title: Inequality of Blockade Suffering and the Nature of (Soviet) Class
metadata.name: dc.contributor.author
metadata.value: Sloin, A.
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.date.accessioned
metadata.value: 2024-01-25T19:36:15Z
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.date.available
metadata.value: 2024-01-25T19:36:15Z
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.date.issued
metadata.value: 2023-12
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.identifier.citation
metadata.value: Sloin A. ‘Inequality of Blockade Suffering and the Nature of (Soviet) Class’, Modern History of Russia, vol. 13, no. 4, 2023, pp. 819–823. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu24.2023.405
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.identifier.other
metadata.value: https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu24.2023.405
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.identifier.uri
metadata.value: http://hdl.handle.net/11701/44730
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.description.abstract
metadata.value: Jeffrey Hass’ Wartime Suffering and Survival is an important study of the social history of emotions
  and group psychologies during the siege of Leningrad. Hass explores how Leningraders responded to the inhuman
  conditions of suffering, death, and starvation. Following Pierre Bourdieu, Hass examines the collective responses
  of different social strata to the siege, and how class was reconceptualized in terms of mental frameworks
  of meaning-making, rather than relations to private property ownership. His analysis reveals how entrenched
  class distinctions were in Soviet society, and how they impacted the strategies of survival employed by the population.
  By combining theory with archival documents, Hass provides an innovative approach to understanding
  the class-food nexus in Soviet society, and how the extreme conditions of the siege amplified the exploitative
  wage labor relationship. Jeffrey Hass’ work shows how theory can allow deeper access into archival documents
  and enrich analysis, thus offering an innovative avenue for reconceptualizing class as an agentive category. To
  push back on the question of class, the Marxist understanding of class is critiqued, as Marx is quite critical of the
  idea that class can be reduced to relations of private property. Class is instead seen as a phenomenon created
  through the process of proletarianization and the alienation of human labor — and not simply as one of property
  ownership. It is thus suggested that, in the context of hyperinflation, siege, scarcity, and threatening social breakdown,
  food also began to function as money, constituting part of the wage and the most desperately needed part.
  Read through this perspective, Jeff’s workers seem far less like a group bounded together not only by habitus
  and customs of thought, but also by a social system of hyper-statist domination grounded from the outset of the
  revolution on the wage labor form.
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.language.iso
metadata.value: en
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.publisher
metadata.value: St Petersburg State University
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.relation.ispartofseries
metadata.value: Modern History of Russia;Volume 13; Issue 4
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: Blockade
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: Leningrad
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: World War II
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: survival
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: institutions
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: culture
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: power
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: resilience
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: social theory
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.title
metadata.value: Inequality of Blockade Suffering and the Nature of (Soviet) Class
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.type
metadata.value: Article
metadata.lang: en_GB
resources.filename: 05_sloin.pdf
resources.url: https://dspace.spbu.ru/bitstream/11701/44730/1/05_sloin.pdf
resources.format: Adobe PDF
resources.size: 242,89 kB