Front cover image for The collective and the individual in Russia : a study of practices

The collective and the individual in Russia : a study of practices

Oleg Kharkhordin has constructed a compelling, subtle, and complex genealogy of the Soviet, individual that is as much about Michel Foucault as it is about Russia. Examining the period from the Russian Revolution to the fall of Gorbachev, Kharkhordin demonstrates that Party rituals - which forced each Communist to reflect intensely and repeatedly on his or her "self," an entirely novel experience for many of them - had their antecedents in the Orthodox Christian practices of doing penance in the public gaze. Individualization in Soviet Russia occurred through the intensification of these public penitential practices rather then the private confessional practices that are characteristic of Western Christianity
eBook, English, ©1999
University of California Press, Berkeley, Calif., ©1999