scholarly journals Developments in Russian Historical Studies in China since Reform and Opening-up

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xianzhong Liu
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Russian History ◽  
New Materials ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Reform And Opening Up ◽  
Opening Up

Abstract It was not until China’s reform and opening-up that the study of Russian history in China really began. From the reform and opening-up to the present, the study of Russian history in China could be divided into two stages: from the reform and opening-up to the disintegration of the Soviet Union as the first stage; from the disintegration of the Soviet Union to the present is the second stage. During the first stage, Russian history researchers in China basically aimed to throw off shackles on their academic minds, set the chaotic academia straight, and break through the rigid research paradigm set by the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): A Short Course. However, due to the lack of information exchange and new materials for reference, some articles published at that time appeared to be vague and general with very limited perceptions. Some articles completely broke the connection between Lenin era and Stalin era, and often judged Stalin by Lenin as a standard, and without taking Lenin and Stalin both as subjects for academic research. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a large numbers of research results and new materials were published, which greatly promoted China’s Russian history studies into a new stage. Compared with the first stage before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the second stage in Soviet history studies features more in-depth research and more specific research questions with basic innovation achieved in historical facts. China's study of Russian history in the future should focus on using new materials, sorting out historical facts and innovating research methodology, aiming to build an academic system, discourse system and discipline system for itself.

Enemy Number One

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rósa Magnúsdóttir
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Peaceful Coexistence ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
Inferiority Complex ◽  
Available Information

Enemy Number One tells the story of Soviet propaganda and ideology toward the United States during the early Cold War. From Stalin’s anti-American campaign to Khrushchev’s peaceful coexistence, this book covers Soviet efforts to control available information about the United States and to influence the development of Soviet-American cultural relations until official cultural exchanges were realized between the two countries. The Soviet and American veterans of the legendary 1945 meeting on the Elbe and their subsequent reunions represent the changes in the superpower relationship: during the late Stalin era, the memory of the wartime alliance was fully silenced, but under Khrushchev it was purposefully revived and celebrated as a part of the propaganda about peaceful coexistence. The author brings to life the propaganda warriors and ideological chiefs of the early Cold War period in the Soviet Union, revealing their confusion and insecurities as they tried to navigate the uncertain world of the late Stalin and early Khrushchev cultural bureaucracy. She also shows how concerned Soviet authorities were with their people’s presumed interest in the United States of America, resorting to monitoring and even repression, thereby exposing the inferiority complex of the Soviet project as it related to the outside world.

Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s–early 1950s

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-88
Author(s):  
William C. Brumfield
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
The Soviet Union

This article examines the development of retrospective styles in Soviet architecture during the Stalin era, from the 1930s to the early 1950s. This highly visible manifestation of communist visual culture is usually interpreted as a reaction to the austere modernism of 1920s Soviet avant-garde architecture represented by the constructivist movement. The project locates the origins of Stalin-era proclamatory, retrospective style in prerevolutionary neoclassical revival architecture. Although functioning in a capitalist market, that neoclassical reaction was supported by prominent critics who were suspicious of Russia’s nascent bourgeoisie and felt that neoclassical or neo-Renaissance architecture could echo the glory of imperial Russia. These critics left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, but prominent architects of the neoclassicist revival remained in the Soviet Union. Together with the Academy of Architecture (founded 1933), these architects played a critical role in reviving classicist monumentalism—designated “socialist realism”—as the proclamatory style for the centralized, neoimperial statist system of the Stalin era. Despite different ideological contexts (prerevolutionary and Stalinist), retrospective styles were promulgated as models for significant architectural projects. The article concludes with comments on the post-Stalinist—and post-Soviet—alternation of modernist and retrospective architectural styles.

Why pioneer camps survived the collapse of the Soviet Union

2021 ◽  
pp. 161189442110186
Author(s):  
Anna Kozlova
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Teaching Experiences ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis ◽  
Children’S Centres ◽  
Educational Field

The article analyses the survival of the children’s centres, Artek and Orlyonok, during the post-socialist transformation. It is based on 50 interviews with employees who worked there starting in the late-Soviet era. Artek and Orlyonok were exemplary children’s camps, subordinated to the Central Committee of the Komsomol. Since the early 1960s, they have functioned as schools for distinguished teenagers who were considered ‘good examples’ for other children. In this article, I have made an ethnographic analysis of Artek and Orlyonok employees’ late-Soviet experiences. This analysis shows how the agency of Soviet counsellors and camp directors became a creative interpretation of the governmental order to raise the children as active Soviet citizens. Camp educators transformed it in line with the idea to base their agency on ‘common human values’, which was spread in the Soviet educational field in the post-Stalin era. As a result, the Soviet teaching experiences gained in these education centres were heterogeneous. When a child-centred paradigm was later introduced to the post-Soviet educational system, the camps adopted the most applicable practices from their Soviet experiences.

scholarly journals Of Loss and Loot: Stalin-Era Culture, Foreign Aid, and Trophy Goods in the Soviet Union during the 1940s

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (02) ◽  
pp. 219-258
Author(s):  
Nathalie Moine
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
Foreign Objects ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Red Army

This article focuses on the influx and circulation of foreign objects in the Soviet Union during the 1940s in order to investigate the specific role of these objects during World War II. It reveals how the distribution of humanitarian aid intersected with both the (non)recognition of the genocide of Soviet Jews during the Nazi occupation, and with Stalinist social hierarchies. It explains why erasing the origins and precise circumstances through which these objects entered Soviet homes could in turn be used to hide the abuses that the Red Army perpetrated against their defeated enemies. Finally, it revises the image of a Soviet society that discovered luxury and Western modernity for the first time during the war by reconsidering the place and the trajectories of these objects in Stalinist material culture of the interwar period.

Conclusion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Heinzen
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Flexible Tool ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Red Tape

This chapter reviews the meaning of the bribe in the late-Stalin era of the Soviet Union, focusing on how both the givers and receivers of bribes learned to use the bribe as a flexible tool for manoeuvring inside a disorganized economy and rigid bureaucratic system. Bribery emerged from a set of practices and attitudes that, in many cases, could serve certain practical functions, from distributing scarce goods and services, to establishing personalized relationships among state functionaries and citizens, to cutting through red tape.

Post-Stalin Purge Defectors, 1953–1954

2020 ◽  
pp. 214-262
Author(s):  
Kevin Riehle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
At Risk ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
State Security ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Perception Of Threat

The flow of defectors waned in the early 1950s as the Soviet Union began again to enforce 1930s rules against defection. However, the death of Stalin in 1953, and equally importantly, the arrest and execution of Soviet state security director Lavrentiy Beriya later that year, prompted a brief new wave of defections—ten officers in a thirteen-month period. They defected for similar reasons as their predecessors in the Yezhovshchina period—out of fear that they were in danger from a purge. With Beriya’s downfall came the inevitable purge that followed the arrest of a state security leader during the Stalin era. Any officer who had connected his or her career with Beriya’s was at risk of going down with him. These officers revealed a growing perception of threat from the United States as the leader of the Western alliance, and targeting of U.S. and NATO information dominated their collection requirements.

scholarly journals The Psychopharmacological Revolution in the USSR: Schizophrenia Treatment and the Thaw in Soviet Psychiatry, 1954–64

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-269
Author(s):  
Benjamin Zajicek
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nervous Activity ◽  
Psychiatric Hospitals ◽  
New Drugs ◽  
Patient Treatment ◽  
The West ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
System A ◽  
The Soviet Union

Twentieth-century psychiatry was transformed in the 1950s and 1960s by the introduction of powerful psychopharmaceuticals, particularly Chlorpromazine (Thorazine). This paper examines the reception of Chlorpromazine in the Soviet Union and its effect on the Soviet practice of psychiatry. The drug, known in the USSR by the name Aminazine, was first used in Moscow in 1954 and was officially approved in 1955. I argue that Soviet psychiatrists initially embraced it because Aminazine enabled them to successfully challenge the Stalin-era dogma in their field (Ivan Pavlov’s ‘theory of higher nervous activity’). Unlike in the West, however, the new psychopharmaceuticals did not lead to deinstitutionalisation. I argue that the new drugs did not disrupt the existing Soviet system because, unlike the system in the West, the Soviets were already dedicated, at least in theory, to a model which paired psychiatric hospitals with community-based ‘neuropsychiatric dispensaries.’ Chlorpromazine gave this system a new lease on life, encouraging Soviet psychiatrists to more rapidly move patients from in-patient treatment to ‘supporting’ treatment in the community.

Russian History and the Soviet Union

1962 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-387
Author(s):  
Robert E. F. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Russian History ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Future

The problem I wish to discuss is how Russian history has differed from that of Western Europe and whether the reasons for these differences continue to be relevant and deep-seated enough to make it seem likely that they will continue in the future.

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