Gleaning for Communism – The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice

Gleaning for CommunismThe Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice\nAuthor(s): Xenia A. Cherkaev\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Cornell University Press, United States\nImprint: Cornell University Press\nISBN-13: 9781501770302, 978-1501770302\nSynopsis\nGleaning for Communism is a historical ethnography of the property regime upon which Soviet legal scholars legislated a large modern state as a household, with guaranteed rights to a commons of socialist property, rather than private possessions. Starting with former Leningrad workers' everyday stories about smuggling industrial scrap home over factory fences, Xenia Cherkaev traces collectivist ethical logic that was central to this socialist household economy, in theory and practice: from its Stalin-era inception, through Khrushchev's major foregrounding of communist ethics, to Gorbachev's perestroika, which unfurled its grounding tension between the interests of any given collective and of the socialist household economy it.