Soviet Union (History)

This article is a study of the age-sex structure, marital characteristics, family size and fertility of the Jews in Georgia as a whole, and Georgian Jews, the Georgian-speaking autochthonous Jewish sub-group, among them in particular. Soviet census data, especially those of 1959 and 1989, have provided a base for such demographic analysis.

The question concerning the logical relationship between the structures and media of totalitarianism has been treated controversially in contemporary scholarship. A large part of the relevant publications (represented by Franz Borkenau, Walter Laqueur and Hannah Arendt) defines totalitarian power primarily as the power of the minority over the majority and, following Aristotle, sees the latter as rooted in structures of political order.  A second corpus of research increasingly interprets totalitarianism as technological power and associates it with scientific inventions in the field of telecommunications.  In this second corpus, the radio, the loudspeaker and sound film, i.e. media forms that realize the principle of optical sound recording, are assigned a structuralizing function with regard to the reproduction and continuity of totalitarian power.

"Summary

The book deals with Soviet mass terror campaigns in the territories of the present day Republic of Moldova. As the breakaway separatist region of Transnistria of today was a part of Ukraine and Soviet Russia-Soviet Union since 1917, the story begins right after the October Revolution. Among the topics included are: Red Terror in Transnistria, latter on territories in which in 1924 was created the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic; the famine of 1921-1922; 1924-1926 (local one) and 1932-33, various aspects, including details about the privileges of nomenklatura; collectivization campaign on 1929-1933 and mass deportations as well other political repressions; resistance of the local populations, scale and forms of manifestations, including the bab'i bunty; Great terror in Moldavian ASSR, 1937-1938; extension of Communist Terror in Bessarabia, 1940-1941, following the application of secret protocol of Soviet Nazi Pact of August 23 1939, including a paragraph on the execution of 136 persons in the first year of Soviet occupation of Bessarabia, their ethnic and social background; postwar famine of 1946-1947, raising questions like: was it organized or determined by natural conditions as the Soviet historiography pretended, how various agenda of different Soviet institutions worsened the situation of the local population and made the death toll (4,5 % out of the total population) the highest in comparison with Ukraine (0,6 %) and Russia (1%) according to Michael Ellman (Cambridge Journal of Economics, September 2000, vol. 24, p. 613); other topics include mass deportations from the late Stalinism, 1949 and 1951, conflicts between MGB and MVD during the mass operations, the reaction of the population, the conditions of life in Siberia etc; and the impact of 20th Congress of CPSU and Hungarian Revolution on public opinion in the Moldavian SSR during February-December 1956 and the contestations of the monopoly of Communist Party in society and the resurgence of apocalyptic rumors and expectations, as well as the end of the myth ‘Americans are coming to liberate us’. The book alternates the general analysis of the phenomena of repressions, violence and resistance with personal stories based on KGB files and testimonies of the victims or their relatives when available. Among the general questions posed in the book is the one related to the nature of repressions and violence in the Soviet Union in its formative years (Lenin and Stalin): were the repressions and mass violence a direct consequence of the application of ideology or a result of certain context?
The book used largely Russian and Ukrainian collections of documents and literature published in the last 20 years as well as reference authors from the West (among others Lynne Viola, David Shearer, Peter Solomon, Nicolas Werth etc). About half of the information is from the archival sources previously inaccessible from the former KGB in Chisinau, MVD of Moldavian SSR and Sovmin of MSSR. 
The book has been published in Romanian and has 396 pages, including conclusions, selective bibliography, Index and 7 pages of pictures with victims and perpetrators. The Russian version is in work now and will be published most probably already in the fall 2014.
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This paper analyzes public perceptions of Joseph Stalin and Stepan Bandera in modern Ukraine. It uses data from a national representative survey conducted in September 2013 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology for this study. The analysis reveals major determinants of attitudes toward the leaders of, respectively, the Soviet Union and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, amid continuing attempts to recast their political identities in contemporary Ukraine.

"This volume brings together two classic works on the culture of the Russian people which have been long out of print. Gorer's Great Russian Culture and Mead's Soviet Attitudes towards Authority: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Problems of Soviet Character were among the first attempts by anthropologists to analyze Russian society.

Reviews:

"These texts expose ... the impoverishing effect of recent emphases on critical virtuosity. The phenomenological status, processes, and practices involved (in our culture) in terms such as "character" are fascinating to study."  · Journal of Anthropological Research

"Regardless of the dated theoretical approach of these classics, their valuable factual material and the ability of the authors to inspire further reflection still make them worth reading."  · Ethnos

They were influential both for several generations of anthropologists and in shaping American governmental attitudes toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War period. Additionally they offer fascinating insights into the early anthropological use of psychological data to analyze cultural patterns. Read as part of the history of the anthropology of complex contemporary societies, they are as fascinating for their more questionable conclusions as for their accurate characterizations of Russian life.

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"This paper proposes a model of dialectical development of the society, created by the dialectical schemes and formulas based on a binary notation (dialectic model of East and West, the political economy model, and others).
Предлагаются модели диалектического развития общества, созданные с помощью диалектических схем и формул на основе двоичного счисления (модели диалектики Востока и Запада, политэкономические модели, и другие)."

"In the months immediately following the collapse of the National Socialist regime, the four Allied military governments administered a ‘denazification’ questionnaire, or Fragebogen, to millions of German civilians and returning soldiers as a means to identify Nazi Party members, affiliates, and sympathizers. This self-administered survey, one that dictated employment opportunities in both the private and public sectors, provided the basic personal information for the Allies’ initiatives to deconstruct the Nazi state, establish democratic government, and rebuild Germany’s economic infrastructure. While the American, British, French, and Soviet authorities hoped that this standardized instrument would accurately identify and appropriately categorize Nazi adherents and staunch militarists, its questions were often ambiguous and misleading, and allowances were made for personal comments, amendments, and supplementary documents, such as third-party testimonials and statements of denunciation.
Therefore, the Fragebogen not only provided military government authorities with valuable information regarding each respondent’s political and military past, but allowed and in a sense required many Germans for the first time since the end of the war an opportunity to actively reflect upon and record their experiences under the Third Reich. Due to earlier limited access to relevant records and the tendency to assume that the Fragebögen were typical surveys consisting of only quantitative data, this rich historical source has been largely overlooked by researchers.

An analysis of the questionnaires reveals the ways in which denazification facilitated the formation of new postwar German identities and narratives of the political and social culture of the Third Reich. Not only did respondents use the Fragebogen to reaffirm, and in many cases redefine, their personal relationship with the Nazi regime, but the questionnaire itself indirectly encouraged respondents to establish their identity as either victims or resistors, or both, to depict themselves as recipients of extreme and unique hardship, and to distance themselves from the Nazi government and its crimes. As such, many Germans were able to rationalize their affiliations and activities during the Third Reich, to offer meaning to the collapse of the regime, and to instill psychological order to their personal postwar experience of disillusionment, disarray, and destruction. This paper explores the influence, consequences, and legacies of the denazification questionnaire and the ‘space’ that it created for Germans to recreate themselves in the immediate postwar years."