Economic reforms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since the 1960s

AbstractIn this article the Soviet-African Modern is presented through an intellectual history of exchanges in a triangular geography, outspreading from Moscow to Paris to Port of Spain and Accra. In this geography, postcolonial conditions in Eastern Europe and Africa became interconnected. This shared postcolonial space extended from the Soviet South to Africa. The glue for the transregional imagination was an engagement with the topos of backwardness. For many of the participants in the debate, the Soviet past was the African present. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, three connected perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and African paths to modernity are presented: First, Soviet and Russian scholars interpreting the domestic (post)colonial condition; second, African academics revisiting the Soviet Union as a model for development; and finally, transatlantic intellectuals connecting postcolonial narratives with socialist ones. Drawing on Russian archives, the article furthermore demonstrates that Soviet repositories hold complementary records for African histories.

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The Evolution of Centripetal Fraternalism: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science ◽

10.1177/0002716285481001009 ◽

1985 ◽

Vol 481 (1) ◽

pp. 92-103

Author(s):

MARCIN SAR

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Eastern Europe ◽

Economic Reforms ◽

Lessons Learned ◽

Eastern European ◽

Federal Republic Of Germany ◽

Economic Independence ◽

The West ◽

The Core ◽

The Soviet Union

The author comments on the dynamics of Moscow's effort to reconcile its pursuit of control over Eastern Europe with its interest in a viable Eastern Europe, one that is stable and capable of self-sustaining development. Although Moscow has always exercised control in military matters, it allowed some Eastern Europeans economic independence in the 1970s. Changing circumstances in the 1980s, however, have caused the Kremlin to rethink its relationships with its Eastern European “satallies”— half satellites, half allies. Moscow faces dilemmas in areas such as energy, agriculture, the Eastern European states' relations with the West, economic reforms occurring in Eastern Europe, and integration within COMECON. How Moscow resolves these dilemmas lies at the core of its future relationships with Eastern Europe. Other important factors include the lessons learned from Poland, East Germany's evolving relationship with the Federal Republic of Germany, and China's growing economic and political initiatives vis-à-vis Eastern Europe.

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The Cuban Economy in the 1990s: External Challenges and Policy Imperatives

Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs ◽

10.2307/166090 ◽

1990 ◽

Vol 32 (3) ◽

pp. 117-150 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

A. R. M. Ritter

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Eastern Europe ◽

Political Institutions ◽

Debt Crisis ◽

International System ◽

External Factors ◽

Convertible Currency ◽

Existential Crisis ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

The 1960S

Cuba has entered the decade of the 1990s in a state of profound existential crisis. The countries of Eastern Europe, whose economic and political institutions and ideologies were adopted by Cuba, albeit with some modifications, were abandoning those same institutions and ideologies. Cuba's place in the international system had become one of growing isolation: Cuba had become a curiosity from the 1960s rather than the wave of the future, as it once perceived itself. By mid-1990, it appeared almost certain that the generous subsidization of the Cuban economy by the Soviet Union was about to end. Moreover, the Cuban economy was in serious difficulty as a result of some external factors, namely the convertible currency debt crisis and the problems and uncertainties in its relationship with the Soviet Union since 1985, but also as a result of internal institutional incapacities and deformities.

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‘Working Towards the Führer.’ Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship

Contemporary European History ◽

10.1017/s0960777300000382 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 2 (2) ◽

pp. 103-118 ◽

Cited By ~ 39

Author(s):

Ian Kershaw

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Eastern Europe ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

The 1960S ◽

The Many

The renewed emphasis, already visible in the mid-1980s, on the intertwined fates of the Soviet Union and Germany, especially in the Stalin and Hitler eras, has become greatly intensified in the wake of the upheavals in Eastern Europe. The sharpened focus on the atrocities of Stalinism has prompted attempts to relativise Nazi barbarism – seen as wicked, but on the whole less wicked, than that of Stalinism (and by implication of communism in general).1 The brutal Stalinist modernising experiment is used to remove any normative links with humanising, civilising, emancipatory or democratising development from modernisation concepts and thereby to claim that Hitler's regime, too, was – and intentionally so – a ‘modernising dictatorship’.2 Implicit in all this is a reversion, despite the many refinements and criticisms of the concept since the 1960s, to essentially traditional views on ‘totalitarianism’ and to views of Stalin and Hitler as ‘totalitarian dictators’.

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