Peoples Well Being In The Ussr

"Quality of life" is a difficult concept to define, and particularly so when referring to the Soviet Union because Westerners have many preconceptions about Soviet living conditions. This volume goes a long way toward illuminating the realities of daily Soviet life and stands as an important contribution to our understanding of the Soviet Union. Contributors focus primarily on the relation of quality of life to living conditions but also discuss the quality and availability of state-provided services such as education, health care, and housing. Of special interest is their coverage of problems in Soviet society, including working conditions in factories, living conditions in rural areas, alcohol abuse, and the status of the elderly. Together these essays show that although the Soviet government has made great strides in improving the living conditions of its citizens, Soviet living standards and services are relatively poor by Western standards and several important social problems continue to burden the Soviet people.

Taking a fresh approach to the study of the Soviet Union, this Very Short Introduction blends political history with an investigation into Soviet society and culture from 1917 to 1991. Stephen Lovell examines aspects of patriotism, political violence, poverty, and ideology, and provides answers to some of the big questions about the Soviet experience. Throughout, the book takes a refreshing thematic approach to the Soviet Union and provides an up-to-date consideration of the Soviet Union's impact and what we have learnt since its end.

The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

We is a dystopian novel written by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. Originally drafted in Russian, the book could be published only abroad. It was translated into English in 1924. Even as the book won a wide readership overseas, the author's satiric depiction led to his banishment under Joseph Stalin's regime in the then USSR. The book's depiction of life under a totalitarian state influenced the other novels of the 20th century. Like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, We describes a future socialist society that has turned out to be not perfect but inhuman. Orwell claimed that Brave New World must be partly derived from We, but Huxley denied this. The novel is set in the future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State which assists mass surveillance. Here life is scientifically managed. There is no way of referring to people except by their given numbers. The society is run strictly by reason as the primary justification for the construct of the society. By way of formulae and equations outlined by the One State, the individual's behaviour is based on logic.