Soviet West Research Articles

From “Soviet West” to “Western East:” Russia’s reimagination of Baltic “Westernness” in a post-2004 geopolitical reality

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore how the popular image of Baltic ‘Westernness,’ widespread in the period from the mid-1950s to late 1980s, has undergone discursive reconstruction in Putin’s Russia. Using popular geopolitics as a theoretical approach, and critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a method, I demonstrate that among other popular geopolitical visions, the reconstructed image in question has been employed by the state media to articulate Russia’s current foreign policy agenda in relation to the Baltic states.

Microdistrict as an element of a city’s visual representation the Tyumen region

This article studies the formation of the visual image of the late Soviet city in 1960s – early 1990s in Western Siberia, approaches to representation and some of its elements. The author aims to show the process of formation of the visual representation of the Western Siberian city of the late Soviet period during the industrial development. The object of the study is an image of the microdistrict as a central element of urban space in late Soviet era. These cities actively developed during the development of the West Siberian oil and gas complex, which allowed to turn these cities into an experimental platform for bold everyday life solutions. This defined new approaches to the visual representation of the late-Soviet city, where the focus was not only on squares, factories and “advanced socialist districts”, like the 1930s. These changes can be traced to the emergence of new elements of the visual image of the city. One of such elements of the visual image of the late Soviet West Siberian city was a microdistrict that appeared during the transition to standardized housing construction that began in the 1950s. It was a “city in miniature” with its own social infrastructure, streets, but it was still reflecting the old idea of a “collective community of Soviet society” in general. These factors predetermined the specificity of the visual image of the late Soviet city, which was an industrial, economic, scientific and cultural center.

냉전기 소련과 서독의 통상 관계 발전과 독일 통일, 1953~1985

냉전기 소련과 서독의 통상 관계 발전과 독일 통일, 1953~1985

Political Censorship in the Soviet West

Cette etude est basee sur une comparaison des efforts deployes par l’Union sovietique en matiere de censure politique en Lituanie et en Lettonie entre 1944 et 1989. Elle cherche a repondre aux questions suivantes : la censure politique sovietique etait‑elle appliquee uniformement ou bien existait‑il des variantes regionales ? Les campagnes de censure politique sovietique furent‑elles developpees de la meme facon dans tous les territoires occidentaux nouvellement occupes ? L’article se fonde sur des sources primaires. Dans un premier temps, il propose de comparer les changements de personnel occupant des fonctions quotidiennes de censure dans les antennes locales de Glavlit, les criteres de recrutement et de licenciement des responsables de bureaux, et les relations de ces responsables avec la structure centrale de Glavlit et les responsables locaux du parti communiste. Dans un deuxieme temps, l’article explore les dynamiques de la censure politique appliquee dans les republiques sovietiques de Lituanie et de Lettonie, comparant les relations entretenues avec l’URSS. Enfin, il compare les interventions des republiques en matiere de censure politique et cherche a comprendre si la politique de censure en place dans les republiques baltes se differenciait de celle appliquee dans le reste de l’empire.

The National as Progressive?

The article analyses debates on jazz after 1953 through the lens of Soviet national cultures. Within the context of Cultural Cold War and the limited opening of the country, the question of a unique Soviet Jazz quickly gained political relevance. Soviet Estonia, at the multinational empire’s periphery, was often imagined as the “Soviet West” by contemporaries. The republic was home to a small but well-educated jazz scene that already developed during the time of the anti-western campaigns of the late 1940s. In the post-Stalin period, Party and cultural elites in Moscow and Leningrad increasingly struggled with a growing number of young jazz enthusiasts that aimed at establishing jazz as art music based on improvisation and influenced by the American model. In these debates on the establishment of a specifically Soviet Jazz, conservative and reform-minded members of the cultural elites envisioned Estonian jazz as an early role model for a number of reasons: Its members were not only highly qualified, but also willing to make traditional Estonian folklore a key element of jazz. What is more, the musicians kept close ties with the Estonian cultural institutions. The growing number of jazz festivals hosted in the Estonian Soviet Republic provided an important public space for the emerging young Soviet jazz culture. At the same time, many Estonian jazz musicians advocated a more critical approach towards improvisation than musicians from Moscow and Leningrad. Their discussions resembled arguments against American superficiality brought forward by party ideologists in the late 1940s. The article questions narratives of jazz as cultural resistance to political oppression, and argues that a focus on cultural transfer from behind the Iron Curtain is too narrow for explaining the genesis, heterogeneity and durability of late Soviet culture. Greater emphasis on the non-Russian peripheries as cradles of culture can provide us with more nuanced interpretations on the renewal of Soviet culture after Stalin’ death.

«Мужская дружба»? Вилли Брандт и Леонид Брежнев в контексте энергетического диалога между ФРГ и СССР в 1970–1973 гг.

With the signing of the Moscow Treaty in 1970 between the Soviet Union and West Germany, a new period in Soviet-German relations began. This phenomenon was made possible by two factors: the strengthening of Brezhnev's power and the election of Willy Brandt as Chancellor of West Germany. This article identified the importance of the personal relationship between the two politicians in the transition from a policy of harsh confrontation during the Cold War to a policy of détente and economic cooperation in the form of an energy dialogue from 1970 to 1973. Against the background of current events, the author poses the question of why the two politicians were unable to agree to a policy against the backdrop of the perceived ideological antagonism between the capitalist and socialist systems. This article also considers how the relationship between the two men affected the development of economic cooperation between the two countries.

Autosovietization. Migration, Urbanization and Social Acculturation in Western Belarus

This article analyzes the Sovietization of Western Belarus after 1944 as a consequence of the region’s Soviet and German occupations. Both occupational regimes inflicted mass violence on the region and deeply altered its urban social structures. During the following decades, most of the local rural population migrated to Western Belarusian destroyed cities and remade the sociospatial structure of the region. The article argues that Sovietization was grounded in the violence that occurred during and after WWII. Yet Sovietization also triggered a long-term process of social acculturation, described in the article as autosovietization. The paper explains how and why rural urbanites actively participated in the creation of a new Soviet West. Eager to partake in the Soviet modernization project, most of these rural migrants voluntarily adopted Russian, the main urban language. To a large extent, this readiness to adopt Russian was an attempt to leave the village and its symbolic heritage behind. This dynamic was strengthened by Soviet folklorization practices, which transformed some elements of rural heritage into new urban forms that strictly bound Soviet Belarusianness to the village. This concept of titular culture in the Belorussian Social - ist Soviet Republic fell in line with the negative self-perception of most migrants, who perceived Belarusian vernacular as a major marker of their rural descent. The mass switch from speaking vernacular to speaking Russian in public spaces is interpreted as a symbolic act of social acculturation. At the same time, newly Soviet towns hosted hybrids of rural and urban cultural practices. In the linguistic field, the strong domination of Russian in public went hand in hand with the emergence of mixed idioms such as the Belarusian- Russian trasianka in private spaces. Based on oral histories and archival records, this text argues that exploring the interplay between the violent dimension of Sovietization and the soft power of the Soviet modernization project is central to understanding the Sovietization of the post-WWII periphery of the Soviet Union.

The Lithuanian Cultural Elite and the End of the Soviet Union

Violeta Davoliute, The Making and Breaking of Lithuania: Memory and Modernity Wake of War. 211 pp. New York: Routledge, 2013. ISBN-13 978-0415714495. $155.00. To date, we know a good deal about making (Sovietization) and breaking (Singing Revolution) of Baltic socialist republics (SSRs), but socialist 1960s and 1970s are far less studied. (1) It was those decades that population of pacified Baltic republics began to adapt to conditions of new regime, and it is perhaps for this very reason that Baltic scholars so far have focused almost exclusively on topics like anti-Soviet resistance and reestablishment of independence. (2) Rein Taagepera and Romuald Misiunas have called years from 1954 to 1968 a period of re-emergence of national cultures, albeit with ideological genuflections. (3) More generally, it was also a time of economic stabilization, growing consumption, and more or less peaceful negotiations between citizens and Party on socialist values. (4) But this period also saw coming of age of a new generational cohort whose members had been raised authoritarian interwar republics, with their strong emphasis on patriotism. This is precisely group of people that Davoliute's book investigates. Despite tide, then, Davoliute's study focuses primarily on time when Lithuanian SSR (LSSR) was in process 1960s and 1970s. Her main objects of inquiry are die culturally active Lithuanians who responded to call of modernity, absorbed patterns of Thaw, and blended them successfully with renaissance of interwar national traditions (88). Her book focuses on inner Lidiuanian processes and this way alone breaks new ground history of Baltic republics, hitherto told most often a narrative of us vs. them. In contrast to earlier works on period, her book does not focus on suffering and resistance. Her focal point is instead rustic turn, a powerful undercurrent cultural of LSSR that began late 1960s and undermined discourse of progress and modernity, eventually leading to rustic revolution of late 1980s. Most notably, she presents the story of Lithuanian cultural mainstream (xvi) a way to challenge popular reference to collective suffering under foreign (Soviet) rule. For this purpose, author conducted in-depdi interviews with many leading intellectuals of time (their biographies are collected appendix). In many ways, Lithuania was different from its northern neighbors Baltic region. Lithuanian postwar armed resistance against Sovietization can be compared scale only to western Ukraine. (5) Lidiuania was distinct from Estonia and Latvia also terms of its political leadership. The career of Antanas Snieckus (1903-1974) was exceptionally long and robust: he became a member of Central Committee of Lithuanian Communist Party 1927 and first secretary 1936. With exception of his arrest 1939-40, he held this position until his death 1974. In contrast, leading Estonian and Latvian comrades sooner or later faced dramatic purges. (6) Moreover, whereas Estonia and Latvia experienced a mass influx of migrants from other republics that eventually threatened demographic majority of titular nationality, Lithuania left Union 1991 with a Slavic minority of only 20 percent, including 8 percent Poles, republic's traditional national minority. At same time, all three Baltic republics represented a Soviet West for many citizens (105), based on particular European outlook of Baltic cities, better standard of life on coast of Baltic Sea, and for some even a somewhat more relaxed ideological atmosphere. (7) In this respect, Davoliute supports Elena Zubkova's view that Baltic republics were used by Kremlin as showcases for achievements of science, culture, and industry (108) for a non-Soviet audience, but she refers also to phenomenal success of a number of Lithuanian actors cinema (108) who contributed to die positive image of their republic rest of USSR. …

A Soviet West: nationhood, regionalism, and empire in the annexed western borderlands

This article considers the role the Soviet Union's western borderlands annexed during World War II played in the evolution of Soviet politics of empire. Using the Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine as case studies, it argues that Sovietization had a profound impact on these borderlands, integrating them into a larger Soviet polity. However, guerrilla warfare and Soviet policy-making indirectly led to these regions becoming perceived as more Western and nationalist than other parts of the Soviet Union. The Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine differed in their engagement with the Western capitalist world. Different experiences of World War II and late Stalinism and contacts with the West ultimately led to this region becoming Soviet, yet different from the rest of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet West was far from uniform, perceived differences between it and the rest of the Soviet Union justified claims at the end of the 1980s that the Soviet Union was an empire rather than a family of nations.

The Foreign Policy of the Voronin Administration

Moldova, which declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, is a young and very poor state with few diplomatic resources and with little in foreign policy compared with Romania, for example. (1) Moldova is a small state, consisting of a population of about 4.3 million. (2) Moldova also is a multiethnic society) with a population that is approximately 65 percent Romanian extraction, with the remainder consisting of Russians (about 13 percent) and Ukrainians (about 14 percent), numbering approximately 650,000 of Ukraninians. (4) There also are approximately 150,000 Gagauz, a Turkic--Christian group of people who live in the southern part of the country and have managed to acquire a certain degree of political autonomy. Moldova, which no longer shares a border with Russia (separated from Russia by Ukraine), is located in the former Soviet West and shares close historic and cultural ties with Romania, underscoring the existence of a special or privileged relationship between the two states. Most of current-day Moldova, previously known as Bessarabia, was once part of historical Greater Romania. (5) As a small state, Moldova finds itself in a weak and vulnerable position in the post-cold war international system. Moldova faces the problem of trying to preserve its independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity while undergoing a difficult transition to democracy and a market economy. The victory of the Party of Moldovan Communists in 2001 marked a major change in the internal power structure of Moldova. The Communists gained control of a majority of seats in parliament in the elections of February 25, 2001. This occurred after parliament had been dissolved by President Petru Lucinschi, following the legislature's failure to elect a president on three separate occasions) On April 4, 2001, the single-chamber legislature elected the leader of the Moldovan Communist Party as president by a vote of seventy-one out of one hundred one. (7) The triumph of the Party of Moldovan Communists underscores the need to realize the importance of the relationship between the historical and cultural context of a country, especially the legacies of the approach, and to understand the foreign policy behavior of the Voronin administration. The historical legacy or path dependency of a country's past has an important effect on the foreign policy behavior of a state, as argued by the realist school of thought known as neoclassical realism. In short, the foreign policy of a country clearly has domestic roots. (8) An example of the influence of path dependency on Moldora occurred at the Fourth Congress of the Party of Moldovan Communists in April 2002, when President Voronin talked about the rebirth of socialism and the historic mission of the Communist Party of Moldova, the only country in Europe that returned the Communists to power. (9) As a further example of the grip of the Communist legacy on Moldova. President Voronin also expressed his great interest in the experience of the Communist parties of China, North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam. (10) The return of the Communists to power in Moldora reflects the need to consider the importance of path dependency by previous rulers of the country, specifically by the Communists, to understand the nature and scope of Moldova's foreign policy. Voronin apparently believed that the collapse of Communism in Europe was only temporary and that the socialist system would be restored. Realism and Moldovan Foreign Policy Concepts Voronin's foreign policy also can be explained by classical realism and its variations, such as neoclassical realism and neorealism. Classical realism always has stressed the primary importance of the state as a rational, unitary actor, focusing on the pursuit of its foreign policy goals in the international system. The classical realist believes that the state is the most important actor in the international system; (11) however, classical realists have been criticized for not paying enough attention to the role of domestic factors to explain a state's foreign policy behavior. …

Gender and policing in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944-1948.

RésuméLes femmes et la police politique dans l’Ukraine occidentale soviétique de 1944 à 1948.Notre article examine le rôle des femmes dans la campagne anti-insurrectionnelle menée par l’Union soviétique en Ukraine occidentale pendant et après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Nous nous sommes basés sur des documents des archives de Moscou, Kiev et Lvov. Au printemps de 1944, l’Armée insurrectionnelle ukrainienne (UPA) et l’Organisation des nationalistes ukrainiens (OUN) firent de plus en plus appel à des femmes et des jeunes filles pour effectuer des tâches vitales pour les rebelles nationalistes. La police secrète soviétique réagit en orientant sa stratégie autour de ces femmes. Les réseaux d’indicateurs (agentura) intégrèrent de plus en plus de femmes alors même que se développaient des tactiques spéciales visant à les terroriser. Celles de la police soviétique, qui mettaient en œuvre des violences sexuelles, engendrèrent en outre une réaction brutale de la part du mouvement clandestin ukrainien. Les moskal´ki (les « collaboratrices ») devinrent ainsi la cible des représailles des unités punitives du mouvement clandestin.

Gender and policing in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944-1948

ResumeLes femmes et la police politique dans l’Ukraine occidentale sovietique de 1944 a 1948.Notre article examine le role des femmes dans la campagne anti-insurrectionnelle menee par l’Union sovietique en Ukraine occidentale pendant et apres la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Nous nous sommes bases sur des documents des archives de Moscou, Kiev et Lvov. Au printemps de 1944, l’Armee insurrectionnelle ukrainienne (UPA) et l’Organisation des nationalistes ukrainiens (OUN) firent de plus en plus appel a des femmes et des jeunes filles pour effectuer des tâches vitales pour les rebelles nationalistes. La police secrete sovietique reagit en orientant sa strategie autour de ces femmes. Les reseaux d’indicateurs (agentura) integrerent de plus en plus de femmes alors meme que se developpaient des tactiques speciales visant a les terroriser. Celles de la police sovietique, qui mettaient en œuvre des violences sexuelles, engendrerent en outre une reaction brutale de la part du mouvement clandestin ukrainien. Les moskal´ki (les « collaboratrices ») devinrent ainsi la cible des represailles des unites punitives du mouvement clandestin.

The Early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944–1948

In 1989, when archival discoveries were about to revolutionize the history of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis published a pathbreaking article entitled “Intelligence, Espionage and Cold War Origins.” While Gaddis expressed serious doubts as to whether anyone had ever established that espionage had positively affected larger historical developments, he did render one sober and perceptive conclusion that did not rely on unencumbered access to Soviet, American, or British archives: espionage had heightened the atmosphere of distrust on all sides, and probably did more to escalate tensions than to abate them. “Was it all worth it, from the Russians’ own standpoint? There is good reason to doubt whether the benefi ts Stalin gained from spying on his allies during and after the war counterbalanced the problems created for him once his indulgence in espionage became known.”

State Characteristics and Foreign Policy:

In the UNESCO crisis the industrialized countries were confronted with the Third World's claim for a New World Information and Communication Order. To this challenge they reacted in many ways, ranging from support of Third World demands to withdrawal from UNESCO. In order to explain this variety, the policies of the United States, the Soviet Union, France and West Germany at the height of the crisis in 1983/84 are compared. Three competing approaches of foreign policy analysis are tested: foreign policy as `interest-oriented behaviour', `behavioural style', or `emergent behaviour'. On the whole, `interest-oriented behaviour' proves to be the most adequate model because the conflict behaviours of the four countries can be systematically related to their different interests. Only US and West German behaviours differed to a much greater extent than their interests. In a basic first cut the variety of UNESCO policies is therefore explained by variables assumed to influence foreign policy interests: the media systems, and the societal values they represent, as well as the positions in the overall international power structure. In a second cut this explanation is refined by looking at factors which might account for differences in US and West German foreign policy styles. In this respect, the differences in behaviours seemed above all to reflect differences in the belief systems of the German and American foreign policy elites.

Toward a Thematic Approach to the Collectivization Campaign in the Soviet West (1948-56)

The collectivization campaign of 1929-36 has been researched extensively by historians in the West (e.g., Naum Jasny, Moshe Lewin, R.W. Davies, Merle Fainsod, Robert Conquest and Lynne Viola1) and in the former Soviet Union, where recently journals have devoted considerable space to this question. There is a consensus that this collectivization campaign was marked by Stalinism at its most sinister: purges, executions, and banishment of so-called kulaks or better off peasants; extensive grain requisitions based on absurdly high quotas; and the imposition of a regime of terror over the hapless Soviet village by Party or urban workers dispatched from the cities to the countryside. By contrast, the postwar collectivization campaign in the western borderlands i.e., the three Baltic republics, Right-Bank Moldavia, and the western provinces of Belorussia and Ukraine (which formed Eastern Poland) annexed by the USSR after the NaziSoviet Pact of August 1939 remains one of the least researched topics in Soviet history. For some time, this was a very sensitive topic, since these regions were ipso facto areas of key military interest. Moreover, because several of these republics were centres of nationalist opposition, they were off limits to both domestic and foreign researchers. The few collections of documents published before the Khrushchev period gave a very stilted picture of events. After 1956 some new and important Soviet works appeared; they still remain among the most revealing.2 By the 1970s, Soviet scholars had provided several studies of each annexed area and one comparative study that appeared in a volume

The Soviet West—or Far Eastern Europe?

The Soviet West—or Far Eastern Europe?

Identity crisis in the Soviet west

What would happen if the Baltics, Ukraine, and Belorussia had their way? Neither the Soviet leadership nor the West is prepared for real autonomy in the prosperous western republics.

The Influence of East Europe and the Soviet West on the USSR

The Influence of East Europe and the Soviet West on the USSR

The Influence of Eastern Europe and the Soviet West on the USSR

The Influence of Eastern Europe and the Soviet West on the USSR

The Influence of East Europe and The Soviet West on The USSR. Edited by Roman Szporluk. Published in cooperation with the University of Michigan Center for Russian and East European Studies. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976. x, 260 pp. Tables. Figures. $17.50.

The Influence of East Europe and The Soviet West on The USSR. Edited by Roman Szporluk. Published in cooperation with the University of Michigan Center for Russian and East European Studies. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976. x, 260 pp. Tables. Figures. $17.50. - Volume 35 Issue 4