Era Of Stalin Research Articles

Кадрове забезпечення Київського центрального архіву давніх актів (1921–1941) у світлі просопографії

The aim of the study is to reconstruct a collective portrait of employees of the Kyiv Central ArchiveS of Ancient Acts in 1921–1941 based on historiographical works and documents of the Central State Archives of the Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine; the methodological basis of the work consists of general scientifi c (analysis, synthesis, deduction, induction, systematic approach) and special-historical (historical-genetic, historicalcomparative) methods and principles of historicism, subjectivism, optimization of the volume of information. The novelty of the work. In the article, for the fi rst time, we reconstruct the prosopographic portrait of the staff of the archival institution according to educational-scientifi c, gender, social and ethnic sections in the era of NEP and Stalin’s industrialization. The turning point in the history of the institution of this period was 1934, when, as a result of a total purge of personnel, the entire archive staff changed. Conclusions. It was found out that until 1934 most of the workers were Ukrainians and Russians. However, from the mid-1930s, signifi cant changes in the ethnic composition took place: along with Ukrainians and Russians, Jews began to be a signifi cant segment of the workforce. Their share among the archive employees correlates with the percentage of Jews among the intelligentsia of the Ukrainian SSR in the 1920s and 1930s. It was found that until 1934, the majority of the archive employees had a classical pre-revolutionary education – gymnasium – university, while in the second half of the decade, the majority of positions were held by persons who graduated from Soviet secondary and higher educational institutions. Signifi cant changes also took place in the social structure of the collective of archivists. Until 1934, the lion’s share of workers were people of non-proletarian origin from noble and bourgeois families. After the «cleaning», the majority came from the families of workers, artisans, civil servants, and peasants. It was observed, that over the course of 20 years, a gradual process of feminization of the collective took place, but women worked in less prestigious and lower-paid positions. As a result of purposeful state policy, the social portrait of the archive workers underwent a radical transformation in the direction of proletarianization.

Ethnic and Cultural Aspects in the Development of Kazakh Theatres during the Independence Period: The Problems of Human Existence

The article gives a detailed description of folklore motifs that became examples for performances in the Kazakh theatre. The interrelation of myth and reality, used as the nature of time, is represented by an existential communica- tional human existence in the ethno-cultural discourse. Here the conditions of existence for the heroes of both the reality and myth are the same. The comparison of the heroes' lifestyle with Kazakh folklore gives a new interpretation quality to the director's conception and dramaturgy. The heroes' destinies under the totalitarian era of Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev are imbued with personifica - tion of folklore myths and legends. The examples given in the study are related to the cultural-philosophical paradigms of modernity and the values of current ethno-cultural transformations. Thus, the inclusion of folklore into the theatre becomes an influential art trend, in which art seeks to give a comprehensive and vivid real-life picture of a person who fights for his/her own destiny and justice. The Gabit Musrepov Kazakh Academic Theatre for Children and Youth solves these problems, using the comparative method of folk stories, encouraging the viewer to understand and appreciate the philosophical meaning of human life and existence. The study uses the ratio of diachronic and synchronic presentation of texts and artefacts as regards current events from the perspective of folklore studies, theatre studies, and art history, as well as from the cultural-philosophical viewpoint.

Making Friends with the Soviets in the Era of Stalin

Making Friends with the Soviets in the Era of Stalin

The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939

Now updated with new facts, and abridged for use in Soviet history courses, this gripping book assembles top secret Soviet documents, translated into English, from the era of Stalin's purges. The dossiers, police reports, private letters, secret transcripts, and other documents expose the hidden inner workings of the Communist Party and the dark inhumanity of the purge process. [This] book will be of great value to students of the Terror and ...the material, such as Bukharin's last letter, is astounding.-Michael J. Ybarra, Wall Street Journal It will be indispensable for all historians and researchers of communism, the USSR, and Stalinism for many decades to come.-Roy A. Medvedev, author of Let History Judge

Lysenko and the tragedy of Soviet science

Trofim Lysenko's campaign against genetics and biology during the era of Stalin and Khrushchev is one of the great tragedies of modern science. In the purges that Lysenko (1898-1976) instigated, even the greatest of Soviet scientists were not safe. Only in 1964, when Khrushchev fell from power and when massive crop failures revealed the emptiness of the peasant-scientist's theories, did Lysenko lose favor. Even now, his long shadow stretches over the countries of the former Soviet Union as they deal with the disastrous consequences of Lysenkoist policies on science, agriculture, medicine, and the environment. As a young student in the 1950s, Valery N. Soyfer saw Lysenko's power - and charismatic charm - at first hand. In the 1970s, when Soyfer found himself stripped of his scientific degrees and positions because he had supported physicist Andre Sakharov and joined the dissident movement in the USSR, he used his time to find out all he could about the man who had destroyed Soviet science. This is the fullest account yet of Lysenko's life and times. It draws on extensive interviews, archives long inaccessible to scholars, and Soyfer's own memories. With the passion of a novelist and the precision of a scientist, Soyfer re-creates this terrible episode in twentieth-century history. The original Russian manuscript of this unique biography circulated as an underground samizdat book and was to the West for publication. When Dr. Soyfer was unexpectedly allowed to leave the USSR in 1988, Rutgers University Press greeted him with a contract for the work.

The Essential Legacy of Clement Greenberg from the Era of Stalin and Hitler

The Essential Legacy of Clement Greenberg from the Era of Stalin and Hitler

Stalinism As Humdrum Politics

Among historians, unlike Marxists, the title is an honored and coveted one. So much so, indeed, that many historians, no doubt unconsciously, exaggerate the errors and consistency of the view and draw an unnecessarily sharp line between their positions and those of their predecessors. The orthodox position, however conceived, can always be challenged from many points of view. Since the revisionists are likely to disagree among themselves, it is usually hard to put them into easily definable groups. In this instance, however, Sheila Fitzpatrick is correct in identifying a new and self-consciously revisionist group of historians of the era of Stalin. As I understand it, this group consists of Roberta Manning, Gabor Ritterspom, Lynne Viola, William Chase, and above all, J. Arch Getty, the only one among these scholars who has published a book, The Origins of the Great Purges (1985), fully developing his point of view. These historians, with one exception Americans, have presented a picture of Stalinism that is radically different from the conventional one. Clearly, something noteworthy is happening in rewriting the history of Stalinism, and it is necessary to take account of the changes. In responding to Fitzpatrick's article, I find that my impression of the new literature is somewhat different from hers. She presents the revisionist point of view with sympathy, mitigating their combative tone and smoothing out some of the rough edges. If the revisionists were as reasonable as she, I would have fewer disagreements with them. What are the defining characteristics of this group of historians? It cannot simply be a rejection of the totalitarian for that model, as an analytical tool, has been rejected, rightly or wrongly, by the majority of historians of the Soviet Union. To mention only one prominent example, Stephen Cohen has argued against this model, and yet his views are as far removed from the revisionists as they are from those of Ulam and Fainsod. According to Fitzpatrick, the new element in the revisionist historiography of Stalinism is the rejection of earlier preoccupations with ideology and politics in favor of a new emphasis on social history. Here, I think her assessment of the group's work is mistaken. If by social history she means an analysis of social relations and social mobility, then it is she alone among the revisionists who has made a lasting contribution with her studies of social mobility. If by social history she has in mind an examination of how simple people actually lived, then

French Communism in the Era of Stalin: The Quest for Unity and Integration, 1945-1962. Irwin M. Wall

<i>French Communism in the Era of Stalin: The Quest for Unity and Integration, 1945-1962</i>. Irwin M. Wall

French Communism in the Era of Stalin: The Quest for Unity and Integration, 1945-1962

French Communism in the Era of Stalin: The Quest for Unity and Integration, 1945-1962

French Communism in the Era of Stalin: The Quest for Unity and Integration, 1945–1962Wall, Irwin M. French Communism in the Era of Stalin: The Quest for Unity and Integration, 1945–1962 . Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981. 268 pp. $29.95.

French Communism in the Era of Stalin: The Quest for Unity and Integration, 1945–1962Wall, Irwin M. <i>French Communism in the Era of Stalin: The Quest for Unity and Integration, 1945–1962</i> . Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981. 268 pp. $29.95.

French Communism in the Era of Stalin: The Quest for Unity and Integration, 1945–1962. By Irwin M. Wall. Contributions in Political Science, no. 97. Westport, Conn, and London: Greenwood Press, 1983. xii, 268 pp. $29.95.

French Communism in the Era of Stalin: The Quest for Unity and Integration, 1945–1962. By Irwin M. Wall. Contributions in Political Science, no. 97. Westport, Conn, and London: Greenwood Press, 1983. xii, 268 pp. $29.95. - Volume 43 Issue 3

Marxism and Art in the Era of Stalin and Hitler: A Comparison of Brecht and Lukacs

ion which favored Nazi ability to hide the real world. What was needed, instead of talk about defending culture, was a literature of plainspeaking realism. This Brecht attempted to present in works such as Schweik in the Second World War, whose idiotic little hero subverts, out of practical opportunism, the poses of those in power. If culture is to be defended, Brecht argued further, it needs to be seen in relation to the entire productive activity of the masses.126 experience of Nazism heightened Brecht's desire for a realist literature which would reveal a material reality hidden by official culture. In this art no period or literary style had a monopoly. Explicitly countering Lukics, Brecht defended modernist experiment where it had exposed a reality opaque to everyday experience, and cited Nazi manipulation of language and visual image as the real formalism. His suspicion of the aesthetics of catharsis had been accentuated by an observation of Nazi theatricality, the deliberate Wagnerian construction of an illusionary reality with which spectators would passionately identify.127 His sharp rejection of a vicariously fulfilling emotionality and insistence upon critical observation and intelligence, moreover, was closely connected with an awareness of the manipulated psycho-drama of Nazi political culture.128 To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, Brecht's politicizing of art intended to challenge the aestheticized politics of the Nazis.129 Like LukAcs after 1928 and official Communist policy after 1934, he too favored a popular front against Nazism. Whereas the former sought upper middle class liberal allies with the working classes, thus accentuating the classical patrician strand of the literary heritage, Brecht implicitly worked for a united front of workers, the lower middle classes, peasants, and the alienated intelligentsia against the economic and political elites, either old or new. His hope for a popular front of SPD and KPD against the Nazis, which Stalin had effectively opposed in the critical years 1930-33, had been for a common effort of rank and file workers more than for alliances of parliamentarians, trade union bureaucrats and communist officials.3 126. Ibid., p. 249. 127. Brecht, GW, 18, p. 132; Schriften zum Theater, 5 (Frankfurt am Main, 1963-64), pp. 92-94. For an excellent discussion and illustration of this aspect of Nazi culture see Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, 1960), pp. 300-303, where the Nazi film Triumph des Willens is analyzed. 128. Ewen, pp. 217-218. 129. formulation is used in Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, p. 242. 130. Fritz Sternberg, Der Dichter und die Ratio, pp. 26-27. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.157 on Tue, 17 May 2016 05:47:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MARXISM AND AR T IN THE ERA OF STALIN AND HITLER 41 Progress as Faith or as Project In their responses to Stalinism and Nazism, Brecht and Luk ics revealed strikingly different views of the modem historical process. Laboring under the strain of his own extremely pessimistic view of western society and culture before and during World War I, LukAcs moved in the 1920s and f930s toward its compensatory, opposite pole--a sanitized view of history as inevitable stages of progress. His portrayal of Nazism as barbaric and decadent denuded contemporary history of its real contradictions and terrors and set heroic Soviet in a single contrasting positive light. latter would bypass the decay and sickness of advanced capitalist society and continue the progressive culture of an earlier bourgeois humanism. In a manner very similar to Stalinist polemics, LukAcs' positivistic and deterministic view of history allowed him to view modern western art (such as expressionism), as objectively reactionary. For one who had contrived to believe in a closed historical process of progressive stages known in advance, western modernist pessimism was to be repressed in favor of the implicitly progressive perspectives found in a Balzac or Goethe, or the enthusiastic certainty of victory which the critic found in Gorkij31 What Lukacs demanded of literature, in effect, and what Kafka, Joyce and Toller did not provide, was a continuous reassurance that this road to progress was inevitably proceeding in spite of capitalist decay, world war and fascism (and often in spite of the author's own political sympathies). His adoption of an Hegelian teleology of history's cunning and imminent rationality as well as his passive aesthetics of reflection are to be seen in this light: if art helps to convince one, through a positive resolution of contradictions, of inexorable progress toward human fulfillment, then there remains little urgency to intervene actively for its

M. N. Roy and the Fifth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party

M. N. Roy was undoubtedly the most colourful of all non-Russian Communists in the era of Lenin and Stalin. A Hindu Brahmin by birth, an ardent Indian nationalist and revolutionary in his youth, and a convert to Marxism only after the Bolshevik revolution hi Russia, he rose rapidly within the Comintern hierarchy to become the most prominent Asian exponent and theoretician of Communism for Asia. During the twenties his concepts of revolution for the colonies and so-called semi-colonies of the world were incorporated into many of the most important decisions of the Communist International, and it is no exaggeration to state that he ranks with Lenin and Mao Tse-tung in the development of fundamental Communist theory for the underdeveloped, as contrasted with the industrialised, areas of the globe.