On Living Through Soviet Russia (Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative) - Hardcover

For a period of over seventy years after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, talking about the past, either political or personal, became dangerous. The new policy of glasnost at the end of the 1980s resulted in a flood of reminiscence, almost nightly on television and more formally collected by new Russian oral history groups and western researchers. This book is a fascinating collection of life stories and family history interview material collected by the editors and two Russian groups of interviewers.

Daniel Bertaux is Director of Research in Sociology at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. For several years after 1991 he organized the collection of case histories of families in Russia in order to document what ordinary Russians had experienced during seventy years of 'State Socialism'. Paul Thompson is Research Professor in Sociology at the University of Essex, and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Community Studies, London. He is Founder-Editor of Oral History and Founder of the National Life Story Collection at the British Library. Anna Rotkirch is a sociologist at the University of Helsinki. She has specialized in comparative research on families and sexuality, autobiographical research and Russian studies.