ABSTRACT
During the Cold War, especially before the 1980s, Soviet society was presented as a onedimensional, monolithic and predictable entity on both sides of ideological divide – in the Soviet studies in the West and in histories of the USSR/Communist Party in the Soviet Union as well. Despite the prevailing diff erent theoretical models of interpretation – a totalitarian/ modernization model in the West and orthodox Marxism-Leninism in the USSR – Soviet studies in both capitalist West and socialist East explained the major developments in a similar way, emphasizing mostly political, economic and ideological moments in a never-changing stability of the Soviet civilization. During the 1970s and the 1980s, the sudden rise of the “revisionist” school in Western historiography, especially with the publication of the brilliant studies by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stephen Cohen, Leopold Haimson and other Western scholars, revealed new data from the Soviet/Russian archives and introduced the fresh ideas and theories of a new social and new cultural history. A new generation of Western scholars, including Richard Stites, Vera Dunham, Laura Engelstein, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Jeff rey Brooks and Denise Youngblood replaced the traditional, one-dimensional interpretation of Soviet society with one that took into account the wealth and variety of diff erent cultural practices which these scholars had “discovered” in the everyday life of Soviet people. This has changed the development of Soviet studies, and eventually contributed to the tremendous popularity of cultural studies among both Western and post-Soviet historians.1
