Suchergebnisse

The Russian civil war was a fratricidal climax of seven years of war and revolution that fractured Russian society. Its traumatic effects on postrevolutionary life are beyond measure. In this article Sean Guillory examines memoirs of Komsomol civil war veterans to illuminate the ways the war shaped their sense of self. Guillory argues that veterans' memoirs reveal a shattering of the self where their efforts to narrate their experience as agents of war was overshadowed by their transformation on the batdefield into instinctual beings, imprisoned by emotions, senses, nerves, and muscles. Guillory engages the scholarship on the Soviet self and subjectivity by calling attention to the ways trauma produces a "darker side" of the self, and in particular, how the body serves as a long-term depository for experiences of loss, disorientation, and deprivation.

The paper reviews the main activities of Komsomol organizations in the South Ossetian Autonomous Region of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic during the Great Patriotic War. The author enumerates the main events of the 1930s that contributed to the education of Komsomol members not only as future political cadres of the country, but also as future soldiers and officers of the Red Army. The paper studies participation of representatives of the Komsomol in support of the Red Army, organization of its sustainment, industrial and agricultural production. The author analyses ideological and agitation activities of the Komsomol organizations that are considered a state function assigned to the Komsomol of the region during the most severe military struggles in the Caucasian theater of operations. The paper identifies the main motive of the Komsomol organizations' activity driven by personal initiative of Komsomol members, as well as the reasons for its formation during the most difficult conditions of wartime.

AbstractThis article examines the evolution of official Soviet remembrance of the Second World War in the decades that followed 1945. Focusing on elite discourse and Komsomol military-patriotic curricula associated with the state cult of the war, the article argues that Soviet remembrance promoted the war as a fundamentally supranational experience and the basis for a transcendent, pan-Soviet imagined community. The article questions an influential scholarly position that emphasizes the party leadership's reliance on pre-socialist, russocentric imagery for popular mobilization. In fact, official remembrance practices after Stalin were most striking in the extent to which they consistently downplayed Russian exceptionalism for the sake of the paramount Soviet whole. The article proposes that this tendency should be viewed as part of a larger, internally contested effort to move away from a distinct ethnic hierarchy, and toward a picture of non-ethnic, pan-Soviet uniformity.

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.

Soviet officials routinely remarked that the Bolshevik Revolution had destroyed the socioeconomic base from which drug use and addiction sprung. Yet, authorities also anxiously reported rising instances of drug use among Soviet youth during the 1950s and 1960s. Through the use of recently declassified Komsomol and police documents from Russian archives, this article examines both the consumptive practices of youth and the measures taken by Soviet authorities to combat this development. Within the liberalizing climate of the Khrushchev-era "Thaw," youth authorities crafted educational and cultural strategies to draw youth away from narcotics. Beginning in the mid-1960s, their emphasis shifted to favor openly punitive strategies as a means of curbing the illegal drug supply and discouraging usage. Contrary to official rhetoric, the consumption of narcotics did not necessarily constitute a political statement or indicate opposition to Soviet power. Instead, drugs could provide an alluring alternative to state-sanctioned leisure practices.

The biography of a first Soviet researcher of the history of the Volyn Germans, Samuel Nickel, is presented and analyzed on the basis of the materials of the archives and judicial investigation. The main focus is made on the circumstances of his arrest, his "crime" investigation and Nickel's long struggle for his justification, including against the blame about the content of his book «Germans in Volyn».
Samuel Nickel came from background of the German colonists of Eastern Volyn. In the early 1920s he joined the Komsomol, that helped him get higher education at the Zhytomyr Institute of Public Education. It was the basis of his rapid career development in the field of education and in the local bodies of Soviet power. In 1927 he became a member of the Communist Party of the Bolsheviks of Ukraine.
In 1931–1935 S. Nickel worked in Kharkiv at the important positions in the editions of the German speaking Soviet journals. In 1935 he finished his book about the history of the Volyn Germans and it was published under the title «Die deutschen in Wolhynien» («Germans in Volyn»).
In October 1935 he was arrested by NKVD. He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and campaigning. A separate point of accusation was against his book «Germans in Volyn». The investigation was not fair, and there was lack of evidences against the author. S. Nickel bravely fought for himself, but in 1936 he was convicted by the court. He was trying to defend his book and his honest name for many years. He was exonerated in 1960.