¹ Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Kotkin, Stephen, ‘Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2, 1 (2001), 111–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kotkin, Stephen, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; 2008)Google Scholar.

² For a critical historiographical discussion of the 1990s-era scholarship on Russian modernity, see Michael David-Fox's seminal essay that analyses academic narratives of modernity by contrasting what he calls modernist and neo-traditionalist approaches to thinking about Russia in twentieth century, David-Fox, Michael, ‘Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 54 (2006), 535–55Google Scholar.

³ In the field of European history, analytical limitations and possibilities of the term ‘modernity’ have been subject to continuous scholarly scrutiny, see, for example, Eley, Geoff, ‘German History and the Contradictions of Modernity: The Bourgeoisie, the State, and the Mastery of Reform’, in Eley, Geoff, ed., Society, Culture, and Politics in Germany, 1870–1930: New Approaches (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 67–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Eley's paper ‘What was German Modernity?’ presented at the German Studies Association, Washington, DC, Oct. 8–11, 2009, that offers an analysis of the ‘multifarious usages of the language of “the modern” and “modernity” both in the work of historians today and in the contemporary discourse of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’. For a recent discussion of the concept and its limitations, see AHR Roundtable on ‘Historians and the Question of “Modernity”’, esp. Mark Roseman's contribution on the limited explanatory capacity of the category when applied to the historical case of Nazism, Mark Roseman, ‘National Socialism and the End of Modernity’, American Historical Review, 116, 3 (2011), 688–701Google Scholar.

⁴ See, e.g. Friedrich's, Carl J. and Brzezinski's, Zbigniew K.Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956)Google Scholar which relied on the neo-liberal (Friedrich Hayek’s) identification of the autonomous and rational individual with conditions of free market competition as a core presupposition in their analysis of the Soviet Union, in Krylova, Anna, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 1, 1 (2000), 121–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ In order to rely on this image of the capitalist West as the harbour of modern individuality, Kotkin had to disregard, in the manner of cold war Soviet studies, a prolific, multifaceted, and ongoing intellectual critique within critical theory of capitalist modernity as the locus of the individual's demise. This critique is hardly reducible to Marxist thought. Critics of the fate of the individual under conditions of capitalist production, accumulation and mass society come from different intellectual milieus, such as romantic, liberal, socialist, Catholic, Fascist, post-Marxist, and postmodern, and could fill up volumes with just the names and titles of the works.

⁶ One of the most canonical treatments of modernity that underlines permanent instability and tension between the impulse toward order and regulation, on the one hand, and inherent ambiguity and changeability, on the other hand, in the modern condition, is, for example, Berman, Marshall, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982)Google Scholar. Field-shaping scholarship on modern Russia, on the other hand, has stressed ordering, regulatory, and surveillance impulses of Russian and Soviet path toward modernity, see, e.g. Holquist's, Peter landmark article ‘“Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work”: Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Perspective’, Journal of Modern History, 69, 3 (1997), 415–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoffmann's, DavidCultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A rare exception to this approach to modernity studies in the Russian context is Steinberg's, Mark fundamental study of ambivalences and ambiguities of modern life, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

⁷ One aspect of Kotkin's definition of Soviet modernity that is not investigated here is his unproblematised reliance on the term ‘non-market industrial economy’. This notion has been a topic of much academic debate. For a field-defining rethinking of Soviet non-market economy as inevitably a mixed economy, i.e. as a peculiar Soviet combination of plan and market (both illegal and legal), see Elena Osokina, esp. her analysis of Soviet black economy and the phenomenon of state entrepreneurship in Osokina, E. A., Za fasadom “stalinskogo izobiliia”: raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody industrializatsii, 1927–1941 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998)Google Scholar, tr. Greta Bucher as, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin's Russia, 1927–1941, ed. Kate S. Tranchel, New Russian History Series (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2001); and Zoloto dlia industrializatsii: TORGSIN (Gold for Industrialization: TORGSIN), (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009). Following Osokina, I use the term ‘non-market’ to mean that the development of Soviet market relations was hindered, deformed, and did not exist in the forms familiar from Western examples.

⁸ On developments within Soviet legal culture, and mainstream artistic and literary conversations away from the Bolshevik and the Socialist Realist traditions, see Nathan's, Benjamin, ‘Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era’, in Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 166–90Google Scholar; and ‘The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol’pin and the Idea of Rights under “Developed Socialism”’, Slavic Review, 66, 4 (2007), 630–63; Reid's, Susan E. path-breaking essay, ‘Toward a New (Socialist) Realism: The Re-engagement with Western Modernism in the Khrushchev Thaw’, in Blakesley, Rosalind P. and Reid, Susan E., eds, Russian Art and the West (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 217–39Google Scholar; Anatoly Pinsky, ‘The Diaristic Form and Subjectivity under Khrushchev’, Slavic Review, (forthcoming).

⁹ The kinds of new cultural forms I explore here go beyond neo-traditionalist interpretations which treat the 1930s discontinuities in the Bolshevik discourse on class as a return to pre-Bolshevik systems of signification (either ‘nationalist’ or ‘bourgeois’), implying that no new socialist cultural forms came to life as a result of the accelerating transformations of Soviet society. For an elaboration of this critique, see my discussion in section three of this essay. See also Michael David-Fox's critical discussion of the neo-traditionalist school of thought, in particular, the work by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Matthew Lenoe and Terry Martin, in David-Fox, ‘Multiple Modernities’, 544–8; also see Hoffmann's, David critique of the ‘great retreat’ paradigm in his ‘Was there a “Great Retreat” from Soviet Socialism? Stalinist Culture Reconsidered’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 5, 4 (2004), 651–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Recently, historians of Nazi Germany have begun to recover discourses on individuality and interest in personality in the Nazi era. For an innovative analysis of culture of individualism in Nazi Germany and effective critique of prevalent interpretive paradigms applied to modern German history, see Föllmer, Moritz, ‘Was Nazism Collectivistic? Redefining the Individual in Berlin, 1930–1945’, The Journal of Modern History, 82, 1 (2010), 61–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Föllmer, Moritz, Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Leo, Per, Der Wille zum Wesen (Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2013)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 12, 23, 364.

¹² Kotkin, ‘Modern Times’, 156–7. For an analysis of the history of the concept of ‘multiple modernities’ in the social sciences and history see David-Fox, ‘Multiple Modernities’, 537–8.

¹³ Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 14, 152.

¹⁴ For the recent critical conversation about conceptual currency of the ‘turn talk’ in the field of history and methodological innovation, under the rubric of the cultural and linguistic turns, see an AHR Forum titled ‘Historiographic “Turns” in Critical Perspective’, esp. the contribution by Cook, James W., in American Historical Review, 117, 3 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Spiegel's, Gabrielle Presidential Address, ‘The Task of the Historian’, American Historical Review, 114, 1 (2009), 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Suny, Ronald Grigour, ‘Back and Beyond: Revising the Cultural Turn?’, American Historical Review, 107, 5 (2002), 1476–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hesse, Carla, ‘The New Empiricism’, Cultural and Social History, 1, 2 (2004), 201–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scott, Joan Wallach, ‘Against Eclecticism’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 16, 3 (2006), 114–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 22, 149–51, 215, 220–1, 223, 236. A similar intellectual move toward a study of totalitarian subjectivity as a productive process was also made in scholarship on Nazi Germany, see Föllmer, Individuality and Modernity, 63–4.

¹⁶ Ibid. 152.

¹⁷ See Krylova, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject’.

¹⁸ Kolakowski, Leszek, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part III: Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951; citations from 1968 edn), 170–2Google Scholar.

²⁰ Meyer, Alfred G., Marxism: The Unity of Theory and Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954; citations from 1970 edn), 144Google Scholar, 137–9.

²¹ Bauer, Raymond A., The New Man in Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in Daniels, Robert V., ed., The Stalin Revolution: Foundations of the Totalitarian Era (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1997), 39–45Google Scholar.

²² The quotes come from 1977 ‘Marxist Roots of Stalinism’ in which Kolakowski offers a dense summary of the totalitarian school's position. Kolakowki, Leszek, ‘Marxist Roots of Stalinism’, in Tucker, Robert C., ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: Norton, 1977), 284, 299Google Scholar. For core works preceding Kolakowski's ‘Marxist Roots of Stalinist’ and Main Currents of Marxism (1978), see Friedrich, Carl J. and Brzezniski, Zbigniew K., Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Erlich, Alexander, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics (New York: Praeger, 1962Google Scholar; Westport: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1976); Daniels, Robert, The Nature of Communism (New York: Random House, 1962)Google Scholar; McNeal, Robert Hatch, The Bolshevik Tradition: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963)Google Scholar; Wolfe, Bertram D., An Ideology in Power: Reflections on the Russian Revolution (New York: Stein and Day, 1969)Google Scholar; Kolakowski, Leszek, Marxism and Beyond: On Historical Understanding and Personal Responsibility (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

²³ Kolakowski, ‘Marxist Roots of Stalinism’, 285, 291, 293–4.

²⁴ Kolakowski, ‘Marxist Roots of Stalinism’, 288.

²⁵ The revisionist challenge to the totalitarian school, for example, first took place in political science in the late 1960s. It drew on an alternative stream in the 1950s scholarship that remained on the margins of Soviet studies for two decades. Its pioneers – a cohort of outstanding social scientists such as Barrington Moore, Merle Fainsod and Adam Ulam – started their explorations of the Stalinist phenomenon with a premise that the power of the communist idea needs to be explained not through its innate qualities, but through social forces and historical circumstances peculiar to Russia. Jerry Hough's 1969 The Soviet Prefects, for example, made a strong case for Barrington Moore's model that posited an eventual retreat of communist ideology all together in reaction to new social circumstances of industrialised society. See, Hough, Jerry F., The Soviet Prefects: The Local Party Organs in Industrial Decision-Making (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ulam, Adam B., ‘The Historical Role of Marxism and the Soviet System’, World Politics, 8, 1 (1955)Google Scholar; Moore, Barrington, Terror and Progress USSR: Some Sources of Change and Stability in the Soviet Dictatorship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fainsod, Merle, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953)Google Scholar. Most recently, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer with a group of scholars have offered a critical comparative exploration of the totalitarian school's legacies, Geyer, Michael and Fitzpatrick, Sheila, eds, Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

²⁶ Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 18, 150–1, 158, 202, 215, 355.

²⁷ Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, see Ch. 5 ‘Speaking Bolshevik’, 198–237.

²⁸ Ibid. 151–2, 356.

²⁹ Ibid. 360.

³⁰ Ibid. 115, 119; also see Kotkin, Armageddon Averted, xii, 23–5.

³¹ Kotkin, Armageddon Averted, 5, 47, 69.

³² Kotkin, ‘Modern Times’, 113–14.

³³ Kotkin, ‘Modern Times’, 124, 132–3, 139; see also, Kotkin, Armageddon Averted, 47.

³⁴ For Kotkin's commentary on the official usage of such terms of Soviet ideology as ‘Soviet’, ‘socialist’, ‘Bolshevism’ as synonyms, see Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 225.

³⁵ For a historiographical review of scholarship on the post-war Soviet Union, see Dobson, Mariam, ‘The Post-Stalin Era: De-Stalinization, Daily Life, and Dissent’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 12, 4 (2011), 905–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ Halfin, Igal, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Kharkhordin, Oleg, The Collective and the Individual in Russia. A Study of Practices (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

³⁷ Halfin, for example, invited his readers to ‘move Marxism from the status of subject to the status of object of historical analysis’. Treating the Bolshevik world-view as a discursive practice that, among many things, aimed at proletarianisation of Soviet state and identity politics, he investigated ‘how historical figures interpreted their historical present and located themselves along the temporal continuum ranging from capitalism to communism’. After focusing on the decade of the 1920s in From Darkness to Light, he later extended his analysis into the 1930s and beyond: Halfin, From Darkness into Light, 2.

³⁸ Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, 279–80, 320, 337–9; see also 294–8.

³⁹ Hellbeck, Jochen, Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ See Siegelbaum, Lewis, ed., Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Polly, ed., The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar; Ilic, Melanie and Smith, Jeremy, eds, Soviet State and Society Under Nikita Khrushchev (London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar; Ilic, Melanie and Smith, Jeremy, eds, Khrushchev in the Kremlin: Policy and Government in the Soviet Union, 1953–1964 (London: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar; Reid, Susan E. and Crowley, David, eds, Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁴¹ See, e.g. Dobson, ‘The Post-Stalin Era’, 918; Lewis Siegelbaum, ‘Introduction: Mapping Private Spheres in the Soviet Content’, in Borders of Socialism, 5; Juliane Fürst, ‘Friends in Private, Friends in Public: The Phenomenon of the Kompaniia Among Soviet Youth in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Siegelbaum, Borders of Socialism, 232.

⁴² Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 8Google Scholar, 11, 13–14, see also Ch. 2.

⁴³ The compilation of characteristics of Soviet ideology of modernity was drawn from multiple scholarly monographs. For a comprehensive discussion of Bolshevik-Soviet ideology applied to the post-war Soviet Union, see, for example, Siegelbaum, ‘Introduction’, 1–21.

⁴⁴ Dobson, ‘The Post-Stalin Era’, 905. The subfield's critical engagement with Oleg Kharkhordin's work in particular underlined scholarly investment in the general association of Soviet modernity with the anti-individualist cultural script of Bolshevism. Scholars’ critique of Kharkhordin's work, for example, was directed at his argument about the successful effort of the post-Stalinist state to instil the collectivist principle into the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens. This attempt to ‘collectivise’ post-war Soviet society, argued such scholars as Steven E. Harris, Susan E. Reid, Christine Varga-Harris, Mark B. Smith, Deborah Field, and Mariam Dobson, was not as successful as Kharkhordin implied. They pointed to Soviet people's resourcefulness in avoiding and subverting the campaign as well as to the emergence of non-formal (i.e. outside the official ideological framework) professional, civic, and private cultures. Thus, the very terms of their critique did not question Kharkhordin's identification of Soviet modernity with the collectivist imperative, but rather explored its limited impact on individuals’ lives. For an analysis of the field's engagement with Kharkhordin's work, see Dobson, ‘Post-Stalin era’, 913–16.

⁴⁵ Fürst, ‘Friends in Private’, 242–4, 232. For similar interpretive choices, see, e.g. Harris, Steven, ‘In Search of Ordinary Russia: Everyday Life in the NEP, the Thaw, and the Communal Apartment’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, 3 (2005), 583–614CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ann Livshchiz, ‘De-Stalinizing Soviet Childhood: The Quest for Moral Rebirth, 1953–1958’, in Jones, eds, The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, 117–34. For Harris as for other scholars working on post-war single family housing and the ‘quest for privacy’, individuality continued to be seen as being at odds with the post-war socialist project. See also his ‘“I Know All the Secrets of my Neighbours” : The Quest for Privacy in the Era of the Separate Apartment’, in Siegelbaum, Borders of Socialism, 171–89. See also Deborah Field's path-breaking work on understanding and practices of private life in the post-war Soviet Union in which she tends to privilege the account of the Soviet public discourse on private life that proclaims ‘private interests’ as being ‘identical to public goals’ and thus frames it in reductive Bolshevik terms. Fields, Deborah A., Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev's Russia (New York: Peter Lang, 2007)Google Scholar, 6. One of the most prolific and innovative directions of the subfield dealing with socialist consumer culture has yet to directly address the relevance of Bolshevik sensibilities and anxieties to individualising discourses and practices of Soviet consumption, see Reid, Susan E., ‘The Meaning of Home: “The Only Bit of the World You Can Have to Yourself”’, in Siegelbaum, Borders of Socialism; Crowley, David and Reid, Susan E., eds, Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, Style and Socialism.

⁴⁶ Lewin, Moshe, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989)Google Scholar, 31, 46. By 1985, the Soviet population became predominantly urban by 1985 and constituted 65% of the total population, Lewin, Gorbachev Phenomenon, 31; see also Kerblay, Basile, Modern Soviet Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983)Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ For the best and most comprehensive analysis of Soviet post-war industrial society with its modern professionally differentiated social structure, individualising practices of intellectual work, and accompanying discourses on the individual in social sciences, see Lewin, , The Gorbachev Phenomenon and Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974)Google Scholar. Lewin's core ideas about post-war Soviet society can be already found in his essay, ‘Society and the Stalinist State in the Period of the Five Year Plans’, Social History, 1, 2 (1976), 139–76; also Suny, Ronald Grigour, ‘Living in the Soviet Century: Moshe Lewin, 1921–2010, History Workshop Journal, 74, 1 (2012), 192–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar for an analysis of Lewin's study of social transformation in Russia from the late 19th c. into the 1980s. For a different interpretive approach to post-war Soviet society as a society of disenchanted, de-politicised and passive resisters see Shlapentokh, Vladimir, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Shlapentokh, Vladimir, The Politics of Sociology in the Soviet Union (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Shlapentokh, Vladimir, Evolution in the Soviet Sociology of Work: From Ideology to Pragmatism (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 1985)Google Scholar. For an overview of pre-1980s scholarship on patterns of social change within post-war Soviet society which approached the question through paradigms of modernisation and convergence theory, see, e.g. reviews by Bertram Wolfe, ‘Russia and the USA: A Challenge to the Convergence Theory’, The Humanist (Sept.–Oct., 1968); Meyer, Alfred G., ‘Theories of Convergence’, in Johnson, Chalmers, ed., Change in Communist Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 313–42Google Scholar; Kelley, Donald R., ‘The Soviet Debate of the Convergence of the American and Soviet Systems’, Polity, 6, 2 (1973), 174–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Engerman, David C., Modernization From the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ For a full explication of the crisis of Bolshevism during the second half of the 1930s, see Krylova, Anna, ‘Identity, Agency, and the “First Soviet Generation”’, Lovell, Stephen, ed., Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 101–21Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ See, e.g. A. Koroteev, ‘Nabolevshie voprosy Komsomolskoi raboty’ (‘Urgent Questions of Komsomol Work’), Pravda, 7 June 1940 and S. Obraztsov, ‘Kto vinovat?’ (‘Who is to Blame?’), Pravda, 11 Aug. 1940 cited in Anna Krylova, ‘Identity, Agency’, 106, 110.

⁵⁰ See Dunham, Vera, In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; see also Timasheff, Nicholas S., The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: Dutton, 1946)Google Scholar. For Kotkin's critique of the ‘retreat paradigm’ as well as Moshe Lewin's and Sheila Fitzpatrick's arguments that Stalinism constituted a ‘reversal’ of the Bolshevik project, see Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 2–6.

⁵¹ For a full analysis of the emerging post-Bolshevik discourse in the mid 1930s, see Anna Krylova, ‘On “Being Soviet” and “Speaking Bolshevik”: Disentangling Histories and Historiographies of the Socialist Self’, under revision.

⁵² See for example, E. Kononenko, ‘Mechty o slave’ (‘Dreams about glory’), Komsomolskaia Pravda (KP), 5 Aug. 1937; A. Konev and L. Kara-Stoianova, ‘Obyvateli s diplomom’ (‘Philistines with Diplomas’), KP, 24 July 1938; ‘Po-bolshevitski podderzhat zamechatelnyi pochin’ (‘Bolshevik Support for the Remarkable Undertaking’), KP, 11 July 1938, cited in Anna Krylova, ‘“On Being Soviet” and “Speaking Bolshevik”’. See also, V. Goldberg, ‘Bliustiteli “nravstvennosti”’ (‘Policemen of Morality’), KP, 3 Mar. 1937; E. Kononenko, ‘Iunoshi i devushki’ (‘Young Men and Young Women’), KP, 22 June 1938.

⁵³ For an analysis of both individualising practices of Soviet industrial society and the discourse on the individual in Soviet social sciences, see Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon and Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates.

⁵⁴ On new direction in Soviet economic history, see Sanchez, Oscar and Sloin, Andrew ‘Economy and Power in the Soviet Union, 1917–1939’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 15, 1 (2014)Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ In his forthcoming collection of essays, Michael David-Fox continues his investigation of the concept of ‘multiple modernities’ with a special attention to ‘the cultural or civilizational particularities that lie at the heart of the theory of “multiple modernities”’, see Michael David-Fox, ‘The Intelligentsia, the Masses, and the West: Particularities of Russian-Soviet Modernity’, forthcoming in Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Soviet Russia, 1921–1941 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming).

⁵⁶ Scholars working on Eastern Europe have begun to question the essential parameters and fixed values of allegedly opposing systems of socialism and capitalism. In The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Jonathan Zatlin, for example, offers a complex relational analysis (informed by methodologies of economic and cultural histories) of intertwining developments of East Germany's financial, economic, political and popular cultures. Betts, Paul in Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar makes a welcome intervention in the issues of socialist privacy and private spaces by working out an interpretive approach that allows him to treat ‘privacy’ of socialist subjects as established entitlement, existing in a dialectical tension with state power and public sphere. Pence, Katherine and Betts, Paul, eds, Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008)Google Scholar explores notions and practices of East German modernity as ‘viable’ difference (not a categorical oppositional reality). Kyrill Kunakovich's 2013 Princeton PhD thesis, ‘In Search of Socialist Culture: Culture and Politics in Krakow and Leipzig, 1945–1970’, uncovers histories of qualitative change in party and popular approaches to socialist culture and consumption in the People's Republic of Poland and the GDR. See also, McLellan, Josie, Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Palmowski, Jan, Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Rubin, Eli, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ The literature on these subject matters is vast. Most recently, for example, James Hinton uncovered a fascinating map of imaginable and enactable subject positions in wartime Britain that encompassed and combined ideals of social solidarity and autonomous individuality, anti-social individualism and expectations of self-realisation in the public sphere. Hinton, James, Nine Wartime Lives: Mass Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.