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Among the most controversial questions associated with the German-Soviet War (1941–1945) is the degree to which intelligence information received from his agents abroad influenced the decision maki...

While important work has been done on what it meant to become newly “Soviet” after 1917, or during the era of “High Stalinism,” it is less clear what it meant to become Soviet for the first time after World War II. For the residents of the new Soviet Baltics, each prewar state received its own republic. In the case of the existing Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, territories that had not experienced Soviet power or the war on the same timeline were put into existing republics and thus existing Soviet structures. How did this process work? For Western Ukraine, one event in this process was the formation of the 1946 Initiative Committee, a joint project of the Central Committee and the newly formed Plenipotentiary for the Matters of the Russian Orthodox Church that presided over a forced conversion of Uniates to the Russian Orthodox Church. This paper examines how the mass religious conversion of Uniates was part of the process of making Galicians into Soviet Ukr...

During World War II the Soviet Union received large amounts of aid from the Western world in the form of supplies and military intervention, both of which were declared to have been irrelevant for the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany by Soviet historians. This article examines the claim made by Soviet historiography, and it comes to the conclusion that both Western supplies and military intervention were far more helpful than claimed by the Soviets. Without this aid the Red Army would not have been able to perform as well as it did historically, tilting the balance in Germany’s favor. Soviet claims about the irrelevance of Western aid can thus be dismissed as propaganda and inaccurate.

One of the World War II stages - the Red Army acquisition and occupying of Eastern Europe, particularly of Hungary is to be considered here. The features of relationships between the Red Army and local people are being analyzed through the revision of views on the Soviet troops presence outside the Soviet Union in 1944 - 1945 years. It is to be defined, based on real facts, the changing of relationships from the first meeting of the hungarians with Soviet units who entered the state territory due to military necessity and to the overall perception of the Soviet. Particularly is to be focused on Budapest inhabitants attitudes in anticipation of the new government establishment in the country. The facts of theb Red Army deviant behavior that led to negative attitudes among the local people are to be defined, and Soviet military and political leaders activities against combat crimes. It is to be defined Soviet propaganda special activities, that were aimed to win hearts and minds of the Hungarians and the correct understanding of the Soviet Union policy in the final stage of World War II. This work is to determine that Soviet propaganda campaign, which unfolded in that period, provided new Hungarian party institutions and consolidated Soviet power in Hungary. Nevertheless Hungarian citizens perceived the Red Army with cautious and fears, due to the Red Army atrocities, but prolonged foreign army occupation of the state and imposing of socialism changed the Hungarians mood to extremely negative. This finally led Hungarian residents to situation understanding, especially in comparison of occupation by Nazi and Soviet.

On the basis of personal memoirs and family histories, the author reproduces the situation in Germany at the end of the Second World War. He concentrates his attention on the material position and spiritual state of normal Germans, for whom the total defeat of their country meant famine, expulsion, destruction, and moral depression. Reflecting on the fact that the majority of Germans (in distinction from the other peoples of Europe) did not consider the collapse of the Nazi regime as liberation, the author discusses differences in perception of VE Day in the German Democratic Republic and the German Federal Republic. He places especial significance on the speech of Federal President Richard von Weizsacker for the formulation of a new approach to evaluating the results of the Second World War for Germany. His 1985 address on the subject of the years after the conclusion of the war, an explicit censorship of the West German interpretation of the 1945 capitulation, was the first to attribute a positive meaning to these events for all Germans and called for the establishment of friendly contacts with the Soviet Union. The concluding remarks relate to the problem of national historical memory, its connection with forms of commemoration (such as the celebration of Victory Day), and the need to take a scholarly approach when studying the Second World War.

Stephen Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919- 1970. xi + 237 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. ISBN-13 9780198725268. $59.95. Anyone who has ever traveled to the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation is used to the more or less steadily playing radio in the kitchen. After World War II, radio became the most popular background medium of industrialized countries. Despite radio's global impact, our knowledge about its history is very uneven from a geographical standpoint. The trajectory of radio historiography after the mid-1990s went from a national focus on radio as a central agent in building national communities to the exploration of the complex transnational interdependencies that not least included questions of Americanization and of "the war of the airwaves" after 1945. (1) In his new book, the British historian Stephen Lovell convincingly tells the history of Soviet radio as a success story in the long run. Although historians and media and communications scholars have already painted a vivid picture of national radios for some West European countries, the United States, and Western foreign broadcasting stations during the Cold War, there are only a few studies on Soviet radio. (2) Against this background, Stephen Lovell confidently claims to present "the first full history of Soviet radio in English." The investigations on Western radio cover a variety of topics ranging from radio technology, content analysis, entertainment and news programming, development of genres, and political propaganda to biographies of radio producers, audience research, and consumer practices. (3) Hence the adjective "full" raises some expectations that the book does not fulfill in the end, as it would have been too challenging to examine all the different aspects of media history. Still, Lovells book sets the benchmark for any study in the field of radio history, as it gives many insights on a bunch of these topics. The book is based on a broad and thorough archival groundwork from central and local archives. Lovell further refers to oral history interviews, which currently represent one of the best sources to get information about the daily life and listening practices of ordinary citizens. The author analyzes his materials in seven chronologically arranged chapters. The first three chapters explore the birth of the new technology, how it spread into Soviet society; how people handled the new medium, gathered in front of the receivers; how the early radio producers conceptualized their programs; and how they spoke and addressed the socially and culturally diverse Soviet audience. From the beginning, radio exerted a high degree of fascination. It attracted enthusiasts of technology, the revolutionary avant- garde of the 1920s, the Bolsheviks and many ordinary listeners. Focusing on these different groups Lovell highlights the considerable extent to which any medium and attitudes toward technology are framed by people and social practices. Early on, the author illustrates that technological progress is always promoted, as well as hampered, by competing perceptions and ideas. He convincingly explains Soviet radios development from a perspective of sociocultural and political interests, as well as economic opportunities. Language was an important issue, especially in the early years of the new medium, when it was still struggling for its place in the hierarchy of arts, culture, and political communication. In the 1930s, the debates on the appropriate style of speaking and broadcasting became very heated. Many observers requested that the speakers' delivery should represent the proletarian culture--whatever this meant. These uncertainties left radio announcers working on a shaky foundation, as potential pitfalls were ever-present but unfortunately not always predictable. To render a proletarian style of delivery compatible with the regimes claims to make high culture accessible to all was as a complicated task as broadcasting ordinary voices by letting workers and farmers speak on the air. …

After World War II, the Soviet leadership returned to the comparatively nationality-friendly rhetoric of the mid-1920s with regard to Estonia and the other Baltic Soviet republics. This rhetoric was taken at face value by many party workers in the republic, who believed that their national rights were supported by Moscow. In reality, however, if the Soviet leadership’s faith in the loyalty of non-Russian nationalities had been low throughout much of the 1920s and 1930s already, it was even lower with regard to the republics that had been forcefully incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940. This is also true for Estonia. Estonians, especially those who had remained in the country during the German occupation, were distrusted from the beginning. Problems that resulted from Soviet policy were soon “nationalized” and interpreted by the new regime as a consequence of “bourgeois nationalism.” Also, resistance against the Soviet system supported a consolidation of Estonia’s national self-consciousness. Meanwhile, the regime offered a Soviet version of Estonian national identity that was diametrically opposed to the one promoted by the resistance. When the Soviet state crushed active and passive resistance by using mass terror to force the Estonian peasants onto kolkhozes in 1949, it not only presented techniques of mass terror as “class struggle in the countryside, it interpreted them as part of a conflict between bourgeois and Soviet understandings of nationality.

How many Soviet citizens died because of World War II? A new estimate of the Soviet war dead is 42 million. This figure, from Russian historian Igor’ Ivlev, is at least 15 million more than the 26–27 million previously estimated by Russian demographers Andreev, Darskii and Khar’kova and widely accepted for a quarter of a century. I consider the implications of the two estimates for the Soviet demographic accounts, contrast their sources and methods, and conclude that the new figure lacks substantial foundations. On existing knowledge, the best estimate of Soviet war dead remains 26–27 million.\ud \ud

The Soviet view of neutrality was shaped by political rather than legal considerations. Whether neutrality was rejected or promoted by the USSR and how it was defined depended on the concept's usefulness for Soviet foreign policy. To advance Soviet interests, a special doctrine of neutrality was created with obligations that Soviet leaders apparently believed would draw the permanently neutral states nearer to the Soviet bloc. This article, which relies on Russian and Western historical literature as well as archival documents, delineates the changing Soviet attitude during the Cold War toward permanent neutrality as well as toward four European neutrals (Austria, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland).

The aggressive foreign policy of the Soviet Union and insufficient dynamic development of Soviet culture of the late 70's of XX century led to a slowdown in the British-Soviet cultural relations, including the prohibition of exchange visits between Ministers of Culture of both countries and bilateral tours of theatre, ballet and opera groups. In order to otrengthen cultural relations between the UK and the Soviet Union, the leadership of both countries established centers of cultural developments like the British Association "Great Britain - USSR" and the Soviet Society "USSR - United Kingdom (UK)". Top priority areas of bilateral relations between the leadership of the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union were literary industry which included publishing scientific literature, expansion of book exchange between Soviet and British libraries, exhibitions of works of literature, such as the exhibition of the works of British authors, published on the territory of the Soviet Union in 1984; theatrical sphere, which included exchange visits of the UK and the USSR theater personalities (F. Dunlop, T. Holt, O. Yefremov T. Lavrov, A. Bartoshevycha) to study the trends of Performing Arts and review of countries' repertoire; contacts in the field of historical sciences by creating among States bilateral commission of historians of the USSR and the UK; research work done by Soviet specialists in the territorial waters of the United Kingdom with the permission of the British government; cooperation in the field of cinema presented directors and actors exchange visits of both countries carrying out the Soviet television Week in 1984 in the National theater of Great Britain; and constructive cooperation in the field of music, which demonstrated the International Music Festival in May 1981 in Moscow and performances of the Moscow Philharmonic, "Music of Russian rites and festivals" and "Tradition of ancient Russian music" in the early 1980's in UK. British-soviet system of contacts in the sphere of culture was a tool for establishing successful diplomatic relations between Great Britain and the Soviet Union.

Did the United States promise the Soviet Union during the 1990 negotiations on German reunification that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe? Since the end of the Cold War, an array of Soviet/Russian policymakers have charged that NATO expansion violates a U.S. pledge advanced in 1990; in contrast, Western scholars and political leaders dispute that the United States made any such commitment. Recently declassified U.S. government documents provide evidence supporting the Soviet/Russian position. Although no non-expansion pledge was ever codified, U.S. policymakers presented their Soviet counterparts with implicit and informal assurances in 1990 strongly suggesting that NATO would not expand in post–Cold War Europe if the Soviet Union consented to German reunification. The documents also show, however, that the United States used the reunification negotiations to exploit Soviet weaknesses by depicting a mutually acceptable post–Cold War security environment, while actually seeking a system dominated by the United States and opening the door to NATO's eastward expansion. The results of this analysis carry implications for international relations theory, diplomatic history, and current U.S.-Russian relations.

The article scrutinizes Nazi Germany’s occupation policy in Yugoslavia and in the Soviet Union in 1941. Particular attention is given to the German application of “divide et impera” principle on the territories of formerly multinational states, whose ethnic groups fought to win occupier’s favours with varying success, meeting at the same time Germany’s demands, chiefly wide participation in destruction of the Jews as a condition to partake in Nazi geopolitical rearrangement of Europe.

In a spring 2015 forum in this journal, a group of established scholars discussed Central Asia's place in the field of Russian and Soviet history. (1) Are scholars of Central Asia, they asked, marginalized by--or worse--marginal to the broader profession? The current collection of essays helps answer this question. Here four young historians present research on Central Asia that is not only valuable as Central Asian history but also addresses questions that are absolutely central to the history of the Soviet Union. What did it mean to be "national," to be Soviet, to be both national and Soviet? How did World War II transform Soviet citizens and their relationship to one another and to the Soviet state? How did Soviet experts conceive of modernity and economic development? How did the Soviet Union represent itself at home and abroad? Each of these essays uses valuable, hitherto underutilized sources: soldiers' letters from the front, written in Uzbek and other non-Russian languages; republican archives in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; the writings of Tajik economists; a trove of photographs from the Sovinformbiuro; oral history interviews. Timothy Nunan and Artemy Kalinovsky focus on topics scarcely explored in Soviet Central Asia--visual culture and political economy. Charles Shaw and Moritz Florin approach the more established topics of ethnicity, nationality, and Soviet identity in innovative ways. All four of these essays investigate the wartime and postwar years, crucial periods in Soviet Central Asian history that have only recently become the object of sustained attention. The essays offer a wealth of material for discussion, but I focus here on three themes that make particularly significant contributions to the field of Soviet history, in my view: World War II as a turning point in the transformation of Central Asia (and, by extension, the Soviet Union as a whole); the evolution of identities in Central Asia during and after the war; and the place of Central Asia in the intersection of Soviet domestic and foreign policy during the postwar era. World War II as a Turning Point The first post-Soviet generation of Western scholars in the 1990s and 2000s focused mainly on the period between the revolutions and World War II, for understandable reasons. A wealth of untouched archival materials and indigenous-language sources existed for the 1920s and 1930s that was richer and more diverse than that of the later Stalinist era. From a strictly practical point of view, it made sense to gain an understanding of the early Soviet period before turning to the later decades. These early post-Soviet works focused primarily on nation making, gender, and Islam--all topics that had attracted attention from scholars well before the post-1991 "archival revolution." (2) Taken together, these monographs suggested that the Soviet transformation of Central Asia in the interwar period was incomplete. Indeed, in some ways it had scarcely begun. At the beginning of World War II, mass education continued to be rudimentary, and few Central Asians knew Russian. Most Central Asians remained mystified by, if not completely unfamiliar with, the main tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Efforts to transform the status of women and "backward" family customs had met with limited success. Historians working on the 1920s and 1930s knew--or surmised--that the war and early postwar years were crucial in making Central Asia Soviet, but we did not yet have the evidence to demonstrate this. The next wave of scholarly work turned to the wartime and postwar periods, and dissertations and books dealing with this period have begun to appear in recent years. (3) Charles Shaw and Moritz Florin emphasize the war as a turning point in the transformation of Central Asia and its integration into the Soviet "imagined community." First and most obviously, the war transformed the young Central Asian men who served in the Red Army. As Shaw shows, Uzbek soldiers learned Russian, adapted to Soviet frontline culture, and learned to present themselves in new ways. …

In October 1941, many expected the Soviet state to collapse; this included not only those living under German occupation but also the people on the home front. In the Kyrgyz Republic, rumor had it that Turkey would soon intervene and that Central Asia would become part of a Turkish protectorate. (1) Initially, people stayed calm, but when the Soviet state started to requisition ever more cattle and grain and recruit more and more Kyrgyz men, turmoil spread throughout the countryside. Over the summer of 1942, armed groups of deserters challenged Soviet power in the northern Issyk-Kul' region and southern Dzhalal-Abad. The Central Committee had to send in troops to quell the uprisings. (2) While Soviet propaganda would later tell a war story of common patriotism and voluntary recruitment, it seems that in reality most Kyrgyz men could only be drafted via brute force and intimidation. Rumors and uprisings point to the fact that at the beginning of the war many rural Kyrgyz did not identify with the common war effort or, for that matter, the Soviet state. Nevertheless, in what follows I argue that these same rural Kyrgyz started to identify with the Soviet state as a result of the war. Even the greatest challenges--such as renewed grain requisitions and the corresponding hunger or the evacuation, flight, and deportation of hundreds of thousands of people to Central Asia and Kyrgyzstan--could not stop this larger trend. Becoming Soviet did not necessarily entail an understanding or the internalization of Soviet ideology (even though this could be a side effect). Instead, people of different generations and regional backgrounds could become Soviet by starting to identify with a community of suffering and heroism that was created by war. This community came into existence as a result of the spontaneous dynamics of the conflict, of individual experiences in the Soviet army or in the rear, and of the state's effort to create inclusive myths for all Soviet citizens. In some cases this entailed not only identification but also the emergence of new, typically Soviet patterns of daily life and--as Eren Tasar has shown--ways of accommodating local and Muslim traditions within a Soviet identity. (3) Of course, this article cannot argue that all the people living in remote rural areas of Central Asia became Soviet through war. Nevertheless, the Kyrgyz example can help us understand that the war created new interpretations of Soviet identity. War provided people of diverse backgrounds with new reasons to identify with the Soviet state. Recent research has argued that the Bolsheviks' attitudes toward Central Asia were shaped by the belief in the civilizational superiority of "European"--in this case, Soviet socialist--modernity. The nomadic way of life was considered to be particularly backward, and thus had to be transformed. (4) While some Central Asians shared this belief in the necessity of modernization, they also adapted the slogans of Bolshevism for their own purposes. (5) Ali Igmen has highlighted the ways Kyrgyz club managers, festival organizers, actors, and authors participated in shaping the institutions and discourses of modern nationhood during the 1920s. (6) This project remained elitist, however. Writing about the fate of Central Asian nomads during collectivization and famine, Robert Kindler and Adrienne Edgar have convincingly argued that they learned to interact with communist officials and to use the newly created institutions in local struggles for power or survival. This, however, did not necessarily entail a more positive sense of identification with the Soviet state and its modernist ideals. (7) In what follows, I argue that during the war the modernist impetus did not completely disappear. Nevertheless, the war created new grounds for identifying with the Soviet state. Focusing on Soviet Tashkent, Paul Stronski has already demonstrated how the war helped solidify a sense of loyalty between Uzbek city residents and the Soviet state. …

When Soviet photographer Evgenii Khaldei photographed Red Army soldiers raising the USSR's flag over the Reichstag on 2 May 1945, he captured not only the arrival of Moscow as a global superpower but also the importance that photojournalism would assume in fashioning the image of the Soviet Union in the world. No longer a pariah but rather the liberator of Europe and a superpower, Moscow faced new challenges in how to present itself. Fashioning the image of a Soviet homeland demanded choices at once aesthetic and political. Presenting an image of the Soviet Union that accented its anti-capitalism and opposition to European imperialism was crucial. Yet other countries were busily remaking their institutions and visual self-presentation too. Journalistic outlets in the United States presented an "American century," while European empires busily reinvented themselves as commonwealths or federations. (1) As the terms of comparison with the West were shifting, Moscow needed to reinvent its own visual brand. It had to remind the world what relevance its own policies of ethnofederal republics and citizenship for all--rather than a distinction between metropolitan citizens and colonial subjects--held for the rest of the world. Nor was this merely a repackaging race for its own sake. With communist parties in Eastern Europe struggling for power, communist parties in Western Europe on the upswing, and all of Europe mired in economic depression, Moscow faced both challenges and opportunities. Soviet photographers and journalists had to supply audiences with visual documents not only of socialist prosperity but also of the Soviet alternative to racial democracy and colonial empire. As Soviet embassies around the world dispatched negatives to communist, socialist, and trade-union papers, the Soviet Union seized on Central Asia to show the enlightened side of Soviet policy. Here former tsarist colonies and protectorates had been transformed into nominally autonomous ethnofederal republics. Already during the interwar period, the five republics carved out of Central Asia had attracted sympathy from European or American socialists, who contrasted them, naively, to American cotton plantations and to British or French aerial bombardments in Mandate Iraq or Syria. Soviet Central Asia, it would seem, gave the lie to Western imperialists' claims to represent "civilization." (2) And during a brief postwar moment, the Soviet federal model gained admirers among not just the anti-imperialist Left but also European imperial administrators as well as colonial intellectuals seeking a nonimperial formula for federative polities. (3) The Soviet vision of politics was, in short, attractive in the postwar years. It needed only photographers to shoot it, state outlets and Soviet embassies to package it, and newspapers to print and sell it to European and colonial observers. While the study of imperial visual culture has long occupied the attention of scholars of the British and French empires, studies of the visual ordering of the Soviet periphery remain limited. (4) Scholarship on Soviet photography focuses primarily on Russia and the prewar period. (5) Some studies of tsarist colonial photography have shifted the focus toward Eurasia, but the Soviet period in general, and the postwar period in particular, remains poorly understood. (6) Studying the visual culture of the Soviet peripheries would not only contribute to an emerging "visual turn" in the study of the late Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, but also--at least as specifically concerns Central Asia--offer a new entry point to debates about the relationship of the Soviet experience to empire. (7) As Adeeb Khalid has urged, we need to move beyond comparisons of the Soviet experience to an ideal type of what empire--or its visual culture-looks like. (8) As noted above, any use of empire as an analytical concept must be grounded in the postwar reality of empires seeking to reform themselves through federative solutions--indeed, often with the Soviet Union as a reference point in mind. …

In A Cold War in the Soviet Bloc, Sheldon Anderson uses recently declassified documents from Polish and East German communist party and foreign ministry archives to examine the interplay of national interests with the exigencies of communist party relations within the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Anderson explores how Polish-East German relations were strained over the permanence of the Oder-Neisse border, the correct road to socialism, German repatriation from Poland, and trade policy; he provides an inside account of the heated debates that seriously divided the Polish and East German communists.Anderson delves into how and why the rift culminated in the return of the anti-Stalinist Wladyslaw Gomulka in October 1956, and he delineates how the Polish-East German conflict undermined the unity of the Soviet bloc on its most strategic flank. In doing so, he reveals the persistence of nationalism and ethnic prejudice in the former communist countries. In this timely text, Anderson pinpoints how nationalism has reemerged as a powerful political force following the end of the Cold War. With A Cold War in the Soviet Bloc, Anderson markedly fills the gap in the existing scholarship on postwar relations between the countries of East Europe.

In both western and Russian historiography the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-40 enjoys, at best, only a passing reference in any narrative of the period and is poorly integrated into existing scholarly analyses of the Soviet regime under Stalin. It is my contention that this conflict offers an invaluable opportunity to test for continuity and change in the form and function of the Stalinist system. Between the disastrous efforts of its forces and the condemnation of the international community, the Kremlin was confronted with the serious challenge of how to portray the events of the war in the media, while managing domestic and international opinion over the course of the fighting. This thesis examines the extent to which the Soviet regime under Stalin had the institutions and agents in place at the close of the 1930s to cope with the crisis of war in Finland; to be in command of the military campaign, while simultaneously controlling the direction of the official narrative about the fighting; and to censor conflicting interpretations, experiences and information channels, which might expose the Red Army's woeful performance on Finnish territory. This mobilisation of press, propaganda and censorship organs in the face of widespread international condemnation and domestic disquiet constituted a significant challenge for a regime still dealing with the sudden reorientation of the Communist International, required after the Soviet Union’s conclusion of a non-aggression treat with Nazi Germany in August 1939. An international perspective is central to this thesis, with a view towards assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the public face and private practice of Soviet information controls.

Using memories of and interviews with Soviet soldiers, the article discusses their experience of combat and physical violence during the Soviet War in Afghanistan (1979–1989). With Afghan statehood rapidly dissolving and little interest on the side of the Soviet military to enforce international law, Afghanistan quickly turned into a space where violence became the most important social resource. The soldiers and other Soviet personnel had to adapt to these conditions, which differed immensely from the late socialist society in the USSR. The article traces their immersion into the violent space and discusses their behavior while in Afghanistan. It points to the brutality of counterinsurgency combat and to the atrocities committed by both sides. In addition, it sheds light on the experience of serving in the Soviet Army during the last decade of the USSR. Many of the dysfunctions of the late socialist society were also prevalent – even amplified – while serving in the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. These problems were often exacerbated during the war and impeded the abilities of the Soviet Army. Upon their return from Afghanistan, many veterans found it difficult to return to civilian life in the USSR. Their immersion into the violent space was more rapid and formative than their return to socialist “normality.”

One Future Only. The Soviet Union in the Age of the Scientific-Technical Revolution The present article focuses on the «Scientific-Technical Revolution» (STR), tracing the Soviet leadership's bid for the future throughout the post-Stalinist period and examining how it came to be challenged by the scientific-technical and literary intelligentsias of the country. I argue that what was claimed to be the main strength of official Soviet thought on the future – its holistic character – was also its most serious limiting factor. Unlike Western futures studies, which assumed a plurality of possible futures and stressed the need to strategically choose between them on the basis of preferences and values, orthodox Soviet theoreticians framed the prospective development of mankind in terms of a single future that demanded an all-encompassing vision. The resulting Soviet future discourse was unwieldy and restrictive, and left the Soviet Union ill-prepared to deal with the onslaught of «reflexive modernity» that reached the country in the 1970s.

Reflection of early Soviet dialects of national languages in Russian bilingual dictionaries published in MoscowAfter the October Revolution, over half of the citizens of the new Russian state were non-Russians. The historical homeland of some of them was outside the Soviet Union. The experiences of two largest national minorities: the Germans (1 238 000) and the Poles (782 000) were similar in many respects. Members of both nations were persecuted, suffered massive repression, and were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. The new cultural and political reality (separation from the historical homeland and national languages, influence of Russian and other languages of Soviet Union nations, necessity to use new Soviet lexis and technical/scientific terminology on a daily basis) forced changes in German and Polish used in the Soviet Union. Soviet dialects of national languages were reinforced in books, handbooks, the press, and propaganda materials etc. published in German and Polish in huge number of copies. The Soviet dialects of German and Polish were reflected on the right side of Russian-German and Russian-Polish dictionaries published in the 1930s by “Sovetskaya Entsyklopedia”. The analysis and comparison of the language material excerpted from the dictionaries show that Soviet dialects of both languages were characterized by the presence of orientalisms (result of the constant contact with the nations and nationalities of the Soviet Union and their culture) and unique lexis related to the Russian way of life (Russian culinary lexis, names of musical instruments, names of garments) and Sovietisms (i.e. new political terminology and words related to the Soviet way of life). The Germans found it more difficult to adapt their native code to life in the Soviet Union.

Conclusions based on a broad panorama of international relations between 1919 and 1939 and on the analysis of trends in the development of Germany and the Soviet Union in the interwar period, are made concerning the causes of WWII and its “turn to the East” on June 22, 1941, the growth of Soviet military art, and the crash of the bloc of aggressors. In addition, the author writes on the preparation and results of key battles and campaigns of the Great Patriotic War and the consequences for the Soviet Union and the entire world’s civilization.

In the course of the Russian Civil War the Bolsheviks conquered most of the territories of the former Tsarist Empire. Consequently, Soviet state-building faced context conditions of multi-ethnicity and cultural diversity. Given the Bolshevik's strive for centralised control and the conviction that nationalism was a threat to a unitary revolutionary state, the Bolsheviks created what they considered to be a modern multi-national state: a federation of formally independent national republics. Yet, in fact, political rule in the Soviet Union was rather characterised by political practices typical for empires: unequal centre-periphery relations, foreign domination and internal colonisation. This became increasingly apparent in the 1930s under Stalin's despotism. Soviet state-building did not result in the creation of a modern multinational state, but rather in imperial metamorphosis. Regarding the way the Soviet Union was ruled, it was an «empire in disguise» that proved its imperial nature during and after World War II and finally fell victim to its composite structure.

Using travel accounts to the Soviet Union as a source, this article explores the ambiguous position of Russia in Germans' global imaginary between the wars. The article first discusses the ways in which German travel accounts redefined Russia's location between Europe and Asia in the interwar years. It then focuses on travellers' fascination with Soviet internal colonization and attempts to mobilize society. Finally, it turns to the ways in which stereotypes about the Soviet rulers' and people's ‘Asiatic’ nature shaped German travellers' observations about violence and coercion in the Soviet state.

Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union is indeed a timely book. It arrives at the 25-year anniversary of the collapse of most of the socialist governments in Eastern and Central E...

This article examines the various components of the image of Soviet children, who were deported to Nazi Germany during the Second World War to perform forced labour, within the culture of remembrance of the USSR and post-Soviet Ukraine. In her analysis, the author emphasises that throughout the Soviet period the topic of forced labour had mostly instrumental significance and was used for a variety of propaganda tasks: during the war, to mobilise the population to struggle against the enemy; in its aftermath, to underscore and contrast the essence and policies of the post-war Western ‘democracies’ and the USSR; and, from the late 1960s, to accuse capitalist countries, above all the Federal Republic of Germany, of preparing for undertakings such as a new war or an arms race. With the collapse of the USSR, the Ostarbeiters' ‘territory of memory’ enlarged dramatically. In the new climate of democratic transformation, there were socio-legal initiatives which aimed to regulate the status of forced labourers, an...

This article deals with the migration of “ethnic Germans” from socialist Eastern Europe to the GDR in the decades after the Second World War. Post-expulsion resettlement from that region is commonly associated with Aussiedler migration to West Germany. Contesting the idea that East Germany displayed no interest in Eastern European Germans, this article shows that the GDR, which challenged the West German claim to be the sole representative of the German nation, also received ethnic German immigrants, mostly from Poland and the USSR. It argues that the distribution of roles between the two German states, with West Germany being the prime destination for resettlers, was not clear from the outset. It was only after Polish–West German “normalization” in 1970 that the FRG became the almost uncontested “fatherland” for Eastern European Germans. West and East German approaches resembled each other as long as they were predicated on humanitarian family reunification. They diverged as the GDR attempted co-ethnic labor recruitment in Poland in the 1960s. These efforts met with limited success, as East Germany was the weakest link in a cross-bloc “tetradic nexus” with the German minority in Poland, the Polish state, and West Germany. Meanwhile, the GDR authorities eyed grass-roots migration initiatives by Soviet Germans with suspicion, as they undermined the government aspiration to control the movement of people. The article finally argues that movement of labor had no priority in the project of socialist economic integration, which gives reason to suspect a link between limited migration and failed COMECON integration.

The ‘displaced persons’ (DPs) from Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, whom Australia took in as immigrants under the mass resettlement scheme after the Second World War, dramatically changed the country’s immigration patterns and demography. They paved the way for further diversity to come. There is a growing scholarly literature on displaced persons (DPs) after World War II, both in general and with reference to their postwar resettlement in Australia in particular. Internationally, the current debate usually focuses either on discourses and institutional settings or the fate of specific ethnic groups.1 In Australia, the discussion is entangled with the history of immigration and of White Australia, and is often connected to present day refugee issues.2 A particularly rich vein of scholarship concerns Australia’s uneasiness about accepting Jews.3 This special issue, by contrast, focuses primarily on the history of one particular group of DPs: people who had been exposed to Soviet rule during the war – either as Soviet citizens, or deportees and refugees from Poland and elsewhere – and who subsequently found their way to Australia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, mainly under the DP mass resettlement scheme administered by the International Refugee Organization (IRO).

AT THE CONCLUSION OF WORLD WAR II IN THE FAR EAST, THE SOVIET Union intervened in the war against Japan and subsequently occupied Manchuria and the northern area of the Korean peninsula. The Soviet military's occupation of what is now the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) significantly influenced Korea's subsequent history, from liberation to division to war. Studying Soviet policies toward Korea, which were a driving force behind the division of the peninsula, still has great academic and practical import for Koreans, who remain separated even after the end of the Cold War.The academic world has shown a keen interest in studying these Soviet policies. Nonetheless, the existing body of work is far from comprehensive, as it focuses primarily on the Soviets' participation in the war against Japan, their role in the demarcation of the 38th parallel, and their policies toward the northern half of Korea immediately following their occupation of the area (Haruki 1983; Oh 1989; Ree 1989; Jeon 1995). In particular, archival restrictions have resulted in a total lack of research on Soviet policies toward Korea in the Moscow Conference of 1945 and on the undertakings of the US-USSR Joint Commission, which was formed according to the agreement adopted at the conference. Research on the Joint Commission has mainly focused on US policy toward Korea (Shim 1989; Jeong 1996).I had an opportunity to analyze diplomatic documents regarding the Soviet Union's policies toward Korea, which became accessible to the public only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and to examine the Soviet Union's blueprint for the Korean provisional government, which developed during the Joint Commission's work (Jeon 1997). I discovered that the Kremlin sought to establish a Korean government dominated by the left wing by strictly adhering to the Moscow Agreement and preventing the participation of factions opposed to the FourPower Trusteeship in the Joint Commission.Meanwhile, notable changes have recently occurred in the research environment for the Soviet policies toward Korea. The documents of the secretariat of the Soviet delegation to the Joint Commission have been released,1 as have the decisions of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).2 An examination of these documents reveals that the CPSU issued three decrees to the Soviet delegation to the Joint Commission, the first two on March 16 and July 26, 1946, and the last on May 20, 1947. The decrees were adopted in the form of decisions by the Politburo, the highest decisionmaking body in the Soviet party-state system. The decrees are definitive in understanding the CPSU's blueprint for the Korean provisional government. They prescribe the general principles guiding the Soviet delegation's work, encompassing the Joint Commission's undertakings and procedures, organizational and political principles for the Korean provisional government, and procedures for holding a conference with political parties and social organizations.In the meantime, for the purpose of supporting the Soviet delegation to the Joint Commission, a special committee was formed, consisting of Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Solomon Lozovsky, Deputy Minister of Armed Forces Nikolai Bulganin, and Chief of General Staff of Soviet Army Aleksei Antonov. This committee, through discussions with different ministries, prepared materials and decision drafts to submit to the Politburo conference regarding key issues such as the decrees that would be communicated to the Soviet delegation.3 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs documents were none other than the ministry's first drafts, composed in the process of preparing materials to submit to the Politburo through the special committee. Nevertheless, a significant number of differences exist between the contents of the Soviet foreign affairs ministry's first drafts and the Politburo's final decrees. …

This article considers the role the Soviet Union's western borderlands annexed during World War II played in the evolution of Soviet politics of empire. Using the Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine as case studies, it argues that Sovietization had a profound impact on these borderlands, integrating them into a larger Soviet polity. However, guerrilla warfare and Soviet policy-making indirectly led to these regions becoming perceived as more Western and nationalist than other parts of the Soviet Union. The Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine differed in their engagement with the Western capitalist world. Different experiences of World War II and late Stalinism and contacts with the West ultimately led to this region becoming Soviet, yet different from the rest of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet West was far from uniform, perceived differences between it and the rest of the Soviet Union justified claims at the end of the 1980s that the Soviet Union was an empire rather than a family of nations.

The high degree of politicisation of the Russian energy sector questions the rationale that lies behind the formation of Russia’s energy politics. In this book, Stylianos Sotiriou develops a framew...

This chapter examines the underlying reasons for corruption within the Former Soviet Union (FSU), and its impact on the process of democratization. It proposes the FSU is taken as encompassing the region of post-Soviet countries excluding the Baltic States, which have dramatically different standards of governance. The chapter argues that corruption creates further barriers to the dual transition to a liberal democracy and market economy. It discusses the key concept is 'social capital', and especially its acquisition and use. Social capital has had many definitions, but Francis Fukuyama's seems most useful here. Francis Fukuyama has described social capital as 'an instantiated informal norm that promotes cooperation between two or more individuals'. The idea of trust or 'social capital' as an important glue holding society together is a relatively new concept in the field of Sovietology or post-Sovietology. The chapter emphasises on national anti-corruption programs in the region are an important step in the right direction.

Despite constitutional provisions, the referendum was rarely used until the end of communist rule, when it precipitated the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Emerging democracies then used the referendum to ratify independence, to endorse constitutions and fundamental decisions, and later to sanction European Union and NATO membership. Increasingly, it has been deployed to entrench authoritarian rule and to modify boundaries that gained new significance with the fragmentation of formerly cohesive states.