Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Half Title -- Series -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- Notes on contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: the politics of commemoration in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia -- Part I Soviet remembrance of the war -- 1 Wartime mobilizational strategies and the origins of Soviet war memory -- 2 Situating Stalin in the history of the Second World War -- 3 Victory Day before the cult: war commemoration in the USSR, 1945-1965 -- 4 Teaching and remembering the Great Patriotic War in Soviet schools -- 5 Representations of gender in Soviet war memorials -- Part II Soviet and post-Soviet war memory -- 6 Veterans remember the war in Soviet and post-Soviet fiction -- 7 Lend-Lease in war and Russian memory -- 8 Politicizing war memorialization in Soviet and post-Soviet Sevastopol -- 9 World War II memories and local media in the Russian North: Velikii Novgorod and Murmansk -- 10 Parades in Russian memory culture -- Part III Representations of the war in the Putin era -- 11 Performing memory and its limits: Vladimir Putin and the celebration of World War II in Russia -- 12 Holocaust discourse in Putin's Russia as a foreign policy tool -- 13 The war film and memory politics in Putin's Russia -- 14 Jews, gender, and just wars: remembering and rewriting the Great Patriotic War in 2015 war films -- 15 The 21st-century memory of the Great Patriotic War in the "Russia - My History" Museum -- Index.

"In 2010, Communist Party members in Zaporizhia, a city in southeastern Ukraine, erected a statue of Joseph Stalin. Attending the monument's unveiling were nearly one thousand people, including many World War II veterans bedecked with medals. After the playing of the Soviet national anthem, one speaker called out, 'Long live Stalin!' and the audience responded 'Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!' Not all of the city's residents welcomed the Stalin monument with such enthusiasm. Several months later, unidentified protesters used a hacksaw to cut off the statue's head. A few days after that, the decapitated statue was blown up completely by a homemade bomb. Where the Stalin statue once stood, only an empty pedestal remains"--

This essay takes the October Revolution's centennial as an occasion to consider Soviet state practices in an international context. Many features of Soviet governance reflected an interventionist ethos that first arose in western Europe and subsequently informed programs of population management around the world. From this perspective, we see that Soviet methods of rule derived not from socialist ideology but rather from pre-existing state practices. Communist Party leaders used these practices to pursue ideological goals, but both ambitions to reshape society and the means to do so originated elsewhere. This comparative approach also highlights ways the Soviet case resembled that of other late-developing countries, where educated elites similarly relied on state interventions to transform their populations. For many of them, the Soviet Union offered an alternative model of socioeconomic advancement, albeit one based on extreme state violence.