Department of History
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About the department
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Lifelong Learning
Dr Juliane Fürst
Lecturer in Modern European History
13-15 Woodland Rd
Email: juliane.furst@bristol.ac.uk
Research
I am interested in the social and cultural history of the Soviet Union, especially youth, subcultures, resistance and spaces. I am currently researching the life and world of the Soviet hippie community – a topic that, more often than not, provokes expressions of disbelief from specialists and laymen alike. Yet the Soviet hippies were arguably the most devoted and most long-lived hippie movement on the planet, existing from the late 1960s to the end of the Soviet system and even beyond. They built up an impressive, informal infrastructure, which they labeled ‘sistema’ and which provided their followers with a way of life that probed and transgressed the ‘borders of socialism’. Part of my research into the networks and life-style of this movement is a re-evaluation of the so-called era of stagnation under Brezhnev and a re-exploration of the causes that lead to the decline and end of the Soviet experiment.
My book Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism has been published by OUP in 2010 and has come out in paperback in May 2012. It was commended for the Fraenkel Prize of the Wiener Library in 2010. Further, I have published extensively on youth, resistance and space and have edited a volume of research on late Stalinism (Late Stalinist Russia, London: Routledge, 2006).
Through my involvement in the University of Oxford-based AHRC project ‘Around 1968’ I have researched political activism and cultural non-conformist behaviour in the Soviet Union for several years. I am now the Principal Investigator on the AHRC project (with Dr. Josie McLellan as Co-I) ‘Dropping out of Socialism’, which explores alternative cultures in the entire Soviet bloc.
I am a member of the British Association of Slavic and Eastern European Studies (BASEES) and of the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) in the USA.
Research supervision
I am currently supervising students working on several aspects of subculture in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and welcome proposals on all aspects of social and cultural life in the former Soviet bloc.
Select publications
Books
Fürst, JAC. Stalin's Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Fürst, JAC (ed.). Late Stalinist Russia: Society Between Reconstruction and Reinvention, Routledge, 2006.
Articles and Chapters
Fürst, JAC. 'Between Salvation and Liquidation: Homeless and Vagrant Children and the Reconstruction of Soviet Society', Slavonic and East European Review, 86, (pp. 232-258), 2008.
Fürst, JAC. 'Friends in Private, Friends in Public: The Phenomenon of the Kompaniia Among Soviet Youth in the 1950s and 1960s', in Siegelbaum, LH (Ed.), Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia, (pp. 229-249), Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.
Fürst, JAC. 'The Arrival of Spring? Changes and Continuities in Soviet Youth Culture and Policy between Stalin and Krushchev', in Jones, P (Ed.), The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, (pp. 135-153), Routledge, 2006.
Full publications
Full list of Dr Furst's publications since 1990 as held in the University's IRIS publications database.