Questions for discussion:

Was the Brezhnev period truly an ‘era of stagnation’? How can oral history illuminate our understanding of the period? What forms did dissent take in the late Soviet era?

Set reading (to be prepared for class discussion):

Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Chapter 5, ‘Living Soviet in the Brezhnev-Era Stagnation’, pp. 220-267. Scan available here.

If you have the time and inclination, you can read some of the oral history interviews on which Raleigh’s book is based in Donald Raleigh (trans, ed.), Russia's Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about Their Lives (Indiana University Press, 2006). Natalia P’s account is particularly pertinent. E-book.

Selected further reading:

John Bushnell, ‘The “New Soviet Man” Turns Pessimist,’ in S. Cohen, A. Rabinowitch, and R. Sharlet, eds. The Soviet Union since Stalin (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 179-199, also in Ronald G. Suny, The Structure of Soviet History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 360-369.

Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (London, 2013). E-book.

Linda J. Cook, The Soviet Social Contract and Why It Failed: Welfare Policy and Workers’ Politics from Brezhnev to Yeltsin (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994).

Dina Fainberg and Artemy M. Kalinovsky, eds., Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: Ideology and Exchange (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016).

Ann Komaromi, ‘Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics’, Slavic Review, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 70-90.

Jeremi Suri, ‘The Promise and Failure of “Developed Socialism”: The Soviet ‘Thaw’ and the Crucible of the Prague Spring, 1964–1972’, Contemporary European History, Volume 15, Number 2 (2006).

Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). E-book.