Trust in Talent

This chapter examines the career of Ilya Averbakh, whose work more than any other director’s came to signify to 1970s audiences the essence of “Lenfilm style.” It contends that a key factor in Averbakh’s easy progress to authority among his elders was his capacity to inspire trust not just by his professional standing within the world of cinema, or his elite Leningrad background, but by virtue of his former professional life as a physician—that is, his membership of a group that enjoyed particularly high esteem from the Soviet population generally. The chapter also traces the resonance of trust in Averbakh’s own films, and particularly, Degree of Risk (which represents a cardiologist) and Monologue, where a scientist’s difficult path to professional rehabilitation is juxtaposed to his increasingly tense relations with his student-age granddaughter.

A Soviet Ethnic Cleansing? The Polish-Soviet Population Exchange and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1944–1947

The article examines the population exchange between Poland and the Soviet Union in 1944–1947, its role in the shaping of modern Ukraine, and its place in the evolution of the Soviet nationality policy. It investigates the factors involved in the decision-making of individuals and state officials and then assesses how people on the ground made sense of the Soviet population politics. While the earlier scholarship saw the transfer as punitive national deportation, the article argues that it was neither punitive nor purely national nor was it a deportation. The article shows that the party-state was ambivalent about the Polish minority and was not committed to total national homogenization of Western Ukraine. Instead, the people themselves were often eager to leave the USSR because of the poor living conditions, fear of Sovietization, and ethnic conflict. Paradoxically, one of the largest Soviet nation-building projects was not the product of coherent nationality policy.

“We Have to Figure Out Where We Lost People”

This chapter examines how the atheist apparatus mobilized the social sciences in order to map patterns of Soviet secularization and understand religious modernization. It first considers the revival of the social sciences and social scientists' role in ideological work before discussing the research carried out by the Institute of Scientific Atheism (INA), especially on the religiosity of the Soviet population. It then explores how atheists tried to figure out how atheism could fulfill spiritual needs in order to develop a positive foundation for atheism, as well as their focus on the role of families and their realization that emotions played a key role in religion. Finally, it describes the Penza project and its claim that the social sciences could be harnessed to finally produce an effective plan for achieving “a society free of religion”.

Profiles

This chapter paints a collective portrait of those who deserted from the Red Army across the frontline to the Germans. It investigates their age, ethnicity, social class, and gender. It concludes that defectors from the Red Army were broadly representative of the Soviet population at large. While minority nationalities, older men, and the lower social orders were over-represented, the largest group were Russians and 40 per cent were 30 years or younger. Every ethnicity, class, and age group in Soviet society thus contained defectors. The one exception is gender. While there were a significant number of women serving in the Red Army, defectors were nearly exclusively male.