New Materials for Studying Preparation and Staging of the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957

2018 ◽  
pp. 550-563
Author(s):  
Daniel Sawert ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Unique Event ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Cultural Standards ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Local Traditions

The article assesses archival materials on the festival movement in the Soviet Union in 1950s, including its peak, the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students held in 1957 in Moscow. Even now the Moscow festival is seen in the context of international cultural politics of the Cold War and as a unique event for the Soviet Union. The article is to put the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in the context of other youth festivals held in the Soviet Union. The festivals of 1950s provided a field for political, social, and cultural experiments. They also have been the crucible of a new way of communication and a new language of design. Furthermore, festivals reflected the new (althogh relative) liberalism in the Soviet Union. This liberalism, first of all, was expressed in the fact that festivals were organized by the Komsomol and other Soviet public and cultural organisations. Taking the role of these organisations into consideration, the research draws on the documents of the Ministry of culture, the All-Russian Stage Society, as well as personal documents of the artists. Furthermore, the author has gained access to new archive materials, which have until now been part of no research, such as documents of the N. Krupskaya Central Culture and Art Center and of the central committees of various artistic trade unions. These documents confirm the hypothesis that the festivals provided the Komsomol and the Communist party with a means to solve various social, educational, and cultural problems. For instance, in Central Asia with its partiarchal society, the festivals focuced on female emancipation. In rural Central Asia, as well as in other non-russian parts of the Soviet Union, there co-existed different ways of celebrating. Local traditions intermingled with cultural standards prescribed by Moscow. At the first glance, the modernisation of the Soviet society was succesful. The youth acquired political and cultural level that allowed the Soviet state to compete with the West during the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students. During the festival, however, it became apparent, that the Soviet cultural scheme no longer met the dictates of times. Archival documents show that after the Festival cultural and party officials agreed to ease off dogmatism and to tolerate some of the foreign cultural phenomena.

Labor, the UN and the Cold War

1957 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold Karan Jacobson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
World Federation ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War

One of the significant structural differences between the organization of economic and social work under the League and under the United Nations is the extent to which non-governmental organizations (NGO's) have been allowed to participate. NGO's have been granted far greater privileges in the UN than they enjoyed in the League. Initially, they were formally recognized in Article 71 of the Charter, which gives the Economic and Social Council the right to make “suitable arrangements” for consultation with them. While defined in differing ways during different periods, consultative status under this article has, subject to various conditions, always included the right to participate in the debates of ECOSOC, its commissions and committees, and to propose items for inclusion in their provisional agenda. NGO's have made extensive use of these privileges. Their use, however, as well as the entire record of NGO action in the UN, has been inseparably linked with the cold war. Russian demands at San Francisco for privileges for the newly created, communist-controlled World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) were a contributing factor in the decision to include Article 71 in the Charter. The initial definition of this article resulted primarily from the interaction of pressures by the Soviet Union and the WFTU and the western response.

Public Sentiment among the Population of the City of Leningrad and the Leningrad Region in June - August 1941: From Situation Reports of the NKGB of the USSR

2018 ◽  
pp. 1051-1059
Author(s):  
Sergey V. Bogdanov ◽  
◽  
Vladimir G. Ostapyuk ◽  
Natalya A. Zhukova ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Leningrad Region ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
State Security ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Military ◽  
The City

The article considers one aspect of everyday life of the population of Leningrad and the Leningrad region in the first months of the Great Patriotic War, which had been carefully concealed by official Soviet propaganda. Throughout all postwar decades up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian historical science continued to reproduce the myth of absolute unity of the Soviet society and mass patriotic enthusiasm of the working class, kolkhoz peasants and intelligentsia in the face of enemy aggression. And yet archival documents of the state security agencies reveal numerous facts and distinctive features of anti-Soviet manifestations among various socio-professional groups of the population of Leningrad and the Leningrad region in the first months following the German invasion in the Soviet territory. These facts show that the imminent war had a serious impact on the inner world of the inhabitants of the Northern capital of the Soviet Union, exacerbating numerous problems that had accumulated in the Soviet society in the decades before the war. The article mostly draws on the recently declassified situation reports of the People's Commissariat of State Security for the city of Leningrad and the Leningrad region from the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense. It deals with such occurrences of anti-state sentiment as panic rumors, anti-Soviet agitation, listening to the radio-broadcasts of hostile states, distribution of anti-Soviet leaflets, planning pogroms of local party and state leaders. It analyses key features of anti-Soviet manifestations among urban and rural population. It contains information on the first manifestations of collaboration among those inhabitants of the Leningrad region, who had ended up in the territory occupied by the German troops. It studies mechanics of repressive activities of state security bodies caused by restructuring of Soviet society, while the military operations began.

scholarly journals Terrorism in Central Asia: Security Implications for Russia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debendra Mahalik
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
The Stability ◽  
External Forces ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Central Asian Republics

End of the cold war following the disintegration of the Soviet Union witnessed unprecedented increase in militancy and terrorism prompted by internal and external forces. This was also fuelled by factors like religious fundamentalism and ethno-nationalist chauvinism. The newly independent countries of the Central Asian region encountered myriad problems like terrorism, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, organized crime, separatism, and ethnic conflicts. Given the geographical proximity and historicity, Central Asia is regarded as Russia’s own backyard and a “soft underbelly”. The near-abroad security developments in the Central Asian republics have great influence on Russia and could create a complex environment detrimental to its security interests. The Russian approach to this challenge is of great importance for the stability of the whole area. Any negative developments in Central Asian Regions and Afghanistan would have serious security implications for Russia. A stable and friendly government in Afghanistan and Central Asian states would prove beneficial to Russian security, including the on ongoing separatist movements in Chechnya and Dagestan. Therefore it is imperative that Russia and Central Asian states act collectively to counter religious radicalism and foster regional stability. This article examines some factors responsible for breeding terrorism and religious extremism in Central Asian Republics and its security implications onRussia such as Central Asian threats, US presence in Central Asia and the Taliban in Afghanistan.  

Corn Crusade

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron T. Hale-Dorrell
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Global Trends ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Hybrid Seeds ◽  
Catch Up ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Competing Priorities

Almost everyone has long misinterpreted Nikita Khrushchev’s ten-year crusade to propagate the cultivation of corn, a crop important across the globe but previously rare across the vast, environmentally diverse Soviet Union. Launched in 1953, this campaign comprised a large part of the new leadership’s efforts to remedy agrarian crises inherited from Iosif Stalin. Khrushchev pressured collective and state farms to increase plantings of corn from an insignificant proportion of their crops to a peak of nearly 20 percent. Expected to feed livestock that were to yield meat and dairy products, corn promised to enrich citizens’ meager, monotonous diets and thereby make good on Khrushchev’s infamous pledges that the Soviet Union was soon to “catch up to and surpass America” in the Cold War “peaceful competition” between communism and capitalism. Echoing Khrushchev’s former comrades, who denounced corn as “harebrained scheming” when ousting him in 1964, scholars have ridiculed it as “an irrational obsession.” Newly available archival documents reveal a more complex and interesting story of how Khrushchev borrowed industrial-farming methods from the United States. Following experts’ advice, he believed that hybrid seeds, machines, agronomy, and other technologies constituting the global trends in farming technology promised even greater increases in productivity under conditions found in the Soviet Union. Yet Khrushchev’s programs achieved only partial success because they could not overcome the entrenched interests, bureaucratic inertia, and competing priorities that encouraged government officials, local authorities, and farmworkers to disregard methods required to grow even modest harvests, let alone the bumper crops that Khrushchev envisioned.

scholarly journals Russia's Muslim Frontiers

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-120
Author(s):  
M. E. Ahrari
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Muslim Country ◽  
Armed Struggle ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Central Asian Countries ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
The Cold War

The sudden independence of five Muslim Central Asian countries-Khazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan-and one Muslim country in the Transcaucasus regionAzerbaijan-has surprised even the international scholarly community.When the former Soviet Union was alive and well, there were "Sovietscholars," a rubric that largely included specialists on Russia, Ukraine,and the Baltic states. Western scholars were almost never inclined tospecialize in, or to give any serious attention to, the Muslim regions ofthe Soviet Union. This neglect was also reflected in their evaluations ofthe problems of this region, as can be seen by the uncritical acceptanceof the Soviet vocabulary. For instance, the Qorabashi armed resistancein Muslim Central Asia was labeled the "Basmachi" (or bandit) movementby the Soviet Union and its scholars. This phrase was also used bywestern scholars.Now there is no more Soviet Union, the cold war has entered history,and there are six new Muslim republics. These developments haveengendered a renewed interest in these republics, as can be seen by thenumber of recently published books that have been devoted to them.Although some of them have been hurriedly compiled, others have beenwritten with a lot of forethought and balanced analysis.Eickelman's present anthology definitely falls into the latter category.In fact, to the best of my knowledge, his anthology is one of thefirst books that raises the question of whether the above-mentionedQorabashi movement was indeed an armed struggle against the Sovietimperial masters or was a "bandit" movement as portrayed by Sovietscholars. This book comprises four parts: "International and RegionalPerspectives," "Central Asia " "Afghanistan and Iran," and "Pakistan."The first two sections formulate the essence of this study. Eickelman'sintroduction, in my estimation, is certainly one of the best chapters. Itis unfortunate that he did not include more of his writing in this book.His review of the literature on modernization theories and orientalismin this chapter will be read by students of Central Asia and the MiddleEast with interest.Other noteworthy contributions are the two essays by RichardCottam and Gregory Kornyenko. It is refreshing to read Cottam's ...

scholarly journals Tsedenbal's Mongolia and Communist Aid Donors: A Reappraisal

2013 ◽  
pp. 91-95
Author(s):  
Balazs Szalontai
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Democratic Transition ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War most Western observers saw the Mongolian Communist dictatorship headed by Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal as a puppet regime, unable and unwilling to defend the nation’s interests against the Soviet Union. Following the democratic transition of 1989, this narrative became widely accepted in Mongolia as well. Recently studied Hungarian archival documents show, however, that the Mongolian Communist leadership resented foreign domination and made great efforts to pursue an independent economic policy. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5564/mjia.v0i12.97 Mongolian Journal of International Affairs No.12 2005: 91-95

scholarly journals Nato and turkey: where is the partnership headed

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 238
Author(s):  
Vinod Saighal
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Vladimir Putin ◽  
Boris Yeltsin

The parting of ways had to take place at some time or the other. The differences had started emerging almost since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the disastrous Yeltsin years, even Russia bereft of the Soviet possessions in Central Asia appeared to be falling apart. This state of affairs continued till almost the turn of the century when Boris Yeltsin nominated Vladimir Putin as his successor. It has to be noted, however, that to this day Mr. Putin having pulled Russia up by the bootstraps has never spoken ill of his erstwhile benefactor.

scholarly journals Red Dawn – the final episode of the Cold war

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 901
Author(s):  
Ivan Kovačević ◽  
Vladimir Ribić
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Adequate Response ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Scene

In the period of renewal of the Cold war, after 1980, movies which abandon the idea of the dentate appear, and they represent the response to Soviet expansion taking place under the auspices of diminished military confrontation. Of course, the Hollywood reaction to the real expansion of communism was not at adequate response, but it is a part of the wider restructuring of American politics regarding the Soviet Union, which was evidenced by strengthening defenses through the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), forcible intervention in Grenada, helping anti-communist movements around the world etc. In opposition to part of the US political scene which shut down attempts to stop the spread of communism across the world, action through popular culture, especially film, created a new climate in which multifaceted pressures on the socialist block were prepared. The movie Red Dawn can be considered part of the reaction of US politics on the particularistic view of the dentate as a shield for military and political spread of the USSR in Africa and other parts of the world. This pressure played on the inherent weaknesses of Soviet society in the 1980’s, a society which, after a brief period of failed transformation fell apart at the start of the final decade of the 20th century.

The Role of the Mongolian People’s Republic in the Korean War

2018 ◽  
pp. 97-130
Author(s):  
Denzenlkham Ulambayar
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Korean War ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
History Of

Since the 1990s, when previously classified and top secret Russian archival documents on the Korean War became open and accessible, it has become clear for post-communist countries that Kim Il Sung, Stalin and Mao Zedong were the primary organizers of the war. It is now equally certain that tensions arising from Soviet and American struggle generated the origins of the Korean War, namely the Soviet Union’s occupation of the northern half of the Korean peninsula and the United States’ occupation of the southern half to the 38th parallel after 1945 as well as the emerging bipolar world order of international relations and Cold War. Newly available Russian archival documents produced much in the way of new energies and opportunities for international study and research into the Korean War.2 However, within this research few documents connected to Mongolia have so far been found, and little specific research has yet been done regarding why and how Mongolia participated in the Korean War. At the same time, it is becoming today more evident that both Soviet guidance and U.S. information reports (evaluated and unevaluated) regarding Mongolia were far different from the situation and developments of that period. New examples of this tendency are documents declassified in the early 2000s and released publicly from the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in December 2016 which contain inaccurate information. The original, uncorrupted sources about why, how and to what degree the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) became a participant in the Korean War are in fact in documents held within the Mongolian Central Archives of Foreign Affairs. These archives contain multiple documents in relation to North Korea. Prior to the 1990s Mongolian scholars Dr. B. Lkhamsuren,3 Dr. B. Ligden,4 Dr. Sh. Sandag,5 junior scholar J. Sukhee,6 and A. A. Osipov7 mention briefly in their writings the history of relations between the MPR and the DPRK during the Korean War. Since the 1990s the Korean War has also briefly been touched upon in the writings of B. Lkhamsuren,8 D. Ulambayar (the author of this paper),9 Ts. Batbayar,10 J. Battur,11 K. Demberel,12 Balảzs Szalontai,13 Sergey Radchenko14 and Li Narangoa.15 There have also been significant collections of documents about the two countries and a collection of memoirs published in 200716 and 2008.17 The author intends within this paper to discuss particularly about why, how and to what degree Mongolia participated in the Korean War, the rumors and realities of the war and its consequences for the MPR’s membership in the United Nations. The MPR was the second socialist country following the Soviet Union (the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics) to recognize the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and establish diplomatic ties. That was part of the initial stage of socialist system formation comprising the Soviet Union, nations in Eastern Europe, the MPR, the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and the DPRK. Accordingly between the MPR and the DPRK fraternal friendship and a framework of cooperation based on the principles of proletarian and socialist internationalism had been developed.18 In light of and as part of this framework, The Korean War has left its deep traces in the history of the MPR’s external diplomatic environment and state sovereignty

Trust, but Verify

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This book uses trust—with its emotional and predictive aspects—to explore international relations in the second half of the Cold War, beginning with the late 1960s. The détente of the 1970s led to the development of some limited trust between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lessened international tensions and enabled advances in areas such as arms control. However, it also created uncertainty in other areas, especially on the part of smaller states that depended on their alliance leaders for protection. The chapters in this volume look at how the “emotional” side of the conflict affected the dynamics of various Cold War relations: between the superpowers, within the two ideological blocs, and inside individual countries on the margins of the East–West confrontation.

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