Research Catalog

Title

Performing justice : agitation trials in early Soviet Russia / Elizabeth A. Wood.

Author

Wood, Elizabeth A., 1958-

Publication

Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 2005.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

viii, 301 p. : ill.; 24 cm.

Summary

• "After seizing power in 1917, the Bolshevik regime faced the daunting task of educating and bringing culture to the vast and often illiterate mass of Soviet soldiers, workers, and peasants. As part of this campaign, civilian educators and political instructors in the military developed didactic theatrical fictions performed in workers' and soldiers' clubs in the years from 1919 to 1933. The subjects addressed included politics, religion, agronomy, health, sexuality, and literature. The trials were designed to permit staging by amateurs at low cost, thus engaging the citizenry in their own remaking."
• "In reconstructing the history of the so-called agitation trials and placing them in a rich social context, Elizabeth A. Wood makes a major contribution to rethinking the first decade of Soviet history. Her book traces the arc by which a regime's campaign to educate the masses through entertainment and discipline culminated in a policy of brute shaming."--Jacket.

Subject

• Trials (Political crimes and offenses) > Soviet Union
• Trials in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [233]-291) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

A question of origins -- Experimental trials in the Red Army, 1919-20 -- The trial of Lenin -- Teaching politics through trials, 1921-23 -- The culture of everyday life, 1922-24 -- Melodrama in the service of science -- The trial of the new woman -- The crisis in the clubs and the erosion of the public sphere -- Shaming the boys who smoke cigarettes -- Fiction becomes indistinguishable from reality, 1928-33.

ISBN

0801442575 (cloth : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2004030153

OCLC

• 57373638
• SCSB-10458172

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library