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.

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.

Moral Victories

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Just War ◽  
Just War Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Theory Of War ◽  
Military Relations

What does it mean to win a moral victory? In the history, practice, and theory of war, this question yields few clear answers. Wars often begin with ideals about just and decisive triumphs but descend into quagmires. In the just war and strategic studies traditions, assumptions about victory underpin legitimations for war but become problematic in discussions about its conduct and conclusion. After centuries of conflict, we still lack a clear understanding of victory or reliable resources for discerning its moral status, its implications for conduct in war, or its relationship to changing ways of war. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to tackle such issues. It is organized in two parts. After a synoptic introduction, Part I, ‘Traditions: The Changing Character of Victory’, charts the historically variable notion of victory and the dialogues and fissures this opens in the just war and strategic canons. Individual chapters analyse the importance of victory in the Bible, Clausewitz’s strategy, the political uses of defeat, arguments for unlimited war, revisionist just war theory, and contemporary norms against fights to the finish. Part II, ‘Challenges: The Problem of Victory in Contemporary Warfare’, shows how changing security contexts exacerbate these issues. Individual chapters discuss ethics in unwinnable wars, the political scars of victory, whether we can ‘win’ humanitarian interventions, contemporary civil–military relations, victory in privatized war, and operations short of war. In both parts, contributors work towards a clearer understanding of victory, forwarding several shared themes discussed in a critical conclusion.

‘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 The Degree of Military Political Autonomy during the Spanish, Argentine and Brazilian Transitions

1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Zaverucha
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
The Political ◽  
Civilian Control ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Military ◽  
Democratic Country

The state of civil–military relations in the world, especially in the Third World, is very well summed up by Mosca's statement that civilian control over the military ‘is a most fortunate exception in human history’.All over the globe, the armed forces have frequently preserved their autonomous power vis-à-vis civilians. They have also succeeded in maintaining their tutelage over some of the political regimes that have arisen from the process of transition from military to democratic governments, as in Argentina and Brazil. Spain is a remarkable exception. Today, Spain, despite its authoritarian legacy, is a democratic country. The constituted civil hierarchy has been institutionalised, military áutonomy weakened, and civilian control over the military has emerged. Spain's newly founded democracy now appears quite similar to the older European democracies.

Constitutions and the struggle for political order: a study in the modernization of political traditions

1992 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saïd Amir Arjomand
Keyword(s):  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Fundamental Level ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Enterprise ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
Legal Foundations ◽  
Human Effort ◽  
Constitution Making

The constitutions of the last two centuries are monuments to an eminently modern enterprise: the reconstruction of the political order by rational human effort. Constitution-making is a deliberate attempt at institution-building at the fundamental level of laying down the normative and legal foundations of the political order. Framing a constitution always purports to be an act of foundation; an act intended to break with the past, and with the existing cultural and institutional traditions, in which principled discussions take the place of everyday horse-trading in politics.

Horror Vacui

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ozan O. Varol
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Dense Material ◽  
The Political ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Civilian Leaders ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
The Military ◽  
Coup Attempt

Nature, Aristotle said, abhors a vacuum. He argued that a vacuum, once formed, would be immediately filled by the dense material surrounding it. Aristotle’s insights into vacuums in the physical world also apply to civil-military relations. Where a vacuum exists in domestic politics because the political parties are weak, unstable, or underdeveloped, the dense material that is the military may fill the void by staging an intervention into domestic politics. But when, as in the July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, the civilian leaders themselves hold densely concentrated authority—in other words, are powerful, popular, and credible—their attempts to keep the military at bay are far more likely to succeed. Without a vacuum there is no void for the military to fill.

Military Coups and Military Régimes in Africa

1973 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Decalo
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Composition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Officer Corps ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Military Regimes ◽  
Middle Range ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
Intense Debate

In the past several years there has been a proliferation of studies on coup d'états in Africa and the political role of African military structures. Armies have been analysed in terms of their social and ethnic composition, training, ideology, and socialising influences. Intense debate has focused around the overt and covert reasons for their intervention in the political arena. Simple and complex typologies of civil–military relations and of military coups have been constructed; statistical data – both hard and soft – has been marshalled and subjected to factor and regression analysis, in order to validate general or middle-range theories of military intervention. And once in power, the officer corps' performance has been examined in order to generate insights into its propensity to serve as a modernising or developmental agent.

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