Misreading History

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Markwick ◽  
Mikhail Shifman
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Experiment

Viewing the rise of fascism in the 1930s, to many European intellectuals the Soviet Union seemed the only barrier to Armageddon. But an environment of total war and backwardness scarred the Soviet experiment.

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Experiment

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools—from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. This book presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. It shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the “sacred spaces” of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. The book explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

Armageddon and the Gulag, 1939–1945

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven A. Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
Red Army ◽  
History Of

This chapter focuses on the Gulag during the Armageddon of the Great Patriotic War. It shows how the institutions, practices, and identities of the Gulag shifted in accord with the demands of total war. The war was an era of mass release on an unprecedented scale side by side with the highest mortality rates in the history of the Gulag system. After four years of brutal, exhausting warfare and a disastrous initial stage, the Soviet Union emerged from its Armageddon victorious. The early postwar period offered no indication that the Gulag would cease to be a mass social phenomenon within fifteen years. Rather, the Gulag remained a pillar in the reestablishment of the Soviet system, following the Red Army into liberated territories, so that every liberated district received its own corrective labor colony. By 1944, the camp and colony population began to grow again.

3. International history 1900–99

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Len Scott
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This chapter focuses on some of the principal developments in world politics from 1900 to 1999: the development of total war, the advent of nuclear weapons, the onset of cold war, and the end of European imperialism. It shows how the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union became the key dynamic in world affairs, replacing the dominance of — and conflict among — European states in the first half of the twentieth century. It also examines the ways that the cold war promoted or prevented global conflict, how decolonization became entangled with East–West conflicts, and how dangerous the nuclear confrontation between East and West was. Finally, the chapter considers the role of nuclear weapons in specific phases of the cold war, notably in détente, and then with the deterioration of Soviet–American relations in the 1980s.

scholarly journals Emancipation Through Communism: The Ideology of A. M. Kollontai

Slavic Review ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Evans Clements
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Free Love ◽  
Soviet History ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
State Welfare ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Experiment

Traditionally in surveys of Soviet history, if Alexandra Kollontai is mentioned she is presented briefly as the advocate of the “glass of water theory of sex,” a woman who practiced free love as freely as she preached it. The lecturer then moves on to more serious concerns, having ignored the history of a tormented, perceptive woman intimately involved in the early Soviet experiment in female emancipation. Kollontai advocated far more than free love, and the role she played was far greater than that of mistress to Alexander Shliapnikov. From 1917 until her departure from the Soviet Union in 1923 she held positions of major importance in the young government and in the Bolshevik party. Kollontai worked first as an agitator in 1917, then took the post of commissar of state welfare from November 1917 to March 1918, when she resigned in protest against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In 1921 she joined the Workers' Opposition, adding to Shliapnikov's proposals for trade-union reform her own call for party and government democratization and giving articulate voice to those demands in an often-cited pamphlet, The Workers' Opposition. Throughout the revolutionary years she was recognized as a major authority on the problems of women and child care. Since Kollontai did play an important role in the early period of Soviet history, her personality and ideology warrant study. That study in turn reveals a woman who perceived the problems of womanhood with clarity and who wrote about and sought a liberation beyond the comprehension of many of her contemporaries.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Wendy Z. Goldman ◽  
Donald Filtzer
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
State And Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
War Production ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

On June 22, 1941, the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa with the mightiest military force ever concentrated in a single theater of war. They occupied large swathes of Soviet territory; surrounded Leningrad in the longest siege in modern history; and reached the outskirts of Moscow. Soviet leaders adopted a policy of total war in which every resource, including labor, was mobilized for war production. The civilian toll was great. The Soviet Union lost more people, in absolute numbers and as a percentage of its population, than any other combatant nation: an estimated 26 million to 27 million people. Almost every Soviet family was affected in some terrible way. This book is the first archivally based history of the home front to explore the relationship of state and society from invasion to liberation. Focusing on the cities and industrial towns, it shows how ordinary citizens, mobilized for “total war,” became central to the Allied victory.

3. International history of the twentieth century

2019 ◽  
pp. 54-69
Author(s):  
Len Scott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter focuses on some of the principal developments in world politics from 1900 to 1999: the development of total war, the advent of nuclear weapons, the onset of cold war, and the end of European imperialism. It shows how the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union became the key dynamic in world affairs, replacing the dominance of—and conflict among—European states in the first half of the twentieth century. It also examines the ways that the cold war promoted or prevented global conflict, how decolonization became entangled with East–West conflicts, and how dangerous the nuclear confrontation between East and West was. Finally, the chapter considers the role of nuclear weapons in specific phases of the cold war, notably in détente, and then with the deterioration of Soviet–American relations in the 1980s.

La Paz en el Concilio Vaticano ii

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 396-422
Author(s):  
Carmen–José Alejos
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Vatican Council ◽  
La Paz ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
Peace And War ◽  
Second World

The Second Vatican Council addressed the question of peace and war in the nos. 77–90 of the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes. A few years after the end of the Second World War, the Council Fathers and the whole of humanity were aware of its devastating effects and need to avoid a new conflict. The Second Vatican Council began and developed in a global context of decolonization of 38 countries, of growth of superpowers and of cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The different editorial schemes show the thought of the Council Fathers, which evolved from proposing peace as a struggle against war, up to posing it as the best condition for the community, which must be complete, durable and stable. Thus the Council firmly rejected all forms of war (just war, total war) and violence; the arms race was also condemned, and at the same time an appeal was made to humanity to free itself from the old slavery of war.

LABOUR, THE LEFT, AND THE STALINIST PURGES OF THE LATE 1930s

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-207
Author(s):  
PAUL CORTHORN
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Pressure ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
British Labour ◽  
United Front ◽  
Soviet Experiment

It is clear that a strand of anti-Stalinism had firmly entered the political discourse of British Labour and the Left by the late 1940s. This was largely a response to mounting Cold War tension and is rightly seen to contrast with their earlier broad support for the Soviet experiment. This article adds to this picture by arguing that anti-Stalinism was first adumbrated in the late 1930s in reaction to the Stalinist purges. Whereas previous accounts have given the impression that the Labour party and the wider Left were largely uninterested in the purges, this article shows instead that they provoked sharp criticisms of Stalin from across the range of Labour and Left opinion. Moreover, it also demonstrates that while certain figures and groupings did choose not to discuss the purges publicly, this was not necessarily because of a lack of interest or knowledge. For the Left the domestic political necessities of supporting the united front meant that, at least temporarily, their real views had to be concealed. More generally, the international pressure of endorsing the Soviet Union as an ally against international fascism inhibited an even more forthright condemnation of Stalin.

War of the Factories

2020 ◽  
pp. 172-206
Author(s):  
Stefan J. Link
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
World War ◽  
War Economy ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
War Machine

This chapter evaluates how both regimes of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany put Fordism to use during World War II. William Werner's ascent to the commanding heights of Nazi Germany's wartime industrial complex illustrates how the state-led pursuit of mass production that began in the 1930s intensified under the conditions of total war. With greater force than before, the Nazi regime sought to bind industry to the war economy. The bureaucracy of the armaments began telling firms what to produce, how to produce, and whom to hire. Werner's career, then, sheds light on a crucial but little-explored realm of the Nazi war economy: the institutional interface that bridged the ministries and the shop floors. Like the Nazi war machine, the Soviet armaments industry had to find ways to achieve, in the words of William Werner, “higher output with fewer skilled workers.” How this worked can be illustrated by looking, once more, at Gaz.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document