Spreading the Bolshevik Message? Soviet Regional Periodicals for Women, 1917–1941
Abstract This paper examines Soviet regional periodicals for women from their beginning as special stranichki in newspapers to the end of the 1930s, when they became instruments for publicizing mass campaigns. In the 1920s—when these periodicals were subject to market mechanisms and had to be profitable in order to survive—they presented a vibrant blend of practical advice, fashion, and emancipatory promises. With the advent of the First Five-Year Plan, the contents of women’s magazines changed dramatically and came to include an ever greater emphasis on the Party leadership and the latest propaganda campaigns. However, a close examination of the periodicals also reveals that the transmission of information, tropes, language, and images from the centre to the periphery was not always smooth or unidirectional. Local periodicals could initiate campaigns, delay publicizing them, and sometimes virtually ignore them.
The Soviet family during the great terror, 1935–1941
LIKE so MUCH in the social history of the era, the Soviet family under Stalin has remained more an object of controversy than of extensive research. Existing literature on the family during the period commonly designated the 'Great Terror', roughly 1935-39, essentially takes two approaches. One emphasises government policies after 1934 that strengthened the family through stricter laws on divorce, abortion and responsibility for children, all part of the regime's increasing conservatism.1 The other approach stresses the terror of the period. Writers focusing on repression frequently suggest that one goal of the mass arrests was to destroy all types of loyalty or trust except dedication to the state: the regime could not permit any human attachments which might stand above the needs of the leadership or divert people's energy and attention from the tasks selected for them. This end, such writers argue, is vital for 'totalitarian' systems, in particular the Stalinist regime.2 Several prominent authors maintain that a high degree of success was achieved in this direction by the late 1930s. The Soviet people became a 'scrap heap of humanity';3 it was possible to have 'only one kind of relationship: that of each citizen directly to the person of the dictator himself', a kind of 'bondage' which 'led to the undercutting and eventual severance of all viable connecting tissue between the citizens'.4 Yet writers making such claims have not utilised the materials which permit profound study of the family. Are such assessments of the family's condition justified, or was the story considerably more complex? An examination of the family during the Great Terror, when presumably regime pressure on domestic life was strongest, ought to provide an answer which helps to illuminate the whole Stalinist period. Did the regime set out to destroy family and friendship and to 'atomise' society, or was it more important to the state to support parental authority? What was the impact of massive arrests, occurring especially in 1937-38, on the Soviet family? For the purposes of this inquiry, 'terror' is defined as large-scale arrests of innocent people; the question of its intent as policy vis-a-vis personal relationships, or even whether it constituted a policy in that sphere, remains to be explored here.5 To probe these issues for the 1930s, it is necessary to examine the complexity of both the regime's policies towards the family and society's response to them. Theories of totalitarianism are not particularly useful in this endeavour. The
Balloon assisted translocation of the mitral anterior leaflet to prevent left ventricular outflow obstruction (BATMAN): A novel technique for patients undergoing transcatheter mitral valve replacement
Transcatheter mitral valve replacement (TMVR) is an option for patients at high risk for mitral valve replacement or repair via sternotomy or left thoracotomy approach. TMVR carries up to 22% risk of left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) obstruction. Severe LVOT obstruction can have devastating hemodynamic and clinical consequences.