Julie Hessler – författare

EUROPE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY offers a comprehensive, yet streamlined narrative of twentieth-century Europe. The scholarship and currency is top-notch as is the book’s excellent consideration of important socio-cultural issues in the twentieth century, including youth movements and feminism.

In this sweeping study, Julie Hessler traces the invention and evolution of socialist trade, the progressive constriction of private trade, and the development of consumer habits from the 1917 revolution to Stalin's death in 1953. The book places trade and consumption in the context of debilitating economic crises. Although Soviet leaders, and above all, Stalin, identified socialism with the modernization of retailing and the elimination of most private transactions, these goals conflicted with the economic dynamics that produced shortages and with the government's bureaucratic, repressive, and socially discriminatory political culture. A Social History of Soviet Trade explores the relationship of trade--official and unofficial--to the cyclical pattern of crisis and normalization that resulted from these tensions. It also provides a singularly detailed look at private shops during the years of the New Economic Policy, and at the remnants of private trade, mostly concentrated at the outdoor bazaars, in subsequent years.Drawing on newly opened archives in Moscow and several provinces, this richly documented work offers a new perspective on the social, economic, and political history of the formative decades of the USSR.

The Soviet Afro-Asianists explores Soviet intellectual and cultural history through the prism of postcolonial connections. Julie Hessler focuses on a cohort of writers and artists, mostly non-Russians from the Caucasus and Central Asia, who played a central role in the Soviet Union's cultural outreach to postcolonial countries in Asia and Africa. Interspersing analysis of the creative work with stories of their lives, Hessler considers three key themes: travel and literary and artistic impressions; ideals, particularly those connected to friendship and socialist internationalism; and civic action through organizations for peace, Afro-Asian solidarity, and international friendship. Born shortly before or after the Russian Revolution, these artists and intellectuals became involved in "Afro-Asian" organizations in the 1950s. They identified passionately with anti-imperialism and with the promise of socialism. Focusing on a particular dimension of the Thaw – the opening of Soviet culture to new influences from the postcolonial world – The Soviet Afro-Asianists traces their path across the second half of the Soviet period, ending with the challenges they faced during the perestroika years.

The Soviet Afro-Asianists explores Soviet intellectual and cultural history through the prism of postcolonial connections. Julie Hessler focuses on a cohort of writers and artists, mostly non-Russians from the Caucasus and Central Asia, who played a central role in the Soviet Union's cultural outreach to postcolonial countries in Asia and Africa. Interspersing analysis of the creative work with stories of their lives, Hessler considers three key themes: travel and literary and artistic impressions; ideals, particularly those connected to friendship and socialist internationalism; and civic action through organizations for peace, Afro-Asian solidarity, and international friendship. Born shortly before or after the Russian Revolution, these artists and intellectuals became involved in "Afro-Asian" organizations in the 1950s. They identified passionately with anti-imperialism and with the promise of socialism. Focusing on a particular dimension of the Thaw – the opening of Soviet culture to new influences from the postcolonial world – The Soviet Afro-Asianists traces their path across the second half of the Soviet period, ending with the challenges they faced during the perestroika years.

In this sweeping study, Julie Hessler traces the invention and evolution of socialist trade, the progressive constriction of private trade, and the development of consumer habits from the 1917 revolution to Stalin’s death in 1953. The book places trade and consumption in the context of debilitating economic crises. Although Soviet leaders, and above all, Stalin, identified socialism with the modernization of retailing and the elimination of most private transactions, these goals conflicted with the economic dynamics that produced shortages and with the government’s bureaucratic, repressive, and socially discriminatory political culture.