Soviet Archives Research Articles

Leadership Transition and Policy Change in the USSR after Stalin

Luc Duhamel, The KGB Campaign against Corruption in Moscow, 1982-1987. xviii + 249 pp. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0822961086. $26.95. Jeremy Smith and Melanie Ilic, eds., Khrushchev in the Kremlin: and Government in the Soviet Union, 1953-1964. xx + 249 pp. New York: Routledge, 2011. ISBN 0415476488. $44.95. One of the characteristic features of Soviet leadership transitions was the rectification campaign, a maneuver undertaken by the Communist Party after the death of a leader to adjust course and rectify errors. Given its claim to a monopoly of truth as well as power, such rectification could be problematic for the Party, but the death or removal of a leader created an opportunity for some necessary adjustments, accompanied in most cases by a bit of scapegoating. Exposing the errors and crimes of the past created an opening to do something new. To be sure, the designated scapegoats were often genuinely responsible for many of the things for which they were blamed, but that was hardly the point--especially since their successors were frequently implicated, too. The point was that their guilt relieved their successors, and the Party as a whole, of the burden of responsibility. Yet the process was never easy or simple. Whether the focus was on repression and crimes committed by the security organs or mistakes in foreign affairs or economic management, such campaigns often threatened many among the living, and they raised the risk that the rectification process itself might go too far, undermining the regime's legitimacy and stability. These dynamics were in many ways critical in shaping the contours of high and low politics in the post-Stalin and post-Brezhnev periods, and the two volumes reviewed here illustrate, albeit in very different contexts, the ways in which leaders and social groups sought to confront the legacies of the past while securing their interests for the future. The two books also demonstrate the continuing wealth of material to emerge from former Soviet archives, even if it is now close to two decades since the Russian authorities began to tighten up control over access to Soviet party and state documents. If the first wave of archival work to emerge in the 1990s focused on filling gaps in our knowledge of key figures and events, particularly in the period before 1953, (1) later work, including the books under review here, demonstrates how much we can still learn about day-to-day governance and low, as well as high, politics. Khrushchev in the Kremlin is part of a two-volume set emerging from a project on Policy and Governance in the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev, which ran from 2005 to 2008 under the aegis of the University of Birmingham's Centre for Russian and East European Studies (CREES). (2) Overall, it is an unusually successful edited collection. The dozen papers included in the book present a great deal of new material, much of it from archival and other primary sources. Perhaps more striking is the degree to which most of them also succeed in presenting new angles on the material, even when looking at issues that have long been the focus of scholarly attention. Some provide unexpected twists by examining issues within the longer run of Soviet and post-Soviet history, while others (most notably J. N. Westwood's contribution on the railways) identify novel but very sensible international comparisons to put developments in the USSR under Khrushchev into a broader context (e.g., Robert Davies and Melanie Ilic on housing). Running through most of them--as befits a volume focused on an activist leader like Khrushchev--is a concern with the persistent gap between the leader's ambitions and what street level bureaucrats actually delivered. A further striking, and important, theme highlighted by the authors is the degree to which, despite Khrushchev's removal in 1964 and the reversal of many of his high-profile policies, a large number of Khrushchevian innovations were preserved and further developed under Brezhnev. …

The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives. By Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin. Translations by Marian Schwartz. Annals of Communism. Edited by Jonathan Brent.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. xxx+486. $75.00 (cloth); $40.00 (paper).

<i>The Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives</i>. By Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin. Translations by Marian Schwartz. Annals of Communism. Edited by Jonathan Brent.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. xxx+486. $75.00 (cloth); $40.00 (paper).

How the Soviets Explored the Cosmic Void and Found … Nothing

James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi, eds., Into Cosmos. 344 pp. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0822961611. $27.95. Andrew L. Jenks, The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling. 318 pp. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0875804477.$35.00. Eva Maurer, Julia Richers, Monica Ruthers, and Carmen Scheide, eds., Soviet Space Culture. 344 pp. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0230274358. $90.00. In fullness of time, Soviet success in space exploration during 1950s and 1960s may well overshadow defeat of Nazis as greatest Soviet achievement. (Alexei Kojevnikov, in his introductory essay in Into Cosmos, goes so far as to say that Sputnik and Gagarin are on their way to attaining status of historical icons, like the pyramids, Great Wall, Santa Maria, evolution, and atomic bomb.) Many countries have evicted an invading army, but only one launched first satellite and first man into space, with added dramatic element of doing so just years after losing millions of citizens and a tremendous amount of economic infrastructure in a war. Despite historical significance and emotional appeal attached to inauguration of Space Age, body of scholarly literature related to Soviet space program remains somewhat undeveloped, with most existing works focused on lifting cloak of secrecy surrounding launches and personnel. The opening of Soviet archives has by now allowed historians to establish reliable answers to fundamental questions such as were true Soviet aims in space? and how close were Soviets to landing a man on moon? Especially thanks to publication of Asif Siddiqi's encyclopedic Challenge to Apollo historians can turn their attention away from what cosmonauts and engineers did and toward what rockets meant. The three books considered here represent a part of this shift, as each aims to highlight impact of space exploration on Soviet society, using space travel as a lens to examine Soviet project more broadly. In addition to this common emphasis, books share a remarkably critical attitude to their object of study, consistently pointing out failure and duplicity that surrounded program. An unstated conclusion impresses itself on mind of anyone who reads them in tandem: while Soviets attempted to use space exploration to support their contention that a socialist country could best chart a path to stars and inaugurate a new era for humanity, they ultimately found in cosmic void nothing usable--only empty space. The unusual thematic unity of these books, two of which are collected volumes and therefore not necessarily expected to promote an argument, derives in part from significant level of common authorship. Andrew Jenks, author of Gagarin biography, contributes an essay to Into Cosmos; Slava Gerovitch, Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, and Roshanna Sylvester each offer articles in both Into Cosmos and Soviet Space Culture; and Siddiqi writes introduction and an article for Into Cosmos and epilogue for Soviet Space Culture. The limited degree to which volumes diverge from their shared outlook appears related to nationality of authors whose works appear in all three books. The Cosmonaut Who Couldnt Stop Smiling is by an American, and American historians dominate Into Cosmos. Both are far more critical in tone than Soviet Space Culture, which features authors from Europe as well as United States, and essays of European provenance are more descriptive than interpretive. Aside from these few exceptions, overwhelming impression made by three books is that Soviet spaceflight, rather than a world historical accomplishment or romantic struggle to break bonds of earth, in truth lays bare fundamental emptiness of Soviet project as a whole. …

Myth, memory, trauma: rethinking the Stalinist past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70

Drawing on newly available materials from the Soviet archives, Polly Jones offers an innovative, comprehensive account of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev eras. Jones traces the authorities' initiation and management of the de-Stalinization process and explores a wide range of popular reactions to the new narratives of Stalinism in party statements and in Soviet literature and historiography. Engaging with the dynamic field of memory studies, this book represents the first sustained comparison of this process with other countries' attempts to rethink their own difficult pasts, and with later Soviet and post-Soviet approaches to Stalinism.

Our South African Freedom Dreams

When Nana Osei-Opare asked to reprint my article, “The Third International and the Struggle for National Liberation in South Africa,” I balked. I was only twenty-three when I wrote it for a graduate seminar at UCLA, and like most preliminary research projects it was based on a slim body of primary sources since I had no access to South African archives. I had just settled on an ambitious and unrealistic dissertation project comparing the histories of the Black Left in South Africa and the U.S. South—unrealistic because I had no prospect of getting into South Africa. In 1985, President P. W. Botha declared a state of emergency, and my participation in protests at the South African Consulate in Beverly Hills did not bode well for my visa application. Looking back at the essay three decades later, I find some of it downright embarrassing—particularly the occasional flights into rigid Marxist language, and the limited sources available to me. Of course, in 1986, the Soviet Union was three years from collapse and the Soviet Archives were several years from opening. But considering these constraints, and the audacity of youth, there are things about the article of which I’m proud. Taking a page from Cedric Robinson, whose book Black Marxism had just appeared in 1983, I suggest that a Black radical tradition rooted in earlier notions of African redemption, rural opposition culminating in resistance to the Land Act of 1913, and expressions of working-class and petit bourgeois African nationalism had already produced a vision of self-determination. These movements preceded the formation of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), whose initial orientation was toward the white working class. Imagine a Communist Party anywhere back ing striking miners under the banner, “Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a WHITE SOUTH AFRICA!” When African trade unionists, as well as officials of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, criticized Party leaders for their uncritical support of the Rand Revolt in 1922, to the exclusion of the more numerous African miners’ struggles, white South African

Collegiality in the People’s Commissariats, 1917-1920

Impulses towards collective decision-making in industrial and military administration in the early years of Soviet power have been well documented by historians. The equivalent expression in state administration, however, has not received the same attention. This article uses evidence from the Soviet state and party archives, memoir material and published legislation and congress records to demonstrate the collegial modus operandi of the early Soviet central state institutions, the People's Commissariats. It argues that the collegium represented a revolutionary innovation by the Soviet leadership and was a key aspect of the organisational culture cultivated at this time inside the state apparatus.

To the Editors

To the Editors Peter Ruggenthaler In a recent issue of Kritika, Andreas Oberender published a review essay on two books, including mine on the so-called 1952 "Stalin Note" on Germany.1 At that time, the Soviet Union had officially proposed signing a peace treaty with the other victorious powers by which Germany would be reunified as a neutral state. While I myself am certain, based on what all declassified sources from Soviet archives show, that Stalin had no desire to sacrifice the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and give up the USSR's position in Germany, the historical debate (especially in Germany) is now focusing on the decision-making process in the Kremlin under Stalin in his last years. Oberender concludes that "Stalin's role remains as obscure as before" (948). In fact, Stalin's role is quite clear, as my book was designed to show. Until the very end of his life, he decided all crucial questions regarding foreign policy on his own.2 No single Politburo decision on any matter would or could have passed without his approval. Even when he was not in Moscow, all relevant materials were sent to him. There is absolutely no indication that even a single decision could have been made without him. If one studies individual documents out of context—for example, Andrei Vyshinskii´s report to Stalin on 2 February—one could come to Oberender's conclusion that Vyshinskii "took the lead" (944). But in fact, Vyshinskii never did. On the contrary, he was a loyal lackey of Stalin and always restricted by instructions from above. It was simply his job to keep Stalin and the Soviet leadership informed. [End Page 697] Oberender is in some sense right to "remind" me that one cannot distinguish "the different, partially conflicting aims [of] all these actors" (948). In an environment where people like Vyshinskii had to fear for their lives if they tried to act against Stalin's will, and in this case eventually caused the loss of the GDR, one cannot speak about conflicting aims. The fact nonetheless remains that even if some had ideas different from those of Stalin, no one would have dared to pursue them while Stalin was alive, especially not on questions of such importance as Germany. There is no evidence that Stalin would have given up Soviet positions in East Germany. No neutrality for a unified Germany was ever discussed in Moscow in the last years of Stalin's life. Why should such evidence be kept secret in Moscow archives? Finally, Oberender criticizes not only my "handling of sources" (947) but also my engagement with secondary literature. He mentions especially Wilfried Loth and Geoffrey Roberts. Loth is an expert on the West in the Cold War and does not speak Russian. Regarding Roberts, it seems to me sufficient to note that Vladislav Zubok criticized him for assuming that Stalin meant whatever he said or wrote. "We know how many people perished because they trusted Stalin's words, and took them at a [sic] face value. Taking Stalin's words as facts is a methodological approach for Roberts. For me it is a bizarre misunderstanding of Stalin's personality, and the nature of his immense power."3 There is nothing else to add. If Oberender is right to assert that no consensus will ever be reached on this issue, then this is because some historians choose to ignore new facts in favor of fantastic arguments to the effect that a neutral Germany was more useful to Stalin than a divided one. All evidence from Soviet archives shows the opposite.4 No single internal document showing that Stalin would have preferred a unified, neutral Germany has ever been found; nor will this ever occur. Peter Ruggenthaler Ludwig Boltzmann-Institut für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung Schörgelgasse 43 A-8010 Graz, Austria peter.ruggenthaler@bik.ac.at Footnotes Andreas Oberender chooses not to respond. [End Page 698] Footnotes 1. Andreas Oberender, "Stalin's Postwar Foreign Policy," Kritika 13, 4 (2012): 937-49; Peter Ruggenthaler, Stalins großer Bluff: Die Geschichte der Stalin-Note in Dokumenten der sowjetischen Führung (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007). 2. As my book shows, in the early 1950s...

The Leningrad blockade, 1941-1944: a new documentary history from the Soviet archives

Based largely on formerly top-secret Soviet archival documents (including 66 reproduced documents and 70 illustrations), this book portrays the inner workings of the communist party and secret police during Germany's horrific 1941-44 siege of Leningrad, during which close to one million citizens perished. It shows how the city's inhabitants responded to the extraordinary demands placed upon them, encompassing both the activities of the political, security, and military elite as well as the actions and attitudes of ordinary Leningraders.

In the cause of freedom: radical black internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939

In this intellectual history, Minkah Makalani reveals how early-twentieth-century black radicals organized an international movement centered on ending racial oppression, colonialism, class exploitation, and global white supremacy. Focused primarily on two organizations, the Harlem-based African Blood Brotherhood, whose members became the first black Communists in the United States, and the International African Service Bureau, the major black anticolonial group in 1930s London, In the Cause of Freedom examines the ideas, initiatives, and networks of interwar black radicals, as well as how they communicated across continents. Through a detailed analysis of black radical periodicals and extensive research in U.S., English, Dutch, and Soviet archives, Makalani explores how black radicals thought about race; understood the ties between African diasporic, Asian, and international workers' struggles; theorized the connections between colonialism and racial oppression; and confronted the limitations of international leftist organizations. Considering black radicals of Harlem and London together for the first time, In the Cause of Freedom reorients the story of blacks and Communism from questions of autonomy and the Kremlin's reach to show the emergence of radical black internationalism separate from, and independent of, the white Left. |Makalani reveals how early-twentieth-century black radicals organized an international movement centered on ending racial oppression, colonialism, class exploitation, and global white supremacy. Focused primarily on two organizations, the Harlem-based African Blood Brotherhood and the International African Service Bureau, In the Cause of Freedom examines the ideas, initiatives, and networks of interwar black radicals, as well as how they communicated across continents.

Should We Stop Studying the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The Cuban missile crisis remains one of the most intensely studied events of the twentieth century, and which engages the attention of scholars from a variety of disciplines. Lessons learned by American practitioners and academics contributed to the conduct of American foreign policy in the 1960s and to academic understanding of nuclear deterrence, nuclear crises and crisis management in general. Nearly 50 fifty years of scholarship have generated new insights and understanding. From the 1980s, study of what in Moscow was termed the Caribbean crisis was informed by access to Soviet officials and Soviet archives, and became the forefront of the ‘new historiography’ of the Cold War. This collection reviews how various texts inform our understanding and how new interpretations and/or new sources of information have overtaken (or indeed validated) the original analysis. This article provides an overview of this endeavour and an answer to the question of whether we should continue to study the Cuban missile crisis.

Stumbling its way through Mexico: the early years of the Communist International

Stumbling Its Way through records the early attempts by the Moscow-based Communist International to organize and direct a revolutionary movement in Mexico. The period studied, from 1919 to 1929, was characterized at the beginning by a wave of revolutions in Europe that the Bolsheviks expected to grow into an international phenomenon. However, contrary to their expectations, the revolutionary tide ebbed, and the new age they had expected receded into an uncertain future. In response, Moscow sent agents and recruited local leaders worldwide to sustain and train local revolutionary movements and to foment what they saw as an inevitable seizure of power by Communist-led workers.Unlike the Soviet seizure of power in Russia, the Mexican Revolution of 1910 1920 had not changed the fundamental character of the nation-state. However, it did represent a sea change in the relationship between the state and society. When the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, Mexican workers already had generations of experience in the struggle against oppression, in forming class solidarity, in organizing strikes, and had tasted both success and failure. For decades in their workplaces, Mexicans had debated how to end the exploitation of labor and practice international solidarity. Mexico had an indigenous labor movement acting with some success to establish a place in a new Mexico. The agents that Moscow chose to lead the Communist movement in Mexico lacked an understanding of the local situation and presumed a lack of indigenous confidence and experience that doomed to failure their efforts to impose external control over the labor movement.Based on documents found principally in the Soviet archives recently opened to the public, Stumbling Its Way through is an invitation to rethink the history of Communism in Mexico and Latin America.Copublication with the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social.

Getting to Know You: The Soviet Surveillance System, 1939–57

Violence is the midwife of history, observed Marx and Engels. One could add that for their Bolshevik pupils, surveillance was the midwife's guiding hand. Never averse to violence, the Bolsheviks were brutes driven by an idea, and a grandiose one at that. Matched by an entrenched conspiratorial political culture, a Manichean worldview, and a pervasive sense of isolation and siege mentality from within and from without, the drive to mold a new kind of society and individuals through the institutional triad of a nonmarket economy, single-party dictatorship, and mass state terror required a vast information-gathering apparatus. Serving the two fundamental tasks of rooting out and integrating real and imagined enemies of the regime, and molding the population into a new socialist society, Soviet surveillance assumed from the outset a distinctly pervasive, interventionist, and active mode that was translated into myriad institutions, policies, and initiatives. Students of Soviet information systems have focused on two main features--denunciations and public mood reports--and for good reason. Soviet law criminalized the failure to report treason and counterrevolutionary crimes, and denunciation was celebrated as the ultimate civic act? Whether a weapon of the weak used by the otherwise silenced population, a tool by the regime to check its bureaucracy, or a classic feature of the totalitarian state franchising itself to individuals via denunciations of their fellow citizens--and quite likely all three--denunciations were critical in shattering old and forming new modes of socialization. Even the most astute studies of denunciations, however, profess that this was not the main source of information for the Soviet regime, if only because of their unpredictability and the fact that they were solicited by the regime at specific moments, especially during mobilization campaigns for certain policies or against targeted individuals and groups. (2) Since the opening of the former Soviet archives, scholars have focused mainly on public opinion, deciphered from the voluminous reports on the political mood of the population gathered by the political police and submitted to party-state organizations and leaders, despite the absence of the term popular opinion from the Soviet political lexicon under Stalin. (3) A handful of insightful studies situate Soviet police reports within a modern pan-European ethos of socio-political engineering and the evolution of the late imperial polity. They offer flesh interpretations of the essence of the system and its values, as well as invaluable comparative angles, albeit with the price tag of universalizing distinct socialist totalitarian features) This essay tackles an additional and new set of questions that help explain the oft, although unsurprisingly, ambiguous record of Soviet surveillance on the ground, which was torn between totalitarian aspirations and institutions and the corresponding quota system, collateral damage, and constant pressure for immediate results, on the one hand, and the aspiration to professional pride and ethos of its police officers, on the other. What did the Soviets initially know about populations on which they imposed their rule? What did they want to know? How did they obtain their information and recruit informants? How successful was the surveillance enterprise according to the Soviets' own goals and evaluation? Finally, what do the surveillance methods tell us about the nature, goals, and distinct features of the regime when compared with other systems? (5) We analyze the manner in which domestic surveillance was used in the application of key Sovietization policies and in coping with ensuing problems on the Soviet western frontier--the territories between the Baltic and Black Seas, populated by some 23 million people--from their annexation in 1939-40 to the aftermath of the eventful year of 1956. Confronted by populations that enjoyed a brief spell of sovereignty during the interwar years, were hostile to Soviet power to the point of launching mass armed resistance, and posed linguistic and religious difficulties for infiltration, the Soviets pressed on relentlessly, imposing at once the political and socio-economic order that they gradually, sometimes even imperceptibly enforced over two decades inside the pre-1939 borders. …

Stalinist state violence: a reappraisal twenty years after the archival revolution

The opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s has offered historians of Stalinism unprecedented opportunities to research and understand the violence of the regime. The discovery of key documents and publication of revealing memoirs have shed light on four important genocides: the man-made famine of 1931-3, the Great Terror of 1937-8, the deportations of ethnic groups in 1939-45, and the mass forced labour in the Gulag. This article discusses three major shifts in the nature of Stalinist repression and examines how the historiography of Stalinist mass violence has changed over the past two decades.

The 1952 Stalin Note on German Unification: The Ongoing Debate

On 10 March 1952 the Soviet government unexpectedly sent an identical diplomatic note to the U.S., British, and French governments proposing the conclusion of a peace treaty with Germany on the basis of neutrality. This document, widely known as the Stalin Note, has been a source of controversy ever since, pitting those who see it as an insincere ploy against those who argue that it was a missed opportunity for German unification. Declassified documents from the former Soviet archives, first published in German translation in 2007 in the book Stalins großer Bluff, allow scholars to reconstruct in a detailed way the preparation of the note and to examine whether Iosif Stalin was really ready to sacrifice the GDR and to reunify Germany. This article shows that the Stalin Note was merely a ploy to facilitate the incorporation of the German Democratic Republic into the Eastern bloc and to blame the Western occupying powers for the division of Germany.

The Post-Stalin Era: De-Stalinization, Daily Life, and Dissent

In the first decade after the opening of the Soviet archives, scholars' focus-both east and west of where the iron curtain once hung--largely centered on the most dramatic and violent period of Soviet history: the 1930s. Groundbreaking studies of the purges, collectivization, and daily life in both the new industrial cities and the socialized countryside all transformed the way Soviet history was conceived and taught in universities across the In contrast, the postwar, and post-Stalin, years seemed relatively virgin territory, at least in terms of archive-based research; and in the late 1990s, historians, particularly graduate students, turned their focus to these later periods. Perhaps in part this younger generation wanted to carve out its own territory, but there was more to the new trend than simple careerism: new interpretations of the 1930s had raised fascinating questions for the decades after 1953. What impact did the leader's death and his subsequent discrediting have on the life stories of those who had seen their lives transformed in the 1930s (through migration to the city, acquisition of literacy, engagement in mass politics)? How did citizens who had, in Stephen Kotkin's terms, started to speak Bolshevik negotiate the sudden shifts in rhetoric introduced when Khrushchev attacked the cult of personality? What impact did the renunciation of terror have on relations between government and society, and how were the legacies of Stalinist violence to be handled? Growing scholarly interest in World War II and its aftermath began to pose additional, and important, questions for the post1953 period, particularly with regard to veterans' expectations for a better life, the demographic shortfall and gender imbalance, and the conflicting emotions of pride and grief generated by the victories and losses of 1941-45. Broader developments within academia also played their part--in particular the turn, which dramatically expanded the issues, methodologies, and sources with which historians engaged. The poetry, paintings, and films of the thaw period had long aroused interest abroad (particularly works deemed transgressive or subversive), but now scholars began to explore not only the politics of production and dissemination but also the wider reception of these works. Researchers also turned their attention to the domestic sphere, which under Khrushchev became the focus of architects, designers, and party officials who ushered in what Susan Reid and David Crowley have called a self-conscious rejuvenation of the material world. (1) The period--once largely the domain of political scientists and literary scholars--became ever more interdisciplinary, with fruitful cross-fertilization among history, art history, film studies, literary criticism, anthropology, and historical sociology. In this essay I identify three key topics that are emerging as focal points of scholarly interest: popular reactions to various reforms often grouped under the label de-Stalinization; the particular significance of byt under Khrushchev; and the nature and scale of dissent in the post-Stalin era. In concentrating on these three themes, this essay is, perhaps inevitably, partial and selective, and a few qualifications are necessary. First, the focus is Russia and the European areas of the Soviet Union, in part because the non-European republics are as yet understudied for the post-Stalin era, particularly in comparison with the recent work on the early decades of Soviet power in Central Asia and the Caucasus? Second, my attention centers on social and cultural history rather than high politics. Again this largely reflects the state of the field--and the difficulties of archive access to Presidium/Politburo materials--though it is worth noting William Taubman's political biography of Khrushchev and Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk's project on regional politics, as well as several studies on the foreign policy of this period. …

Research Note: Documenting Saddam Hussein's Iraq

This research note introduces a major archival resource for scholars and analysts interested in the security, foreign and domestic policies of pre-2003 Iraq. Recently released captured records from Saddam Hussein's Iraq are now housed at the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC), located at the National Defense University in Washington DC, and are available for public use. This expanding collection of documents and audio files of meetings between Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi leaders offers scholars and opportunity to explore topics including Iraqi policies on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, internal repression, decisions to go to war, policies on terrorism, inter-Arab politics, and foreign relations. Akin to the opening of the Soviet archives, this collection is the first substantial archive on contemporary political and security issues from the Arab world.

Cold War broadcasting: impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: a collection of studies and documents

Preface by Timothy Garton Ash Foreword Introduction PART ONE: GOALS OF THE BROADCASTS Chapter One: RFE's Early Years: Evolution of Broadcast Policy and Evidence of Broadcast Impact Chapter Two: Goals of Radio Liberty Chapter Three: The Voice of America: A Brief Cold War History PART TWO: JAMMING AND AUDIENCES Chapter Four: Cold War Radio Jamming Appendix A: Types of Jamming Appendix B: An Example of a Shortwave Broadcasting Station During the Cold War Chapter Five: The Audience to Western Broadcasts to the USSR During the Cold War: An External Perspective Chapter Six: The Foreign Radio Audience in the USSR During the Cold War: An Internal Perspective Chapter Seven: The Audience to Western Broadcasts to Poland During the Cold War Appendix C: Weekly Listening Rates for Major Western Broadcasters to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and the USSR During the Cold War PART THREE: IMPACT OF WESTERN BROADCASTS IN EASTERN EUROPE Chapter Eight: Radio Free Europe in the Eyes of the Polish Communist Elite Chapter Nine: Polish Regime Countermeasures Against Radio Free Europe Chapter Ten: Radio Free Europe's Impact in Romania During the Cold War Chapter Eleven: Ceausescu's War Against Our Ears Chapter Twelve: Just Noise? Impact of Radio Free Europe in Hungary Chapter Thirteen: Bulgarian Regime Countermeasures Against Radio Free Europe PART FOUR: IMPACT OF WESTERN BROADCASTS IN THE USSR Chapter Fourteen: Soviet Reactions to Foreign Broadcasting in the 1950s Chapter Fifteen: Foreign Media, the Soviet Western Frontier, and the Hungarian and Czechoslovak Crises Chapter Sixteen: Water Shaping the Rock: Cold War Broadcasting Impact in Latvia PART FIVE: CONCLUSIONS Chapter Seventeen: Cold War International Broadcasting and the Road to Democracy PART SIX: DOCUMENTS FROM EAST EUROPEAN AND SOVIET ARCHIVES I. Regime Perceptions of Western Broadcasters II. Regime Countermeasures Against Western Broadcasters Contributors Glossary Index

Les Malgré-Nous dans les archives des camps soviétiques

The article focuses on the fate of the so-called « Malgré Nous » (« Against our will »). These French Nationals from Moselle and Alsace were incorporated against their will into the German army during WWII, as the Nazis considered them to be German. After the German army invaded the USSR, many of them became POW and were imprisonned in Soviet camps, especially in the Tambov area. Since 1995, over 5000 archive items have been copied from the Soviet POW camp archives, and brought to France. The author highlites the value of the information contained in these documents, and presents the various difficulties attached to their study. In order to overcome these difficulties, the author suggests that a team of historians from various European countries be set up to study the Soviet archives on the « Malgré Nous ». Such a study would provide the reading public with valuable information both on the fate of these French Nationals and on the organization of the Soviet POW camps.

Lenin's Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives

Lenin's Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives

Former Soviet Dissidents Believed APA Pressure Forced Change

APA letters to incarcerated Soviet dissidents served notice to Soviet officialdom that the world was watching, and documents in Soviet archives reveal that authorities paid attention. This is the second article in a three-part series on psychiatry and the Cold War.