What did it mean to be a Soviet citizen in the 1970s and 1980s? How can we explain the liberalization that preceded the collapse of the USSR? This period in Soviet history is often depicted as ...stagnant with stultified institutions and the oppression of socialist citizens. However, the socialist state was not simply an oppressive institution that dictated how to live and what to think—it also responded to and was shaped by individuals’ needs. In Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–85, Neringa Klumbyte and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova bring together scholarship examining the social and cultural life of the USSR and Eastern Europe from 1964 to 1985. This interdisciplinary and comparative study explores topics such as the Soviet middle class, individualism, sexuality, health, late-socialist ethics, and civic participation. Examining this often overlooked era provides the historical context for all post-socialist political, economic, and social developments.
One of the greatest ironies of the history of Soviet rule is that,
for an officially atheistic state, those in the political police
and in the Politburo devoted an enormous amount of time and
...attention to the question of religion. The Soviet government's
policies toward religious institutions in the USSR, and toward
religious institutions in the non-Communist world, reflected this,
especially when it came to the Vatican and Catholic Churches, both
the Latin and Byzantine Rite, in Soviet territory. The KGB and
the Vatican consists of the transcripts of KGB records
concerning the policies of the Soviet secret police towards the
Vatican and the Catholic Church in the Communist world, transcripts
provided by KGB archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin, from the
Second Vatican Council to the election of John Paul II. Among the
topics covered include how the Soviet regime viewed the efforts of
John XXIII and Paul VI of reaching out to eastern side of the Iron
Curtain, the experience of the Roman Catholic Church in Lithuanian
Soviet Socialist Republic and the underground Greek Catholic Church
in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the religious
underground in the key cities of Leningrad and Moscow, and finally
the election of John Paul II and its effect on the tumultuous
events in Poland in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This valuable
primary source collection also contains a historical introduction
written by the translator, Sean Brennan, a professor of History at
the University of Scranton.
Originally published in 1970. This volume presents a study of American foreign policy during the Cold War period, investigating the United States' involvement with the U.S.S.R., China, and communist ...parties throughout the world.
By the mid-1980s, public opinion in the USSR had begun to turn
against Soviet involvement in Afghanistan: the Soviet-Afghan War
(1979-1989) had become a long, painful, and unwinnable conflict,
one ...that Mikhail Gorbachev referred to as a "bleeding wound" in a
1986 speech. The eventual decision to withdraw Soviet troops from
Afghanistan created a devastating ripple effect within Soviet
society that, this book argues, became a major factor in the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
In this comprehensive survey of the effects of the war on Soviet
society and politics, Yaacov Ro'i analyzes the opinions of Soviet
citizens on a host of issues connected with the war and documents
the systemic change that would occur when Soviet leadership took
public opinion into account. The war and the difficulties that the
returning veterans faced undermined the self-esteem and prestige of
the Soviet armed forces and provided ample ammunition for media
correspondents who sought to challenge the norms of the Soviet
system. Through extensive analysis of Soviet newspapers and
interviews conducted with Soviet war veterans and regular citizens
in the early 1990s, Ro'i argues that the effects of the war
precipitated processes that would reveal the inbuilt limitations of
the Soviet body politic and contribute to the dissolution of the
USSR by 1991.
Innocent weapons Peacock, Margaret
2014, 20140825, 2014-08-25, 2014-11-19
eBook, Book
In the 1950s and 1960s, images of children appeared everywhere, from movies to milk cartons, their smiling faces used to sell everything, including war. In this provocative book, Margaret Peacock ...offers an original account of how Soviet and American leaders used emotionally charged images of children in an attempt to create popular support for their policies at home and abroad.Groups on either side of the Iron Curtain pushed visions of endangered, abandoned, and segregated children to indict the enemy's state and its policies. Though the Cold War is often characterized as an ideological divide between the capitalist West and the communist East, Peacock demonstrates a deep symmetry in how Soviet and American propagandists mobilized similar images to similar ends, despite their differences. Based on extensive research spanning fourteen archives and three countries, Peacock tells a new story of the Cold War, seeing the conflict not simply as a divide between East and West, but as a struggle between the producers of culture and their target audiences.
Concentrating on the formative years of the Cold War from 1943 to 1957, Patryk Babiracki reveals little-known Soviet efforts to build a postwar East European empire through culture. Babiracki argues ...that the Soviets involved in foreign cultural outreach tried to use "soft power" in order to galvanize broad support for the postwar order in the emerging Soviet bloc. Populated with compelling characters ranging from artists, writers, journalists, and scientists to party and government functionaries, this work illuminates the behind-the-scenes schemes of the Stalinist international propaganda machine. Based on exhaustive research in Russian and Polish archives, Babiracki's study is the first in any language to examine the two-way interactions between Soviet and Polish propagandists and to evaluate their attempts at cultural cooperation. Babiracki shows that the Stalinist system ultimately undermined Soviet efforts to secure popular legitimacy abroad through persuasive propaganda. He also highlights the limitations and contradictions of Soviet international cultural outreach, which help explain why the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumbled so easily after less than a half-century of existence.
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