Dr. Elena Osokina, to Appear at MSSU Missouri Southern News Bureau FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 13, 2004 Contact: Dr. Chad Stebbins (417) 625-9736 E-Mail: News Bureau Voice: (417) 625.9399 FAX: (417) 625.3142 |
JOPLIN, MO (SNS) - Dr. Elena Osokina, writer, scholar, and assistant professor of history at Southwest Missouri State University, will make two presentations at Missouri Southern State University on Tuesday, Oct. 19. She will present "Women in a Totalitarian Society: Soviet Union, Late 1920s-Early 1940s" at 11 a.m. in Webster Hall Auditorium. The presentation is free and open to the public. Dr. Osokina will explore the changes that "Stalin's revolution from above" brought into women's life. She will look at the central political decisions and actions that changed women's positions in the society and then will focus on women's everyday duties to provide food and goods for their families under the conditions of permanent shortages and famine caused by Stalin's destruction of the peasant markets. She will also describe women's resistance to the regime and the impact that Stalin's Great Terror had on them. Dr. Osokina will address Dr. Ree Wells' International Semester Perspectives class at 9:30 a.m. in Room 207 of Webster Hall. Her address is titled "Stalin's Gold, Industrialization and Soviet Everyday Life." Permission of instructor required. To attend, please call Dr. Wells at (417) 625-9762. In that address, she will explore a historically new form of everyday life that can be called "Soviet socialism." She will argue that two things worked together to shape Soviet everyday life, the state's claim for total control and the population's responses to it. The Soviet Union was the first state in the modern world to attempt to completely control not only production but also the distribution of goods within a country over an extended period of time. Dr. Osokina also will focus on the creation of special stores to drain the Soviet people of their wealth, showing how the state's economic interventions led the people to create a new set of strategies for survival and enrichment. These two things -- state interventions and grassroots responses -- worked together to create a new form of everyday life. Dr. Elena Osokina received her Ph.D. from Moscow State University in 1998. She has been a visiting scholar at Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris, a senior research associate in the Institute of Russian History at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, a post-doctoral fellow at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University, and a visiting lecturer at Donaueschingen Academy in Germany. She has given presentations at the Russian and East-European Centers of Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Princeton, Stanford, Pittsburgh, Boston College, Library of Congress, University of Aberdeen (Great Britain), University of Helsinki (Finland), and University of Toronto. Her book, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin's Russia, 1927-1941, was published in 2001. . |
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