Soviet Union (History)

The personnel structure of the Chernigov regional office of ‘Torgsin’, based on previously unknown ar-chival documents, is investigated in the article. Basic attention is given to the quantity of personnel, level of his education, nationality, party membership.

В статье на основе неизвестных ранее архивных документов исследуется кадровый состав Черни-говской областной конторы «Торгсин». Основное внимание уделяется численности персонала, уровню его образования национальности, партийности.

Humanitarian Invasion is a global history of development and humanitarianism told through the lens of Afghanistan during the Cold War. From roughly the mid-1950s to the early 1990s, Afghanistan became an unprecedented arena for different models of state-building as Afghan élites sought to leverage their country's geopolitical position to secure development aid from the Soviet Union, the United States, West Germany, and international institutions. After a Communist revolution in April 1978 and a Soviet invasion in December 1979, however, Afghanistan became a laboratory for full-blown Soviet attempts at massive societal transformation. But the decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan also inspired a new generation of European humanitarian activists, like France's Médecins sans Frontières and Sweden's Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, to embed themselves with Pakistan-based mujahideen groups in an attempt to save the population of Afghanistan from Soviet domination. By the time of the withdrawal of the Soviet Union (February 1989) and the collapse of the formerly Soviet-supported government in the spring of 1992, Afghanistan had become the "failed state" par excellence, wracked by civil war and without any functional state apparatus. Humanitarian Invasion is an attempt to explore the paradox of how a country that was more intensively "developed" than almost anywhere in the world ended the Cold War in shambles. In telling this story, it is also an exploration of the changing registers of development during the 20th century, integrating the perspective of the Soviet Union and non-state humanitarian actors with the more familiar stories of Western development, all within the context of Afghanistan.

Based on years of research in dozens of archives and multiple languages, and several dozen interviews with former advisers and translators, Humanitarian Invasion represents a contribution to the historiography of the Soviet Union, of development, and of the modern history of Afghanistan. It is forthcoming as a monograph with the Global and International History Series of Cambridge University Press, edited by Erez Manela, John McNeill, and Aviel Roshwald.

В.И. Хотимский  (1892–1939) был одним из тех, кто решил судьбу царской семьи. Для узкого круга специалистов – это ученый-статистик, на учебниках которого выросло целое поколение советских экономистов. При этом он же – засекреченный сотрудник советской военной разведки. И наконец,  именно Хотимский руководил подсчетом итогов разоблачительной переписи 1937 года, результаты которой были на полвека скрыты после приказа Сталина. В возрасте 47 лет он стал одной из жертв учения, в которое слепо верил.

The capitalist as person no longer serves in this: capital lives without him but with its same function multiplied 100 fold. The human subject has become useless. A class without members to compose it? The state not at the service of a social group, but an impalpable force, the work of the Holy Ghost or of the Devil? Here is Sir Charles’s irony. We offer the promised quotation: "By turning his money into commodities which serve as the building materials for a new product, and as factors in the labour process, by incorporating living labour into their lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorisation process, an animated monster which begins to ‘work’, ‘as if possessed by the devil’ ."
Capital must be seized by the horns.

Under Stalin’s totalitarian leadership of the USSR, Soviet national identities with historical narratives were constructed. These constructions envisaged how nationalities should see their imaginary common past, and millions of people defined themselves according to them. This book explains how and by whom these national histories were constructed and focuses on the crucial episode in the construction of national identities of Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan from 1936 and 1953.

A unique comparative study of three different case studies, this book reveals different aims and methods of nation construction, despite the existence of one-party rule and a single overarching official ideology. The study is based on work in the often overlooked archives in the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan. By looking at different examples within the Soviet context, the author contributes to and often challenges current scholarship on Soviet nationality policies and Stalinist nation-building projects. He also brings a new viewpoint to the debate on whether the Soviet period was a project of developmentalist modernization or merely a renewed ‘Russian empire’. The book concludes that the local agents in the countries concerned had a sincere belief in socialism—especially as a project of modernism and development—and, at the same time, were strongly attached to their national identities.

Claiming that local communist party officials and historians played a leading role in the construction of national narratives, this book will be of interest to historians and political scientists interested in the history of the Soviet Union and contemporary Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Focusing on the development of travel between the borderlands of Ukraine and Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, this article explores what it meant to be Soviet outside
the Russian core of the USSR between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s. The cautious opening of the Soviet border was part of a larger attempt to find fresh sources of popular support and enthusiasm for the regime’s “communist” project. Before the Prague Spring of 1968 in particular, official policies and narratives of travel thus praised local inhabitants who crossed the Soviet border for supposedly overcoming age-old hatreds
to build a brighter future in Eastern Europe. By the 1970s, however, smuggling and cultural consumption discredited the idea of “internationalist friendship.” This encouraged residents of Ukraine to speak and write about the continuing importance
of the Soviet border. The very idea of Sovietness was defined in national terms, as narratives of travel emphasized that Soviet citizens were inherently different from ethno-national groups in the people’s democracies. Eastern Europe thus emerged as
an “other” that highlighted the Soviet character of territories incorporated into the USSR after 1939, helping to obscure western Ukraine’s troubled past and leading to the emergence of new social hierarchies in the region.

For the Truman administration, American foreign policy was the definition of a national security state. In the creation of such a state, one of the most noteworthy security documents was the National Security Council document 68, or NSC 68. Paul H. Nitze, director of Policy Planning for the State Department from 1950 to 1953, used three principal excursive tactics in the report: an implied apocalyptic narrative which warned Americans of the end to the Republic and free civilization; binary constructs of Soviet-American relations; and the exemplification of America’s responsibility as the global police force for liberal democratic values. Such tactics, whether or not empirically legitimate, used the authority of history to accentuate continuity of tradition and purpose. In obscuring the past, the NSC 68 report placed America’s future foreign policy under the framework of unrestricted military resources.

This paper is devoted to the scholarly career of Miron Kantorowicz (1895 - after 1977), the German-educated Russian-Jewish refugee. Kantorowicz spent the fifteen years, from 1919 to 1934, in Berlin. He is best known in contemporary Germany as “Alfred Grotjahn’s librarian”, as he was long-time assistant to Grotjahn, the founder of social hygiene, and his name is often mentioned among scholars expelled by the Nazis from Berlin University. However, Kantorowicz’s scholarly career and contributions to demography after his flight from Germany to England and his subsequent emigration to the United States are much less studied and understood. One of the reasons is that he changed his name several times. In June 1934 he immigrated to Great Britain with a provisional visa. The spelling of his family name in this country was changed to Kantorowitsch and his publications were accordingly credited. In London he found temporary work as a statistician at the Jewish Health Organisation of Great Britain (JHOGB), where his good knowledge of general British population statistics and his previous interest in Jewish demography were combined and properly utilized. In 1936, Kantorowicz published two seminal articles resulting from the reports he had prepared for JHOGB. His findings were highly acclaimed by later generations of demographers of Anglo-Jewry. Later, in the course of his migrations he became a co-founder of American demographic Sovietology. When he became a U.S. citizen, he finally settled on the name Myron K. Gordon. The paper shows how Kantorowitz’s scholarly career was re-moulded in the course of successive migrations.

СОДЕРЖАНИЕ
Берлизов Н.Е. Савроматы и сарматы в отечественной и зарубежной историографии кон. XVI - сер. XIX вв. (доархеологический этап)
Фролов Б.Е. Дискуссионные вопросы биографии атамана З.А. Чепеги
Гордейчук О.В. Деятельность Н.Н. Кармалина в области народного образования
Колесов В.И. Сталинский религиозный "ренессанс" и история общин иудейского вероисповедания в Краснодарском крае (1945-1950-е гг.)
Кринко Е.Ф. "Немецкое представительство на Кавказе является исключительно политическим...": кавказская программа А. Розенберга
Винидиктов А.П. К вопросу статистической обработки данных в историческом исследовании
Хлынина Т.П. Возможности времени, или о трудностях, связанных с семантической атрибуцией мусульманской секции в истории взаимоотношений народов Кубани 

When thinking of Oriental carpets, motifs like geometrical and vegetal ornament, hunting scenes, and paradasaical gardens usually come to mind. This paper, instead, draws attention to pictorial rugs featuring large-scale portraits that were made in Iran and in the Soviet Union in the 19th and 20th century. By shedding light on this hitherto rather neglected group of artifacts and by interrogating the artistic practices and challenges of translating portraits onto carpets, this study will contribute to discussions of artistic intermedial processes, multiple temporalities, and the relationship between figure and ornament. Further, it will enhance our understanding of the political dimensions of portrait rugs.