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1
Kelleher, Michael. "Bulgaria's Communist-Era Landscape." Public Historian 31, no. 3 (2009): 39–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/tph.2009.31.3.39.
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Abstract This essay discusses the various architectural and design elements that helped define the communist-era landscape of Bulgaria. The conclusions presented here are based on observations made by the author while living in Bulgaria and research into the literature on communist architecture and design in the East Bloc. Bulgaria was the member of the East Bloc that most closely followed the architectural and design model established by the Soviet Union and exported to its satellite states following the Second World War. This didactic model was intended to present a certain image of communism and its achievements. Despite physical changes that came with the end of communism in Bulgaria, the country has retained a significant communist-era landscape. Bulgaria, therefore, presents an opportunity to examine many of the architectural and design elements typical of the East Bloc, both how the communists intended them to be interpreted and how these buildings and monuments made the transition to the postcommunist era.
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Drake, Richard. "Italian Communism and Soviet Terror." Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 2 (April 2004): 57–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/152039704773254768.
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The declassification of materials from the Russian archives has provided a good deal of new evidence about the relationship between the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Soviet Union both before and after World War II. Two newly published collections of documents leave no doubt that, contrary to arguments made by supporters of the PCI, the Italian party was in fact strictly subservient to the dictates of Josif Stalin. The documents reveal the unsavory role of the PCI leader, Palmiro Togliatti, in the destruction of large sections of the Italian Communist movement and in the tragic fate of Italian prisoners of war who were held in the Soviet Union during and after World War II. Togliatti's legacy, as these documents make clear, was one of terror and the Stalinization of the PCI.
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Drake, Richard. "The Soviet Dimension of Italian Communism." Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 3 (July 2004): 115–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/1520397041447355.
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This essay reviews two books that provide diverging views of the relationship between the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Soviet Union. The first book, a lengthy collection of declassified documents from the former Soviet archives, provides abundant evidence of the PCI's crucial dependence on Soviet funding. No Communist party outside the Soviet bloc depended more on Soviet funding over the years than the PCI did. Vast amounts of money flowed from Moscow into the PCI's coffers. The Italian Communists maintained their heavy reliance on Soviet funding until the early 1980s. The other book discussed here a memoir by Gianni Cervetti, a former senior PCI financial official seeks to defend the party's policy and to downplay the importance of the aid provided by Moscow. Nonetheless, even Cervetti's book makes clear, if only inadvertently, that the link with the Soviet Union helped spark the broader collapse of Marxism-Leninism as a mobilizing force.
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Esenwein, George. ":The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism." American Historical Review 110, no. 3 (June 2005): 876–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/ahr.110.3.876.
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Kramer, Mark. "The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 1)." Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 4 (September 2003): 178–256. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/152039703322483783.
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The largely peaceful collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 reflected the profound changes that Mikhail Gorbachev had carried out in Soviet foreign policy. Successful though the process was in Eastern Europe, it had destabilizing repercussions within the Soviet Union. The effects were both direct and indirect. The first part of this two-part article looks at Gorbachev's policy toward Eastern Europe, the collapse of Communism in the region, and the direct “spillover” from Eastern Europe into the Soviet Union. The second part of the article, to be published in the next issue of the journal, discusses the indirect spillover into the Soviet Union and the fierce debate that emerged within the Soviet political elite about the “loss” of the Eastern bloc—a debate that helped spur the leaders of the attempted hardline coup d'état in August 1991.
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Rutland, Peter. "What Was Communism?" Russian History 37, no. 4 (2010): 427–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187633110x528591.
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AbstractCommunism dominated the political history of the 20th century. Yet it remains an enigmatic force: how could a philosophy of universal liberation turn so quickly into an engine of oppression? How was it possible for a rag-tag movement of street protests and café conspirators to seize command of the Russian state, turn it into a military superpower, and spread revolution to other lands? Communism exemplified the pernicious role of ideology in modern mass society. Both the sudden rise of communism in the early 1900s, and its equally abrupt collapse in the 1980s, caught observers by surprise and confounded academic conventions. The three books under review here, written by distinguished British specialists on Soviet history, successfully convey the international sweep and complexity of the Communist phenomenon. While the focus is on the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the authors also cover the spread of Communism to China, Africa and elsewhere, and its blunting in Western Europe. The impact of Communist thinking on the arts is also explored, especially by David Priestland. But the debate over the driving forces behind communism's initial success and ultimate failure will continue for years to come.
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Hurst, Mark. "‘Gamekeeper Turned Poacher’: Frank Chapple, Anti-Communism, and Soviet Human Rights Violations1." Labour History Review: Volume 86, Issue 3 86, no. 3 (December 1, 2021): 313–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/lhr.2021.14.
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The inclusion of the British trade union leader Frank Chapple on the panel of the 1985 Sakharov hearings, an event designed to hold the Soviet authorities to account for their violation of human rights, raises questions about the workings of the broader network of activists highlighting Soviet abuses. This article assesses Chapple’s support for human rights in the Soviet Union, arguing that because of his historic membership of the Communist Party and subsequent anti-communist leadership of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) in Britain, his support for victims of Soviet persecution was multifaceted in the Cold War context.
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Bandey, Aijaz A., and Farooq Ahmad Rather. "Socio-Economic and Political Motivations of Russian Out-Migration from Central Asia." Journal of Eurasian Studies 4, no. 2 (July 2013): 146–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.euras.2013.03.004.
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The unexpected fall of Soviet Union left ethnic Russians, outside Russia with many questions and concerns. Many of them emigrated to Russia from the erstwhile Soviet Union, for better conditions there. The disintegration of Soviet Union – a state created on the ideology of Communism was one of the reasons, apart from economic, political, socio-cultural, reasons besides the failure of Communism to keep the Soviet Union together were the main causes of Russian out-migration from Central Asia. The out-migration of Russians from Central Asia to Russia began in the 1970s as internal labour migration shifted in the wake of better job opportunities. It accelerated tremendously after 1991, and touched its highest mark in 1994, as a response to the relative economic prosperity of Russia at that time. Thus the improved standard of living in Russia and the desire to return to their cultural homeland were some major issues that concerned people to shift to Russia.
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Snyder, Tim. "‘Coming to Terms with the Charm and Power of Soviet Communism’." Contemporary European History 6, no. 1 (March 1997): 133–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0960777300004082.
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The day of communism is done, in Europe at any rate. If Minerva's owl flies at dusk, we should now expect the appearance of works which, while conceived during the epoch of communism, have been given their sense and conclusions by the events of 1989–91. The three books considered here are the fruit not only of scholarly reflection but also of personal reconsiderations of the nature of Soviet communism. Each author recounts a story through which he has lived, with glances backwards to find the origins of an idea (in Walicki's case), an illusion (in Furet's) or a word (in Gleason's). The Marxist idea of freedom (Walicki), the appeal of the Soviet Union to Western intellectuals (Furet) and the definitions and uses of the term ‘totalitarianism’ (Gleason) are the avenues taken towards an understanding of the role of communism in this century, avenues which lead from the lives of the scholars in question. The degree of intellectual, and the kind of political, engagement with the idea of communism was different in each case, reflecting most notably the nationalities of these three historians.
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Kramer, Mark. "The Dissolution of the Soviet Union." Journal of Cold War Studies 24, no. 1 (2022): 188–218. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_01059.
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Abstract In late December 1991—some 74 years after the Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin—the Soviet Communist regime and the Soviet state itself ceased to exist. The demise of the Soviet Union occurred less than seven years after Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Communist Party. Soon after taking office in March 1985, Gorbachev had launched a series of drastic political and economic changes that he hoped would improve and strengthen the Communist system and bolster the country's superpower status. But in the end, far from strengthening Communism, Gorbachev's policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (official openness) led inadvertently to the collapse of the Soviet regime and the unraveling of the Soviet state. This article analyzes the breakup of the Soviet Union, explaining why that outcome, which had seemed so unlikely at the outset, occurred in such a short period of time.
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Ruutsoo, Rein. "The Perception of Historical Identity and the Restoration of Estonian National Independence." Nationalities Papers 23, no. 1 (March 1995): 167–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905999508408358.
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Attitude towards one's past, the farewell to the communist past, has become a vital matter on the territory of the former Soviet Union. The failure of the “building of communism” project has, besides a devastated environment, left behind it a spiritual “homelessness.” For Russians, for whom communism was the path to global power, the collapse of the Soviet Union also meant a collapse of their national identity. “Look back in anger” might be the most concise way of characterizing their attitude to their history of the past seventy years. The same might be said of the other peoples of the former USSR. Sovietologists who treated the Soviet Union as one entity and placed the Baltic nations into the same category as the other “fraternal” people created insurmountable problems for an understanding of Baltic developments, and Estonian, in particular.
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Kramer, Mark. "The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 2)." Journal of Cold War Studies 6, no. 4 (October 2004): 3–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/1520397042350955.
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This is the second part of a three-part article that looks at the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the repercussions of those events in the Soviet Union. The first part focused on the “direct” spillover from Eastern Europe into the Soviet Union, whereas this segment examines the “indirect” spillover, which took four forms:(1) the discrediting of Marxist-Leninist ideology, (2) the heightened sense of the Soviet regime's own vulnerability, (3) the diminished potential for the use of force in the USSR to curb internal unrest, and (4) the “demonstration effect” and “contagiousness” of regime change and democratization in Eastern Europe. These factors together made it considerably more difficult for Gorbachev to prevent the Soviet Union from unraveling. The final part of the article will be published in the next issue of the journal.
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Thomas, Daniel C. "Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War." Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 2 (April 2005): 110–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/1520397053630600.
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This article analyzes the role of human-rights ideas in the collapse of Communism. The demise of Communist rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was significantly influenced by the transnational diffusion of humanrights ideas. The analysis focuses on how human-rights norms were transmitted to Soviet dissidents and policymakers. The article also considers precisely how, and how much, these norms affected policy. The two primary causal mechanisms were the transmission of these ideas by a transnational Eastern European social movement for human rights, which expanded the roster of available political concepts and the terms of political legitimacy, and the mechanism of “rhetorical entrapment” whereby Soviet leaders became “trapped” or constrained to uphold their rhetorical commitment to the Helsinki Accords by the expanding discourse of human rights. Subsequently, Soviet leaders accepted human rights ideas for both substantive and instrumental reasons. Western power played some role, but the ideas themselves were salient, legitimate, and resonant for Soviet leaders seeking a new identity and destiny for the Soviet Union.
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Grant, Susan. "Building Communism and Policing Deviance in the Soviet Union: residential childcare, 1958–91." Social History 47, no. 1 (January 2, 2022): 112–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2022.2009702.
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Port, Andrew I. "Love, Lust, and Lies under Communism: Family Values and Adulterous Liaisons in Early East Germany." Central European History 44, no. 3 (September 2011): 478–505. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008938911000409.
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According to a joke that made the rounds in the former Soviet Union, women from different countries held on to their husbands in different ways: the German by her skills as a housewife, the Spaniard by her passionate lovemaking, the Frenchwoman by her refined elegance—and the Russian by the party committee. This sexist quip was a not so oblique reference to the ways in which the communist party intervened in the private domestic affairs of its members. But—even leaving aside the obviously offensive—it was not entirely accurate, for the practice was just as common in other communist countries as well. This included the eastern half of postwar Germany, where, as in the Soviet Union, the wives of adulterous members of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) sometimes appealed to local functionaries for assistance with their straying husbands.
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Karlsen, Patrick. "Zadnja bitka v Stalinovem imenu: Vittorio Vidali, komunizem na obalah Jadranskega morja in boj Informbiroja proti Titu (1947-1954)." Contributions to Contemporary History 56, no. 2 (November 9, 2016): 59–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.51663/pnz.56.2.04.
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The essay aims to analyse the "Adriatic communism" policy implemented in the period from World War II to the eve of the schism between Stalin and Tito in 1948, with the subsequent rift in relations between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and the expulsion of Belgrade from the socialist camp. The essay focuses on the figure of Vittorio Vidali, an Italian communist leader (born in Muggia, near Trieste) with a long and prominent militant role in the Soviet intelligence services as evidenced by his involvement in various events both in Europe and the United States.The choice to focus the analysis on Vittorio Vidali is based on the decisive role he played in the "Adriatic communism" in the stages immediately preceding the Tito–Stalin split and then during the years of the Cominform's opposition against the Party and the Yugoslav regime after 1948.
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Kramer, Mark. "The Collapse of East European Communism and the Repercussions within the Soviet Union (Part 3)." Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 1 (January 2005): 3–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/1520397053326185.
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This is the concluding part of a three-part article that discusses the transformation of Soviet-East European relations in the late 1980s and the impact of the sweeping changes in Eastern Europe on the Soviet Union. This final segment is divided into two main parts: First, it provides an extended analysis of the bitter public debate that erupted in the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991 about the “loss” of Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. The debate roiled the Soviet political system and fueled the hardline backlash against Mikhail Gorbachev. Second, this part of the article offers a concluding section that highlights the theoretical implications of the article as a whole. The article, as the conclusion shows, sheds light on recent literature concerning the diffusion of political innovations and the external context of democratization and political change.
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McMeekin, Sean. "Stanley G. Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism." Journal of Cold War Studies 10, no. 1 (January 2008): 125–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.1.125.
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STANCIU, CEZAR. "Autonomy and Ideology: Brezhnev, Ceauşescu and the World Communist Movement." Contemporary European History 23, no. 1 (January 6, 2014): 115–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0960777313000532.
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AbstractOne of Leonid Brezhnev's primary goals when he acceded to party leadership in the Soviet Union was to restore Moscow's control over the world communist movement, severely undermined by the Sino-Soviet dispute. Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania was determined to prevent this, in order to consolidate his country's autonomy in the Communist bloc. The Sino-Soviet dispute offered the political and ideological framework for autonomy, as the Romanian Communists claimed their neutrality in the dispute. This article describes Ceauşescu's efforts to sabotage Brezhnev's attempts to have China condemned by an international meeting of Communist parties between 1967 and 1969. His basic ideological argument was that unity of world communism should have a polycentric meaning.
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Haskell, John D., and Boris N. Mamlyuk. "Capitalism, Communism and Colonialism? Revisiting "Transitology" as the Ideology of Informal Empire." Global Jurist 9, no. 2 (January 16, 2009): 1–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.2202/1934-2640.1293.
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In the context of international law, transitology" is often used to describe the literature surrounding the former Soviet Union (fSU) and the subsequent reform attempts by Western and Eastern/Central European market reformers. While it is often acknowledged there have been other waves" of transition, this literature typically asserts that the situation in the fSU is somehow distinct in human history, and thus, to a large extent, unmixable with other past transition" histories. Likewise, the story of the Soviet Union's dissolution, and the subsequent reforms in its aftermath, largely avoid the radar of critical colonial discourses. In short, there is almost no effort to link the fSU to the 19th century colonial project of Western European states, in particular the story of informal empire. This article seeks to re-frame the post-communist transition debate in terms of the broader international challenges of decolonization, neo-colonialism," and informal empire building in the West, the former Soviet Union, as well as between the two in the post Soviet space.
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Garver, John W. "The Chinese Communist Party and the Collapse of Soviet Communism." China Quarterly 133 (March 1993): 1–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305741000018178.
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The collapse first of Communist rule of the USSR and then of the USSR itself was without question one of the pivotal events of the era. Since China's 20th-century history has been so deeply influenced by Soviet developments, it is important to examine the impact of these events on China. This article asks, first, whether the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), had a deliberate policy towards the decline of Soviet Communism, and if so, what was the nature of that policy? Did the CCP attempt to assist their comrades in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) as the latter battled for survival during 1990 and 1991?
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Coleman, Heather J. "Studying Russian Religion Since the Collapse of Communism." Russian History Forum 25, no. 2 (September 2, 2015): 309–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1032851ar.
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This review article surveys the field of the religious history of Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. Increased accessibility to the archives in the early 1990s coincided with historiographical developments such as the “new cultural history” and the “lived religion” approach to the study of religious cultures, favouring a renewed interest in religious topics. The article argues that the lived religion approach has allowed scholars to rethink the classic question of the relationship between church and state, to demonstrate the significance of religion to the social, intellectual, and political transformations experienced in late imperial and early Soviet Russia, and to reconceptualize Russian Orthodoxy’s relationship with modernization and modernity. This research demonstrates the need to correct the traditional neglect of the Orthodox experience in histories of religion in Europe and in theorizing religious change and secularization in the modern era.
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Dragišić, Olivera. "The Soviet Union, Allies and the beginning of “Sovietization” of Romania, 1944–1945." Tokovi istorije 30, no. 3 (December 31, 2022): 75–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.31212/tokovi.2022.3.dra.75-92.
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The article analyzes the beginning of the establishment of the socialist system in Romania, focusing on the Soviet and Allied role in setting up the people’s democratic system in this Eastern European country. In addition, the paper examines the dependence of Romanian communism on relations within the victorious, anti-fascist coalition. Th e aims at analyzing the basic processes and actors in the first months of the establishment of socialism in Romania. Regardless of the fact that in Romanian historiography the topic is solidly researched, in domestic historiography it can be considered necessary for understanding the development of Yugoslav socialism. The work is mainly based on the documents of Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series.
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Ruthchild, Rochelle Goldberg. "Becoming Communist." Aspasia 13, no. 1 (March 1, 2019): 163–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/asp.2019.130114.
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Kelly Hignett , Melanie Ilic, Dalia Leinarte, and Corina Snitar, Women’s Experiences of Repression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, London: Routledge, 2018, xiii, 196 pp., $123.09 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-138-04692-4.Lisa Kirschenbaum, International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, xiii, 278 pp., $29.99 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-131-622690-2.
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Ifidon, Ehimika A., and Charles O. Osarumwense. "Politics without Commerce? Explaining the Discontinuity in Soviet-Nigerian Relations, 1971-1979." African and Asian Studies 14, no. 4 (December 8, 2015): 289–314. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15692108-12341345.
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The paper set out to explain the discontinuity in Soviet-Nigerian relations between the periods 1967-1970 and 1971-1979. The explanation usually given for the poor relations between Nigeria and the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1966 is the anti-communism of the Nigerian political elite; and ideological incompatibility for the non-vibrant relations between 1971 and 1979. These explanations appear idealistic and hypothetical. A major source of the problem of explanation is the consideration of Soviet-Nigerian relations only within the context of the Soviet-American Cold War struggle, from a trilateral perspective. What if the Cold War did not exist, what would have been the nature of Soviet-Nigerian relations? Adopting a bilateral framework, the paper argues that it was the inchoate state of trade relations, which would have provided the basis for continuity across administrations, that retarded Soviet-Nigerian political relations between 1971 and 1979.
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Davies, Christie. "Humour and Protest: Jokes under Communism." International Review of Social History 52, S15 (November 21, 2007): 291–305. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020859007003252.
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The largest corpus of jokes we have ridiculing both rulers and a political system comes from the former Soviet Union and the then communist countries of eastern Europe. These forbidden jokes were important to those who told them at some risk to themselves. They can be construed as a form of protest, but the relationship between jokes and protest is not a simple one. The number of jokes told was greater, and the telling more open, in the later years of the regimes than in the earlier years of terror and extreme hardship. The number of jokes is a product of the extensiveness of political control, not its intensity. Such jokes probably have no effect either in undermining a regime or in acting as a stabilizing safety valve. However, they were a quiet protest, an indication that the political system lacked stability and could collapse quickly.
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Malaia, Kateryna. "Transforming the Architecture of Food." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 80, no. 4 (December 1, 2021): 460–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2021.80.4.460.
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Abstract Transforming the Architecture of Food: From the Soviet to the Post-Soviet Apartment focuses on the changes to urban domestic architecture and food-related spaces—those for eating, cooking, and storage—that occurred parallel to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this article, Kateryna Malaia traces a path from standardized Soviet apartment housing built and regulated by the state to the implementation of architectural and spatial solutions by individual apartment dwellers and designers in the post-Soviet years. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, such remodeling projects affected late- and post-Soviet architectural imagination and urban apartments en masse, coinciding with ephemeral yet important changes in domestic practices. To navigate these complex transformations, Malaia questions traditional architectural programmatic labeling—kitchen, dining room, family room, open plan—within the late- and post-Soviet context. Drawing on both archival and popular sources as well as interviews with apartment dwellers, architects, and engineers collected in the post-Soviet urban centers of Kyiv and Lviv in Ukraine, this study shows how the grassroots adaptation of standardized apartment housing at this time echoed new economic and political circumstances. Malaia’s analysis of changes in food-related spaces and practices provides a critical index of the widespread social impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union in everyday architecture and life.
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Belyakova, Nadezhda. "Anti-Communism and Soviet Evangelicals in the 1960–1970s: Metamorphoses of Relations during the Cold War." Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 6 (2022): 153. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/s013038640014621-1.
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The article examines the international activity of the leaders of the official All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (VSKHB) at the turn of the 1960s–1970s, which was carried out under the conditions of control and regulation by state authorities. The leadership of the denomination was forced to prove the “usefulness” of its existence; contacts of Baptist Christians from different countries could bring such benefits. The main form of presentation of the international work of VSKHB was the compilation of reports both on foreign business trips and on communication with foreigners inside the USSR. These reports were sent to the Council for Religious Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, where they were used to compile summary analytical notes for higher authorities on the success of the international activities of the leadership of the confessions of the USSR. The author concludes that the struggle against the international anti-communist movement led to the development of international contacts by the leadership of the official Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists. For Soviet Baptists, the key figure in global evangelical anti-communism at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s was Richard Wurmbrand, a preacher. He was organising actions in support of Christians in communist countries, persecuted not only by the state but also by the official church leadership compromising with the authorities. Such actions threatened the legitimacy of the VSKHB, since in the early 1960s a Baptist initiative movement opposed to the official union emerged in the USSR. The struggle of all of them with the international evangelical anti-communist movement had an unexpected effect for evangelical Baptist Christians inside the USSR: it contributed to the stabilization of the existing associations of evangelical Baptist Christians and even the emergence of new communities.
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Aralbay, Saken, Gaziz Telebaev, Оmirbek Bekezhan, Assem Sagatova, and Kamchat Abdrahmanova. "The problem of the nation and national values in the ideology of Marxism." Journal of the National Academy of Legal Sciences of Ukraine 28, no. 3 (September 17, 2021): 56–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.37635/jnalsu.28(3).2021.56-63.
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Analysis of the influence of the ideas of Marxism on the national values of the Kazakh people in the Western and Soviet Union were founded by K. Marx and his ideological partner F. Engels. Although the ideas of Marxism were intended to resolve the economic and social contradictions that occurred in Western countries, they belonged to this view. And the communist ideology, formed on the basis of Marxism, bypassed Western culture and radically changed the national values of the Kazakh state within the Soviet Union, the culture of thinking. Identification of the main mistakes in the ideas of Marxism and the consequences of one-sided scientific concepts took place in further development. In this article the author analyzes the Soviet government on the way of creating a formation of communism with the definition of one-sided scientific factors that took place in the ideology of Marxism and the state of Kazakhstan that was part of Soviet Union and its cultural essence. The author proves that the main mistake in the ideology of Marxism is that the problems of national values remain outside the process of society; ideologists turned a blind eye to this problem and as a result, have lost the existing opportunities
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Aralbay, Saken, Gaziz Telebaev, Оmirbek Bekezhan, Assem Sagatova, and Kamchat Abdrahmanova. "The problem of the nation and national values in the ideology of Marxism." Journal of the National Academy of Legal Sciences of Ukraine 28, no. 3 (September 17, 2021): 56–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.37635/jnalsu.28(3).2021.56-63.
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Analysis of the influence of the ideas of Marxism on the national values of the Kazakh people in the Western and Soviet Union were founded by K. Marx and his ideological partner F. Engels. Although the ideas of Marxism were intended to resolve the economic and social contradictions that occurred in Western countries, they belonged to this view. And the communist ideology, formed on the basis of Marxism, bypassed Western culture and radically changed the national values of the Kazakh state within the Soviet Union, the culture of thinking. Identification of the main mistakes in the ideas of Marxism and the consequences of one-sided scientific concepts took place in further development. In this article the author analyzes the Soviet government on the way of creating a formation of communism with the definition of one-sided scientific factors that took place in the ideology of Marxism and the state of Kazakhstan that was part of Soviet Union and its cultural essence. The author proves that the main mistake in the ideology of Marxism is that the problems of national values remain outside the process of society; ideologists turned a blind eye to this problem and as a result, have lost the existing opportunities
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Gil Guerrero, Javier. "Propaganda Broadcasts and Cold War Politics: The Carter Administration's Outreach to Islam." Journal of Cold War Studies 19, no. 1 (January 2017): 4–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_00716.
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After the Islamic revolution in Iran in early 1979 and the hostage crisis that began at the U.S. embassy in Tehran later that year, the Carter administration launched a public diplomacy campaign specifically directed at Muslims, the first of its kind. The idea was to counter the narrative of a Western crusade against Islam while highlighting the differences between the United States and militant Islam. In time, the damage control effort was transformed into an attempt to rally Muslims—both outside and inside the Soviet Union—against Soviet Communism. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created an opportunity for the United States to bolster its standing in the Islamic world. Influencing Muslim opinion was no longer just a matter of delegitimizing the discourse of radical Islam, but also one of using the growth of religious sentiment among Muslims against the Soviet Union. The initiative's spearhead was the increased multilingual radio broadcasts directed at Muslim audiences across the globe.
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Zakharova, Larissa. "Everyday Life Under Communism: Practices and Objects." Annales (English ed.) 68, no. 02 (June 2013): 207–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s2398568200000212.
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Why should we consider the everyday life of ordinary citizens in their countless struggles to obtain basic consumer goods if the priorities of their leaders lay elsewhere? For years, specialists of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies neglected the history of everyday life and, like the so-called “totalitarian” school, focused on political history, seeking to grasp how power was wielded over a society that was considered immobile and subject to the state's authority. Furthermore, studies on the eastern part of Europe were dominated by political scientists who were interested in the geopolitics of the Cold War. The way the field was structured meant that little attention was paid to sociological and anthropological perspectives that sought to understand social interaction.
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Michaels, Jeffrey H. "Waging “Protracted Conflict” Behind the Scenes: The Cold War Activism of Frank R. Barnett." Journal of Cold War Studies 19, no. 1 (January 2017): 70–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_00718.
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From the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Frank R. Barnett, a private U.S. citizen, became a central player among the West's ‘Cold Warriors’ by developing and applying a unique methodology for organizing anti-Communist “political warfare” both in the United States and around the world. Recognizing the limits of government-sponsored activities in prosecuting a more aggressive strategy to counter the Soviet Union, Barnett sidestepped U.S. officialdom and created a parallel and less-constrained private network to engage in “protracted conflict” for the purpose of “rolling back the Soviet empire.” A key aspect of his activism involved developing educational gatherings for policymakers, lawmakers, industrialists, military reserve officers, and scholars. Arguably the most notable achievement of this network was that it kept the ideology of hardline anti-Communism on the “back burner” during a period when the mainstream discourse of “peaceful coexistence” and détente prevailed.
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Hassner, Pierre. "Europe between the United States and the Soviet Union." Government and Opposition 21, no. 1 (January 1, 1986): 17–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.1986.tb01106.x.
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‘EUROPE BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND THE SOVIET UNION’. This subject could have been formulated in different terms, such as: ‘Europe between East and West’ or: ‘The European states between the two empires’ or: ‘The two Europes and the two superpowers’. Europe is at the same time one geographically and culturally, divided into nations, and split into two camps. The United States and the Soviet Union are both two global and two European powers, two ordinary states and the leaders of two alliances, the standard bearers of two ideologies. If one were discussing Korea instead of Europe, one would hesitate between calling our study ‘Korea between East and West’ and ‘Korea between North and South’. Europe is that continent where political divisions seem cast in the stone of history and geography, where the opposition between East and West seems to have at the same time a geopolitical meaning (that of maritime versus continental coalition), an ideological one (liberal democracy or capitalism versus communism) and a cultural one (the Western Church versus the Eastern one, Rome versus Byzantium).
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Polianski, Igor J. "Pathologia religiosa: Medicine and the Anti-religious Movement in the Early Soviet Union." Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 3 (December 30, 2016): 524–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022009416669421.
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The interwar secularist-religious clashes across Europe were often perceived as a conflict between religious and scientific worldviews. The interactions and tensions between religion and science are analysed in this article through an examination of the impact of medicine on the secularist project of Russian communism. According to Marx, the religious consciousness was tantamount to the ‘sigh of the oppressed creature’. Soviet physicians diagnosed the believer as a sufferer, as someone plagued by chronic ‘religious feelings’. Small wonder then that a fixed association between religiosity and morbidity could arise. Under these premises Soviet physicians felt predestined to do direct battle with every form of ecclesiastically determined phenomenon as a health risk factor or manifestation of disease. By using various sources of specialist medical and atheist discourse, this contribution seeks to conceptually understand this confluence of health and atheist propaganda, secularization, and healing in terms of a ‘medicalization of religious faith’ in the early Soviet Union. It will address the various fields of discourse within the Soviet pathologia religiosa, that is, constructions of religion and religiosity as pathological phenomena particularly within psychiatry.
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OCHMAN, EWA. "Commemorating the Soviet Deportations of 1945 and Community-Building in Post-communist Upper Silesia." Contemporary European History 18, no. 2 (May 2009): 217–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0960777309004949.
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AbstractThis article focuses on the remembrance of the deportations of Silesians to the Soviet Union in 1945, undertaken in Upper Silesia, Poland, after the collapse of communism. It explores the relationship between local elite-sponsored official remembrance of the deportations and the formation of regional identity in the context of the Upper Silesia's borderland locality and the post-war population movement. The article also investigates the role of public commemorations of the Silesian past in the construction of a Silesian national identity undertaken by the Silesian separatist movement that gained in popularity against the backdrop of the post-1989 de-industrialisation of the region, Poland's most important centre for coal mining industry.
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Forji Amin, George. "Marxism, International Law and the Enduring Question of Exploitation: A History." ATHENS JOURNAL OF LAW 7, no. 3 (July 1, 2021): 359–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.30958/ajl.7-3-5.
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Until the 1990s, there was a longstanding disdain on Marxism amongst jurists especially international lawyers, with non-Soviet international lawyers only paying scant attention or lip service to Marxist thinking, based on a number of misgivings. Firstly, reminiscing of legal history in general, Marxism was perceived as activism reserved for a distant past and irrelevant to the present and future. Secondly, Marxism was long perceived as the prerogative of non-jurists, most especially as Marx himself did not pay attention to jurisprudence. Moreover, Marxism was throughout the cold war period generally associated with the Soviet Union. Any legal analysis from a Marxist perspective was tantamount to being misinterpreted as a defence for Soviet communism—a derogatory position for any scholar in the West at the time. Lastly, although many Soviet publicists did examine Marxism in their studies, Soviet international law was however often excluded from mainstream considerations —and framed as alternative international law rather than conventional discourse. With Soviet International law restricted to rules consented or acquiesced to by states (at least in principle), the Soviet brand of international law was perceived in the West as the most extreme form of positivism. Keywords: Marxist International Law; Capitalism; Exploitation Question; Human Development; Emancipation; Marxist Theory of Law
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Kirschenbaum, Lisa A. "Exile, Gender, and Communist Self-Fashioning: Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) in the Soviet Union." Slavic Review 71, no. 3 (2012): 566–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.5612/slavicreview.71.3.0566.
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Focusing on the Soviet exile of the Spanish communist and orator Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria), Lisa A. Kirschenbaum brings into dialogue two topics often treated in isolation: Soviet subjectivities and the selfunderstandings of international communists. During the Spanish civil war, the Soviet media popularized Ibárruri's performance of fierce communist motherhood. The article traces Ibárruri's efforts in exile to maintain and adapt this public identity by analyzing sources in two distinct registers, both of which blurred the boundaries between public and private selves: Ibárruri's “official” correspondence and her interventions in party meetings. Reading such sources as sites of self-fashioning, Kirschenbaum argues that Ibárruri was at once empowered and constrained by her self-presentation as the mother of the Spanish exiles. Ibárruri's case both internationalizes understandings of Stalinist culture and suggests the possibility of a history of international communism structured around the interconnected and diverse lives of individual communists.
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Alexseev, Mikhail A. "Early Warning, Ethnopolitical Conflicts, and the United Nations: Assessing the Violence in Georgia/Abkhazia*." Nationalities Papers 26, no. 2 (June 1998): 191–213. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905999808408560.
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The collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was accompanied by ethnopolitical conflicts that erupted “with unusual cruelty and violence” but without much warning and were soon recognized as a major threat to peace, security, and development in the post-Cold War era. Can one be alerted to the Nagorno-Karabakhs, Bosnias, Rwandas, and Tajikistans of the world—in time to take decisive preventive action?
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Sungur, Hasan. "How is the Origin of the Cold War Depicted in Turkish History Textbooks?" European Journal of Educational Research 10, no. 3 (July 15, 2021): 1411–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.12973/eu-jer.10.3.1411.
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The primary purpose of this article is to analyze how the origin of the Cold War is represented in Turkish history textbooks for general secondary school education for the twelfth grade. The author examined three history textbooks, which are only approved by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE) for teaching the course of Contemporary Turkish and World History. This research applied content analysis, including narratives and visual interpretation of the origins of the Cold War, and also the events regarding the emergence of Soviet Bloc and Western Bloc in high school history textbooks in Turkey. Findings indicate that treatments of the origin of the Cold War in Turkish history textbooks are remarkably similar in many ways. The traditional approach of the origin of the Cold War, which depicts the Soviet Union as an aggressive power whose primary purpose was to expand Communism to the world, constitutes the dominant narrative in Turkish history textbooks. The representation of the United States is very positive. All textbooks underline that the United States played a crucial role in solving many problems in many different parts of the world to prevent the expansion of Communism.</p>
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В.В., Паршуков,. "Architectural and artistic features of the reconstruction projects of the Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks building in Novosibirsk." Iskusstvo Evrazii [The Art of Eurasia], no. 4(27) (December 29, 2022): 140–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.46748/arteuras.2022.04.010.
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В статье представлена история проектирования реконструкции здания обкома ВКП(б) в Новосибирске. Анализируются архитектурно-художественные решения проектов надстройки здания и пристройки к нему. Первоначальное здание для отделов Сибревкома построено по проекту сибирского архитектора А.Д. Крячкова в 1926 г. и выполнено в стилистике рационалистического модерна. Его же проект надстройки здания 1936 г. предложен в стилистике ар-деко с элементами неоклассицизма и с богатым скульптурным оформлением фасадов. В 1945–1949 гг. институтом «Промстройпроект» выполняется проект пристройки здания на ул. Свердлова, авторы которого, архитекторы С.П. Скобликов и В.И. Нуждин, выполняют архитектурное оформление здания в стилистике советского неоклассицизма — государственного архитектурного стиля того времени. В проекте фасад с главным входом со стороны ул. Свердлова оформлен ризалитами с дорическими колоннами, в нишах между которыми размещены скульптуры советских людей, и гербом СССР с флагами на венчающем аттике. Некоторые использованные источники введены в научный оборот впервые. The article presents the history of designing the reconstruction of the building of the Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in Novosibirsk. The object of analysis is the architectural and artistic solutions of the projects of the superstructure of the building and extension to it. The original building for the departments of Sibrevkom was built in 1926 according to the project of the Siberian architect A.D. Kryachkov and made in the style of rationalist modern. He also proposed a project for the superstructure of the building in 1936 in the Art Deco style with neoclassical elements and richly sculpted facades. In 1945–1949 Promstroyproekt Institute completed the project for the extension of a house along Sverdlov Street. Its authors — architects S.P. Skoblikov and V.I. Nuzhdin decided on the architectural design of the building in the style of Soviet neoclassicism — the state architectural style of that time. In the project, the facade with the main entrance from Sverdlov Street is decorated with ledges with Doric columns, in niches between which sculptures of Soviet people are placed, and on the crowning attic the coat of arms of the USSR with flags. Some of the sources used are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.
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McGuire, Elizabeth. "Sino-Soviet Romance: An Emotional History of Revolutionary Geopolitics." Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 4 (October 2017): 853–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022009417730894.
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This article argues that the relationship between the Russian and Chinese revolutions can be interpreted as a romance, to create an emotional history of elite revolutionary geopolitics. Tracing the stories of two prominent Sino-Soviet couples – President of Taiwan Jiang Jingguo and his wife Faina Vakhreva, and PRC Labor Minister Li Lisan and his wife Elizaveta Kishkina – against a larger backdrop of cultural exchange highlights continuities in a relationship most often described in terms of its ruptures. In the 1920s, when Jiang Jingguo first arrived in the Soviet Union, attitudes toward love and sex in both cultures were shifting, and the Chinese Revolution was celebrated in Moscow, rendering early Chinese experiences there romantic on several levels. The Liza-Li affair, begun in the difficult circumstances of the 1930s, highlights the ways in which the choices of one partner, personal or geopolitical, could come to constrain those of the other, through the 1950s and beyond. Such deeply felt and publicly prominent cross-cultural romances gave China’s relationship with Russia an emotional complexity and cultural depth that were lacking before the advent of twentieth century communism – and have survived its demise.
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Sokolov, E. G. "Sublime Theology of the Decline of the Soviet Empire. Akat K. Belykh." Discourse 6, no. 6 (January 15, 2021): 20–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.32603/2412-8562-2020-6-6-20-36.
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Introduction. Socio-political disciplines are an important component of the Humanities of the Soviet period of Russian history. Scientific communism, introduced as a compulsory subject in all Higher education institutions of the USSR in the last 30 years of the state's existence, was considered as the final expression of all the theoretical propositions of Marxism-Leninism. The article attempts to consider Scientific communism as a speculative speculative construction that, on the one hand, reproduces the terminological, logical, semantic and operational regulations of classical philosophical systems, and on the other hand, is a privileged mechanism of discursive production. As a typical example of how and through what tools the doctrine is legitimized, the texts of the work of A. K. Belykh, who for almost 30 years headed the Department of the theory of scientific communism at the faculty of philosophy of LSU (now SPBU).Methodology and sources. Methodologically, the work is based on a philosophical analysis of texts representative of the epoch (D. de Tracy, grammar of Port Royal, Soviet Russian philosophers who worked in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, monographs by A. K. Belykh), included in the approved canonical corpus of Marxism-Leninism.Results and discussion. Scientific communism, now virtually removed from historical memory, was an interesting example of how social thought evolved during the Soviet period of Russian history. The corpus of socio-political disciplines, which included Marxist-Leninist philosophy (dialectical materialism and historical materialism), political economy, history of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, and scientific communism, was a single complex of speculative doctrine. All these disciplines, positioned as scientific knowledge, can be fully evaluated only in the context of the main trends in the development of social and philosophical knowledge of the New time, set by the Enlightenment era. Symbolic points of reference here can be considered projects of ”universal grammar” (Port Royal) and ”ideology” (Destute de Tracy).Conclusion. Scientific communism is not an accidental, but characteristic of Russian thought, intellectual construct. Collective, i. e. a large number of people are involved in its implementation, which means it can be considered as a well-formed direction of social thought. Among the historical analogs that use the same strategic and tactical Arsenal of means of expression and discursive fixation, it can be compared and likened to the wellknown speculative constructs of a theological nature: high scholasticism.
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Gray, John. "From Post-Communism to Civil Society: The Reemergence of History and the Decline of the Western Model." Social Philosophy and Policy 10, no. 2 (1993): 26–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s026505250000412x.
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For virtually all the major schools of Western opinion, the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, between 1989 and 1991, represents a triumph of Western values, ideas, and institutions. If, for triumphal conservatives, the events of late 1989 encompassed an endorsement of “democratic capitalism” that augured “the end of history,” for liberal and social democrats they could be understood as the repudiation by the peoples of the former Soviet bloc of Marxism-Leninism in all its varieties, and the reemergence of a humanist socialism that was free of Bolshevik deformation. The structure of political and economic institutions appropriate to the transition from post-Communism in the Soviet bloc to genuine civil society was, accordingly, modeled on Western exemplars—the example of Anglo-American democratic capitalism, of Swedish social democracy, or of the German social market economy— or on various modish Western academic conceptions, long abandoned in the Soviet and post-Soviet worlds, such as market socialism. No prominent school of thought in the West doubted that the dissolution of Communist power was part of a process of Westernization in which contemporary Western ideas and institutions could and would successfully be exported to the former Communist societies. None questioned the idea that, somewhere in the repertoire of Western theory and practice, there was a model for conducting the transition from the bankrupt institutions of socialist central planning, incorporated into the structure of a totalitarian state, to market institutions and a liberal democratic state. Least of all did anyone question the desirability, or the possibility, of reconstituting economic and political institutions on Western models, in most parts of the former Soviet bloc.
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Leustean, Lucian N. "Ethno-Symbolic Nationalism, Orthodoxy and the Installation of Communism in Romania: 23 August 1944 to 30 December 1947." Nationalities Papers 33, no. 4 (December 2005): 439–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905990500353915.
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The presence of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe and the reshaping of Europe's internal borders sped up the separation between the Eastern and Western blocs in the first years after the end of the Second World War. In countries where communism had been declared illegal or lacked the support of the electorate before 1944, the accession of communist leaders to governmental structures had been advanced by the politics of the Soviet Union, based on systematised political intimidation, institutionalised violence, and blackmail. The communist authorities then legitimised their political positions in relation to the historical past of their countries and according to the development of their societies after the Second World War.
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Reisinger, William M., Geoffrey Hosking, Jonathan Aves, and Peter J. S. Duncan. "The Road to Post-Communism: Independent Political Movements in the Soviet Union, 1985-1991." Russian Review 54, no. 1 (January 1995): 155. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/130814.
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Schmitter, Philippe C., and Minxin Pei. "From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union." Russian Review 55, no. 1 (January 1996): 138. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/131942.
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Borisenok, Elena. "The Ukrainophilism of P.E. Shelest in the Interpretation of Modern Ukrainian Historiography." Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 2 (2022): 24. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/s013038640018553-6.
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The author of this article explores the discussion in contemporary Ukrainian historiography of the “Ukrainophilia” of the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Pyotr Efimovich Shelest (1963‒1972). Ukrainian historians are trying to determine the extent to which the Soviet leader proved to be a consistent follower of the political line of the Union centre, the areas in which he defended the interests of the republic, and whether he should be considered a representative of National Communism. The purpose of the article is to analyse the key provisions of and evidence for the conception of Shelest's “Ukrainophilism” and “localism” developed by Ukrainian scholars. Particular attention is given to the conclusions of Yu.I. Shapoval on the inconsistencies in Shelest and his actions, his peculiar dual loyalty (all-union and republican), and his constant manoeuvring between two political discourses (centralist and anti-centralist). According to the historian, Shelest's views were formed during the Stalinist era. This point of view has been widely accepted in contemporary Ukrainian literature. The article specifies that Shelest as a politician was a product of Soviet Ukrainianisation of the 1920s. It was at this time that the seeds of the paradox that contemporary Ukrainian scholars have been writing about were sown.
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O’Connor, Emmet. "Jim Larkin and the Communist Internationals, 1923–9." Irish Historical Studies 31, no. 123 (May 1999): 357–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021121400014206.
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In 1924 James Larkin agreed with British and Soviet communists to undertake the leadership of communism in Ireland. The triangular relationship soon became poisoned with dissension, insubordination and deceit. Not only did Larkin refuse to form a communist party, he went to great lengths to ensure that no one else did either. By 1925 British communists, contrary to Moscow’s directives, were attempting to work in Ireland independently of Larkin, and by 1927 Moscow too was plotting to clip his wings.Larkin’s communist career is treated in some detail in two publications. Emmet Larkin’s biography offers the kindest interpetation, taking his subject’s politics at face value, and concluding that Ireland, and the weak and divided condition of its labour movement after 1923, were simply too hostile an environment for communism. Mike Milotte’s Communism in modern Ireland deals more directly with organisational politics and cites repeated examples of Larkin’s failure. Both studies are based on sources available in the west, which offer a superficial picture of events, and the story still holds obvious puzzles. Why did Larkin accept the leadership of the communist movement and then deliberately prevent its development? Why did Moscow tolerate his leadership for so long? Did Larkin have a political strategy, or were his political thinking and actions purely impulsive and reactive? And how do we explain his eccentric behaviour during these years, when he seemed to quarrel with everyone?With the liberalisation of access to the former Central Party Archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Institute for Marxism-Leninism, Moscow, now the Russian Centre for the Conservation and Study of Documents of Modern History (Rossijskij Tsentr Khraneniya i Izutshenija Dokumentov Novejshej Istorij, cited as R.Ts.Kh.I.D.N.I. throughout this article), it is possible to answer these questions.
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Siromskyi, Ruslan, and Hanna Siromska. "“MY VISIT DID NOT REASSURE ME”: FROM THE HISTORY OF VISIT LESTER PEARSON’S TO THE SOVIET UNION (OCTOBER 5–12, 1955)." Вісник Львівського університету. Серія історична / Visnyk of the Lviv University. Historical Series, no. 54 (November 3, 2022): 169–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.30970/his.2022.54.11608.
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The article examines the political background, organization and course of the official visit of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of Canada Lester Pearson to the Soviet Union in October 1955. It is established that after ten years of mutual mistrust caused by the “Gouzenko case” (exposing the Soviet spy network in Canada), each side pursued its own goal of establishing contacts. Diplomatic searches for common ground between the two countries were made possible by a change of top leadership in the Soviet Union and a brief reduction in international tensions following the 1955 Geneva Summit, which expressed readiness to discuss acute international conflicts. Significantly, Pearson was destined to become the first high-ranking Western official to visit the Soviet Union since NATO’s founding. Pearson tended to be flexible in relations with the USSR, in particular, sought to take advantage of bilateral relations. Despite criticism of Soviet expansionist policies in the international arena and contempt for human rights within the country, he believed that it was in the West’s interest to maintain contacts with the USSR through trade in non-strategic goods and cooperation within the UN. For this he was sometimes accused of being too lenient with communism. At the same time, in the Soviet Union, Pearson was perceived as a cautious politician, “hostile” to their country. The visit of the Canadian official delegation led by L. Pearson to the Soviet Union was organized by the newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Canada John Watkins (1954–1956). Watkins earned the support of the Soviet leadership, but fell victim to the newly formed KGB: they tried to turn him into an “agent of influence” by blackmailing him with leaked spicy information about the diplomat’s homosexual relations. In addition to Moscow, part of the Canadian delegation – only four people – visited Stalingrad, from where in the afternoon of October 11, 1955 arrived in Sevastopol. In addition to two hours of Soviet-Canadian talks with Khrushchev’s expressive behavior, the Crimean part of the Canadian delegation’s visit went down in history with its “drinking session”. The Crimean part of L. Pearson’s visit to the Soviet leadership and Khrushchev personally was an attempt to show that the Soviet Union was a sincere and reliable partner with whom it was profitable to deal. Unaware of common approaches to international issues, the parties focused on economic cooperation, which resulted in a mutually beneficial Canadian-Soviet trade agreement in 1956. The Soviet Union became a regular buyer of Canadian wheat for many years. It was found that conversations during the so-called the “Crimean party” (banquet) became for the Canadian delegation an indicator of the mood and intentions of the new Soviet leadership, which differed little from those that took place in the Stalinist era. Despite slight liberalization, the Soviet regime of the “Khrushchev thaw” period remained expansionist, hostile to human rights and freedoms. Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-Western (primarily anti-American) rhetoric, diluted by reflections on war and peace, allowed Canadian visitors to acknowledge the longevity of Soviet foreign policy and the inevitable continuation of the Cold War.