Suchergebnisse

Drawing on historian Frank Costigliola's accent on the importance of "emotional belief" in understanding how statesmen formulate foreign policy, I apply this cultural approach to diplomacy in considering Soviet leader Leonid Ilich Brezhnev's personal relationship with President Richard M. Nixon. Appreciating both the merits and difficulties in employing this "soft" methodology to diplomacy, I draw on recently published documents, memoirs, and available archival material to examine the evolution of Brezhnev's relationship with Nixon at three summit meetings held in Moscow in 1972, in Washington in 1973, and, again in Moscow in 1974, weeks before Nixon's resignation. I argue that Brezhnev's emotional belief convinced him of the need to go beyond the evidence to cultivate a personal relationship with Nixon based at first on suspicion, then on cautious courting, and eventually on trust so that Brezhnev could achieve his aims of promoting the cause of peace.

The author of this article, an early practitioner of local history in the field, takes an autobiographical approach in tracing his evolving views on, and the practice of, local history. The piece outlines how the changes that have come to local history since the early 1970s reflect broader transformations in the historical profession and intellectual life, as well as in the sociohistorical context. It discusses the emergence of local history in the field of Russian studies at the time that social history and social science models invigorated the writing of history, and how the genre remained in its infancy until Russia's opening and the opening of its archives, when it fell under the influence of sister disciplines and of the cultural turn. Until the late 1990s, the dearth of distinguished works of local history written by Russian scholars constrained the research agendas of foreign scholars because the latter could not enter into dialogue with scholarship by Russia-based historians. This has changed as Russian historians have rejoined the larger historical community and as they have made efforts at distinguishing the more popular genre of kraevedenie from professional and academic work on local history that welcomes interdisciplinary currents.

In this essay, Donald Raleigh suggests what oral history can contribute to discussions of the closed nature of Soviet society by comparing the memories of a privileged cohort of baby boomers from Moscow and Saratov regarding how foreign travel shaped their worldviews and heightened their awareness of the fault lines in the Soviet system, made clear through the kind of invidious comparison that firsthand encounters with the outside world invite. The essay is focused on how baby boomers remembered and understood such experiences. It is based on interviews of sixty individuals who graduated in 1967 from Moscow's School No. 20 or from Saratov's School No. 42, then recently opened "specialized" schools that offered intensive instruction in English. More specifically, this is a group of individuals conceived in 1948−1949, when Soviet propaganda declared that efforts to "reconstruct" the war-ravaged country had been completed. In that regard, the 1967 graduates' collective story tells the larger story of the upper strata of the Cold War generation that lived through the USSR's twilight years. В своем эссе Дональд Рейли исследует возможности устной истории применительно к обсуждению закрытости советского общества. Его анализ основан на воспоминаниях привилегированных представите­лей поколения "бэбибумеров" из Москвы и Саратова, отвечавших на вопрос автора о том, как заграничные путешествия формировали их мировоззрение и представления о недостатках советской системы. Райли не только анализирует собранные свидетельства о столкновении советских туристов с внешним миром как единый комплекс памяти, но и сравнивает между собой пережитый опыт москвичей и саратовцев – жителей закрытого города. Статья основана на шестидесяти интервью, взятых у выпускников 1967 г. московской школы № 20 и выпускников того же года саратовской школы № 42. Это были новые "специализи­рованные" школы с углубленным преподаванием английского языка. В поколенческом срезе информанты представляют собой группу ин­дивидуумов, зачатых в 1948–1949 гг., когда советская пропаганда объ­явила о завершении послевоенной "реконструкции" и окончательной нормализации жизни в стране. В более широком социологическом смысле коллективная биография выпускников 1967 г. является общей историей привилегированного слоя поколения холодной войны, чьи зрелые годы выпали на время заката СССР.

RésumésMalgré l'importance majeure de la guerre civile en Russie, l'historiographie du sujet reste, jusqu'à ce jour, singulièrement restreinte. Fondée sur des archives encore inexploitées, la présente étude, concentrée sur la région de Saratov, s'attache à démontrer comment le traumatisme social prolongé des années 1914-1922 exerça une influence capitale sur les événements ultérieurs de l'histoire soviétique, interdisant au bolchevisme de recourir à des alternatives réelles. Après avoir considéré l'impact de la guerre et de la révolution, l'auteur se propose d'analyser quatre aspects qui, en dehors des paramètres d'actions militaires directes, résument les expériences essentielles de la guerre civile : le problème du localisme, la culture politique et la corruption, les stratégies politiques des bolcheviks en milieu rural et l'explosion du mécontentement ouvrier en mars 1921. Selon l'auteur, un grand nombre de formes de gouvernement traditionnellement attribuées à l'ère stalinienne avaient déjà été esquissées, pratiquées et même implantées en profondeur durant la période de 1914- 1922. Ces formes de gouvernement reflètent des éléments connus de la culture politique russe, mais révèlent également des configurations nouvelles, façonnées par les idéologies, les circonstances, les personnages et le hasard, et forgées au brasier de la guerre civile.