Les organisations de masse en Union soviétique, syndicats et Komsomol
In: [Publications] 1
In: [Publications] 1
In: Studia politica: Romanian political science review ; revista română de ştiinţă politică, Band 17, Heft 1, S. 37-54
Created in 1934, the Union of Soviet Writers facilitated the instrumentalisation of literature by the Soviet authorities: it was its main goal, explicitly proclaimed at the first Congress of this Union, and repeated until the 1980s. The Union of Soviet Writers was supposed to create and educate a "New Person" who would build and embody communism. Furthermore, the Union of Soviet Writers was the model of other creative unions in the USSR and in the Soviet bloc. For more than fifty years, it selected, guided and controlled writers; it participated to the censorship process, as well as to the purges and repression of dissidents. In exchange, the Union of Soviet Writers received very important material rewards, of which its leaders were the main beneficiaries. The Union of Writers developed as a pyramidal structure: it had organizations in every Soviet republic (in Russia, only since 1958) and in many towns, and they collaborated at all levels with the corresponding CPSU structures. During the Stagnation, it also reactivated functional links with the army, the Ministry of the Interior and the Komsomol, with kolkhozes and factories. The Union of Soviet Writers was infiltrated by the KGB, which contributed to spreading fear and sterilizing an official literature of which few works are still read nowadays.
In: Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, Band 24, Heft 4, S. 369-410
Wladimir Berelowitch, The ancient and the new: the life of the Russian village under the NEP as per Soviet monographs of the time.
At the time of the NEP, Soviet villages had been the subject of different monographs bearing on all aspects of rural life, in most cases on the scale of the volost'. These monographs, which combine precise information with personal impressions and comments of peasants, constitute irreplaceable evidence bearing on changes that occurred in the Russian countryside.
Utilizing this little-explored source, the author endeavors to establish the constants. The analysis attempts to show that the "ancient" is still very much alive and that the "new" that the research workers endeavor to define is mostly mythical: the differentiation of peasants is very slight, the Soviet institutions are but barely implanted, the political influences practically non-existent, and the Church still present. But against the background of deep social changes (propulsion towards instruction, unsettling of the family...), new elements tend to appear (school of atheism, anti-adult Komsomols...) announcing the revolution of 1929.