scholarly journals Modernity and the Failure to Maintain the Peace (1918–1938): Comparing the Cases of the Soviet Union and the German Reich

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-131
Author(s):  
Штефан Мерль
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Expert Advice ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Perspective ◽  
State Organization ◽  
German Reich

Citation: Merl S. (2020) Modernity and the Failure to Maintain the Peace (1918–1938): Comparing the Cases of the Soviet Union and the German Reich. Mir Rossii, vol. 29, no 1, pp. 103–131. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2020-29-1-103-131 Modernity brought the promise of a better world – a world in which society and the economy are more rationally organized and in which people themselves could be improved. In the 1880s, European states began to translate the findings of the social sciences into practical politics (“the scientization of the social”). Once the established monarchies had been overthrown in Germany and in Russia, the new political forces needed to legitimize their claim to power before the people. The most practical way to do so was to exploit the idea that the social could be subjected to scientization, and thus legitimize political domination by means of implementing a new type of rationality. With the transition to Stalinism and National Socialism, their approaches became more radical. Both dictatorships launched large-scale projects to restructure their societies according to the concepts of class and race respectively. They bet on an unprecedented degree of state organization and control over the economy and society. Their economic success in the 1930s owed much to rearmament programs, which could do nothing but resolve into a new war. Today it appears surprising how naively expert advice was handled at that time, such that the complete physical destruction of enemies and the idea that lives could be treated as worthless could be sold as a “scientific” means of creating better societies. In order to understand what happened in the Soviet Union and Germany, one cannot look at it from a single national perspective. That is why I adopt an entangled history approach. The dissemination of modern ideas and the scientization of the social were taking place through a network connecting scholars and thinkers from all over the world. This article sets the inter-war period in the context of the whole period during which the scientization of the social was taking place without any particularly critical reflection (from the 1880s to the early 1970s). In the first part, I present the concepts of Modernity and the scientization of the social and propose a periodization of their political use. In the second part, I  focus more specifically on the events and developments in the Soviet Union and Germany, and the means of political communication by which the legitimization of the new powers were achieved.

scholarly journals “FOOD EXPEDITIONS” AND “AVOSKA”: CONSUMER PASSIONS OF “HOMO SOVIETICUS” IN THE MODERN PROSE

2021 ◽  
pp. 48-59
Author(s):  
Liudmyla Danylenko
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Happy Life ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
True Values ◽  
Homo Sovieticus

Contemporary Ukrainian prose has been actively appealing to the memory of the Soviet past recently. Especially interesting is the literary reconstruction of everyday life that creates a background for demonstrating a specific type of ‘homo sovieticus’. A discussion on this large-scale and promising process has already started within literary studies. The paper deals with O. Ilchenko’s “Fog Pickers” and S. Baturyn’s “Shyzgara”, which represent the everyday life of Kyiv in the Soviet era. The focus is on the literary treatment of consumerism as a feature of a unified model representing the Soviet man. The researcher explains the ideas of debunking the myths about happy life in the USSR, analyzes the ways of creating the panoramic view of everyday life, traces the consistency of the authors’ interpretations that shows how accurately the experiences are depicted. The gastronomic routes of Kyiv residents, the methods of obtaining the foodstuffs, the social relationships established during purchases presented in the literary works are worth special attention. The writers are definitely critical regarding everyday living conditions in the recent past. They put characteristic features of the Soviet everyday life at the center of events, namely the lines in the stores of all kinds and their primitive range of products. Some Soviet euphemisms related to the food theme have been explained in the paper as well. The researcher comes to the conclusion that reconstruction of the everyday life of a Soviet man in the works by O. Ilchenko and S. Baturyn reveals the despicable nature and danger of the totalitarian system, shows the groundlessness of the nostalgic gasps for the Soviet Union. The literary representation of life in the USSR prompts one to reflect on the true values and uphold human dignity in a free state.

The North Caucasus During Collectivisation

2018 ◽  
pp. 227-254
Author(s):  
Jeronim Perović
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
North Caucasus ◽  
Mountain Communities ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Ways Of Life

This chapter presents the first detailed account of the tragic impact of the collectivization and “de-kulakization” campaign in the North Caucasus based on Soviet archival sources. In 1929-30, under the slogan of “socialist transformation of the country,” the Soviet state reached out to the countryside, trying forcibly to change traditional economic ways of life and break up the existing social structures within the villages. In the eyes of the peasants, however, the state’s collectivization and “de-kulakization” campaign represented nothing less than a brutal assault, plunging the whole country into chaos and provoking large-scale rebellions. Resistance was especially fierce in the Muslim-dominated parts of the North Caucasus, where Soviet structures were weak and the social cohesion of mountain communities strong. Ultimately, the Red Army and the armed forces of the secret police crushed these rebellions ruthlessly. However, especially in Chechnia, Ingushetia, Karachai, and the mountainous parts of Dagestan, they were at least sufficiently violent for the Soviet leadership to decide to suspend their collectivization attempt altogether. In fact, it was not until mid-1930s, much later than in most other areas of the Soviet Union, that collectivization was formally completed.

Utopias of One

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Original Research ◽  
The Soviet Union

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

RESTORATION OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF YALTA IN 1944

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (72) (4) ◽  
pp. 24-36
Author(s):  
N. D. Borshchik
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Food Industry ◽  
Southern Coast ◽  
Recreational Facilities ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Health Resorts ◽  
Post War ◽  
Short Time

The article considers little-studied stories in Russian historiography about the post-war state of Yalta — one of the most famous health resorts of the Soviet Union, the «pearl» of the southern coast of Crimea. Based on the analysis of mainly archival sources, the most important measures of the party and Soviet leadership bodies, the heads of garrisons immediately after the withdrawal of the fascist occupation regime were analyzed. It was established that the authorities paid priority attention not only to the destroyed economy and infrastructure, but also to the speedy introduction of all-Union and departmental sanatoriums and recreation houses, other recreational facilities. As a result of their coordinated actions in the region, food industry enterprises, collective farms and cooperative artels, objects of cultural heritage and the social and everyday sphere were put into operation in a short time.

SPATIAL LAYOUT OF THE SOVIET UNION TIMBER PROCESSING COMPLEX: THE IDEA BEHIND THE FIRST FIVE-YEAR PLAN

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-154
Author(s):  
Ivan V. ZYKIN
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Far East ◽  
Spatial Layout ◽  
Capital Investments ◽  
Wood Industry ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Central Regions

During the years of Soviet power, principal changes took place in the country’s wood industry, including in spatial layout development. Having the large-scale crisis in the industry in the late 1980s — 2000s and the positive changes in its functioning in recent years and the development of an industry strategy, it becomes relevant to analyze the experience of planning the spatial layout of the wood industry during the period of Stalin’s modernization, particularly during the first five-year plan. The aim of the article is to analyze the reason behind spatial layout of the Soviet wood industry during the implementation of the first five-year plan. The study is based on the modernization concept. In our research we conducted mapping of the wood industry by region as well as of planned construction of the industry facilities. It was revealed that the discussion and development of an industrialization project by the Soviet Union party-state and planning agencies in the second half of the 1920s led to increased attention to the wood industry. The sector, which enterprises were concentrated mainly in the north-west, west and central regions of the country, was set the task of increasing the volume of harvesting, export of wood and production to meet the domestic needs and the export needs of wood resources and materials. Due to weak level of development of the wood industry, the scale of these tasks required restructuring of the branch, its inclusion to the centralized economic system, the direction of large capital investments to the development of new forest areas and the construction of enterprises. It was concluded that according to the first five-year plan, the priority principles for the spatial development of the wood industry were the approach of production to forests and seaports, intrasectoral and intersectoral combining. The framework of the industry was meant to strengthen and expand by including forests to the economic turnover and building new enterprises in the European North and the Urals, where the main capital investments were sent, as well as in the Vyatka region, Transcaucasia, Siberia and the Far East.

scholarly journals Lend-lease Program through the Prism of Official and Ego Sources

2021 ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
O. Lysenko ◽  
O. Fil ◽  
L. Khoynatska
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Global Challenge ◽  
Military Equipment ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Red Army

Discussions around various aspects of World War II in the world’s scientific space and memory field have continued throughout the postwar decades. Initially, they were determined by polar and antagonistic ideological paradigms, and after the end of the Cold War – the discovery and introduction into scientific circulation of previously classified sources, testing of avant-garde methods of scientific knowledge, the development of interpretive tools. In the late 1930s, the Soviet Union found itself virtually isolated, alone with the Axis bloc and their allies. It was difficult for the Soviet leadership to overcome the existing threats on its own, especially after the German attack. Only the realization by the Western Allies that Berlin’s aggressive course had become a global challenge made it possible to find a constructive way to join forces in the fight against a common enemy. One of the channels of cooperation between the states of the Anti-Hitler Coalition was the organization of supplies to the USSR of military equipment, ammunition, food, and materials necessary for the facilities of the Soviet military-industrial complex within the framework of the land lease program. Until recently, the problem of land lease was more in ideological discourse than in purely scientific. The currently available source base allows for an unbiased analysis of this phenomenon and elucidation of the place and role of foreign revenues to the USSR in strengthening its defense capabilities during the war against Germany and its allies. However, to this day, the researchers look out of focus, because of the perception of this phenomenon by veterans who fought on foreign military equipment, ate food from overseas. The authors of the article sees their task as combining these two dimensions of the lend-lease and finding out its impact not only on the scale of the large-scale armed confrontation, but also on the moral and psychological condition of the Red Army, for whom the war was an extremely difficult test.

How Should One Evaluate the Soviet Revolution?

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Hösle
Keyword(s):  
Side Effects ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Marxist Philosophy ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Soviet Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

AbstractThe essay begins by discussing different ways of evaluating and making sense of the Soviet Revolution from Crane Brinton to Hannah Arendt. In a second part, it analyses the social, political and intellectual background of tsarist Russia that made the revolution possible. After a survey of the main changes that occurred in the Soviet Union, it appraises its ends, the means used for achieving them, and the unintended side-effects. The Marxist philosophy of history is interpreted as an ideological tool of modernization attractive to societies to which the liberal form of modernization was precluded.

Russian Organized Crime: Its History, Structure and Function

1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 213-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph L. Albini ◽  
R.E. Rogers ◽  
Victor Shabalin ◽  
Valery Kutushev ◽  
Vladimir Moiseev ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Soviet History ◽  
Russian Economy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Client Relationships ◽  
And Function

In analyzing Russian organized crime, the authors describe and classify the four major forms of organized crime: 1) political-social, 2) mercenary, 3) in-group, and 4) syndicated. Though the first three classifications of the aforementioned types of organized crime existed throughout Soviet history, it was the syndicated form that began to emerge in the late 1950's, expanding during the corrupt Breznev years (1964–82), exploding during perestroika, and reaching pandemic levels after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. The abrupt transformation of the Russian society from a centralized command economy to one driven by the forces of market capitalism created the socio-pathological conditions for the malignant spread of mercenary and especially syndicated organized crime. New criminals syndicates were created by an alliance of criminal gangs/groups and former members of the Soviet Union's communist nomenklatura (bureaucracy) and the consequence was the criminalization of much of the Russian economy. The social structure of these syndicates is based on a loose association of patron-client relationships rather than a centralized hierarchical system; their function is to provide illicit goods/services desired by the people. The authors conclude their study by emphasizing that what has taken place in Russia is not peculiar to the Russian people, but exemplifies what can happen to societies that experience rapid and intense social change.

A New Circle of Hell: The Postwar Gulag and the Rise of the Special Camps

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven A. Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Social World ◽  
Political Institution ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Significant Life Experience ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Significant Life

This chapter takes the Gulag into the postwar era when authorities used the institution in an attempt to reassert social control. At the same time, arrivals from the newly annexed western territories and former Red Army soldiers dramatically altered the social world of the Gulag prisoner. New prisoner populations of war veterans, nationalist guerrillas, and peoples with significant life experience outside the Soviet Union provided a potentially combustible mix. The isolation and concentration of many of these prisoners in a small number of special camps raised even further the potential explosiveness of the population. The Gulag was a political institution, though, and it was only the death of the system's founder that would set off the explosions.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johann P. Arnason ◽  
Marek Hrubec
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
New Era ◽  
Central European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
East Central European

Problems of social revolutions and/or transformations belong to the classical agenda of social inquiry, as well as to the most prominent real and potential challenges encountered by contemporary societies. Among revolutionary events of the last decades, particular attention has been drawn to the changes that unfolded at the turn of the 1990s and brought the supposedly bipolar (in fact incipiently multipolar) world to an end. The downfall of East Central European Communist regimes in 1989 and of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the beginning of a new era, originally characterised on the one hand by the relaxation of international tensions and on the other by the ascendancy of Western unilateralism. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet collapse prompts the authors of this book to reflect on revolutions and transformations, both from a long-term historical perspective and with regard to the post-Communist scene. The social changes unfolding in Eastern and Central Europe are not only epoch-making historical turns; their economic, social and political aspects, often confusing and unexpected, have also raised new questions and triggered debates about fundamental theoretical issues. Moreover, they have had a significant impact on developments elsewhere in the world, in both Western and developing countries.

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