scholarly journals FUNERAL WREATH TO THE LEADER: GRIEF FOR LENIN AND THE PRACTICES OF SOVIET SELF-REPRESENTATION

2020 ◽  
pp. 87-94
Author(s):  
S. Yu. Malysheva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Common Method ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Professional Identities ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
Soviet History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Continuum

The article deals with the experience of early Soviet identity self-representation related to the situation of funeral and state mourning for Lenin. The 1917 decree disavowed the former estates, ranks and identification markers that determined a person’s status in society. In the fluid conditions of civil war and new economic policy, social status was also unsustainable. The period of mourning for Lenin became a certain point of rupture in the continuum of the short Soviet history, a time of reflection on the past, future and one’s place in it. The “political grief” for the leaders, encouraged in the 1920s, in the specific case of mourning for Lenin, contributed to the formation of a space for expressing more than just grief itself. The space was used by citizens, collectives, communities to develop, to articulate and affirm their own identities. One of the means of self-representation were funerary wreaths brought “on the leader’s coffin”. The article considers both traditional forms of wreaths and the reasons for their prevalence, as well as new, unusual forms and the claims they contained for expressing and asserting identity. The most common method of self-representation was to affirm labor and professional identities. Moreover, individuals and collectives who were not classified as “workers” used verbal and non-verbal markers of funerary wreaths to add themselves to this desired and safe category, thus constructing their own identity and asserting their place in the new Soviet society.

Civil-Military Relations and the Evolution of the Soviet Socialist State

Slavic Review ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark von Hagen
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Military Relations

For the past few years, Soviet historians have fixed their attention on the problem of "alternatives," a shorthand for wide-ranging attempts to free historical thinking from the overly determinist schemes of Stalinist orthodoxy. The question is posed most often as the possibility of a more humane alternative to Stalin and the political order associated with his name. Some historians and publicists, however, have gone beyond the Stalin period to reflect on, for example, how even the 1917 revolutions might have been avoided. The leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev and reformist allies among the intelligentsia have singled out the New Economic Policy, or NEP, as the legitimate socialist forerunner to the present reformist programs. In so doing, they approach consensus with an influential group of western historians, including Stephen Cohen, Moshe Lewin, and Robert Tucker, who have kept alive the memory of Nikolai Bukharin in particular, but a non-Stalinist path to socialism as well.

‘A Party for Owners or a Party for Earners?’ How far did the British Conservative Party Really Change After 1945?

1987 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 49-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ramsden
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
Characteristic Mode ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Electoral Defeat ◽  
Post War ◽  
Looking Back

THE period spent in opposition between 1945 and 1951 has generally been thought of as a key to the understanding of the activities of the post-war British Conservative Party. Autobiographies of the Party leaders of the time began to appear at the end of the Fifties, already looking back to a period in which the Conservatives had decisively changed their approach. So for example, Lord Woolton's Memoirs reviewed not only a term as Party Chairman which had been a highlight of his own crowded career, but also his sharing in a major act of transformation, a transformation that had led on to Conservative success since 1951: ‘the change was revolutionary’. Other key figures in the organisation reached similar conclusions as their own accounts appeared: David Maxwell-Fyfe argued that the new Party rules which he had drawn up had not only decisively widened the political base of British Conservatism, but that events since had confirmed the importance of the change. R. A. Butler's account of The Art of the Possible argued in 1971 that ‘the overwhelming electoral defeat of 1945 shook the Conservative Party out of its lethargy and impelled it to re-think its philosophy and re-form its ranks with a thoroughness unmatched for a century’. The effect was to bring both the policies of the Party and ‘their characteristic mode of expression’, as he puts it, ‘up to date’. As recently as 1978, Reginald Maudling—a key figure behind the scenes in 1945–51 as a speechwriter from Eden and Churchill and as the organising secretary of the committee which produced the Industrial Charter of 1947—reached much the same view: ‘We were at that time developing a new economic policy for the Conservative Party … It marked a substantially different approach for post-war Conservative philosophy.

The Political Function of Domestic Objects in the Fiction of Aleksandra Kollontai

Slavic Review ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgitta Ingemanson
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
The Real ◽  
Political Function ◽  
The Status ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Status Of Women

During the winter of 1922-1923 when she was just beginning her diplomatic career, Bolshevik activist Aleksandra Kollontai wrote two novels and several short stories that were immediately published in Russia and subsequently combined into two volumes under the titles Liubov’ pchel trudovykh and Zhenshchina na perelome. They were dismissed as mere autobiographical romances, indulging in unhealthy introspection and dangerously divorced from the “real” demands of society. At a time when Soviet Russia was facing enormous challenges connected with the reconstruction after the civil war and with the partial return to a market economy under the New Economic Policy (NEP), Kollontai's focus on domestic relationships and the status of women seemed narrow and excessively private.

scholarly journals Communist Party of Bolsheviks as a Soviet Social Elevator in the Context of the New Economic Policy

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 902-932
Author(s):  
T. I. Morozova ◽  
◽  
V. I. Shishkin ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
Middle Level ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Internal Mobility ◽  
New Generation

The authors analyze and interpret the processes that occurred during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period in the Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks) (RCP(b)) — All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) (AUCP(b)) as a “social elevator” from the standpoint of the theory of social mobility. The article takes into account the achievements of national historiography and is based on a wide range of published and unpublished sources. The authors reveal conditions that the party leadership imposed on those who wanted to “enter” the elevator; the number and social composition of replacements; the mechanisms, instruments, and procedures used to carry out movements between floors, as well as the volume of these movements; the transformation of the party as a social elevator; and its impact on mobility in Soviet society. The authors conclude that, thanks to the mass recruitment of workers, the height of the party pyramid quickly increased, and its structure and profile became more complex, which increased the potential for internal mobility. The forced promotion of young Communists into leading party bodies and the expansion of the number of party committees artificially caused upward intra-party mobility and the formation of a new generation of middle-level elites. The use of the nomenklatura system for appointing to the upper floors of the party hierarchy completed the process of rebuilding the RCP(b) — AUCP(b) as a social elevator controlled by Stalin’s Central Committee. As a result, by the end of NEP, the party’s influence social stratification in Soviet society became decisive.

The role of social communications in the modernization of the Russian village in the 1920s (based on the materials of the Bryansk, Smolensk, Gomel, Oryol and Kursk provinces)

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-4) ◽  
pp. 93-103
Author(s):  
Vadim Kulachkov ◽  
Irina Goncharova ◽  
German Chuvardin
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
Technical Problems ◽  
Communication Models ◽  
Social Communications ◽  
The Village

The article examines the role of social communications in the modernization of the Russian village in the 1920s, which were used by the authorities to transform rural life and form “Pro-Soviet” attitudes in the village. On the basis of archived data, we analyze communication models and determine the political and social order in this area. It is proved that the achievement of optimal results was hindered by material, financial and technical problems of the period of the new economic policy.

THE BIRTH AND TRANSFORMATION OF THE “GENERAL LINE” OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE VKP(B) IN THE POLITICAL STRUGGLE OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1920S AND EARLY 1930S

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-113
Author(s):  
Andrey L. Yurganov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
Administrative Management ◽  
General Line ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Village ◽  
General Secretary

The article studies the concept of “general line” in the history of the Bolshevik Party during the second half of the 1920s. N.I. Bukharin first introduced that concept into the political lexicon, speaking at the Fourteenth Party Conference (1925). The concept fixed the basic idea of the new economic policy – that it was necessary to fight against two tendencies: against considering the kulaks as the main peasant force in the village and against ignoring the main figure in the village – the middleman. That notion had a debatable meaning – above all. It was actively used by representatives of the united opposition. It was not until the beginning of 1929, when the transition from the new economic policy to the methods of military-administrative management of agriculture was outlined, that the notion of the “general line” of the Party began to express the opinion of the Central Committee of the Party and the General Secretary personally. At the beginning of 1929, Stalin posed the question that any disagreement, even the slightest, with the “general line” of the Party in conditions of aggravation of the class struggle meant a “rightwing deviation”. Subsequently, the concept became the symbolic designation of totalitarianism.

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