Stalin’s death is considered a mayor caesura in Soviet history. In its aftermath, the state had to redefine itself in political, economic, social and cultural matters. This volume includes various contributions of new international research that critically engage with questions of change and continuities in the fields of politics, modernization and social communities. In addition to Stalinism, processes such as urbanization therefore move into the center of interpreting Soviet history. The history of the Soviet 1950s and 60s is not only crucial for understanding glasnost and perestroika but contemporary Russia as well.
Providing a comprehensive history of reform in the Khrushchev era, this book focuses specifically on social and cultural developments. It appraises how far 'Destalinization' went and whether developments in the period represented a real desire for reform, or rather an attempt to fortify the Soviet system, but on different lines.
How was it possible to write history in the Soviet Union, under strict state control and without access to archives? What methods of research did these 'historians' - be they academic, that is based at formal institutions, or independent - rely on? And how was their work influenced by their complex and shifting relationships with the state? To answer these questions, Barbara Martin here tracks the careers of four bold and important dissidents: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, Aleksandr Nekrich and Anton Antonov-Ovseenko. Based on extensive archival research and interviews (with some of the authors themselves, as well as those close to them), the result is a nuanced and very necessary history of Soviet dissident history writing, from the relative liberalisation of de-Stalinisation through increasing repression and persecution in the Brezhnev era to liberalisation once more during perestroika. In the process Martin sheds light onto late Soviet society and its relationship with the state, as well as the ways in which this dissidence participated in weakening the Soviet regime during Perestroika. This is important reading for all scholars working on late Soviet history and society.
The Khrushchev Era examines the major political, social, and economic reforms of Nikita Khrushchev, from the 'Secret Speech' and Khrushchev's limited, but at the time earth-shattering critique of Stalin, to his ill-fated reorganizations of the Communist Party, agriculture, and industry. Besides giving a factual account of the reforms themselves, Filtzer analyses the complex factors behind their failure, focussing not so much on the inadequacies of Khrushchev as a leader, as on the structural obstacles to reform within the Stalinist system itself. As such the Khruschev period is shown to contain instructive historical lessons for our understanding of Mikhail Gorbachev and his own failed perestroika.
North Korea remains the most mysterious of all Communist countries. The acute shortage of available sources has made it a difficult subject of scholarship. Through his access to Soviet archival material made available only a decade ago, contemporary North Korean press accounts, and personal interviews, Andrei Lankov presents for the first time a detailed look at one of the turning points in North Korean history: the country’s unsuccessful attempts to de-Stalinize in the mid-1950s. He demonstrates that, contrary to common perception, North Korea was not a realm of undisturbed Stalinism; Kim Il Sung had to deal with a reformist opposition that was weak but present nevertheless. Lankov traces the impact of Soviet reforms on North Korea, placing them in the context of contemporaneous political crises in Poland and Hungary. He documents the dissent among various social groups (intellectuals, students, party cadres) and their attempts to oust Kim in the unsuccessful "August plot" of 1956. His reconstruction of the Peng-Mikoyan visit of that year—the most dramatic Sino-Soviet intervention into Pyongyang politics—shows how it helped bring an end to purges of the opposition. The purges, however, resumed in less than a year as Kim skillfully began to distance himself from both Moscow and Beijing. The final chapters of this fascinating and revealing study deal with events of the late 1950s that eventually led to Kim’s version of "national Stalinism." Lankov unearths data that, for the first time, allows us to estimate the scale and character of North Korea’s Great Purge. Meticulously researched and cogently argued, Crisis in North Korea is a must-read for students and scholars of Korea and anyone interested in political leadership and personality cults, regime transition, and communist politics.
Monograph on the theoretics of international law as seen in the context of the concepts and principles of Marxism-leninism - covers the process of forming norms, and the legal nature and essence of contemporary international law, foreign policy and diplomacy, the laws of societal development and international organizations (legal status), the general character and forms of State responsibility under international law, etc., and includes a bibliography of published works of gi tunkin (1938 to 1973), etc.
