Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization

Le hockey bourgeois est-il compatible avec la morale prolétarienne ? La naissance du hockey soviétique dans la complexité politique du stalinisme d’après-guerre

“…D'ailleurs, pour arriver à leurs fins, ils avaient parfois recours au « parler bolchévique », selon l'expression d'un influent historien ayant adopté une approche foucaldienne pour étudier les relations de pouvoir dans la civilisation staliniste des années 1930, faisant ainsi ressortir les manoeuvres et contre-manoeuvres conçues comme des petites tactiques de la vie en socié-té. Ni complètement cyniques, ni totalement enthousiastes par rapport à l'ordre politique ambiant, les Soviétiques n'avaient cependant d'autre choix que de jouer les règles du jeu pour survivre dans cet environnement particulier 7 . La population n'était d'ailleurs pas passive et apathique vis-à-vis des mots d'ordre politiques qui émanaient d'en haut.…”

Fragile Conviction : Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan

“…The turmoil of ideas that swept through Kyrgyzstan showed the fragility of each ideological vision, which in any case only addressed a part of the population. By contrast, even though Soviet implementation used to be chaotic (Kotkin 1995) and produced many excesses, its vision of a better future remained unwavering. Perhaps it was for this reason that this Lenin was patched up.…”

“…Kotkin 1995;Fitzpatrick 1999). The plateau just above the city center is a reminder of this coercive past.…”

Understanding Stalinism in, from and of Central Asia: beyond failure, peripherality and otherness

“…Defining modernity as a condition in which individuals become subjects through acquiring a political project (Wittrock 2000, 47-49), some argued that the Soviet people indeed internalized the Soviet ideal of modernity and imagined themselves in political terms (Halfin 2006;Hellbeck 2006;Studer and Haumann 2006). This mental placement, historians showed, was also physically structured by the Soviet state: 'good' and 'modern' citizens were to live in exemplary cities (Kotkin 1995); 'bad' citizens and traitors to the Soviet project were to be removed (Hagenloh 2009;Shearer 2009) and contained in isolated conditions (Alexopoulos 2003). The castigated learned, experienced and, as Blackwood and Scarborough suggest in this issue, accommodated, even if they did not fully accept, the language and practices of stately disciplining.…”

“…First, historians interpreted the Stalinist project not as an archaic despotic system of repression detached from and against the population, but rather as a modernization project that worked and depended upon the human condition (Kotkin 1995;Hoffmann and Kotsonis 1999;Hoffmann 2011). Stephen Kotkin (1995), for example, demonstrated on the basis of the industrial showpiece project Magnitogorsk that the Soviet state actively promoted modern ideals such as welfare, class equality and socialist justice, and hence was a hypermodern venture. The Soviet state, then, not only repressed its people, it also turned them into the central goal of its project.…”