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Between Dictatorship, Stagnation, and the “Golden Age”:
The Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s
This seminar focuses on a period often neglected by historians of the Soviet Union: the Brezhnev years (1964-1982). Wedged in between the unpredictability of the Khrushchev era and the tremendous changes of the 1980s, these years are often associated with stagnation, cronyism, and monotony. At the same time, by people across the former Soviet Union, the Brezhnev period is now often viewed as the period of the greatest political stability and material comfort, and even retrospectively idealized as the “golden age”. This seminar challenges these images and ideas, discussing the 1960s and 1970s as a highly dynamic period in which continuity and change always coexisted.
In order to analyze this coexistence, the course looks at the micro and macro levels of society. Was everyday life really so “golden”? The seminar addresses the importance of blat (personal connections and networks), thus trying to gain a deeper understanding of Soviet consumerism, work and life under socialism, and economic development. How did the forms and implications of personal networks differ across the Soviet Union? At the same time, the seminar explores macro politics. Particular attention is paid to the tension between liberalization and repression in political and cultural life, and to the growing nationalism that took hold of Soviet society from the late 1960s. The same ambivalence between détente and antagonism will also be traced in foreign policy.
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