Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Literature under Communism: The Literary Policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from the End of World War II to the Death of Stalin. “Russian and East European Series,” Vol. XX. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960. vii + 165 pp. $4.00.

Slavic Review ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 371-372
Author(s):  
Deming Brown
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
World War ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union

The Soviet Blueprint

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail Kligman ◽  
Katherine Verdery
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Technology Transfer ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
World War ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Ambitious Program

This chapter discusses the Soviet blueprint, which established the technology of collectivization that East European leaders followed, with variations, during the 1950s. As the first country in the world to be founded on Marxist–Leninist principles, the Soviet Union had myriad problems to solve. The leaders' ambitious program of social engineering required developing a variety of techniques for carrying out specific tasks, such as obtaining food requisitions, collectivizing agriculture, and so on. These techniques formed the basis for creating “replica” regimes in Eastern Europe following World War II, in a process of technology transfer of almost unparalleled scope. This technological package may be called “the Soviet blueprint,” of which collectivization was a major part. Although the results varied considerably, each East European country was pressed into adopting more or less the same package. Nowhere, however, did the blueprint fully succeed against recalcitrant local realities—not even in the Soviet Union itself.

The Legal Framework for the Sovietization of Czechoslovakia 1941–1945

1997 ◽  
Vol 25 (02) ◽  
pp. 255-268
Author(s):  
Basil Dmytryshyn
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Asylum ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

Literature in many languages (documentary, monographic, memoir-like and periodical) is abundant on the sovietization of Czechoslovakia, as are the reasons advanced for it. Some observers have argued that the Soviet takeover of the country stemmed from an excessive preoccupation with Panslavism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by a few Czech and Slovak intellectuals, politicians, writers and poets and their uncritical affection and fascination for everything Russian and Soviet. Others have attributed the drawing of Czechoslovakia into the Soviet orbit to Franco-British appeasement of Hitler's imperial ambitions during the September 1938, Munich crisis. At Munich, Czechoslovakia lost its sovereignty and territory, France its honor, England its respect and trust; and the Soviet Union, by its abstract offer to aid Czechoslovakia (without detailing how or in what form the assistance would come) gained admiration. Still others have pinned the blame for the sovietization of Czechoslovakia on machinations by top leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, who, as obedient tools of Moscow, supported Soviet geopolitical designs on Czechoslovakia, who sought and received political asylum in the USSR during World War II, and who returned to Czechoslovakia with the victorious Soviet armed forces at the end of World War II as high-ranking members of the Soviet establishment. Finally, there are some who maintain that the sovietization of Czechoslovakia commenced with the 25 February 1948, Communist coup, followed by the tragic death of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk on 10 March 1948, and the replacement, on 7 June 1948, of President Eduard Beneš by the Moscow-trained, loyal Kremlin servant Klement Gottwald.

Defining the McCarthy Era

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Lichtman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
World War ◽  
Mccarthy Era ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Political Tactics ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
Communist Party Usa

This chapter considers the combination of circumstances and events following World War II that held the seeds of political repression during the McCarthy era. These developments signaled unmistakably that the Soviet Union and its allies threatened America’s security on the international scene. On the domestic front, McCarthy-era repression targeted the Communist Party USA and alleged “Communist front” organizations. Whether a significant internal Communist threat existed in the postwar years was open to question. However, the widespread belief that such a threat did exist, and the related claim that liberal Democrats—New Dealers and their political successors—bore responsibility and could not be trusted to respond adequately, would soon become a reality in American politics. McCarthyism was energized not by opposition to communism but by the linkage of Marxism with liberalism. It was also energized by bare-knuckle partisan political tactics.

Soviet and Muslim

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eren Tasar
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Soviet Central Asia

Long associated with its aggressive promotion of atheism, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union adopted a nuanced, flexible, and often contradictory approach toward Islam in the USSR’s largest Muslim region, Central Asia. “Soviet and Muslim” demonstrates how the Soviet state unwittingly set in motion a process of institutionalization during World War II that culminated in a permanent space for Islam in a society ruled by atheists. Central Asia was the sole Muslim region of the former Russian empire to lack a centralized Islamic organization, or muftiate. When the Soviet leader Stalin created such a body for the region as part of his religious reforms during World War II, he acknowledged that the Muslim faith could enjoy some legal protection under Communist rule. From a skeletal and disorganized body run by one family of Islamic scholars out of a modest house in Tashkent’s old city, this muftiate acquired great political importance in the eyes of Soviet policymakers, and equally significant symbolic significance for many Muslims. This book argues that Islam did not merely “survive” the decades from World War II until the Soviet collapse in 1991, but actively shaped the political and social context of Soviet Central Asia. Muslim figures, institutions, and practices evolved in response to the social and political reality of Communist rule. Through an analysis that spans all aspects of Islam under Soviet rule—from debates about religion inside the Communist Party, to the muftiate’s efforts to acquire control over mosques across Central Asia, changes in Islamic practices and dogma, and overseas propaganda targeting the Islamic World—Soviet and Muslim offers a radical new reading of Islam’s resilience and evolution under atheist rule.

Art, Politics, and War, 1941–1945

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Cherny
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Fund Raising ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
War Effort ◽  
American Society

During World War II, Victor and Lydia threw themselves into organizing and fund-raising for Russian War Relief, organized the Russian American Society, and took active parts in the American Russian Institute, all in support of the Soviet war effort. Becoming more active in the Communist party, they met Soviet consular officials, including at least one KGB agent. The FBI opened a file on Arnautoff. The Arnautoffs applied for permission to emigrate to the Soviet Union but were turned down.

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