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"1925–1953"
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Bringing Stalin back in : memory politics and the creation of a useable past in Putin's Russia
While Joseph Stalin is commonly reviled in the West as a murderous tyrant who committed egregious human rights abuses against his own people, in Russia he is often positively viewed as the symbol of Soviet-era stability and state power. How can there be such a disparity in perspectives? Utilizing an ethnographic approach, extensive interview data, and critical discourse analysis, this book examines the ways that the political elite in Russia are able to control and manipulate historical discourse about the Stalin period in order to advance their own political objectives. Appropriating the Stalinist discourse, they minimize or ignore outright crimes of the Soviet period, and instead focus on positive aspects of Stalin's rule, especially his role in leading the Soviet Union to victory in the Second World War. Advancing the concepts of \"preventive\" and \"complex\" co-optation, this book analyzes how elites in Russia inhibit the emergence of groups that espouse alternative narratives, while promoting message-friendly groups that are in line with the Kremlin's agenda. Bringing the resources of the state to bear, the Russian elite are able to co-opt multiple avenues of discourse formulation and dissemination. Elite-sponsored discourse positions Stalin as the symbol of a strong, centralized state that was capable of great achievements, despite great cost, enabling favorably portrayals of Stalin as part of a tradition of harsh but effective rulers in Russian history, such as Peter the Great. This strong state discourse is used to legitimize the return of authoritarianism in Russia today.
BOOK
Stalin's Gulag at War
Stalin's Gulag at War places the Gulag within the story of
the regional wartime mobilization of Western Siberia during the
Second World War. The author explores a diverse array of issues,
including mass death, informal practices, and the responses of
prisoners and personnel to the war.
eBook
Guns and Rubles
For this book a distinguished team of economists and historians-R. W. Davies, Paul R. Gregory, Andrei Markevich, Mikhail Mukhin, Andrei Sokolov, and Mark Harrison-scoured formerly closed Soviet archives to discover how Stalin used rubles to make guns. Focusing on various aspects of the defense industry, a top-secret branch of the Soviet economy, the volume's contributors uncover new information on the inner workings of Stalin's dictatorship, military and economic planning, and the industrial organization of the Soviet economy.
Previously unknown details about Stalin's command system come to light, as do fascinating insights into the relations between Soviet public and private interests. The authors show that defense was at the core of Stalin's system of rule; single-minded management of the defense sector helped him keep his grip on power.
eBook
It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway
Russia today is haunted by deeds that have not been examined and words that have been left unsaid. A serious attempt to understand the meaning of the Communist experience has not been undertaken, and millions of victims of Soviet Communism are all but forgotten. In this book David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent and longtime writer on Russia and the Soviet Union, presents a striking new interpretation of Russia's great historical tragedy, locating its source in Russia's failure fully to appreciate the value of the individual in comparison with the objectives of the state.
Satter explores the moral and spiritual crisis of Russian society. He shows how it is possible for a government to deny the inherent value of its citizens and for the population to agree, and why so many Russians actually mourn the passing of the Soviet regime that denied them fundamental rights. Through a wide-ranging consideration of attitudes toward the living and the dead, the past and the present, the state and the individual, Satter arrives at a distinctive and important new way of understanding the Russian experience.
eBook
Moscow, the Fourth Rome
The sixteenth-century monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the Third Rome. By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals sought to establish their capital as the Fourth Rome—a cosmopolitan post-Christian beacon for the rest of the world.
eBook
The Search for a Socialist El Dorado
In the 1930s, thousands of Finns emigrated from their communities in the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia, a region in the Soviet Union where Finnish Communist émigrés were building a society to implement their ideals of socialist Finland. To their new socialist home, these immigrants brought critically needed skills, tools, machines, and money. Educated and skilled, American and Canadian Finns were regarded by Soviet authorities as agents of revolutionary transformations who would not only modernize the economy of Soviet Karelia, but also enlighten its society. North American immigrants, indeed, became active participants of socialist colonization of what Bolshevik leaders perceived as dark, uneducated and backward Soviet ethnic periphery. The Search for a Socialist El Dorado is the first comprehensive account in English of this fascinating story. Using a vast body of documentary sources from archives in Petrozavodsk and Moscow, Russian- and Finnish-language press and literature from the 1930s, oral history interviews and secondary literature, Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala explore in depth the “Karelian fever” among Finnish Americans and Canadians, and the lives of immigrants in the Soviet Union, their contribution to Soviet economy and culture, and their fates in the Great Terror.
eBook