High Stalinism Research Articles

Prokofiev'sSemyon Kotkoand the melodrama of High Stalinism

AbstractThis article examines the first opera of Prokofiev's Soviet period,Semyon Kotko(1939), in light of the disparity between two forms of melodrama, one affecting the opera's composition, the other its reception. The first is the classic melodrama, which offered the composer the foundation for a vivid, intense work that would also be suitable for a mass audience; the second is the melodrama reflecting the aesthetic norms and moral framework of socialist realism and High Stalinism. The simplicity and immediacy ofKotkoavoided the directed emotionalism of the officially favoured model of Romantic opera, and the Ukrainian setting prompted references to the tradition of Gogolian comedy rather than an elevation of folk content to an epic dimension. Characters conform to archetypes of classic melodrama, and together with the opera's comic elements and the unique gestural idiom of its music and manner of performance, this detracted from the required effects of sublime heroism and nationalism. While the outlines of a socialist realist plot remain inKotko, Prokofiev's commitment to what he considered timeless values of music and drama led to a failure, in socialist realist terms, to achieve an appropriate amplification of its moral essence.

:A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland, 1945–1960.(Rochester Studies in Central Europe, number 7.)

Most studies of Eastern Europe's postwar ethnic cleansing wrap up their narratives with the departure of the expelled in the 1940s or with the imposition of high Stalinism in the early 1950s. T. David Curp, by contrast, extends his inquiry deep into the period of post-Stalinist Poland. In doing so he illustrates not only the immediate role the expulsion may have played in communist victory—a common theme of the literature on the topic—but also the long-term corrosive effects that ethnic cleansing had on communist legitimacy. In addition to offering a new perspective on the construction of communist Poland, Curp's approach compels us to consider the legacies of postwar forced migrations. The book concentrates on the region around Poznań, an ethnically mixed area that Germany lost to Poland in 1918. The anticommunist National Democratic movement of Roman Dmowski (the Endecja) was especially strong here in the interwar period. During the German occupation the Nazis expelled more than one million Poles from the region. Thanks to their Catholic and conservative ideology, the war's Polish survivors might have been expected to resist communist rule. In fact, Poznanians did not participate in the brief and futile postwar anti-communist insurgency. To the contrary, Curp argues, “The fiercely anti-Communist but highly nationalistic society of Poznań, the church, and the Endecja together pioneered collaboration with Poland's Communist rulers—to ethnically cleanse their country” (p. 8).

East as True West: Redeeming Bourgeois Culture, from Socialist Realism to Ostalgie

East as True WestRedeeming Bourgeois Culture, from Socialist Realism to Ostalgie Greg Castillo (bio) Depicting the postwar world as sundered and under siege, Winston Churchill’s “Sinews of Peace” speech of March 1946 catapulted the phrase “Iron Curtain” into public discourse and U.S. foreign policy. Churchill warned of a West jeopardized by communist infiltrators—a far cry from the eastern menace posed by the Golden Horde of yore. The literary heritage of former Oriental perils lived on, however, in the “Sinews of Peace” address, as György Péteri has observed. Invoking images far more visceral than those of mere doctrinal difference, Churchill characterized communist “fifth columns” as a barbarian invasion’s “challenge and peril to Christian civilization.” Churchill fashioned this vivid mental map of a divided Europe to compel Americans to act. His message of impending catastrophe lent impetus to the creation of the U.S. Marshall Plan, which in the words of the economic historian Carlo Spango “can be regarded as the founding act of the postwar Western world” (emphasis in original).1 The trope of Bolshevist barbarism, which came to permeate U.S. Cold War nationalism, found its complement in anti-American discourses shared among the people’s republics, a coalition forged at the initial Cominform conference of September 1947. According to Andrei Zhdanov, the Politburo member charged with orchestrating Cominform’s debut, international alliances fell into two factions: America’s imperialist, anti-democratic camp; and the Soviet democratic, anti-fascist camp, which embodied the “aspirations of progressive mankind.” Zhdanov’s “two camps” thesis reversed the polarities of Churchill’s schema of modern barbarism, implying that continuities with fascism implicated the United States—and, by extension, Marshall Plan Europe—in the brutal legacies of Hitler and Mussolini. Soviet fulmination [End Page 747] against American “cultural barbarism” was conveyed to divided Germany by Aleksandr Dymshits, the Red Army officer in charge of cultural affairs in the eastern sector. His denunciation of the United States for contaminating German arts and letters found a sympathetic local audience.2 West European intellectuals and opinion leaders typically regarded America as characterized by “a primitive, vulgar, trashy Massenkultur, which was in effect an Unkultur, whose importation into postwar Europe had to be resisted,” as the historian Volker Berghahn notes.3 The Marshall Plan administrator Paul G. Hoffman believed that dispelling “the old stereotype of the Yank as a cross between a cinematic gangster and an uncultivated bumpkin” was crucial in the struggle for American influence.4 Antithetical, yet complementary, notions of a post-war threat to civilization—Churchill’s warning of a communist assault on Christendom and the Party’s denigration of the Marshall Plan as a conveyor belt for cultural degradation—illustrate what Péteri has called the “systemic relativism” of Cold War discourses, which mobilized common concepts yet defined them in ways that buttressed divergent epistemes.5 Parallel but incommensurable models of barbarian invasion and cultural resistance were indispensable to both camps, grounding their respective identities in an adversarial relationship with a hemispheric “other.” Within the disciplines of architecture and industrial design—the subjects of this essay—Socialist Realism and International-style modernism defined the East/West epistemological divide. The cultural geographies theorized by these opposing design movements, however, were far more complex than the cartography of their practices. U.S. cultural propaganda in Marshall Plan Europe emphasized New World experiments in modernism as the antithesis of “totalitarian” art and architecture—a contention that lumped Soviet and Nazi cultural production in a single catch-all category while conveniently ignoring the fact that neo-traditional design was alive and well in America’s architecturally pluralist society. Even more entangled was the representational [End Page 748] logic of Soviet Socialist Realism, glossed as a creative method “socialist in content and national in form.” As the aesthetic associated with the high culture of “high Stalinism,” Socialist Realism emerged during the USSR’s “Great Retreat” of the mid-1930s and came to the postwar people’s republics through a Party-choreographed cultural revolution in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Abandoning the universalist pretensions of a modernist avant-garde, Socialist Realists proposed a novel form of cultural internationalism clad in recycled and reprocessed...

Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: the establishment of the Communist regime in Hungary, 1944-1948

1. Introduction 2. The revolution, 1917-21 3. New economic policies, 1921-9 4. The first five-year plan 5. High Stalinism 6. A great and patriotic war 7. The Nadir: 1945-53 8. The age of Khrushchev 9. Real, existing socialism 10. Failed reforms 11. Leap into the unknown 12. Afterthoughts Chronology.

L. N. Tolstoy and N. N. Strakhov: Complete Correspondence by A. A. s> Donskov (review)

I26 SEER, 83, I, 2005 that Gogol"slife acquired 'the "valueof narrativity"'as a simplifiedpersonal historywith a moral and didacticmessage (p. 105). Chapterfourof thebook offersan enlighteninghistoryof Gogol"streatment by the publishingindustryin the late Imperialera. Moeller-Sallyis especially interestedin the interactionof the commercially-mindedmass-publishers(e.g. Vladimir Dumnov, Adol'fMarksand Ivan Sytin)and the zemstvo-based civicminded enlighteners of the common folk, the two acting as both rivals and accomplices in the enterprise of bringing Gogol' to the people via Imperial Russia's'popularcommunication circuits'(p. 94). One of the most importantstrategiesfor generatingthe symbolicvalue of a 'classic' in this period was the organization of large-scale national literary jubilees. Moeller-Sally'sdetailed account of the centenaryof Gogol"sbirthin I909 is not only a valuable complement to existing studiesof similarcultural events (e.g. Marcus Levitt'swork on the Pushkinjubilees of i88o and i899), but also contains an original methodological perspective on the specific culturalformsthroughwhich Gogol"sclassicalstatuswas createdin thisera. The book hasonly one (thefinal)chapteron the Sovietperiod. This presents a highly suggestive but hardly definitive account of what happened to the classics under Lenin and Stalin. Moeller-Sally shows that the Proletkul't's decision to assimilate the classics into proletarian culture as a vital form of 'culturalcapital' found a ratherdifferentexpressionin the late I920S and the mid I930s. Whereasduringthe firstFive-YearPlan Gogol' acquiredthe image of a literarylabourerwhose techniqueproletarianwriterswere incitedto learn from and be cultivatedby, duringthe second Five-YearPlan Gogol' became a charismatic,semi-divine literarygenius and a true 'General-Classic'(p. 146). The latter image culminated in the Gogol' monument sculpted by Nikolai Tomskii for the I952 jubilee. Gogol"s eerie resemblance to Stalin and the unusual inscription on the pedestal 'from the government of the Soviet Union' are seen as emblematic of the identityof the Russianliteraryclassic in high Stalinism(p. I55). Moeller-Sally's book offers a convincing, systematic and much needed historicalaccount of a Russianliteraryclassic'speculiarexistence 'beyond the book'. Its principal strengthlies in the fact that it is not simply about Gogol', but about the broad institutionalcontext that generated and made possible the literaryclassicas a 'socio-culturalstatus'(p. I62). WolfsonCollege, Oxford ANDY BYFORD Donskov, A. A. (ed.). L. N Tolstoy andN N Strakhov. Complete Correspondence. Tolstoy Series, 6-7. Slavic Research Group, University of Ottawa, and State L. N. Tolstoy Museum, Moscow, 2003. lxii + I079 PP. (2 vols). Illustrations.Bibliography.Appendix. Index. $45.00 (2 vols, paperback). THISimpressivepair of volumes is the fruitof the sixth collaborationbetween the SlavicResearch Group at the Universityof Ottawa, the StateL. N. Tolstoi Museum in Moscow and the Institute of World Literature at the Russian Academy of Sciences (IMLI).(Previoustitles in the seriesalso concentrate on archivalwork and have included Tolstoi's correspondencewith the Molokan REVIEWS I27 writerF. A. Zheltov, and correspondencewith and reminiscencesby Tolstoi's secretaryN. N. Gusev.) A total of 467 letters are presented here, several of which arepublishedfor the firsttime afterbeing unearthedfollowingrigorous archivalresearchby the compilers;all have been verifiedagainstthe original manuscripts, and where necessary, corrections to text and chronology have been made in respect of previous publications. The work includes an introductory essay in English, a biographical sketch of Strakhov by Boris Nikol'skii, in English translation, extensive annotations by L. D. Gromova and T. G. Nikiforova, and indexes of names, letter chronology and titles of Tolstoi'sworks. The preparation of such a meticulous piece of work must have been a labourof love, and as suchit is a fittingmemorialto the late LidiiaDmitrievna Gromova-Opul'skaia, Head of Russian Classical Literature at IMLI, who passed away late in 2003. In a career spanning more than half a century as a Tolstoi scholar, she took a leading role in editing both the go-volume Jubilee Edition of his complete works,and also the new i oo-volume edition currently being issued. I was privileged to hear her speak,not long before her death, at the linked conferences in honour of the I 75th anniversaryof Tolstoi's birth, held in August and September 2003 in Iasnaia Poliana, Tula and Moscow. It was clear at this meeting that love for Tolstoi permeated her work, and the importance for Tolstoi of love as the sole path to unity was what she chose to stressto the assemblyof scholarsfrom as far...

National Bolshevism: Stalinist mass culture and the formation of modern Russian national identity, 1931-1956

List of Figures and Table A Note on Conventions Terms and Acronyms Introduction: Mobilization, Populism, and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity 1. Tsarist and Early Soviet Society's Weak Sense of National Identity Part One: 1931-1941 2. Mobilizing Stalinist Society in the Early to Mid-1930s 3. The Emergence of Russocentric Etatism 4. Ideology in the Prewar Classroom 5. Popularizing State Ideology through Mass Culture 6. The Popular Reception of National Bolshevism on the Eve of War Part Two: 1941-1945 7. Wartime Stalinist Ideology and Its Discontents 8. Ideological Education on the Home Front 9. Wartime Mass Culture and Propaganda 10. Popular Engagement with the Official Line during the War Part Three: 1945-1953 11. Soviet Ideology during the Zhdanovshchina and High Stalinism 12. Public and Party Education during the Early Postwar Period 13. Postwar Soviet Mass Culture 14. The Popular Reception of Ideology during Stalin's Last Decade Conclusion: National Bolshevism and a Modern Russian National Identity Appendix: Civic History Textbook Development, 1934-1955 Notes Index

Comparing Sample Frames for Research on Arts Organizations: Results of a Study in Three Metropolitan Areas

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaul DimaggioDeborah Kaple, who holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University, is a scholar, novelist, and journalist. She directed the project described in this article. Her most recent book is Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China (Oxford University Press). Ziggy Rivkin-Fishis a graduate student in sociology at Princeton University. His research interests include the arts, social capital, social identity, and survey design. Hugh Louchis a graduate student in sociology at Princeton University. His research interests include philanthropy, social networks, and economic sociology. Lori Morrisholds a Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University. She has done research on theater and on education. Paul DiMaggiois a professor and the chair of the Sociology Department at Princeton University and is codirector, with Stanley Katz, of the Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. He has written widely on the arts, cultural policy, organizations, and other topics.

Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China

Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China

Dream of A Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China.

Dream of A Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China.

Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China (review)

Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China (review)

Gomulka's ‘Rightist-Nationalist Deviation,’ The Postwar Jewish Communists, and the Stalinist Reaction in Poland, 1945-1950

The first years of Communist rule in Poland profoundly shaped the 45 year political experience of the country until the 1989 democratic breakthrough. These formative years encompassed such historic developments as postwar reconstruction and central economic planning, the emergence of new and the disappearance of old political parties, the heretical notion of a Polish road to socialism but also the advent of high Stalinism. Even with the redrawing of Poland's postwar boundaries and with increasing Communist hegemony over political life, the period between 1945 and 1948 was characterized by considerably more political and ethnic heterogeneity than the decades that followed. A significant and, ultimately, controversial role in the shaping of postwar Poland - in its rebuilding, in its economic program, political configuration, national security organization, and in its minorities policies - was played by Jewish Communists.