The Soviet Income Revolution

Slavic Review ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-697 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murray Yanowitch

A number of studies of income distribution have suggested that income inequality in the United States showed some tendency to decline during the 1930's and the war years. Although the extent and timing of the decline may be in dispute among specialists in this area, and some recent studies suggest that no significant changes in income shares have occurred since 1944, the American Income Revolution has nonetheless been widely accepted and acclaimed. All the more reason, it would seem, that studies of changes in income inequality in Soviet Russia should prove of great interest. If income inequality has been reduced in the world's major capitalist economy, what has been happening to income distribution in the Soviet Union?

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (02) ◽  
pp. 32-49
Author(s):  
Li Yan

The rumors that Lenin was a “German spy” first appeared in Petrograd after the February revolution in Russia. During the Soviet period, the “Sisson documents” (papers) were fabricated in the United States and other Western countries, and other evidence was sought that Lenin was allegedly an “agent” of the German government. However, all the evidence presented were convincingly refuted. V. I. Lenin’s “German spy” case was discussed again during the collapse of the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia. In some Russian media, political and academic circles, this “case” was reproduced in various forms, but new materials and new evidences were not found.


Slavic Review ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip S. Gillette

In 1921 a young American doctor named Armand Hammer went to Russia, met Lenin, and undertook the first American concession in Soviet Russia. Interest in this episode has been heightened by the fact that fifty years later Armand Hammer, as chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, forged new commercial links between the United States and the Soviet Union. This article provides a new interpretation of Hammer’s meeting with Lenin and his receipt of the first American concession granted by the Soviet government. It throws light on how Soviet national security objectives and personal relations can influence Soviet government decisions on American trade.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladislav Ryabyy

After December 6, 1917, the government of the United States led by President Woodrow Wilson decided not to recognize the new government of Russia, which was led by the Bolshevik Party. Some of the reasons for this lack of recognition came from the Bolshevik government’srefusal to honor prior debits owed by the Tsarist government and the seizure of American property. The next three presidents would continue this policy.1 For the next sixteen years, many Americans visited and wrote about the Soviet Union. Amongst those visitors was a delegation of twenty-five who visited the Soviet Union in the summer of 1928. Their stated purpose was to,“study methods of public instruction in Soviet Russia this summer.” 2 The most influential amongst the twenty-five was John Dewey, a professor of philosophy at Colombia University and one of the leading educational reformers in the United States. In the time during and after this trip Dewey wrote a series of articles for the “New Republic” and later collected these articles andplaced them in his book, Impressions of the Revolutionary World.3 This book also dealt with his travels to China in 1920, Turkey in 1924, and Mexico in 1926. This book does not tell the full story of the trip. By analyzing his letters that he sent during this time, one can recreate a partial itinerary of his daily activities and those that he met with. Those letters also reveal that this trip influenced not only the twenty-five educators from the United States but also had an impact on Soviet educators because they had the ability to finally meet the man that they had studied for so long. The United States Department of State was also interested in this trip and used it to learn more about the Soviet Union. The Department of State was also dealing with anticommunism at this time and this caused Dewey’s trip to be closely monitored. The New York Times and other newspapers reported on this trip and the aftermath of this trip can be seen through these reports. This trip impacted not only those within the Soviet Union but also the State Departments and the American public’s view of the Soviet Union.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-108
Author(s):  
Petr Cheremushkin (Пётp Чepёмушкин )

This is a review essay of Dariusz Tołczyk’s book Gułag w oczach Zachodu (The Gulag in the Eyes of the West), which was published in Polish in 2009. This controversial work examines the question of why, for at least the first half of the twentieth century, the West has turned a blind eye to the Stalinist repression. Tołczyk notes that the West paid little attention to the complaints of the Baltic countries and Poland about Stalin’s Great Terror. The reviewer states that the formation of an improved Western image of first Soviet Russia and then the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Gorbachev years by a West that is currently worried about the Putin regime, is Tołczyk’s, a Polish author residing in the United States, main theme.


2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-478
Author(s):  
David Zdeněk Chroust

The Hospodář was a twice-monthly magazine for Czech farmers in America, launched in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1891. In the 1920s it became more international as the United States shut out immigrants from Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union became a leading subject in its editorials, columns and especially the hundreds of reader letters published every year. Transnational families were a window into the Czech communities in Volhynia and Crimea. Social Democrats, Communists and others argued about the Soviet Union’s merits as a workers’ and peasants’ state. Agronomist Stanislav Kovář became a regular columnist in Vologda and then Novorossiisk on the NEP and then collectivization in Soviet agriculture. Tolerant, largely written by readers, without political or religious affiliation, and international, the Hospodář was a productive forum for experience, imagination and discourse in the international Czech diaspora on the early Soviet Union.


Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin

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.


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