-1945 Soviet history to draw extensively on oral history, a particularly useful approach in studying a country where the boundaries between public and private life remained porous and the state sought to peer into every corner of people's lives. During and after the dissolution of the USSR, Russian citizens began openly talking about their past, trying to make sense of it, and Raleigh has made the most of this new forthrightness. He has created an extraordinarily rich composite narrative and embedded it in larger historical narratives of Cold War, de-Stalinization, "overtaking" America, opening up to the outside world, economic stagnation, dissent, emigration, the transition to a market economy, the transformation of class, ethnic, and gender relations, and globalization. Including rare photographs of daily life in Cold War Russia, Soviet Baby Boomers offers an intimate portrait of a generation that has remained largely faceless until now.--Publisher description Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index SUBJECT Deutschland Bundesrepublik Grenzschutzkommando Mitte Schule gnd Sovetskaja Associacija Meždunarodnogo Prava gnd Galereja "Kino" Moskau gnd Saratovskaja Oblastnaja Duma gnd Subject Baby boom generation -- Soviet Union -- History Families -- Soviet Union -- History Youth -- Soviet Union -- History Cold War -- Social aspects -- Soviet Union Social change -- Soviet Union -- History Oral history -- Soviet Union Interviews -- Russia (Federation) FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS -- Life Stages -- General. Baby boom generation Families Interviews Oral history Social aspects Social change Social conditions Youth Weltkrieg 1939-1945 Nachkriegsgeneration Alltag SUBJECT Soviet Union -- Social conditions -- 1945-1991. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85125856 Moscow (Russia) -- Biography Saratov (Russia) -- Biography Subject Russia (Federation) Russia (Federation) -- Moscow Russia (Federation) -- Saratov Soviet Union Genre/Form Biographies History Form Electronic book ISBN 0199876800 9780199876808

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