Questions for Discussion:

What was the purpose of the NEP, and how did it unfold? How did young people respond to this change? Why might NEP be described as a ‘nervous’ era?

Set reading (to be prepared for class discussion):

Source: Paraskeva Ivanova, 'Why I Do Not Belong in the Party', in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, pp. 213-218. Scan available here.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'The Problem of Class Identity in NEP Society', in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites, eds. Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Indiana University Press, 1991).

Lewis Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Chapter 4, ‘Living with NEP’. E-book.

Selected further reading:

Alan Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921-1929 (Berkeley, 1987). E-book.

Frances Bernstein, ‘Panic, Potency, and the Crisis of Nervousness in the 1920s’ in Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, eds., Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Boomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 153-182. E-book.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites, eds. Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Indiana University Press, 1991).

Anne E. Gorsuch, ‘NEP Be Damned! Young Militants in the 1920s and the Culture of Civil War’, The Russian Review, 56 (1997), pp. 564–80.

Anne Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Indiana University Press, 2000). E-book.

Matthias Neumann, The Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1917-1932 (Routledge, 2011).

Kenneth Pinnow, Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 1921-29 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). E-book.