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Zones of violence are spaces in which violence against other human beings becomes normal; they are characterized as places where primal trust in institutions and rules has been lost. While Jörg Baberowski initially used this concept to refer to Nazi Germany, I assert that its lessons are just as applicable to the Soviet Union, especially during the 1930s. In order to demonstrate this, I highlight how, already in tsarist Russia, institutions and communities had been shaken up by the processes of industrialization and urbanization. Moreover, when the Bolsheviks came to power they aimed to further weaken the symbolic systems and destroy the institutions - thus the existing bulwarks of habitual trust were enfeebled or eliminated. Universal distrust was now the modus operandi of the entire system, which simultaneously demanded total trust in the Party. This demonstrates why Soviet society developed the way that it did. The use of violence as a political tool became simply routine: shoot first, ask questions afterwards. In this milieu everyone became fearful and distrustful - a hyper-vigilant, paranoid outlook burnt itself into the whole structure of society, lasting right to the end of the Soviet Union and even after. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union from the 1920s to his death in 1953, often invoked the specter of war. For some reason, however, we have never taken those invocations seriously. We have always understood them as a manipulative device, either to gain political advantage over his opponents, to mobilize the population, to deflect blame for ill-advised and extreme policies, or in some other way to consolidate the dictator's power. This article argues that the dictator's expectations of war were not just discursive or rhetorical, as most histories argue. In fact, Stalin's perceptions of external threat were inextricably intertwined with internal pohcies of mass repression, as well as campaigns of industrial mobilization. This article examines the patterns of radicahzed internal violence that so characterized the Stalinist regime, and connects them to the dictator's perceptions of war and foreign threat. Discussion focuses on the crisis years 1927-1932, 1936-1939, the Great Patriotic War, and the last war crisis period, 1946-1952. Violent repressions under Stalin were cyclical, peaking and ebbing but, in each case, they were linked to Stalin's expectation of war and invasion, and they followed a pattern established during the dictator's experience as a military commander in the Russian revolutionary and civil wars, from 1918 to 1920. This article examines those links, and it compares the cyclical character of Stalinist repression to the pattern of cumulative radicalization of violence under the German National Socialist regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1936 case of United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., the U.S. Supreme Court reasoned that the president is the sole organ of foreign affairs given implicitly through the commander-in-chief clause. With over 10,000 citations (Code of Federal Regulations) and 145 Curtiss-Wright references by attorney generals and the Department of Justice justifying presidential prerogatives, the imperial president is enshrined in law. Even with recent challenges, the Court remains steadfast to unilateral executive decision making. However, few studies identify when the executive branch first adopts the Court's newly constituted constitutional order, and few provide a systematic analysis of how presidents advance the sole-organ doctrine. Building on this scholarship I show that President Truman's cohesive narrative of asserted unilateral powers redirects development for future executives to claim unfettered discretion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists have long been interested in how indiscriminate violence affects the behavior of its victims, yet most research has focused on short-term military consequences rather than long-term political effects. We argue that largescale violence can have an intergenerational impact on political preferences. Communities more exposed to indiscriminate violence in the past will--in the future--oppose political forces they associate with the perpetrators of that violence. We document evidence for this claim with archival data on Soviet state violence in western Ukraine, where Stalin's security services suppressed a nationalist insurgency by deporting over 250,000 people to Siberia. Using two causal identification strategies, we show that communities subjected to a greater intensity of deportation in the 1940s are now significantly less likely to vote for "pro-Russian" parties. These findings show that indiscriminate violence systematically reduces long-term political support for the perpetrator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the properties and proprietors of the Soviet Union Red Army soldiers during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. It examines the emergence of khoziaeva in the Workers' and Peasants' Redy Army. It discusses property as an idiosyncratic institution in Soviet Union, Also discussed is the relationship soldiers have with their own meager khoziaistvo.

The article discusses the Stakhanov movement, the political program designed to maximize and modernize industrial production, during the 1930s in the Soviet Union, focusing particularly on its implementation during the construction of the Far Eastern Railroad, known as the Ussuri railways prior to 1936. Soviet officials felt the program was hindered by sabotage or wrecking, and its implementation was followed by the Great Terror or Purge under the administration of Russian leader Josef Stalin. Topics include the railroad's officials and administration, laborers used to construct the railway, and how mistakes were criminalized.

In the early 1950s, the Soviet Union made great efforts to persuade its former citizens among the 'displaced persons' (DPs) resettled in Australia after the war to repatriate. They sent two undercover military intelligence men to Canberra to identify DPs who might be interested in returning, offer them free passages, and organize the repatriation. The result was a paltry dozen repatriations, out of the estimated 50,000 eligible DPs resettled in Australia. This strange story - hitherto completely unknown and reconstructed on the basis of recently opened Soviet classified material in the State Archive of the Russian Federation and ASIO files in the National Archives of Australia - adds a new angle to our understanding of Soviet-Australian (and, in general, Soviet-Western) relations at the height of the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ethnic Germans were the single largest and one of the oldest diaspora groups in the USSR connected to a foreign state. During the Second World War the Soviet government forcibly resettled the German communities living in territory it controlled west of the Urals to Kazakhstan and Siberia. It placed these internal deportees under special settlement restrictions which greatly limited their freedom of movement and choice of residency. The NKVD counted, registered, and instituted a system of surveillance over the special settlers to prevent them from moving from their assigned places of resettlement. This in turn greatly constrained their options regarding education and employment. Initially almost all of the deportees including urban populations from Engles and other cities found themselves settled on kolkhozes and sovkhozes and assigned to unfamiliar agricultural work. The failure to integrate these men and women into productive agricultural work on the kolkhozes led to widespread unemployment, lack of work days, and subsequently severe food shortages. The Soviet solution to integrating them into the economy was to again move them and assign them to extractive enterprises. This took two forms. The first was a second deportation of tens of thousands of ethnic Germans to Siberia northward to work in the fishing industry. These men, women, and children remained special settlers. The second form was the mobilization of ethnic German men and later women into the labor army to work building factories, felling trees, and laying rail lines in NKVD camps, and mining coal, extracting oil, and manufacturing munitions for civilian commissariats under UNKVD supervision. The restrictions on the men and women in the labor army which ultimately comprised over a quarter of all ethnic Germans in the USSR were even more onerous than the special settlement regime and closely resembled the situation of convicted Gulag prisoners. The Stalin regime's policy towards its ethnic German citizens during World War II involved ethnic cleansing, the imposition of apartheid like residency restrictions, and their mass conscription into forced labor detachments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the recent scholarly interest in the history of anti-communism, it is surprising that relatively little has been written on the ambitious transnational anti-communist campaign launched by the Vatican in the early 1930s. Drawing on new archival material, this article explores how the Vatican founded an organization known as the Secretariat on Atheism, which disseminated a form of anti-communism grounded in Catholic teachings. The Secretariat sought to buttress the position of the Roman Catholic church in international affairs and unite Catholic groups across Europe and the Americas, all the while maintaining its independence from other forms of anti-communism – particularly those espoused by Nazi and Fascist forces. However, the Secretariat was only partially successful in preserving its independence. For if the Vatican campaign avoided the antisemitic and nationalistic motifs that characterized Nazi-Fascist propaganda, the key protagonists of the movement cooperated with Nazi, Fascist and proto-Fascist forces on the ground. The Vatican campaign led to joint surveillance efforts, the toning down of the Pope's public denunciations of Nazi-Fascism, and the papal sanction of violence against purportedly communist enemies. Despite its potentially damning association with Nazi-Fascist forces, the Vatican anti-communist movement would outlive both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and leave a lasting mark on Cold War politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efforts of the Nazis to appeal to Muslims in the Soviet Union, the Balkans, and elsewhere to join the German orbit are now well known. These efforts sometimes succeeded: in Soviet Crimea, for example, some twenty thousand Tatar Muslims joined the German ranks as volunteers. The simultaneous, large-scale efforts by Stalin's government to rally Soviet Muslims to the fight against Hitler has gone largely unnoticed, however, perhaps because much of the evidence for these efforts remains buried in Russian and Central Asian archives. Drawing on some of this archival evidence, this paper introduces the Soviet-sponsored jihad against Hitler, and it argues for the revision of common conceptions concerning Islamic institutions and state propaganda in the Soviet Muslim context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Soviet airship programme o f the 1930s is one of the least studied topics in the history of Soviet aviation. Based on Imperial precedents, the Soviets thought that through their ambitious Five Year Plans they could rapidly catch up to and surpass the West in airship and all technical construction. Although lacking all the required components of such an ambitious aviation project, the Soviets believed that sheer revolutionary enthusiasm and ideology would ensure success. While public support for the programme started in 1930 and remained high for years, Communist Party support at best was guarded. Once the airship programme started, the Soviets quickly learned that this technology was far more complex than anticipated. Goaded by Stalins desire to create aircraft that couldfly faster, further and higher' and for immediate results, the airship programme found itself in immediate trouble. This article will explore how technology and politics led to a fantasy airship programme and a deeplyflawed airship programme, both of which have largely been unexamined by scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of the author's research (and to a lesser extent that of other scholars), this paper argues that for constructing the history of Soviet criminal justice archives served mainly as a supplement to rather than substitute for printed sources and oral history. Archives were more important for the postwar decade, 1946-55, when the quality of printed sources reached a low point. Overall, archival sources provided special insights into decision-making in criminal policy and the role of Stalin; statistics on the work of the justice agencies (including campaigns and the implementation of new laws); secret laws and decrees; and documents on the management of the penal system. Major findings to which archival sources contributed include the difficulties implementing extreme measures initiated by Stalin (extensions of the law and severe punishments) because of resistance of officials to them; the abandonment in the mid-1930s of the practice of running legal institutions with uneducated trustees in favor of trained legal officials making careers and the way their work came to be evaluated; the extent of dysfunctions in the administration of justice before Stalin's death; and the seriousness of attempts at reform in the first years of Khrushchev's rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stalin's purge of his military elite during 1937–1938 is one of the most unusual events of the Great Terror. Why would Stalin execute his most qualified officers at the same time as defence spending was rising and a world war was approaching? This article argues that a long history of the Red Army being perceived as vulnerable to subversion is central to understanding this military purge. When faced with perceived plots in the military Stalin tended to lean towards restraint, but by 1937 he felt he could no longer hesitate, and finally cracked down on what he saw as a compromised army. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on author Geoffrey Swain's biography and essays of Josip Broz Tito, president of Yugoslavia from 1943 to 1980, and communism in the country in the 20th century. Topics include Swain's exploration of alternatives in the history of communist Eastern Europe, his observations on the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, and his decision to revisit the subject of Tito in the I. B Tauris Communist Lives series to understand Tito's personal and political life in the context of a Bolshevik and Communist life.

Applying the ‘victory at all costs’ principle adopted during World War II, partisans—the long arm of the Soviet regime in the occupied territories—pressured civilians to resist the enemy. The thinking behind most of their coercive policies seemed rational within the framework of this concept; however, the passions produced by merciless fighting, communist dogma, Stalinist culture with its habitual witch-hunts, and the belief in collective guilt frequently escalated coercion far beyond rational limits. Partisans increased the polarisation of civilian society between supporters and enemies of the Soviet state, killing thousands of bystanders in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers a historical division into periods of the Chinese diaspora in the Soviet Far East from 1922 to 1938. Three periods in the attitude of the Soviet authorities toward Chinese migrants have been singled out on the basis of the foreign and domestic political situation in the U.S.S.R. This approach makes it possible to better analyze the policy toward migrants and understand the reasons for the deportation of the Chinese diaspora from the Soviet Far East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Die 1936 in der Sowjetunion mit großem propagandistischen Pomp verabschiedete, sog. »Stalinsche« Verfassung fand ein lebhaftes, kontroverses Echo in der jüdisch-amerikanischen Presse. Abraham Cahan , der Redakteur der jiddischsprachigen sozialistischen Tageszeitung Forverts (dt. ›Vorwärts‹), rief seine Leserschaft zu einer offenen Diskussion über die Vorzüge und Nachteile des neuen sowjetischen Grundgesetzes auf. In den Jahren 1936-1937 erschienen in einer dazu eigens geschaffenen Rubrik des Forverts in fortlaufender Folge Leserbriefe mit Stellungnahmen, Kommentaren und Meinungsäußerungen zu dieser Frage. Die im Zuge der Diskussion veröffentlichen, in ideologischer Hinsicht höchst individuellen Stellungnahmen bieten reichlich Material über die Reaktionen des amerikanisch-jüdischen Publikums und der amerikanisch-jüdischen Journalisten auf zeitgenössische Nachrichten über vermeintliche Veränderungen im sowjetischen System. Der Artikel analysiert diese Stellungnahmen als Indikator politischer Sympathie bzw. Antipathie der osteuropäisch-jüdischen Zuwanderer, die in den USA zum großen Teil selbst in der sozialistischen oder kommunistischen Bewegung engagiert waren, zur Sowjetunion , und deutet sie als Anzeichen für eine zunehmende Hinwendung der Leserschaft des Forverts hin zur links-liberalen, bürgerlichen Mitte. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stalin's Great Terror of 1937–1938 did not stop at the Soviet borders: under Moscow's explicit instructions, it extended to Asia, particularly to the People's Republic of Mongolia and to Xinjiang or Chinese Turkestan. More people proportionately suffered from the Terror in Mongolia than in the Soviet Union. Stalin's terror operations in the Asiatic lands were implicitly directed against Japan, the main competitor for influence in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Famines were a common occurrence in the early Soviet Union. While dealing with the famines of 1921/22, 1932/33, and 1946/47, as well as the somewhat different catastrophe in the besieged city of Leningrad during the winter of 1941/42, this article investigates forms and functions of political communication processes during and after famines. How did the Stalinist state try to monopolize public discourse on hunger? And why did most people - at least publicly - accept these official interpretations? It is argued here that both the act of keeping silent about hunger as well as formulaic communication in relation to the catastrophes played an important role in the stabilization of Soviet society: it affirmed the apparent correctness of official narratives. To some degree, the same was even true for many deviant statements, like written complaints to the authorities. Being increasingly dependent on the Soviet state or fearing the threat of repression, people had to submit to the regime’s linguistic coercive measures. During the famines, the population had to rely on the very same state that had caused them. At the same time, however, the official rules of discourse offered a way to repress hunger and all it entailed - the consequences of which are still discernible today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the late Stalin era, many of the USSR's local party control officials and prosecutors entered into a protracted conflict over who had the right to judge the conduct of communists; prosecutors charged that party committees were shielding communists from prosecution, while control officials claimed that party organs were deferring to prosecutors and abandoning their traditional oversight role. This article will argue that although some party committees were interfering in the courts, the dominant story of party–procuracy relations under post-war Stalinism involved the disengagement of party organs from the oversight of administrative wrongdoing, with long-lasting consequences for the Soviet regime's attitude toward corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the punishment, or purging, of World War II Soviet collaborators in the Soviet Union and within the greater context of Europe. The author focuses on two forms of repression used by the government in Moscow, Soviet Union. The first form includes repression by police without going through the court system, which was aimed at Soviets who developed friendships or intimate relations with the occupant during the German occupation. The second form of repression includes the sanctioning of the family members of traitors sentenced to death, which resulted in family deportation. The role of the Soviet law enforcement agency People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) is mentioned.

George Orwell, the author ofAnimal Farm(1945) andNineteen Eighty-Four(1949), wrote relatively little about sport, but is nevertheless quoted regularly on the topic. Today, his descriptor of international sport and the Olympics as ‘war minus the shooting’ has become almost a reference point for those talking or writing about sport in public life, academia or the media. More recently, Orwell's contemporary sporting role has acquired an additional dimension, given the way in which the deliberate erasure and rewriting of the past inNineteen Eighty-Fourhas featured increasingly in media and other commentaries about sporting scandals such as that involving Joe Paterno. Although Orwell touched briefly upon sport in several publications, his principal text on the topic was ‘The Sporting Spirit’, an article published inTribunein December 1945. The title's overt emphasis upon sport obscured Orwell's underlying political message reflecting his hostile attitude towards the Stalinist totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union; his growing recognition of the political symbolism of sport, particularly as a highly visible tool of nationalism; and his strongly critical response to the 1945 British tour conducted by the Dynamo Moscow football team. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the role of the government of the Soviet Union led by then-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in influencing and directing the childhoods of Soviet youth in order to create a citizenry subservient to the Soviet state. It examines state-funded Soviet schools and ideological curriculum and propaganda, authoritarian efforts at the subordination of individual goals, and the Communist influence upon Soviet social life. It also discusses the policy known as the New Economic Policy (NEP).

An essay is presented which examines documentary evidence concerning the imprisonment and life of Russian Mikhail Ivanovich Romanov in the Soviet Union during the 20th century. According to the article, Romanov was incarcerated in the Soviet penitentiary system known as the Gulag Archipelago. The article cites information from Romanov's government file concerning the 1937 state case against him for counterrevolutionary activities.

The article discusses the history of the relationship between the USSR and the Axis Powers in the period between 1939 and 1941. Topics discussed include the history of negotiations and pacts signed between the two sides, such as the treaty of non-aggression signed between the two in 1939, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; the reactions of the leadership of the Allied Forces to developments between the USSR and the Axis Powers, and agreements between the Third Reich in Germany and the Soviet Union.

The article discusses the policies of the Soviet government toward ethnic and national minorities along the Western borders of the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Situating these policies within the broader history of nationalities policies since the end of the Russian Civil War, the author emphasizes the fear, prevalent among the Soviet leadership, that minorities might become fifth columns. Issues considered include the connection between the collectivization of agriculture and ethnic cleansing, Soviet foreign policy vis-à-vis Germany after the establishment of the National Socialist dictatorship there, and the deportation of minorities from the Western borderlands following the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

The article discusses the deportation of the Crimean Tatars to Central Asia by the Soviet government during the final phase of the Second World War. The author provides both statistics and personal narratives concerning the experiences of the deportees. Issues raised include the Soviet government's consideration regarding minorities, military policy, and geopolitics which, according to the author, were the backdrop against which the deportations occurred, the settlements and labor camps into which the Tatars were forced in Central Asia, and the continued discrimination against this ethnic group in the postwar period.

The article discusses a written proposal by former Soviet Union premier Iosif Stalin on March 10, 1952, which signaled a possible willingness to negotiate a peace treaty that would reunify Germany as a neutral country. It analyzes the reaction of Western countries to Stalin's proposal and an exchange of letters between the U.S., British, and French governments. According to the author, the Western governments declined to enter into negotiations with the Soviet Union. The author asserts that democratic governments viewed Stalin's letter as Soviet propaganda, the pending agreements to make the Federal Republic of Germany a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and diplomatic relations between Western governments and the Soviet Union.

The Great Terror was a defining moment of the Stalin era, indeed perhaps the defining moment of 20th century Russian history. The purge of the military is a striking subplot with the potential to unlock the mystery which still surrounds the Terror. Why did Stalin feel the need to decimate his general staff and officer corps on the eve of a world war at the same time as military spending was rising at a breakneck pace? Why destroy with one hand while building with the other? There is no adequate solution to this problem in the existing literature, and recent work does fully not take into account the great wealth of archival materials released in the last 20 years. This historiographical review will seek to evaluate the historiography of the military purge in showing how the literature has evolved, highlighting the diversity of approaches, where there is consensus, where unanswered questions remain, and how it is now possible to advance a more comprehensive explanation of the purge of the military. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]