Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction. Into and Beyond the Stalinist Model of Secret Policing | Michael David-Fox -- 1. The Origins of Stalin's Mass Operations: The Extrajudicial Special Assembly, 1922-1953 | Marc Junge, Andrei Savin, and Aleksei Tepliakov -- 2. The NKVD and the Political Origins of Socialist Realism: The Persecution of the Boichukisty in Ukraine | Angelina Lucento -- 3. KGB Photography Experimentation: Turning Religion into Organized Crime | Tatiana Vagramenko -- 4. The Gulag's "Dead Souls": Mortality of Released Invalids in the Camps, 1930-1955 | Mikhail Nakonechnyi -- 5. Deciphering the Stalinist Perpetrators: The Case of Georgian NKVD Investigators Khazan, Savitskii, and Krimian | Timothy K. Blauvelt and David Jishkariani -- 6. "Conflicts Are the Core of Social Life": Fomenting Mistrust at the Tallinn State Conservatory in the 1940s-1960s | Aigi Rahi-Tamm -- 7. Constructing Guilt and Tracking the Enemy: The Hunt for "State Criminals" in Soviet Lithuania, 1944-1953 | Emilia Koustova -- 8. The Mug Shot and the Close-Up: Identification and Visual Pedagogy in Secret Police Film | Cristina Vatulescu -- 9. The Soviets Abroad: The NKVD, Intelligence, and State Building in East-Central Europe after World War II | Molly Pucci -- 10. The Black Sea Coast as a Landscape of Cold War Intelligence | Erik R. Scott -- 11. Recidivism, Prophylaxis, and the KGB | Edward Cohn -- 12. Human Rights Activism as International Conspiracy: Iurii Andropov, Soviet Dissidents, and "Ideological Sabotage," 1967-1980 Douglas Selvage -- 13. Cybernetics and Surveillance: The Secret Police Enter the Computer Age | Joshua Sanborn -- Contributors -- Index.

"Before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent archival revolution, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous "literary investigation" The Gulag Archipelago was the most authoritative overview of the Stalinist system of camps. This volume develops a much more thorough and nuanced understanding of the Gulag. It brings a greater awareness of the wide variety of camps, the forced labor system, and the Gulag as viewed in a global historical context, among many other topics. It also offers fascinating new interpretations of the interrelationship and importance of the Gulag to the larger Soviet political and economic system, and how they were in fact, parts of the same entity"--

Using archival materials never previously accessible to Western scholars, Michael David-Fox analyzes Bolshevik Party educational and research initiatives in higher learning after 1917. His fresh consideration of the era of the New Economic Policy and cultural politics after the Revolution explains how new communist institutions rose to parallel and rival conventional higher learning from the Academy of Sciences to the universities. Beginning with the creation of the first party school by intellectuals on the island of Capri in 1909, David-Fox argues, the Bolshevik cultural project was tightly linked to party educational institutions. He provides the first account of the early history and politics of three major institutions founded after the Revolution: Sverdlov Communist University, where the quest to transform everyday life gripped the student movement; the Institute of Red Professors, where the Bolsheviks sought to train a new communist intellectual or red specialist; and the Communist Academy, headquarters for a planned, collectivist, proletarian science.

"Crossing Borders deconstructs contemporary theories of Soviet history from the revolution through the Stalin period, and offers new interpretations based on a transnational perspective. To Michael David-Fox, Soviet history was shaped by interactions across its borders. By reexamining conceptions of modernity, ideology, and cultural transformation, he challenges the polarizing camps of Soviet exceptionalism and shared modernity and instead strives for a theoretical and empirical middle ground as the basis for a creative and richly textured analysis. Discussions of Soviet modernity have tended to see the Soviet state either as an archaic holdover from the Russian past, or as merely another form of conventional modernity. David-Fox instead considers the Soviet Union in its own light--as a seismic shift from tsarist society that attracted influential visitors from the pacifist Left to the fascist Right. By reassembling Russian legacies, as he shows, the Soviet system evolved into a complex 'intelligentsia-statist' form that introduced an array of novel agendas and practices, many embodied in the unique structures of the party-state. Crossing Borders demonstrates the need for a new interpretation of the Russian-Soviet historical trajectory--one that strikes a balance between the particular and the universal"--

Introduction : Russia and the West in a Soviet key -- Cultural diplomacy of a new type -- Going West : Soviet cultural operations abroad -- The Potemkin village dilemma -- Gorky's gulag -- Hard-currency foreigners and the campaign mode -- Stalin and the fellow-travelers revisited -- Going East : friends and enemies -- Rise of the Stalinist superiority complex -- Epilogue : toward the cultural Cold War

The German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941 brought with it the most extreme conditions of the short twentieth century. Suddenly, the existence of the Soviet state was no longer assured. What the regime did in response tells us much about Stalinism and the Soviet order. In an enormous swathe of territory from the western and southern borderlands of the USSR to the ethnic Russian heartland, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Operation Barbarossa triggered successive regime changes and reversals with which everyone had to reckon. States and armies were hardly the only critically important actors, moreover, as the war unleashed local conflicts and nationalist movements. In sum, aft er years of extreme statism and isolation, millions of Soviet citizens suddenly faced fateful decisions about what to do and how to act.

The intellectual movement to interpret fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism as "political religions" has generated lively debates and an intensive publication program for over a decade. The scholarly trend has been closely associated with a revival of the concept of totalitarianism, reconfigured to account for the popular appeal and violent fervor of twentieth-century mass movements of the extreme right and left. As theoreticians of political religion have been preoccupied with arguments about the definition of religion and the problems of comparison, two stumbling blocks have become increasingly apparent. First, historians of Soviet communism, who since the early 1990s have empirically and conceptually transformed the study of Stalinism and Soviet history, have either exhibited "utter neglect" of the political-religion concept or have shunned it due to the scientism and official atheism of the regime. As a result, comparisons in the political-religion mode have generally been carried out by scholars not expert in Soviet history. Second, and closely related to this, even sympathetic critics have found secular religion too blunt a tool and too generic a concept to probe the "novel, supranational, but historically specific . . . sense of mission" produced by radical interwar regimes. Soviet communism as a project, more than fascism, was deeply invested in viewing its own ideology as genuinely scientific.