Book chapter
"Критика низкой успеваемости в школах района и города - это наличие элементов аракчеевского режима". Практики и смыслы профессиональных конфликтов в контексте послевоенных политических кампаний.История сталинизма: Жизнь в терроре. Социальные аспекты репрессий: материалы международной научной конференции. Санкт-Петербург, 18-20 октября 2012 г / Науч. ред.: А. Сорокин. М. : РОССПЭН, 2013.
In article on the basis of a case study examines the everyday life of the Stalinist system. Postwar political campaign was broadcast on the world of Soviet man. The study of conflict within the school community, helps to understand the strength of practices that used an ordinary Soviet people beyond the boundaries of the world of big politics. Professional conflict between the teacher of history and Director of the school suddenly acquired political resonance. The quarrel went outside educational institutions, and became the subject of discussion of various political and administrative authorities. The teacher of history and continued the fight in new institution.
In book
This paper is devoted to the explanation of selected bureaus’ behavior patterns in the soviet type of totalitarian dictatorships with the command economic model. It is a proven fact that the plan figures in the soviet economy were fabricated as a consequence of intrigues and secret negotiations between different interested parties. Generally, bureaus, as rational agents that minimize risk and maximize slack, should have been interested in reducing the plan figures, nevertheless, they strived to increase them. As examples, mass repression under dictatorships and overexpenditure of an administrative leverage at elections in non-democratic and quasi-democratic countries can be observed. In the article we develop a simple model of coordination between principal (dictator) and his agents (bureaus), which explain the mentioned paradoxical situation.
Main focus of this article is on narrative representation of the school discipline (student resistance, incompliance and conflicts with teachers) in Russian school folklore and official school documents in the second half of the 20th century. Two genres of school jokes (written and oral), school rules and official lists of allowed punishments were compared. Concept of discipline is operationalized as disciplinary episodes depicting student infringements or disciplinary acts (punishments) taken by teachers. Distribution of infringements and punishments among studied genres and genre differences in perspective on the same disciplinary episodes discover subtle borders between official and unofficial view on discipline in Soviet school. Also I suggest several semantic categories, guiding narrative representation of school discipline: isomorphism of disciplinary and schooling processes, risk involved in initiating disciplinary conflict, connection between discipline and everyday school routine, internal structure of disciplinary system (hierarchy of punishments).
The series of studies collected in theis book represent different approaches of their authors to the problem of privat life in the past.
The main theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of Stalinism within the Weberian tradition in historical sociology are discussed. Particular attention is devoted to Michael Mann's discussion of the "regimes of continuous revolution" and Johann Arnason's analysis of the Soviet model of modernity.
The article examines the main trends in the study of the Stalinist period and the phenomenon of Stalinism in connection with the mass opening of the archives.
A major contribution to the growing literature on Soviet nationality policy. David Brandenberger frames his study with a large and important question: the generation of a Russian/Soviet national identity during the Stalinist years. He tells the important story of the production of a more nationalist world view and how it was received, moving from elites to the masses. Focusing on history and historians, Brandenberger links historiography with nation-making and state building. This work should be widely read, not least because it clearly and eloquently illuminates the painful process of forging national identity. (Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Chicago) Brandenberger alters our understanding of how Soviet culture was created and how it held Soviet society together. Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is the foundation of documents on which it rests. Clearly the result of years of gathering, these documents show us Stalinism as received, as a set of social practices and discourses in constant revision and misuse. National Bolshevism illuminates broader debates about the functioning of Soviet society, the origins of national consciousness, and the formation of the subject with the modern state, and will be a widely read contribution to the field. (James von Geldern, Macalester College)
The article reviews the development of Soviet psychology at the beginning of the 20th century and its contemporary school viewed through the prism of thriving global psychology. The development process is considered to be influencing the establishment of operational approach in Soviet education.