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Information is provided on the conference titled "Cultures of Secrecy in Soviet Life" held from January 25-27, 2017. The conference's topics, including the post-Stalinist Soviet Union state's violence, Soviet power over the circulation of information, secret communities' everyday life, state security policy on the Soviet space program and the science community's relations with the Soviet Communist Party, are discussed.

The encounters between Soviet citizens and African students studying in the Soviet Union in the sixties inevitably generated problems of acclimation, social and political conflict, and racial strife. The article illuminates the ways the cultural clash affirmed Russians’ and Africans’ sense of cultural superiority. The African presence in Russia confirmed Soviet altruism in rearing Africans into cultured and scientifically endowed people. Similarly, African encounters with Soviet daily life reaffirmed their identity as culturally superior to Russians by emphasizing aspects of the individual that directly conflicted with Soviet notions of collectivism. The conflict over culturedness had direct ramifications on the Cold War as it strengthened Africans’ pragmatic stance toward Soviet patronage and their reluctance to embrace Soviet ideology and values. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ideological considerations have always influenced science, but rarely as directly and massively as in the Soviet Union during the early Cold War period, when cosmology was among the sciences that became politicized. This field of science developed very differently in the Communist countries than in the West, in large measure because of political pressure. Certain cosmological models, in particular of the big bang type, were declared pseudo-scientific and idealistic because they implied a cosmic creation, a concept which was taken to be religious. The result of the ideological pressure was not an independent Soviet cosmology, but that astronomers and physicists abandoned cosmological research in the Western sense. Only in the 1960s did this situation change, and cosmology in the Soviet Union began to flourish. The paper reviews the relationship between cosmology and political ideology in the soviet union from about 1947 to 1963, and it briefly relates this case to the later one in the People's Republic of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a conference on the Brežnev era in Soviet history, held in Tübingen, Germany, from February 9-11, 2012. Topics discussed included consumerism, social mobility, leisure activities, and cultural change in cities in the Soviet Union the 1960s and 1970s, the role of artists and intellectuals in Communist society, and Soviet foreign relations in the era of détente during the Cold War.

This paper argues that the works of dissident Soviet bard Aleksandr Galich are best understood as folklore rather than literature, texts, or recordings. Since his songs were censored, live, person-to-person dissemination was crucial to their circulation. Unfortunately, though, the very underground, word-of-mouth mechanisms that allowed Galich to dodge censors has rendered historical record of his performative importance spotty. Drawing on newly-available memoirs, this paper reframes Galich's songs as a dialogue—with fans, other songwriters, and the Soviet government itself. Rather than a static, linear artist-to-fan relationship, emphasising the social bonds built through oral tradition deepens understanding of Galich's project, his influence on major musical trends in the USSR, and his contemporary, postsocialist significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the death of Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953, the members of the Soviet government's Politburo, or governing council, began a reform of the Soviet prison system. This article deals with the impact that these reforms had on the people who lived in the remote areas of the Soviet empire. Particular attention is paid to the question that faced Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev of whether people, in particular the Tartars, who had been freed in the Caucuses and in the Crimea would be allowed to migrate to Russia. The article discusses a political movement that lobbied for greater political and social rights for Tartars.

Postcolonial scholars show how knowledge practices participate in the production and reproduction of international hierarchy. A common effect of such practices is to marginalize Third World and other subaltern points of view. For three decades, analysis of the Cuban missile crisis was dominated by a discursive framing produced in the ExComm, one in which Cuba was invisible. The effort to produce a critical oral history enabled Cuban voices—long excluded from interpretive debates about the events of October 1962—to challenge the myth of the crisis as a superpower affair. Despite the oral history project’s postcolonial intervention, however, and greater attention to Cuba’s role in the crisis, this framing persists and is reproduced in the micro-practices of scholarship. Decolonizing the crisis, and by extension the discipline itself, is not easy to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of Stalin's death in 1953 and Khrushchev's Secret Speech three years later, many Soviet citizens hoped that past injustices would now be put right. For some, this meant the right to rejoin the Communist Party. This article explores how former party members -- including many returning from the camps -- sought rehabilitation in the years 1956 to 1957. Focusing in particular on the party organization in Vladimir province, the article examines the differing ways POWs and purge victims were treated, and asks how far the decisions made by the party elite in this oblast' reflected central policy or local concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the cultural politics of memory in the late Thaw, during the period when Soviet literature confronted the Terror and other difficult episodes from the Stalinist past most fully. Using published literature and a variety of archival sources, the article focuses on the different understandings of traumatic memory that emerged in party political discourse, literary criticism and literary works themselves after the public de-Stalinization of the 22nd Party Congress in 1961. While emphasizing the contested meanings of trauma and memory in the period, the article argues that pressure from party authorities and editing and censorship practices ultimately led Soviet literature of the period to narrate the overcoming of trauma and to advocate an orientation to the future rather than to the Stalinist past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During successive waves of de-Stalinization, Nikita Khrushchev trumpeted the principle of glasnost' as the key to Communist Party reform. At the same time, his revelations of past wrongdoing were always carefully tailored and chronically incomplete. Throughout his reign, Kremlin-generated stories of the Stalin era shifted significantly over time, as did the extent of their allowed discussion; these shifts testified to the fact that post-Stalin professions of openness had failed to supplant more traditional Party practices of censorship and concealment. By looking at such changes, and at the way Party members in the regions of Ekaterinburg and Samara responded to them, this article argues that the rhetoric of glasnost' triggered enormous conflict within the Party about openness in practice and drew new, or at least newly vocal, attention to continuities in the top-down manipulation of truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private property was abolished in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1922, but identifiable forms of individual ownership of urban housing persisted. Several tenures were always present in the urban housing fund -- but each contained a varying component of individual ownership. Late Stalinist reconstruction and then the Khrushchev-era mass housing programme decisively intensified the strength and reach of these components, in de facto and de jure terms. Although historians have largely neglected the existence of these possibilities of individual ownership, they acted as an essential driver of post-war housing construction and were a defining feature of people's experience of their urban housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This examination of amateur theatres from 1957 to 1971 reveals that members of the educated public beyond the cultural elite were engaged in shaping the cultural landscape to suit their own preferences, if not necessarily state priorities. In their efforts to expand social criticism and stylistic innovation, 'amateur publics', consisting of amateurs and their supporters, invoked the term 'civic spirit' (grazhdanstvennost) to explain artistic heterodoxy as a form of loyal criticism of Soviet society. Amateurs also pursued formal and informal mechanisms to improve troupes' material conditions and status in order to secure permanent sites for those critical views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an introduction to a series of articles in the issue devoted to the history of the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1964, including articles by Cynthia Hooper, Miriam Dobson, and Polly Jones.

Homeless and vagrant children were one of the most visible and traumatic consequences of the Soviet experience of World War Two. They were living testimony not only to the physical destruction and hardship of a merciless war fought largely on Soviet territory but also to the ideological fractures in the Soviet system. The latter's doctrine of happy Soviet childhoods had to give way in the face of hundreds of thousands of needy and often delinquent and disobedient children. This article examines the rhetoric that surrounded the problem of child besprizornost' and beznadzornost', analyses Soviet society's responses to both the phenomenon itself and to official policy dealing with the phenomenon, and reconstructs the world in which these 'non-Soviet' children of the post-war era lived. It argues that it was precisely the high expectations of 'perfect Soviet childhoods' that prevented the acknowledgment of post-war trauma and led to the ideological anti physical exclusion of those who did not fit the narrative of quick integration and salvation. Ultimately, the way the. Soviet system and society related to the problem of child homelessness and delinquency reveals much of the political and ideological contradictions that were characteristic for the late Stalinist years, yet also indicates how the central and defining Soviet device of integration through discriminatory exclusion was resurrected and maintained in the decades to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the three institutional pillars of the Soviet polity -- political order of a single-party dictatorship with the distinctive feature of party-state bifurcation, economic order of non-market, non-private property economy, and a system of mass state terror -- and the way they coped with particular circumstances between 1945 and 1968, especially the Second World War, the profound change in its composition (i.e., the renunciation of the mass terror), changes in the supreme leadership, generational change' and interactions with the outside world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the policy of Perestroika Byta or "restructuring of everyday life" in the era of Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev. The author says that Khrushchev denounced the Stalin cult of personality and officially sanctioned the de-Stalinization of the Soviet society. The policy included the rehabilitation of unjustly accused former enemies of the state, greater liberty in the area of literature, restructuring of the economy, and the resurgence of Soviet agriculture. The spirit of reform gave the country its belated return to normalcy and earned Khrushchev the moniker of "The Thaw". Nutritional standards, improvement of education and healthcare, the production of consumer goods and the expansion of housing program to more Soviet citizens are the highlights of the Thaw.

The article explores the origins and development of Soviet historiography in the fields of historical psychology and mentality in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It describes the revisionist tendencies spurred by the Twentieth Party Congress within Soviet historiography. The establishment of a Marxist social psychology under sociologist Boris Porshnev is discussed.

Discusses the problem of the intelligentsia and leftist radicalism in higher education in Soviet Union and China during the 1960s. Comparison of the first five-year plan under Soviet leader Josef Stalin and Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung; Important aspects of the first five-year plan in the Soviet Union and its influence on the Cultural Revolution in China.

The article presents a report on a workshop on the integration of territories gained during World War II into the postwar Soviet Union, organized by the Graduiertenschule für Ost- und Südosteuropastudien (Graduate School of Eastern and Southeastern European Studies) at the University of Munich, Germany, on July 4, 2014. The history of several places was discussed, including Lviv, Ukraine, Sakhalin, Russia, and Vilnius, Lithuania.

Examines the reforms introduced by Nikita Khrushchev to the Soviet Union's Ministry of Justice from 1953 to 1956 and its subsequent dissolution. Administrative reforms under Khrushchev; Problems of bureaucracy; Responses to bureaucracy; Solutions to bureaucracy; Reasons for the fall of the Ministry of Justice.

Comments on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Cost of the war; History of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Soviet political and military objectives; Approach used by the Soviet leadership in governing the country; Roots of the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation.

Discusses how official versions of the 1956 invasion changes during the late Soviet period and after the Soviet Union disintegrated. Challenges faced by leaders of the Soviet Communist Party by crises in Hungary and Poland in the autumn of 1956; Reference to information found in documents from Russia and Eastern Europe on the events of 1956; Impact of measures adopted by Polish officials to alleviate public discontent and prevent further disorders.

This article discusses the demographic transition of the Soviet Union that took place during the 1960s. A demographic transition occurs when a nation that once had high levels of fertility and mortality progress to lower levels of these rates,an occurrence that plagued the Soviet Union during the post World War II period. The authors speculate on reasons for this fertility drop and mortality increase, and compare the Soviet Union rates to those of countries such as the United States or Japan during the same time. The authors also discuss the Soviet Union's social history, especially as it pertains to fertility and mortality.

Reveals how Andrei Sakharov's ideas were the basis for both the first and second Soviet hydrogen bombs. Andrei Sakharov's memoirs, excerpted in Time magazine last May, are deeply moving. The 1953 test of a big boosted fission bomb at Semipalatinsk was celebrated by the scientists and hailed by Stalin's successor, Georgi Malenkov. Thus, it was three years after the first U.S. test before the Soviets' first test of a corresponding design. This refutes the conventional wisdom--still frequently offered--that the interval between successful U.S. and Soviet H-bomb tests was barely 10 months, from November 1952 to August 1953, and that it was high time for the U.S. government to decide in 1950 to pursue H-bomb development. Sakharov dismissed the suggestions of Oppenheimer's colleagues on the General Advisory Committee, I.I. Rabi and Enrico Fermi in particular, that the United States try to conclude an agreement with the Soviet Union not to develop the H-bomb.

The article presents the summary of a workshop that focused on the legacy and memory of Soviet pilot and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin that was held April 15-16, 2011 in Berlin, Germany. Topics under discussion included Gagarin's visit to Erfuhrt, Germany in 1963 for the German Democratic Republic elections, the representation of Yuri Gagarin and other Russian cosmonauts in Russian newspaper articles, as well as an analysis of his transmissions from outer space in the 1960s.

The article presents the abstracts for articles featured in the issue, including "Robust Revolution to Retiring Revolution: The Life Cycle of the Soviet Revolution, 1945-1968," by Amir Weiner, "Between Salvation and Liquidation: Homeless and Vagrant Children and the reconstruction of Soviet Society," by Juliane Fürst, and "Peace or Pacifism? The Soviet 'Struggle For Peace in All the World', 1948-54," by Timothy Johnston.