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- Title
Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament.
- Authors
KRYLOVA, ANNA
- Abstract
‘Modernity’ has long been a working category of historical analysis in Russian and Soviet studies. Like any established category, it bears a history of its own characterised by founding assumptions, conceptual possibilities and lasting interpretive habits. Stephen Kotkin's work has played a special role in framing the kind of scholarship this category has enabled and the kind of modernity it has assigned to twentieth-century Russia. Kotkin's 1995 Magnetic Mountain introduced the concept of ‘socialist modernity’. His continued work with the concept in his 2001 Kritika article ‘Modern Times’ and his 2001 Armageddon Averted marked crucial moments in the history of the discipline and have positioned the author as a pioneering and dominant voice on the subject for nearly two decades. Given the defining nature of Kotkin's work, a critical discussion of its impact on the way the discipline conceives of Soviet modernisation and presents it to non-Russian fields is perhaps overdue. Here, I approach Kotkin's work on modernity as the field's collective property in need of a critical, deconstructive reading for its underlying assumptions, prescribed master narratives, and resultant paradoxes.
- Subjects
HISTORY of the Soviet Union; MODERNIZATION (Social science); SOCIAL change; BOLSHEVISM; KOTKIN, Stephen; MAGNETIC Mountain: Stalinism As a Civilization (Book)
- Publication
Contemporary European History, 2014, Vol 23, Issue 2, p167
- ISSN
0960-7773
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1017/S0960777314000083