workers of the world untie

Well, I've been sick nigh on two weeks now, but am finally on a variety of medications to clear up what is apparently a collateral-damage sinus infection.

In addition to revising lecture notes every day as I try to manage my ever-changing course schedules (lost 2 class days this week AND a snow day) I've been trying to do some reading for The Book.

First up: an archival look at Moscow's proletariat in the 1918-1929 period. I had had the picture of enormous intellectual and social ferment in the 1920s, most of which of course comes from an architectural history lens. Constructivism, the influence of the International Style - real excitment about making new forms for new ways of living.

Yet my most recent reading paints a different picture: for the masses, Moscow (and the other Russian cities) was hell on earth - low wages, famine approaching starvation, no fuel for heating and transport, tremendous shortages of housing. Crime, prostitution, drug use. And the parallel universe of a limited market economy that the overlords deemed necessary to ease the transition to pure socialism. So while you were starving, you could see your merchant neighbor digging into a juicy roast in a spacious, overheated apartment.

It's a bit peripheral to the larger story of how a political system imposes order - yet some really useful bits.