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Soviet Economic Policy in Annexed Eastern Poland, 1939–1941

Marek Wierzbicki

in Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928-1953

The years 1939–41 entailed dramatic changes for the economy of the Soviet-occupied Polish territories. Moscow radically transformed the socioeconomic system along the lines of the Soviet example. ... More

The years 1939–41 entailed dramatic changes for the economy of the Soviet-occupied Polish territories. Moscow radically transformed the socioeconomic system along the lines of the Soviet example. These changes were incomplete by the time of the German invasion in June 1941, but economic life was revolutionized. The prewar structures of private and public ownership had been destroyed. The main branches of the economy, save for agriculture, had been completely reorganized. And the integration of the occupied Polish territories into the Soviet economic system had made much headway.Less

Empire’s Shades and Shadows

Patryk Babiracki

in Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin's New Empire, 1943-1957

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to examine both sides of the story of Soviet-Polish cultural interactions during the troubled and little-known postwar decade. It builds ... More

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to examine both sides of the story of Soviet-Polish cultural interactions during the troubled and little-known postwar decade. It builds on both classic accounts of Soviet-East European relations, new works on Sovietization, and recent studies that recognize the Soviet and Polish communists' limited successes in meeting their stated objectives. It shows that the Soviets participated actively in shaping Poland's culture and cultural relations between the two countries. Yet many Soviet officials displayed a much greater sensitivity to local conditions than has been acknowledged. They also experienced a great deal of confusion about what was expected of them. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less

The Founding of Industrial Lviv: Factories and Identities

Tarik Cyril Amar

in The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists

This chapter addresses Lviv's postwar industrialization and the creation of a large population of workers from two kinds of immigrants: locals from the western Ukrainian countryside and easterners. ... More

This chapter addresses Lviv's postwar industrialization and the creation of a large population of workers from two kinds of immigrants: locals from the western Ukrainian countryside and easterners. These new workers were crucial to Lviv's Sovietization not only as labor power but also as an essential element of the city's Soviet identity. Indeed, Lviv's postwar industrialization shaped its reality and image for decades. Ultimately, it produced some of the key stories and symbols of Sovietization. In 1950, the Lviv obkom noted the three “fundamental issues” of the postwar years: the industrialization of Lviv, the collectivization of its countryside, and “ideological work”—meaning the battle against Ukrainian nationalism and the education of toilers (trudiashchie) to follow the “party of Lenin-Stalin.”Less

Unlikely Heroes

Patryk Babiracki

in Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin's New Empire, 1943-1957

This chapter focuses on Moscow's failure to co-opt Polish officials and writers by letting the latter publish contemporary Polish fiction in the USSR. In the popular press, the Soviet authorities ... More

This chapter focuses on Moscow's failure to co-opt Polish officials and writers by letting the latter publish contemporary Polish fiction in the USSR. In the popular press, the Soviet authorities encouraged the masses to think of socialist Eastern Europe as a source of pride. But the Soviet reading public was unlikely to learn about the new empire from the East European writers themselves, or from the heroes of their novels. Similarly, the heroic efforts of Soviet soft-power advocates in Poland also went largely unnoticed and unrewarded. Still, the Soviet-Polish efforts to publish new Polish belles lettres in the USSR are historically revealing in three ways. First, they expose the systemic tethers of Stalinism, which forced the Kremlin to ignore the long-term consequences of depriving East European writers of opportunities to publish their works in the USSR. Second, the abortive cultural exchange reveals the severe limitations of the vast Soviet empire in advancing cultural reciprocity. Finally, failed as they were, the attempts to establish reciprocity further underscore the limited utility of “Sovietization” as the dominant analytic category to make sense of Soviet-East European cultural interactions even during the apex of Stalinism.Less

The Vanguard Will Be the Guerrilla Movement, 1968–1979

Anna Clayfield

in The Guerrilla Legacy of the Cuban Revolution

This chapter explores how guerrilla motifs were still readily discernible in the official discourse of the 1970s. Scholarly studies have often overlooked this period in the Revolution’s trajectory, ... More

This chapter explores how guerrilla motifs were still readily discernible in the official discourse of the 1970s. Scholarly studies have often overlooked this period in the Revolution’s trajectory, designating it simply as a decade of “Sovietization,” or, to use the Cuban term, increased “institutionalization.” What the evidence in this chapter reveals is that, though the Revolution underwent a profound structural change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of the beliefs and values which underpinned the revolutionary project in its formative years—that is, those linked to a guerrilla ethos—were still being promoted well into the Revolution’s second decade in power.Less

The Discovery of a World

Elidor Mëhilli

in From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World

This chapter views socialism as a mental world, following Albanian youths sent to the Soviet Union in the 1950s for training in literature, engineering, and architecture. These youths came to see ... More

This chapter views socialism as a mental world, following Albanian youths sent to the Soviet Union in the 1950s for training in literature, engineering, and architecture. These youths came to see themselves and others in similar socialist terms. The encounter with Moscow was awe-inspiring, but exposure to the socialist world could also be alienating. Such contradictory reactions find expression in the lives of two individuals: an aspiring architect shipped to Moscow to learn how to plan the socialist cities of the future, and a young writer sent on a scholarship to absorb the techniques of socialist realism. The chapter also shows how party-enforced “friendship propaganda” for the Soviet Union was meant to insert Albania into a genealogy of international socialism. This campaign came with rewritten history textbooks, mandatory Russian language courses, and a system of sanctions and rewards.Less

Lviv under Soviet Rule, 1939–1941

Christoph Mick

in Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928-1953

Soviet occupation policy in Lviv was based first and foremost on socio-political and power-political categories and only second on ethno-political ones. The local population, however, continued to ... More

Soviet occupation policy in Lviv was based first and foremost on socio-political and power-political categories and only second on ethno-political ones. The local population, however, continued to view events in terms of a competition between ethnic groups and interpreted Soviet measures accordingly. Most Poles and Ukrainians saw Soviet policy as a direct assault on their nationhood. Despite the suffering of Jewish elites, a majority of Jews could only prefer Soviet rule to Nazi rule. The city’s non-Jews forgot about the seizure of Jewish property, the arrests of Jewish political and religious leaders, and the deportation of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees to the Soviet interior. What they recalled instead were the actions of a part of Jewish youth, Soviet officials of Jewish origin, and those refugees who joined the Soviet administration.Less

State Ownership of the Trade on the Chukchi Peninsula

John R. Bockstoce

in White Fox and Icy Seas in the Western Arctic: The Fur Trade, Transportation, and Change in the Early Twentieth Century

This chapter outlines the efforts of the Soviet authorities to change the lifeways of the Indigenous peoples (the Chukchi and Yupik) by re-locating them, re-educating them, forcing them to work in ... More

This chapter outlines the efforts of the Soviet authorities to change the lifeways of the Indigenous peoples (the Chukchi and Yupik) by re-locating them, re-educating them, forcing them to work in collectives for state-owned industries, and requiring them to sell their furs to the state at set prices.Less

Introduction In the Archives of the Cultural Base

Craig Campbell

in Agitating Images: Photography against History in Indigenous Siberia

Agitating Images examines this era when the construction of Soviet landscapes began, and it seeks to bring into the account the lives of peoples affected by those structures. While the rest of Russia ... More

Agitating Images examines this era when the construction of Soviet landscapes began, and it seeks to bring into the account the lives of peoples affected by those structures. While the rest of Russia was undergoing radical and bloody transformations, life on the land for most hunters and herders in Evenkiia was not so confrontational.Less

The Years Are Like Centuries

Craig Campbell

in Agitating Images: Photography against History in Indigenous Siberia

Wherein a nervous history of Soviet culture shaping in central Siberia in the years before the formation of the Evenki National Region on December 10, 1930 is presented amidst photo-fragments. It is ... More

Wherein a nervous history of Soviet culture shaping in central Siberia in the years before the formation of the Evenki National Region on December 10, 1930 is presented amidst photo-fragments. It is a nervous history, as all histories should be.Less

Dangerous Communications

Craig Campbell

in Agitating Images: Photography against History in Indigenous Siberia

Wherein the everyday as an inimitable and steadily dynamic combination is interrelated elements is used to explore archives, photography, and sovietization in early post-revolutionary central Siberia.

Ethics of Presence and the (De)generative Image

Craig Campbell

in Agitating Images: Photography against History in Indigenous Siberia

I argue that photographs work along the same principle as archives and they undermine the rules of historical narrative by way of their bald disclosure of alternative historical readings, blind ... More

I argue that photographs work along the same principle as archives and they undermine the rules of historical narrative by way of their bald disclosure of alternative historical readings, blind spots, and the seams of knowledge production itself. Image agitators are dangerous communications to the integrity of conventional historiography.Less

Epilogue: After the War: Adjusting to Socialism

Ana Antić

in Therapeutic Fascism: Experiencing the Violence of the Nazi New Order

This chapter discusses the development of Yugoslav and East European psychiatry in the early socialist period, and documents the ideological and political changes within the profession’s intellectual ... More

This chapter discusses the development of Yugoslav and East European psychiatry in the early socialist period, and documents the ideological and political changes within the profession’s intellectual outlook which were dictated by socialist revolutions and Sovietization. It directly addresses the issue of important continuities across the year of 1945, and interrogates the relative importance of wartime experiences and the postwar revolution for the construction of Yugoslavia’s socialist psychiatry. It also demonstrates how Yugoslavia’s break with the Stalinist regime in 1948 dramatically affected the social and cultural history of the Yugoslav psychiatric profession, and interrupted the fledgling process of Sovietization of the country’s mental health professions.Less

“I Will Be His Witness until Death”

Emily B. Baran

in Dissent on the Margins: How Soviet Jehovah's Witnesses Defied Communism and Lived to Preach About It

The Second World War brought about a new era for Jehovah’s Witnesses in Eastern Europe. Soviet Witnesses organized a complex underground organization, ran dangerous smuggling operations, and ... More

The Second World War brought about a new era for Jehovah’s Witnesses in Eastern Europe. Soviet Witnesses organized a complex underground organization, ran dangerous smuggling operations, and distributed illegal literature printed on secret presses. The remarkable activity of postwar Witness communities suggests the need to rethink the boundaries of dissent and conformity during the late Stalin era. The state treated the newly minted citizens in its borderlands as a potential fifth column, and directed much of its repressive capacity toward the wholesale elimination of people and groups who represented a threat to the Sovietization process. Viewed in this light, Witnesses’ subversive actions were taken far more seriously because of their geographic location in a politically sensitive region. The state arrested hundreds of Witnesses and undertook two mass exiles of Witnesses and their families from the western borderlands to Siberia.Less