Social Deviants, Urban Myths, and the Socialist Everyday

Abstract

Historians have recently been paying more attention to the margins. This is partly the long-term germination of seeds sown by the emergence of such approaches as microhistory, gender history, and Alltagsgeschichte. But it is also a reflection of the contemporary cultural and political climate: many of our own societies are paying more attention to those who once were, or still remain, on their margins. Scholarship on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is reflecting this broader trend. To their interrogations of Communist Party politics and the