Soviet Campaign Research Articles

Soviet Campaigns against “Capitalist Ideological Subversives” during the Cold War: The Latvian Experience

This article discusses the Soviet Union's use of propaganda warfare during the Cold War, focusing on the specific case of Soviet Latvia. Archival materials from recently opened archives in the former USSR show that the Soviet Union pursued a methodical ideological campaign against certain groups of U.S. citizens, including the post-World War II political refugees from Latvia. The main institution charged with this task was the Liaison Committee for the Cultural Relations with Countrymen Abroad (LCCR), which was highly influential at the time. Archival materials allow scholars to examine the LCCR's history, methods, and goals, as well as its successes and failures. Among the findings in the article is the importance the Soviet Union attached to propaganda and to programs to counter and discredit “anti-Soviet” émigré organizations.

Tending to the “Native Word”: Teachers and the Soviet Campaign for Ukrainian-Language Schooling, 1923–1930

In the 1920s, the Ukrainian Commissariat of Education and a circle of progressive educators aimed to radically transform the educational system in Ukraine, and, as a consequence, the skills and mentality of its graduates. To do this, they would have to teach students in a language they understood. For nearly three-quarters of the juvenile population of Ukraine, this meant instruction in Ukrainian. Although this may have sounded like a simple proposition, it was not. Throughout the pre-revolutionary period, schools had educated Ukrainian children in Russian, and teachers, regardless of their ethnicity, were trained and accustomed to teaching in it. Pre-revolutionary publications, still widely used in Soviet schools, and even the early Soviet primers were overwhelmingly written in Russian. Ukrainian national leaders had made an attempt to set up a network of Ukrainian-language schools during the country's short-lived period of independence, but their attempts were disrupted by the chaos of civil war and the fall of successive governments. It was under Soviet patronage that the “Ukrainization” of the schools reached its greatest extent; however, it was an achievement that required effort, and real qualitative change in the language of instruction was gradual.

Examining the Authoritarian Model of Counter-insurgency: The Soviet Campaign Against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army

In an effort to better understand the benefits and limitations of an authoritarian approach to counter-insurgency, this article examines the relationship between regime type and military effectiveness in the often neglected case of Soviet counter-insurgency operations in Western Ukraine. This study finds that the advantages authoritarian governments enjoy in designing, planning and implementing counter-insurgency campaigns – related to a lack of restraints and constraints – can all too easily become reversed through the excesses they permit.

Shoshana Keller. <italic>To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–1941</italic>. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 2001. Pp. xix, 277. $64.95

Shoshana Keller. To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–1941. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 2001. Pp. xix, 277. $64.95 Get access Keller Shoshana. To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–1941. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 2001. Pp. xix, 277. $64.95. Shirin Akiner Shirin Akiner School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 109, Issue 1, February 2004, Pages 291–292, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.1.291 Published: 01 February 2004

Reviews of Books:To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941 Shoshana Keller

Reviews of Books:To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941 Shoshana Keller

To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941

Journal Article To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941 Get access To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941 by Shoshana Keller. Westport, CT, Praeger, 2001. 384 pp. $64.95. Kathleen Collins Kathleen Collins University of Notre Dame Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 118, Issue 1, Spring 2003, Pages 160–162, https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-165X.2003.tb01181.x Published: 25 March 2013

Emancipation of the Unveiled: Turkmen Women under Soviet Rule, 1924–29

In the Soviet campaign to abolish backwardness in Central Asia, some of the fiercest battles were fought over the fate of Muslim women. It was impossible to build a socialist society without freeing women from their subordinate status and recruiting them into Soviet collective farms, factories, and schools, Soviet authorities believed. By doing away with archaic and degrading customs, the Soviet regime hoped to transform Central Asian women into free individuals and active Soviet citizens. In much of Central Asia, the effort to transform the lives of women centered on the campaign against female seclusion and the veil. The Bolsheviks viewed the veil as an appalling manifestation of female inferiority, and the veiled woman herself as a potent symbol of Central Asian backwardness. Soviet propaganda vividly and indignantly described Muslim women who were covered from head to toe with heavy fabric, secluded in the female quarters of their houses, and prohibited from speaking to men who were not their relatives. A campaign to promote unveiling culminated in the hujum (onslaught) of 1927, in which thousands of women tore off and burned their veils in public squares.' Yet the unveiling campaign-and indeed, the veil itself-was generally limited to the urban and sedentary agricultural areas of what are today Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In Turkmenistan, as in other parts of Central Asia with a recent history of pastoral nomadism, women were not secluded and did not wear the paranji and chachvon, the heavy veil and cloak that were the focus of Soviet activists' attention.2 How, then, did Soviet

To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–1941. By Shoshana Keller. Westport, Conn, and London: Greenwood Press, 2001. xvii, 277 pp. $64.95 (cloth).

To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–1941. By Shoshana Keller. Westport, Conn, and London: Greenwood Press, 2001. xvii, 277 pp. $64.95 (cloth).

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:Vysheslavtsev, B. P. The Eternal in Russian Philosophy.McReynolds, Louise and Joan Neuberger, eds. Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia.Ketchian, Sonia I. Keats and the Russian Poets.Davidson, Pamela, ed. Russian Literature and Its Demons.Connolly, Julian W. The Intimate Stranger: Meetings with the Devil in Nineteenth‐Century Russian Literature.Donskov, A. A., ed. Novye materially o L. N. Tolstom: Iz arkhiva N. N. Guseva / New Materials on Leo Tolstoy: From the N. N. Gusev Archive.Clayton, J. Douglas. Wave and Stone: Essays on the Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pushkin.Spieker, Sven, ed. Gøgøl: Exploring Absence: Negativity in 19th‐Century Russian Literature.Kanevskaya, Marina. N. K. Mikhailovsky’s Criticism of Dostoevsky: The Cruel Critic.Khlebnikov, Velimir. Doski sud′by.Livingstone, Angela, ed. A Hundred Years of Andrei PlatonovKrutikov, Mikhail. Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914.Felch, Susan M. and Paul J. Contino, eds. Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith.Connolly, Julian W., ed. Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives.Gillespie, David. Early Soviet Cinema: Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda.Dudakov, Savelii. Paradoksy i prichudi filosemitizma i antisemitizma v Rossii.Bolkhovitinov, Nikolai N., ed. Istoriia Russkoi Ameriki, 1732–1867.Dixon, Simon. Catherine the Great.Briantsev, M. V. Kul′tura russkogo kupechestva (Vospitanie i obrazovanie).Herlihy, Patricia. The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia.Morison, John, ed. Ethnic and National Issues in Russian and East European History.Khaziev, R. A. Gosudarstvennoe administrirovanie ekonomiki i rynok na Urale v 1917–1921 gg.Keller, Shoshana. To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–1941.Raleigh, Donald J., ed. Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917–1953.Payne, Matthew J. Stalin’s Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism.Kuhr‐Korolev, Corinna, et al., eds. Sowjetjugend 1917–1941: Generation zwitschen Revolution und Resignation.Chase, William J. Enemies Within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939.Brackman, Roman. The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life.Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David. Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan.Zhang, Shu Guang. Economic Cold War: America’s Embargo against China and the Sino‐Soviet Alliance, 1949–1963.Winkler, David F. Cold War at Sea: High‐Seas Confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.Dukes, Paul. The Superpowers: A Short History.White, Stephen, Alex Pravda, and Zvi Gitelman, eds. Developments in Russian Politics 5.Tikhomirov, Vladimir. The Political Economy of Post‐Soviet Russia.Hahn, Jeffrey W., ed. Regional Russia in Transition: Studies from Yaroslavl′Clemens, Walter C., Jr. The Baltic Transformed: Complexity Theory and European Security.Malik, Hafeez, ed. Russian‐American Relations: Islamic and Turkic Dimensions in the Volga‐Ural Basin.Austin, Greg and Alexey D. Muraviev. The Armed Forces of Russia in Asia.

To Moscow, not Mecca: the Soviet campaign against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941

Preface Imperial Russia and Islam Old Empire on a New Basis Soviet Central Asia: Laying a Foundation Discussing the Problem Breaking Islam Retrenchment Second Wave Conclusion Glossary Bibliography

The Rural Batrachka (Hired Agricultural Laborer) and the Soviet Campaign to Unionize Her

This article explores the Soviet campaign in the mid-1920s to unionize the poorest women in rural villages: hired, agricultural laborers known as batrachkas. The goal was to make them literate, class-conscious workers who saw themselves not as peasants but as the vanguard of a rural proletariat. The mobilization movement met with little success--the majority of batrachkas remained outside the union--in part because the Soviet regime was ambivalent toward recruiting women and in part because it was ill-prepared materially to reach an often isolated and largely temporary work force. Moreover, the predominantly urban communists did not understand the needs or cultural assumptions of female agricultural laborers. Poor peasant women tended to rely on traditional village structures and were reluctant to risk losing the meager bene�ts they derived from the "bosses" by joining a union that seemed mainly to make promises.

Rules, Incentives and Soviet Campaign Justice After World War II

(1999). Rules, Incentives and Soviet Campaign Justice After World War II. Europe-Asia Studies: Vol. 51, No. 7, pp. 1245-1265.

Trapped between State and Society: Women's Liberation and Islam in Soviet Uzbekistan, 1926-1941

The Soviet campaign for the liberation of women in Uzbekistan consisted of two major components. The first was freeing women from Muslim social and religious strictures. The second was moving large numbers of women into the new agricultural and industrial workforce. This article focuses on the method and results of the first component. The Communist Party attempted to destroy by administrative fiat arranged marriage, bride-price, the marriage of young girls to adult men, the seclusion of women from public life, polygyny, and other customs. While the Soviets made significant changes in women's status, particularly among the educated classes, in the end they failed to stamp out any of the traditional practices they had campaigned against. The liberation effort, while claiming to help Uzbek women, instead bound them in a terrible dilemma. Women found themselves caught between obeying the government, remaining loyal to their families, communities, and customs, and trying to realize their own desires in a bewildering sea of new opportunities. Ultimately, thousands of women became victims of the very forces claiming to help them.

1990

The archival communities of the Baltic republics are engaged in political activities to reestablish independence in archival affairs. The Estonian archival community is fighting what it considers to be a Soviet campaign to control Estonian archives by subordinating the state archives under the Ministry of Justice. Estonian archivists are addressing the problems of excessive access restrictions and the lack of adequate material and technical facilities. Perhaps most importantly, work began in 1989 on the drafting of an Estonian archives law to regulate the reorganization of archives in independent Estonia.

The Soviets m Afghanistan: Can the Red Army Fight A Counterinsurgency War?

After nine years of inconclusive combat, the Soviet Union has finally begun withdrawing their forces from Afghanistan. Their lack of military success initially forced them to adopt tactics that were not part of standard Soviet military doctrine and, ultimately, to disengage their forces. In an attempt to discover a more effective counterguerrilla strategy, the Soviets began to re-examine their experiences in crushing the Basmachi revolt, the Central Asian insurgency that lasted from 1918 to 1929. That conflict has been considered by some Soviet military analysts as a good example of how indigenous guerrilla forces could be defeated. However, unlike their campaign in Central Asia (which equally emphasized political, socioeconomic, and military policy tools), the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan emphasized primarily, although not exclusively, a military solution. Operationally, Soviet tactics were predicated upon the use of high-technology weapons (such as helicopter gunships and tactical aircraft) to give them mobility and firepower. In one of numerous parallels to the U.S. experience in Vietnam, the Soviet military discovered that superior technology has only limited application in a counterinsurgency campaign.

A mutual security regime for Europe?

NATO is currently facing an unprecedented and probably short-lived opportunity to collaborate in developing a completely new kind of mutual security regime for Europe, extending from the Atlantic to the Urals. This opportunity has been created by a fundamental change in the way the Soviet Union defines its national security requirements. The radical nature of that change has unfortunately been obscured by the broad sweep and utopian flavour of the Soviet campaign for 'new thinking' in international relations and Soviet exhortations to adopt a new approach to world affairs. These far-reaching proposals are too easily dismissed as a traditional Soviet peace offensive, as propaganda designed to breed complacency in the West and give the Soviet Union the breathing space it needs to restructure its economy. At the end of this article I shall return briefly to what this 'new thinking' implies and how it relates to the change in Soviet national security requirements. But the immediate task is to describe exactly what has changed and to highlight its far-reaching implications, to outline the process of doctrinal evolution that made the change possible, and to summarize the evidence that change is actually in progress. It would be nice to wait until the process of change in the Soviet Union had run its course, but that is not really an option. Developing a new security regime for Europe is inherently a collaborative enterprise, and without active participation by NATO the new Soviet regime will be either stillborn or seriously deformed. The change in how the Soviet Union defines its security requirements can be summarized as follows. From 1948 to 1984, planning for the defence of the Russian homeland centred on the worst-case contingency of world war. In order not to lose such a war, the Soviet Union would need to evict American forces from the European continent. This required an offensive posture facing NATO, a measure of overall superiority, and the advantage of surprise, which would depend on secrecy. Although the Soviet Union has considered war progressively less likely since 1963, the scale of force required to mount a successful offensive against Western Europe has steadily increased. A particularly pronounced Soviet build-up occurred during the 1970s, a consequence of the new strategy which relied primarily on conventional means. In 1983-4 the Soviet Union faced up to the fact that in covering the ever more remote contingency of world war it had raised international tension, fostered distrust, and made world war more likely. It had meanwhile incurred heavy political and military costs in the form of NATO's response to what the West perceived as an increase in threat. These political and military costs came on top of the economic burden of maintaining the military capability required to implement the contingency plans for world war. This impasse prompted a shift in military doctrine concerning the

Branch of Medicine Called 'Narcology' Spearheads Aggressive Soviet Campaign Against Alcoholism

ALCOHOLIC PERSONS in the Soviet Union will wait up to three years to be treated by Grigorii Romanovich Dovzhenko, MD, of Feodosiya in the Crimea. Dovzhenko uses hypnosis and individual psychotherapy. The goal of his treatment is to condition the patient to abstain completely from alcohol for as long a period of time as the patient wishes. According to Lyudmila Vasilevna Novitskaya-Usenko, MD, an anesthesiologist and director of the Dnepropetrovsk Medical Institute in the Ukraine, Dovzhenko has been treating alcoholic persons for about 40 years, but it has been during the last 15 years that his ideas coalesced and he developed this specific psychotherapeutic method. The treatment is done on an inpatient basis and takes only three days. It combines group and individual psychiatric counseling, in addition to the hypnosis. No drugs are used. Novitskaya-Usenko said he has now treated more than 12 000 people, and the relapse rate—that is,

Branch of medicine called 'narcology' spearheads aggressive Soviet campaign against alcoholism

Branch of medicine called 'narcology' spearheads aggressive Soviet campaign against alcoholism

Soviet Views of SDI

The culprit, of course, was President Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative" (SDI). As the late General Secretary's response indicates, the Soviet campaign against SDI1 began punctually and without equivocation. From Andropov to the present, it has been characterized by high degrees of both intensity and consistency over time. About two years afterAndropov's exc~nge, the newly installed General Secretary, M. S. Gorbachev, voiced similar concerns in his Pravda interview...

The Manchurian campaign and its relevance to modern strategy

Abstract From studying the Soviet campaign in Manchuria we can derive several principles of Soviet military strategy that are still relevant today: (1) the importance of diplomacy in deciding the outcome of war; (2) the primacy of the offensive; and (3) the desirability of achieving strategic surprise. Nevertheless, although the principles of Soviet military art have changed little since 1945, the means by which these principles would be put into practice at the tactical level have changed. The increase in the destructive power of conventional weaponry, combined with the development of precision‐guided munitions, has increased the relative effectiveness of the defense. Although the Soviet Army is making impressive efforts to deal with the problems that confront it, there is a question as to whether these can be successful in the absence of radical changes in its organizational and command structure.