HIST-2660-A01 – Midterm Test Review

Beginning of the Soviet Union

 1917-1922
 The First World War occurred between 1914-1917, the Russian Empire
had joined due to its defensive alliance with France against German-
backed Serbia and Austro-Hungary, however, the Russian Empire had
exited the war short of 1916 due to severe civil unrest that precipitated
into civil war
 The Russian Civil War occurred between the White Tsarist loyalists
and the Red Communist/Leninist revolutionaries, as Lenin and his
compatriots had spread their ideology across the motherland, even as
Lenin was exiled to western Europe
 When Lenin had returned to Russia, he founded the Communist Party
with the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks factions, with Lenin aligned to the
Bolsheviks
 By 1917, the Communists had achieved their revolution, aptly named the
October Revolution, where they had decimated their White Army
opponents and captured the Tsar and his family, imprisoning them in a
remote Siberian home
 1918 saw famine and economic downturn throughout Europe, especially
so in postwar France and Germany, as well as the emergent Turkiye
Republic from its own civil war and coup of the Ottoman Empire
 Various smaller nations throughout the central and eastern Europe areas,
especially in the Balkans, appeared after the fracturing of the German
and Russian Empires
 1848-1849
 Europe had divided itself into various imperial alliances and treatises that
secured their sovereignty and defensive pacts, accentuated during WWI
 Russia had entered a treatise and defensive alliance with France, who had
protected the sovereignty of its Serbian allies, alongside Great Britain,
whereas the Serbian separatist group, the Black Hand, and its terrorist
activities and operative Felipe Princip had successfully assassinated Duke
Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary in Sarajevo in 1913
 Due to these formalized defensive alliances and European pride, in 1914,
the war began and continued for a gruelling 4 years of trench warfare
and horrific technological advancements, even though many diplomats
 and consulates attempted to de-escalate the political hot bath to little
effect
 Although many of these European monarchs had ancestry with
Queen Victoria, all being cousin kings, they had opted to continue
to uphold their sense of national pride
 Kaiser Wilhelm II of the Prussian faction in the newly formed
German Empire had inherited the nation from his father, but was
known for being impulsive and otherwise easy to enrage, which
affected his persistence to reach Germany’s imperial potential
 1905
 The first major civil unrest within the Russian Empire, just after the
disastrous Russo-Japanese War against the emergent Japanese Empire
post-Meiji Restoration and its grand military growth, resulting in their
formal embarrassment as a European power
 February Revolution, Mar. 2, 1917
 Tsar Nicholas II of Russia was forced to abdicate his throne, allowing
the formation of the Lenin-influenced Russian Provisional Government
between March and October, including membership of Aleksander
Kerensky
 The Empire had suffered economically and politically in the early 20 th
Century, and after the Communist revolutions, it had become a Soviet
Republic, and former Russian regions were also formed into national
Soviets, forming into the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR)
 The Kornilov Affair (putsch) occurred in August 1917, where many
Russian citizens had still supported the previous government, and
Kornilov’s military loyalists sought to restore Nicholas II to no success
 Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov/Lenin (1870-1924)
 Lenin’s brother had attempted to assassinate the Tsar in 1890, but failed
and was executed for sedition
 Lenin had begun his political ambitions and career in 1895, joining the
League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class and
became its leader
 Between 1897 to 1899, Lenin was sentenced by the Imperial Russian
justice system without trial, spending a 3-year exile in the eastern
Siberian wastes, where he became avid in writing his thoughts and
philosophies
  In 1903, he had a key role within the Russian Social Democratic
Labor Party and its ideological split of the Mensheviks and
Bolsheviks
 1905 saw Lenin’s return to the motherland and he sought to achieve his
own Marxist worker’s revolution, adapting the philosophies of his
Socialism into Communism, seeking to convert all workers across the
world
 The October Revolution championed itself with the following
slogans, between October 25 to November 7 in 1917
 “Peace to soldiers”
 “Land to peasants”
 “Factories to workers”
 Many tired and homesick soldiers on the Eastern Front and other
oppressed groups of workers and farmers under the Russian
Empire had backed Lenin due to his revolutionary ideas
 By 1917, the Bolsheviks had less supporters than the Mensheviks, due to
the unpopularity of divisional regional governments, forcing them to
reorganize and attempt another revolution (October Revolution)
 October Revolution
 The soldiers and other Communist supporters had marched on the
Winter Palace, establishing their own government after dismantling the
Provisional Government
 The Russian Civil War
 The Bolsheviks had formed its own military branch as the Red Army,
and had killed the Tsar’s family and the monarch to prevent his
restoration by the White Army in their remote house arrest cottage in
Siberia
 The White loyalists to the Tsar was led by Anton Denikin and Pyotr
Wrangel, attempting to restore Tsar Nicholas II
 Various national movements across the outer regions of the Russian
Empire had established their own governments, even against the
Bolsheviks
 The Soviet propagandists believed that all regions of the Empire
were in a civil struggle and to be led by Lenin and his followers,
although the reality was that many still believed that the
Bolsheviks were occupiers and wished to establish their own
national sovereignties (i.e., Ukraine)
  The Soviet Union was formed on December 30th, 1922, after much
conflict and organizing the formal states of the Russian Empire under
the Bolshevik umbrella
 Communist militarism and war economics
 The Communists stylized themselves with golden stars and red, and their
ferocity across the Russian Civil War resulted in their Red Terror
 The Prodrazveriska, or grain requisitioning, was a system for the
Soviets to circulate food across villages and regions from farms, through
state-controlled collectivist farms worked by Soviet-assigned workers
throughout the citizenry
 All industries within the former empire were nationalized within the
Soviet regime, all being dictated by Soviet state mandates
 Soviet railways were under military jurisdiction of the Red Army as a
means of transporting their troops throughout their controlled state
 Foreign trade was also heavily regulated by the Soviet government, as a
means of maintaining communist ideologies and preventing pockets of
capitalists and other profit-driven Russians to control them
 After Lenin’s death in 1924, propaganda was used to prop up him as a
mortal god of communism and to be worshipped, creating various
posters, later biographies, and creation of a Leninist popularity cult in all
facets of Soviet culture
 In 1927, the Soviets filmed a documentary-esque propaganda film
of the USSR’s founding during the October Revolution and
establishment of Soviet Union into the 1920s, aptly named
October
 Lenin’s body was preserved in a controlled coffin unit to be
viewed by all citizens, and many depictions of him had made him
a child-friendly figure albeit his various associations to violent
revolution
 Many of his followers still wished to push for his globalization of
socialist and communist ideas, by inciting socialist revolutions to
overthrow “evil” capitalist nations from within
Early Soviet Union
 1920s to 1940s
 The Soviet Union political system
  The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or Russian Social
Democratic Labor Party, was the successor of the Bolsheviks faction
during the 1917-1922 rise of the Leninist communists
 After the October Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks
established their Commissariat of the Council of the People
 The Soviet ideology was a mix of Marxism-Leninism communist
philosophies
 The Central Committee of the Community Party of the
Soviet Union had worked between the Party Congresses of the
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
 The Politburo, shortened from Political Bureau of the Communist
Party, had 7-10 elected members from the Central Committee
 The leader of the Soviet Union was named the General Secretary
of the Communist Party, the first being Joseph Stalin from
1922, one of Lenin’s enforcers and totalitarian dictator
 Lenin’s death the Soviet succession struggle
 Lenin had written his testament in 1922, discussing his vision on
how the Soviet Union should be led and who the leaders should
be, electing Trotsky his successor but was politically removed by
Stalin, even though Lenin had condemned Stalin’s rulership due
to his crude and non-communist behaviors
 In 1924, the leader was just called vozhd, naming Lenin the head
of state and was the center of his popularity cult, denounced by
Stalin and was not claimed as official due to the General Secretary
position
 Leon Trotsky had led the Mensheviks while Stalin succeeded
Lenin’s Bolsheviks, as well as other major leaders being
Nadezhda Krupskaya, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Kamenev,
erupting into civil war that ended with Trotsky’s exile to Mexico
and potential assassination order by Stalin
 New Economic Policy
 Began implementation in 1921 until 1928, it was meant to allow
small industry and trade to be privatized, allow peasants to sell
their produce in their markets, and prodnalog (“tax in kind”) for
establishing prices for goods
  Enemies of the working class and criminal elements deemed by
the Soviet government were named nepmen, all political enemies
against the Soviet Union
 Artistically depicted as being higher class and otherwise
ugly as they had enjoyed the results of the work of the
lower-class peoples, often stylized as wearing fancy suits
and dresses of black, jarring contrasted backgrounds, and
ugly face depictions
 Lenin had insisted in the relaxation of economic policies was not
equated to political relaxation, thus pushing for a driven planned
economy
 Collectivization
 From 1928, peasants were to participate within the kolkhoz,
collectivist farms assigned by the Soviet government
 Propaganda had represented that these farms as migrating from
smaller farms to larger-scale operations, while modernizing and
industrializing agriculture
 Peasants did not have any passport documentation, allowing them
freedom of travel, and still were not granted any salaries
 Kulaks were leaders of individual households and had denied
participating within the state collectivist farm experiment, causing
Soviet seizure of their horses and eventually deportation, opening
their living quarters for collectivist farmers
 These farms were insufficiently prepared and poorly instructed to
many of the peasants and collectivists, leading to future
complications and poor results
 It was a means of financing Soviet Union industrialization, as a
means of selling Russian grains abroad and stimulating their
economy
 Industrialization
 From 1925, there was a statewide campaign to rapidly develop
heavy industry, especially in the developments of mining,
metallurgy, and machining industries
 The Soviet goals were
 To achieve the pre-Great War economy of Russia
  Increase the Soviet’s military might to contest with the
United States and their Western allies that champion
capitalism and its exploitation, in the case of any future war
 Priority of heavy industry over the light and food industries
 Demonstration of propaganda for the advantages of the
communist system and its socialist policies that makes the
capitalist structure obsolete
 Five-Year Plan
 As part of their initiatives to construct a planned economy, the
Soviets instituted labor camps, first populated by many kulaks
being sent to gulags, systems of forced labor in remote camps
 Many peasants left the country and went to work in the urban
centers during the collectivist and industrial workforce, including
women
 Soviet territory stretched between Ukraine, the Ural Mountains
around Magnitogorsk, Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus
Mountains, for their resources and topographical location
 Socialist competition was brigade-worker competition, including
working long hours with extreme effort, and even extending their
work into the weekends
 Many foreign specialists had worked within the USSR, seeking to
aid the achievement of the communist dream
 Gulags
 Between 1918 to the 1960s, the gulag system was formulated by both
Lenin and Trotsky, who sought to use it for “re-education” against
“detractors” of their communist movement and to persuade them after
experiencing hard labor
 Gulags were notorious for their brutal working and living conditions as a
means of dehumanization, due to the following
 Hefty limitations of food both by regulation and supply due to
remoteness
 Replaced prisoners’ names with serial numbers as well as
prohibition on calling each other by their names if known
 Spaces in both living quarters and working spaces were known to
be inadequately sized and intentionally uncomfortable
 Forced laborers were usually overworked, typically to death, partly
martyred by the Soviet propaganda
  Typically, gulags had been constructed far from the urban centers of
Russia, usually the depths of the Siberian wilderness, on rural properties
to spread and seed nationwide industrialization
 Children were often separated into their own children gulags, separated
from their parents who went to work in the described working
conditions
 Anyone that attempted to help the children were threatened with
death, dissuading basic human empathy within the Soviet system
 Famines in the Soviet Union
 The Holodymor (Russian: “death famine”) occurred between 1932 to
1933 was a major famine event that led to the deaths of many Soviet
citizens
 Discussion within the Soviet Union of the event was a national
embarrassment, thus the leaders had enacted prohibitions and
censorship with close surveillance within its borders, and
disallowed any international aid and did not call upon other
nations to alleviate their emergency due to ideological shame
 The period of censorship and topical prohibition was
dubbed the Dekulaktivistation, otherwise known as “the
Soviet campaign of oppression”
 It was considered an act of genocide to the Soviet Union’s
Ukrainian population to better control and silence their unrest, to
ensure their submission under the Soviet banner
 The Ukrainian peoples had fought against Soviet
implementation of collectivization with open rebellion,
causing 112000 Soviet troops to guard collectivist livestock
and grain and prevent them from entering the Ukrainian
Soviet state
 The famine had incurred a great cost in lives as well as
harming the Ukrainian culture and language
 Many Soviet troops had also confiscated food from
Ukrainian homes to ensure the starvation of the unruly
Soviet citizens
 By June 1933, the rate of death by starvation had amassed
upwards of 28000 per day
 The 1930s within the Soviet Union
  The 1930s of the Soviet Union were distinct by the cult of popularity
surrounding Stalin and his fearsome, inhuman actions, his caused various
societal regressions, the Great Terror event, extensive use of gulags and
rampant outbreaks of famines
 Prior to Stalin’s rise to power, Lenin had not been propositioned
as an uncontested dictatorial figure, rather maintained the aura of
being a collectivist and socialist decision maker amongst his peers
within the Soviet Bolshevik government
 After Lenin’s death in 1924, cities were renamed to become more
Soviet-oriented (Petrograd → Leningrad), the rise of popularity in
choosing the name of Vladimir for newborn boys, the highest
award by the Soviet state being named the “Order of Lenin”, and
his was consecrated and preserved within a transparent vacuum
chamber in the Red Square, Moscow
 Lenin also had a cult of personality, beginning from a supposed
public championing by the “people” of Soviet propaganda, being
revered and thriving due to similarities with how people had
treated the Tsar
 Stalin wanted to emulate his own cult of personality akin to
Lenin’s, forcibly manufacturing it himself through intimidation
and terror, fashioning himself as the “Great Leader” and “Father
of Nations”, going as far to even titled himself as “Lenin’s best
student”
 He had his own statues and other art projects dedicated to
himself, as well as renaming cities after himself (Volgograd
→ Stalingrad) as well as coercing Soviet historians to write
positively about his regime and personality, regulated with
propaganda and censorship
 In comparison, Lenin’s cult had stemmed from how his
peers and audience perceived him, whereas Stalin used his
underworld experience and tactics to “persuade” those
beneath him to worship his reign of the early Soviet era
 Stalin’s totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union
 Stalin made himself personally involved in all decisions throughout the
Soviet Union, rather being hands-on and actively influential by his own
personal motivations prior to signing off on many legislative and
executive orders with his peers
  He is heavily suspected to have plotted various politically
motivated murders and assassinations of political figures that were
not in his playbook, or he had deemed a threat to his rule, named
the Great Purge
 Such may have been the case of the assassination of Sergey
Kirov, who was the first Secretary of Lenin’s organized socialist
party, underwent a sham judicial trial and summarily executed
 Party members Zinoviev and Kamenev were accused of Kirov’s
assassination, alongside further accusations against failed
assassination plots against Lenin and Stalin as well as being double
agents of foreign intelligence agencies
 Stalin’s regime was also notorious for the introduction of using
gulags being regularly used to send all political and perceived
threats to remote regions away from the Russian urban centers
 An unknown of people were condemned for various
crimes, supposedly true and completely fabricated, to their
agonizing deaths through hard labor, abuse, or starvation
 Soviet constitution of 1936
 The Soviets had written themselves a new national constitution that
proclaimed their communist definition of democracy, going as far as to
claim it as the “most democratic constitution”
 One of the key figures during the writing of this constitution,
Nikolai Bukharin, was later arrested by his comrades
 Within the constitution, many propagated false truths were woven
in, such as the promise of guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom
of the press, freedom of political and social assembly, and
freedom of religious practice without prosecution
 Soviet society and propaganda
 The Soviet regime was totalitarian, as it had only formed a singular
political party and had elected a single head of state as its leadership
 The Soviet ideology was unified under the banner of communism,
an advanced form of the Marxist-Leninist socialist philosophy,
and championed itself as a structure that benefitted the working
class
 To the Soviets, a democracy was one of control by state oversight
in public living and mass media as well as economic control to
propagate a productive and industrial society, where everything
 provided to them by the government was to benefit both the
individual worker and the greater socialist state in the long-term
 Under the political regime of Josef Stalin however, he led the
Soviet Union under an authoritarian dictatorship that surrounded
him in his own cult of personality, and through the submission of
those who opposed him through major oppression and terror
campaigns
 To Stalin, the Soviet experiment was a “great goal” that must be
achieved at any cost, even if it meant subduing the very working
people he lorded over through repressive means, creating an
empire of fear
 Soviet propaganda was often used as a means of spreading “new”
communist ideas to the masses, slowly propagating their fundamental
tenets into individuals’ actions
 Through various imagery and representations of what
communism could ultimately achieve, the Soviet government used
these means of manipulative optimism to try and inspire the
average worker into becoming their own champion of the
ideology
 According to Hannah Arendt, totalitarian states had the
propensity to replace it with supposedly tangible “evidence” of
the success and prosperity achieved under their ideological regime
 Thus, the Soviet Union was a state of propaganda in which it used
its control of state media to push communist “education” to the
masses without any opposition and alternate perspectives to argue
against them
 Under Vladimir Lenin, he had sought to sow the seeds of socialism in
other societies from within, rather than onto them as external force, in
his so-called “Cultural Revolution”
 To Lenin, he believed that the world would naturally conform to
socialist ideas and its principles of governance, however it needs a
catalyst to begin the global process in which he wished to provide
through the Soviet experiment
 Through the changes of educational materials and removal of
hoarded wealth away from the masses of the working class, Lenin
sought to overthrow the domineering capitalist systems
 prominent within imperialist Europe and its heart of the United
States
 Under Lenin, he sought the concept of akbez, the total
elimination of illiteracy in Russia and eventually the world, as a
means of allowing more workers and lower-class persons to be
persuaded to join the socialist cause
 The Bolshevik Party rose to prominence between the 1920s and
1930s, as it pushed for its “Cultural and Educational campaign”
by focusing on rural areas across the former Russian Empire and
seeking to eradicate the illiteracy rate in these populations
 The Soviet press was placed unto a “hierarchy of newspapers”, which
centered itself on narratives regarding issues within the political spheres
of central, republican, regional, district, city, and world affairs
 The Soviet national press was tasked with catalyzing the
integration of its socialist ideas and policies across the USSR by
reaching the individual citizen
 One such major idea was to prioritize the collective interest of the
Soviet Union over one’s own prosperity and interests
 The state-controlled newspapers were to provide “analytical”
prose to the people as a means of promoting Marxist-Leninist
socialism as their educational conclusion
 In 1919, the Soviet government established the gosizdat, the
state publishing house, and proletarian, the state union of
writers, to centralize the act of publication across the nation, often
taking a class-based approach to describing society and promoting
the “Soviet citizen” as a heroic builder of the socialist plan, as well
as greatly censoring and preventing “harmful” literature that
argued other ideologues
 Similar to printed media, the advent and proliferation of radio became
state-controlled within the Soviet Union, as the communists held
national radio broadcasts as a means of broadening their socialist
education schemes
 This would be extremely apparent into the late 1930s and early
1940s as the outbreak of war against Nazi-controlled Germany
broke its non-aggression agreement and arduous attrition covered
most of European Russia
  Posters and photographs were also extremely prevalent in Soviet
propaganda, often placed in high-traffic areas for more eyes to gaze onto
them and provide them clear and concise socialist ideas to the broader
masses
 They often focused on the eternal “workers’ struggle” as usually
understood by socialist ideology, and typically were simplistic in
their designs with easy reading and contrasting color
 Soviet film had also come under state control by the government of the
USSR, as it was seen for its potential to further integrate its manipulative
strategies to cement socialist thoughts into the “consciousness of the
masses”
 Stalin sought to rival the broadness of Soviet entertainment to a
level which directly opposed the American Hollywood
entertainment machine
 For the USSR, movies were a perfect depiction of the Soviet man
vs the ascribed “image of the enemy” of the state, often rousing
agitation and promoting its own propaganda
 The Soviets had pushed to relay these strategies to attract its
people and reinforce their belief in the socialist dream, and thus,
privately-owned cinemas were liquidated and reopened as state
theaters
 The new Soviet Citizen
 Since the Age of Enlightenment, various philosophers discussed the
image of a “new era” person
 By the end of the 19th Century, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote his 1883-
1885 work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, discussing the concept of the
“Overman”
 For the Nazis of Germany, they provided their own meaning to
Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Übermensch; the demonstration
of superiority of the supposed German Aryan lineage and it being
their penultimate life goal to strive towards
 According to the Russian communists of Lenin, Trotsky, Anatoly
Lunacharsky, and Maxim Gorky, they defined the Soviet “Overman”
as the following
 In various pieces of propaganda, the Soviet Union used “New
Man” to characterize a “real Soviet man” who held firm beliefs in
their revolution, dedicating his life to its success, was active in
 socialist work and reform, and studied and worked for the good
of all socialism
 Furthermore, other major characteristics include the constant
work ethic, speaking in the perceived proper Soviet tongue, had
the supposed correct origin, and was not an individualist but a
die-hard socialist and cog in the larger Soviet machine
 To Karl Marx, a person belonged to a class as determined by their
socioeconomic status
 For the USSR, they took into consideration the following
 Current social status and standing within Soviet society
 Former social status
 Parental social status
 Class divisions had been first written into the Constitution of the
communist party by 1918, which granted full citizenship and
voting rights to the “right” classes while branding all others as
“socially hostile”
 Social origins were fixed documentation as presented within a
Soviet citizen’s passport
 The amendments by Stalin in the 1936 Constitution had granted
civil rights to all Soviet citizens “regardless of class origin”, as a
means of legally enforcing the equality principle of the USSR
 According to Soviet doctrine, there were 3 denominations of the
social classes
 The working class
 The collectivist farmers
 The intelligentsia who led the nation
 Oftentimes, Soviet propaganda took a staunch anti-enemy
approach, describing the “We vs Them” argument and defining
“We” as the workers and Bolsheviks under the term of
Proletariat
 A major national issue arose in the merger of 2 philosophical models of
governance in the USSR
 Under Lenin and Khrushchev, they argued for the international
model, which described the importance of national loyalty and
religious fervor
 Under Stalin and Brezhnev, they argued for the Russian
imperial model, which sought influence within their governed
 people, oftentimes alienating and endorsing discriminatory
practices against other nationals, as an extension of Russification
 According to the 3rd Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union in 1961, they had laid out the “Moral Code of the Builder of
Communism” as the idealistic Soviet citizen with the following
characteristics
 Devotion to communism and to socialist Russia
 Diligence and hard work for communist benefit, reinforcing the
doctrine of “who does not work, does not eat”
 Social responsibility being acknowledged and made highly aware
within the individual worker
 Emphasizing the benefits of collectivism and mutual assistance in
a quasi-Three Musketeers philosophical attitude
 Maintenance of a humane attitude and sharing mutual respect,
“Man to man is a friend, comrade, and brother”
 Upholding the tenets of honesty and truthfulness in their lives,
familial mutual respect, intolerance of injustice, friendship and
brotherhood of all USSR citizens, and solidarity of workers in a
fraternity worldwide
 Within Soviet propaganda, they had described the various opponents of
the Soviet people as “enemies”
 Soviet citizens were on a constant battlefield against Western
opposition, education, and literature, often employing militarization
of language
 These people of the USSR were encouraged to adapt suspicion
and cruelty against their enemies
 However, they also had many enemies within their state, such as
“pests”, spies, priests, Trotskyists, and Zinovievites, as well as the
umbrella of “social deviants” which included alcoholics,
hooligans, and prostitutes
 For internal enemies against communism within Soviet Russia,
they were branded as pathogenic carriers of foreign ideologies that
directly challenged Soviet philosophy and understanding
 Work within the USSR
 According to communist party documents describing the “new Soviet
man,” their transformation was done through their efforts in labor and
towards the socialist cause
  To Stephen Kotkin, the 1936 Soviet Constitution had been criticized
for writing that all had the right to work but no right to rest from said
work
 For socialist competitions, the goal was to ultimately achieve the “bright
communist future” sooner, but became a struggle of recognition due to
their indicative criteria, and its Soviet working man comprehension and
their development
 On August 31, 1935, the record of Oleksiy Stakhanov was achieved, in
which he worked in a Kadiivka coal mine and had exceeded the normal
quota with a multiplicative of 14
 A key propaganda effort was to incite and inspire the “Revolutionary
Enthusiasm of the Workers” into the Soviet people, who would work
themselves for the communist future promised without compromise or
reprieve
 To the Soviet workers, work was not about income but self-
realization and actualization; there was a sense of socioeconomic
security and satisfaction from their work as they better society for
everyone
 Thus, to Soviet leadership, attitudes toward processes of work
was of uttermost importance than just focusing upon attitudes
toward work itself
 Soviet women
 Within the tsarist empire, women were expected to follow an otherwise
typical patriarchal familial structure, kept within these societal strictures
 According to socialist philosophers Marx and Engels, women’s plight
had been constructed by private property owners and capitalists, such
that the socialist movement called them the causal points of inequality
 Key socialist figures that were women include Nadezhda Krupskaya,
Alexandra Kollontai, and Inessa Armand
 Alexandra Kollontai had criticized the entire framework argument
of the feminist movement, citing that the issues of women were
not entirely separable from “struggle of labor and capital”
 She also cites that motherhood was a social duty expected of a
woman, as she would provide the state with “new labor units”
 In 1919, the Russian provisional government had legalized abortions
 Many revolutionaries and ideologues, such as Kollontai and Trotsky,
condemned the family institution as a “relic of the age of autocracy” and
an “instrument of women’s oppression”
 In 1927, the Soviet government defined the “state” as a main institution
for child upbringing, seeking to eliminate the idea of family and its
associated connotations as society built itself toward communism
 During the 1920s and 1930s, homeless children’s rates had
increased, and Soviet lawyers had shifted the blame towards the
lack of a “strong family institution”
 In 1936, the Soviet government had overturned the previous legislation
of their predecessors by illegalizing abortion and motherhood support,
as they had declared a “struggle against a frivolous attitude towards the
family and family responsibility” as men were attributed to lack of
alimony payments leading the issues of child homelessness
 A common theme worldwide during the 1920s and 1930s was the
prevalence of eugenics and supposed social engineering the next
generation to favorable racial attributes
 To the Nazis, they had wished to install a pure German bloodline
that traced itself back to the Aryan peoples of Persia who since
migrated to Europe, and sought the active destruction of all other
races, whether through passive manipulation of social structures
and active eradication through disturbing immoral means of
systematic and industrialized decimation
 A target of the Nazis’ ire were the Slavic peoples, and during the
Second World War, during the post-broken pact between the
Nazis and Soviets in the 1940s saw an extreme campaign of
attempting to entirely wipe out the Slavs
 The Slavs, especially the Red Army and its many resistance cells in
retracted Soviet territories, had fiercely fought against the
encroaching Nazi forces into the harsh Siberian winter
 Women had actively participated during the resistance efforts as
combatants, as women that lived in the Russian wilderness had
acquired hunting skills and were crafted marksmen, key anti-
infantry units during both world wars
 Otherwise, the idealized “Soviet woman” was expected to
demonstrate their loyalty to the state by becoming mothers and
producing future workers, thus not being provided rights in
 abundance compared to their male counterparts, being second-
class citizens and support units of the family to their husbands
 Soviet schools and education
 In 1919, the Soviets defined that “schools” were instruments of social
transformative processes and the “teachers” as communist educational
agents to the next generation
 Main topics taught in Soviet education were literature, Russian
language arts, history, social studies, basic military training, and
otherwise atheistic teaching
 History was primarily defined as a part of the ideological front,
necessitating being atheistic in its approach
 Past events were correlated to present concurrent events, such as
the USSR’s formation being the start of history, and all preceding
events led up to it
 Some major characteristics of 1930s Soviet textbooks regarding
history include “unbreakable union and friendship of peoples,”
and “struggle of peoples for liberation against class exploiters and
foreign enslavers”
 However, in the Russian population and Soviet territories, there was an
illiteracy rate of 60%, and the only literate people were those that led
urban lives and were young males
 Village schools for adults were oftentimes taught by local priests
 Accordingly, education was another outlet and means of attempting to
spread their ideology to the masses by the Bolsheviks
 Village teachers were supposedly to have a traditional attraction of
socialist revolutionary ideology
 The children and adolescents of the Soviet Union were divided into the
following
 Little Octobrists include children between 7 to 9 years old
 Pioneers included preteens and teens between the ages of 10 to
14
 Komsomol, shortened for All-Union Leninist Young Communist
League, included all those over age 14 to 26, where they were
prepared for ideological indoctrination and participation within
sociopolitical projects
 Soviet rights for women
  March 8th was hailed a time in which women were given more flexibility
in their choice of roles within Soviet society
 This meant the allowance of departments of Soviet women within
the workplace, including the attending of meetings, reception of
awards, and even the bestowing of a dedicated day in which
promised a “Worker’s Uprising against Kitchen Slavery”
Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union
 New Soviet Person
 The Soviets believed that physical training and sports had created a
development of harmony between one’s morals and physique,
beautifully merging them to strengthen body and mind
 According to Nikolai Podvoiskii, there was a need for Soviet citizens
to “develop courage, discipline, endurance, and strength”
 Furthermore, Nikolai Semashko recommended physical training
take one’s entire day
 Physical training became a Soviet prerequisite to achieving their full
communist society, as well as a connection between hygiene, cleanliness,
and health
 In a similar fashion, the cult of beauty was a prominent belief of
Italian fascism under Mussolini
 To the Soviets, healthy lifestyle was an indicator of the “new citizen”,
which were necessarily to thwart of capitalist “social diseases”, as coined
in 1919
 To Lenin, he defined similarly contentious issues of lower
personality traits being inherently linked to traditional
psychological manifestations due to capitalism, such as alcoholism
 The first All-Russian congress had emphasized in 1919 the necessity of
physical training, sports, and pre-conscription training to be a vital part
of a Soviet’s daily routine
 Throughout the 1920s, various discussions included ancient ideas
that also argued with harmonious human development, such as
Ancient Greek emphasis on honing one’s physique
 Physical education and military training had been interlinked,
which saw the militarization of these institutions, which in the
1930s, became “Ready for Labor and Defence of the USSR”
systems as a mandatory physical exam for young Soviet people
  In 1928, the first All-Union Workers’ Sports Days were held in Moscow,
and throughout the 1920s and 1930s were many sports day events,
performances, and parades
 According to sociologist data, the inverse had shown few people
had taken part in physical training and typically did not devote
themselves of hours to sports
 In the Moscow subway system, there existed a source of studying
physical education throughout the 1930s, such as the championed
regimen by Matvii Manizer and his body sculpting group which
often compared the “weak pre-revolutionary people” with the
“beautiful new Soviet man”
 Up until the middle of the 1930s, Soviet athletes were not allowed
to attend international sports conventions and competitions, until
they were granted the “honorable task” of demonstrating the new
Soviet man to the world, which meant many Soviet athletes that
participated were under immense control and surveillance of
Soviet security forces
 Throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, the idealized physical
athletic standard had shifted within the Soviet Union, which changed
from a physically toned man towards those of more intellectual growth
that could compete with the great minds of the West
 The Soviets believed great sport at competitions was pivotal in creating
national heroes of communism and as a means of propagating its
supremacy over the Western capitalists
 Both in the Nazi-held Berlin Olympics in 1936 and Moscow
Olympics in 1980 were examples of the Soviet regime’s push to
demonstrate itself as a means of producing the next social
evolution of mankind and their beauty
 However, the Western countries boycotted the 1980 Moscow
event and in response, the USSR did the same for the 1984 Los
Angeles Olympics
 Soviet labor clubs and reading houses
 During the early 1920s and the beginning of the Soviet legitimacy,
Trotsky created the formulate to be carried out within labor clubs, as a
means of “re-educating the worker” through participation in theatre,
music, literature, Marxist rhetoric, and sports
  After October 1917, many Russian workers were resettled into
apartments meant for the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia
 1918 saw the creation of the Soviet housing policy, which
abolished private property rights towards estate ownership
 According to party member Anatoliy Lunacharskyi, the
communal apartment program was a way of “helping to
transform all people into brothers”
 Furthermore, the Soviet philosophy was to aid and guide the
workers into forming into collectivist cliques, promoted
throughout the 1920s and 1930s as idealized housing in the USSR
 However, Soviet leadership had often privy themselves to estates
of high value and made the reservations to claiming them, albeit
being against communist values
 Due to the rapid industrialization of Russia, it had seen a
population boom which had eclipsed the housing market and
worsened it for many migrating into the cities
 Socialist city planning for the Soviets was for workers to live in barracks
adjacent to their industrial village territories, as they also attempted to
resettle many peasants to factories and manufacturing plants as well as
reconstructing a new daily living routine and socialist education
programs
 The initial plan was to have connected housing by corridor-
bridges between complexes on the second floor, having ease of
access to other amenities that were shared amongst occupants,
such as the labor club, dining hall, and library
 During this period, the liberation of Soviet women from
“enslavement” of the kitchen had been implemented and
integrated within apartment planning
Religion and Time in the USSR
 Soviet anti-religious movement
 During the Russian Empire, the Orthodox Church has openly supported
the tsar and White regime, thus branding themselves as active enemies
against the Red regime and Soviet nation
 Thus, Soviet leadership sought to subdue and replace organized
traditional religion with its own religious worship of the socialist
principles
  First proposed by ideologues Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim
Gorky, they suggested that mankind was at the center of religious
thought and education, rather than the omnipotent Abrahamic
deity
 The Soviet regime had nationalized Orthodox lands, separated
them from state affairs, prohibited their education and practice in
favor for more atheistic and scientific theories, and often saw
major success within the urban centers and children
 For the annual calendar within the USSR, there remained calendar
holidays, life cycle rites, and specific ceremonies for Marxist-Leninist
socialism to celebrate the cult of labor and Lenin
 Political rituals were also marked on their own special calendar of
leader cult and mass celebratory events
 To the Soviet leaders, this ritualistic atheism was to aid in one’s
reorganization of their private lives by presenting the dichotomy
of a global arena of struggle between good and evil, various icons
being replaced by “red corners”, gatherings akin to Orthodox
Christian liturgy, and celebration of the idea of communist party
unity and “leader-people” over God
 Soviet calendar
 The revolutionaries began the first anniversary of the October
Revolution in November 1918 at the Red Square
 1918 also marked the beginning of the new Soviet calendar, which
had also seen the revival of its carnival traditions and military
parades for the Red Army
 Other notable Soviet days in their calendar include
 All-Union holidays include New Year’s Day, the anniversary of
October Revolution (November 7), day of the Red Army
(February 23), and Labor Day (May 1)
 Physical culture parades
 New Year had replaced Christmas, and “spring holidays” rather
than Easter
 The Soviet leadership attempted to subvert daily life with teachings and
sayings from the Cult of Lenin
 Many reforms made were phrased under the slogan of “return of
Lenin’s principles”
  In 1923, Lenin had his works published, and any criticism of them
were considered hearsay
 Various Leninist corners were established and even some cities
were renamed after him
 The USSR conducted holidays in a controlled and initiatory manner,
focusing on the main principles: ostentatiousness, massiveness, and
theatricality
 These were made as events to further bolster Soviet propaganda
by demonstrating their socialist system
 In 1923, based on special recommendations from agitators within
the party concerned about holidays, their celebrations, and public
explanation behind their replacement of traditional Orthodox
Christian holidays were an extension of Soviet secularism
 The authorities attempted public interest in celebrating these
events within labor clubs, including concerts, films, theater, and
any other discussion against religion, which were often decorated
with posters and slogans advertising said space
 However, many criticisms of this calendar drive by the USSR had
left many citizens conflicted, as some cited the atmosphere of
matrimony and festivity occurred traditionally within the church
and how wondrous a sight it was during the holidays
 The Soviets created the New Year Day as a means of opposing
established Christmas holidays in 1929, with a slogan of “become
enemies of religion and friends of the forest”, solidifying itself as a
public holiday in 1936
 Springtime holidays were similarly inducted into Soviet secularist
programs, colloquially known to citizens as “Komsomol Easters”
 Various normative rituals conducted in church congress had been
rebranded, often with addition of “Red”, including red baptisms, red
Komsomol weddings, and non-religious funerals
 Red baptisms instead opted for a written fill-out questionnaire
pertaining to a child, their social origins and their potential future
prospect
 Red weddings occurred within labor clubs rather than churches,
removing religious connotations and encompassing more
communal celebrations
  Into the 1930s, various anti-religious rhetoric and actions were taken by
the Soviet state
 In 1925, the Union of the Godless was founded and sought to
indoctrinate children away from Orthodox Christian practice,
which was traditional in rural Russia pre-revolution
 In 1928, Stalin introduced his Five-Year Plan, which had included
mandates in which religious institutions would be seized and
destroyed, leading to various places of worship being razed
Sovietization of Memory and History
 According to the Bolsheviks, 1917 was the point of origin for Soviet history
going forward, which occurred after the seizure of Petrograd and other
territories that established the foundations of the Soviet Union
 They sought to define their own interpretation of historical events
circulating their philosophy onwards, as proposed by Marxist historians
that included Mikhail Pokrovsky, by application of social class
foundations over nationalistic identity
 The 1930s was considered the Stalinization of sciences, alongside historical
science
 Maxim Gorky was an ideologist of a future Soviet paradigm shift that
sought to record the history of Soviet factories and manufacturing
plants, highlighting to Josef Stalin that all aspects must been known, as
“illuminated by the teaching of Marx-Lenin-Stalin”
 Soviet historical methodology often rewrote history from a Soviet
perspective and its ideological tendencies throughout the Soviet period,
which was not unheard of in totalitarian regimes of similar vein
 According to the Soviet historical consensus, the October Revolution was
explained as the following
 The Commission on the History of the October Revolution and the Communist
Party, or Istpart, had been founded in 1920 to best apply communist
philosophy onto spacetime events within Bolshevik territorial authority
 It was split into 3 major divisions, which in part was the centralized
Istpart, republican bureaus, and local bureaus, all of which were tasked
with documentation and accounts of all participating revolutionaries
 They were also responsible for the organization of “evenings of
memoirs” dedicated revolutionaries, Soviet-ordained historical
 publications and Soviet-accepted archives and arrangements for
exhibitions
 According to Frederic Corney whilst researching the October
Revolution, he dubs it as the Soviet “Memory Project”, characterizing
memoirs of October revolutionaries collected in the 1920s
 He discusses that it was not merely a campaign of memoir
collection of the participants, but also a visual medium by
dedicating places after these peoples throughout Soviet territory
 Decorations during each October anniversary was placed onto
buildings and town squares, demonstrations are held and
performances that reenacted revolutionary chronology
 The central Ishpart had constructed a guideline of writing Soviet memoirs, such
as Nikolai Baturin’s 1921 “The Basic Outline for Memoirs”, which often
answered questions of Bolshevik characterization and work in historical
archiving
 According to Joseph Gelis in his methodological essay “How to Write
Memoirs” within the 1925 Ishpart journal, “Proletarskaya revolyutsiya”,
in which he criticized memoirs that lavished in self-description, as not
reflecting reality and placing themselves in favorability, arguing they were
harmful to the coming generations as a means of influence and hypnosis
towards personality cults
 Within the “evenings of memoirs”, the Soviet authorities sought to make the
populous aware of the mythicized October Revolution and constructing
embellished accounts of said memoirs
 A means of creating a consensus of the propagated information during
these events led to participants with a questionnaire pertaining to the
events described, like writing short autobiographies, throughout the
1920s
 This was a means of guiding the participants to construct and present
their own memoirs through implicative answers from curated questions
and avoidance of topics that were not positive for the Soviet regime
 The goal of the survey process was a means of integrating the
perception, belief, and demonstration that the October Revolution was
an important point of their own lives, as a means of subversive
manipulation of their memories by the Soviet revolutionaries
 Regarding the history of Soviet factories, it was a major rewrite of history
during the 1930s as part of Stalin’s plan to enforce his “scholarly research” and
 “historical concepts” that he wished to propagate about the greatness of the
USSR
 The 1931 publication of Proletars’ka revoliutsiia had included a Stalin
correspondence regarding questions of Bolshevik recall of histories,
Stalin’s response being his dissatisfaction of the current history records
and that he wished to institute his own subordinate historical science and
correctness, preluding to his skewed bias that would form the basis of
his regime
 Though championed as a means of reframing Russian history according
to Bolshevik axioms and emphasizing the socialist “class struggle”
narrative, Stalin had used this campaign to ensure the rewrite of USSR
history was socialist but beneficial to himself
 By 1931, the Soviet authorities had announced their new historical
record project, which sought to recount the historical background of
industry within the USSR, beginning with the creation of the Commission
on the History of Factories and Plants by the Central Committee under
proletariat Maxim Gorky’s leadership
 According to comrade Eugene Dobrenko, Gorky’s fascination with history
which aligned with the Bolshevik account and narrative led to him creating
various projects such as the aforementioned
 Other projects included “History of the Civil War”, “History of Cities
and Villages”, “History of the Village”, “History of Urban Culture”, and
“History of Two Five-Year Plans”
 Jochen Hellbeck had referred to Gorky’s writings being inclined
towards the philosophy of Nietzscheanism, believing that the
revolution marked a new beginning of history that began with the new
social order and liberation of humanity’s heroism to allow for a better
and newer way of life under communism
 As such, Gorky was responsible for leading the 1932 Union of Soviet
Writers and 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers, which had focused upon
achieving Socialist Realism as described by Gorky’s “historiomania”
 In his “History of Factories and Plants”, Gorky reflected that it should
have been written by the workers who were active within the
construction, occupation, and responsibility of the industry, thus being
the sole proprietors of their own history in which they could relay to one
another
  He further placed emphasis on the work and writing that allowed for
workers to formulate the “new Soviet world and citizen” through labor
and satisfaction in one’s life being a part of social welfare, relating the
productivity with creativity and joy as well as learning to know love
 The Commission on the History of Factories and Plants were tasked with the
following
 To legitimize the power claim of the Soviet regime over the tsarist
Russian Empire
 To demonstrate Soviet superiority and system that supposedly eclipsed
the capitalist ideology
 To educate the Soviet people to realize their place in society as a “new
citizen”
 By collection of the archived materials for use to organize Soviet
exhibitions as to champion the first couple goals
 Gathering worker recollections in an autobiographical memoir-like style,
the conduction of interviews with participating individuals in the
construction of socialism, and organization of “evenings of memoirs”
 To construct descriptions of specific plants with local commissions,
which were then oversighted by state and central commissions for
agreeability of the regime prior to publication
 The main editorial board for the History of Factories and Plants project
published 12 journals between 1932 to 1934, with the contents of
methodological recommendations, memoirs of the workers, and historic
exposition on industrial enterprise, alongside a list of approved facilities
to write about in their essays
 Many of the plants were constructed prior to the revolution in 1917,
emphasizing them being a part of the turning point of the revolution
come October, rebranding the workers as liberators of themselves from
enslavement by capitalists and seeking their own prosperity
 The “evenings of memoirs” events were aimed to collect more
information of worker’s accounts to manipulate in the publications and
propaganda, as well as encouraging them to continue to achieve the
Soviet goal by emphasizing labor and its fruits, such as socialist
competition, development and improvement of operations, and
mobilization of future performance in industry
 Similarly, these were a means of financing and promoting the
construction of the subway system beneath the capital of Moscow,
 placing it as a convenience and large-scale social welfare project to the
benefit of the workers and symbol of communist motivation
 The Soviet publication authorities had focused upon key buzzwords in which
they had emphasized and used in repetitious fashion
 The new Soviet citizen, especially Soviet men, were often referred within
a collective and inclusive “we”
 Those that were deemed ideological enemies and opposed to socialism
and communism under the umbrella term of the alienating “they”, which
included kulaks, nepmans, priests, and deviant “former people” and
“nationalists” as well as foreigners
 The memoirs often idealized the Soviet worker and their efforts to the
collective gain of the system in stark contrast to the selfishness and sole
growth of one’s own finances and wealth
 Laborers were often given militarized terminology regarding their work
when described, often with words including “struggle”, “fight”, and
“front”
 Workers were to describe themselves within their own group as a
collective, as the Soviet individual was part of the larger Soviet collective
society
 Through various propaganda, the Soviet government had planted the seed of
distrust in the collective image of foreigners, branding them in the minds of the
workers as “others”, being estranged within the USSR and acted as active
agents of pro-capitalist Americanism
 This was especially apparent from the late 1920s to early 1930s onwards,
as the world experienced a devastating economy recession period
dubbed The Great Depression, thus the West at the time was easily
molded by Soviet and socialist thinkers as a place of economic crisis and
massive unemployment
 Throughout the 1930s, the Soviets glorified its many achievements and
championed its various “proletarian heroes” while starkly contrasting
them with the “decline of the West”
 Supposedly, the American perception of the Russians, much less the
Soviet socialists, was akin to “savages… barefoot and dirty in shorts”, a
permanent projection of the decline of the Russian Empire amidst its
civil war
 In an interview with Zhenia Romanko, leader of the female brigade, by
the DniproHES commission, she spoke of how her fellow female
 workers discussed foreigners and their lifestyles, depicting themselves an
example of camaraderie and serving the ideals of communism without
corrupting themselves to the lows of capitalist exploitation
 Further, she had proclaimed they managed to educate their
American brethren and act as beacons of proper socialist living
and behavior, away from their barbaric capitalist-driven deviancy
 For example, Romanko did not consume alcohol, and often
sought to convince foreigners to remove it from their diet entirely
as well as not to drink such vile beverages as a temptation to their
fellow workers
 She also believed that the dances after lunch break, as afforded by
the Soviet managerial system, allowed them to freely express
themselves and their happiness while not feeling constrained to a
predeterminant style of dance, “the foxtrot”
 Other notable figures as championed by the Soviet leadership were
Alexei Stakhanov, who was featured on a cover issue of TIME
magazine, and Nikita Izotov as the perfect self-motivated and selfless
Soviet worker
 In 1928, Sergei Eisenstein released his pro-communist film within the
USSR, named “October: Ten Days That Shook The World” as a pseudo-
documentary of the October Revolution
 The 1920s campaign by the Soviet Union was a means of rewriting their history
and focusing it on a crafted projection of the October Revolution, whereas the
1930s were more focused on industrial history and their sites to demonstrate
the boons of communism
 However, it must be understood that these were fixtures of the Soviet
propaganda machine, which also sought to cover its involvement in the
genocide of Ukrainians by the Soviet leaders during the Holodomor as
well as suppressing non-aligned philosophical intelligentsia
 The Bolsheviks had curated their own history in such a way that
presented only the most positive of the communist system and ideology,
while simultaneously redacting and silencing any dissent or truth of the
actual events under their governance, in a constant system of revision
and censorship
 The construction of this Soviet history continued well after WWII, in
which it was named the “Great Patriotic War”; however, the trends set
forth from their initial success would not last until the death knell of the
 USSR, which had unraveled entirely post-1991 as many previously
named “enemies of the state” had been re-evaluated
 For example, many of the Ukrainians that had suffered under the
Soviet regime were posthumously exonerated for being falsely
accused and persecuted
 Excursions of Soviet history was heavily surveyed and scrutinized by the
leadership as to maintain a “correct” account that aligned with the political
interests of the Bolsheviks
 Museums within the Soviet Union were important in preserving the supposed
achievements and tangible history that propelled it as an industrial superpower
in comparison to the United States, as well as focusing on the proper points of
how communism and the conduct of the USSR were inseparable in everything
 Various Soviet-era monuments were constructed in non-central locales across
cities and by train stations
 Post-USSR, many of these old monuments championing Lenin and
other Bolshevik figures were toppled and replaced by more culturally
significant ones instead
 However, many still do remain from the Soviet times, such as the
“Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” constructed in 1937 as an expression of
“Socialist Realism”; or the “Monument to Artem” in 1927, reflecting
Soviet “constructivism”
The USSR and World War II
 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939
 In World War I, the postwar Entente victors had reduced German’s
military and economic influence through heavy concessions
 Due to Russia’s civil war between the White tsarists and Red
Leninists, Russia was largely removed from the conflict and had
formally agreed to neutrality for the remainder of the war
 In 1920, the member nations of the Entente had formed the first
congressional of the world, the League of Nations
 By 1933, Adolf Hitler had been elected Chancellor of Germany and had
overthrown the weak Weimar Republic created by the Entente victors
 He had championed himself on the topics of Revanchism
against the Allied powers, seeking to return to imperial German
borders; often spoke on the German “Aryan race” and its
 supremacy over other ethnic Germans, which had also questioned
and persecuted Jewish ancestry
 In 1938, the Munich Agreement had been signed, which allowed
Germany to annex the region of Sudeten
 The former Allied powers of Britain and France attempted to
avoid war against the aggressive Germans under Hitler, giving
them extreme leeway as to ensure no conflict broke out
 Across the various Czech districts, the number of ethnic Germans
that populated across the former imperial boundaries was greatly
entrenched between 1934 and 1935
 Era artistic pieces depicted Hitler and Stalin in a consecrated
marriage, with Stalin as the bride and Hitler as the groom, or
otherwise Hitler dancing with a bear, being political illustrations
of this supposed peace between the fascists and communists
 On August 23, 1938, the Nazi and Soviet regimes met in secret and had
signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which had promised a non-
aggression treatise between Germany and Russia, as well as agreed
cooperative annexation of territories of Poland
 In September of 1939, the Soviets and Nazis enacted their annexation
plans of central Europe
 The Nazis began their invasion of Poland on September 1,
causing chaos in the terms of resistance and aid from the British
and French, who were hesitant on entering the war and fulfilling
their promise of sovereignty
 By September 3, the British and French had formally declared war
on the aggressive Nazis for annexing Polish territory, but would
not allocate any proper military aid or resources
 On September 17, the Soviets had formally invaded the eastern
fringes of Poland and annexed them, causing even more
hesitation between France and Britain as they sought to not
declare war on Stalinist Russia
 By September 28, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had
formed an agreement on how they would divide Europe
according to their newly acquired territories
 By October 1939, Poland was partitioned for the fourth time
between the Nazi and Soviet occupations
  Between 1939 and 1941, the following occurred between this treatise
between the Soviets and Nazis
 The Soviets provided Germany with raw materials for industry
and grain
 The Soviet NKVD and Nazi SS Gestapo had collaborated as joint
intelligence agencies
 In October 1939, the Baltic nations of Estonia, Lithuania, and
Latvia were annexed as well as the Soviets setting up various
military bases across these new territories
 Within the annexed territories of eastern Poland, western Belarus,
western Ukraine, and Bessarabia (Moldova), the Soviets employed
various purges of and mass relocations by deporting locals
 The Katyn massacre in 1940 saw the mass executions of Polish
prisoners of war, numbering up to 21857; this was later classified
as a war crime in 2012
 The Soviets had reignited conflict with the Finns, in what they call
the Winter War or the Finnish Continuation War of 1939-1940
 The League of Nations had motioned for the expulsion of the
Soviets from the congressional union, but it was obvious to all
powers that the League had failed to do its job and was otherwise
useless in its control of global aggression
Nazi Occupation of Soviet Territories
 By the breaking of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 by the Nazis, the 2
major belligerents of the Second World War became the following
 The Allies had been comprised of Great Britain, the United States, and
the Soviet Union, initially also including France prior to its annexation
and puppet statehood of Vichy France
 The Axis powers included Germany, fascist Italy under Mussolini, fascist
Hungary, and imperialist Japan
 Their conflict would continue from June 22, 1941, until May 9, 1945, in
the European theater, whilst the Americans would conclude their Pacific
theater campaign against Japan after Germany’s surrender
 Between September 1939 and 1945, the Soviets and Nazis initially
cooperated in the annexation of Baltic and Scadinavian nations,
culminating the Nazis’ Barbarossa Directive in 1940
  This was the Nazi regime’s formal declaration of war against their
Soviet allies, as a means of exterminating the communists, their
leadership and elite, and all Slavs as a “degenerate peoples”
 However, the Nazis’ treachery would be uncovered in their application
of their successful Blitzkrieg war doctrine on the Western Front as they
moved to open the Eastern Front, attacking on June 22, 1941
 This involved attacking on 3 major lines to consolidate a frontal
push into the heartland of Russia, through various Baltic states
and into sieging Leningrad, through Ukraine and the Caucasus
Mountains, and directly reaching Moscow through a united push
 The initial success of the Nazi invasion into Soviet territories
persisted for months
 Stalin had given a speech on July 3, 1941, condemning the Nazis and
Hitler for this betrayal and seek to decimate their forces after repelling
them from the Russian heartland
 The USSR at the time of hostilities between them and the Nazis had suffered
significantly in their counter-offensives
 The Siege of Leningrad was a prolonged war of attrition between the
Soviets and Nazis, where the Nazis had taken all surrounding and some
sections of the city, causing 2½ years of famine and mass starvation,
with upwards of 1 million civilian casualties, and the experience of the
harshest Russian winters further expanding the death count
 The Great Terror of 1937 was the political purge campaign by Josef
Stalin to eliminate any dissent within the communist party and potential
external threats
 The Battle of Sevastopol was a major conflict on the Eastern Front
where the Soviets had severely repelled German and Romanian forces
over 250 days, preventing them from crossing through Crimea and into
southern Russia
 The Battle of Kyiv in November 1943 was another major battle on the
Eastern Front which resulted on the Nazi garrison being surrounded and
cut off by Soviet assault, which led to their retreat of the city and mass
evacuation of the region
 Many of the Soviet prisoners of war were victims of the
Holocaust and send to Nazi concentration camps in Majdanek
and Auschwitz, interned by “special groups of the Schutzstaffel”
  The total number of casualties sits between 100000 to 150000
people
 The Babyn Yar occurred on September 29 and 30 of 1941, seeing the
extermination of 33771 Jews, during the German occupation of Kyiv
 The employment of Barrier Troops, which were used to block and
enforce anti-retreat military doctrine as commissars, locating themselves
on both the rear and front lines behind the main advancing force to
prevent deserters and capturing suspected spies
 Between October 1941 and July 1942 was the steadfast Soviet defense at
the Battle of Sevastopol, lasting 250 days of attrition and guerrilla war
 Between September 1941 to April 1942, in the harshest winter of the
region, the Battle of Moscow halted the German blitzkrieg
 From July 1942 to February 1943 was the worst conflict on the Eastern
Front at the Battle of Stalingrad
 Between July to August 1943, the Battle of Kursk was the largest tank
engagement in military history, involving upwards of 6000 tanks between
both belligerents
 To further starve the Germans from supplies as they extended into
Russia, the Soviets employed scorched earth doctrine to their policy,
destroying infrastructure and denying their functions for the Nazis,
causing them to overextend their reach
 However, the Soviets had destroyed a Russian dam and shifted
the blame onto Wehrmacht as a means of sabotage, which caused
countless deaths of Soviets and destruction of various villages
 Nazi ideology and Slavs
 In the eyes of Hitler and his Nazi ideology, Russia proved to be great
land wasted away by the inferior peoples of the Slavs and Armenians
 The Nazis had also regarded the Estonians and Georgians as
lesser but not as despicable, albeit not anywhere near the German
“Aryans”
 The Germans were invading the Soviet Union to take the land
and prepare it for German-blooded colonization, using their
newfound prisoners as ostarbeiters (German: forced laborers),
attempting to even persuade many Soviet citizens to surrender
themselves to the Third Reich and seek asylum in Germany as
workers
  Suspicions of sedition were not uncommon in Stalinist Russia, as he had
branded the people of Crimean Tatars and Muslims as “Nazi
collaborators” in his slanderous propaganda campaign, leading to their
deportation into Central Asia during 1943 and 1944, and numbering
190000 between May 18 to 20 of 1944
 When hostilities rose between the USSR and Germany, many
German citizens were deported, due to their ethnic backgrounds
and potential “loyalty” to Hitler’s regime
Crimean Tatar Deportation
 During May 1944, the Crimean Tatars were accused of being foreign
collaborators with the Nazis and Westerners, and were given the ultimatum
 They were given only 15 minutes to gather their things and sort
themselves to leave their houses
 Between May 18 to 20, 190000 Crimean Tatars had been deported to the
interior of Central Asia
 This was an extension of pre-Soviet Imperial Russian policy regarding
Crimean Tatars since 1783
 Crimea had undergone Detatarization in which many of their towns
and villages were renamed to fit within Soviet nomenclature
 Afterwards, Crimea became a center of Soviet colonialism as they sought
to employ Russification by bringing Soviet citizens into the region to
form a new society
 In various Soviet publications, the Tatar language was banned, and they
were prohibited to return to Crimea until the 1980s
 Many Crimean Tatars experienced a shared sense of “Lost
Home”, as many could not return to their homes as new people
occupied them
 Crimea was considered a strategic location on the edges of Russian
territories, since the Napoleonic Wars, through the World Wars, and into
the contemporary age of the 2010s and 2020s of conflict
 It provides a direct route into the southern tip of Russia and allow
any potential enemy to support a two-front strategy if another
invasion into Russia occurred
 Throughout the Eastern Front between the Nazis and Soviets, many of the
Baltic nations hosted their own resistance cells against both major powers while
they waged war on their land, holding them in the crossfire
  In the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia had partisans form
“Forest Brothers” against Soviet invaders
 In the mainland Balkans, the Ukrainians formed their own Insurgent
Army, while the Belarusians started their Liberation Army Black Cats
 Oftentimes, they had the support of their cultural populations and were
renown for fighting in the mountainous and arboreal areas
 During the conflict in the Balkans between the Nazis and Soviets across the
Eastern Front, many people had sought to evacuate workers to reassign them
to factories in safer regions or continue their production until the last man
 40% of the USSR’s territory had fallen to the Nazis, including Ukraine,
Belarus, the Baltic states of Moldavia and Crimea, southern Russia, and
some of the Caucasus Mountains; thus, 45% of Soviet citizens had fallen
under occupation by the Germans
 Wartime Soviet propaganda had framed the Eastern Front and its conflict
against the Germans as the Great Patriotic War
 They often featured derogatory images of the Germans and various
heroes of the USSR in movies and posters
 On July 3, 1941, Stalin gave a speech in which he outlined this new
conflict between Russian and German peoples as the “Great Fatherland
War”, akin to the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812, noting its
“sacred war” by the Soviet people and their “immortal feat” against their
enemies
 Various posters had included similar messaging along the lines of “For
the Motherland, for honor, for freedom, and for Stalin”
 Other notable Soviet media included songs of patriotism, newspaper
publications, novels, and films
 Konstantin Simonov in 1942 wrote the poem Kill him!
 Ilya Ehrenburg in 1942 wrote a newspaper article titled Kill!
 A famous slogan was “Kill the German!” and “Kill the invader-
enemy for the honor of the wife, for the life of the children!”
 Many features of Soviet wartime movies described the following
 Prewar happy Soviet life, wartime depression and
exhaustion
 Spoke of heroic acts and conduct by various Soviet soldiers
and civilians, but never spoke of their suffering
 Glorification of the Soviet people, from throughout the
socialist republics, and the Red Army
  Documentaries were usually higher received by Soviet
audiences
 Other movie topics included focusing on the Red Army
victory during the Battle of Moscow and the partisan
movements
 Comparatively, 1920s Soviet movies focused on the people
and their collectivist unity, whereas the 1940s shifted to the
individual and their contributions to the war effort
 In 1944, a wartime film was made about Zoia
Kosmodemianskaia of the Konsomol and partisan
movement
 Many images conjured of the Soviets’ enemy was of the fascists
and primarily the Germans
 1941 propaganda often depicted the Germans and Hitler as
a silly man and cowardly, akin to wolves or vermin
 Key characteristics of German troops were cruelty,
mercilessness, insidiousness, thievery, and murder, entirely
devoid of human traits, embodying inhumanity and evil
 Synonyms of the Germans were aggressors, occupiers, and
invaders
 Soviet propaganda during the war often followed the
guideline of “We will mercilessly defeat and destroy the
enemy!”
 They extended this image of the “enemy of the state” to
collaborators and seditionists
 This included the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Baltic “Forest
Brothers”, and Russian Liberation Army led by Andrey
Vlasov, a Red Army general
 The Liberation Army was often composed of prisoners of
war and White Army members of the previous regime
 However, they were often framed as Nazi collaborators and
allies to them
 The image of the Soviet Hero was depicted as ready for their patriotic
duty and fight against the German, ideologically communist and a
partisan
 They hated the German people and wished to avenge their fallen
brethren
  Embodied the characteristics of bravery and sacrifice, laying down
their lives for the Motherland, honor, freedom, and Stalin; some
even beckoning them to defend Lenin’s honor and the heart of
the USSR in Moscow
 During the 1940s, religion within the USSR remained otherwise suppressed but
had seen a resurgence due to the nationalist propaganda
 While in the 1920s saw the prosecution and dismantling of the religious
Orthodoxy, as they had embodied attempting to return to the Russian
Empire and gain their power and prestige once more
 Thus, during the Nazi invasion, the Soviet leadership sought to reframe
religion such that the Germans could not claim themselves as Christian
crusaders
 The Soviets had contacted the Orthodox Christians in Russia and used
their churches as further propaganda spheres, while granting them
printing rights, church ceremonies, and radio broadcasts on Radio
Moscow
 The Orthodoxy leaders had also visited the Kremlin and Stalin to grant
their blessing and God’s permission to defend the Russian Motherland
 Russian nationalism was revitalized during this period, through various media
 Movies and novels had become open on Imperial Russian generals and
statesmen, as the foundation of Soviet principles and strength
 Stalin’s speech in November 1943 discussed 13 th Century Russian
general Alexander Nevsky against Teutonic Knight invasion in the
Battle on the Ice, and Tsarist general Aleksander Suvorov a century
prior against Napoleon’s invading forces
 Nationalism was viewed as a powerful motivation device to inspire
resistance against the German aggressors and solidify the belief that the
Soviet leadership was friends of the Soviet people
 This also included attempting to champion Pan-Slavism through
including Yugoslav, Czech, and Polish partisans are Soviet heroes
 Alexander Vasilyevich Alexandrov composed The Sacred War in 1941,
alongside many other patriotic songs by other Soviet artists
 In 1945, Stalin had celebrated a toast dedicated to the Russian peoples of
the USSR; at the Red Square in Moscow, the Red Army was hailed as
Europe’s liberators on May 9, 1945, and annual celebration of their
overcoming of Nazi Germany is celebrated on June 24 since 1945
The Cold War and Stalin’s Death
 Soviet casualties during the Great Patriotic War numbered upwards of 28
million to no less than 7 million, with 5 million interned as prisoners of war and
ostarbeiters
 The 3 main Allied leaders of the United States, United Kingdom, and USSR
met in Crimea for the Yalta Conference between February 4 to 11 in 1945
 US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, UK Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, and USSR General Secretary Josef Stalin met to discuss
potential plans going forward in their diplomatic actions after handling
Germany
 However, with rising tensions between the ideological Soviets and the
progressive Americans, success of the USSR’s contributions to the Allied
war effort was lessened, causing further fragility of the uneasy peace
 Furthermore, Poland would be divided once more between the new
coalition of occupied German territories and the Soviet Union
 Later in the year, the Western nations formed the United Nations to
succeed the failed League of Nations, and Ukraine and Belarus had
participated in their Assembly
 The UN passed its first Resolutions by concurring with the consensus of
dividing Germany amongst the Allied powers of the United States,
United Kingdom, France, and the USSR, as well as Berlin between the
US and USSR, with hopes of reuniting the German territories in a
Denazified state
 However, as tensions rose and suspicions irked both superpowers, this
reunification of Germany was barred by Soviet initiation, resulting in the
construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961
 East Germany was held by the Soviets, with only the eastern part of
Berlin also being theirs, while the Americans, British, and French held
the western portions of Germany and Berlin, as partitioned in 1949
 Winston Churchill had given his infamous 1946 speech, coining the term
“Iron Curtain” that befell Europe as the USSR positioned itself to
seemingly intimidate and threaten European autonomy
 Soviet espionage had allowed them to recover the secrets of the
Manhattan Project that led to the American construction of nuclear
devices, further dividing and causing turmoil between them
 The USSR had their own population boom in which between 1948 to
1953, their army had staffed just under 3 million to over 5 million
  The separation of the capitalist West and communist East became center
stage, especially so with both the Soviets and Americans possessing
nuclear arsenals and other powers following suit
 Thus, many of the outer territories of the USSR that buffered Russia from
mainland Europe had undergone Sovietization
 The Balkans, west Ukraine, and west Belarus were primary targets of
ensuring loyalty to the Soviet regime
 The implementation of collectivism in these socialist republics was
important as an ideological staging ground to convert Westerners to
Soviet industrial supremacy
 However, in the last years of Stalin, major deportations of many
supposed resistance members and dissidents were sent gulags in the
depths of western Russia of Siberia and moved away from their
communities in eastern Soviet territories for easier monitoring
 Between August and September of 1945, around 60000 Lithuanians had
been deported; February 1946 saw the deportation of 40000 people from
the Balkans, and on October 21, 1947, west Ukrainians numbering
78000 had been relocated to Siberia and Kazakhstan
 In lieu of these mass forced relocations, pro-Soviet people were moved
from other socialist republics to repopulate the region and finalize its
purge of anti-Soviet elements
 In a lesser repetition of the Holodomor, Ukraine had experienced another
major famine during 1946 to 1947
 Anti-Semitism was still a rampant belief worldwide, and remained heavily
promoted between 1947 to 1953 under Stalin in the USSR
 Stalin was a hardline opponent to the establishment of the Israeli state in
Palestine which the Americans had overlooked, causing him to form
more anti-Semitic legislative decisions in his last years
 Many within the Politburo had become anti-Semites and often erred on
the side of caution to remain on Stalin’s good side lest they be executed
or deported, seeking his approval by the removal of Russian Jews
 In 1952, a plot was formed against Stalin’s physicians, who were all
Jewish, in which they were falsely accused of attempting to assassinate
the General Secretary within the Kremlin’s hospital facilities; this
resulted in their deportation and inadequate replacements, which would
detriment Stalin during his time of death alongside his longstanding fear
Khrushchev and the Soviet Union
 Sovietology is the study of the Soviet Union and its culture and society
 Between 1953 and 1957, there was a revitalization of “collective
leadership” in the USSR much like how it was during the birth of the
nation between 1923 to 1927
 Within the Politburo, comrade Malenkov was responsible for many of
the bloodied purges within the Soviet leadership and dissidents, like
during the 1949 Leningrad Affair
 Comrade Beria was the head of the NKVD, the Soviet Union’s secret
police, since 1938 by Stalin’s appointment, and was known to stash
plenty of blackmail materials on all party leaders
 Comrade Molotov was a major candidate for many foreign opinions in
terms of Soviet leadership due to his delegacies and public appearances
 Comrades Mikoyan and Khrushchev were other major members of the
inner Soviet circle of Stalin
 Malenkov, Molotov, and Mikoyan had supported the return to a
collective leadership type of governance after Stalin’s untimely death,
with both Beria and Khrushchev vying for the position of vozhd
(Russian: “leader”)
 In 1953, shortly after the death of Stalin, Beria had been arrested as
Khrushchev established a coup d’etat for the position of Soviet General
Secretary, with the aid of Red Army hero and Marshal Zhukov
 Among many of Beria’s egregious crimes, he was also accused of
actively working as a foreign spy within the Bolshevik party during
since 1919, particularly with British intelligence services
 The larger accusation was followed by the active undermining of
collectivist agriculture within the Soviet system, which both
crimes had only been suspicions of malicious activity
 After Khruschev’s rise to and consolidation of the leadership position
between 1953 to 1957, the active persecutions based on anti-Semitic
conduct were dropped, many of the victims between the late 1940s and
early 1950s of Stalin’s fabricated criminal convictions and sham trials
were rehabilitated and reintegrated as was during the Leningrad Affair in
which many party leaders were accused of seditious activity such as
citing to harbor anti-Soviet sentiments
 Many newspaper publications had begun dropping the mention of
Stalin during these stages of Destalinization and after the reveal of
 the “Secret Speech” in which many of Stalin’s acts were
condemned and deemed criminal
 Mass amnesties within the gulag system began as many citizens as
possible that were sent to these faraway prison camps had been
returned to their home and relayed their experiences, even writing
memoirs regarding their forced labor and poor conditions
 Between 1953 and 1954, uprisings began in the gulags between many of
the political prisoners had organized into riots, often comprised of
Ukrainian nationalists, Polish Army prisoners, and Baltic inmates
 In 1953, the first major gulag riot within the Arctic Circle, at
Vorkuta, Norilsk
 Workday hours were reduced to 9 hours, the allowance of family
correspondences was permitted, and prisoners were no longer
encoded with numbers and letters
 However, in the gulag of Kengir, Kazakhstan had experienced its
own uprising that lasted 40 days in 1954, however was violently
suppressed and led to casualties within the hundred and the
involvement of 5 Soviet tanks
 Nikita Khrushchev
 According to Kenez, Khrushchev’s emergence to the top of Soviet
leadership during the archaic period of transition after Stalin’s death is a
surprising highlight of Soviet history, as nobody could have predicted his
propulsion into the seat of General Secretary
 Khrushchev was renown for his energy and ambition, albeit having
peasant blood within his veins and previously working as a miner
 His major strength in relation to his public outreach was that he was a
working man much like them, thus it allowed him to safely navigate the
sociopolitical imagination of the populous
 Between 1946 and 1947, he had become the head of the Ukrainian party,
and called for Stalin’s focus onto the 1947 Ukrainian famine for
provisions and protection of its Ukrainian citizens
 During the 20th Party Congress on February 25, 1956, the leaked
transcript of Khruschev’s address to the Soviet council spoke on the
purging of 70% of the Central Committee under Stalin during his purges
and named 1500 delegates killed by his order in the “Secret Speech”
 Some suspect that he had criticized Leninist ideas such as
collectivization from his experience in Ukraine, the use of famines
 as a means of population control and social censure since the
1930s, and potentially linking Stalin to Trotsky’s death
 Khrushchev had criticized Stalin’s leadership rather than the
Soviet system, and spoke of the excess of collectivization, as well
as Stalin’s war plans, deportation of nationals that were not
“Soviet” enough, and otherwise anti-Semitic rhetoric
 He had even gone as far as to official accuse Stalin of having the
intent and orchestrating the death of comrade Kirov in his
“auspicious” circumstances in 1934
 Coined by Ilya Ehrenberg, she named the period between 1956
to 1964 as “Khrushchev’s Thaw”; Fitzpatrick elaborates as a
movement to rejuvenate national cultures across the USSR
without allowing anti-Soviet sentiments to foster
 The motive of Stalin’s forced deportation of certain ethnic groups within
the Soviet Union and his Great Purges during 1937 and 1938 were
encouraged by comrades Kaganovich, Molotov, and Malenkov, which
had been revealed to the public during the process of Destalinization
 Though many victims of Stalin’s purges were rehabilitated, many
of the politically opposed inmates remained in Soviet custody and
remained in the gulags
 In 1957, the Soviet government had restored the Chechno-Ingush
ASSR, allowing Chechens and Ingush peoples to return to the
region of Chechnya
 400000 Chechens had been forcefully relocated to Kazakhstan
and further into Central Asia in 1944
 Soviet leadership had promoted public discussion and cultural
liberalization within their determined parameters, however
according to Kenez, post-Stalin USSR had been built on the
“rotten foundation” of its tyrannical rule
 The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 had become so unruly that their
leader had requested aid from the Soviet government and Red Army,
who responded in kind with shipments of troops and armor into the
capital of Budapest
 At the same time, the Polish workers had organized their own
protests against the local communist government for major
famines caused by tight food distribution, leading to public in
Poznań
 Tsar Nikita
 In 1954, the Soviet leaders launched the Virgin Lands campaign, which
sought to fertilize and enable cultivation on land deemed too difficult to
convert into viable agricultural sectors, such as in southern Siberia,
Central Asia, and Kazakhstan
 About 13 million hectares was repurposed for increased
agricultural output, land which was not arable prior to the project
 Over 300000 young Soviet citizens had moved eastward, in a
similar momentous occasion of the rapid industrialization
campaign during the 1930s, which saw the construction of various
factories and manufacturing plants
 People had come to adjust to the newer climate of the more
temperate zones across the USSR, as well as motivated major
infrastructural projects like housing and transportation
 Many of the migrants were members of the Komsomol who
sought better opportunities out in these prepared lands to prosper
in the agricultural sector
 Corn had become a staple of animal feed as its key component, being
the best and most abundant crop, being the main project to greatly
increase meat production within the USSR
 Across various regions, the culmination of corn fields had
numbered in millions of hectares, albeit in poorer-than-expected
fertile soil
 By 1955, it had proven to be a tried success, but the overall
productivity and yield had proven unsustainable for future crops
and food stockpiles
 By 1959, Khrushchev had made a trip with a Soviet delegation to
the United States as a means of promoting Soviet supremacy in its
core fields of agriculture and industrial balance
 Communal apartment complexes, dormitories, and barracks were
constructed during nationwide construction projects to enable available
housing across the Soviet Union from the 1920s onwards
 Between 1956 and 1965, millions of Soviet citizens had settled
into these khrushchevki apartments, having been named after
the General Secretary himself for the initiative
  The layout of the complexes was based on connecting panels and
five level buildings, which accommodated single families for the
privileged
 However, there was a waitlist for many of the employees that
would be responsible for maintaining these complexes, leaving
many understaffed and underequipped
 Sovnarkhozy
 The Soviet Union worked on a centralized and planned economy with
established 5-year plans, which by 1957 there existed over 100 different
regional economy planning councils
 The idea was to dissolve centralization of industrial ministries to enable
regional economic councils, otherwise known as the sovnarkhozy
 By 1954, the administrative transfer of Crimea had been completed,
subsuming it into the Ukrainian SSR
 In the summer of 1962, workers in Novocherkassk had begun their
strike, albeit largely unorganized; once more, they were oppressed by the
Soviet authorities and had 30 casualties with 5000 arrests
 In 1955, the Warsaw Pact was forged by the signing of the Treaty of
Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance by the members of the
USSR, which included
 Albania
 Bulgaria
 Hungary
 The German Democratic Republic, or colloquially East Germany
 Poland
 Romania
 The Soviet Union, or Russia
 Czechoslovakia
 The Warsaw Pact was officially signed as a response to the creation of the
American-backed North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which had
effectively become a West European and North American anti-Russia
coalition that promised common trade and defense, including the
contentious state of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany)
 To better soothe relations, Khrushchev had visited the United States in
1959, but had unintentionally worsened fears of nuclear retaliatory war
by mistranslation of “crushing you [the Americans/Western capitalists]”
  In 1961, both General Secretary Khrushchev and then-US President
John F. Kennedy met at a diplomatic summit in Vienna, Austria,
discussing and hoping to come to peaceful concessions regarding the
tensions between the superpowers regarding the question of American
intervention into Vietnam, affairs between the split Germanies and
avoiding military confrontation again, and the CIA’s failed Bay of Pigs
Invasion in Cuba and how it raised concerns within the communist
sphere
 Unfortunately, tensions continued to boil until they hit a precipice
in 1962 with the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis, which had
been ended by last-minute compromise between the Soviets and
Americans in which both removed their nuclear missile
capabilities out of Cuba and Turkey respectively
 In so doing, this event had also caused the necessity of a direct
line between the capitals to ensure confirmation of any
declaration of war or act of aggression and its intent; thus,
beginning the famous Red Line emergency line between the
Kremlin in Russia and the Oval Office in the US
 The American-Soviet space race
 Outside of otherwise chilled hostilities, both Soviet and American space
programs had used knowledge from WWII German scientists to fund
both space exploration programs as a new scientific frontier as well as
potential weapons advancement in missile technologies
 The Soviets would be the first to achieve the first manned flight into
extra-Earth orbit, putting cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into the exosphere
and re-entry into the atmosphere in 1961 without major complications
 Other events
 Between 1958 and 1964, the Soviets pursued another anti-religious
campaign in which they began to condemn their religious authorities
postwar whom they had used as a recruitment drive
 In favor of more secularist and progressive thinking, 1958 had also seen
a major reform in educational curricula across the USSR, focusing on
primarily shifting religious faith into belief in science
 Major talking points was the idea of “Science and Religion”, as
well as the establishment of “universities of atheism” and
prohibition of religious ceremonies like prewar Soviet legislation
  The major educational reform had changed in which high school
teenagers had to work 2 days out of their week at the factories as
productive citizens
Brezhnev and Soviet Stagnation
 After ousting Khrushchev with growing discontent with his leadership style in
the party, Leonid Brezhnev had succeeded him and sought to return the
USSR to its more hardline stances to guide their principles and lead to their
goals
 However, Brezhnev would be remembered as the man responsible for the “Era
of Stagnation” that befell the Soviet Union and ultimately spelt its spiraling
downfall until his replacement in 1982
 Under Brezhnev, various economic reforms had been made to the system to
allow it to better adjust to Soviet government dictation, such as centralized
planning
 The 1960s say comrade Kosygin introduce elements of the “grey
market” into the economic planning structure
 Brezhnev’s reign is remembered for its otherwise intolerant stance on any
dissidence and potential sedition from the goals of Soviet doctrine
 In 1968, the Czechoslovakian Soviet had made various liberal reforms
that greatly angered and curtailed belief of Westernization, attempting to
appeal to the Westerners as “socialism with a human face”
 However, Brezhnev’s regime and his various allies across the Balkans
had not approved of the Czechoslovak reforms and instead created a
joint police force between many Soviets to suppress and coup the
government, which involved many protestors being marched on by
Soviet troops and tanks
 Worse still, to secure their borders and ensure control to their south, the
Soviets committed to a 10-year long conflict in Afghanistan that had
ended disastrously against the American-backed Mujahedeen (later
becoming the terrorist group Al-Qaeda, led by once-Mujahedeen Osama
bin Laden)
 The Soviets attempted to aid their communist affiliates in the Afghani
socialists after their coup d’etat of the Afghan government, named the
Saur Revolution of 1978, prior to pushing their forces into the region
to secure the legitimacy of an Afghan Soviet-aligned communist regime
 Even on the homefront, Brezhnev’s Soviet government had to deal with many
of its citizens growing discontent with his otherwise regressive stance on a
variety of topics
 These included the Soviet intelligentsia and its promotion, the claims of
samizdat (Russian: “unsanctioned press”) unregulated by Soviet media
officers, and the growing civil and human rights movements
 In 1970, the Soviets held the Committee on Human Rights, where their
chief nuclear physicist during their nuclear bomb project, Andrei
Sakharov, spoke on the necessities of discussing religion in the USSR as
well as deporting ethnic groups across the Soviets
 He also spoke on the Soviet leadership’s reliance on repressing
information and people, like in 1965 and coming in 1975, alongside the
leadership’s abuses of the field of psychiatry across the USSR
 Because Sakharov was such a high-profile figure in the Soviet Union, he
had expected persecution on a low-profile level but overall came out
unscathed; the deconstruction of the hero of Soviet nuclear potential
would be detrimental to Soviet heroism rhetoric