Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This article explores the challenge presented to governments and the scientific establishment by physicists who campaigned internationally on behalf of their Soviet scientific colleagues in the early 1980s. Cold War science operated in a highly charged environment: while the work of scientists on both sides of the Cold War divide was sponsored and closely guarded by government and military agencies, scientists were also at the forefront of activist challenges to human rights infringements suffered by their colleagues. The article explores the motivations for and limitations of a moratorium on participation in scientific exchange with the Soviet Union launched by the California-based group "Scientists for Sakharov, Orlov and Shcharansky" (sos). It considers the ways that both professional identity and Cold War dynamics shaped this solidarity campaign. sos sought to build their activism on a transnational basis and worked closely with scientific colleagues in Europe to do so. They pitched a campaign that appealed beyond the university and national scientific laboratories to a broad range of people who identified as scientists. Unlike many contemporary scientific organizations, the sos leadership embraced the political nature of such activism. As a whole, this article shows how scientists navigated different political and scientific contexts when organizing support for their Soviet colleagues.

The Royal Naval Armoured Car Division was dispatched to fight with the Russian Army in 1915. In diaries, letters, and post-war exercises in autobiography, members of the unit expressed a sense of disconnection from the 'real war' in the west. In fact, their tour of Russia exemplified many aspects of the wartime Anglo-Russian alliance: the profusion of channels of authority; the logistics of wartime supply; the interventionist schemes designed to keep Russia in the war at all costs. This article examines how the connections between the western and eastern fronts were understood and navigated by diplomats and strategists, and by soldiers encountering an unfamiliar theatre of war.

«A Great Host of Sympathisers»: The Doukhobor Emigration and its International Supporters, 1895–1905 Between September 1898 and July 1899, 7500 members of the non-resistant Doukhobor sect emigrated from Russia to Canada. This article investigates the networks of moral, logistical and financial support that made this emigration possible. Members of the Society of Friends in England and America, Tolstoyan Christian anarchists and opponents of the Tsarist regime worked, through their own networks and together, to raise funds and raise the Doukhobors' profile. Their relationships with each other, with the Doukhobors and with external audiences were complicated by their own very different investments in the cause. This article explores the aims, activities and impact of this campaign, along with its value for the campaigners. It offers a case study of the complex relationships in such a campaign between humanitarianism, solidarity and self-interest.

Abstract
This essay introduces "Between Subversion and Opposition: Multiple Challenges to Communist Rule," a special issue of East Central Europe. It focuses on four broader questions raised by the contributions: the different periodizations associated with communist rule; the meanings attached to different forms of subversion and dissent; the broader transnational contexts in which activists operated – including the role of contacts with activists in the West; and, finally, the different ways oppositional activity has been remembered and represented.

This article introduces a special Labour History Review issue on the subject of Challenges to State Socialism in Central and Eastern Europe: Activists, Movements and Alliances in the 1970s and 1980s. Our piece highlights different stimuli for dissent and opposition in the Eastern bloc, drawing attention to three strands that helped to inform political activism. First, it discusses the way in which various forms of dissident Marxism informed critiques of 'actually existing socialism' and helped activists to envision alternative ways of organizing society and state. Second, it emphasizes intersections between different actors and motivations, including links between the labour movement and forms of activism that have sometimes been categorized as 'new social movements'. Third, it notes the relevance of transnational inspirations and alliances, with a particular consideration of those that cut across the two power blocs. As a whole, the essay establishes the broader context for the case studies of activism and dissent that feature in this special journal issue.