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Substate Dictatorship: Networks, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union

Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk

How do local leaders govern in a large dictatorship? What resources do they draw on? This book examines these questions by looking at one of the most important authoritarian regimes of the twentieth ... More

How do local leaders govern in a large dictatorship? What resources do they draw on? This book examines these questions by looking at one of the most important authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. Starting in the early years after the Second World War and taking the story through to the 1970s, the book charts the strategies of Soviet regional leaders, paying particular attention to the forging and evolution of local trust networks. The book begins with an explanation of what dictatorship is and how it works, and it analyzes how countries move from one form of dictatorship to another. It also looks at the most important dictatorships of the modern era in a new perspective. It focuses on the personal dictatorship that formed in the Soviet Union from the 1930s that center on the supreme leader, Joseph Stalin, and talks about substate dictators that were nested in Stalin's statewide dictatorship. The book builds on recent developments in the theory of dictatorship, such as the distinction between the dictator's problem of controlling threats from the masses, the problem of authoritarian control, and the problem of authoritarian power sharing. It discusses the challenges that substate leaders faced after the war and the party-based tools they used to forge networks. The book moves on to examine the stabilization of hierarchies and the changing balance between co-optation and political exclusion after the war, and explores the various ways in which substate leaders responded to new impulses at a regional level. It looks at the succession struggle in Moscow and its effects on the environment in which substate leaders operated. The book's conclusion suggests how a public discursive framework can help provide a benchmark for comparing the Soviet Union with other regimes, including that of contemporary post-communist Russia. It summarizes how substate leaders and their strategies can shed light on dictatorship and on how it changes over time. It also explains that the Soviet case falls into two broad categories, one empirical and historical, the other comparative and theoretical. The chapter draws attention to a parallel act of delegation at the regional level. It also recounts how Joseph Stalin handed over power on a provisional basis to regional leaders due to his inability to penetrate the inner recesses of local administration.Less

Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics

Evgeny Dobrenko

This nuanced historical analysis of late Stalinism organized chronologically around the main events of the period—beginning with Victory in May 1945 and concluding with the death of Stalin in March ... More

This nuanced historical analysis of late Stalinism organized chronologically around the main events of the period—beginning with Victory in May 1945 and concluding with the death of Stalin in March 1953—analyzes key cultural texts to trace the emergence of an imperial Soviet consciousness that, the book argues, still defines the political and cultural profile of modern Russia. The book provides a cultural and intellectual history of the era in which the shaping of the Soviet nation was completed. It talks about the era when mental and cultural dominants that determined the character of Russia were definitively affirmed. It also looks into cultural texts of literature, theater, cinema, art, music, scientific and historical texts, and popular literature through which history reveals its internal logic. The book analyzes Stalinism that communicated the new agenda, gave the new political course form through media, and inculcated the new ideological modulations. It explores the prism of Soviet art in order to trace the political and ideological transformation of the Stalinist regime from revolutionary international utopianism to conservatively patriarchal national Bolshevism.Less

Claiming Crimea: A History of Catherine the Great's Southern Empire

Kelly O'Neill

Russia's long-standing claims to Crimea date back to the eighteenth-century reign of Catherine II. This book is the first archive-based, multi-dimensional study of the initial “quiet conquest” of a ... More

Russia's long-standing claims to Crimea date back to the eighteenth-century reign of Catherine II. This book is the first archive-based, multi-dimensional study of the initial “quiet conquest” of a region that has once again moved to the forefront of international affairs. The book traces the impact of Russian rule on the diverse population of the former khanate, which included Muslim, Christian, and Jewish residents. The book discusses the arduous process of establishing the empire's social, administrative, and cultural institutions in a region that had been governed according to a dramatically different logic for centuries. With careful attention to how officials and subjects thought about the spaces they inhabited, this book reveals the lasting influence of Crimea and its people on the Russian imperial system, and sheds new light on the precarious contemporary relationship between Russia and the famous Black Sea peninsula.Less

Gulag Letters

Arsenii Formakov

Emily D. Johnson (ed.)

Memoirs and works of fiction that describe the Stalinist Gulag often depict labor camps as entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society. In fact, however, many prisoners corresponded at least ... More

Memoirs and works of fiction that describe the Stalinist Gulag often depict labor camps as entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society. In fact, however, many prisoners corresponded at least sporadically with relatives either through the official, censored Gulag mail system or by smuggling letters out of camp with free laborers. Examples of such correspondence that survive to the present day represent a powerful, largely unstudied historical source with the potential to fundamentally change the way we understand both the Soviet forced labor system and Stalinist society in general. Gulag Letters offers readers an English-language translation of the letters of a single Gulag inmate, the journalist, poet, and novelist Arsenii Formakov (1900-1983), who was a prominent member of Latvia’s large and vibrant Russian Old Believer community during the interwar period. Formakov was arrested by the Soviet secret police in June 1940 as part of a broad round-up of anti-Soviet elements that began just weeks after the Soviet Union forcibly annexed Latvia, and survived two terms in Soviet labor camps (1940-1947 and 1949-1955). The letters that he mailed home to his wife and children while serving these sentences reveal the surprising porousness of the Gulag and the variability of labor camp life and describe the difficult conditions that prisoners faced during and after World War II. They also represent an important eye-witness account of the experience of Latvian citizens deported to internment sites in the Soviet interior during the 1940s.Less

Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag

Golfo Alexopoulos

This book is a new and chilling study of lethal human exploitation in the Soviet forced labor camps, one of the pillars of Stalinist terror. The book is a shocking study of life and death in Stalin's ... More

This book is a new and chilling study of lethal human exploitation in the Soviet forced labor camps, one of the pillars of Stalinist terror. The book is a shocking study of life and death in Stalin's Gulag. It demonstrates how the ruthless exploitation of prisoners, their hunger, and a lack of medical care turned the camps into destructive-labor camps, and suggests that these forced labor camps were often administered as death camps. Examining the Gulag penal system through the lens of health, medicine, and human exploitation, this book draws from previously inaccessible archives to offer a chilling new view of one of the pillars of Stalinist terror.Less

Sincerity After Communism: A Cultural History

Ellen Rutten

This book presents the compelling study of “new sincerity” as a powerful cultural practice, born in perestroika-era Russia, and how it interconnects with global social and media flows. The global ... More

This book presents the compelling study of “new sincerity” as a powerful cultural practice, born in perestroika-era Russia, and how it interconnects with global social and media flows. The global cultural practice of a “new sincerity” in literature, media, art, design, fashion, film, and architecture grew steadily in the wake of the Soviet collapse. This book traces the rise and proliferation of a new rhetoric of sincere social expression characterized by complex blends of unabashed honesty, playfulness, and irony. This study of a sweeping cultural trend with roots in late Soviet Russia addresses postsocialist, postmodern, and postdigital questions of selfhood. It explores how and why a uniquely Russian artistic and social philosophy was shaped by “cultural memory, commodification, and mediatization” and how, under Vladimir Putin, “new sincerity” talk merges with transnational pleas to “revive sincerity”.Less

The Art of the Bribe: Corruption Under Stalin, 1943-1953

James Heinzen

Traditions of official corruption inherited from the Soviet and late Imperial eras have continued to touch Russian life since the collapse of the USSR. This study is the first archive-based, ... More

Traditions of official corruption inherited from the Soviet and late Imperial eras have continued to touch Russian life since the collapse of the USSR. This study is the first archive-based, historical study of bribery and corruption in the Soviet Union for this period. A study of the solicitation and offering of bribes forms the heart of this research. Bribery (vziatochnichestvo)—typically defined in law as gifts in cash or in kind intended to influence public officials to the benefit of the giver—represents the paradigmatic variety of corruption. This study takes a novel approach to the phenomenon of the bribe, examining it as an integral part of an unofficial yet essential series of relationships upon which much of Soviet society and state administration relied in order to function, as it gradually became part of the fabric of everyday life. The book examines three major, related themes. The book’s first theme, “The Landscape of Bribery,” concerns the nature and varieties of bribery, while painting a sociological portrait of the people involved. Whom did prosecutors accuse of such crimes? The second major topic addresses the regime’s attempts to understand the causes of bribery, and then to wipe it out through centrally directed anti-corruption “campaigns.” “The view from below,” which examines popular perceptions and understandings of bribery, constitutes the third dimension of the study. Focusing on bribery among police, court, and other law enforcement employees, this phase explores the imprecise and shifting line that separated “acceptable” from “unacceptable” behavior.Less

Scorched Earth: Stalin's Reign of Terror

Jörg Baberowski

This book, an unremitting indictment of the mad violence with which Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, depicts Stalinism as a cruel and deliberate attack on Russian society, driven by ... More

This book, an unremitting indictment of the mad violence with which Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, depicts Stalinism as a cruel and deliberate attack on Russian society, driven by “totalitarian ambitions” and the goal of modernizing and rationalizing a backward people. The text takes a twofold approach, emphasizing Stalin's personal role and responsibility as well as the continuity he sees in Communist aims and ideology since 1917. Unlike recent apologist accounts that focus on the challenges of modernization or on the operational complexities of managing the Soviet state, this hard-hitting analysis unequivocally locates the origins of the terror in the culture of violence and the techniques of power. Detailed, well-documented, and including many new details on the workings of the Stalinist state, this work encompasses the dictator's brutal reign from his achievement of total power in 1929 to his death in 1953.Less

Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television

Christine E. Evans

This book—the first full-length study of Soviet Central Television to draw extensively on archival sources, interviews, and television recordings—challenges the idea that mass culture in the Soviet ... More

This book—the first full-length study of Soviet Central Television to draw extensively on archival sources, interviews, and television recordings—challenges the idea that mass culture in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era was dull and formulaic. The book follows the history of Central Television in the Soviet Union from the mid-1960s through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Tracing the emergence of play, conflict, and competition on Soviet news programs, serial films, and variety and game shows, the book shows that Central Television's most popular shows were experimental and creative, laying the groundwork for Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms and the post-Soviet media system. It shows that the highly televisual Putin era represents the culmination of a long Soviet—now Russian—“era of television” that began in the late 1950s.Less

Russia's Path Toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500-1801

G. M. Hamburg

This book, focusing on the history of religious and political thinking in early modern Russia, demonstrates that Russia’s path toward enlightenment began long before Peter the Great’s opening to the ... More

This book, focusing on the history of religious and political thinking in early modern Russia, demonstrates that Russia’s path toward enlightenment began long before Peter the Great’s opening to the West. Examining a broad range of writings, the book shows why Russia’s Enlightenment constituted a precondition for the explosive emergence of nineteenth-century writers such as Fedor Dostoevskii and Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev. The book examines ideas of faith, politics, and reason in Muscovite Russia across three centuries. It explores Russian religious, political, and social thought by focusing on a disparate cast of thinkers, from Churchmen and laymen to theologians and heretics, government officials and their critics, statists and brigands. It also considers how Orthodox Christianity became the dominant strain in Russian religious and political life and thus in Russian culture, the relationship between virtue and politics in the turbulent era of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great’s contributions to Russian thought, and the genesis of enlightened conservatism late in the eighteenth century.Less