Those Narkompros materials were absolutely fascinating. Through them I Country Email List learned about Lunacharsky, but above all I began to understand how politics worked in the ussr. The prevailing idea about the ussr , encapsulated in the totalitarian model, held that all policy was formulated in the Politburo and then passed down. Country Email List But what I discovered in the files was that the Ministry of Education formulated policies (just like other ministries, departments of the Central Committee of the Party, etc.) and then tried to put pressure on the Politburo, the government, the Council Country Email List of Ministers and the people who they integrated it so that their policies were approved.
Sometimes they were successful and sometimes they were not, but I was seeing Country Email List a political process that the totalitarian model simply did not allow to see. When you began your historiographical Country Email List studies of Soviet communism, this "totalitarian school" perspective was predominant in Sovietology . However, Country Email List you took a different stance, focusing on a « story from below » , which served and centered on everyday life.
What were your criticisms or objections to this paradigm and why did you choose to Country Email List approach Soviet history from a societal perspective ? My first negative encounters with the "totalitarian model" came from my Country Email List archival work in the ussr . That was before I went to the United States, in the early 1970s. However, Country Email List when I settled there, the question became more important to me because Soviet studies in the.