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Purpose-This article examines English language historiography surrounding the 1956 August Plenum Incident. It identifies the widely held \"traditionalist\" and recent \"revisionist\" views and compares them to assess if the incident really was a \"factional\" struggle. Approach-This paper identifies and analyzes key secondary sources from the 1950s to the 2010s alongside relevant primary sources to deconstruct and better understand historical understandings of this event. By doing this, this paper can assess if the event was a factional struggle. Findings-Through the analysis of various secondary sources on this event, this paper identifies and explores the dominant \"traditionalist\" view in scholarship, that this event was indeed a factional struggle. This paper also identifies the recent \"revisionist\" view, that the incident was a policy dispute over de-Stalinization rather than an attempt to depose Kim Il-sung as North Korea's leader. This article concludes on the side of traditionalism that it was most likely a factional struggle, although it acknowledges that wider access to primary sources will be needed to draw any definitive conclusions. Originality-A careful consideration of both \"traditionalist\" and \"revisionist\" arguments, along with relevant primary source material, brings together previous and contemporary understandings of the 1956 August Plenum Incident.

Khrushchev’s Secret Speech about Stalinist crimes in February evoked heated public responses in many parts of the USSR. In stark contrast, the momentous changes of 1956 evoked little controversy among inhabitants of Soviet Kazakhstan. De-Stalinization has mostly been studied as a state-led attempt to breathe a new life into communism, or a process in which the regime and its citizens negotiated the meanings of Soviet utopia after the traumas of Stalinism. But the Kazakhstani case suggests that state–society dynamics in 1956 were often shaped not so much by the revolutionary state and the practices of ‘searching for socialism’, but rather by the limited reach of utopian ideas, the weakness of Soviet structures in the provinces, and deep social and ethnic fragmentation.

The emigration movement among Soviet Jews is usually dated to the 1960s–1990s. This essay focuses on the premovement emigration in the 1950s, which prepared the ground for the massive departure of Jews and non-Jewish members of their families, primarily to Israel and the United States. The parameters for leaving the Soviet Union in the 1950s were in many ways similar to the parameters for returning to Poland in the immediate post–World War II years. On paper, the basic pools of emigrants were the same: Jews who at the outbreak of World War II were Polish nationals. In reality, many repatriates of the 1950s were more Soviet than Polish, leaving the country where they had lived for up to twenty years, which often was a lion’s share of their lives. Those—that is, the majority—who ultimately reached Israel went through two repatriation processes: first, as returnees to their pre–World War II homeland and, second, as Jews going back to their historical homeland. As this essay shows, the contemporaneous political and social climates in the Soviet Union and Poland, the nature of those countries’mutual relations and of their relations with Israel, not present on the map until 1948, framed a unique context for emigration in the early post-Stalinist period.

El presente artículo examina la recepción en el Partido Comunista de Chile, y específicamente en su rama juvenil, del proceso de \"desestalinización\" iniciado en 1956 a partir del \"Discurso secreto\" que Nikita Jruschov efectuó al finalizar el XX Congreso del Partido Comunista de la Unión Soviética. Señalado por algunos especialistas europeos como el comienzo de la crisis terminal del Movimiento Comunista Internacional, a partir del caso chileno, el artículo indaga sus efectos en el contexto latinoamericano, que vivía procesos políticosociales distintos a los europeos. La hipótesis que atraviesa el texto afirma que en Chile la desestalinización ofreció una versión mejorada del comunismo, convirtiéndose en una herramienta que coadyuvó a obtener nuevos adherentes a las Juventudes Comunistas de Chile. En particular, la influencia soviética durante el período de la desestalinización fue parte fundamental en la elaboración comunista de una propuesta de cultura juvenil alternativa a la que surgió en Chile durante la década de 1960.

On October 23, 1956, a popular uprising against Soviet rule swept through Hungary like a force of nature, only to be mercilessly crushed by Soviet tanks twelve days later. Only now, fifty years after those harrowing events, can the full story be told. This book is a powerful eyewitness account and a gripping history of the uprising in Hungary that heralded the future liberation of Eastern Europe. Paul Lendvai was a young journalist covering politics in Hungary when the uprising broke out. He knew the government officials and revolutionaries involved. He was on the front lines of the student protests and the bloody street fights and he saw the revolutionary government smashed by the Red Army. In this riveting, deeply personal, and often irreverent book, Lendvai weaves his own experiences with in-depth reportage to unravel the complex chain of events leading up to and including the uprising, its brutal suppression, and its far-reaching political repercussions in Hungary and neighboring Eastern Bloc countries. He draws upon exclusive interviews with Russian and former KGB officials, survivors of the Soviet backlash, and relatives of those executed. He reveals new evidence from closed tribunals and documents kept secret in Soviet and Hungarian archives. Lendvai's breathtaking narrative shows how the uprising, while tragic, delivered a stunning blow to Communism that helped to ultimately bring about its demise. One Day That Shook the Communist World is the best account of these unprecedented events.

The Geography of Ethnic Violence is the first among numerous distinguished books on ethnic violence to clarify the vital role of territory in explaining such conflict. Monica Toft introduces and tests a theory of ethnic violence, one that provides a compelling general explanation of not only most ethnic violence, civil wars, and terrorism but many interstate wars as well. This understanding can foster new policy initiatives with real potential to make ethnic violence either less likely or less destructive. It can also guide policymakers to solutions that endure. The book offers a distinctively powerful synthesis of comparative politics and international relations theories, as well as a striking blend of statistical and historical case study methodologies. By skillfully combining a statistical analysis of a large number of ethnic conflicts with a focused comparison of historical cases of ethnic violence and nonviolence--including four major conflicts in the former Soviet Union--it achieves a rare balance of general applicability and deep insight. Toft concludes that only by understanding how legitimacy and power interact can we hope to learn why some ethnic conflicts turn violent while others do not. Concentrated groups defending a self-defined homeland often fight to the death, while dispersed or urbanized groups almost never risk violence to redress their grievances. Clearly written and rigorously documented, this book represents a major contribution to an ongoing debate that spans a range of disciplines including international relations, comparative politics, sociology, and history.

A decade after the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China established their formidable alliance in 1950, escalating public disagreements between them broke the international communist movement apart. InThe Sino-Soviet Split, Lorenz Lüthi tells the story of this rupture, which became one of the defining events of the Cold War. Identifying the primary role of disputes over Marxist-Leninist ideology, Lüthi traces their devastating impact in sowing conflict between the two nations in the areas of economic development, party relations, and foreign policy. The source of this estrangement was Mao Zedong's ideological radicalization at a time when Soviet leaders, mainly Nikita Khrushchev, became committed to more pragmatic domestic and foreign policies. Using a wide array of archival and documentary sources from three continents, Lüthi presents a richly detailed account of Sino-Soviet political relations in the 1950s and 1960s. He explores how Sino-Soviet relations were linked to Chinese domestic politics and to Mao's struggles with internal political rivals. Furthermore, Lüthi argues, the Sino-Soviet split had far-reaching consequences for the socialist camp and its connections to the nonaligned movement, the global Cold War, and the Vietnam War. The Sino-Soviet Splitprovides a meticulous and cogent analysis of a major political fallout between two global powers, opening new areas of research for anyone interested in the history of international relations in the socialist world.

InMaking Sense of War,Amir Weiner reconceptualizes the entire historical experience of the Soviet Union from a new perspective, that of World War II. Breaking with the conventional interpretation that views World War II as a post-revolutionary addendum, Weiner situates this event at the crux of the development of the Soviet--not just the Stalinist--system. Through a richly detailed look at Soviet society as a whole, and at one Ukrainian region in particular, the author shows how World War II came to define the ways in which members of the political elite as well as ordinary citizens viewed the world and acted upon their beliefs and ideologies. The book explores the creation of the myth of the war against the historiography of modern schemes for social engineering, the Holocaust, ethnic deportations, collaboration, and postwar settlements. For communist true believers, World War II was the purgatory of the revolution, the final cleansing of Soviet society of the remaining elusive \"human weeds\" who intruded upon socialist harmony, and it brought the polity to the brink of communism. Those ridden with doubts turned to the war as a redemption for past wrongs of the regime, while others hoped it would be the death blow to an evil enterprise. For all, it was the Armageddon of the Bolshevik Revolution. The result of Weiner's inquiry is a bold, compelling new picture of a Soviet Union both reinforced and enfeebled by the experience of total war.

Joseph Stalin was the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union for so long that most historians have dismissed the officials surrounding him as mere yes-men.On Stalin's Team overturns this view, revealing that behind Stalin were a dozen or so loyal and competent men who formed a remarkably effective team from the late 1920s until his death in.

True to the escapist tendencies of cinema in general, and the political sensitivity of authoritarian state cinema more particularly, postwar rural films skipped over the social and political disruption caused by demobilization, wartime occupation, and destruction. But these were not the areas of whitewashing that earned the collective farm comedies and dramas of the late Stalin era such infamy. Instead, an altogether cruder application of lacquer darkened the legacy of rural cinema: namely, the treatment of the postwar crisis of privation. Wartime economic disruption spilled over into the postwar period as shortages persisted and famine set in, tainting the recent