But what they were actually doing, and one that had some resonance with real Country Email List workers, was offering upward mobility opportunities to workers, but especially to their children. They gave them preference Country Email List in admission to higher education, for example. I thought that it was a really interesting phenomenon and that Country Email List it was worth studying it, and that it was feasible to do it despite the limitations of access to the archives. The Soviets, of course, would have rejected the term "upward social mobility." They did not recognize that notion and would surely not have been comfortable with that interpretation of "proletarian preference rules.
However, they had their own approach which their historians called "the formation of the Soviet Country Email List intelligentsia ." Now, the "formation of the Soviet intelligentsia " means, among other things, the social advancement of people of worker and peasant origin. Therefore, under that heading of formation of the Soviet intelligentsia I was able to get archival material Country Email List on upward social mobility. In " New Perspectives on Stalinism , " an article published in The Russian Review in 1986, you argued, in line with your criticism of the model proposed by the school of totalitarianism, that it was possible to Country Email List think of Stalinism " from down » . Then, effectively, it was what you yourself did and reflected in your book Daily life during Stalinism. What specific modifications did this study of Stalinism imply in order to understand the forms of the regime.
What issues came to light that had not been addressed before? As a historian, I always Country Email List doubt models. Therefore, what I intended was not to develop an alternative to totalitarianism, but to Country Email List highlight and account for those aspects that this approach did not allow us to see. In that sense, I also did not Country Email List express my ideas and my analyzes about the functioning of Soviet politics in model terms. In addressing the question of how society works, the image I offered was that of a vast institutional structure created and controlled by the state.