Gregory L Freeze

Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev (1827– 1907) was a highly prominent— and highly controversial— political figure in late imperial Russia. 1 Home-schooled by his father (a priest’s son who opted out of a clerical career and became a literature professor at Moscow University), Konstantin matriculated in the newly established Imperial School of Jurisprudence for the elite and well-connected. After graduating in 1846, he received an appointment to serve in the Moscow branch of the Senate, the supreme judicial organ. For the next fifteen years, he not only oversaw several central provinces but also conducted research on the history of Russian law.

The years of war and revolution fundamentally transformed the Orthodox Church. Although that entailed much destruction (disestablishment and divestment of the Church; dissolution of the hereditary caste of the parish clergy; virtual elimination of monastic orders), it also represented a surge of democratization and laicization, with power shifting from a professionalized clergy to rank‐and‐file believers. That shift, conceived by Bolsheviks as a strategy for neutralizing the ‘counter‐revolutionary’ Church, actually served to reinvigorate popular Orthodoxy and provide the main dynamic for revival and survival during next seven decades of anti‐religious campaigns and persecution.

"Life in Stalin's Soviet Union is a collaborative work in which some of the leading scholars in the field shed light on various aspects of daily life for Soviet citizens. Split into three parts which focus on 'Food, Health and Leisure', the 'Lived Experience' and 'Religion and Ideology', the book is comprised of chapters covering a range of important subjects, including: food, health and housing, sex and gender, education, religion (Christianity, Islam and Judaism), sport and leisure, festivals. There is detailed analysis of urban and rural life, as well as explorations of life in the gulag, life as a peasant, life in the military and what it was like to be disabled in Stalin's Russia. The book also engages with the wider Soviet Union wherever possible to ensure the most in-depth discussion of life, in all its minutiae, under Stalin. This is a vitally important book for any student of Stalin's Russia keen to know more about the human history of this complex period of dictatorship."-- Back cover.