Brezhnev Era Research Articles

Ethnic Relations between Lithuanians and Poles in the Eastern and South-Eastern Part of Lithuania 1960–1985

The article explores the manifestation of the Soviet national policy in the eastern and south-eastern part of Lithuania during the Khrushchev Thaw period and the Brezhnev Era of stagnation by focusing on the ethnic relations between Lithuanian and Poles who, in terms of numbers, dominated in the region. The situation in the eastern and south-eastern part of Lithuania (multi-ethnic population, geographical location, historical heritage, etc.) was very favourable for the implementation of the Soviet national policy. Based on the slogans of “friendship between nations” and “internationalism”, the concept of the convergence of the nations was realised. It manifested in closer relations between various ethnic groups, soviet republics and their population. As far as eastern and south-eastern part of Lithuania was concerned, relationships were promoted with neighbouring republics, firstly with Belarus, rather than with other regions of the Republic of Lithuania. Such policy led to the formation of a specific situation in Vilnius region. A certain part of the inhabitants of the region more often identified themselves with the Belarusian population and had a poor understanding of the life of other regions in Lithuania. This determined segregation between the Lithuanian and Polish communities, and alienation of the Poles. The Soviet authorities controlled ethnic relations between Lithuanians and Poles; any potential ethnic tension was immediately repressed and hardly ever surfaced. Ethnic disagreements between Lithuanians and Poles (due to different interpretation of historical past, etc.) were frozen for several decades and broke out only at time of the decline of the Soviet period. The position of the Polish population in the region was fuelled by attention and support from the Polish authorities and society. However, only relationships sanctioned by the Soviet authorities were allowed. Therefore any nationalist ideas from Poland were immediately stifled. Seeking faster indoctrination of the population, the Soviet authorities used the Polish language factor in the eastern and south-eastern part of Lithuania. The Polish population in this region was provided an opportunity to develop education and culture in their mother tongue, yet this was controlled and Sovietised. The support for nurturing the Polish ethnic identity by the Soviets formed a stereotype among Lithuanians that Poles were protected and the eastern and south-eastern part of Lithuania was deliberately Polonised. In the 1970s, when attempts to consolidate the society in the USSR were made on the basis of the Russian language and culture, assimilation efforts (Russification) strengthened in Lithuania. This process particularly affected the position of the Poles in the eastern and south-eastern part of Lithuania (Polish schools became Russian schools, the number of mixed marriages increased, the Russian language was increasingly used for communication, etc.). Such policies led to the assimilation of certain part of the Polish population in the region.

The New Scholarship on the Brezhnev Era

The New Scholarship on the Brezhnev Era

Africans and the Soviet Rights Archipelago

AbstractThe history of Soviet “rights defenders” is seemingly well known. Emerging in the 1960s in response to fears of a creeping re-Stalinization, the rights movement was part of the broader dissident milieu that coalesced in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Drawing on new documents from the Ukrainian KGB, this article broadens the canon of what we consider “Soviet rights talk” by focusing on a group completely ignored in the existing history of Soviet rights defenders: African students. As the article demonstrates, Soviet citizens were not the only people to draw on a discursive repertoire of civil and universal rights to articulate their demands against the Soviet state. By closely examining the letters and petitions activists produced, it becomes clear that African students’ language of rights grew alongside and, in many respects, pre-empted the Soviet rights movement. The article concludes by considering why, despite sharing the same discursive and physical spaces, neither African nor Soviet rights defenders succeeded in building bridges between their respective islands of protest. Examining this failure to build meaningful solidarities demonstrates the value of pursuing the social history of internationalism; it is only in the banality of the everyday that the capacity for Soviet internationalism to create unanticipated frictions and conflicts reveals itself.

Why Russia has botched diplomacy with Japan: comparisons of 2013–23 and the late 1980s

The prevailing narrative from the Brezhnev era to the present holds that Moscow’s relations with Tokyo failed to achieve a breakthrough due to a territorial dispute lingering from 1956. Japan had demanded the return of all four islands seized by the Soviet Union after Japan had announced its surrender, but Moscow had insisted on no islands or hinted at two. A different argument is made here: The primary culprit in the two periods when diplomacy took off was Moscow’s skewed thinking about Japan. Rejecting arguments for complementarity, historical parallelism, and balance of power, Russian writings in the late 1980s and 2013–2023 saw little value in Japan. Regardless of Gorbachev’s ‘New Thinking’ and Putin’s ‘Turn to the East’, the intellectual groundwork for rapprochement never materialized. This was a harbinger of other negativity about Japanese history, the Japan-U.S. alliance, and Japan’s ‘disrespect’. Failure to assess Tokyo accurately, including its many reasons for pursuing Moscow, testifies to a warped understanding of geopolitics as well as geo-economics owing to a distorted national identity. Misjudging Japan in each period paved the way to greater hostility to the West that followed.

Времена выбирают: образы желаемого прошлого глазами россиян

The article, based on the secondary analysis of all-Russian quantitative and qualitative sociological research data, examines the question of the Russians’ attitude to various time periods in the history of the country. Surveys over the past 20 years have documented an increase in preferences for the present over the past, while the late Soviet period is still relatively attractive. The author interprets the fact that this trend, although to a different extent, can be traced within all age cohorts, as evidence that images of the past, which were similar in their meaning, were formed and promoted in both communicative and cultural memory. The politics of memory, constructing images of the recent past, did not contradict the ideas transmitted by family memory. Data from quantitative and qualitative studies indicate the dominance of a largely negative image of the 1900s and a positive image of the Brezhnev era. Having tested the existing explanations for the continued popularity of the Brezhnev era as a desirable past, the author comes to the conclusion that each of them is valid to the extent that it does not claim exclusivity. Nostalgia (in its broadest interpretation), the state’s memory politics, the hardships of the 1990s, and many other factors played a role in establishing the image of the late USSR as a golden age in the Russian history. At the same time, the study once again confirms that presentism dominates the perception of the past, and the attitude towards the past depends to a decisive extent on the current events and the current situation. According to the author, in today’s Russia, the idealized image of the late Soviet period turns out to be what Pierre Nora called a “site of memory”. And the fact that not all Russians are familiar with a detailed map of this “site of memory” does not defy its symbolic significance.

Return to Shalamov

The essay considers V. Shalamov’s gulag experiences that inspired his Kolyma Tales [Kolymskie rasskazy]. In this commentary on Shalamov’s work, A. Ter-Abramyants examines his personal perspective as a reader who first got hold of Kolyma Tales in the Brezhnev era, long before the book was officially published in the Soviet Union. While most gulag survivors tried to bury the memories of the camp in the deepest recesses of their mind, Shalamov poured out his experiences onto the pages of Kolyma Tales. He was convinced that, unless touched by art, nothing can survive the passing of time. He believed he owed it to the millions of gulag victims to immortalize their memory in art, despite the fact that disclosing the prison camp goings-on was severely punishable as treason. Shalamov succeeded in depicting the scale and impact of Stalin-era dehumanization: prison camps engendered loathing of labour and the discouragement of forming friendships, sharing or thinking, as even a mental activity depleted one’s physical resources. Shalamov’s powerful writings transform the reader from a bystander into a witness of crimes against humanity that defy any statute of limitation.

Critical Letter Writing and Deliberation During the Brezhnev Era

This article analyses letters sent by Soviet citizens to newspapers and authorities during the Brezhnev era, supposedly a period of political stagnation. Citizens wrote critical letters, individually and collectively, signed and anonymously, to have problems solved. Authorities responded to citizen concerns, which were mostly very specific and non-systemic, and also used the letters to monitor public opinion. The practice of letter writing in the Soviet Union in this period enabled citizens to hold authorities to account while also providing leaders with the opportunity to legitimise their authority by taking action.

Andrejs Dripe’s Journalism about the Federal Republic of Germany and Its Impact on Societal Change in the 1980s

This article examines travels outside the Soviet Union by Latvian writers who were recognized by the occupation regime and acclaimed by the public during the Brezhnev Era, as one of the privileges enjoyed by the so-called creative intelligentsia, and how those travels were reflected in their literary and journalistic writings. Journeys abroad elicited conflicting emotions, and writers had to be relatively affluent to travel. Still, they often experienced humiliation when confronted with the reality of their meager financial means outside the U.S.S.R. and the fact that they remained in imprisonment even in the free West. The surge in popularity of literary periodicals in the 1980s played a crucial role in shaping a new culture of the press and journalism, as they provided large masses of readers with essential information about living abroad. Notes on the travels include observations on the socio-economic situation, environment, and political events and documents that have facilitated trips to the West. The case study explores the travelogue by Andrejs Dripe from the 1980s. Dripe’s journalism records the rapid transition from the Brezhnev Era to Gorbachev’s perestroika. It becomes the first official source of information about the West only a few people among his readers have visited.

Communist Quality: Dairy Production at the Leningrad Dairy Combine, 1965-1982

ABSTRACT Throughout the twentieth century, particularly post-WWII, dairy became a staple part of the “modern” diet throughout many parts of the globe due to new technologies in pasteurization and production. Dairy’s significance was felt in the Soviet Union as well, which used food to improve the standard of living and open another avenue of competition with the West. This study makes two main arguments: Soviet dairy and its ideas of quality were modern in their belief in scientific controls and implementation of new technologies but were distinctly Soviet in that state and scientific actors were the ones to define what was quality in dairy production. While consumer concerns were embraced, they were to be rationalized and filtered through the rational actors in the ministries and enterprises. Using quality reports from the Leningrad Dairy Combine and the Soviet Ministry of Meat and Milk Production, along with articles from professional journals from 1965–1982, this study highlights how Soviet officials had to contend with the Brezhnev era’s focus on consumer abundance while ensuring it remained rational. To reconcile these factors, the Soviet Union sought examples of quality dairy products from foreign countries both in the socialist and capitalist blocs while the Leningrad Dairy Combine tried to address subjective factors of quality like color in “tasting commissions” and address the causes of complaints from the ministry and local shops. However, Soviet consumers were never involved in these processes, setting Soviet dairy, and by extension, Soviet modernity apart from other dairy-rich societies in the West.

Introduction II: Shifting Literary Culture since Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: The Baltic Paradigm

Introduction II: Shifting Literary Culture since Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: The Baltic Paradigm

Reception and Translations of Western Modernist Literature in Latvia in the Brezhnev Era

Reception and Translations of Western Modernist Literature in Latvia in the Brezhnev Era

Lithuanian Drama in the Brezhnev Era: The Two Cases of the Theater of the Absurd

Lithuanian Drama in the Brezhnev Era: The Two Cases of the Theater of the Absurd

Introduction: Shifting Literary Culture since Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: The Baltic Paradigm

Introduction: Shifting Literary Culture since Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: The Baltic Paradigm

«We lived under communism without realizing it». How former schoolchildren and students perceive today Brezhnev era

«We lived under communism without realizing it». How former schoolchildren and students perceive today Brezhnev era

An Empire in Aspic: Popularizing National Cuisines in Late Soviet Russia

Abstract During the Brezhnev era, the USSR’s food world was preoccupied with the “national cuisines” of the Soviet peoples. This represented the culmination of a major postwar trend expressed in cooking advice literature and public dining, notably through the publication of “national” cookbooks and the establishment of flagship ethnic restaurants in Moscow. Food experts promoting national cuisines sought to tidy up the borders of the USSR’s gastronomic landscape, putting each people in their place and elevating selected aspects of their cultures. This encouraged a collision between a longstanding drive for cultural modernization and a growing popular desire for historical “authenticity.” This collision not only laid bare failures of the Soviet food system, but also established an appealing and durable culinary legacy. Examining the national cuisines paradigm, we can identify productive tensions in late Soviet culture and come to better understand how fluidity across time and space helped define socialist modernity.

Russia’s Hero Cities: From Postwar Ruins to Soviet Heroarchy by Ivo Mijnssen

Reviewed by: Russia’s Hero Cities: From Postwar Ruins to Soviet Heroarchy by Ivo Mijnssen Adrienne M. Harris Russia’s Hero Cities: From Postwar Ruins to Soviet Heroarchy. By Ivo Mijnssen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2021. xxii+310 pp. £33. ISBN 978– 02–5305622–1. In this volume Ivo Mijnssen uses the thirteen ‘Hero Cities’ of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus as a lens to understand how Soviet officials shaped war memory through ritualized space. He argues that the designation of hero cities created an idealized narrative of collective heroism which served the state’s needs. Furthermore, ‘as products of the Brezhnev era [. . .] the Hero Cities provide insights into the social and political dynamics of the late USSR’ (p. 6). Though the monograph covers all thirteen ‘quasi-sacred cities’ (p. 2), Mijnssen devotes most of his analysis to two cities on the geographic periphery, Tula and Novorossiysk. He shows how designation as a Hero City effected both large-scale change, such as monuments, and smaller-scale change, since the material benefits accompanying these designations and monuments created spaces for the performance of calendrical and life rituals. His book traces how this ‘honorary status shaped [the Hero Cities], their inhabitants, and the Soviet Union—both during the Brezhnev era and beyond’ (p. 9). Mijnssen’s thoughtful interpretation of a wide variety of source material distinguishes this monograph: he uses national and local archival documents, oral interviews (between 2012 and 2013), speeches and resolutions, newspaper articles, and material culture (stamps, postcards, coffee-table books, and tourist guides). Extensive notes demonstrate the rich body of secondary works with which he engages. Maps, charts, reproductions of published and archival photographs, photographs from interviewees’ personal collections, and Mijnssen’s own photographs illustrate the volume’s arguments. After briefly describing the individual Hero Cities, Mijnssen introduces the concept of the hero in the first chapter. He [End Page 734] identifies a ‘socialist contract born of the trauma’ of the Great Patriotic War (p. 6) and points to the multifaceted processes at play in the designation ‘Hero City’. Chapter 2 addresses the emergence of an official, idealized war memory under successive governments from Stalin to Brezhnev, while the third and fourth chapters analyse Tula, the last city awarded this designation during the Brezhnev era. In Chapter 3 Mijnssen discusses the multifaceted nature of war commemoration in the USSR, such as the erasure of women from war memory, contested memories of the war and taboos, Brezhnev-era expectations for youth and their activities, veterans’ material conditions, and various rituals. Chapter 4 details deficits experienced by Tula in both food and housing stocks, expectations for material privileges, and subsequent disappointment when ‘the state was less able to uphold its side of the socialist contract—the improvement of living conditions’ (p. 132). Only two hundred kilometres from Moscow, Tula exemplifies the gap between Moscow and regional cities. The next two chapters focus on a city which was privileged by Brezhnev’s favour, Novorossiysk. After addressing the city’s role in the war effort, Mijnssen turns to previously taboo subjects: deportation and repatriation, experiences under occupation, and the problems that partisan activity created for civilians. He details youth activity, including both spontaneous play in the battle-scarred wastelands surrounding the city and state-sanctioned, highly ritualized activities at memorial sites. Chapter 6, subtitled ‘Wartime Glory and Window to the World’, investigates Brezhnev’s affection for this city and its reconstruction and development under his patronage. The final chapter continues chronologically from the end of Chapter 2, as Mijnssen examines the dissolution of official war memory that occurred after Brezhnev’s death and during perestroika, and the resurrection of this cultural memory under Putin. He discusses the Immortal Regiment and the Cities of Military Glory, as well as the role played by Sevastopol and Kerch in rhetoric justifying the annexation of Crimea. He disagrees with those who identify ‘the state’s use of the past to promote authoritarian tendencies’ as re-Stalinization, arguing instead that Putin aims for a ‘re-Brezhnevization under the conditions of capitalism’ (p. 251). Although Mijnssen grounds his arguments in Jan Assmann’s work on collective memories and cultural memory, readers seeking rich theoretical discussion should look...

Turning Science into Fiction? Censoring Population Research in the Soviet Union, 1964–1982

Population statistics reflect a nation's quality of life and accordingly have the potential to be highly politically charged, with implications for a government's legitimacy. In the Brezhnev era Soviet Union, emerging negative trends regarding life expectancy, fertility and mortality had the potential to de-legitimise the Soviet regime just at the moment when population issues were taking the spotlight through the United Nations. For this reason, population statistics were subject to significant censorship. The article examines how this censorship worked for domestic and international audiences. I show the main form of censorship was an editorial review by trusted experts in the Party and argue that the process was defined by uncertainty and negotiation, with personal networks mediating the result. In general, the period was characterised by tension between the need to expand demographic research and leaders' desire to suppress knowledge of unfortunate demographic truths.

Sanitising Sex in the USSR: State Approaches to Sexual Health in the Brezhnev Era

This article examines Soviet approaches to sexual health in the Brezhnev era (1964–1982), specifically venereal diseases (VD). After the death of Stalin, the Soviet leadership adopted new methods for regulating the behaviour of Soviet citizens based on collective adherence to specific moral codes. State ministries took tentative steps towards mass sex education. In the 1960s, the Soviet leadership relaunched the ‘struggle with VD’, a state-led campaign to drastically reduce rates of infection. This article explores the enactment of this campaign in the Latvian SSR, where VD cases exceeded all-union averages and where Party leadership adopted a stringent approach to perceived sexual misconduct.

Pillars of the Soviet Dictatorship at the Local Level

Pillars of the Soviet Dictatorship at the Local Level Donald J. Raleigh (bio) Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Substate Dictatorship: Networks, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union. 445 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. ISBN-13 978-0300230819. $65.00. Saulius Grybkauskas, Governing the Soviet Union’s National Republics: The Second Secretaries of the Communist Party. 226 pp. New York: Routledge, 2021. ISBN-13 978-1138391758. $160.00. The comparative and theoretical literature on dictatorships shows that deeply ideological one-party states such as the Soviet Union—especially if forged in civil war—not only tend to survive longer but also show more resiliency than other types of authoritarian rule.1 Despite the recent publication of archival-based biographies of I. V. Stalin, N. S. Khrushchev, L. I. Brezhnev, and M. S. Gorbachev that throw light on politics at the top, remarkably little research has been conducted on how local leaders governed under these rulers. Making substantial contributions to our understanding of how the USSR functioned at the regional level, the two complementary books under review draw on strategic archive-based research, memoirs, and the secondary literature (and, in Grybkauskas’s case, on oral interviews) to reveal how local leaders—first secretaries of oblasts (and of Soviet republics) and second secretaries in republic party committees—functioned after World War II and how their modus operandi changed as the USSR became less oppressive. [End Page 379] ________ Gorlizki and Khlevniuk’s impressive study comprises ten chapters, a conclusion, eight appendices, and a glossary. Building on the findings they present in their monograph Cold Peace and in related articles, especially that a number of key institutional changes in the highest party echelons occurred while Stalin was still alive, they in Substate Dictatorship focus on the scores of substate (Rogers Brubaker’s term) regional leaders tasked with managing the ruling coalition locally while thwarting revolts from below and dealing with pressures from above.2 Given the unfeasibility of examining all 139 possible units of analysis, the authors fashioned an inductive research design of 30 in-depth oblast- and republic-level case studies over a 30-year period and hired full-time researchers to tap local archival sources. Observing that from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, the Soviet political system “moved from being a repressive autocracy to an oligarchy with low to medium levels of repression” (5), Gorlizki and Khlevniuk argue that Stalin laid the foundation for this transformation that reflected the resiliency of the Soviet regime and its institutions. To chart the change, they identify and compare three models of local dictators: substate dictators (“little Stalins”—not their term) and contested autocrats (those challenged by other influential networks in the region) who prevailed in the late Stalin era, and party governors, who appeared under Khrushchev to become the norm in the Brezhnev era. Like substate dictators, party governors oversaw appointments to the local nomenklatura, but they ran organizations governed by a set of informal rules such as seniority and by adherence to systems of local practices that linked together the local political elite. To handle pressures from above and to foster local patronage systems, substate dictators employed three strategies to make followers dependent upon them: forms of exclusion (including expulsion from the party); the use of kompromat, sensitive or compromising material, as leverage; and overpromotion of cadres who remained indebted to their patron. Offering informative examples of how substate dictators used these approaches, the authors show how, in time, a stratification took place at the regional level as a system emerged of seniority marked by age, length of service, and levels of political education, reinforced by a package of benefits (salary, allotments of foods and goods, hard to get items, etc.) that undermined Moscow’s system of remuneration. [End Page 380] After the war, most oblast party committees (obkomy) fell into the hands of young substate dictators, who proliferated because of the need for regional leaders to assume decision-making powers during the conflict, the legacy of quasi-military forms of ruling, the trials of achieving uncompromising reconstruction quotas, and the fact that Stalin realized that he had to give them breathing space to meet state targets. Directors...

From State to Society: The Komsomol in Yeltsin’s Russia

From State to SocietyThe Komsomol in Yeltsin’s Russia Kristiina Silvan (bio) In September 1991, Vladimir Elagin, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Leninist Communist Youth League of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (LKSM RSFSR), was speaking to a sparse audience. It was the first time in the organization’s history that the attendance was so low: only two-thirds of both the Central Committee and the Central Control Committee members had arrived to hear what Elagin had to say about the organization’s future a week after the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had been outlawed on Soviet territory.1 Contrary to one contemporary interpretation,2 he did not, however, take the floor to confirm the youth league’s liquidation but instead urged his listeners to revive it: “To keep up with the current turbulent time, we need to make serious, responsible, and radical decisions on the transformation of the Union.… We must transform ourselves into a public organization [obshchestvennaia organizatsiia] … [and] say that we will continue to develop and participate in the youth movement and help revive it.”3 Speaking almost three decades after the meeting, one of the members of the organizing committee of the LKSM RSFSR, interviewed for this study, claimed that the dismantling of the Russian Komsomol organization was never even considered. “It was because they were real organizations that genuinely worked with youth. They were real organizations, projects, and programs. The activity was real.”4 [End Page 289] In Russia, the centenary of the Komsomol in 2018 was commemorated by special exhibitions and events.5 It also stimulated discussions of the history and legacy of the Soviet youth league.6 In the 2000s, historians’ interest in the Komsomol has primarily concentrated on the first decades of the youth league’s existence, demonstrated by the publication of a number of in-depth scholarly works that have succeeded in capturing not just the transformation of the Komsomol but also the changes in the Soviet political system as a whole. Juliane Fürst, Matthias Neumann, Seth Bernstein, and others have demonstrated that once the Komsomol changed from a quasi-autonomous association into the party-state’s tool of mass socialization, it “hollowed out” to such an extent that when the time was right, the youth league simply “disappear[ed] overnight, leaving almost no traces.”7 Those examining the youth league in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras have followed up on the story of the Komsomol’s erosion, demonstrating that the youth league could generate genuine support among young people only when it downplayed its practices of political education and accommodated its activities to the (cultural) wishes of young people.8 Finally, scholars looking at the last years of the Komsomol’s existence point to the lack of commitment among both the rank-and-file and the officials. They note that once alternative platforms of entertainment and social engagement emerged and binding Komsomol enrollment targets were lifted, both [End Page 290] young people and Komsomol bureaucrats left the youth league en masse.9 As has been demonstrated by the literature on the construction of the market economy in the USSR, Komsomol officials were among the first to become engaged in business activities, and they were quick to appropriate the league’s lucrative enterprises when that became possible.10 Returning to the research on the Komsomol of earlier decades, it is easy to point out why Komsomol officials did not mourn the loss of their constituency: youth upbringing and welfare had become of secondary interest a long time ago. Any lingering hopes of the Komsomol’s reform to overcome the “crisis”—a topic of heated discussions throughout perestroika—were crushed by the failed coup of August 1991. In September 1991, the organization would finally “reach … its logical conclusion,” declaring that “the political role of the All-Union Leninist Communist Union of Youth [VLKSM, Komsomol] as a federation of young communist leagues has been exhausted,” and self-dissolving into oblivion.11 In his case study of the Komsomol’s demise, Steven Lee Solnick convincingly argued that the Komsomol collapsed because of the breakdown of hierarchical control. This article does not challenge that claim...