Coming to Terms With the Village: Stalin’s Death and the Reassessment of Rural- Urban Relations in the Soviet Union
Journal: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas
Year: 2017

In August 1953, the Soviet writer Tikhon Semushkin was sent by Pravda to the countryside to report on the current state of the kolkhoz village. In this article, we use Semushkin’s unpublished travel diaries to study elite perceptions of the countryside and patterns of identity construction in the period of the interregnum between Stalin’s death and the confirmation of Nikita S. Khrushchev as head of the Communist Party. We analyse how in 1953 Soviet citizens reconsidered their place within Sovie