This book compares the various aspects – political, military economic – of Soviet occupation in Austria, Hungary and Romania. Using documents found in Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian and Russian ...archives the authors argue that the nature of Soviet foreign policy has been misunderstood. Existing literature has focused on the Soviet foreign policy from a political perspective; when and why Stalin made the decision to introduce Bolshevik political systems in the Soviet sphere of influence. This book will show that the Soviet conquest of East-Central Europe had an imperial dimension as well and allowed the Soviet Union to use the territory it occupied as military and economic space. The final dimension of the book details the tragically human experiences of Soviet occupation: atrocities, rape, plundering and deportations.
The Soviet Union in World Politics provides an introductory history of Soviet foreign policy and international relations from 1945 to the end of the Cold War and the break up of the USSR. The book ...summarizes historical and political controversies about Soviet foreign policy and brings the latest research to bear on these debates. The Soviet Union in World Politics interprets the latest evidence available from the Soviet archives and includes * summaries of the main events in Soviet Policy from 1917-1945 * a framework for student discussion of relevant issues * guides to further reading and research * exploration of the role of ideology in the Cold War * discussion of Stalin's role in the formulation of policy.
1. History: A Revolutionary State in World Politics 2. Diplomacy: The Soviet Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1947 3. Ideology: Stalin and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1948–1953 4. Decision-Making: Khrushchev, Crisis and the Cold War, 1953–1964
It can seem as though the Cold War division of Europe was inevitable. But Stalin was more open to a settlement on the continent than is assumed. In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order, ...Norman Naimark returns to the four years after WWII to illuminate European leaders' efforts to secure national sovereignty amid dominating powers.
"Doesn't an educated person—simple and working, sick and with a sick child—doesn't she have the right to enjoy at least the crumbs at the table of the revolutionary feast?" Disabled single mother ...Maria Zolotova-Sologub raised this question in a petition dated July 1929 demanding medical assistance and a monthly subsidy for herself and her daughter. While the welfare of able-bodied and industrially productive people in the first socialist country in the world was protected by a state-funded insurance system, the social rights of labor- incapacitated and unemployed individuals such as Zolotova-Sologub were difficult to define and legitimize. The Right to Be Helped illuminates the ways in which marginalized members of Soviet society understood their social rights and articulated their moral expectations regarding the socialist state between 1917 and 1950. Maria Galmarini-Kabala shows how definitions of state assistance and who was entitled to it provided a platform for policymakers and professionals to engage in heated debates about disability, gender, suffering, and productive and reproductive labor. She explores how authorities and experts reacted to requests for support, arguing that responses were sometimes characterized by an enlightened nature and other times by coercive discipline, but most frequently by a combination of the two. By focusing on the experiences of behaviorally problematic children, unemployed single mothers, and blind and deaf adults in several major urban centers, this important study shows that the dialogue over the right to be helped was central to defining the moral order of Soviet socialism. It will appeal to scholars and students of Russian history, as well as those interested in comparative disabilities and welfare studies.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Soviet musicians and ensembles were acclaimed across the globe. They toured the world, wowing critics and audiences, projecting an image of the USSR as a sophisticated ...promoter of cultural and artistic excellence. InVirtuosi Abroad, Kiril Tomoff focuses on music and the Soviet Union's star musicians to explore the dynamics of the cultural Cold War. He views the competition in the cultural sphere as part of the ongoing U.S. and Soviet efforts to integrate the rest of the world into their respective imperial projects.
Tomoff argues that the spectacular Soviet successes in the system of international music competitions, taken together with the rapturous receptions accorded touring musicians, helped to persuade the Soviet leadership of the superiority of their system. This, combined with the historical triumphalism central to the Marxist-Leninist worldview, led to confidence that the USSR would be the inevitable winner in the global competition with the United States. Successes masked the fact that the very conditions that made them possible depended on a quiet process by which the USSR began to participate in an international legal and economic system dominated by the United States. Once the Soviet leadership transposed its talk of system superiority to the economic sphere, focusing in particular on consumer goods and popular culture, it had entered a competition that it could not win.
The world we live in is structured by the fateful U.S. decision to divide the Korean peninsula at World War II's end. Tasked with dividing Korea into temporary U.S. and Soviet zones of occupation, ...two junior U.S. military officers, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, armed with just a National Geographic map, bisected Korea, long a colony of Japan, at the 38th parallel on August 10, 1945. Although the Soviet Union consented to this decision, no Korean was party to it. The consequences would be catastrophic. As historian Bruce Cumings writes in Origins of the Korean War (1981), "From partition forward, war was predictable if not inevitable." In Dictee (1982), Korean American artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha offers an elliptical yet critical account of the internecine violence that ensued from the U.S.-drafted division of Korea: "We are severed in Two by an abstract enemy an invisible enemy under the title of liberators who have conveniently named the severance. Civil War. Cold War. Stalemate." Setting into motion a world-shattering chain of events, these enemy-cum-liberators, Cha writes, violated that 'which was once whole." Yet more than a tragic past event, the partition and division of Korea reverberate as a durable structure of the present. Flexibly serving U.S. interests as a staging ground for its regional strategic interests, the divided Korean peninsula "offers an opportunity for staging a power transition within the arena of global politics," as longtime Korean peace activist, Kang Jeong-koo perspicaciously stated in a 2012 interview, "The First Year of Peace on the Korean Peninsula." Keywords * Cairo Declaration (1943) * Isan gajok * 38th parallel * Military occupation * U.S. deferral of decolonization * Displacement and refugees * Diasporic return/kohyang * Reunification
Between 1945 and 1964, six to seven million members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were investigated for misconduct by local party organizations and then reprimanded, demoted from full ...party membership, or expelled. Party leaders viewed these investigations as a form of moral education and used humiliating public hearings to discipline wrongdoers and send all Soviet citizens a message about how Communists should behave. The High Title of a Communist is the first study of the Communist Party's internal disciplinary system in the decades following World War II. Edward Cohn uses the practices of expulsion and censure as a window into how the postwar regime defined the ideal Communist and the ideal Soviet citizen. As the regime grappled with a postwar economic crisis and evolved from a revolutionary prewar government into a more bureaucratic postwar state, the Communist Party revised its informal behavioral code, shifting from a more limited and literal set of rules about a party member's role in the economy to a more activist vision that encompassed all spheres of life. The postwar Soviet regime became less concerned with the ideological orthodoxy and political loyalty of party members, and more interested in how Communists treated their wives, raised their children, and handled their liquor. Soviet power, in other words, became less repressive and more intrusive. Cohn uses previously untapped archival sources and avoids a narrow focus on life in Moscow and Leningrad, combining rich local materials from several Russian provinces with materials from throughout the USSR. The High Title of a Communist paints a vivid portrait of the USSR's postwar era that will help scholars and students understand both the history of the Soviet Union's postwar elite and the changing values of the Soviet regime. In the end, it shows, the regime failed in its efforts to enforce a clear set of behavioral standards for its Communists—a failure that would threaten the party's legitimacy in the USSR's final days.
![Joshua Wright [PhD]: Comic ...](http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/image/issn/XR4PS5YY4K/0017-8160/small "Joshua Wright [PhD]: Comic Belief: Religious Irreverence and Irreverent Religion in Cold War America")