scholarly journals Oh, That! Myth, Memory, and World War I in the Russian Emigration and the Soviet Union

Slavic Review ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron J. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Russian Territory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
The Great War

Historians of Russia have not analyzed the roles that the memory of World War I played in Russian life, and Russia remains largely absent from comparative studies of the war and its legacy. Russian people did have “sites of memory” where they expressed myths, displayed symbols, and mobilized public opinion around the memory of World War I. Outside the Soviet Union, a non-Soviet Russian memory of the Great War flourished in the interwar years, and the war became an important memory that military émigrés used to overcome the rupture from the past (imperial Russia) and the present (Russian territory) caused by revolution and life in emigration. The war had a different expression in Soviet Russia, where journalists and publicists evoked its image, but not its historical content, to break the USSR from the Russian past and separate the first socialist society from its enemies in the present.

A Separate Moldovan Language? The Sociolinguistics of Moldova'sLimba de Stat

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 575-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Ciscel
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Language Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Language And Power ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Soviet Russia

The politics of language identity have figured heavily in the history of the people of the Republic of Moldova. Indeed the region's status as a province of Russia, Romania, and then the Soviet Union over the past 200 years has consistently been justified and, at least partially, manipulated on the basis of language issues. At the center of these struggles over language and power has been the linguistic and cultural identity of the region's autochthonous ethnicity and current demographic majority, the Moldovans. In dispute is the degree to which these Moldovans are culturally, historically, and linguistically related to the other Moldovans and Romanians across the Prut River in Romania. Under imperial Russia from 1812 to 1918 and Soviet Russia from 1944 to 1991, a proto-Moldovan identity that eschewed connections to Romania and emphasized contact with Slavic peoples was promoted in the region. Meanwhile, experts from Romania and the West have regularly argued that the eastern Moldovans are indistinguishable, historically, culturally, and linguistically, from their Romanian cousins.

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization

2018 ◽  
pp. 350-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Mark ◽  
Quinn Slobodian
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter places Eastern Europe into a broader history of decolonization. It shows how the region’s own experience of the end of Empire after the World War I led its new states to consider their relationships with both European colonialism and those were struggling for their future liberation outside their continent. Following World War II, as Communist regimes took power in Eastern Europe, and overseas European Empires dissolved in Africa and Asia, newly powerful relationships developed. Analogies between the end of empire in Eastern Europe and the Global South, though sometimes tortured and riddled with their own blind spots, were nonetheless potent rhetorical idioms, enabling imagined solidarities and facilitating material connections in the era of the Cold War and non-alignment. After the demise of the so-called “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, analogies between the postcolonial and the postcommunist condition allowed for further novel equivalencies between these regions to develop.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-214
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Identity ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War

The book closes with a short glimpse into the history of Jewish veterans after 1945, as the survivors of the camps returned to Germany, outlining ruptures and continuities in comparison with the pre-Nazi period. Jewish veterans imposed different narratives on their experiences under National Socialism. As the past receded into the distance, it became a concern for the survivors to engage with the past, which they variously looked back on with nostalgia, disillusionment, or bitter anger. Although National Socialism threatened to erase everything that Jewish veterans of World War I had achieved and sacrificed, sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the nation, as well as bonds with gentile Germans that had been forged under fire during the war, threatened to sever their connections to the status they had earned as soldiers of the Great War and defenders of the fatherland, their minds, their values and their character remained intact. Jewish veterans preserved their sense of German identity.

Soviet Selves

2019 ◽  
pp. 60-81
Author(s):  
Justine Buck Quijada
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
Soviet History ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Religious Actors

Chapter 2 presents the Soviet chronotope embodied in Victory Day celebrations. Victory Day, which is the celebration of the Soviet victory over Germany in World War II, presumes the familiar Soviet genre of history, in which the Soviet Union brought civilization to Buryatia, and Buryats achieved full citizenship in the Soviet utopian dream through their collective sacrifice during the war. The ritual does not narrate Soviet history. Instead, through Soviet and wartime imagery, and the parade form, the public holiday evokes this genre in symbolic form, enabling local residents to read their own narratives of the past into the imagery. This space for interpretation enables both validation as well as critique of the Soviet experience in Buryatia. Although not everyone in Buryatia agrees on how to evaluate this history, this genre is the taken-for-granted backdrop against which other religious actors define their narratives.

Letters from Kapitza to his mother, 1921-27

1988 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-228 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Good Thing ◽  
World War ◽  
Technical Institute ◽  
The West ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Peter Kapitza

Peter Kapitza (1894—1984) came to England as a member of a Soviet mission sent to renew scientific relations with the West after the upheavals of World War I, the Revolution and the Civil War. He had recently suffered the tragic loss of his wife, their two young children and his father in the epidemics that raged in the Soviet Union at that time. It was partly to distract him from his grief that he was invited to join the mission, and A. F. Joffé, who had been his chief at the Physico-Technical Institute in Petrograd, thought it would be a good thing for him to get some first-hand experience of the latest research techniques by spending the winter in a leading physics laboratory in the West. Eventually, Rutherford agreed to have him in the Cavendish and Kapitza made such an impression by his originality and experimental skill that he was encouraged to extend his stay.

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), man of dissent

2009 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 365-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Grattan-Guinness
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Nuclear Disarmament ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Private Citizen ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Great War

Russell argued against the Great War, but he also wanted to drop atomic bombs on the Soviet Union after World War II, and later he advocated nuclear disarmament. How could a great logician accommodate such inconsistencies? How, as a private citizen, did he make such a world-wide impact in his late years?

scholarly journals Analysis of the population dynamics in the “Slavic World” with a special focus on Russia

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 317
Author(s):  
Nina N. Loginova ◽  
Milan M. Radovanović ◽  
Anatoliy A. Yamashkin ◽  
Goran Vasin ◽  
Marko D. Petrović ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Relationship

Population changes of the Russians and other Slavs are an important original indicator of demographic, economic, political, and cultural analysis of over 300 million Slavic inhabitants in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. The indicators are conditioned by the large number of people executed in World War I and World War II, significant economic migrations, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. Utilizing data from official reports, the authors proceed to analyze the demographic tendencies in order to find out the relationship between modern demographic trends and political and economic events over the past years. The results showed that economic and demographic stagnation, which favor religious and national (ethnic) ambivalence, influence the strengthening of groups ethnically isolated or religiously differentiated in the observed macroregions of Eurasia. The contemporary challenges of modern society in terms of global politics (e.g. terrorism and migrations) will be more pronounced and turbulent in these areas. For these reasons, the original data represent an important segment of the study of Slavic history, demography, and politics throughout the turbulent 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium.   

The New Aesthetic of the Late Nineteen Twenties Reconsidering the Periodization of the Interwar Avant-Gardes

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-216
Author(s):  
Éva Forgács
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Nineteen Twenties ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Short Time

AbstractThe avant-gardes of the nineteen twenties are discussed in the art historical literature as the art products of a rarely upbeat decade, which featured great utopian aspirations and progressive art between the wake of World War I and the Nazi takeover in Germany, as well as the consolidation of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. This essay depicts the decade as being far from a homogenous period, demonstrating that the early internationalism and sense of unlimited possibilities gave way, in or around 1923, to less idealistic, more pragmatic views and practices in even the avant-garde. If examined in this framework, the reception of avant-garde artists and works in the late 1920s that had been enthusiastically embraced in the first years of the decade, was understandably cooler. Professional eminence was overwriting great ideas. The lack of the earlier fervor had disappeared, not because the art was worse, but on account of the new Zeitgeist that brought about the new moral idea of utilitarianism, requiring that the artists be, first of all, of use to the community. Several artists and art writers suddenly turned against those ideas and art that they had only a short time earlier held in the highest esteem.

The Condition of Labor in Post-Soviet Russia

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 637-665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis H. Siegelbaum
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
World War ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Enterprise Level ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Wage Arrears

Labor (meaning both wage workers as well as their collective representation) in Russia was a major loser in the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Aggregate data on prices, average wage and pension levels, wage arrears, and unemployment indicate a serious decline in workers’ standard of living that is unprecedented in the post-World War II era, while strike data show an upsurge in this form of worker militancy during the mid-1990s but a decline thereafter.This article seeks to explain both why these developments occurred and what prevented workers from adequately defending their collective interests. Four explanations have been advanced by Western and Russian scholars. The first is that workers were victims of state policies pursued in line with the“Washington consensus” on how to effectuate the transition from an administrative-command to a market-based economy. The second points to workers’ attitudes and practices that were prevalent under Soviet conditions but proved inappropriate to post-Soviet life. The third, claiming that several key indices of workers’ standard of living are misleading, denies that labor has been a loser. The fourth and most compelling of the explanations is derived from ethnographically based research. It argues that despite changes in the forms of property and politics, power relations at the enterprise level remained intact, leaving workers and their unions dependent on the ability of management to bargain with suppliers of subsidies and credits. The article concludes with some observations about workers’ survival strategies and the extent to which collective dependence on economic and political strongmen has worked against structural change in favor of labor.

German Documents in the United States

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhard L. Weinberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
Joint Control ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Foreign Office

At the end of World War II, vast quantities of German documents had fallen into the hands of the Allies either during hostilities or in the immediately following weeks. Something will be said near the end of this report about the archives captured or seized by the Soviet Union; the emphasis here will be on those that came into the possession of the Western Allies. The United States and Great Britain made agreements for joint control and exploitation, of which the most important was the Bissell-Sinclair agreement named for the intelligence chiefs who signed it. The German naval, foreign office, and chancellery archives were to be physically located in England, while the military, Nazi Party, and related files were to come to the United States. Each of the two countries was to be represented at the site of the other's holdings, have access to the files, and play a role in decisions about their fate. The bulk of those German records that came to the United States were deposited in a section of a World War I torpedo factory in Alexandria, Virginia, which had been made into the temporary holding center for the World War II records of the American army and American theater commands. In accordance with the admonition to turn swords into plowshares, the building is now an artists' boutique.

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