Dictatorship and Daily Life in Twentieth-Century Europe

✍ Scribed by Lisa Pine (editor)

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 281
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Bringing together leading scholars from across the UK, North America and mainland Europe, this book provides a uniquely comparative exploration of daily life under dictatorship in 20th-century Europe. With coverage of well-known regimes and some that are relatively underrepresented in the literature from right across the continent, it examines the impact felt on people’s lives amidst political administrations characterised by some or all of the following: a one-party state, in which opposition or multiple parties were banned; a cult surrounding the leader; the censorship of the press and other publications; the widespread use of propaganda and political persuasion; and the threat or use of force by the regime and its agents.
The chapters investigate crucial questions in relation to life under dictatorships as follows:
Dictatorship and Daily Life in 20th-Century Europe addresses these issues and more, striking to the heart of European life in the darkest episodes of its recent history.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and glossary
Introduction Lisa Pine
Notes
1 Everyday life in Fascist Italy Kate Ferris
Coercion and persuasion
Going out: leisure and ‘free time’
Eating in the dictatorship: policies and practices of food consumption
Friends, family, neighbours, domesticity, intimacy
Conclusion
Notes
Select bibliography
2 Daily life in Hitler’s Germany Lisa Pine
The creation of consensus and the use of terror
Private life and the family
Food policy and food choices
Auslese and Ausmerze (selection and eradication)
Notes
Select bibliography
3 Life in Franco’s Spain Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez
A cruel peace, 1939–52
The people and the regime, 1939–59
An evolving society, 1939–70
The end: between fear and freedom, 1970–5
Notes
Select bibliography
4 Salazar’s Portugal Living ‘by habit’ in an authoritarian regime António Costa Pinto and Duncan Simpson
The Estado Novo and its repressive and co-optation institutions
The value system: ‘God, Fatherland, Family, and Work’
The politics of subsistence in rural Portugal
Urban life: repression, ‘room for manoeuvring’, and the normalisation of rule
Salazarist gender politics: the subordination of women
Conclusion
Notes
Select bibliography
5 Transnational totalitarianism and the building of a new public consciousness in Kārlis Ulmanis’s Latvia Jordan T. Kuck
Introduction
A brief overview of the Ulmanis regime
Totalitarianism and transnational totalitarianism
Transnational totalitarianism: two scenes on the building of public consciousness
Conclusion
Notes
Select bibliography
6 Everyday life in the Soviet Union under Stalin Kees Boterbloem
Totalitarian byt’?
The brutal context of daily life
The secret police and its world
The Great Turn and the Great Terror
The Great Patriotic War
Trauma
Post-war
Resist and adapt
Gender relations
Education, socialisation, town and country
Health and welfare
Stalin’s cult and popularity
Subversive behaviour
Civic life: civil society?
Religion
Intelligentsia
The survival and adaptation of popular and elite culture
Concluding remarks
Notes
Select bibliography
7 Life in Ceaușescu’s Romania Dennis Deletant
Introduction
The role of the political police, the Securitate
Compliance
The personality cult
Religious life
Public opposition
Censorship
The descent from utopia into dystopia
Conclusion
Notes
Select bibliography
8 Between barbed wire and country garden idyll: Dictatorship and everyday life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) Stefan Wolle
Introduction
The double security of dictatorship
The Wall as a way of life
Work as myth and reality
Full employment, half the availability of goods
From the cradle to the grave
Love in the time of socialism
The perfect world of babies
Pedagogical ideals
Living conditions and free time
The summer house as symbol and reality
Shopping in the state-owned retail trade
The administrators of the shortages
Years of change
Entropy
Notes
Select bibliography
Conclusion Lisa Pine
Index