This book is a history of the Soviet tours of European and American intellectuals, writers, bohemians, professionals, and political tourists who saw the “Soviet experiment” in the 1920s and 1930s. It ...provides a new framework for understanding the relationship between intellectuals and communism and the Soviet reception of foreign visitors, including the leading fellow-travelers who praised Stalin and Stalinism in the interwar period. The work is based on a far-reaching analysis of the declassified archives of agencies charged with crafting the international image of the first socialist society, including VOKS (the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad). The book brings this story into new focus as one of the great transnational encounters of the twentieth century. As many visitors were profoundly influenced by their Soviet tours, so too was the Soviet system itself: the experiences of building showcases and tutoring outsiders to perceive the future-in-the-making comprise a neglected international dimension to the emergence of Stalinism. Probing entanglements between far-left and far-right ideological extremes, the work pays special attention to the covert interaction between communism and fascism, including Soviet attempts to recruit German “National Bolsheviks” and fascist intellectuals. The unprecedented scope of Soviet efforts to mold foreign, particularly Western public opinion created a new chapter in the history of modern cultural diplomacy. Setting the revolutionary regime's innovations in the context of the entire history of foreign visitors in Russia, the book argues that Soviet mobilization for the international ideological contest directly paved the way for the cultural Cold War.
The nomads of Central Asia were already well accustomed to life under the power of a distant capital when the Bolsheviks fomented revolution on the streets of Petrograd. Yet after the fall of the ...Tsar, the nature, ambition and potency of that power would change dramatically, ultimately resulting in the near eradication of Central Asian nomadism. Based on extensive primary source work in Almaty, Bishkek and Moscow, Nomads and Soviet Rule charts the development of this volatile and brutal relationship and challenges the often repeated view that events followed a linear path of gradually escalating violence. Rather than the sedentarisation campaign being an inevitability born of deep-rooted Marxist hatred of the nomadic lifestyle, Thomas demonstrates the Soviet state's treatment of nomads to be far more complex and pragmatic. He shows how Soviet policy was informed by both an anti-colonial spirit and an imperialist impulse, by nationalism as well as communism, and above all by a lethal self-confidence in the Communist Party's ability to transform the lives of nomads and harness the agricultural potential of their landscape. This is the first book to look closely at the period between the revolution and the collectivisation drive, and offers fresh insight into a little-known aspect of early Soviet history. In doing so, the book offers a path to refining conceptions of the broader history and dynamics of the Soviet project in this key period.
Lara Douds examines the practical functioning and internal political culture of the early Soviet government cabinet, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), under Lenin. This study elucidates ...the process by which Sovnarkom’s governmental decision-making authority was transferred to Communist Party bodies in the early years of Soviet power and traces the day-to-day operation of the supreme state organ. The book argues that Sovnarkom was the principal executive body of the early Soviet government until the Politburo gradually usurped this role during the Civil War. Using a range of archival source material, Lara Douds re-interprets early Soviet political history as a period where fledging ‘Soviet’ rather than simply ‘Communist Party’ power was attempted, but ultimately failed when pressures of Civil War and socio-economic dislocation encouraged the centralising and authoritarian rather than democratic strand of Bolshevism to predominate. Inside Lenin's Government explores the basic mechanics of governance by looking at the frequency of meetings, types of business discussed, processes of decision-making and the administrative backdrop, as well as the key personalities of Sovnarkom. It then considers the reasons behind the shift in executive power from state to party in this period, which resulted in an abnormal situation where, as Leon Trotsky commented in 1923, ‘leadership by the party gives way to administration by its organs’.
Beginning in 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was divided into opposing sections, one led by Vladimir Lenin, the other by Iulii Martov. Until 1917, both Lenin and Martov were equally ...prominent figures in Russian politics. Martov, an anti-war socialist intellectual from a Jewish background, wrote prolifically for a number of important publications inside and outside Russia. Although the books, articles, and pamphlets written by Lenin during the same period remain readily available today, those by Martov are extremely hard to find in their original Russian or in translation. Following Martov’s untimely death in 1923, a Russian-language edition of one of his books, World Bolshevism , was published. But it was only in 2000, after decades of extreme censorship, that parts of the book were legally published in Russia. In English, this work has reached the public in pieces, often as a part of pamphlets with limited circulation. This edition, which includes an introduction by Paul Kellogg that contextualizes the work and reintroduces Martov as an important thinker to a twenty-first century readership, makes Martov’s work available in its complete form for the first time in a hundred years.
This first English-language biography of Mikhail Tomsky illuminates how the sole worker in the top echelon of the Bolshevik Party, and the leader of the huge trade-union bureaucracy, helped shape ...Soviet domestic and foreign policy along generally moderate lines throughout the 1920s.
Face to the Village McDonald, Tracy
Face to the Village,
2011, 20110521, 2010, 2011., 2010-12-31, 20110101
eBook
In the summer of 1924, the Bolshevik Party called on scholars, the police, the courts, and state officials to turn their attention to the villages of Russia. The subsequent campaign to 'face the ...countryside' generated a wealth of intelligence that fed into the regime's sense of alarmed conviction that the countryside was a space outside Bolshevik control. Richly rooted in archival sources, including local and central-level secret police reports, detailed cases of the local and provincial courts, government records, and newspaper reports, Face to the Village is a nuanced study of the everyday workings of the Russian village in the 1920s. Local-level officials emerge in Tracy McDonald's study as vital and pivotal historical actors, existing between the Party's expectations and peasant interests. McDonald's careful exposition of the relationships between the urban centre and the peasant countryside brings us closer to understanding the fateful decision to launch a frontal attack on the countryside in the fall of 1929 under the auspices of collectivization.
Policing Stalin's Socialismis one of the first books to emphasize the importance of social order repression by Stalin's Soviet regime in contrast to the traditional emphasis of historians on ...political repression. Based on extensive examination of new archival materials, David Shearer finds that most repression during the Stalinist dictatorship of the 1930s was against marginal social groups such as petty criminals, deviant youth, sectarians, and the unemployed and unproductive.
It was because Soviet leaders regarded social disorder as more of a danger to the state than political opposition that they instituted a new form of class war to defend themselves against this perceived threat. Despite the combined work of the political and civil police the efforts to cleanse society failed; this failure set the stage for the massive purges that decimated the country in the late 1930s.
States of obligation Kotsonis, Yanni
States of obligation,
2014, 20140917, 2014, 2014-09-17
eBook
States of Obligation is the first sustained study of the Russian taxation system, the first to study its European and transatlantic context, and the first to expose the essential continuities between ...the fiscal practices of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
Romancing the revolution Bullock, Ian
Romancing the revolution,
c2011, 2011, 2014, 2011, 2011-10-07, 2012-07-27, 20110101
eBook
Odprti dostop
Over two decades have passed since the collapse of the USSR, yet the words "Soviet Union" still carry significant weight in the collective memory of millions. But how often do we consider the true ...meaning of the term "Soviet"? Drawing extensively on left-wing press archives, Romancing the Revolution traces the reactions of the British Left to the idealized concept of Soviet democracy. Focusing on the turbulent period after the 1917 Russian Revolution, author Ian Bullock examines the impact of the myth of Soviet democracy: the belief that Russia was embarking on a brave experiment in a form of popular government more genuine and advanced than even the best forms of parliamentarism. Romancing the Revolution uncovers the imprint of this myth on left-wing organizations and their publications, ranging from those that presented themselves as "British Bolsheviks"—the British Socialist party and The Call, the Socialist Labour party's The Socialist, Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Dreadnought—to the much more equivocal Labour Leader and The New Statesmen.
The Workers' Opposition in the Russian Communist Party: Documents, 1919-30 comprises translations of articles, speeches, theses, letters, and other documents pertaining to the activity of the ...Workers' Opposition group and its members during its existence and until 1930.
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