A brief history of post-war soviet engineering psychology and ergonomics in persons

Ergodesign ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (4) ◽  
pp. 313-319
Author(s):  
Sergey Sergeev

The article deals with a brief history in the faces of post-war engineering psychology and ergonomics. It is shown that the emergence of disciplines in the Soviet Union taking into account the human factor while building complex systems of guided weapons and their improvement was an organized process of specialists’ joint activities in a wide class of scientific and practical disciplines involved in designing and operating ergatic systems for general and military purposes. Prominent representatives of the engineering-psychological and ergonomic discourse of the Soviet engineering psychology and ergonomics of the post-war period are considered in historical and personal terms. Their contribution to the theory and practice of designing man-machine systems is considered. The article shows the existence of local scientific schools in the field of human factor problems, the schools have arisen around the authoritative leaders and scholars solving scientific, design and organizational tasks for creating a new technology. The main literature sources, which served as a scientific and educational-methodological basis for developing domestic engineering psychology and ergonomics, are highlighted. The centres of advancing academic research and applying scientific developments into practice in the field of engineering psychology and ergonomics in modern Russia are stressed.

Author(s):  
N. D. Borshchik

The article considers little-studied stories in Russian historiography about the post-war state of Yalta — one of the most famous health resorts of the Soviet Union, the «pearl» of the southern coast of Crimea. Based on the analysis of mainly archival sources, the most important measures of the party and Soviet leadership bodies, the heads of garrisons immediately after the withdrawal of the fascist occupation regime were analyzed. It was established that the authorities paid priority attention not only to the destroyed economy and infrastructure, but also to the speedy introduction of all-Union and departmental sanatoriums and recreation houses, other recreational facilities. As a result of their coordinated actions in the region, food industry enterprises, collective farms and cooperative artels, objects of cultural heritage and the social and everyday sphere were put into operation in a short time.


2017 ◽  
Vol 922 (4) ◽  
pp. 48-57
Author(s):  
V.L. Kashin ◽  
N.L. Kashina

Biographic information about the veteran of geodetic service of the Soviet Union Tamara Aleksandrovna Prokofieva is provided in this article. On January 1, 2017, she turned 96 years old. T. A. Prokofieva’s biography is in many respects similar to destinies of her age-mates who met the Great Patriotic War on a student’s bench. In 1939 she entered the Moscow Institute of Geodesy, Aerial Photography, and Cartography. Since then all her life was connected with geodesy. In this article we use Tamara Aleksandrovna’s memories of a communal flat of the 1930s, peripetias of military years, of the North Caucasian and Kazakh aero geodetic enterprises where she worked with her husband Leonid Andreevich Kashin who held a number of executive positions in geodetic service of the USSR in the post-war time.


1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Burkett

AbstractRecent decades have seen a rethinking and renewal of Marxism on various levels, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s when New-Left movements in the developed capitalist countries combined with Maoist, Guevarist, and other Third-World liberation struggles to challenge the ossified theory and practice of Soviet-style communism and traditional social democracy. More recently, the rethinking of Marxism has been driven largely by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its official Marxist ideology, and by the movement toward neoliberal ‘free market’ policies on a global scale, which together have brought forth a tidal wave of frankly pro-capitalist as well as ‘postmodern’ left varieties of ‘end of history'-type thinking. The contemporary challenge to Marxism, however, also has a positive side in the form of popular revolts against the neoliberalisation of the global economy – the Chiapas rebellion in Mexico, the December 1995 public sector upheavals in France, and many others, not to mention the heroic struggle of the Cuban people against the threat of recolonisation by US and global capital. Here the challenge is to incorporate the changing forms of working-class movement, and their new prefigurations of post-capitalist society, into the theory and practice of Marxian communism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-31
Author(s):  
Jakub Majkowski

This essay will firstly address the extent of Stalin’s achievements in leading the course for domestic policy of the Soviet Union and its contribution towards maintaining the country’s supremacy in the world, for example the rapid post-war recovery of industry and agriculture, and secondly, the foreign policy including ambiguous relations with Communist governments of countries forming the Eastern Bloc, upkeeping frail alliances and growing antagonism towards western powers, especially the United States of America.   The actions and influence of Stalin’s closest associates in the Communist Party and the effect of Soviet propaganda on the society are also reviewed. This investigation will cover the period from 1945 to 1953. Additionally, other factors such as the impact of post-war worldwide economic situation and attitude of the society of Soviet Union will be discussed.    


Author(s):  
N.D. Borshchik ◽  

The article deals with the problems of post-war reconstruction of Yalta – one of the most popular resorts of the Soviet Union. During the great Patriotic war, this all-Union health resort was subjected to barbaric destruction and looting. The fascist occupation regime (1941-1944) caused enormous damage to the health resort Fund of Yalta, the city economy and the entire infrastructure of the southern coast of Crimea. The rapid return to the pre-war structure and the commissioning of social facilities has become a priority for the regional authorities and the population. In addition to traditional methods, the Patriotic «Сherkassov» movement, which began in the liberated Stalingrad in 1943 and spread throughout the country, was widely used. A solid Foundation was laid for the interaction of the city administration of Yalta and the local population with the commanders and soldiers of the red Army. Based on the analysis of archival documents of the State archive of the Republic of Crimea, it was possible to trace the course of restoration work in the fi rst months after the liberation of the Crimean Peninsula from fascism. It is established that for the rapid restoration and functioning of the Yalta resorts, public activists launched a socialist competition on «Сherkassov» methods


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 141-162
Author(s):  
Magdalena Ruta

The literary output of the Polish-Yiddish writers who survived WWII in the Soviet Union is mostly a literary mirror of the times of exile and wartime wandering. The two major themes that reverberate through these writings are: the refugees’ reflection on their stay in the USSR, and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. After the war, some of them described that period in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction, however, due to censorship, such accounts could only be published abroad, following the authors’ emigration from Poland. These writings significantly complement the texts produced during the war, offering plentiful details about life in Poland’s Eastern borderlands under Soviet rule as it was perceived by the refugees, or about the fate of specific persons in the subsequent wartime years. This literature, written in – and about – exile is not only an account of what was happening to Polish-Jewish refugees in the USSR, but also a testimony to their coping with an enormous psychological burden caused by the awareness (or the lack thereof) of the fate of Jews under Nazi German occupation. What emerges from all the literary texts published in post-war Poland, even despite the cuts and omissions caused by (self)-censorship, is an image of a postwar Jewish community affected by deep trauma, hurt and – so it seems – split into two groups: survivors in the East (vicarious witnesses), and survivors in Nazi-occupied Poland (direct victim witnesses). The article discusses on samples the necessity of extending and broadening of that image by adding to the reflection on Holocaust literature (which has been underway for many years) the reflection on the accounts of the experience of exile, Soviet forced labour camps, and wandering in the USSR contained in the entire corpus of literary works and memoirs written by Polish-Yiddish writers.


1970 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 256-276
Author(s):  
Dariusz Miszewski

During the Second World War, the national camp preached the idea of imperialism in Central Europe. Built peacefully, the Polish empire was supposed to protect the independence and security of countries in Central Europe against Germany and the Soviet Union, and thus went by the name of “the Great Poland”. As part of the empire, nation-states were retained. The national camp was opposed to the idea of the federation as promoted by the government-in-exile. The “national camp” saw the idea of federation on the regional, European and global level as obsolete. Post-war international cooperation was based on nation states and their alliances.


Author(s):  
Dianne Kirby

Despite Hoover's efforts to develop an alliance with the American Catholic Church, other Christian communities came under suspicion during the Cold War. This chapter by Dianne Kirby examines the surveillance of communities during the Cold War period that had transatlantic links and supported the continuation of the alliance with the Soviet Union or developed other contacts beyond the Iron Curtain. Her case studies include surveillance of the Russian Orthodox Church in America, which in the course of the war sought to transfer allegiance to the Moscow Patriarchate, a move that was stymied in the post-war period by deteriorating US-Soviet relations and Roman Catholic opposition.


Author(s):  
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė

This chapter focuses on computer-based global modeling, a new technology of knowledge production that emerged in the early 1970s and played an important, transformative role in Soviet governance by opening it up to East-West cooperation. Global modelers conceptualized the planet as a complex, interconnected system, the understanding of which required transnational scientific cooperation, enabling both scientists and data to cross national boundaries and Cold War divides. Moreover, Soviet scientists forged and used models of possible long-term futures of the world to reveal and criticize problems being experienced, but not always acknowledged, in the Soviet Union. Therefore, a history of computer-based global modeling is a history of East-West transfer, the transformation of the late state socialism and globalization.


Modern Italy ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Lee

Situated on the border between the capitalist West and Communist East, and with the largest Communist party in Western Europe, Italy found itself at the centre of global ideological struggles in the early Cold War years. A number of Italian writers and intellectuals who had joined the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) during the Resistance had hoped that the party would play a central role in the post-war reconstruction of Italy and were attracted to the Soviet Union as an example of Communism in action. This article centres on accounts of journeys to the USSR by Sibilla Aleramo, Renata Viganò and Italo Calvino. It will argue that although their writings portray a largely positive vision of the USSR, they should not be dismissed as naive, or worse, disingenuous travellers whose willingness to embrace Soviet-style Communism was based on a wholescale rejection of Western society and its values (see P. Hollander's 1998 [1981] work, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society). Rather, the article shows how their accounts of the USSR shed light on the writers' relationship with the PCI and argues that the views expressed in the travelogues emerge from the writers' personal experiences of war and resistance, a fervent desire to position themselves as anti-Fascist intellectuals, and their concerns regarding the direction that Italian politics was taking at a pivotal moment in the nation's history.


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