3 Review(s)

Stalinist Reconstruction and the Confirmation of a New Elite focuses on the technical intelligentsia's postwar construction as a Stalinist elite and shows that postwar Stalinism differed in significant respects from the prewar Stalin phenomenon. J.Eric Duskin finds that the postwar technical intelligentsia emerged from the late-Stalin era as a more stable, influential, and far larger social cohort than it had been before the war, and he demonstrates that elite recruitment in the late Stalin years helped to institutionalize technocratic socialism. The book portrays the late-Stalin era's commitment to social stability and professionalization by examining the social and economic contexts for postwar elite formation, the training of the technical intelligentsia in the Soviet higher education system and their subsequent hiring as industrial managers and supervisors, and the structures of authority and social relations inside Soviet factories. In the end, Duskin argues that the social policies of the late-Stalin era ultimately laid the groundwork for the stability and stagnation of the Brezhnev era.