Reform and the Redefinition of the Social Contract under Gorbachev

1991 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 284-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janine Ludlam
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Blue Collar ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Know How ◽  
Blue Collar Workers ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social

The concept of “social contract” is useful in understanding the process of reform currently under way in the Soviet Union. The social contract “concluded” by Khrushchev and Brezhnev provided the population with economic guarantees but deprived it of any political power. Their contract was geared primarily toward less educated, blue-collar workers. During the past seventy years Soviet society has become industrialized, urbanized, and educated. Gorbachev has understood that the well-being of the Soviet economy will in the future rest on the labor and know-how of skilled and educated professionals. He must therefore conclude a new contract that will be advantageous to this sector of society in order to ensure its participation in his efforts to reform the economy.

The Social Evaluation of Occupations in the Soviet Union

Slavic Review ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 619-643 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murray Yanowitch ◽  
Norton T. Dodge
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Social Evaluation ◽  
Economics Literature ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social

One of the consequences of the revival of sociology as a distinct discipline in the Soviet Union has been the appearance of empirical studies of prevailing attitudes toward the major occupations in Soviet society. These studies have been accompanied by discussions in Soviet newspapers and in the educational and economics literature of the problems associated with the popular perception of various occupations, particularly among student youth.

Reimagining the Private Firm

2019 ◽  
pp. 207-233
Author(s):  
Daniel W. Bromley
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Work Conditions ◽  
Private Firm ◽  
Plant Closings ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
The Government

Escape from possessive individualism requires that the terms of engagement between households and firms be rebalanced. Rarely is the firm seen as the essential component in the economic well-being of households. And when it is seen in this light, contestation over wages and work conditions arises. The post-revolutionary regimes in China and the Soviet Union then tried to situate that obligation on the government. We know how that turned out. A better solution—economically and politically—is to bring capitalist firms into a joint obligation with the government in this essential task. The persistence of union-busting, desultory pay and fringe benefits, layoffs, plant closings, automation, and out-sourced jobs to foreign countries ought to remind politicians—and capitalists—that radical solutions are always available if hope is too long delayed. We now concentrate on the difficult realm of ideas. For here lurks the greatest barrier to necessary institutional change—defective imagination.

Peace Propaganda and Submarines: Soviet Policy toward Sweden and Northern Europe

1985 ◽  
Vol 481 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
INGMAR OLDBERG
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Free Zone ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Stagnation ◽  
East West

Since the late 1970s, as part of an intensified peace propaganda campaign, the Soviet Union has sought to create a nuclear-free zone in Sweden and northern Europe. Simultaneously, it has increased its criticism of Sweden's defense, partly to offset the effects of Soviet submarine violations of Swedish waters. These violations have increased since the stranding of the U-137 in 1981 and have seriously impaired Soviet-Swedish relations. The Soviet leaders perceive new opportunities with the advent of the Social Democrats in Sweden, whose active foreign policy favors détente and disarmament rather than the arms race. Important factors in the background include growing East-West tension, with Soviet superiority in northern Europe, and the political and economic stagnation, militarization, and “KGB-ization” of Soviet society.

History, Villagers, and the Social Scientists: Wrestling with the Past in the Present

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 149-162
Author(s):  
Tracy McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
The Urals ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Historical Ethnography ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

What is the relationship between the historical Soviet countryside and the post-Soviet present both for the scholars who study them and for the population that inhabits them? Together Margaret Paxson, Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village; Jessica Allina-Pisano, The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth; and Douglas Rogers, The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals create a rich, nuanced portrait of contemporary rural life in parts of the former Soviet Union. When one reads the three books together, one finds evidence of interesting continuity alongside dynamism and change that varies depending on the region and on the questions that motivated the researcher. The three works ask in varied ways how individuals in post-Soviet society perceive their world and attempt to live in it. The three studies extend far and wide across the territory of the former Soviet Union: Solovyovo, three hundred miles north of Moscow; the Black Earth, more than four hundred miles to the south; and Sepych, about one thousand miles to the east.

Life and Death in the Demiansk Pocket: The 123rd Infantry Division in Combat and Occupation

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-380
Author(s):  
Jeff Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social

During the past two decades, focus on the German-Soviet war has shifted from a nearly exclusive fascination with field marshals and their battles—“chaps and maps”—to one more concerned with the social aspects of the war. Issues of resistance and collaboration, German occupation policies and everyday life under Nazi rule, and the Soviet Union's recovery from the catastrophe of 1941 and its subsequent unprecedented mobilization during the latter stages of the war now constitute the main emphases of research. Many of these new lines of investigation revolve around the implementation and results of the German Vernichtungskrieg, the war of annihilation carried out by the Wehrmacht, SS, and myriad other German agencies against the Soviet state and population. As the army was the largest and most powerful German institution operating in the Soviet Union, it has recently attracted the most attention and generated the most controversy. Historians have reached a rough consensus concerning the German High Command's complicity in implementing the Vernichtungskrieg; here, the set of orders commonly referred to in the literature as the “criminal orders” illustrate the army's means of achieving Hitler's goals. More recently, scholars have begun to investigate the army's responsibility for starving millions of Soviet civilians. While some dissenting voices have been heard, it is clear that the German High Command willingly and even enthusiastically participated in the war of annihilation.

Religious Dissent in the USSR in the 1960s

Slavic Review ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 298-316
Author(s):  
William C. Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Religious Dissent ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Unusual Phenomenon ◽  
Western Scholarship ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Insight Into

With some justification, the 1960s may be called the decade of dissent. This is true even with regard to the Soviet Union, where broad sectors of the population have resorted to increasingly vociferous expressions of dissatisfaction with present conditions. If, when the decade began, overt alienation from the system was a relatively unusual phenomenon, the past ten years have given rise to an increasing stream of dissent in the Soviet populace. Among the intelligentsia, almost every rank and profession has been involved in oral, written, and organizational protest. Considerable attention has been devoted to this development by Western scholarship and journalism, and rightly so, for the voices of dissent provide an immediate insight into the tensions and conflicts within the rapidly changing society. One area of dissent, however, has received rather less attention in the West. This paper will attempt to survey the religious portion of the Soviet population, in an endeavor to illustrate the degree to which religious dissatisfaction during the past decade has been consonant with the general current of dissent within Soviet society.

scholarly journals Philosophical and Legal Interpretations of the Deformations of Legal Awareness in the XX - Early XXI Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 23-32
Author(s):  
M. V. Melnyk
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
General Level ◽  
Theoretical Level ◽  
Legal Scholar ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Soviet Space ◽  
Post Soviet Space

It has been stressed that the topic of philosophical and legal interpretations of the deformations of legal awareness in the XX – early XXI century is actively developed by scholars of the countries of the post-Soviet space. Emphasis has been placed on the development of the doctrine on legal nihilism that has been developed in Western European philosophical and legal thought, as well as on the problem of totalitarian legal awareness that has emerged in Soviet society. It has been revealed that the foundation of the concept of the deformations of legal awareness in Ukrainian philosophical and legal science was laid by the great household names of the past – P. I. Novgorodtsev, I. A. Il`in, M. M. Alekseev, L. I. Petrazhitskii, B. I. Kistiakivskyi and others. There is not so much in the world scientific thought about the deformations of legal awareness, where the concept of legal nihilism is the exception. The foundations of the doctrine of nihilism were laid by such outstanding thinkers as F. Nietzsche, A. Schopenhauer, M. Heidegger, F. H. Jacobi. Therefore, nowadays the doctrine of legal nihilism is the most developed in relation to the types of the deformations of legal awareness. It has been determined that the “golden age” of this extremely negative social phenomenon occurred at the beginning of the XX century, after the formation of the USSR. Totalitarian propaganda machines, the Soviet Union in particular, tried to transform society into a governed crowd, brainwashed by a certain ideology that led to a degeneration of legal awareness into a totalitarian consciousness and, as a consequence, to the widespread deformation of legal awareness. However, the deformations of legal awareness were not discussed at theoretical level, because they were considered a vestige of bourgeois times. Discussion about the deformation of legal awareness was initiated by the prominent Soviet legal scholar E. A. Lukasheva in her work “Socialist Legal Awareness and Legality”, where she characterized that the legal awareness of a particular individual can be defective, limited, and backward from the general level of public consciousness, can contain harmful installations and defective assessments of legal phenomena.

Cassation of Criminal Cases from Moscow Province Courts and Tribunals, 1921–1928

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Newman
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
Judicial Decisions ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Case Files ◽  
The Law

Although students of the Soviet period have long been fascinated with criminality, few works have studied courts and common criminals on the basis of trial records, especially during the nep. Aside from scholarly treatments of show trials, the reasoning behind judicial decisions and criminal pleas has been left to the imagination of Sovietologists. This gap is addressed by examining case files involving the primary form of appeal available to Soviet convicts: cassation. After detailing the evolution of Soviet cassation from its origins in the French Revolution and contextualizing its place in the Soviet justice system, this article embarks on a close reading of convicts’ pleas, prosecutors’ reports, and judges’ written decisions in cassational cases. Cassational appeals are examined to determine how different seats of power within the judiciary sparred over verdicts. Judicial decisions of cassational cases are cross-referenced with legal codes and legislation to determine how Soviet judges applied the law, particularly when considering the social backgrounds of appellants. From the outlook of criminals themselves, the wording of their appeals is analyzed to determine how they understood the law, Soviet society, and what they thought they needed to say to gain redemption. Ultimately, this paper explores how individuals brought before courts understood Soviet power and justice through the lens of criminal appeals during the infancy of the Soviet Union.

Historical Changes in the Design of Beijing Social Housing

2013 ◽  
Vol 742 ◽  
pp. 122-126
Author(s):  
Xu Jia Li ◽  
Ying Wei Cui
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Urban Background ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Goals And Objectives ◽  
Historical Origins

This paper centers on the changes in the interior configuration of typical social housing in Beijing in the past 63 years. This history is divided into three distinct stages, and comparisons are made between social housing in Beijing and its models for each stage. The models for the three stages were chronologically, the Soviet Union, Hong Kong, and western countries. The rationale for this study is to find the historical origins of the broad contemporary changes in the interior configuration of Beijings social housing. The theoretical framework is based on the three stages of social housing in Beijing; each stage has a unique political, economic, cultural, and urban background, which influences the social housing greatly. The goals and objectives are to make a clear historical line of the social housing, and the intended readers are professional designers and individuals who are interested in social housing history. The study will be in the form of a literature review and a series of case studies, and its scope will be within typical social housing.

New Materials for Studying Preparation and Staging of the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957

2018 ◽  
pp. 550-563
Author(s):  
Daniel Sawert ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Unique Event ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Cultural Standards ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Local Traditions

The article assesses archival materials on the festival movement in the Soviet Union in 1950s, including its peak, the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students held in 1957 in Moscow. Even now the Moscow festival is seen in the context of international cultural politics of the Cold War and as a unique event for the Soviet Union. The article is to put the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in the context of other youth festivals held in the Soviet Union. The festivals of 1950s provided a field for political, social, and cultural experiments. They also have been the crucible of a new way of communication and a new language of design. Furthermore, festivals reflected the new (althogh relative) liberalism in the Soviet Union. This liberalism, first of all, was expressed in the fact that festivals were organized by the Komsomol and other Soviet public and cultural organisations. Taking the role of these organisations into consideration, the research draws on the documents of the Ministry of culture, the All-Russian Stage Society, as well as personal documents of the artists. Furthermore, the author has gained access to new archive materials, which have until now been part of no research, such as documents of the N. Krupskaya Central Culture and Art Center and of the central committees of various artistic trade unions. These documents confirm the hypothesis that the festivals provided the Komsomol and the Communist party with a means to solve various social, educational, and cultural problems. For instance, in Central Asia with its partiarchal society, the festivals focuced on female emancipation. In rural Central Asia, as well as in other non-russian parts of the Soviet Union, there co-existed different ways of celebrating. Local traditions intermingled with cultural standards prescribed by Moscow. At the first glance, the modernisation of the Soviet society was succesful. The youth acquired political and cultural level that allowed the Soviet state to compete with the West during the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students. During the festival, however, it became apparent, that the Soviet cultural scheme no longer met the dictates of times. Archival documents show that after the Festival cultural and party officials agreed to ease off dogmatism and to tolerate some of the foreign cultural phenomena.

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