Les Sovietiques, Un Pouvoir, Des Regimes

In the Soviet Union, the population’s lifestyle and the way they organised their work in the kolkhozes, closed cities, the “creator unions,” and the military-industrial complex factories were regulated by multiple special regimes.In this book, Russian and French historians explore this particular reality which is relatively unknown and in the process show how multifaceted the Soviet regime was. Considered to be totalitarian under Stalin, and authoritarian after his death, this regime sheds its all-encompassing nature as the reader learns about the closed worlds inhabited by various categories of the USSR’s population. Beyond the administrative, national, social and professional divisions somewhat familiar to us today, the authors describe the population through the ways in which it reacted to the specific rules imposed on it by the diverse regimes in power at the time. They reveal that the Soviets are not truly a single and uniform people but are comprised of distinct unique groups whose peoples can be individually identified. Contrary to what is commonly thought to have been a leadership-imposed consensus, this book shows that a gap between personal strategies and the collective norm suddenly widened in the 1970s. This imbalance developed in reaction to a cultural organisation which was mixing ideological dogma acquired after 1917 with secular government methods.The aim of this work is to enable readers to discover the diversity of the Soviet peoples’ experiences, which depended upon the category to which they belonged. In the Soviet Union, the Party line was dominant, but it was also considerably more multifaceted than suggested by the commonly accepted impression of the country, unchanged since the Cold War.