Living the Revolution

With this book, Andy Willimott enters the small circle of historians devoted to the communal movement in the early USSR. * Éric Aunoble, University of Geneva, The International Newsletter of Communist Studies *
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 *
Andy Willimott takes an almost entirely unknown topic and makes it his own, turning what could have been a traditional 'thesis book' into something of real lasting value. This fine, energetic piece of scholarship offers a genuinely new perspective on the revolutionary developments of the 1920s by making a compelling case for the importance of the much neglected urban commune movement ... Willimott's impressive command of his sources enables him to expand the scope of his conclusions beyond his field of specialism and to make a major contribution to revitalising the study of early Soviet Russia. He is a worthy winner of this year's Nove Prize. * Comments by the jury of the BASEES Alexander Nove Prize 2016 *
Dr Willimott's book provides a lively insight into the attempts of some young people in early Soviet Russia to live out in practice the proclaimed ideals of the new Communist regime. He describes vividly the hopes inspiring their experiments in collective living, their successes, frustrations and failures, and how ultimately those experiments were integrated into the emerging totalitarian structure of the Stalinist regime. * Geoffrey Hosking, University College, London *
Living the Revolution is about those youthful citizens of the new Soviet republic -- men and women -- who sought to remake their lives by throwing in their lot with the Bolsheviks. It is, to be sure, a critical analysis of their many projects. But, unlike previous historians who all too easily dismissed them as "utopian," it revivifies the spirit of those efforts, putting the reader in touch with the emotional energy of the revolution. Here, at last, is a rigorously researched yet unapologetically sympathetic account of the multiple initiatives undertaken in the first decade of Soviet power to bring the revolution into the workplace, the classroom, and the home. * Lewis Siegelbaum, Michigan State University *
Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and bursting with narrative appeal, Willimott's study of early Soviet communes demonstrates that a hundred years after the Russian Revolution not all has been said about the revolution's layers, complexities, and legacies. From the very first sentence -- a question to his readers -- Willimott draws us into an energetic world of enthusiasm, idealism, and activism, but also of disappointment, fracture, and conflict. He convincingly shows that neither did spontaneous self-experimentation end with the advent of Soviet power, nor was every aspect of revolutionary utopianism irrevocably lost during the Stalin years. Rather he weaves a fine net of dense description, in which he brings the elusive communes to life, while subtly quoting, probing, and pushing existing scholarship on the period and indeed beyond. * Juliane Furst, University of Bristol *
This is an excellent book that deserves to be read widely by all those interested in early Soviet history, the origins of Stalinism, revolutions, the nature of 20th-century dictatorships, and the functioning of political ideologies in authoritarian regimes. * James Ryan, Reviews in History *
Willimott's highly original, groundbreaking study of the urban commune movement in the early years of the Soviet regime is an important contribution to understanding the popular experience of revolution ... this important contribution to the study of the 1917 revolution in its centennial year deserves to be read not only by specialists but also by those scholars interested in revolutions, political theory, and the like ... Essential. * CHOICE *
an exemplary study of the people who founded, developed and lived in urban communes in the early Soviet Union ... I strongly recommend this book to any scholars interested in the early Soviet period, as well as scholars interested more generally in issues of ideology and lived experience. Willimott's work is analytically insightful, methodologically rich, and carefully written. It is an excellent addition to our scholarly understanding of experience and culture in early Soviet Russia. * Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman, Revolutionary Russia *
skilfully pieced together existing evidence to present a fascinating account of spontaneous attempts to make the communist dream a reality in the early Soviet era. * Clayton Black, European History Quarterly *
Living the Revolution will be of particular interest to historians of the NEP and the early Stalin era, and it will work well in both undergraduate Soviet history courses and graduate seminars ... historians of housing and consumption in the post-Stalin decades should also read this book to understand how tensions between ideology and everyday life in late socialism were shaped by the earliest attempts to live the Revolution. * Steven E. Harris, Slavic Review *