scholarly journals Everyday Life Under Communism: Practices and Objects

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (02) ◽  
pp. 207-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larissa Zakharova
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Basic Consumer

Why should we consider the everyday life of ordinary citizens in their countless struggles to obtain basic consumer goods if the priorities of their leaders lay elsewhere? For years, specialists of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies neglected the history of everyday life and, like the so-called “totalitarian” school, focused on political history, seeking to grasp how power was wielded over a society that was considered immobile and subject to the state's authority. Furthermore, studies on the eastern part of Europe were dominated by political scientists who were interested in the geopolitics of the Cold War. The way the field was structured meant that little attention was paid to sociological and anthropological perspectives that sought to understand social interaction.

Ballet in the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Searcy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The United States ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
Exchange Programs ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.

Cold War consumption and the marketing of childhood in the Soviet Union and the United States, 1950-1960

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Peacock
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
The Cold War

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the relationship between childhood, consumption and the Cold War in 1950s America and the Soviet Union. The author argues that Soviet and American leaders, businessmen, and politicians worked hard to convince parents that buying things for their children offered the easiest way to raise good American and Soviet kids and to do their part in waging the economic battles of the Cold War. The author explores how consumption became a Cold War battleground in the late 1950s and suggests that the history of childhood and Cold War consumption alters the way we understand the conflict itself. Design/Methodology/Approach – Archival research in the USA and the Russian Federation along with close readings of Soviet and American advertisements offer sources for understanding the global discourse of consumption in the 1950s and 1960s. Findings – Leaders, advertisers, and propagandists in the Soviet Union and the USA used the same images in the same ways to sell the ethos of consumption to their populations. They did this to sell the Cold War, to bolster the status quo, and to make profits. Originality/Value – This paper offers a previously unexplored, transnational perspective on the role that consumption and the image of the child played in shaping the Cold War both domestically and abroad.

Is It Transnational? A New Perspective in the Study of Communism

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 114-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogdan C. Iacob
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Fundamental Shift ◽  
The Continuum

This article presents a comprehensive review of the transnational perspective in the study of communism and the implications of this methodological turn for the transformation of the field itself. While advancing new topics and interpretative standpoints with a view to expanding the scope of such an initiative in current scholarship, the author argues that the transnational approach is important on several levels. First, it helps to de-localize and de-parochialize national historiographies. Second, it can provide the background to for the Europeanization of the history of the communist period in former Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Third, and most importantly, the transnational approach can reconstruct the international dimension of the communist experience, with its multiple geographies, spaces of entanglement and transfer, and clustered, cross-cultural identity-building processes. The article concludes that the advent of transnationalism in the study of communism allows for the discovery of various forms of historical contiguousness either among state socialisms or beyond the Iron Curtain. In other words, researchers might have a tool to not only know more about less, but also to resituate that “less” in the continuum of the history of communism and in the context of modernity. The transnational approach can generate a fundamental shift in our vantage point on the communist phenomenon in the twentieth century. It can reveal that a world long perceived as mostly turned inward was in fact imbricate in wider contexts of action and imagination and not particularly limited by the ideological segregationism of the Cold War.

From Stalin to Mao

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elidor Mëhilli
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Small Country ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This book interprets socialism as a form of globalization by telling the unknown history of a small country that found itself entangled in some of the biggest developments of the Cold War. Within two decades, Albania went from fascist Italian rule to Nazi occupation, a brief interlude as a Yugoslav satellite, and then to a heady period of borrowings—government advisers, brand new factories, school textbooks, urban plans, and everything in between— from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. With Soviet backing, Albania’s regime launched a bold experiment: turn illiterate peasants into conscious workers. Ambitious but poor, the country also turned into a contact zone between East German engineers, Czech planners, and Hungarian geologists who came to help build socialism from scratch. Then, the socialist world shattered. During the Sino-Soviet conflict of the 1960s, Albania’s party clique switched allegiance to China, seeing in Mao’s patronage an opportunity to keep Stalinism alive. Combining an analysis of ideology with a keen sense of geopolitics, this book explores this strange connectivity of socialism, showing how socialism created a shared material and mental culture—still evident today across Eurasia—but it failed to generate political unity.

Same As It Ever Was: Nuclear Alarmism, Proliferation, and the Cold War

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis J. Gavin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nuclear Arms Race ◽  
Nuclear History ◽  
The Cold War

A widely held and largely unchallenged view among many scholars and policymakers is that nuclear proliferation is the gravest threat facing the United States today, that it is more dangerous than ever, and that few meaningful lessons can be drawn from the nuclear history of a supposed simpler and more predictable period, the Cold War. This view, labeled “nuclear alarmism,” is based on four myths about the history of the nuclear age. First, today's nuclear threats are new and more dangerous than those of the past. Second, unlike today, nuclear weapons stabilized international politics during the Cold War, when in fact the record was mixed. The third myth conflates the history of the nuclear arms race with the geopolitical and ideological competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, creating an oversimplified and misguided portrayal of the Cold War. The final myth is that the Cold War bipolar military rivalry was the only force driving nuclear proliferation. A better understanding of this history, and, in particular, of how and why the international community escaped calamity during a far more dangerous time against ruthless and powerful adversaries, can produce more effective U.S. policies than those proposed by the nuclear alarmists.

Cold-War Twins: Mikhail Alpatov's a Universal History of Arts and Ernst Gombrich's the Story of Art

Human Affairs ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vardan Azatyan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Art History ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Art History Survey ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
History Survey

Cold-War Twins: Mikhail Alpatov'sThis article deals with the "afterlife" of a methodological disagreement in the Vienna School of Art History between the positions of Alois Riegl and Julius von Schlosser in Mikhail Alpatov's and Ernst Gombrich's art history survey texts published during the Cold War on different sides of the Iron Curtain. Though these surveys are methodological antipodes, the difference itself, I argue, is possible only within the framework of the larger art historical discourse they share. In addition, I will draw on the radical ideological critique of Alpatov's survey inside the Soviet Union and the case of the Stalinist survey meant to replace it, in order to address the ideological commonality between Alpatov's and Gombrich's surveys.

scholarly journals DIASPORA DAN IDENTITAS KOMUNITAS EKSIL ASAL INDONESIA DI BELANDA

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Gusnelly Gusnelly
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This paper is the result of research on Indonesian migration that focuses on the diaspora of the exile community in the Netherlands. The purpose to discuss this issue is to tell about the existence of an Indonesian community that has been exiled from the country for decades and became stateless or lost citizenship, because its passport was revoked by the Indonesian government. They are the generation who have been forced to move to several countries and choose to seek asylum in various Western European countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The history of their existence abroad as a result of the event of G30S/1965. They were abroad when the G30S occurred in the country. Their departure abroad was in the leftist (socialist) countries of the mid-1960s not because of political affairs but for various interests, but in fact it was related to the occurrence of the G30S/1965. In 1989 with the fall of communism and the end of the cold war after the collapse of the superpower of the Soviet Union, most of them have registered themselves as asylum seekers to several countries in Western Europe, including to the Netherlands. As a Dutch citizen, their descendants get education and work in the Netherlands. Their descendants feel that the Dutch or Europeans are his identity but the exiles keep their nationalism for Indonesia. We call that with long-distance nationalism.Keywords: Dutch, diaspora, exile community, asylum, citizenshipABSTRAKTulisan ini merupakan hasil penelitian tentang migrasi orang Indonesia yang fokus pada diaspora komunitas eksil di Belanda. Tujuan untuk membahas masalah ini adalah untuk menceritakan tentang keberadaan komunitas Indonesia yang sejak puluhan tahun terbuang dari tanah air dan menjadi stateless atau kehilangan kewarganegaraan, sebab pasportnya dicabut oleh pemerintah Indonesia. Mereka merupakan anak bangsa dari satu generasi yang terpaksa pindah ke beberapa negara dan memilih mencari suaka ke berbagai negara Eropa Barat pascaruntuhnya Uni Soviet. Sejarah keberadaan mereka di luar negeri sebagai akibat dari peristiwa G30S tahun 1965. Mereka sedang berada di luar negeri ketika terjadi peristiwa G30S di dalam negeri. Kepergian mereka ke luar negeri yaitu di negara-negara beraliran kiri (sosialis) di pertengahan tahun 60-an bukan karena hanya karena urusan politik, tetapi untuk berbagai kepentingan, namun pada kenyataannya disangkutpautkan dengan terjadinya peristiwa G30S tahun 1965 tersebut. Pada tahun 1989 dengan kejatuhan komunisme dan berakhirnya perang dingin setelah keruntuhan negara adi kuasa Uni Soviet sebagian besar mereka telah mendaftarkan diri menjadi pencari suaka ke beberapa negara di Eropa Barat, termasuk ke Belanda. Sebagai warga negara Belanda, anak keturunannya mendapatkan pendidikan dan bekerja di Belanda. Anak-anak keturunannya merasa Belanda atau Eropa adalah identitasnya akan tetapi orang eksil tetap menjaga nasionalisme mereka buat tanah airnya yaitu Indonesia. Kami menyebutnya dengan nasionalisme jarak jauh.  Kata Kunci: Belanda, diaspora, komunitas eksil, suaka, kewarganegaraan

Latin American Tercermundistas in the Soviet Union

2020 ◽  
pp. 221-240
Author(s):  
Tobias Rupprecht
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Third World ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter complicates conventional understandings of Latin America’s Cold War by looking at the travels of tercermundista intellectuals and activists to all parts of the USSR. Visits of intellectuals from the global South to the Cold War Soviet Union have hardly been studied. Accounts of the history of Cold War Latin America have put the Soviet Union, as a political and intellectual point of reference, aside too readily. The early Cold War was a time of enhanced, and rather successful, Soviet attempts to present their country in a positive light towards the emerging Third World. Those Latin Americans who developed a sense of belonging with the Third World in the 1960s, this chapter demonstrates, were still susceptible to the lures of certain characteristics of the Soviet state and suggested their implementation in their home countries. The reason for the positive perception came, on the one hand, as a result of very lavishly funded and well conducted programmes for Third World visitors in the Soviet Union.

Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev

Slavic Review ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Reid
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Economic Capacity ◽  
The Ideal

Consumption, a key issue in the study of post-Soviet culture, was already a central concern during the Cold War. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Khrushchev regime staked its legitimacy at home, and its credibility abroad, on its ability to provide its population with consumer goods and a decent standard of living. Despite promising "abundance for all" as the precondition for the imminent transition to communism, the regime could not afford to leave abundance undefined. In this article, Susan E. Reid examines the way discourses of consumption, fashion, and the ideal Soviet home sought to remake consumers’ conceptions of culturedness, good taste, and comfort in rational, modern terms that took into account the regime’s ideological commitment and economic capacity. Such efforts to shape and regulate desire were directed above all at women. Reid proposes that the study of consumption provides insights into the ways in which post-Stalinist regimes manipulated and regulated people through regimes of personal conduct, taste, and consumption habits, as opposed to coercion. Indeed, the management of consumption was as significant for the Soviet system's longevity as for its ultimate collapse.

Socialist high modernity and global stagnation: a shared history of Brazil and the Soviet Union during the Cold War

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 505-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Rupprecht
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Foreign Ministry ◽  
Economy And Education

AbstractThis article questions a prevailing bipolarity of traditional Cold War history by examining commonalities and interactions between the Soviet Union and Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s. After outlining the common characteristics of both states around 1960, it analyses the cultural diplomacy of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union towards Brazil. Transforming its hitherto prevailing image as the cradle of world revolution and communist class struggle, the USSR now represented itself as a role model for the quick industrialization of the economy and education of the masses. Many Brazilian intellectuals and political reformers from President Kubitschek to President Goulart shared with the Soviets an interest in what is here called ‘socialist high modernity’. Contacts with the Soviet Union were connected to the putsch and the end of Brazilian democracy in 1964. However, the new military leaders also had their own interests in, and surprisingly good relations with, the stagnating Soviet Union. This was again based on a set of commonalities in the historical development of the two ostensibly idiosyncratic and distant states on either side of the Iron Curtain. Eschewing teleological interpretations of the period and exploring the ideational basis of actors in the conflict, this article – based on new documents from Moscow archives and recently declassified sources from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry – aims to link Cold War historiography to the debates on global history, which have lately neglected both Latin America and eastern Europe.

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