Search

Historical writing is inherently political, shaped not only by the author’s personal politics but even more so by the temporal, geo-political and institutional context in which it is researched and...

Stalinism, particularly the period of Stalin’s rule in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), must be one of the most investigated topics in the field of Soviet studies. Most of those stud...

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-...

During World War II, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union had thriving domestic gardening movements. Actively promoted by their governments, gardening was supposed to supplement diets and nourish the patriotic spirit. In the Soviet Union, however, gardening was much more than a patriotic duty; it was often a matter of survival, the primary means of supplementing near starvation bread rations. Amidst incomparable, catastrophic wartime conditions, the huge Soviet gardening movement was distinguished by the speed with which it was implemented and taken up, predominantly by women. Based on original archival and published sources, this article examines in depth the Soviet wartime legislative framework, material resources and propaganda that promoted individual kitchen gardens. The article analyzes the way the state organized and promoted individualist, small-scale urban horticulture – a politically risky initiative given that it conflicted with the Stalinist model of large-scale, industrialized agriculture – and argues that in promoting gardening self-sufficiency, the Soviet socialist state shifted much of its responsibilities for food production onto its citizenry. The article not only aims to shed new light on the crucial role gardening played in feeding a famished citizenry but also the distinctive way in which Soviet propaganda, in giving voice to the psychological satisfaction of gardening, tapped into women’s commitments to the family, in intimate alignment with patriotic, home front defence of the Soviet Motherland.

The demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991 when viewed alongside the seeming success of the Peoples Republic of China’s (PRC) reforms since the 1980s is a study in contrasts. This chapter compares the approaches adopted by the Soviet and Chinese Communist Parties to the reform of state socialism and considers why one ended in collapse and the other in resurgence. The chapter considers the specific challenges each state faced, international and domestic, in the context of neoliberal capitalism; the intellectual compasses that guided their respective party leaderships; the roles played by domestic forces in the reforms; and what light all these considerations cast on the role of the state in socialist reform.

From their inception, the 1917 Russian Revolutions, specifically the October Revolution, have been synonymous with Bolshevik violence. In the course of the last century, almost all observers have believed that violence was inherent in the Russian revolutions and revolutions generally. Such views have obscured what a revolution actually is. Closer examination of the October Revolution confirms violence was not its defining feature. Further, the Bolsheviks conceived October as the opening salvo of international, socialist revolution; expectations largely crushed by overwhelming counter-revolutionary violence. The discrediting of war and political violence since World War II has seen the conception of revolution as a “velvet” process of political transformation emerge, particularly in Latin America, the US, Britain, and Europe. While such movements rarely look back to the Russian Revolutions, they echo the democratic, egalitarian, and emancipatory impulses bequeathed by 1917, and raise the possibility of near non-violent socialist revolutions.

This article examines the everyday experiences of evacuees and how Iaroslavl’ residents and authorities dealt with the resulting social stresses and challenges amidst the exigencies of total war. It does so primarily on the basis of reports and data from Iaroslavl’ district communist party organisations, held in the Center for the Documentation of Contemporary History of the Iaroslavl’ Region State Archive (TsDNI GAIaO), on ‘accommodating’ (razemeshchenie) evacuees in the region. Comparison between these reports and Sovnarkom resolutions on the way evacuees were supposed to be dealt with and the resources allocated to them reveals a wide gap between official expectations and the harsh reality of life for the evacuees, especially children. The article concentrates on the critical summer and autumn of 1941, which saw a flood of evacuees, women and children, the elderly and sick, followed by a further influx as the enemy threatened Moscow and even Iaroslavl’ itself, necessitating re-evacuations, children in particular, by water and rail.

Women played a pivotal role in the Soviet victory over Nazism in the ‘Great Patriotic War, 1941–45’. In contrast to most other combatant countries in the Second World War, Soviet women took on roles in the military, industry and agriculture that elsewhere were generally regarded as the exclusive domain of males. This chapter narrates the roles of Soviet women on the front lines and on the home and domestic fronts. It analyses the mechanisms employed by the draconian Stalinist regime at a critical moment to mobilise millions of women for the war effort. It also considers to what degree, if at all, mass female participation in the Soviet war effort was emancipatory.

Europe was a continent of nation states by the mid-twentieth century. But it was not always thus. The patchwork quilt of nation states and the nationalism that coloured them in were forged by massive social and political shifts that had been gathering momentum since the late nineteenth century. Viewing nations and nationalism as constructs of modern, global capitalism, often legitimated by national mythologies old and new, this chapter surveys the forces at work: from above and below, from centre and periphery. The First World War raised nationalism to white heat, and as multi-ethnic empires faltered, myriad subaltern nationalisms erupted, demanding ‘self-determination’, the watchword of the post-war peace settlements. But the war also unleashed internationalist class challenges to belligerent nationalism, culminating in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Thereafter, European nationalism assumed its most truculent guise: fascism and military dictatorships warring against class in the name of ethnic, national, and biological purity.

Some 500,000 women fought with the Red Army in the Great Fatherland War, 1941-1945. Based on a selection of women veterans’ memoirs published since the demise of the Soviet Union, this article looks at what these women choose to remember about the war, and how, and equally what they choose to forget or remain silent about. The paper seeks to illuminate shared or disparate collective and individual memory and experiences. A particular objective of the paper is to assess the degree to which these written recollections coincide with or deviate from the predominant patriotic, heroic, masculine paradigm of the Great Fatherland War and its historiography. The overall objective of the paper is to humanise the female faces behind the masculine mask of the Red Army at war against Nazism.

The demise of the Soviet Union and with it Marxism-Leninism as the officially endorsed paradigm for the social sciences in general and historical research and writing in particular left a yawning theoretical and methodological gap facing post-Soviet historians in Russia and elsewhere. Nevertheless, despite the material and intellectual obstacles to historical careers and scholarship during the 1990s, some younger historians began to fill this paradigmatic gap with new approaches, at a time when there were unprecedented opportunities for archival research, particularly on the Stalin era. While many historians of the Stalin period quickly embraced the "totalitarian" model largely derived from Western political science, others turned to researching Soviet cultural history, namely, popular perspectives, attitudes and behavior under Stalinism. Such research has proceeded under a number of rubrics: "everyday life," "historical psychology," "mentalites" and, increasingly, "historical anthropology."' Among the foremost practitioners of this genre of cultural historiography are Elena Zubkova, author of Russia after the War, and Elena Seniavskaia, author of The Front Generation.2 Research of this cultural genre is not

The stalling of Russia's transition to capitalism and the apparent ineffectiveness of its presidential regime raises important questions about the nature of the Russian state and its apparatus. Paradoxically, it seems to have connived in the demise of Russia as a nation and world power and even in its own instruments of governance. To understand this self‐destructive process it is necessary to look beyond the trappings of Russian democracy and focus on the apparatuses of political power. Several typologies of the Russian state have been advanced. To analyse it, however, requires not only looking at the internal dynamics of the Yeltsin regime but also locating it in the larger correlation of domestic social forces and Russia's place in the international capitalist system.

The collapse of the Soviet system and its partners in the ‘communist’ world poses problems of theory for scholars, as well as practical problems of managing a transition to a new social, political and economic system on the part of the peoples and governments concerned. Previous understanding of the nature of the ‘communist’ system has come under fresh scrutiny, with ‘totalitarianism’, ‘socialism’, ‘communism’ and other concepts in the established literature of sovietology giving way to fresh analysis, as scholars attempt to come to terms with the collapse and the transition. There are limits to the value of studies of ‘comparative democratization’: in fact, the proximity of the system undergoing transition to the core of the capitalist and liberal‐democratic world is a critical variable in the transition. The role of the state in the transition is likewise crucial, and needs to be carefully studied. These features require the substitution of comparative study for the ghetto style of research that charact...

World War II has never ended for the citizens of the former Soviet Union. Nearly 27 million Soviet citizens died in the course of what Joseph Stalin declared to be the Great Patriotic War, half of the total 55 million victims of the world war. The enduring personal trauma and grief that engulfed those who survived, despite the Red Army's victory over fascism, was not matched by Stalin's state of mind, which preferred to forget the war. Not until the ousting of Nikita S. Khrushchev in October 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev was official memory of the war really resurrected. This article elaborates a thesis about the place of World War II in Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory by illuminating the sources of the myth of the Great Patriotic War and the mechanisms by which it has been sustained and even amplified. It discusses perestroika, patriotism without communism, the fate of the wartime Young Communist heroine Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the battle for Victory Day, the return of ‘trophy’ art, the Hill of Prostrations, and Sovietism without socialism.

Many hold the view not only that Soviet communism and Italian fascism were close ‘totalitarian’ cousins, if not twins like Stalinism and Nazism, but also that the threat of communism begat fascism in its Italian, German, and other European guises. This article compares Stalin's Soviet Union with Mussolini's Fascist Italy, with occasional asides on fascist Germany. Close inspection of Italian fascism and Soviet communism, on a historical basis rather than abstract, political science principles, suggests that their similarities were more apparent than real. The rise of fascism in its Italian and other European manifestations was, in good part, a response to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and its shock waves in Europe after the First World War. But fascism, like communism, was also a radical reaction to the crises that racked European states and societies in the aftermath of that traumatic, total war.

The Red Army’s victory over fascism, formally proclaimed by Moscow Radio at 2.10 a.m. on 9 May 1945, was greeted with elation by Soviet civilians and military alike. An estimated two to three million citizens spontaneously flocked into Moscow’s Red Square on what would become henceforth ‘Victory Day’ (Den pobedy).2 Far from Red Square, Red Army women and men, many still on the march, were ecstatic. A Red Army woman political officer, A. V. Nikulina, was among those who hoisted a victory banner over Hitler’s Reich Chancellery.3 Sniper Yulya Zhukova on the Baltic coast was awoken by a whisper: ‘Junior sergeant Yulya, get up. Victory!’ It was a miracle: a mere whisper awoke everybody in the room. They could sleep through artillery fire but now woke as one. Seizing our weapons, we leapt into the street. The unimaginable erupted: bear hugs, tears, laughter, indiscriminate shooting into the air. The artillery unleashed several mighty salvoes seawards. An accordion began playing from somewhere, music rang out, dances began spontaneously. Victory! The long awaited victory!4 Meanwhile, ‘anarchic frenzy’ seized Vera Galaninskaya’s Medsanbat, deployed nearby in Latvia. Awaking to cries of ‘Ura! Ura! Pobeda!’ (Hooray! Hooray! Victory!), elated nurses laughed, cried, kissed, embraced, and fired off ‘pistols, rifles and machine guns’ which ‘chattered out “personal salutes” in honour of the Victory’. Elation was not the only feeling that engulfed medsestra Galaninskaya

The singular exception to the initial prohibition on women combatants in the Red Army was Stalin’s secret Order No. 0099 of 8 October 1941 authorizing the formation of three women’s air regiments by 1 December 1941.2 The initiative to do so may well have come from the Komsomol central committee (CC). But the record-breaking navigator and Hero of the Soviet Union (HSU), Marina Raskova, had also personally lobbied Stalin, who, like his air force commanders, opposed women fighting with the army, to form the three regiments. These included the all-female night bomber regiment, which became known by the contemptuous sobriquet German soldiers gave it, ‘night witches’ (Nachthexen); a nickname these female flyers themselves embraced with ironic pride. A unique phenomenon in the annals of warfare — no other belligerent state allowed women to fly in combat — these predominantly female regiments produced an extraordinary 30 out of the 86 women HSUs, the highest Soviet military award.3 More has been written on these gender-defying heroines than any other Soviet women soldiers, above all on the exclusively female ‘night witches’ bomber regiment, the legendary stature of which has only grown with the passage of time. The ‘night witches’ are the protagonists in this chapter too. It focuses on the social and political profile, and the motivations, mindset and emotional world, of the most successful women’s unit in the Red Army. The undoubted success of the night-bomber regiment fits neatly into the heroic-patriotic master narrative of the war, for which reason, it seems, its archival record is the most accessible. Accordingly, the ‘night witches’ have overshadowed not only the achievements and shortcomings of the other women’s air regiments but also the horrific experiences faced by less feted women in the military.

Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union came at 4 a.m., Sunday 22 June 1941. Nearly four million Axis soldiers poured over the borders, routing a Red Army that had been lulled into a false sense of security by Stalin and his September 1939 non- aggression pact with Hitler. War shattered the lives of the Stalin generation of young women, just as it seemed that they had everything to look forward to; a mid- summer night’s nightmare that would be immortalized in the words of the female frontline bard Yulya Drunina: No it’s not the huts that are burning/It is my youth in the fire.

Women nurses and doctors were the acceptable feminine face of the Soviet Union at war. Civilian nurses affirmed the role of women as mothers and family makers that was increasingly the preferred model for Soviet women in the 1930s, notwithstanding elite, gender challenging heroines, such as aviators, beloved of Stalinist propaganda. In the Soviet Union, as in almost all mid-twentieth century industrial states, the image of the civilian nurse in particular, as opposed to the woman doctor, deeply inscribed as it was with assumptions about womanhood, femininity and family, represented at once a caring profession and a powerful cultural affirmation of the nurturing nature that supposedly defined women biologically.2 However, military nurses, once incorporated into male dominated militaries as non-combatant ‘soldiers’, unsettled the supposed binary opposition between masculine war-making and feminine caring; they also straddled the ‘porous boundaries’ between the home and fighting fronts.3 In the Soviet Union, as the Great Patriotic War raged, the image of the heroic woman military nurse, rescuing the wounded Red Army soldier from the field under fire or tending to defenceless, shattered, male bodies in hospitals, dovetailed perfectly with the intensely female gendered discourse and iconography of defending the Motherland against the onslaught of a barbaric, misogynist Nazi enemy.

The Red Army was haemorrhaging male soldiers in the spring and summer of 1942 when the People’s Commissariat of Defence (NKO) was recruiting women en masse. In this desperate situation, the NKO also proposed the formation of all-women’s infantry units, for the first time since the secret formation of the women’s air regiments in October 1941. However, unlike the air regiments, notably the ‘night witches’ regiment, which since the demise of the Soviet Union have come to be celebrated as exemplars of women warriors, the all-women’s infantry units have remained virtually unknown, with the partial exception of two of them: the 1st Separate Women’s Reserve Rifle Regiment and the 1st Separate Women’s Volunteer Rifle Brigade (Otdelnaya zhenskaya dobrovolcheskaya strelkovaya brigada – OZhDSB). There are no official histories of these two units. The Reserve Rifle Regiment gets a passing mention in V. S. Murmantseva’s 1974 study of Soviet Women in the Great Patriotic War,2 from which we learn that the Rifle Regiment trained hundreds of skilled women shooters, machine-gunners and mortar- gunners for fighting in the regular Red Army. Even less is known about the Women’s Volunteer Rifle Brigade which, apart from a cursory reference in the Encyclopaedia of the Great Patriotic War, has practically disappeared from the historical record.3

In one field above all were women specifically trained and ordained by the Soviet warring state to kill: sniping. Trained assassins, required to stalk a human quarry with the deliberate intent of killing in cold blood, the woman sniper seemed the antithesis of Soviet or any other womanhood.2 For the Red Army, the sniper, male or female, was by necessity a ‘terrible avenger, who hates the enemy with all their being’.3 For the Wehrmacht, the Red Army woman sniper was undoubtedly the ultimate manifestation of the ‘ferocious’ Soviet ‘riflewomen’ (Flintenweiber): ‘Bolshevik beasts’ and ‘Amazons devoid of femininity’.4 Indeed, for women snipers themselves, the act of killing was a profoundly disturbing one, at least initially. In good part, of course, the seemingly inherent ‘contradiction’ of the term ‘woman-soldier’, that is, between self and state perception of women as natural nurturers and killing, was resolved and justified by the need to eliminate an inhuman, fascist enemy that flouted the rules of warfare.5

The young Soviet women who went to the frontline in the 1940s—the frontovichki—were essentially products of the peacetime Stalin era of the 1930s. Stalin’s abandonment of socialist internationalism in good part repudiated the genderless citizen of the earlier Bolshevik period whereby women were firstly workers wedded to the world revolution, alongside their male comrades.2 In the 1930s a pro-natalist ‘triumphal rehabilitation’, as Trotsky put it, of ‘the joys of motherhood’ and ‘the family’ reinforced by the outlawing of divorce and abortion in 1936, necessarily re-emphasized distinct social roles for the sexes.3 Nevertheless, Stalinism did not simply force women out of the public domain back into the family. Quite the opposite; as part of Stalin’s drive for industrial accumulation, millions of women were forced by hunger and poverty, or driven by enthusiasm, into the factories while still carrying the burdens of domesticity. In the 1930s a veritable ‘regendering’ of the workforce took place as women took on previously male-dominated occupations, including heavy industry.4 But continued mass female participation in the Soviet industrialization drive, and commitment to the Soviet nation, family and Stalin, generated hybrid self-conceptions of Soviet womanhood: pre-revolutionary and Soviet values of family, marriage and nation coupled with a fervent post-revolutionary commitment to industrialization, education, and an increasingly patriotic and gendered ‘socialism in one country’.

(1994). Catalyst of historiography, Marxism and dissidence: The sector of methodology of the institute of history, Soviet academy of sciences, 1964–68. Europe-Asia Studies: Vol. 46, No. 4, pp. 579-596.

It is a testimony to the caliber of the scholarship of the late A. IA. Gurevich that he almost single-handedly sustained social psychology and mentalite as vibrant, if fine, filaments within Soviet historical scholarship, which not only survived the draconian Soviet academic environment of the Brezhnev years but re-emerged as driving forces of post-Soviet historiography, particularly in the guise of historical anthropology. This chapter looks at his place in the origins and development of Soviet historiography in the fields of historical psychology and mentalites in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the degree to which these fields and Gurevich's work in particular, laid the groundwork for contemporary historical anthropology. The discrediting of Marxist-Leninist historiography in the former Soviet Union opened the floodgates for a wave of new approaches to historical writing, from political history to social and cultural history. Keywords: A. IA. Gurevich; historical anthropology; Marxist-Leninist; social psychology; Soviet historiography

(1990). Peaceful coexistence, detente and third world struggles: The soviet view, from Lenin to Brezhnev. Australian Journal of International Affairs: Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 171-194.

Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in his secret speech at the February 1956 Twentieth Congress of the CPSU sent shock waves through Soviet society and the international communist movement. The dethronement of Stalin could hardly leave Soviet historiography untouched; but even before the main shock there were several tremors among politicians and historians alike. At the congress itself A. I. Mikoyan, while bemoaning the theoretical poverty of Soviet social science as a whole, singled out party and Soviet history as its “most backward” branch.1 The principal editor of Voprosy istorii, Academician Anna Pankratova, attributed the oversimplification, embellishing and modernization of the past by historians to the ‘cult of the personality’, without mentioning Stalin by name.2 This was an understatement. The triumph of Stalinism had been a tragedy for history — the “most political of all the sciences” as M. N. Pokrovsky, the leading Marxist historian in the 1920s, had rightly deemed it. The General Secretary’s menacing admonition to the editorial board of Proletarskaya revolyntsiya back in 1931 that scholarship, history especially, should be nothing less than “party scholarship” had taken a terrible toll.3

At the heart of this book lies the question of what the debates among Soviet historians during the 1950s and 1960s tell us about their evolution as intellectuals in relation to the Soviet state and society in that period. The book is thus political science in that it assumes that the production of history in Soviet society, indeed in any society, had a political function over and above the individual historian’s quest for historical truth. It is an exploration of the politics of knowledge that assumes there is a link between knowl- edge, intellectuals as its bearers, and power. Probing the precise nature of that link in the case of Soviet historians is a major objective of this study.