Red Army Research Articles

Umerziehung durch rote Bibliotheken: SED-Bibliothekspolitik 1945/46 bis zum Ende der 1960er Jahre

Umerziehung durch rote Bibliotheken: SED-Bibliothekspolitik 1945/46 bis zum Ende der 1960er Jahre

Măsurile pregătitoare politico-diplomatice și militar-propagandistice ale U.R.S.S. pentru anexarea Basarabiei și a nordului Bucovinei (II)

"A significant turning point in relations between the Soviet Union and Romania was associated with the incorporation of Bessarabia and northern part of Bukovina into the USSR, which took place in the context of Soviet-German rapprochement. To this end, the Soviet leadership developed a set of preparatory political-diplomatic and military-propaganda measures. Soviet political and diplomatic actions were based on fundamental military preparations. In order to prepare and further joining Bessarabia and the northern part of Bukovina to the USSR, the Southern Front was created on the basis of the Kyiv Special and Odessa military districts. Army General Georgy Zhukov was appointed as a commander. The General Staff of the Red Army developed two variants of actions by Soviet troops. The first one provided for measures in case the Romanian government would not agree to the peaceful transfer of Bessarabia and Bukovina to the USSR. The second variant was an action plan in case of a voluntary retreat of Romanian troops west of the Prut. The first option was taken as the base. As early as June 26, 1940, on the border with Romania, the Soviet command concentrated 32 infantry, 2 motorized infantry, 6 cavalry divisions, 11 tank, 3 airborne brigades, 16 artillery regiments of the commander-in-chief’s reserve, 14 corps artillery regiments and 4 separate artillery divisions. In the main areas of the offensive, more than a triple advantage in manpower and means was provided. At the same time, for the purpose of ideological support, a huge propaganda apparatus was prepared to work with the population. In accordance with the Directive of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army № 0140 (June 21, 1940), a large number of political workers were sent to the disposal of the Southern Front. One month before the start of the military operation, all employees of party and Soviet organizations were considered as mobilized. After appropriate training, they were ready for further activities as editorial staff, propagandists and agitators. Concert brigades and drama theatre groups were organized for the cultural service of the population. There were selected mobile library, gramophone records, and films. Book-mobile was arranged; everything necessary for the publication in Romanian newspaper was completed and provided with everything necessary. Due to the diligence of all these preparatory acts, the territories of Bessarabia and the northern part of Bukovina were occupied by the Red Army according to all the rules of military art (all elements of military operation were used: military force, local military pressure, military intelligence and counterintelligence, agitation and propaganda), thanks to which the USSR could reach its purpose. "

The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children ed. by Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine

Reviewed by: The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children ed. by Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine Megan Swift (bio) The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children. Edited by Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine. University of Toronto Press, 2021. The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children is a major new contribution to the field of children's literature. The volume is edited by two leading figures in Russian and Soviet children's literature, Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine, and includes sixteen chapters by contributors from Russia, Europe, and North America. It is lavishly illustrated with over 250 beautifully-reproduced color illustrations from Princeton University's collection of Soviet illustrated children's literature at the Cotsen Children's Library. Thomas Keenan, one of the Slavic librarians at the Cotsen, is a contributor to the volume. Keenan and another contributor, Katherine Reischl, co-created an accompanying digital humanities project based on the same rare books, "Playing Soviet: The Visual Language of Early Soviet Children's Books" (https://commons.princeton.edu/soviet/books/). While this website features the full texts of over 50 Soviet illustrated children's books from the 1920s and 1930s, researchers will want to turn to The Pedagogy of Images for comprehensive analyses of these and other works. The first innovation of the volume is its thematic approach, with divisions into three sections dedicated to Mediation, Technology, and Power. As the editors explain in their introduction, they wanted to focus beyond the "institutions of power" towards "various practices of expression and narration" (5). The first part, Mediation, looks at how the Soviet picture book helped mediate between traditional print practices and new visual practices coming from film, photography, and "how to" books. Chapters examine the negotiation between the figuration of the past and the avantgarde geometry of the future (Helena Goscilo); the so-called "cine-book," a picture book influenced by contemporary film techniques (Yuri Leving); the use of children as active co-creators in their role as photo-correspondents and worker-correspondents for early Soviet journals (Erika Wolf); the concept and inspiration behind the unrealized "book-toy" (Aleksandar Bošković); and the material implications of the Soviets' "paper regime" on children's books (Birgitte Beck Pristed). This section will beckon readers interested in hybrid book forms, in the influence of avant-garde techniques on book-making, and in the material and sociological circumstances that led to the early Soviet focus on do-ityourself and make-it-yourself books. The second part of the book, which focuses on Technology, is the longest section. This part is dedicated to the "representational capacity" of the [End Page 348] new Soviet book to capture categories crucial to the Soviet state such as industrialization, technology, and modernity (207). Larissa Rudova's chapter explores how, in order to represent the Soviet theme of struggle with nature, children's books "used anthropomorphism and animation to blur the distinction between nature and culture" (208). Sara Pankenier Weld investigates depictions of hybrid human-machines as harbingers of the biomechanical future. Kirill Chunikhin's chapter looks at how to represent the largely-invisible technological advancement of electricity and its treatment as a hybrid of materialism and magic; Maria Litovskaya examines "Do It All Yourself!" (Delai vse sam), a do-it-yourself magazine that encouraged technological literacy among children; Michael Kunichika explores how modernity was envisioned in a Stalin-era picture book about the construction of the Turkestan-Siberia railroad; and Katherine M. H. Reischl looks at the category of Soviet transportation and the theme of hyper-mobility. Part three is dedicated to the theme of Power. Kevin M. F. Platt explores the "representations of temporality in spatial forms" during Stalin's infamous 5-Year plans for rapid industrialization. Daniil Leiderman and Marina Sokolovskaia's chapter looks at images of Lenin's death and its representation in children's books as the end of time and the passage to immortality. Stephen M. Norris examines how images of Red Army soldiers taught child readers how to "see in Soviet"; and Alexei Golubev's chapter explores images of the laboring body and its association with economic class. In the final chapter of the volume, Thomas Keenan discusses how—counterintuitively—the...

От «Русского Манчестера» к «Красному Вердену»: Царицын и Гражданская война в России (1917–1920 гг.) (по материалам периодической печати)

Introduction. The history of Tsaritsyn as a frontier is a unique example of urbanization, the struggle for which was both ideological and strategic. Since the Russian Revolution of 1917, the city has been under pressure from the ideological systems of the “fiery revolutionaries” of 1917, the Bolsheviks and their opponents in 1917–1920. Methods. Using the accumulated historiographical material, based on the material of the local periodical press, practically not put into circulation, an attempt is made to reconstruct the life of Tsaritsyn in 1917–1920. Analysis. The analysis revealed a number of important problems. The central problem of the city was the food issue, which reached a crisis stage under the influence of public criticism of the government’s actions to introduce food appropriation (1916) and was not resolved until the end of the war. The crisis, aggravated by revolutionary actions, introduced the public into (2) a spiritual crisis, which manifested itself in the unwillingness of people to participate in the activities of self-government. Fuel, crime, epidemiological and budgetary problems led to the breakdown of the urban economy and the lack of combat capability of the military. The capture of the city by the Whites in 1919 only worsened the urban economy. The public was in crisis and quickly panicked at reports of the threat of a fall in volunteer power. The return of the city to the leadership of the Red Army and the creation of an independent province with its center in Tsaritsyn led to the gradual restoration of the city on the basis of an industrial base established in the 19th century. Results. Research into the history of Tsaritsyn during the transition years has shown that radical transformations and the inconsistent policy of successive regimes led to the deformation of urban structures, bringing them into a state of permanent crisis. Only the end of hostilities and the establishment of a stable state course of development can provide the potential for the functioning of the city within the state.

Interview with Ronald Grigor Suny

Interview with Ronald Grigor Suny Ronald Grigor Suny We renew our interview series this fall with Ronald Grigor Suny, who recently retired from the University of Michigan as William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Political Science. As our field faces unprecedented challenges and we seek to decenter and decolonize our work, it seems like an ideal time to hear from Suny. In a career spanning nearly 60 years, he has foregrounded the experiences of non-Russian peoples in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. When Suny entered our field, scholars considered nationalism and nationality frameworks of analysis and non-Russian histories to be inconsequential. Suny's work challenged these dominant paradigms, placing nationality and non-Russians at the center of conversations about identity, class, labor, genocide, Marxism, and emotions. He pushed us to recognize the ways in which the Soviet Union became "the crucible of nations."1 Over his career, Suny has worked across disciplines and fields, published prolifically in academic and public venues, shaped generations of students and scholars, and offered countless lectures and media interviews around the world. Born in 1940, Suny once described the milieu in which he was raised as "Armenian America." His paternal grandparents shared a rich history in the Caucasus (his grandfather is the renowned composer and musicologist Grikor Suni). It is with this side of his family that we can find both the locus of Suny's interest in the Soviet Union and his leftist politics. His father—who as a child experienced the Red Army's invasion of Tiflis, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Georgia—was Suny's first history teacher. Inspired by his father's political orientation, the young Suny gave a school presentation on the Soviet Union's efforts to build socialism, which, at the height of McCarthyism, both horrified his teacher and saw him renamed "Comrade Suny" at school. Suny's maternal grandparents, meanwhile, immigrated to the United States from Turkey; his grandmother left after her sister and others were murdered during the 1890s massacres of Armenians in Diyarbakır, and his grandfather [End Page 693] migrated following the 1909 massacres of Armenians in Adana. Relatives who stayed behind were murdered in the Armenian Genocide. Suny's immense bibliography, including more than twenty books and countless articles, testifies to his boundless intellectual curiosity and innovative ideas. Drawing on Russian, Armenian, Georgian, Turkish, French, and German sources, through his work he has shared untold histories with his readers. His first book, The Baku Commune, 1917–1918, explored the intersection of class, nationality, empire, and Bolshevism in this multinational and dynamic city.2 The fall of this radical Bolshevik experiment foreshadowed the violence that was yet to come. In articles and monographs, including The Making of the Georgian Nation and Looking toward Ararat, Suny explored cultural, social, and political transformations as well as memory politics in the South Caucasus region, drawing out in particular the emergence of nationalism and national consciousness in these spaces.3 In operationalizing nation alongside more traditional categories of Soviet history, Suny has led historians to understand the importance of the USSR. His A State of Nations, co-edited with Terry Martin, solidified nationality as a fundamental building block of imperial and Soviet identities and politics, and The Revenge of the Past showed how nation could end the USSR just as it had sustained it for decades.4 Even when Suny adopted a wide lens—as in The Soviet Experiment and Russia's Empires, co-authored with Valerie Kivelson—he remained focused on drawing out the multinational histories of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.5 More recently, in Stalin (2020), Suny revisited the dominant themes of his first book—Social Democracy, the revolutionary movement, and the South Caucasus—to explore the story of the Georgian Marxist who went on to rule the Soviet Union for three decades.6 Suny won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Book Prize in 2022 and Honorable Mention for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize in 2021 for this book. [End Page 694] Although much of Suny's career has been dedicated to the Russian imperial and Soviet worlds, his oeuvre extends to...

Uncovering Buried Historical Memory: A Conversation with Grzegorz Kwiatkowski

Uncovering Buried Historical MemoryA Conversation with Grzegorz Kwiatkowski Grzegorz Kwiatkowski (bio) and Peter Constantine (bio) Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a new and dynamic poetic voice from Poland, with six volumes of poetry and several translations on the way, as well as the vocalist of the psychedelic postpunk band Trupa Trupa. His newest collection, Crops, translated into English by Peter Constantine, was published by Rain Taxi in November 2021. In this interview, Constantine and Kwiatkowski discuss the themes of his poetry and his endeavors as a musician and activist. [End Page 34] Click for larger view View full resolution HOLOCAUST CONCEPT JEWISH SHOES FOR REMEMBRANCE DAY, AUSCHWITZ BIRKENAU Peter Constantine: Several years ago a number of students at the University of Connecticut specializing in Polish began translating your work. One of the students, Michal Ciebielski, published his translations in New Poetry in Translation, which caused quite a sensation. Readers were drawn to the stark voices of your poems, the different narrators from a troubling past who tell compelling and often frightening stories in a minimal and distilled form. Grzegorz Kwiatkowski: On reflection I realize that was in fact the first time my work was translated and published outside Poland. I was delighted with the translation. It really hit the mark. The English was minimalistic and cold and very direct. As for the voices in my poems, I feel that an artist in some way has to be like a sponge, and for me that means hearing and absorbing different voices from the past and present. It was important to live with these voices for a while. I think this is the crux of my method: I strive to listen to others as much as I can and to be as open as I can. But I do make a selection from these voices, and this selection is usually very dark. I believe that this dark music that I am seeking and re-creating has its source in my family history, in which the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof played a very central role. Constantine: When I started reading your poetry, I came across an article in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, and then later in the Guardian too, about your grandfather taking you to the Stutthof camp when you were a child, and about the gruesome and momentous discovery you made there more recently. Kwiatkowski: Yes, when I was a child my grandfather took me to Stutthof. It was the first time he’d returned there since World War II. It was a very traumatic experience for him. He tried to reconstruct what had happened to him, and his memories suddenly came alive—memories from when he was an inmate there. Both he and his sister. I was a child, and suddenly I saw my grandfather as a broken person. He was crying, shouting. He was in a state of trauma. It was a very powerful and very devastating experience for me, perhaps the most important experience in my life. My head was suddenly filled with so many questions, vital and simple questions: Why do people hate one another? Why do people murder one another? Why do such places as concentration camps exist? In some way from this time on I was lost, and yet perhaps quite the opposite. I began seeking a way to understand these horrors. Walter Stier by Grzegorz Kwiatkowski translated by Peter Constantine You never saw any trains? nonever we had far too much work to dowe never left the officewe worked day and night And yes, many years after this visit with my grandfather, my friend and Trupa Trupa bandmate Rafał Wojczal and I were walking near the fence of the museum of the concentration camp and found first hundreds and then thousands of shoes. It turned out that there were almost half a million shoes. The Stutthof concentration camp was a kind of shoe-gathering center for all the concentration camps in Europe; the Nazis collected the leather for manufacturing everyday leather items. And when the Red Army soldiers in 1945 “liberated” the camp, they counted the shoes. There were half a million. In 1967, when the Stutthof Museum was established, the director...

Наследие Гражданской войны во взаимоотношениях казачества и крестьянства Юга России с властью в 1920-х годах

Introduction. The relevance of the topic is to identify the practices and socio-cultural manifestations of the legacy of the Civil War in the Soviet society of the 1920s. In the South of Russia, violence persisted in the form of insurgent actions, clashes over land and the distribution of power resources, symbolic influence. The purpose of the article is to identify the forms of the legacy of the Civil War in the relations of the Cossacks and the peasantry of the South of Russia with the authorities in 1921–1926. Methods and materials. The novelty of the article is manifested in the synchronous comparative analysis of conflicts based on the materials of the Don, Kuban and Terek. Analysis and results. Attention is paid to the experience of the amnesty of White movement participants and repatriates in 1924–1925, the presence of alternative forms of civil self-organization in the village communities. The similarities and differences in the perception of the experience of the Civil War by Cossacks and “nonresident” peasants, as well as by socio-class groups of the poor, middle-class and well-off are established. It is proved that the party-state authorities initially regarded the course “Face to the village” as ensuring civil peace, but by the spring of 1926 they refused full-fledged reforms. The civil peace was also disputed within the community of farmers: both by wealthy Cossacks who dreamed of restoring the pre-revolutionary order, and by “red partisans” and demobilized Red Army soldiers who wanted a second revolution. The “military alarm” of 1927 and the extraordinary measures of grain procurement led to the return of the Southern Russian villages to mass practices of violence.

The feat of the home front workers of the «Alaska - Siberia» ferry route

During the Great Patriotic War, the entire Soviet people stood up to defend their homeland. All the resources of the country were mobilized to repulse the enemy. The paper is devoted to home front workers who during the Great Patriotic War carried out an important task of the State Defense Committee to arrange the supply of combat aircraft under lend-lease from the United States to the Soviet Union along a shorter route through Alaska, Chukotka, Eastern Siberia to Krasnoyarsk and further to the front, where fighters and bombers were needed, which the Red Army badly needed, especially in the initial period of the war. In harsh climatic and natural conditions, inaccessible deserted areas, where delivery of equipment and building materials was difficult, aviation specialists and local residents managed to build airfields in a short time, the construction of which would have taken 5 years in peaceful time. The pilots of the Alaska-Siberia ferry route, showing courage and heroism, made flights in extreme conditions, mastered new equipment and eliminated malfunctions of American aircraft, poorly adapted to work in low temperatures. The flight crew, aviation specialists and local residents did everything to help the front and defeat fascism.

Churchill and Roosevelt on the Role of the Red Army in the Victory Over Nazi Germany

Churchill and Roosevelt on the Role of the Red Army in the Victory Over Nazi Germany

Wykorzystanie Państwowego Funduszu Ziemi jako instrumentu legitymizacji władzy komunistycznej oraz środka legalizacji rewolucji społecznej

After the Red Army entered Poland in the summer of 1944, and the installation of a new system of power began, the communists were faced with a general social disapproval of the transformations they proposed. This was especially true of the peasants, who constituted the vast majority of Poland’s inhabitants at that time. They were afraid of introducing general collectivization of land and their forceful inclusion in the agricultural production cooperatives under strict state supervision. Meanwhile, gaining the support of at least some of the peasants seemed to remain an indispensable element in the takeover of power by the communists, who always presented themselves as representatives of the interests of economically disadvantaged social classes. An equally important intention of the authorities was to eliminate all influence of the gentry in the countryside because of their hostility to the new political order.
 The purpose of this article is to present the principal aspects concerning the use of the State Land Fund as an instrument for the justification of the communist government’s approach, as well as for legitimizing the social revolution in post-war Poland. Attempts were made to indicate the use of this institution to make profound transformations regarding the model of property relations in Polish agriculture, previously shaped over centuries. It was also pointed out that the above-mentioned approach was aimed at simultaneously destroying the landed gentry as an elite social class and winning the support for the communists from the peasants, who were given the land taken from the landowners. Thus, in the political reality of the time, the State Land Fund became one of the most important (and at the same time often underrated) instruments in constructing the system of totalitarian power in post-war Poland. The primary goal of the article is to show how the instrumental treatment of the legal solutions regulating the functioning of the fund was used in practice by the communist authorities acting on the Kremlin’s behalf. It seems that in the literature on the subject, there are still deficits in the search for the bases of legitimization imposed in Poland by external political and military factors of the communist government.
 The most important conclusions from this analysis include the negative economic effects in terms of perpetuating the defects of the agricultural system and the inability to deal with the indicated legacy of the totalitarian system within the contemporary political and socio-economic reality.

Negotiating Chinese Youth Cyber Nationalism through Play Methods

In this paper, we will look at how Chinese youth perform nationalism through player-devised play methods. We argue that as young players become more politically conscious, they are negotiating their politics through play. Within these play situations, players are solidifying their individual beliefs while finding like-minded players. However, players are also establishing a nationalism that is defined not only through a set of core characteristics, but also through an active rejection of the politics embedded within western-oriented digital spaces, by playing in non-standard ways. Through transgressive play methods, players are countering hegemonic western politics present in commercial games and replacing them with their own nationalist politics through player-enforced rules, discussed through internet forums and preserved through memorial videos on online websites. We will look at two specific case studies: firstly, we will look at the Red Shirt Army, a streaming community in H1Z1, where players acted out Chinese military superiority by flouting the four player limit originally set by the designers; secondly, we will look at the Great Socialist Production play method, where Chinese players went against the morality set in Frostpunk, a steampunk game by Polish developers, by arguing that greater societal prosperity was more important than “white left” moral posturing.

Тематическая палитра абазинской поэзии периода зарождения (На материале газетных публикаций)

Goals. The article attempts a thematic systematization of Abaza poetic works published by the Krasnaya Cherkessia newspaper from 1935 to 1941. Results. It identifies a number of themes, such as the Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, Soviet schoolchildren, May Day, Red Army, collective farm labor, and nature (The paper ignores themes of dark past and bright present, poetic dedications to the Constitution of 1936, and panegyrics to Joseph Stalin). The study provides multifaceted (semantic essentials, metrics and rhythmic patterns, stanza, rhyme, vocabulary, visual and expressive means) insights into four translated and nineteen original poems to reveal specific features inherent to each of the latter. The final part contains a generalization of all observations.

Rethinking the Postwar International Migration Regime from the Global South: Venezuela in a Global History of White Immigration

AbstractBetween 1947 and early 1952, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which was established within the framework of the United Nations to “solve” the so-called European refugee problem after the end of the Second World War, resettled one million European refugees—victims of Nazism as well as East European refugees who escaped the Red Army—all over the world. The IRO's resettlement project is regarded as a blueprint for the establishment of the postwar international migration regime, and it was the predecessor of later initiatives such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).In this article I argue that the IRO's history as well as the history of the migration regime after the Second World War has, thus far, mainly been written from the perspective of U.S. American and European history. Northern nations are considered agents in this history, while southern countries are considered as passive “destinations.” In the case of Venezuela, the article argues that the Global South's active role in the migration regime must be taken into consideration to understand postwar migration. From the perspective of a connective approach to global history, it shows how Venezuela, as a political agent, was involved in shaping the migration regime; how it perceived itself as an agent within that regime; and how it intervened on a small scale to shape its form and function.

Геннадий Матвеев, Карина Колихова, Введение советско-польского перемирия в действие (октябрь-ноябрь 1920 г.)/The Implementation of the Polish-Soviet Peace Preliminaries (October–November 1920)

The article clarifies the actual date of the entry into force of the Soviet-Polish treaty on the preliminary conditions of peace and armistice of October 12, 1920. The preliminary treaty stipulated that the enactment should happen no later than November 2, and after that date, the withdrawal of Polish troops to the state border line was to begin. The parties pledged not to interfere in each other’s internal affairs and not to support organizations aimed at overthrowing the state and social system of the other party from the moment the truce was ratified under article II of the treaty. Realizing the importance of the armistice, the Ukrainian SSR, Poland and the RSFSR ratified the treaty within the agreed time frame, and it seemed that nothing prevented them from immediately starting work on the final text of the peace treaty in accordance with the agreements. However, the Soviet peace delegation that had arrived in Riga on November 3 did not find the Polish delegation there. It turned out, moreover, that the Polish army was in no hurry to leave the regions of the Ukrainian SSR and the Belorussian SSR occupied by it, and thus covered the flanks of the anti-Soviet armies of Symon Petliura, Boris Piermikin, and Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz which invaded Soviet territory. The protests expressed by the Soviet side yielded results only aer the Red Army had broken through the defense of the Crimea on November 9-10. On November 13, a Polish delegation finally arrived in Riga and a meeting of the heads of the Soviet and Polish delegations, Adolph Joffe and Jan Dąbski, took place, following which Poland undertook to begin the withdrawal of its troops from November 19, 1920. Its yesterday’s eastern allies retreated to Poland and were interned. The analysis of the problem shows that the armistice agreement was actually put into effect not on November 2, but on November 19, 1920, and Józef Piłsudski and the Polish military command are primarily to blame for this.

Afghanistan: la guerra delle donne, custodi di dignità e speranza

Departing from the direct testimonies gathered in Afghanistan during over 20 years of fieldwork, the paper offers an overview of Afghan women's resistance, especially following the experience of the RAWA association, in their fight against all the oppressive regimes that have featured Afghanistan's history, from the resistance against the Red Army, to that against the United State’s and NATO invasion, to the restored Taliban regime. The paper, also, focuses on the struggles of the Afghan democratic resistance in the years of the Soviet occupation, which the A. personally witnessed in 1980.

„Homo sovieticus” piszący: O „Zapiskach oficera Armii Czerwonej” Sergiusza Piaseckiego

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how a soldier and amateur writer, who is the protagonist of Sergiusz Piasecki's novel, Zapiski oficera Armii Czerwonej (Notes of a Red Army Officer), restricted by the apparatus of terror and propaganda of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, gradually frees himself from linguistic enslavement (caused by the use of Soviet newspeak). The author of the text focuses on the analysis of the protagonist's speech, pointing out elements that limit creative use of language, as well as the events that gradually lead to his liberation from the enslavement of newspeak, thus demonstrating its ineffectiveness in permanent and ruthless restriction of human freedom.

Підготова суспільства УРСР до участи у можливому воєнному конфлікті напередодні Другої світової війни

Soviet propaganda continually exploited the thesis of the inevitability of war with a “hostile” capitalist environment, formed the image of an enemy, who could be blamed for all "temporary" troubles, and constantly emphasized on the danger of armed conflict – that could enable justifying punitive-repressive measures. The purpose of the article is to investigate the impact of Soviet "class" propaganda on the country's defense capability. The task is to analyze the general tendencies and peculiarities of preparing the population of the USSR for a possible military conflict on the eve of World War II. The main idea of the article is that during five pre-war years, a great deal of work was done in the USSR to prepare the population for participation in a possible military conflict. The military training was all-encompassing. During first five years, when unrealistically inflated plans for industrialization had exhausted the economy of the country there was a deficit even for essentials, the card supply system was reintroduced, and the propaganda of the inevitable collision with the “hostile” capitalist world became hypertrophied. Such a policy allowed the Soviet administrative top to radically change the emphasis in addressing the problems of provision for population. The refrain “if only there was no war” became very advantageous for the leadership of the state, allowed to justify the neglect of human needs. Preparations for actions under the war circumstances were carried at all factories and plants, at all Soviet institutions. The article analyzes how the peoples of Soviet Ukraine were preparing for a possible conflict during the five peaceful pre-war years. First of all, the emphasis of the article is not on the professional training of the military − soldiers and officers, much more indicative and characteristic is the analysis of the experience of training civilians, workers of the branches far from military affairs – workers, employees, collective farmers, students and schoolchildren. After all, since the beginning of the war, the level of training of civilians who are drafted into the army in the context of mobilization measures became one of the decisive factors. The issue of the country's defense capability was under constant control of the party-state leadership. The article proves that lectures, mobilization training, various courses in which they were taught to provide first aid, bandage the wounded, use gas masks, hide in bomb shelters, and compulsory political information on the international situation and regular analysis of the fight against “enemies” inside the countries was getting more widespread year after year, reaching more and more workers and employees. Almost 100% of the population was covered by military training. Children and adults, employees and workers, scientists and collective farmers – everyone had to go through military training. There were almost no exceptions by gender, age, or health. Young children along with adults learned to throw grenades, mastered various weapons, the skills of air and chemical defense. In addition, the atmosphere of general hysteria led to the emergence of such fundamentally Soviet inventions as a parachutist-accountant or a book-keeper-machine gunner. Thus, society has consciously injected military hysteria. However, the bureaucratization and formalism, the inherent defects of command management led to the absolute unpreparedness of the Soviet economic mechanism for a real war. Despite the fact that during the five pre-war years, almost all the population (including schoolchildren and accountants or collective farmers) was covered by military training, 1941 – the year of the German attack – turned into a disaster for the Red Army. In fact, Stalin's methods of governing the state gave rise to a sad paradox: for many years the country persistently and purposefully prepared for war, but in the end it turned out not to be ready for a real war.

"Missed in action": the problems of perception, calculation and personalization of Red Army losses in 1941-1945

"Missed in action": the problems of perception, calculation and personalization of Red Army losses in 1941-1945

Формирование новой идентичности в условиях воинской повседневности Гражданской войны (на материале Карелии)

The article was prepared on the basis of materials on the history of military units stationed in the Olonets province and the Kemsk district of the Arkhangelsk province during the Civil War in Karelia and immediately after it. The author shows how the army and navy political and educational bodies coped with the task of “re-educating” yesterday's peasants, of whom the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army and the new Red Fleet were in the overwhelming majority. As a result, a new social identity of servicemen was formed. In the cultural context of the early Soviet period of Russian history, the idea of educating the “new man” was one of the most significant. The ideological background of such education was the militarization of the 1920s, which largely predetermined the transformation of this fruitful idea into a kind of authoritarian state intervention in all aspects of the life of the army and society as a whole.

Organizaciya dobrovol'nogo prizyva chechencev i ingushej v Krasnuyu armiyu v 1942— 1943 gg.

The article is devoted to the organization of voluntary conscription into the Red Army of Chechens and Ingush in 1942-1943. The work reveals various forms and methods in the activities of state authorities and party bodies for the organization of voluntary conscription in the part of the belligerent army. The authors come to the conclusion that among Chechens and Ingush there was a patriotic upsurge and a desire to fight as part of the Red Army against the Nazi invaders.