Gleaning for Communism

The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice

Xenia A. Cherkaev

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Hardback

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English

Cornell University Press
15 July 2023

European history; Social & cultural anthropology; Civil codes & Civil law

Gleaning for Communism is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal scholars legislated a large modern state as a household, with guaranteed rights to a commons of socialist property, rather than private possessions. Starting with former Leningrad workers' everyday stories about smuggling industrial scrap home over factory fences, Xenia Cherkaev traces collectivist ethical logic that was central to this socialist household economy, in theory and practice: from its Stalin-era inception, through Khrushchev's major foregrounding of communist ethics, to Gorbachev's perestroika, which unfurled its grounding tension between the interests of any given collective and of the socialist household economy itself.

A story of how the socialist household economy functioned, how it collapsed, and how it was remembered, this book is haunted throughout by a spectral image of the totalitarian state, whose jealous political control over the economy leads it to trample over all that which ought to be private. Underlying this image, and the neoliberal state phobia it justified, is the question of how individual interests ought to relate to the public good in a large modern society, which, it is assumed, cannot possibly function by the non-private logics of householding. This book tells the story of a large modern society that did.

By: Xenia A. Cherkaev
Imprint: Cornell University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 22mm
Weight: 907g
ISBN: 9781501770234
ISBN 10: 1501770233
Pages: 210
Publication Date: 15 July 2023
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Xenia Cherkaev is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the Higher School of Economics University, St. Petersburg, Russia. She has published articles in The American Historical Review; Cahiers du monde Russe; Environmental Humanities; and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Reviews for Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice

Cherkaev has fashioned a historical ethnography of this property regime which is both theoretically complex and convincing. Rich in emic detail, it captures the essence of how the socialist household functioned, how it collapsed, and how it was remembered. -- Dominic Martin * Ab Imperio *