Introduction

Abstract

THE SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW Volume 86, Number 2 April 2008 The Relaunch of the Soviet Project, i945-64 Introduction JULIANE F?RST, POLLY JONES andSUSANMORRISSEY This special issue is devoted to a time period that has recently seen growing scholarly interest: 'late Stalinism' and the 'Khrushchev era' (or the vaguer 'post-Stalinism'). Yet the years following the Soviet Union's spectacular victory in World War Two are inmany ways still shrouded in stereotypes and preconceptions. Born out of the chaos of war and seemingly settling into the subsequent 'era of stagnation', this period witnessed strikingmismanagement and repression, yet equally striking innovation and achievement. Paradoxically, perhaps, itprovided a sur prisingly stable environment for several generations of Soviet citizens. The growing sense that the post-war and post-Stalin years hold the key both to the Soviet Union's eventual demise and also to its longevity make them a tempting topic for historians, sociologists, anthropologists and literary critics. This collection of articles, 'The Relaunch of the Soviet Project, 1945-64', based on the eponymous conference held at theUCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in September 2006, presents some of the innovative research carried out on both the late Stalinist and the Khrushchev period. Without wanting to imply that the war constituted a 'zero hour' for the Soviet system, there can be little doubt that the Soviet revolutionary project, as it had been conceived and modified in the years between 1917 and 1941, had to be reconstructed, re-legitimized and, given the new geopolitical and domestic realities, even re-imagined after 1945. Focusing on the period as a whole has enabled us both to identify themultiple and varied, yet interconnected, attempts to 'relaunch' the Soviet project and to analyse the overlapping 202 INTRODUCTION and competing challenges that the seismic shocks of war and Stalin's death produced. Of course, neither 1945 nor 1964, nor indeed 1953, should be viewed purely as beginnings or endings. The year 1945marked the official end to thewar, but the ideological refashioning of Soviet power had started several years before the Soviet advent into Berlin, and the lingering effects of war endured formany decades afterwards. The policies and practices of the Stalinist 1930s remained ever present in collective and individual memory and in everyday life.After all, the Soviet Union was almost unique inEurope in experiencing a continuity in leadership that survived and transcended the interruptions of war, and this lent the post-war revolutionary project important continuities with the pre-war period. Likewise, to end our study with Khrushchev's 'retirement' in 1964 imposes a rather abrupt conclusion onto a remarkably unpredict able period of 'thaws' and 'freezes'; the end of the thaw might easily be placed two years earlier (with theManezh incident) or four years later (with the invasion of Czechoslovakia). Nevertheless, the twenty years following the end of the war had their own distinctive features and displayed characteristics that critically distinguish them from both the pre-war era and also the era of so-called mature socialism. As this special issue seeks to demonstrate, therefore, these years can meaningfully be analysed as a coherent period. Post-war Stalinism was defined by the recent conflict: by pride in the victory and the new superpower status of theUSSR yet also by thewar's destructive effects on the motherland, its potentially liberating effects on the Soviet people, and the troubling instability of war memory. The war likewise shadowed the Khrushchev years, as both an ambiguous memory and a tangible set of problems still in need of resolution. Meanwhile, Stalinism continued to be redefined by Stalin himself in the eight years before his death, arguably taking on a qualitatively different character from its pre-war incarnation. These post-war iterations of Stalinism were in turn central to Khrushchev's critique of the leader and his system, with the period 1945 to 1953 viewed as the nadir of the 'cult of personality'. Repeatedly redefined and rethought, the legacies of the war and of Stalinism influenced policy-making and shaped the very nature of the Soviet party-state throughout the period. Equally important, however, is another prominent motif of this era: the resurgence of utopianism in politics. After...