Description: Living the Revolution offers a pioneering insight into the world of the early Soviet activist. At the heart of this book are a cast of fiery-eyed, bed-headed youths determined to be the change they wanted to see in the world. First banding together in the wake of the October Revolution, seizing hold of urban apartments, youthful enthusiasts tried to offer practical examples of socialist living. Calling themselves 'urban communes', they embraced total equality and shared everything from money to underwear. They actively sought to overturn the traditional family unit, reinvent domesticity, and promote a new collective vision of human interaction. A trend was set: a revolutionary meme that would, in the coming years, allow thousands of would-be revolutionaries and aspiring party members to experiment with the possibilities of socialism.
The first definitive account of the urban communes, and the activists that formed them, this volume utilizes newly uncovered archival materials to chart the rise and fall of this revolutionary impulse. Laced with personal detail, it illuminates the thoughts and aspirations of individual activists as the idea of the urban commune grew from an experimental form of living, limited to a handful of participants in Petrograd and Moscow, into a cultural phenomenon that saw tens of thousands of youths form their own domestic units of socialist living by the end of the 1920s. Living the Revolution is a tale of revolutionary aspiration, appropriation, and participation at the ground level. Never officially sanctioned by the party, the urban communes challenge our traditional understanding of the early Soviet state, presenting Soviet ideology as something that could both frame and fire the imagination.Review Quotes:
"original and engaging ... Willimott has got close to his subjects and tells their stories with enthusiasm. He acknowledges that they are only a small part of the history of the Revolution, but he is not troubled by whether their experience is representative, precisely because they offer new stories told from unusual angles that illuminate wider themes. There is much for students and scholars to enjoy and learn from in this important book." -- Mark B. Smith, Slavonic and East European Review
"By presenting communards as driven by both revolutionary hope and belief that an interventionist state could create a harmonious, rational, modern world, and by indicating how their ideas for daily life, cultural enlightenment and building the new socialist person persisted into the 1930s, Willimott revises the understanding that their initiatives constituted a fleeting manifestation of utopian visions that was extinguished by rising state socialist construction. That this older interpretation largely held ground since 1989 (when Richard Stites offered the first significant scholarly treatment of urban communes in his Revolutionary Dreams) speaks to the path-breaking nature of this book." -- English Historical Review
"Willimott's prose, which is consistently inviting, paints a vivid portrait of daily life in urban communes" -- Edward Cohen, Journal of Modern History