Anna Alekseyeva Everyday Soviet Utopias

Annotation

This book explores how intellectuals of the later Soviet decades - the 1970s and 1980s - sought to bring about the socialist utopian world. It argues thata thea last two decades of thea Soviet Uniona were nota characterised by state withdrawal and malaise, as some scholars have argued;a attempts to envisage and enact Utopia remained as imaginative and creative as ever. The book considersa what these utopian ideas looked like througha housing schemes, layouts of districts and cities,a design of objects and interiors,a and proposals for the organisation of family and social life. Relating developments in the Soviet Union to evolving social theory and postmodernism more broadly, the book draws transnational parallels between the intellectual history of east and west in the late twentieth century.a