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This article explores the experiences of Soviet mannequins in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the account of Valentina Chernova at the Leningrad Dom Modelei. Unlike contemporary fashion models, Soviet mannequins operated within a centralized and controlled system of fashion institutions. However, they still managed to cultivate their allure and project their images beyond their organizations. The article challenges stereotypes about fashion in the USSR and highlights the unique beauty, charisma, and creative input of Soviet mannequins. The research emphasizes the creativity and agency of mannequins and examines their labor through the lens of "glamour labor." The article aims to fill gaps in understanding Soviet models and challenges ideas of oppression and objectification commonly associated with the modeling profession and the Soviet era. [Extracted from the article]

Working from the memoir literature of Soviet Gulag survivors, the article explores the curious practice of tukhta as contrived by the toiling zeks of the archipelago. In a labour regime tasked with accumulating surplus, destroying political dissent, and transforming the subjectivity of the imprisoned, tukhta proved to be a tactical means for resisting the logic of Gulag as an audit regime. The subtle labour control of numbers effected by Gulag demanded equally sophisticated practices of resistance on the part of the zeks subjected to its technique, and tukhta was one of those practices. When treated as a kind of phronesis, the informal and ethical quality to the practice of tukhta can be appreciated in a way that more formal social scientific epistemology and historical method would miss. Perhaps the most salient counter-conduct to be found in the experiences of Gulag's orchestration of labour control, tukhta has the potential to reveal a great deal about audit regimes generically beyond the historical bounds of Soviet Russia. Historical inspiration for engaging audit regimes can therefore be derived from the ethico-political practice of tukhta, where otherwise there might just be pessimism, demoralization, and resigned acceptance to the awesome power of those regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Letonica is the property of University of Latvia, Institute of Literature, Folklore & Art and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Large‐scale evasion of the requirements of the law is a substantial part of the interaction between citizen and state under authoritarian regimes. Forced to exist within a coordinate grid established against their will, people routinely play games with the state with the goal of minimizing the hardships of life. Tactics of covert resistance are not necessarily politically motivated by conscious opposition to the regime. Instead, these are a matter of accommodation and survival. It is precisely these popular illegalities that, paradoxically, do not so much weaken a system intended to achieve full implementation of its instructions, but instead strengthen it to a certain degree. Evasion serves as a safeguard against social burnout, replete with unpredictable reactions born of desperation. This article examines practices of mass illegality via examples of evasion of labor obligations in the Soviet Union during the war with Nazi Germany. It analyzes instances that primarily involved peasants, especially women, who predominated in the Soviet rear areas after the men were conscripted into the army. This discriminated‐against and uneducated majority rarely enters historians' field of vision, which concentrates on the diaries and memoirs of the educated, urban part of the Soviet population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the article is to investigate the causes and circumstances of the destruction of the civilian population carried out by employees of the Soviet special services of the NKGB and the NKVD in the pre-trial detention cells (KPZ) of the district units of these structures, in particular in Mezhyrichi, after the German attack on the USSR in late June -- early July 1941 p. The methodology is based on the principles of historicism, systematicity, verification, and scientificity. Biographical, problem-searching, chronological, retrospective methods, the methods of local history, as well as the prosopographical approach, were used to reproduce the biographies of the victims and executioners. Scientific novelty. For the first time, documents on the circumstances of the crime in Mezhyrichi, which come from the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine, the Ministry of Internal Aff airs of Ukraine, and state archives, have been collected, analysed and verified. Main results, prospects for further research. The physical destruction of those arrested by the NKGB bodies, who at the beginning of the German-Soviet war were held in prisons of the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and pre-trial detention cells at the district departments of the NKGB and the NKVD, took place under the secret directive of the People's Commissar of State Security of the USSR Vsevolod Merkulov No. 2445/M dated June 23, 1941 p. The murders carried out in the execution of this directive in prisons are more widely covered in the scientific and memoir literature. On the other hand, information about similar crimes committed by employees of the Soviet special services in district departments is almost unknown. In our article, based on the first discovered and analyzed archival sources, the murder of those arrested by the Mezhyrichi district branch of the NKGB on June 27, 1941, is highlighted. It was found that all employees of the district departments of the NKGB and the NKVD were direct participants or witnesses (that is, involuntary accomplices) of this crime. Employees of the MGB, KGB, and National Security Service of Ukraine in the Rivne region, who stopped investigating the cases of those killed in 1947-1964 or carried out manipulations aft er its renewal in 1990-1991, can also be considered accomplices. It has been proven that the operatives of the Mezhyrichi district departments of the NKGB-NKVD, having received the news about the beginning of the German-Soviet war, implemented a plan to "completely clear" the area of unsavoury elements that posed a threat to the communist regime as a potential "fift h column". Murders similar to the one in Mezhyrichi were carried out at the end of June -- the beginning of July 1941, also in other district departments of the NKGB and the NKVD of the western regions of Ukraine (Vyshnyvets, Klesiv, Sarny), which may become the subject of further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dacoromania Litteraria is the property of ACADEMIA ROMANA Filiala Cluj-Napoca Institutul de Lingvistica si Istorie Literara "Sextil Puscariu" and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article examines Stalin's confrontation with the Bulgarian communist exiles in the USSR by the example of two political émigrés – Nediu Sakov and Petar Marinov, who were arrested during the mass purges in 1936 – 1938 and sentenced to five and three years in labor camps. For reconstruction of the experienced repressions and imprisonment in the Gulag are used published documents from the Bulgarian archives, electronic databases of the victims of political terror in the Soviet Union of the international human rights organization “Memorial”, as well as the unpublished memoirs of the two Bulgarians, stored for many years in the former Central Party Archive of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party. The comparison of documents and memoir testimonies, which contain a wide range of personal experience, helps to more completely reconstruct the repressive policy towards the Bulgarian communist emigration in the USSR during the “Great Terror” and to expand the scientific knowledge about the Bulgarians in the GULAG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study proposes a historical approach to the experiences of War Children who were evacuated to Mexico and the USSR during the Spanish Civil War between 1937 and 1938 and their experiences, through diverse sources, testimonies, memoirs, specialized literature, collected throughout various research projects, and focuses on audiovisual narrative, to address the perceptions of exiles and the press to collect their impact on host societies, the latter aspect that must be studied to deepen contemporary legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Rusycystyczne Studia Literaturoznawcze is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Investigaciones Historicas is the property of Universidad de Valladolid, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In late 1941 British Lend-Lease aid was arriving in the Soviet Union in meaningful quantities and seeing frontline use against German forces. During this period the military initiative passed from Germany to the Soviet Union. British-supplied tanks and aircraft were helping tip the balance of forces in Soviet favor and attracting the attention of both German forces on the ground and their superiors. This article uses archival sources and memoirs — many of which have only have been made available to researchers in the last decade — to more deeply assess the impact of this aid on the fighting on the Eastern Front around the period of the Battle of Moscow than was possible in the authors' previous works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Komunikaty Mazursko-Warminskie is the property of Komunikaty Mazursko-Warminskie and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This memoir tells the story of how Veronica Ahrens-Puławski came to America, settled in San Francisco, California, worked in the business of importing books and periodicals from the Soviet Union, and became the owner and manager of the Russian bookstore, Globus, for 34 years (from 1984–2018). Ahrens-Puławski describes the challenges she faced in learning how to run a business, adopting to new computer technologies, and adapting to changes in the Soviet-Russian book trade brought about first by perestroika and later by the information revolution and the internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interview with with Lilly and Michael Idov on Leto. Dedicated to the Leningrad underground rock scene of the early 1980s, Kirill Serebrennikov's Leto follows the friendship of two musicians, Mike Naumenko and Viktor Tsoi. The former was the frontman of Zoopark, a band that performed in the western rock tradition of Bob Dylan and Lou Reed, the latter led a band named Kino influenced by such post-punk bands as Joy Division and The Cure.

After analysing the Romanian press and various memoirs from the spring and summer of the tragic year of 1941, it is evident that almost all people realized that a war will likely follow between Germany and Soviet Russia. Under this conditions, General Ion Antonescu tried to adopt a number of measures destined to gain the sympathy of the people in general and of the peasants in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Colloquia is the property of Institute of Lithuanian Literature & Folklore and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Russkaa Starina is the property of Cherkas Global University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This memoir looks at the final fifteen years of the CPGB from the standpoint of a party activist. It considers the attraction of the party, its internal practices and the significance of its relationship with the USSR. It examines how the inner-party struggle developed and intensified throughout the 1980s, leaving a diminished and disoriented party unable to find a role for itself following the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the USSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literary output of the Polish-Yiddish writers who survived WWII in the Soviet Union is mostly a literary mirror of the times of exile and wartime wandering. The two major themes that reverberate through these writings are: the refugees' reflection on their stay in the USSR, and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. After the war, some of them described that period in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction, however, due to censorship, such accounts could only be published abroad, following the authors' emigration from Poland. These writings significantly complement the texts produced during the war, offering plentiful details about life in Poland's Eastern borderlands under Soviet rule as it was perceived by the refugees, or about the fate of specific persons in the subsequent wartime years. This literature, written in - and about - exile is not only an account of what was happening to Polish-Jewish refugees in the USSR, but also a testimony to their coping with an enormous psychological burden caused by the awareness (or the lack thereof) of the fate of Jews under Nazi German occupation. What emerges from all the literary texts published in post-war Poland, even despite the cuts and omissions caused by (self)-censorship, is an image of a postwar Jewish community affected by deep trauma, hurt and - so it seems - split into two groups: survivors in the East (vicarious witnesses), and survivors in Nazi-occupied Poland (direct victim witnesses). The article discusses on samples the necessity of extending and broadening of that image by adding to the reflection on Holocaust literature (which has been underway for many years) the reflection on the accounts of the experience of exile, Soviet forced labour camps, and wandering in the USSR contained in the entire corpus of literary works and memoirs written by Polish-Yiddish writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Top interpreters are rarely able to discuss publicly negotiations between their bosses-cum-clients. Yet the downfall of Nazi Germany and the USSR allowed some interpreters to speak, in interviews and memoirs, without fear of retribution. In the end, only a few told their story, and some did not always tell it correctly, either because of memory lapses or because of a desire to appear more informed or to distance themselves from the people for whom they had worked. Still, these publications contain material to investigate to what degree, in the service of an all-powerful client, interpreters remained "invisible" or exercised a "special interactional power, [...] as a result of his or her bilingual and bicultural expertise" (Mason and Ren 2012: 238). This article presents a case study of Soviet interpreters for Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev and their associates, with memoirs by the interpreters for Hitler and British PMs consulted for cross-correlation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shortly before and after the USSR’s demise, a new literature emerged: memoirs by veterans of the Soviet Union’s massive military intervention in the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 1960s and ’70s. Resurgent Russian pride, coupled with condemnation of its corruption by Soviet crimes, permitted startling disclosures. Tools we developed to evaluate these sources found them remarkably reliable and necessitated a reassessment of existing historiography. The Putin administration marked a reversal. Russian nationalism now stressed continuity with the USSR’s great-power status. ‘Falsification of history against Russian interests’ was criminalized. Some veterans resorted to purported ‘fiction’, which if challenged could be disclaimed. But under even stricter scrutiny, these narratives generally proved to reflect the authors’ actual experience, providing significant pointers for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the history and reception of memoirs written by dissidents of the Soviet Union. The author reflects on gaps in Soviet historiography and Russian autobiographical themes such as prisons and exile. Books noted include "My Testimony" by Anatoly Marchenko, "A Childhood in Prison" by Petr Yakir, and "To Build a Castle" by Vladimir Bukovsky.

There exist incompatible depictions of the Second World War, and specifically of the year 1941. Numerous documents from the archives now available in Moscow and Washington invite comparison with the memoirs of contemporary witnesses. The present article first describes the situation in German–Soviet relations before 22 June 1941. Then it contrasts the memoirs of the interpreters involved (in the German Embassy in Moscow, in the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, and at the delivery of the memorandum by Ribbentrop to Dekanozov) with newly available archive material and with the official records of the Nuremberg trial. The goal of this comparison is to form an assessment of these memoirs as subjective historical sources and to arrive at a new evaluation of their reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej is the property of Redakcja Przegladu Socjologii Jakosciowej and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Changes in the type of a society's cultural consciousness are always accompanied by serious modifications in fashion and human's appearance. The author of the article analyzes the memoirs of Andron Konchalovsky, a talented Russian producer ['Low Truth' (1998) and 'Exalts Fraud' (1999)], who matured in the period of 'Thaw'. Throughout the whole narration, Konchalovsky persistently repeats that the exposure of Stalinism did not make him a dissident, and did not impart him taste to politics. 'Thaw' turned for the future producer to be the time when it had become possible to abandon the standard, including domestic culture. Remembering his own youth forty years later, the author reconstructs the process of creating another system of artistic values, explains how a human's simple wish to differ from others and even to shock by appearance gradually gives birth to a new deep system of values which supposes loss from the system, openness, tolerance, respect for the rights of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the construction of a collective memory of suffering involved with forced labor within the Soviet Union during World War II. The author comments on the press coverage of the laborers at the time as well as the literary production related to these captives produced both during and after the war, which includes the publication of Soviet propaganda, newspaper articles, documentary films, and documents of the laborers themselves, such as personal letters, memoirs, and poetry.

The Russian civil war was a fratricidal climax of seven years of war and revolution that fractured Russian society. Its traumatic effects on post-revolutionary life are beyond measure. In this article Sean Guillory examines memoirs of Komsomol civil war veterans to illuminate the ways the war shaped their sense of self. Guillory argues that veterans' memoirs reveal a shattering of the self where their efforts to narrate their experience as agents of war was overshadowed by their transformation on the battlefield into instinctual beings, imprisoned by emotions, senses, nerves, and muscles. Guillory engages the scholarship on the Soviet self and subjectivity by calling attention to the ways trauma produces a "darker side" of the self, and in particular, how the body serves as a long-term depository for experiences of loss, disorientation, and deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the political career, the influence, and the memoirs written by the Soviet politician Anastas Mikoian, who was a member of the Politburo (term for the governing body of the Soviet Union's Communist Party). Several topics are discussed, including how he was one of the few political leaders of the Soviet Union that wrote about his life, how Mikoian contributed to the process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union and its member countries after the death of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953, and how he was criticized for his objective historiographical accounts of the conflicts between the people from Armenia and the people from Azerbaijan in his memoirs by the Armenian and Azerbaijani historians and people.

The memoirs of Ivan Chugurin translated below are of interest because they are written by someone who lived through some of the most crucial moments in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement. Chugurin's narrative takes us through the 1905 revolution in Sormovo and Nizhnii Novgorod, culminating in the overthrow of the tsarist regime in February 1917. He is able to provide insights into the development of Social Democracy in Sormovo, the 1905 events there, the Longjumeau party school, and the part played by Bolshevik organisations in the February revolution. In his revolutionary career Chugurin made the acquaintance of several prominent figures in the Russian revolutionary movement and is in a position to describe his encounters with Lenin, Plekhanov, Sverdlov and Martov. What lends particular authenticity to these memoirs is that they are an unvarnished factual account of events, with very little in the way of ideological colouring. The memoirs, which appear to have been written in the 1920s, were discovered by Professor Vladimir Sapon in the Nizhnii Novgorod archives. The translation is by James White and Vladimir Sapon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Beatrice Farnsworth suggests that Aleksandra Kollontai, Old Bolshevik, socialist-feminist, and former leader of the Workers' Opposition, survived Iosif Stalin's terror largely because in her effort to assure Stalin that she was no longer an oppositionist, she nurtured a friendly dynamic with him. Indeed, in their conversations, she pursued a gendered strategy of warm deference and flattery. Yet, while publicly serving the Soviet regime, even ingratiating herself with the party leadership, Kollontai, in diaries written for history, privately, and at risk to her life, mourned the regime's failure to develop "communist humanism." With their interlocking themes of emotion and personalities, her diaries not only provide insight into Kollontai's uncanny survival and the personal responses of an Old Bolshevik to political changes and people but offer a rare and intimate portrait of the internal life of Soviet politics at their highest level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes several memoirs and fictional narratives in which those who returned from the gulag penal labor camps of the Soviet Union were misrecognized by their loved ones. The author states that the narrative of misrecognition is important in the memoirist and fictionalized literature about the gulag. The author analyzes the poetic and ideological aspects of several texts. The article focuses on the early narratives, which the author states provide rhetorical models for memoirs and family legends that came after.

The author examines the contents of a Memoir elaborated by the Italian diplomat Raffaele Guariglia, to serve the Mussolini's cabinet in order to ratify the treaty on Bessarabia (20th October 1920). It is a review, from the Italian perspective, of the fact that it was necessary to perform the ratification - by Italy, too (after Great Britain and France) - of this Treaty. There's to be noted the rigor and prudence with which this issue is presented, emphasising the attitude of Italy (during 1920-1926), its concerns not to affect the Italian-Soviet trade relations and the obligation to give effect to a commitment (under signature) that was taken to Paris in 1920. This time, too is made evident the fact that the decisional act of the Italian government was based on an interest of its, regarding the cultivation of the image of a favourable Italy among the Romanian public opinion and in the direction to decrease the impact on some countries like the Soviet Union, Turkey, Great Britain, France and Yugoslavia. It is necessary to mention the intentions of the Italian part to get some economic benefits in its relations with Romania and to counterbalance the effects of the same nature, in case of the Soviet Union, which had made pressure on Italy not to ratify the treaty of Bessarabia. The memoir in question (which enters now the historiographic circuit) is an exception documentary testimony about the concerns of the Italian diplomacy to achieve a benefit as large as possible (in the relations with Romania) by ratifying the Treaty on Bessarabia and losses as low as possible in the diplomatic external range, but also in the economic one (especially in the relations with the Soviet Union). For the Romanian historiography this memoir provides clarifications (necessary) on the position of Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the author's dual self-portrait and some reflections on memoir writing. Family history; Education; Career with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Career as a doctor of philosophy and a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences; Progress of career under Mikhail Gorbachev; Reflections on the Soviet period.

This essay discusses the memoir Knekht zenen mir geven (Buenos Aires, 1956), by Avrom Zak (1891–1980), a Polish-Yiddish journalist, poet, and prose writer who survived WWII in the Soviet Union. While in the USSR, he was deported in summer 1940 to a forced labor camp in the Republic of Komi, where he spent more than a year. The essay focuses on the reconstruction of the existential experience that Zak's memoirs contain against the backdrop of the memoirs of Polish Gulag prisoners who, unlike the Jewish prisoners, have already become the subject of extensive research by literary historians. Moreover, the essay addresses the uniqueness of the Jewish experience. Yiddish memoirs of Polish Jews who were prisoners of Soviet forced labor camps during WWII, heretofore absent from studies of so-called Gulag literature and/or Soviet exile literature and, in a broader sense, from Holocaust studies, are still waiting to become incorporated into that discussion. It is only by collecting the greatest possible corpus of testimonies that we shall be able to reconstruct a wider image of the Soviet aspect of the Jewish experience of WWII. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the publishing of a best-selling memoirs by former communist leaders of Poland. In a once book-starved Warsaw, a new and aggressively commercial private publishing industry has learned how to get books out fast. former communist leaders have adapted to this particular capitalist enterprise is both intriguing and galling to their countrymen. Currently reaping royalties from best-selling memoirs are Edward Gierek, Communist Party leader in the 1970s. former premier Mieczyslaw Rakowski. Rakowski's picture of the Soviets seems equally likely to conjure up a "Godfather" image (National Review, June 24, 1991).