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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.

Though the institution of the Gulag was nominally closed over half a decade ago, it lives on as an often hotly contested site of memory in the post-socialist era. This ethnographic study takes a holistic, comprehensive approach to understanding memories of the Gulag, and particularly the language of commemoration that surrounds it in present-day Russian society. It focuses on four regions of particular historical significance-the Solovetsky Islands, the Komi Republic, the Perm region, and Kolyma-to carefully explore how memories become a social phenomenon, how objects become heritage, and how the human need to create sites of memory has preserved the Gulag in specific ways today.

The main aim of this article is to show the origins and development of the “Great Terror” in the Young Communist League and to analyse the role played in this context by Aleksandr Kosarev, a well-known Soviet official of the 1930s and Secretary General of the Komsomol. Despite the rich scholarly literature on Stalin’s Terror, many questions remain about the course it took and the impact of the purges on individual Soviet institutions. The Komsomol has received little interest among scholars until recently and the same applies to its chief, Aleksandr Kosarev. Given that 2018 marked the centenary of the founding of the Komsomol, which falls shortly after the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the “Great Purge,” it is necessary to focus researchers’ attention on such forgotten topics. This paper seeks neither to describe the eventful life and political career of Aleksandr Kosarev nor to recount the history of the Komsomol. The main focus is on how Kosarev exercised his power and took decisions during these extraordinary two-and-a-half years. Did he interact with other political players and how are his relations with Stalin during this time to be characterized? Did Kosarev discern a difference between “key decisions” and “routine decisions”? And if so, how did it affect the actions he took? Finally, why was he removed from office and sentenced to death, despite seeming so eager to unmask his enemies?

The main aim of this article is to show the origins and development of the “Great Terror” in the Young Communist League and to analyse the role played in this context by Aleksandr Kosarev, a well-known Soviet official of the 1930s and Secretary General of the Komsomol. Despite the rich scholarly literature on Stalin’s Terror, many questions remain about the course it took and the impact of the purges on individual Soviet institutions. The Komsomol has received little interest among scholars until recently and the same applies to its chief, Aleksandr Kosarev. Given that 2018 marked the centenary of the founding of the Komsomol, which falls shortly after the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the “Great Purge,” it is necessary to focus researchers’ attention on such forgotten topics. This paper seeks neither to describe the eventful life and political career of Aleksandr Kosarev nor to recount the history of the Komsomol. The main focus is on how Kosarev exercised his power and took decisions during these extraordinary two-and-a-half years. Did he interact with other political players and how are his relations with Stalin during this time to be characterized? Did Kosarev discern a difference between “key decisions” and “routine decisions”? And if so, how did it affect the actions he took? Finally, why was he removed from office and sentenced to death, despite seeming so eager to unmask his enemies?

This article is a reconstruction of travel experiences of Swedish artist Albin Amelin in Moscow in 1937–1938, based on archival materials. It focuses on the exchange between the Soviet Union and Western artists in the interwar period and shows international Soviet art contacts as part of the state’s diplomatic work. This case study enables a detailed observation of the elements of the Soviet hospitality industry, and a description of various practical aspects of the artist’s stay in Moscow.

How did communities come to terms with the collapse of communism? In order to guide the wider narrative, many former communist countries constructed museums dedicated to chronicling their experiences. Museums of Communism explores the complicated intersection of history, commemoration, and victimization made evident in these museums constructed after 1991. While contributors from a diverse range of fields explore various museums and include nearly 90 photographs, a common denominator emerges: rather than focusing on artifacts and historical documents, these museums often privilege memories and stories. In doing so, the museums shift attention from experiences of guilt or collaboration to narratives of shared victimization under communist rule. As editor Stephen M. Norris demonstrates, these museums are often problematic at best and revisionist at worst. From occupation museums in the Baltic States to memorial museums in Ukraine, former secret police prisons in Romania, and nostalgic museums of everyday life in Russia, the sites considered offer new ways of understanding the challenges of separating memory and myth.

Existing scholarship suggests that Stalin’s Great Terror of 1936–8 seriously undermined Soviet cultural diplomacy and forced its main promoter, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), to succumb to the strict control of the party and secret police. By contrast, this article argues that by the spring and summer of 1939 VOKS was recovering from stagnation and reintroducing customs from before the Great Terror. Through a micro-historical analysis of Finnish writer Olavi Paavolainen’s exceptionally long visit to the Soviet Union between May and August 1939, the article demonstrates how case studies of select VOKS operations can explain many of the dilemmas and peculiarities of Soviet cultural diplomacy during the thus far scantily researched 1939–41 period. By focusing on the interactions between Paavolainen, the VOKS vice-chairman Grigori Kheifets and Soviet writers, the article illustrates that after the purges, VOKS continued its efforts to disseminate a positive and controlled image of Soviet life by complex means that linked propaganda with network-building. Finally, the article highlights the role of individuals in cultural diplomacy and explores how an outsider perceived the Great Terror’s effects on Soviet cultural intelligentsia.

In the 1930s, hundreds of scientists and scholars fled Hitler’s Germany. Many found safety, but some made the disastrous decision to seek refuge in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The vast majority of these refugee scholars were arrested, murdered, or forced to flee the Soviet Union during the Great Terror. Many of the survivors then found themselves embroiled in the Holocaust. Ensnared between Hitler and Stalin explores the forced migration of these displaced academics from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. The book follows the lives of thirty-six scholars through some of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. It reveals that not only did they endure the chaos that engulfed central Europe in the decades before Hitler came to power, but they were also caught up in two of the greatest mass murders in history. David Zimmerman examines how those fleeing Hitler in their quests for safe harbour faced hardship and grave danger, including arrest, torture, and execution by the Soviet state. Drawing on German, Russian, and English sources, Ensnared between Hitler and Stalin illustrates the complex paths taken by refugee scholars in flight.

The great romance and fear of bloody revolution--strange blend of idealism and terror--have been superseded by blind faith in the bloodless expansion of human rights and global capitalism. Flying in the face of history, violence is dismissed as rare, immoral, and counterproductive. Arguing against this pervasive wishful thinking, the distinguished historian Arno J. Mayer revisits the two most tumultuous and influential revolutions of modern times: the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Although these two upheavals arose in different environments, they followed similar courses. The thought and language of Enlightenment France were the glories of western civilization; those of tsarist Russia's intelligentsia were on its margins. Both revolutions began as revolts vowed to fight unreason, injustice, and inequality; both swept away old regimes and defied established religions in societies that were 85% peasant and illiterate; both entailed the terrifying return of repressed vengeance. Contrary to prevalent belief, Mayer argues, ideologies and personalities did not control events. Rather, the tide of violence overwhelmed the political actors who assumed power and were rudderless. Even the best plans could not stem the chaos that at once benefited and swallowed them. Mayer argues that we have ignored an essential part of all revolutions: the resistances to revolution, both domestic and foreign, which help fuel the spiral of terror. In his sweeping yet close comparison of the world's two transnational revolutions, Mayer follows their unfolding--from the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Bolshevik Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Masses; the escalation of the initial violence into the reign of terror of 1793-95 and of 1918-21; the dismemberment of the hegemonic churches and religion of both societies; the \"externalization\" of the terror through the Napoleonic wars; and its \"internalization\" in Soviet Russia in the form of Stalin's \"Terror in One Country.\" Making critical use of theory, old and new, Mayer breaks through unexamined assumptions and prevailing debates about the attributes of these particular revolutions to raise broader and more disturbing questions about the nature of revolutionary violence attending new foundations.

Between summer 1937 and autumn 1938, the time of the 'Great Terror', numerous so-called 'National Operations' targeting ethnic minorities were carried out in the USSR. The largest was the 'Polish Operation'. Starting in August 1937 and ending in October 1938, NKVD units arrested over 150,000 people, 111,000 of whom were soon shot. The 'Polish Operation' marked the zenith of the persecution of Poles in the Soviet Union, which had begun in the early 1930s when the party leadership embarked on systematic mass terror against the Polish minority. Between 1930 and 1936 Stalin ordered the Belorussian and Ukrainian Soviet Republics to be purged of Poles, resulting in thousands of deaths and many more deportations. It is estimated that Polish losses in the Ukrainian SSR were about 30 per cent, while in the Belorussian SSR, where some 300,000 persons declared themselves as Poles in the 1920s, the Polish minority was almost completely annihilated or deported. The available sources clearly imply that it was ethnic-defined terror and that the 'Polish Operation' was merely a peak in the persecution.