scholarly journals Splitting Apart: How the Soviet-Albanian Relations Came to an End

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 66
Author(s):  
Geri Pilaca ◽  
Alban Nako

Albania was the only Eastern European country to exit from the Warsaw Pact and consequently become diplomatically isolated by its member states by late 1961. Such an event was the result of the continuous accusations exchanged between the Albanian and the Soviet Leaders, primarily between Enver Hoxha and Nikita Khrushchev. In the midst of the turbulent Soviet-Albanian relations, China offered its alliance to Albania which only worsened the situation. This study aims to illustrate how the curve of the Albanian-Soviet partnership changed over time, starting from the Stalin era and finishing with the Khrushchev era. More precisely, this study explains how Khrushchev’s decision-making concerning other countries, especially Yugoslavia, pushed the Albanian leaders into changing attitude towards the Soviet Union and make alliances with Mao Zedong.   Received: 2 May 2021 / Accepted: 15 June 2021 / Published: 8 July 2021

Author(s):  
Rósa Magnúsdóttir

Enemy Number One tells the story of Soviet propaganda and ideology toward the United States during the early Cold War. From Stalin’s anti-American campaign to Khrushchev’s peaceful coexistence, this book covers Soviet efforts to control available information about the United States and to influence the development of Soviet-American cultural relations until official cultural exchanges were realized between the two countries. The Soviet and American veterans of the legendary 1945 meeting on the Elbe and their subsequent reunions represent the changes in the superpower relationship: during the late Stalin era, the memory of the wartime alliance was fully silenced, but under Khrushchev it was purposefully revived and celebrated as a part of the propaganda about peaceful coexistence. The author brings to life the propaganda warriors and ideological chiefs of the early Cold War period in the Soviet Union, revealing their confusion and insecurities as they tried to navigate the uncertain world of the late Stalin and early Khrushchev cultural bureaucracy. She also shows how concerned Soviet authorities were with their people’s presumed interest in the United States of America, resorting to monitoring and even repression, thereby exposing the inferiority complex of the Soviet project as it related to the outside world.


Author(s):  
William C. Brumfield

This article examines the development of retrospective styles in Soviet architecture during the Stalin era, from the 1930s to the early 1950s. This highly visible manifestation of communist visual culture is usually interpreted as a reaction to the austere modernism of 1920s Soviet avant-garde architecture represented by the constructivist movement. The project locates the origins of Stalin-era proclamatory, retrospective style in prerevolutionary neoclassical revival architecture. Although functioning in a capitalist market, that neoclassical reaction was supported by prominent critics who were suspicious of Russia’s nascent bourgeoisie and felt that neoclassical or neo-Renaissance architecture could echo the glory of imperial Russia. These critics left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, but prominent architects of the neoclassicist revival remained in the Soviet Union. Together with the Academy of Architecture (founded 1933), these architects played a critical role in reviving classicist monumentalism—designated “socialist realism”—as the proclamatory style for the centralized, neoimperial statist system of the Stalin era. Despite different ideological contexts (prerevolutionary and Stalinist), retrospective styles were promulgated as models for significant architectural projects. The article concludes with comments on the post-Stalinist—and post-Soviet—alternation of modernist and retrospective architectural styles.


Arts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Izabela Kozłowska ◽  
Eryk Krasucki

Central and Eastern European countries were subjugated to the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century. In this new political environment, defined as the period of dependency, the concept of space gained a new denotation as a space of dependence, in both social and physical terms. The political changes that took place after 1989 enabled these spaces to be emancipated. In this work, we aim to delineate the complex relationship between architecture and politics from the perspective of spaces of dependence and their emancipation. Through a case study of two squares, plac Żołnierza Polskiego (the Square of the Polish Soldier) and plac Solidarności (Solidarity Square) in Szczecin, we gained insights into the processes and strategies that promoted their evolution into spaces of emancipation within architectural and urban narratives. Szczecin’s space of dependence was created by an authoritarian state that had a monopoly on defining architecture and urban planning in the country and the state as a whole. In a process orchestrated by economic factors, as well as the scale of architectural and urban degradation, the squares under discussion have transitioned from spaces of dependency to spaces of emancipation. As a result, an architectural-urban structure characterized by new cultural and identity values has been created.


2021 ◽  
pp. 161189442110186
Author(s):  
Anna Kozlova

The article analyses the survival of the children’s centres, Artek and Orlyonok, during the post-socialist transformation. It is based on 50 interviews with employees who worked there starting in the late-Soviet era. Artek and Orlyonok were exemplary children’s camps, subordinated to the Central Committee of the Komsomol. Since the early 1960s, they have functioned as schools for distinguished teenagers who were considered ‘good examples’ for other children. In this article, I have made an ethnographic analysis of Artek and Orlyonok employees’ late-Soviet experiences. This analysis shows how the agency of Soviet counsellors and camp directors became a creative interpretation of the governmental order to raise the children as active Soviet citizens. Camp educators transformed it in line with the idea to base their agency on ‘common human values’, which was spread in the Soviet educational field in the post-Stalin era. As a result, the Soviet teaching experiences gained in these education centres were heterogeneous. When a child-centred paradigm was later introduced to the post-Soviet educational system, the camps adopted the most applicable practices from their Soviet experiences.


2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erwin A. Schmidl

Geographically, Austria's position during the Cold War differed significantly from that of Switzerland or Sweden, let alone Ireland. Austria, like Finland, was situated along the Iron Curtain. In 1945, Austria was divided between East and West, and the Soviet Union hoped that the Austrian Communists could quickly gain power by largely democratic means. This effort failed, however, when the Communists lost decisively in the November 1945 elections. Over the next decade, Austria remained under Soviet and Western military occupation. The formal adoption of a neutral status for Austria in May 1955, when the Austrian State Treaty was signed, was a compromise needed to ensure the departure of Soviet forces from Austria. Although some other orientation might have been preferred, neutrality over time became firmly engrained in Austria's collective identity.


Author(s):  
Kevin Riehle

This book identifies 88 Soviet intelligence officers who defected from 1924 to 1954 and provides an aggregate analysis of their information to uncover Soviet strategic priorities and concerns. When intelligence officers defect, they take with them privileged information and often communicate it to the receiving state, and thereby they open a window into a closed national security decision making system. The book provides the most comprehensive list of Soviet intelligence officer defectors compiled to date representing a variety of specializations. Through the information they provided in now-declassified debriefings, documents they brought with them, and post-defection publications and public appearances, this book shows the evolution of Soviet threat perceptions and the development of the "main enemy" concept in the Soviet national security system. It also shows fluctuations in the Soviet recruitment and vetting of personnel for sensitive national security positions, corresponding with fluctuations in the stability of the Soviet government. The shifting motivations of these officers also reveals the pressures that they were experiencing at the time, leading to their choice to break with the Soviet Union.


2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (02) ◽  
pp. 219-258
Author(s):  
Nathalie Moine

This article focuses on the influx and circulation of foreign objects in the Soviet Union during the 1940s in order to investigate the specific role of these objects during World War II. It reveals how the distribution of humanitarian aid intersected with both the (non)recognition of the genocide of Soviet Jews during the Nazi occupation, and with Stalinist social hierarchies. It explains why erasing the origins and precise circumstances through which these objects entered Soviet homes could in turn be used to hide the abuses that the Red Army perpetrated against their defeated enemies. Finally, it revises the image of a Soviet society that discovered luxury and Western modernity for the first time during the war by reconsidering the place and the trajectories of these objects in Stalinist material culture of the interwar period.


2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 18885 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikoloz Chkhartishvili ◽  
Nino Rukhadze ◽  
Mariam Svanidze ◽  
Lali Sharvadze ◽  
Jack A Dehovitz ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
James Heinzen

This chapter reviews the meaning of the bribe in the late-Stalin era of the Soviet Union, focusing on how both the givers and receivers of bribes learned to use the bribe as a flexible tool for manoeuvring inside a disorganized economy and rigid bureaucratic system. Bribery emerged from a set of practices and attitudes that, in many cases, could serve certain practical functions, from distributing scarce goods and services, to establishing personalized relationships among state functionaries and citizens, to cutting through red tape.


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