scholarly journals Poles in the Arkhangelsk exile during the Second World War (a case study of the special settlements of Uima and Koskovo)

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 1294-1324
Author(s):  
Mikhail N. Suprun ◽  
Alena I. Gerasimova

After the outbreak of the Second World War, the eastern territories of Poland were occupied by the Soviet troops (and the new Soviet-Polish border was removed far to the West). Almost 320 thousand Polish citizens who resided in these territories were arrested and sent to the camps and special settlements in the remote regions of the USSR. Of them, almost 58 thousand people were deported to Arkhangelsk Oblast. Based on the materials of two special settlements of Primorsky Raion of Arkhangelsk Oblast, this article considers the process of deportation of Polish citizens, the conditions of their accommodation and labor, their legal status, and repatriation. The authors made an attempt to identify social groups, establish the sex and age composition of the deportees, describe the process of their adaptation to the new conditions and labor efficiency, and point out the peculiarities of the application of amnesty and repatriation. According to the results of the study, the authors came to the conclusion that the conditions in the special settlements under study were such that the death rate among Polish settlers there in the first winter was almost 10% despite the territorial proximity of these settlements to the regional center. Of the survivors, only 20% of working-age men could be involved in the work in the forest. The rest of the exiles consisted of women and children, more than half of whom (47%) were children under the age of 14. In violation of the law, another 15–20% of this number could be sent to work, but in any case, the labor efficiency of such workers was minimal. The situation was aggravated by the lack of normal working and living conditions, which entailed high disease incidence and, as a result, absence from work. Such a contingent became burdensome for logging enterprises. Even with the lowest wages, special settlers’ labor was unprofitable. Meanwhile, even after the 1941 amnesty, the authorities did everything they could to keep the special settlers in the USSR. The authors explain this fact by an attempt to make Polish citizens hostages in resolving the “Polish issue,” i.e. recognition of the new Soviet-Polish border by the West and the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. As soon as an agreement with the allies on the western border of the USSR was reached and the special settlers got an opportunity to leave the USSR, there was no single Polish citizen who wanted to stay in the Soviet Union, and all of them hastened to leave for their homeland.

1984 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 473-480
Author(s):  
Gavin White

Why have churches in the U.S.S.R. been harassed in recent years? It has been supposed by many that if Stalin stopped most persecution during the Second World War, then things under Khrushchev could only improve. Instead they deteriorated, and all liberties of Soviet citizens received more respect except the religious.A common answer has been that the Soviet authorities were horrified by the continued hold of religion which they considered to be a threat to Marxism. Such a view is quite popular in the west where a clash of ideologies, with Christianity triumphing over Marxism, consoles churchmen who cannot find such a triumph in their own society. But this assumes that the Soviet rulers consider Christianity to be a religion based on certain tenets, and as Marxists they cannot be expected to do so. For them religion is primarily an instrument of social control.


1960 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 51-60
Author(s):  
Robert C. North

Western visitors to the Soviet Union report a growing Russian anxiety about Communist China and its inclinations and potentialities. The Soviet “man in the street,” who recalls what Leningrad and Kiev and Minsk and Odessa experienced during the Second World War, maintains a sober respect for the world's new weapons—whether nuclear, bacteriological or something even more dreadful that is only whispered about. He is increasingly ready to believe, moreover, that Western capitalist peoples share this sober respect, but Communist China gives him cause for deep uneasiness. Is it possible that China might trigger a war which both the Soviet Union and the West would prefer to avoid?


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 100-123
Author(s):  
Marlene Laruelle

With memory wars between Central and Eastern European states and Russia, the Second World War has become a useable past instrumentalized as a currency for legitimacy on the international scene. These memory wars focus on who was fascist and who colluded with Nazism—the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941 or the collaborationist forces in Central and Eastern Europe? And, subsequently, who are the new fascists advancing a revisionist interpretation of the Second World War today: Putin’s Russia or Central and Eastern European countries? What is at stake here is the recognition of Russia as having a legitimate say in European affairs because of the Soviet victory, or its exclusion for refusing to repent of its role in dividing Europe and occupying a part thereof. This article debunks the accusation of fascism attributed to Putin’s regime and offers to look at the label of fascism as a mirror game between the West and Russia in defining what Europe should be like and Russia’s inclusion or exclusion.


2021 ◽  
pp. 91-117
Author(s):  
David Bosco

The years following the Second World War saw dramatic national expansion into the ocean. The United States began the process in 1945 by claiming the continental shelf and expanded fishing rights. Other countries followed suit, sometimes with even more ambitious claims. New concerns about overfishing motivated many countries to expand their national waters. National pressure on freedom of the seas combined with a conceptual challenge as newly independent countries argued that the doctrine had aided colonialism by the West. On the environmental front, figures like Rachel Carson warned about the damage humans were inflicting on the oceans. Meanwhile, ocean commerce went through a revolution prompted by the development of container shipping. The Soviet Union became a major maritime power, a transformation that would have major implications for the effort to provide a new legal framework for the oceans.


Belleten ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 67 (250) ◽  
pp. 949-986
Author(s):  
Yücel Güçlü

In view of growing threat of the Axis powers, by the beginning of 1939 a security agreement with the Soviet Union came high on the list of Turkish priorities. Turkey would also co-operate with Britain in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Ankara proposed a triangular Turco-Anglo-Soviet relationship. Turkey sought to search for the illusive Soviet connection to parallel its signing of mutual assistance agreement with Britain on 12 May 1939. But the Germano-Soviet Non-aggression Pact of 23 August 1939 upset the entire international balance and put Turkey into a delicate position. Nonetheless Ankara still considered that arriving at an accord with Moscow would not be incompatible with its engagements towards the West. Saracoğlu's mission to Muscow in the autumn of 1939 failed because of Russia's attempts to unilaterally amend the Montreux Straits Convention and to draw Turkey away from the West. During Saracoğlu-Molotov talks, Kremlin endeavoured to obtain a foothold at the Straits in order at once prevent others from commanding the warm water approach to its Black Sea ports and to place itself in a position to exercise a hand in Mediterranean affairs. Relations between Turkey and Russia thus entered into a new period of mutual distrust and tension.


2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 839-859 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Earl Porter

The sheer enormity of Soviet losses at the hands of German forces during the Second World War staggers the mind. During the immediate post-war period, Stalin did not want the West to know just how badly the Soviet Union had been mauled or the fact that far more Soviet soldiers had died than German ones (up to three times as many); consequently, the Soviets clamed that the total number of dead was 7 million, while Western estimates were between 10 and 15 million Soviet dead. It was only during the Khrushchev era that the true scale of the disaster was revealed and the more accurate figure of 20 million dead was generally accepted. Of these, only half were soldiers. The rest were at least 10 million civilians, including 2 million who died as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. The death toll has more recently been put at 25, 27 and even 30 million, though I suspect the latter figures also take into consideration the decline in birth rates. In April 2009 Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev appointed yet another commission to give a final accounting of Soviet losses.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
John Marsland

During the twenty years after the Second World War, housing began to be seen as a basic right among many in the west, and the British welfare state included many policies and provisions to provide decent shelter for its citizens. This article focuses on the period circa 1968–85, because this was a time in England when the lack of affordable, secure-tenured housing reached a crisis level at the same time that central and local governmental housing policies received wider scrutiny for their ineffectiveness. My argument is that despite post-war laws and rhetoric, many Britons lived through a housing disaster and for many the most rational way they could solve their housing needs was to exploit loopholes in the law (as well as to break them out right). While the main focus of the article is on young British squatters, there is scope for transnational comparison. Squatters in other parts of the world looked to their example to address the housing needs in their own countries, especially as privatization of public services spread globally in the 1980s and 1990s. Dutch, Spanish, German and American squatters were involved in a symbiotic exchange of ideas and sometimes people with the British squatters and each other, and practices and rhetoric from one place were quickly adopted or rejected based on the success or failure in each place.


2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-23
Author(s):  
Nela Štorková

While today the Ethnographic Museum of the Pilsen Region represents just one of the departments of the Museum of West Bohemia in Pilsen, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in 1915, it emerged as an independent institution devoted to a study of life in the Pilsen region. Ladislav Lábek, the founder and long-time director, bears the greatest credit for this museum. This study presents PhDr. Marie Ulčová, who joined the museum shortly after the Second World War and in 1963 replaced Mr. Lábek on his imaginary throne. The main objective of this article is to introduce the personality of Marie Ulčová and to evaluate the activity of this Pilsen ethnographer and the museum employee with an emphasis on her work in the Ethnographic Museum of the Pilsen Region. The basic aspects of the ethnographic activities, not only of Marie Ulčová but also of the Ethnographic Museum of the Pilsen Region in the years 1963–1988, are described through her professional and popularising articles, archival sources and contemporary periodicals.


Author(s):  
Mark Edele

This chapter turns to the present and explains the implications of the current study for the ongoing debate about the Soviet Union in the Second World War and in particular about the role of loyalty and disloyalty in the Soviet war effort. It argues that this study strengthens those who argue for a middle position: the majority of Soviet citizens were neither unquestioningly loyal to the Stalinist regime nor convinced resisters. The majority, instead, saw their interests as distinct from both the German and the Soviet regime. Nevertheless, ideology remains important if we want to understand why in the Soviet Union more resisted or collaborated than elsewhere in Europe and Asia.


2021 ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Boris Martynov

The article deals with the evolution of views of the Brazilian authors on the role, played by the Soviet Union in the WWII and its contribution to the victory of the anti-Hitlerian coalition. It contains a historiographical review of the works, written by the Brazilian authors on the theme, beginning from 2004. One follows the process of their growing interest towards clarifying the real contribution of the Soviet part to the common victory, along with the rise of the international authority of Brazil and strengthening of the Russo – Brazilian ties. One reveals the modern attitude of Brazilian authors towards such dubious or scarcely known themes as the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact, the battles for Smolensk and Rhzev, town–bound fights in Stalingrad, liberation of the Baltic republics, the Soviet war with Japan, etc. The author comes to conclusion, that in spite of the Western efforts to infuse the people`s conscience with the elements of the “post – truth” in this respect, the correct treatment of those events acquires priority even in such a far off from Russia state, as Brazil.


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