Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality

Book excerpt: For millions of people, the Soviet experience meant not only living through the torment of Stalinism and the GULAG, the unbelievable destiny of men and women during the 1917 Revolution, civil war, and the Second World War, or those breathtaking, gigantic Socialist construction projects. Many citizens of the former Soviet Union lived ¿ordinary lives in ordinary times¿, where the fate of men and women depended not on armed coercion, but Soviet ideology and propaganda. Adopting and Remembering Soviet Reality contains the stories of ten women, talking about their lives in Soviet Lithuania, one of the annexed Baltic republics. The book gives a compelling account of how, in the last years of Stalin¿s rule, after 1945, during the so-called ¿Khrushchev Thaw¿, and in the beginning of the ¿Stagnation Era¿, Soviet ideology transfused the everyday life of women and dictated just about every major aspect of their lives. Based on interviews, the journalistic press of that era, as well as other material, the book reveals how propaganda shaped women¿s understanding of family and work responsibilities, child care, interpersonal relationships, romantic love, and friendship.