Arkadi Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018. 386 pp.

2021 ◽  
pp. 278-280

This chapter explores Arkadi Zeltser's Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union (2018). Despite its modest title, Unwelcome Memory is a profoundly serious study that successfully engages with the many aspects of Jewish–Soviet relations in the postwar period, showing how both the Soviet regime and Soviet Jews came to terms with Holocaust memorialization. Zeltser's understanding of the complexities of this relationship is truly remarkable and this, coupled with the book's many illuminating photographs, makes it essential reading for students of Soviet and Soviet Jewish history. Unwelcome Memory also offers rich opportunities to reflect upon the issue of the postwar state response toward Holocaust legacy. To what extent was Soviet exceptionalism responsible for the state's response? It appears that owing to a unique alignment of circumstances, such as ebbs and flows in anti-Jewish bias at the state and local levels, and evolution of the general approaches toward war legacy and remembrance, Jews were occasionally able to find loopholes in the seemingly indifferent and omnipotent bureaucratic Soviet state.

2021 ◽  

Free Voices in the USSR is a project dedicated to the myriad of independent voices present in the culture of dissent in the Soviet Union in the second half of the twentieth century. Its aim is to offer a conceptual overview of the many forms of dissent by exploring two main thematic areas, the first devoted to “free voices” in the USSR and the second focused on reception in the West. The different manifestations of the USSR’s ‘Second Culture’, which was non-official and independent, spread thanks to the samizdat (the clandestine publication and circulation of texts within the USSR) and the tamizdat (the publication of texts forbidden in the USSR in the West). The reception of non-official forms of expression in the West is explored in the context of the debates arising from the Cold War; the role of the West in engaging with the literary, cultural and artistic challenges to the Soviet regime from within its own borders proved fundamental. Contributions to this website including critical essays, bio-bibliographic entries, archive information and the review and cataloguing of magazines are the result of coordinated research by a group of specialists at an international level.


Author(s):  
Mark Edele

This chapter turns to the present and explains the implications of the current study for the ongoing debate about the Soviet Union in the Second World War and in particular about the role of loyalty and disloyalty in the Soviet war effort. It argues that this study strengthens those who argue for a middle position: the majority of Soviet citizens were neither unquestioningly loyal to the Stalinist regime nor convinced resisters. The majority, instead, saw their interests as distinct from both the German and the Soviet regime. Nevertheless, ideology remains important if we want to understand why in the Soviet Union more resisted or collaborated than elsewhere in Europe and Asia.


1986 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 5-18
Author(s):  
Michael Rywkin

Soviet reactions to Western writings on the Soviet Union are as old as the Soviet regime itself. They are handled in an organized manner, with targets, delivery vehicles and gradation of response carefully coordinated and measured.Soviet response is, moreover, not solely connected to the perceived degree of offensiveness of the given Western work; in addition, such considerations as general relations between the USSR and the country from where the publication came, as well as political opportunities of the moment, are given even more importance than the committed “offense.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 55-62
Author(s):  
Dilshod P. Komolov ◽  

Using the example of the Uzbek SSR, this article reveals the process of militarization of enterprises and institutions on the eve of the attack of Fascist Germany on the Soviet Union, restrictions on the constitutional right of citizens to freely choose a profession and work, cruel exploitation of the population and the use of tens of thousands of prisoners aslabor by the despotic Soviet regime. The article also highlights the emergence of judges as victims of repression, the strengthening of party and state control over the judicial system based on archival sources.Index Terms:People's Commissariat of Justice, Supreme Court of the Uzbek SSR, people's Court, judge, investigation, sentence, prison, correctional labor, fine, working week, labor discipline, prisoner, military enterprises, decree


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Zava

Writings by three Italian journalist-authors provide an evocative picture of the Soviet Union during the ’50s and ’60s, interpreted through different personal styles, analytical systems and reporting techniques. In close relationship with the many-sided reality of the Soviet landscape, the meeting with the ‘other’ (geographically, culturally and in personal terms) allows Enrico Emanuelli, Carlo Levi and Guido Piovene to realise individual volumes of reportage (Emanuelli and Levi) or newspaper articles (Piovene) poised between travel literature and the informative-journalistic dimension.


Author(s):  
Assaf Razin

The disunion of the Soviet Union and the destruction of communism in the USSR 1987-1991 triggered the recent emigration wave of Soviet Jews to various parts of the world, primarily to Israel. The professional, social, attitudinal and behavioral characteristics of the 1990s Jewish exodus cohort proved to be distinctive. Immigrants came mostly from urban areas, with advanced education systems. Immigration produced massive investments, both in residential structures and in non-residential capital. These investments were so substantial that they increased the capital to labor ratio and facilitated economic growth, aided by the remarkable human capital brought by the immigrants. The massive investments in physical capital and infrastructures were financed by capital imports as immigrants themselves fled their former homes almost penniless and credit constrained so that they hardly saved.


Author(s):  
Judith M. Brown

Recent events in the Arab world have sharpened and widened public interest in the way states can be broken and made. Since the end of the Second World War the world has seen three great waves of state-breaking and state-making: the end of European empires; the collapse of the Soviet Union; and the contemporary ‘Arab Spring’. By revisiting an example from the first of these great waves, perhaps the greatest ‘imperial ending’—the end of British imperial rule in India in 1947, this lecture investigates issues which may prove instructive in probing the dynamics of other phases of turbulence in the structures and nature of states. It addresses four major questions which are relevant across the many different episodes of state breaking and making, with the help of evidence from the case of the South Asian subcontinent. What is the relationship between state and society and the patterns of relationship which help to determine the nature and vulnerability of the state? What makes a viable and destabilising opposition to the imperial state? What is the nature of the breaking or collapse of that state? How are states refashioned out of the inheritance of the previous regime and the breaking process?


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-100
Author(s):  
Anastasia Felcher

Abstract Efforts to commemorate the victims of the 1903 Chişinǎu (Kishinev) pogrom and the Holocaust in Bessarabia and Transnistria have achieved varying degrees of success in the Republic of Moldova. Gaining public recognition for these experiences has proven a convoluted process. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the local Community has led an enduring memorialization campaign, which has steadily evolved with the shifting political climate. Though Community representatives have at times had a fraught relationship with Moldovan officials, they have continuously sought official acknowledgment of their efforts. This article analyzes how both the government and the Jewish Community have handled memory in public spaces and the local media of Chişinǎu.


1974 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 588-593
Author(s):  
Meir Rosenne

The problem of the Jews in the Soviet Union is one of the most important issues that dominates our life today. It is not my intention to deal with the numerous aspects of this problem nor to describe the history of the struggle of Soviet Jewry. I shall deal only with some of the legal considerations concerning this issue and more specifically with four of them:1. Is Israel entitled, from the point of view of International Law, to raise the issue of Soviet Jews in International Organizations in general? Is it not a violation of the Charter of the U.N. and an intervention in the domestic affairs of a Sovereign State?2. Does public protest help in the defence of the rights of the Jews in the Soviet Union?3. Does the Soviet Union violate Soviet law or any international obligation in discriminating against Soviet Jews?4. According to International Law, is Israel entitled to grant Israeli nationality to Jews living in the Soviet Union?


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