An analysis of Soviet writings on sex and gender, the climate and thought around them, and their implications for the development of male and female personality differences. Aspects covered include the sociological and demographic approaches to sex differences.

This book explores the Soviet attempt to propagandise the 'new Soviet woman' through the magazines Rabotnitsa and Krest'yanka from the 1920s to the end of the Stalin era. Balancing work and family did not prove easy in a climate of shifting economic and demographic priorities, and the book charts the periodic changes made to the model.

Cinema has long been recognised as the privileged bridge between Soviet ideologies and their mass public. Recent feminist-oriented work has drawn out the symbolic role of women in Soviet culture, but, not surprisingly, men too were expected to play their part. In this first full-length study of masculinity in Stalinist Soviet cinema, John Haynes examines the ‘New Soviet Man’ not only as an ideal of masculinity presented to Soviet cinemagoers, but also, precisely, as a man in his specific, and hotly debated social, cultural and political context. A detailed analysis of Stalinist discourse sets the stage for an examination of the imagined relationship between the patriarch Stalin and his ‘model sons’ in the key genre cycles of the era: from the capital to the collective farms, and ultimately to the very borders of the Soviet state. Informed by contemporary and present day debates over the social and cultural significance of cinema and masculinity, New Soviet Man draws on a range of theoretical and comparative material to produce engaging and accessible readings accounting for both the appeal of, and the inherent potential for subversion within, films produced by the Stalinist culture industry. New Soviet Man will be widely read by students and specialists in the fields of film studies, Russian and Soviet studies, gender and modern European history.

In Stalinist Russia, the idealized Soviet man projected an image of strength, virility, and unyielding drive in his desire to build a powerful socialist state. In monuments, posters, and other tools of cultural production, he became the demigod of Communist ideology. But beneath the surface of this fantasy, between the lines of texts and in film, lurked another figure: the wounded body of the heroic invalid, the second version of Stalin's New Man. In How the Soviet Man Was Unmade, Lilya Kaganovsky exposes the paradox behind the myth of the indestructible Stalinist-era male. In her analysis of social-realist literature and cinema, she examines the recurring theme of the mutilated male body, which appears with startling frequency. Kaganovsky views this representation as a thinly veiled statement about the emasculated male condition during the Stalinist era. Because the communist state was "full of heroes," a man could only truly distinguish himself and attain hero status through bodily sacrifice-yet in his wounding, he was forever reminded that he would be limited in what he could achieve, and was expected to remain in a state of continued subservience to Stalin and the party.Kaganovsky provides an insightful reevaluation of classic works of the period, including the novels of Nikolai Ostrovskii (How Steel Was Tempered) and Boris Polevoi (A Story About a Real Man), and films such as Ivan Pyr'ev's The Party Card, Eduard Pentslin's The Fighter Pilots, and Mikhail Chiaureli's The Fall of Berlin, among others. The symbolism of wounding and dismemberment in these works acts as a fissure in the facade of Stalinist cultural production through which we can view the consequences of historic and political trauma.

As perceived icons of indifferent marginality, disorder, indolence, and parasitism, “Gypsies” threatened the Bolsheviks’ ideal of New Soviet Men and Women. The early Soviet state feared that its Romani population suffered from an extraordinary and potentially insurmountable cultural “backwardness,” and sought to sovietize Roma through a range of nation-building projects. Yet as Brigid O’Keeffe shows in this book, Roma actively engaged with Bolshevik nationality policies, thereby assimilating Soviet culture, social customs, and economic relations. Roma proved the primary agents in the refashioning of so-called “backwards Gypsies” into conscious Soviet citizens. New Soviet Gypsies provides a unique history of Roma, an overwhelmingly understudied and misunderstood diasporic people, by focusing on their social and political lives in the early Soviet Union. O’Keeffe illustrates how Roma mobilized and performed “Gypsiness” as a means of advancing themselves socially, culturally, and economically as Soviet citizens. Exploring the intersection between nationality, performance, and self-fashioning, O’Keeffe shows that Roma not only defy easy typecasting, but also deserve study as agents of history.