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The article reviews major frameworks for re-evaluating Soviet Central Asian history in anglophone scholarship after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It tackles recent popular concepts such as 'modernity', 'development' and 'modernization' for analysing the Soviet past in the region. It questions the analytical value of the terms as well as their ability to capture the complexity of social, political and economic changes that Central Asia underwent in the course of seven decades between the October Revolution and the dissolution of the USSR. The article furthermore provides an overview of novel themes and approaches in the field and suggests themes for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article seeks to underline the ideological filiation between the principles of Russian political warfare (disinformation, aggressive propaganda, manipulation, distortion, political isolation of the target (politicide), the anti-Zionist propaganda formulated by the Soviet Union and the BDS argument, conceived as a node around which anti-Israeli organisations and structure gravitate. To determine this filiation this article examines step by step; the principles of Russian political warfare; the development of that doctrine as expressed in the anti-Zionist propaganda formulated by the Soviet Union between 1897 and 1991 and finally the modalities of the application of the Russian political warfare in the BDS argument. The findings reveal a twin phenomenon of appropriation; first an appropriation of Russian political warfare as a strategy to delegitimise Israel and second, an appropriation of the arguments produced by the anti-Zionist propaganda formulated by the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Athenaeum: Polskie Studia Politologiczne is the property of Faculty of Political Science & Security Studies Nicolaus Copernicus University 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 explores the political warfare or active measures reportedly associated with Soviet security services. Topics discussed include the definition of active measures according to the Russian Committee for State Security (KGB), the significant role of active measures in the foreign and domestic policies of the Soviet Union, and the common perceptions of the U.S. government on Soviet active measures which tend to influence the relations between the two regions.

Until now research on religious in Soviet Russia has relied chiefly on documents generated by state, party, and police organs. As instruments of the regime's antireligious campaigns, these documents reflect official policy and reveal little about the everyday life of believers. To fill this gap in the documentation and historiography, the Russian Science Foundation has funded a three-year project to identify and publish documents from below--by tapping into those documents transmitted to the West and located in various institutional and private archives. In April 2020 the project organized a conference to discuss the initial results of this new undertaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Soviet legal scholar Aron Trainin's evolving writings on international law. Initially, Trainin formulated aspects of his concept of "crimes against peace" as a sort of Soviet alternative to Raphael Lemkin's crimes of barbarity and vandalism. Crimes against peace both converged with the larger international movement to outlaw aggressive war, provided a Soviet alternative to proposed international crimes that they believed would threaten Soviet sovereignty, and provided a Soviet response to Lemkin's proposals to outlaw mass killings. During World War II, Trainin articulated the Nazi extermination of the Jews as "crimes against peaceful civilians," linking the Nazi atrocities to his concept of crimes against peace. Trainin's concept of "crimes against peaceful civilians" encompassed the atrocities of the Holocaust while also asserting that the Soviet experience of the war – most notably Soviet sacrifice and suffering – meant that the Soviets should determine how international criminal law punished the war's perpetrators. After World War II, when it became clear that genocide, rather than "crimes against peace" or "crimes against peaceful civilians," was becoming the primary concept in international law to understand mass killings, Trainin portrayed the concept of genocide according to the perspective of Soviet propaganda, opposing an international criminal court for genocide, supporting the concept of cultural genocide, and portraying genocide as an inevitable outcome of capitalism. At the same time, Trainin and the Soviets never abandoned his concept of "crimes against peace," portraying capitalism as inherently bound up with war and genocide. Trainin was the most significant genocide scholar in the Soviet Union, and his work exemplifies both the ways in which Soviet approaches to international law converged with other approaches, and the ways in which the Soviet Union diverged from non-Soviet international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the samizdat and tamizdat versions of the journal Political Diary, edited between 1964 and 1970 by the Soviet dissident Roy Medvedev. Based on an analysis of the nearly full collection of issues from the Moscow Memorial archives and interviews with Roy Medvedev, the author explores the functions of the journal during its samizdat and tamizdat periods, its place in the history of socialist dissent in the USSR, the transformations the text underwent for publication abroad, and its reception. The article argues that the journal's functions were to aggregate reliable information on current Soviet politics, history, and culture gathered through various official and non-official channels; to offer Medvedev and his like-minded reformist socialist readers a space to reflect on current events and socialist democracy, primarily in opposition to attempts by neo-Stalinists to rehabilitate Stalin; and to give Medvedev an outlet and feedback mechanism for his current historical and political research. With the publication of the journal abroad in the 1970s, however, its perception shifted, influenced by the political context and Roy Medvedev s reputation as a left-wing dissident. As a result, the dissident connections of the journal were downplayed and it was labelled a "loyal" samizdat publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Soviet Union after the Second World War can serve as a prime example of how victory 'locks in' a political system. In a mirror image of Wolfgang Schivelbusch's argument of how 'cultures of defeat' encourage social and political innovation, the Soviet 'culture of victory' reaffirmed a dictatorial system of government and a command economy based on collectivized agriculture and centrally planned industry. At the same time, however, the war also engendered changes, which played themselves out somewhat subterraneously at first. They include a complex system of veterans' privileges, a growing welfare state, a more routinized administration, and an economy where individual and family farming played a major role in the provisioning not only of the rural, but also of the urban population. Moreover, counter-narratives and counter-memories of this war could never be completely silenced by the bombastic war cult and would break forth at the end of the Soviet century. Finally, the economic and human costs of this victory were such that they formed a constant dark underbelly to the celebration of the 'Great Victory'. This article surveys these contradictory legacies of the war and the ways in which they helped shape late Soviet society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the translation of the book "The Horse and His Boy" by C. S. Lewis. Topics discussed include the history of translation between English and Arabic literature; the use of a turn of phrase with a religious intension in the book and different translations reflect in different ways about the complex political and sociological conditions of the former Soviet Union.

Defining the state as 'organised violence', based on the emergence of the modern European national state system, Charles Tilly identified four essential war-driven, state-building activities: 'war-making'; 'state-making'; 'protection' of elite 'clients'; and 'extraction' of resources. Drawing on Tilly's primary categories of analysis, this essay considers the ways in which war, or the threat of war, real or imagined, shaped the Soviet state, particularly in its Stalinist manifestation. This essay argues that Tilly's warfare-state paradigm, judiciously deployed, brings into high relief facets of Soviet state-making that few other paradigms do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the career of N. V. Solov'ev, a prominent Stalin-era official and little-known victim of the 1949 Leningrad Affair. When treated as a case study, Solov'ev's life and times illustrate a variety of important things about Stalinism as a whole. Most obviously, Solov'ev's rapid ascent into the party nomenklatura during the interwar years exemplifies the dramatic trajectory that many in party service enjoyed during this period. Once in office, Solov'ev promptly embraced the Stalinist political culture that had promoted him there, at times even emulating the general secretary himself. Finally, Solov'ev's postwar disgrace and ruin reveal much about the broader functioning of this political system, particularly in regard to Joseph Stalin's concerns about the USSR's emergent party elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay challenges the frequent references to the concept of Soviet nationality policy by historians and social scientists. The argument proceeds, first, by unpicking some of the logic in the use of the term; second, by examining the evidence for the existence and nature of such a policy; and third, by considering alternative explanations for major decisions and events concerning non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union. The essay concludes that, at least after the 1920s, there was no Soviet nationality policy, and the processes of negotiation and nation-promoting practices pursued by republic leaders were, instead, the key influences on decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conflation of Stalinism with socialism was a key aspect of the relationship between Stalinism and capitalism. The Russian Marxist Nodari Simoniya exposed that conflation in his book What We Have Built, which is discussed in this essay in the context of Russian historiography about Stalinism. The main themes of Simoniya's critique of Stalinism as a historical reversal are elaborated and linked to political images during the Cold War that distorted the meaning of socialism. Stalinism is revealed as a negative satellite of capitalism, constituting an external economic zone, not an alternative form of world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular protest, which repeatedly occurred in Communist regimes, turned into massive mobilizational waves in the late Communist period. Why did some protests result in state cooptation and particularist nationalism (Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union), and others in state-society polarization (Poland) and protest containment (China), when these states shared important historical, political, and institutional legacies? Political regimes with origins in indigenous popularly-based revolutionary movements are more resilient to popular protests and other major crises than other authoritarian regimes. Protracted ideological armed struggle largely overlaps with broader patriotic causes, such as liberation wars or struggles against foreign intervention. The revolutionary regimes thus acquire patriotic credentials, while boundaries between partisan and patriotic identities become blurred, which strengthens their elite unity and popular base. Popular protests thus facilitate a complex political game of old and new actors that may result in regime survival or transformation. In other regimes, popular unrest tends to produce state-society polarization and, ultimately, regime delegitimation and breakdown. Popular contention in complex multinational institutional settings, if there is no major external threat, highlights old and triggers new conflicts along these structural and institutional divides and, where dual political identities prevail, facilitates identity shifts in particularist direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intellectual efforts to understand post-Crimean Russian society have brought to prominence explanations that emphasize psychological and attitudinal legacies of Soviet society. The recent revival of the term homo sovieticus (or Soviet man) in the media and intellectual discourse is a good illustration of this trend. Yurii Levada's late-Soviet sociological research project on the "simple Soviet man" serves as a frequent reference point in these discussions. In this article, I explore the ideological and analytical foundations of the Levada project and juxtapose the sociological construct developed by Levada and his team with the interpretative approach developed by Natalya Kozlova, another Soviet scholar who dedicated her life to studying Soviet society. I argue that essentialist and deterministic views of individual personality underpinning the Levada project that guide the current use of the Soviet man category are more politically and ideologically driven rather than being based on the state of the art in social psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the old regime of Soviet Union and China along with factors due to which the political party Communist Party of China survived; and mentions that civil war and the struggle for national survival against an invading power reinforced the centralist aspects of the Communist Party.

The article discusses the book "Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall Apart," by Andreas Wimmer, focusing on linguistic integration. Topics include the role of the Han language in Chinese nation building, the ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and the impacts of Soviet and Russian linguistic policies in relation to the Russian language and imperialism.

The article offers responses to issue pieces by scholars Vera Tolz and Elliott Green to the author's book "Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall Apart." Topics include the role of linguistic policy in nation building in China and the Soviet Union, relations between elites and masses as a factor in nation building, and the role of public goods provision by the central state in national identification.

Copyright of Trabajos y Comunicaciones is the property of Universidad Nacional de La Plata 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.)

Evaluates the moves of the Soviet government during the first few days after the accident in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in Ukraine in 1986. Exposure of the weaknesses of the Soviet System due to the accident; Soviet citizens' practice of avoiding accountability for mistakes and failures; Efforts to contain the nuclear accident.

Analyzes the relations between the U.S. and Soviet Union. Origin of anti-Soviet fundamentalism; Evolution of domestic politics in the Soviet Union; National security issues in the U.S.; Military competition between the two countries. INSETS: "X" on containment, 1947.;Kennan redux, 1987..

Comments on evidence pointing to the emergence of thinking in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev that represents greater geopolitical consciousness. Decision to give greater weight to political element in political doctrine; Widened policy role for civilian analysts of international security affairs; Political efforts to reduce confrontation with the West; Internal debate on the nuclear testing moratorium. INSET: Sakharov and Gorky..

Focuses on the economic and political conditions in the Soviet Union. Signs of economic, social and moral crisis; Manifestation of ethnic-religious tension; Political alienation; Developments in the Soviet Union in 1985; Annual economic growth rate; Status of marriage and divorce; Soviet alcohol consumption; Campaign against alcohol abuse; Restrictions on literary and artistic expressions. INSETS: Alcohol, work, and the war between men and women: excerpts...;Yevgeny Yevtushenko on writing, censorship, and life in the....

The article presents information on the transition due to the emergence of a new generation that has the urge to assume power in the Soviet Union. The transition is related to the factors on economic, military and social policy. Several developments have taken place in the Soviet Union including the installation of intercontinental ballistic missiles thereby acquiring massive retaliatory capability, and the holding of new bases for the deep-water navy. In relation to the U.S.-Soviet relationships that began in the mid-1980s on subjective realms, significant developments have been initiated in both the countries. The potential changes in the Soviet Union are more radical due to the fundamental priorities started by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1929.

The article focuses on the importance of religious factors in the development of the Soviet Union. In the country, the political leadership remained subservient to the Orthodox church. It discusses the course of the country's history from the period of the Bolshevik government, to the civil war in the early 1920s, and further. During the 1920s, protestant "sectarians" grew rapidly, owing to the country's religious policy. However, the reign of the country's former premier Stalin witnessed severe religious policies.

The article examines the change in political conditions and quality of life in pre-1917 Russia and the Soviet Union. Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, remarked on the absence of continuity in the transition from pre-revolutionary Russia to the Soviet Union. It is stated that the American or Western ideas played an important role in underlining the perceptions of the Soviet Union. However, the Russian language is known to be the language of the multi-national Soviet Union. It is reported that the Russian state has been the largest territorial existence since the seventeenth century. The natural environment of Russian-speaking people has uncurled the starting of the present millennium. All these factors will command the policies of the country in future.

Alan Shandro's Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony is an original and powerful exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of Lenin's politics. Against both mainstream dismissals of Lenin's supposed elitism and minority attempts to reduce him to the status of a talented Second International Marxist, Shandro powerfully reasserts the claim that the Leninist moment was the point at which Marxist politics finally came of age. If Shandro can be faulted for his tendency to dismiss other contemporaneous contributions to the renewal of Marxism, his book nonetheless shows that Lenin's understanding of the struggle for hegemony was a pivotal moment in this process that remains an indispensable contribution to Marxism. Shandro shows that Lenin asked a fundamental political question: how are we as socialists to intervene in concrete political movements without succumbing to the hegemony of bourgeois ideology on the one hand or retreating into sectarianism on the other? He persuasively argues that the left still has much to learn from Lenin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the transformation of government forms in the post-Soviet states (Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia) towards parliamentarization on the basis of neo-institutional and comparative methods. The reasons for this transformation and the degree of its influence on the political process are analyzed. As a result of the changes, the presidents of Georgia, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan lost the most important powers, retaining, however, the status of the head of state. The electoral system for parliamentary elections in all three states has been replaced by a fully proportional one. The author comes to the conclusion that the changes in government forms and the electoral system were initiated by the ruling elites and are aimed not so much at improving the efficiency of public administration, but at preserving the power. However, the parliamentarization of government systems in the three post-Soviet states had a "capsizing" effect on the ruling elite in two cases (Armenia and Georgia), and in another case (Kyrgyzstan) it could lead to the removal of the former incumbent from the channels of influence on the incumbent President. In general, institutional reforms geared towards parliamentarization, combined with the transition to a proportional representation system, lead to the development of political competition and contribute to the institutionalization of party systems in the states considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay examines the effects of Soviet nationalities policy on Armenians living in Baku, the capital of the Azerbaijani SSR, and on ethnic Azerbaijanis in Kyzyl-Shafag, an Azerbaijani village in the Armenian SSR. A series of interviews were conducted with members of these two communities to explore some of the results of Soviet nationalities policy. Although the residents of Baku emphasised the multinational character of the city, they nevertheless conceded that ethnicity played an important role in their lives, even at the level of everyday practices. The same also applies for the Azerbaijanis in the far less cosmopolitan Armenian countryside, where ethnic boundaries remained largely impenetrable. Soviet language, with its essentialist categories that separated people into internally homogeneous groups, could not have been more appropriate for this purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The October Revolution was not a coup d'état, and it would not have succeeded without the support of the majority of the Russian people; it also benefited from the enthusiasm and support of plebeians worldwide, including the United States. The Revolution did not produce Utopia, but many of the expectations it raised were not disappointed. Without the October Revolution, Russia would not have morphed in very short time from a big but backward and impoverished country, ravaged by the Great War, into one of the world's two superpowers with a relatively high standard of living; and the colonies and semi‐colonies of the imperialist powers might not have achieved their independence. As for the Western World, it would not have attained its high level of political and social democracy without the major political and social reforms that were introduced by the ruling elites in the years following 1917 to avoid revolutions à la russe in Britain, France, and so forth. Finally, it is also thanks to the October Revolution that the Soviet Union was strong enough to survive the Nazi onslaught of 1941 and ultimately to bring about the defeat of Nazi Germany—for the benefit not only of the Russians and other Soviet peoples, for whom Hitler had planned enslavement, but for all of Europe and the entire world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing the economic reality and prospects of the Soviet Union was of major importance for U.S. policy-making throughout the Cold War. In the future, the U.S. is likely to be faced with adversaries with similarly opaque command (or mixed command and free market) economies; accurately assessing their size and health will remain an important U.S. intelligence task. This task is generally seen as requiring the development of complex quantitative methodologies which, despite their necessary reliance on poor quality and perhaps manipulated data, produce an output that can appear “objective” and precise. This can be counteracted in part by focusing on the likely biases in the input date, as caused, for example, by the ulterior motives of those providing it. Furthermore, intelligence must constantly be searching for, and making use of, new sources of insights even if they are more subjective and less precise in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John le Carré's Cold War espionage novels were heralded as a realist antidote to the Manichean, good vs. evil simplicities of Ian Fleming and John Buchan. Rather than creating British gentlemen unmasking foreign grotesques, le Carré was held by critics and media commentators to have demonstrated a moral equivalence between the Cold Warring sides. To the contrary, le Carré retains a subtle Manicheanism, and creates British heroes just as gentlemanly as Buchan's, who do battle with Eastern monsters, dehumanised by Communist 'ideology.' This reflects contemporary anxieties about a British 'way of life' felt to be under threat from expansionist Soviet Communism from without and post-war social reorganisation from within. In Call for the Dead (1961) Communist villain, Dieter Frey, is a 'Satanic' multiple-murderer who is cathartically executed by George Smiley. Into the mouth of GDR Communist, Fiedler, in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), le Carré puts a 'monstrous utilitarianism' regarding human life. With Soviet master spy, Karla, le Carré created an enemy of mythic monstrousness for Smiley to battle in a 1970s trilogy of novels. Implacable and brutal, Karla is an inhuman 'fanatic,' a lethal merger of 'ideology' and 'evil.' That Karla never speaks a word throughout the trilogy enhances his monstrosity, while also crucially silencing his political rationale. Modern twists on this monstrosity occur in the way neo-Nazi spymaster Mundt in The Spy and Nazi war criminal Karfeld in A Small Town in Germany (1968) both transpire to be on the British side. We see this twist also in the mirror imaging of Smiley and Karla in Smiley's People (1980). But British monstrosity is seen only as a copy of - and defence against - a Communist original. Although the British state is defended as much as decried, perhaps the unambiguous defeat of these Communist monsters in every novel is an indicator of political insecurity in both le Carré and Cold War British culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note offers an outline of the origins of Stalinist secrecy policy: the conceptions behind it and the concrete practices for handling documents. It also provides an introduction to a recently declassified and still under-used set of documents, the Special Folders of the Politburo, the most secret documents of all. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the history of the Soviet dissident historical collection Pamiat΄ through the lens of liminality. It argues that the publication sought to bridge the gap between dissident and professional scholarship, between grassroots memory collection, with its emphasis on the witness's voice, and historical research's reliability and 'scientificity.' Although Pamiat΄ was inspired by earlier dissident historiographical projects and its editorial team was closely linked to the human-rights movement, its ambitions of objectivity and representativeness also connect it to later Perestroika projects based on citizen involvement, such as Memorial. Pamiat΄s ambiguous identity and claim to neutrality may have delayed the Soviet authorities' response to it, but repression eventually hit the publication. By putting into question the state's monopoly on historical scholarship and connecting readers and contributors across the Iron Curtain, Pamiat΄ had clearly overstepped the boundaries of the permissible and acquired a political meaning it disingenuously claimed not to have. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]